Ukraine reports 469 violations of Putin’s 32-hour ceasefire, hours after deadly drone attacks on Odesa and Kherson
Russia continued to strike Ukrainian positions with drones after a Kremlin-declared Easter ceasefire took effect on Saturday, a Ukrainian military officer said.
“The ceasefire is not being observed by the Russian side,” said Serhii Kolesnychenko, a communications officer for the 148th Separate Artillery Brigade.
Continue reading...Police rescued boy after neighbour reported sounds of a child coming from vehicle in Hagenbach in eastern France
A malnourished nine-year-old boy was rescued after being locked in his father’s van since 2024 in eastern France, a prosecutor said.
A neighbour alerted police to “sounds of a child” coming from a vehicle in the village of Hagenbach, near the borders of Switzerland and Germany.
Continue reading...Three arrested by federal agents had family ties to Iranian military general, regime spokesperson or security chief
United States federal agents arrested three Iranian nationals – including the son of a revolutionary at the center of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis – after the US state department terminated their green cards, the department announced on Saturday.
State department officials revoked the green card status of Seyed Eissa Hashemi, whose mother was an Iranian revolutionary who served as the spokesperson for Iran’s regime during the hostage crisis that defined the late Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The state department also revoked the green card – or legal permanent resident – statuses of Hashemi’s wife and son.
Continue reading...Archaeological record suggests hunter gatherers were playing games of chance at the end of the last ice age
Native American hunter gatherers were using dice for gaming and gambling more than 6,000 years before the practice appeared anywhere else, a new study argues.
It says dice were being made and used on the western great plains of North America at the end of the last ice age, more than 12,000 years ago.
Continue reading...Former Ukrainian major general says 4kg of material was most likely an attempt to influence Hungary’s election
The amount of explosives discovered in Serbia last week would not have been enough to destroy the Balkan Stream gas pipeline, prompting an expert to conclude it was probably a Russian intelligence plot aimed at influencing Hungary’s impending election.
A former Ukrainian major general and a munitions specialist told the Guardian calculations made by his company showed the 4kg of explosives recovered by Serbia’s military security agency in Kanjiža could not have seriously ruptured the pipe.
Continue reading...Officials accept that time has run out to pass law to allow transfer of islands to Mauritius
The UK government has been forced to shelve its legislation to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after the US dropped its support for the agreement.
On Friday, UK government officials acknowledged that they had run out of time to pass legislation within the current parliamentary session, which ends in the coming weeks.
Continue reading...Britain’s standing in the world was never the same after its assault on Egypt in 1956. Now the US risks repeating history in the Middle East
Donald Trump’s addiction to framing every event in the most apocalyptic terms is what allows conservative commentators such as Mark Levin to praise him as “a once-in-a-century president”.
But Trump cannot play out his entire presidency on a reckless high wire without eventually falling off – potentially taking America with him into a steep decline into the unknown.
Continue reading...Vice-president’s war doubts and his boss’s desperation to reopen the Hormuz strait constitute a weak deck against bolstered opponents
As JD Vance arrives in Islamabad to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, his first high-profile assignment of the war looks to be a poisoned chalice.
Vance, a vocal opponent of US wars in the Middle East gone quiet since the beginning of the current military campaign, will now face off with Iranian negotiators who feel emboldened by their new control of the Hormuz strait and their resilience in the face of the largest US-Israeli onslaught in history. Vance’s presence at the talks as vice-president will make it the highest-level meeting since the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Continue reading...Locals say the Ha Giang loop is rugged, unpredictable and congested, with some guides not prioritising safety
The recent death of a British gap-year student on the Ha Giang loop, a popular motorcycle tour through the mountains in north Vietnam, has heightened concerns about a trail reputed to be one of the most dangerous in the country.
Orla Wates, 19, from Surrey, was riding as a pillion passenger when she fell off and was hit by an oncoming truck, according to local media. She was taken to hospital in Hanoi, where she died from her injuries last week.
Continue reading...The men, sent to the southern African country in July, have been denied in-person counsel for nine months
Four men deported by the US to Eswatini and denied in-person legal counsel for nine months while detained in a maximum security prison have the right to see a local lawyer, Eswatini’s supreme court ruled.
The men, from Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam and Yemen, were sent to the small southern African country, formerly known as Swaziland, in July despite having no connection to the country, as part of Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to ramp up deportations.
Continue reading...Vehicle veered into a ravine on island of La Gomera while transporting a tour group for a boat excursion
A man has died and 27 people are in hospital after a bus carrying British passengers crashed in the Canary Islands, local officials have said.
The incident happened at 1.15pm local time on Friday when the vehicle veered into a ravine on the GM-2 highway near the town of San Sebastián de La Gomera.
Continue reading...Summer holidays could be hit unless oil flows through strait of Hormuz recommence within three weeks
Airports have warned that jet fuel could run short within three weeks in Europe if oil supplies do not start to flow through the strait of Hormuz, raising concerns over flight cancellations in the UK and EU going into the summer holiday season.
Jet fuel shortages will become so acute without the resumption of supplies from the Middle East that cancellations across Europe will be inevitable, disrupting travel plans for potentially millions of passengers.
Continue reading...Prime minister says conversation with US president on Thursday night focused on need for ‘practical plan’ to open strait of Hormuz
Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, has joined those saying the government should allow drilling for oil and gas in the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields in the North Sea.
