Category Archives: World News

Putin is seeking to weaponise threat of mass migration, says Estonian PM

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‘Adversaries know migration is our vulnerability,’ says Kaja Kallas, spelling out negative consequences to Europe of Ukrainian defeat

Vladimir Putin is seeking to weaponise the threat of mass migration to divide and weaken Europe as supporters of Ukraine struggle to maintain unity to defeat Russia, Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister said on Friday.

“What our adversaries know is migration is our vulnerability,” she said. “The aim is to make life really impossible in Ukraine so that there would be migration pressure to Europe, and this is what they are doing.”

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French police kill armed man who set synagogue on fire in Rouen

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Mayor calls for show of solidarity against attack after synagogue damaged in blaze amid rising antisemitism in France

French police shot dead a man armed with a knife and an iron bar who set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen on Friday.

The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, travelling to visit the fire-damaged synagogue, said France was “deeply affected” by what he called an antisemitic act. He said the government was “extremely determined to continue to fully protect Jewish people in France, wherever they are, and Jews should practice their religion without fear”.

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No genocide taking place in Gaza, Israel tells UN’s top court – as it happened

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Israel is appearing at international court of justice after South Africa asked it to urgently order end to assault on Rafah

Yemen’s Houthis said they downed a US MQ9 drone on Thursday evening over the south-eastern province of Maareb, the group’s military spokesperson said on Friday.

According to Reuters, the Iran-aligned group said they would release images and videos to support their claim and added that they had targeted the drone using a locally made surface to air missile.

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‘Bullet wounds are common’: crime rife in DRC’s rebel-besieged city of Goma

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Robberies, shootings, extortion and rapes have surged since the Rwandan-backed M23 militia cut off the eastern Congolese capital

In broad daylight on 16 April, three armed and uniformed men held up a city centre mobile phone shop.

Threatening staff, they helped themselves to about £700 worth of goods, before making off on a motorbike, disappearing into the busy streets of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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China to cut mortgage rates as part of plan to prop up property market

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Local authorities will be allowed to turn unsold homes from developers into affordable housing

China will cut mortgage rates and allow local authorities to turn unsold homes from developers into affordable housing, in a series of drastic measures by Beijing aimed at propping up the country’s faltering property market.

The People’s Bank of China said it would scrap the minimum rate of interest and reduce down-payment ratios to 15% for first-time buyers and 25% for second homes. It will also create a 300bn yuan (£32.8bn) facility to support local state-owned companies to buy homes at reasonable prices, it said in a series of statements on Friday.

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Have I Got News for You to launch in the US in autumn

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Adaptation of hit comedy quiz will begin airing on CNN on Saturday nights to coincide with presidential election

Arch, ironic and understated, Have I Got News for You is the quintessential British comedy quiz, but its creators are hoping a US version of the show can translate its particular brand of political humour across the Atlantic.

A US adaptation of the show will be broadcast by CNN in the autumn, to coincide with the presidential election. It will hit screens on Saturday nights – part of a double-bill with Bill Maher’s Real Time.

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Cop29 at a crossroads in Azerbaijan with focus on climate finance

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Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering

Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.

It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.

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‘Exhausting and extremely dangerous’: Mohammad Rasoulof on his escape from Iran

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Exclusive: The director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig details how he discarded electronic devices and fled over the mountains on foot after authorities sentenced him to eight years in prison and flogging

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof escaped imminent imprisonment in Iran by discarding all trackable electronic devices and walking across a mountainous borderland on foot, the film-maker has told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.

But even though he has found shelter in Germany and is optimistic about attending next week’s Cannes premiere of the film that nearly saw him jailed for eight years, Rasoulof said he still expects to return to his home country “quite soon” and sit out his sentence.

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Weather tracker: heavy snow hits eastern highlands in South Korea

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As much as 40cm fell in less than a day in part of Seoraksan national park. Plus, a powerful tornado in Australia

There was unusually heavy snowfall this week in the highlands of the mountainous region of eastern Gangwon province in South Korea. Between 5.30pm local time on Wednesday and 9am on Thursday, as much as 40cm fell at the Socheong shelter of Seoraksan national park, while 20cm was recorded at its Jungcheong shelter.

This unexpected snowfall has caused damage ahead of a harvest on wild vegetable farms that operate on the mountains. Conditions over the next few days are expected to improve, with warmer and drier weather over the weekend.

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Chinese social media companies remove posts ‘showing off wealth and worshipping money’

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Targeting posts boasting of personal wealth appears to be part of campaign to ‘purify the internet cultural environment’

Chinese social media companies have launched a new crackdown on user content, targeting posts that show off personal wealth and financial extravagance.

