Category Archives: World News

Mexico elects Claudia Sheinbaum as its first female president in landslide victory

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Former Mexico City mayor’s Morena party also on track for possible two-thirds super majority in Congress

Claudia Sheinbaum has won a landslide victory to become Mexico’s first female president, inheriting the project of her mentor and outgoing leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose popularity among the poor helped drive her triumph.

Sheinbaum, a leftwing climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, according to a rapid sample count by Mexico’s electoral authority.

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More than 100 artists tell Starmer to halt arms sales to Israel if he becomes PM

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Letter signatories from Steve Coogan to Paloma Faith urge Keir Starmer to ‘take stand’ for human rights and international law

Actors including Steve Coogan, Miriam Margolyes and Juliet Stevenson have joined forces with musicians, writers and directors in calling on Keir Starmer to halt arm sales to Israel if elected prime minister.

The singer Paloma Faith, the film-maker Mike Leigh and the author Michael Rosen are among the more than 100 celebrities who have signed a joint letter, coordinated by Artists for Palestine UK, that urges the Labour leader to “take a stand against the ongoing atrocities committed by Israel” in Gaza.

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Final results in seismic South Africa election confirm ANC has lost majority

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ANC says demands that President Cyril Ramaphosa must step down is ‘no-go area’ as rival Jacob Zuma stokes fears of violence

Final results from Wednesday’s seismic South Africa elections have confirmed that the African National Congress (ANC) party has lost its majority for the first time in 30 years of full democracy, firing the starting gun on unprecedented coalition talks.

The ANC, which led the fight to free South Africa from apartheid, won just 159 seats in the 400-member national assembly on a vote share of just over 40%. High unemployment, power cuts, violent crime and crumbling infrastructure have contributed to a haemorrhaging of support for the former liberation movement.

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Italian village with 46 residents has 30 local election candidates

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Two-thirds of Ingria near Turin are competing for positions including a mother and son in rival camps

The last time Igor De Santis ran for mayor in Ingria, a tiny village surrounded by forests and mountains near Turin, he won an easy landslide victory. But he faces a tough challenge in his bid for a fourth mandate, after his mother joined a rival camp.

Ingria, one of the smallest villages in Italy, is home to 46 inhabitants. A further 26 people, registered to vote from abroad, make up the electorate.

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Revealed: Russian legal foundation linked to Kremlin activities in Europe

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Exclusive: Leaked internal documents show Pravfond has spent millions of euros to finance propaganda and legal campaigns

Leaked internal documents have exposed the activities of a Russian state-backed legal defence foundation that European intelligence agencies and analysts say is in fact a Kremlin influence operation active in 48 countries across Europe and around the world.

Internal documents from the Fund for Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad (Pravfond) indicate that the foundation finances propaganda websites targeted at Europeans, helped pay for the legal defence of the convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout and the assassin Vadim Krasikov, and has employed a number of former intelligence officers as the directors of its operations in European countries.

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China’s Chang’e-6 probe lands on far side of the moon

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Spacecraft to collect samples from rarely explored area after landing heralded as ‘enormous technical achievement’

China has landed its uncrewed Chang’e-6 lunar probe on the far side of the moon, marking an important step in the country’s 53-day mission to retrieve rock and soil samples from the “dark” lunar hemisphere, in what would be a world first.

The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the US are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.

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AI hardware firm Nvidia unveils next-gen products at Taiwan tech expo

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CEO Jensen Huang tells packed stadium in Taipei ‘next Industrial Revolution has begun’

Nvidia has unveiled new products and plans to accelerate the advance of artificial intelligence, with the AI hardware company’s chief executive telling a packed stadium in Taipei on Sunday that “the next Industrial Revolution has begun”.

Jensen Huang is in Taiwan for the island’s leading tech expo, Computex, along with the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest semiconductor companies – including AMD, Intel and Qualcomm – and their plans for a tech industry dominated by AI are top of the agenda.

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Netanyahu tries to avoid coalition implosion over Gaza ceasefire plan

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Israeli prime minister juggles differing demands of partners after Joe Biden announced latest peace proposal

Benjamin Netanyahu is once again trying to balance the demands of centrist and far-right members of his government after a threat from his extremist allies to collapse the coalition if Israel moves forward with a new ceasefire plan for Gaza announced by the US president, Joe Biden.

In an unexpected broadcast from the White House on Friday night, Biden urged Hamas to accept what he said was a new proposal from Israel for a three-phrase plan towards a permanent ceasefire in the nine-month war.

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Rescue worker dies amid flooding in southern Germany

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Heavy rain that trapped people in their homes and reportedly caused a train derailment is forecast to continue

A volunteer firefighter died during a rescue operation during heavy rain and flooding in the south of Germany, local police said on Sunday.

Four emergency workers were attempting to reach people trapped by the flood waters near Pfaffenhofen in the region of Bavaria when their boat capsized.

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Zelenskiy: Trump risks being ‘loser president’ if he imposes bad deal on Ukraine

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Exclusive: Ukrainian leader says bad peace deal in event of Trump victory would mean end of US as global ‘player’

Donald Trump risks being a “loser president” if he wins November’s election and imposes a bad peace deal on Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said, saying it would mean the end of the US as a global “player”.

In an interview with the Guardian in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said he had “no strategy yet” for what to do if Trump returned to the White House, and that the former British prime minister Boris Johnson had approached him on his behalf.