Both applications were approved by the last Conservative government, but then overturned by a court ruling. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has to make a decision about the revised applications operating in a quasi-judicial capacity, which means he has to follow due process and can’t take the decision purely on political ground.
The current debate [on energy policy] is deadlocked between two incomplete responses. The government argues the answer is to accelerate Clean Power 2030, focusing on decarbonising the electricity system as quickly as possible. The opposition argues that the answer is to expand domestic oil and gas production. Both positions contain elements of truth, but neither addresses the core strategic problem: outside the power sector the UK economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels, and electricity is still too expensive to support mass electrification.
The UK is caught in a self-reinforcing high-cost, low-electrification trap. High electricity costs suppress demand, slowing the uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial electrification. Weak demand growth, in turn, means that the fixed costs of the system – from networks to long-term contracts – are spread across a smaller base, keeping prices high. The result is a system that is too expensive to electrify and therefore remains dependent on fossil fuels and exposed to global shocks …
The first of these vital measures will ban anyone from possessing or publishing harmful pornography that shows incest between family members, and sex between step or foster relations where one person is pretending to be under 18.
A further amendment will criminalise the publication and possession of pornography where an adult is roleplaying as a child.
This government is uncompromising in our mission to protect women and girls online, and we have taken action to stop tech firms from publishing this abusive content.
In February, we told platforms that they must remove reported non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours.
I greatly welcome the government’s plans to fully address harmful pornographic content such as incest, step-incest and the mimicking of child sexual abuse. This content that is freely and widely available online is deeply harmful, normalising child sexual abuse and abusive relationships within families …
Today the government has answered our calls for change, and I am delighted that once again the UK is leading the way on regulating this high harm industry.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Dozens of organizations write to Congress after general announced plan to ‘deal with’ those fleeing any humanitarian crisis on the island
Dozens of US and international human rights organizations are decrying the Trump administration’s plans to establish a migrant “camp” for fleeing Cubans at the Guantánamo Bay military base if the island nation’s crisis worsens under pressure from the US, according to a letter to members of Congress on Friday.
The 85 groups plan to submit the joint letter, exclusively shared with the Guardian, to US senators and House representatives, expressing their “profound concern” with comments made last month by a top Department of Defense commander, and describing any prospect of further migrant detention at the base as “deeply troubling and unacceptable”.
Continue reading...Crime and corruption top voter concerns in highly unpredictable election with 35 candidates for president
Peruvians go to the polls on Sunday hoping to break a cycle of instability that has produced nine presidents in a decade as well as surging violent crime, corruption scandals and overwhelming distrust in institutions and politicians.
About 27 million people who are eligible to vote must choose between a record 35 presidential candidates as well as contenders for the bicameral congress – all from a ballot sheet measuring nearly half a metre, the longest in the country’s history.
Continue reading...Negotiators of 2015 deal say Tehran has seen how cutting off Hormuz strait can help it counter asymmetry of power
Former US envoys who dealt with Iran have said that the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent closure of the strait of Hormuz have given Iran new tools and resolve to resist pressure to shutter its nuclear programme.
Two senior negotiators for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama-era agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief, said the Trump administration’s war had handed Iran a coveted weapon by demonstrating its ability to cut off the strait of Hormuz, an economic chokehold that one negotiator said would help Iran “balance the asymmetry of power” with the US.
Continue reading...John Feeley says US president was ‘flush with victory’ of Maduro capture and could make same mistake in Cuba
Donald Trump is “reaping the bitter fruit” of erroneously thinking that the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, offered a blueprint for toppling the Iranian regime, according to one of the US state department’s most respected former Latin America experts.
John Feeley, a Marine helicopter pilot who later served as the US ambassador to Panama, believed Trump had been “flush with the victory from Venezuela” when he made the ill-fated decision to attack Iran in February, leaving a trail of destruction across the Middle East and dealing a hammer blow to the global economy.
Continue reading...Democratic representative Yassamin Ansari says the war has only more deeply entrenched the Iranian regime
Donald Trump is an “evil human being” who “wants to be an emperor” and should be removed from office over the war in Iran, Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian American member of the US Congress, has told the Guardian.
Ansari, the daughter of Iranian immigrants who decades ago fled the regime, spoke out after the president threatened to wipe out Iran’s civilisation before backing down and announcing an uncertain two-week ceasefire.
Continue reading...Cheng Li-wun’s visit to Beijing has sparked controversy in Taiwan, with critics accusing her of being too close to China
In a rare meeting with Taiwan’s opposition leader, China’s president, Xi Jinping, declared that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait were Chinese and wanted peace.
The meeting in Beijing between Xi and Cheng Li-wun, the chair of Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT), is the first such contact in a decade. The visit has sparked controversy in Taiwan, with Cheng’s critics accusing her of being too close to China, a country that many in Taiwan see as a threat.
Continue reading...In Pakistan’s capital, the army has been deployed, a public holiday has been declared and the streets are eerily empty
The streets of Islamabad were on strict lockdown as Pakistan’s capital prepared to play host to historic negotiations between Iran and the US that have dangled the promise of an end to war that has devastated the Middle East.
Even as the US-Iran ceasefire looked increasingly precarious, amid Israel’s continued bombardment of Lebanon and disputes over the terms of the talks, Pakistani officials insisted that the make-or-break peace negotiations would be going ahead over the weekend as planned.
Continue reading...