In a statement posted online on Wednesday, Weibo said it had spent this month carrying out special management work on “undesirable value-orientated content”, including content “showing off wealth and worshipping money”.

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US museum curator held in Turkey over spider and scorpion samples is freed

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American Museum of Natural History says Dr Lorenzo Prendini was working on research project and ‘has arrived safely home’

A curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was detained in Istanbul on Monday while allegedly attempting to smuggle spider and scorpion samples out of Turkey has been released.

In statement on Thursday, a spokesperson for the museum said Dr Lorenzo Prendini, curator of arachnida and myriapoda, had arrived back in New York.

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Spain denies port of call to ship carrying arms to Israel

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Foreign ministry says it will reject all such stopovers because ‘the Middle East does not need more weapons, it needs more peace’

Spain has refused permission for a ship carrying arms to Israel to dock at a Spanish port, its foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, said on Thursday.

“This is the first time we have done this because it is the first time we have detected a ship carrying a shipment of arms to Israel that wants to call at a Spanish port,” he told reporters in Brussels.

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Michael Cohen tells trial he once thought Stormy Daniels was extorting Trump over her story – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. You can read our latest reporting below:

Judge Juan Merchan is on the bench and the court is in session.

Donald Trump has arrived in the courtroom for day 18 of his criminal trial.

Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican representative

Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican congresswoman

Eric Trump

Boris Epshteyn, a longtime Trump aide

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South Africa calls on ICJ to order Israel to end Rafah offensive

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Lawyers urge international court of justice to issue urgent measures over assault on Gaza’s southernmost city

South Africa has asked the international court of justice (ICJ) to urgently order Israel to end its assault on Rafah, halt its military campaign across Gaza, and allow international investigators and journalists into the territory.

In a court hearing, lawyers for South Africa expanded a written request for judges to issue an emergency order to stop the offensive into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

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Nigerian activists condemn mass ‘forced marriages’ of 100 girls and young women

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Petition launched to halt mass ceremony that organisers say is for 100 orphans whose parents were killed by gangs

Human rights activists in Nigeria have launched a petition to stop a plan to push 100 girls and young women into marriage in a mass ceremony, which has caused outrage in the west African country.

The plan, sponsored by Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, the speaker of the national assembly in the largely Muslim north-western state of Niger, were criticised by Nigeria’s women’s affairs minister, Uju Kennedy Ohanenye. She said she would seek a court injunction to stop the ceremony next week and establish if any of the girls were minors.

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‘He was not radical’: Slovakia tries to make sense of Fico shooting

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Friends in town of Levice say 71-year-old showed no signs of planning attack, while Slovakian president says climate of hate is collective work

Mile L’udovit, like other residents of the unassuming grey apartment block on the outskirts of the sleepy central Slovakian town of Levice, considered Juraj Cintula a reliable neighbour and friend.

Having lived side by side with him for more than 40 years, L’udovit could never have imagined the 71-year-old former security guard and amateur poet would be suspected of perpetrating the worst political attack in Slovakian modern history – shooting the prime minister multiple times at point-blank range.

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Woman accusing Christian Brückner of rape says his eyes ‘bored into my skull’

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Hazel Behan, who says main suspect in Madeleine McCann case raped her in Portugal in 2004, tells court she will never forget his eyes

A woman who alleges she was raped at knifepoint by the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has told a court she would never forget the eyes of her attacker, which “bored into my skull”.

Giving evidence in the trial of Christian Brückner, who stands accused of five sexual assaults in Portugal of women aged between 10 and 80 between 2000 and 2017, Hazel Behan, 40, who was raped in June 2004, told the court: “I believe that this man was my attacker.”

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US completes installation of floating pier to deliver aid to Gaza

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Aid agencies poised to receive supplies and distribute to territory where people face imminent starvation

The US military has said the installation of a floating pier for the delivery of humanitarian aid off Gaza has been completed, with officials ready to begin ferrying supplies into the territory, where much of the population faces imminent starvation owing to the continuing Israel-Hamas war.

Ordered two months ago by the president, Joe Biden, the US military transported the system overnight from the Israeli port of Ashdod, about 20 miles north of Gaza.

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Scientists find buried branch of the Nile that may have carried pyramids’ stones

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Discovery of the branch, which ran alongside 31 pyramids, could solve mystery of blocks’ transportation

Scientists have discovered a long-buried branch of the Nile River that once flowed alongside more than 30 pyramids in Egypt, potentially solving the mystery of how ancient Egyptians transported the massive stone blocks to build the monuments.

The 40-mile-long (64km) river branch, which ran by the Giza pyramid complex among other wonders, was hidden under desert and farmland for millennia, according to a study revealing the find on Thursday.

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