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For Labour, the Gaza crisis is a foreign policy tightrope in waiting

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Starmer’s belief in international law and the rise of Labour Friends of Israel offer clues to potential stance on Palestinian statehood

A snap election, and the certainty that the Gaza crisis will not be resolved by polling day, means Keir Starmer already knows the first foreign policy challenge of his expected premiership.

Even if the peace proposal announced by Joe Biden on Friday is accepted by both Israel and Hamas, something a Labour-run Foreign Office would encourage, vast issues remain concerning the future role of Hamas and Iran in Middle Eastern politics, as well as Israel’s conduct in the conflict, and restoration of faith in the universality of international law.

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Zelenskiy accuses China of deterring countries from going to peace summit

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Ukrainian president says Beijing is supporting efforts by Moscow to warn leaders off attending Swiss meeting

Volodomyr Zelenskiy has accused China of discouraging other countries from attending a peace summit in Switzerland later this month that is aimed at bringing peace to war-ravaged Ukraine.

Speaking at Asia’s biggest security conference, the Shangri-La Dialogue, in Singapore, the Ukrainian president sought to rally support among Asia-Pacific nations, urging them to attend the Swiss meeting.

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Children die of malnutrition as Rafah operation heightens threat of famine in Gaza

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Arrival of Israeli troops in the southern border town has choked aid supplies, as hunger deepens in southern Gaza

Fayiz Abu Ataya was born into war and knew nothing else. Over his first and only spring, in a town stalked by hunger, he wasted away to a shadow of a child, skin stretched painfully over jutting bones.

In seven months of life, he had little time to make a mark beyond the family who loved him. But when his death from malnutrition was reported last week, it sounded a warning around the world about a rapidly deepening crisis in central and southern Gaza, triggered by the Israeli military operation in the southern town of Rafah.

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Giorgia Meloni has emerged as a kingmaker for the EU – but will she turn to centre right or far right? | Jon Henley

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Even her toughest opponents admit she’s played it cleverly. Yet the long-term aims of Italy’s prime minister remain unclear

When she became Italy’s prime minister in October 2022, Giorgia Meloni looked like Brussels’ worst nightmare. Until then, the fiery leader of the Brothers of Italy – a party with neofascist roots – had seemed anything but EU-friendly.

For years, railing against the bloc had been Meloni’s stock in trade: the euro amounted to enslavement, the European Commission was effectively a loan shark. “Bring down this EU!” she urged the 2019 conservative CPAC conference in the US.

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China’s defence chief repeats threat of force against Taiwanese independence

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Dong Jun rails at length about democratic island’s ‘separatists’ during Shangri-La Dialogue defence conference in Singapore

The Chinese defence minister, Dong Jun, has warned that anyone who dares pursue independence for Taiwan will be “crushed to pieces” and face “destruction”, as he accused external forces of dragging the island into “a dangerous situation”.

In a speech to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s biggest defence summit, Dong said Beijing was committed to “peaceful unification” with Taiwan, but that it was prepared “for all kinds of extreme situations” and that any attempts to seek independence would be futile.

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‘We refuse to disappear’: the Hong Kong 47 facing life in jail after crackdown

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Last week’s conviction of dissidents came in the biggest case since introduction of a new national security law

The verdict wasn’t surprising but outside room no 2 of the West Kowloon courthouse, people still wept. The panel of Hong Kong national security judges had set down two days for the hearing but dispensed with the core business in about 15 minutes. In the city’s largest ever national security trial – involving the prosecution of pro-democracy campaigners and activists from a group known as the “Hong Kong 47” – almost all the defendants were found guilty of conspiracy to commit subversion.

Their crime was trying to win an election, holding unofficial primaries in 2020 attended by an estimated 600,000 residents.

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Stormy Daniels says Donald Trump should be jailed after felony conviction

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Ex-president should also be made ‘the volunteer punching bag at a women’s shelter’, says former actor, following guilty verdict

Stormy Daniels has called for Donald Trump to be jailed after he was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

The adult film star, who was paid $130,000 as “legal expenses” for her silence about her affair with the former US president, warned the presidential candidate is “completely and utterly out of touch with reality”.

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Julia Gillard says progress on gender equality is ‘really glacial’

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Former Australian prime minister issues warning that young men’s thinking on the issue is going backward

Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.

Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.

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Biden’s botched Gaza ceasefire deal only demonstrates his lack of influence | Julian Borger

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The US president’s announcement on Friday suggested a ceasefire might be close, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s rebuke was swift and decisive

The latest peace plan for Gaza was given a launch worthy of a historic turning point, with the US president delivering remarks directly to camera from the White House state dining room, declaring it finally “time for this war to end”.

Yet even as Joe Biden spelled out the proposal – leading in theory to a permanent end to hostilities, large-scale food deliveries and the start of reconstruction, there was clearly something awry.

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Modi’s alliance to win easily in India election, exit polls project

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Prime minister claims victory but opposition dismisses poll results as fixed and unscientific

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP)-led alliance is projected to win a big majority in the general election that concluded on Saturday, TV exit polls said, suggesting it would do better than expected by most analysts.

Most exit polls projected the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) could win a two-thirds majority in the 543-member lower house of parliament, where 272 is needed for a simple majority. A two-thirds majority will allow the government to usher in far-reaching amendments to the constitution.

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