Three women found with fatal knife wounds in brothel, while bodies of another woman and daughter discovered in apartment
Austrian authorities are investigating the killings of four women and a 13-year-old girl in Vienna within a day, including three found stabbed to death in a brothel.
The bodies of three young women were found with fatal knife wounds in a brothel in the Austrian capital’s Brigittenau district on Friday night after a witness alerted police.
Continue reading...Police in Spanish city continue to search debris after blaze that consumed one of the buildings in less than an hour
The death toll from a fire that left two residential buildings charred ruins in the Spanish city of Valencia rose to 10 on Saturday after authorities announced they had located the remains of what they believed to be the last missing person.
Forensic police found the 10th victim inside the building, the national government delegate in Valencia, Pilar Bernabé, told journalists. Police would proceed with DNA testing to confirm the identities of all the victims, she said.
Continue reading...US enthusiasts who follow the tradition of sharing dough are now receiving about 1,000 requests a week, up from 30 to 60
“There’s an old pioneer tradition” dating from the earliest days of the colonisation of the US west, says Mary Buckingham, “that you shared your bread starter with anyone who asked.”
Which was all very well until TikTok came along.
Continue reading...Ukrainian military claims it shot down Russian spy plane; Ukraine marks second anniversary of war; Russian drones kill one in Odesa attack
Continue reading...On 900 miles of track between the frontline and the edge of the EU, soldiers and civilians reflect on their experiences
The opening bars of the Cossack March rang out from the platform speakers at Zaporizhzhia-1 train station, jaunty trumpets transitioning into a rousing military march, heralding the departure of train number four, the 17.53 to Uzhhorod.
Carriage attendants slammed shut the heavy metal doors, a few people on the platform waved forlorn goodbyes in the evening gloom, and the train clattered off on its journey across the entire breadth of Ukraine, a 900-mile ride from close to the frontline all the way to the border with the European Union.
Continue reading...Star tells audience at prestigious César awards that they need to challenge powerful and abusive men whatever the career risk
Judith Godrèche has urged the French film industry to break its omertà on sexual abuse in an unprecedented address to the country’s most prestigious awards ceremony on Friday evening.
Godrèche, who says she was groomed and raped as a teenager by an acclaimed director, received a standing ovation as she took the stage at the Césars – the French equivalent of the Oscars.
Continue reading...Authorities lower count of victims in Valencia fire, with one more person considered missing
Spanish police have said the final death toll from a devastating fire that tore through a 14-storey block of flats in the eastern city of Valencia is nine, with one person thought to have died now considered missing and all others accounted for.
El País cited national police as saying that after forensic analysis of the bodies found in the charred building, they had lowered the number of victims from the 10 previously reported by the Spanish government’s representative in the region.
Continue reading...President faces uncertain reception at Salon d’Agriculture after weeks of protests by furious farmers
Most politicians kiss babies; French leaders pat cows and make a fuss of lambs.
The Salon d’Agriculture, the country’s annual farm show which opens on Saturday, is a date presidents cannot afford to miss.
Continue reading...Secretary of state’s characterization of West Bank settlements signals return to longstanding US policy reversed by Trump
Israel’s expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank was inconsistent with international law, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Friday, signaling a return to longstanding US policy on the issue, which had been reversed by the previous administration of Donald Trump.
The Trump administration in 2019 in effect backed Israel’s right to build West Bank settlements by abandoning a long-held US position that they were “inconsistent with international law”.
Continue reading...University of Waterloo dispenser displays facial recognition message despite no prior indication it was monitoring students
A malfunctioning vending machine at a Canadian university has inadvertently revealed that a number of them have been using facial recognition technology in secret.
Earlier this month, a snack dispenser at the University of Waterloo showed an error message – Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognition.App.exe – on the screen.
Continue reading...British foreign secretary argues blockage of $61bn aid package in Congress strengthens China and undermines confidence in US
David Cameron has said that the continued US failure to supply arms to Ukraine would undermine its own security, strengthen China and cast doubt on America’s reliability as an ally around the world.
The UK foreign secretary, who attended the G20 meeting in Brazil earlier in the week, admitted that the effort to rally global support for the Ukrainian cause had been “damaged” by the fact that neither the US nor the UK had voted for a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. But he argued the damage had been mitigated by the UK’s clarification of its position.
Continue reading...Pressure mounts on Israel and Hamas to make a deal before threatened Rafah offensive
An Israeli negotiating team arrived in Paris on Friday for talks about a potential ceasefire in Gaza in the latest sign of tentative progress towards an agreement that could end the five-month-old war.
The Israeli delegation, which includes the heads of its internal and external intelligence services, will meet the director of the CIA, Qatar’s prime minister and Egypt’s most senior intelligence official for talks over the weekend in what appears to be the most serious push for weeks to halt the fighting.
Continue reading...US looked into claims that Andrés Manuel López Obrador allies took money from cartels, according to a New York Times report
Officials with the justice department and the Biden administration have downplayed a report that US law enforcement spent years looking into allegations that allies of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, were investigated for taking millions of dollars from drug cartels after the president took office.
López Obrador, who denied the report, also reacted to the New York Times report on Thursday by revealing the contact details of the journalist at its Mexico bureau, Natalie Kitroeff, including her telephone number – which Mexico’s freedom of information body (INAI) immediately said it would launch an investigation into.
Continue reading...Xinjiang in north-west recorded minus 52.3C, while Badu in south recorded 38C – the largest temperature contrast recorded in a single country
China’s Xinjiang region, in the far west of the country, experienced record-breaking low temperatures of -52.3C on 18 February, surpassing a 64-year-old record for the region. The figure was just shy of the lowest national temperature of -53C, which was recorded in the Heilongjiang region in January last year.
The extreme weather has caused big disruption after the lunar new year celebrations, with blizzards and ice leaving people stranded on roads and railways. On the same day, Badu in the south of China recorded a maximum temperature of 38C, meaning there was a staggering temperature difference of 90.3C across the country. This is the largest temperature contrast ever recorded for a single country, surpassing the US in January 1954 by a whole degree Celsius.
Continue reading...Leaked files shows range of services offered and bought, with data harvested from targets worldwide
A big leak of data from a Chinese cybersecurity firm has revealed state security agents paying tens of thousands of pounds to harvest data on targets, including foreign governments, while hackers hoover up huge amounts of information on any person or institution who might be of interest to their prospective clients.
The cache of more than 500 leaked files from the Chinese firm I-Soon was posted on the developer website Github and is thought by cybersecurity experts to be genuine. Some of the targets discussed include Nato and the UK Foreign Office.
Continue reading...The environment minister Susana Muhamad says nature is a ‘pillar’ of fighting the climate crisis
The next round of global biodiversity negotiations will put nature at the heart of the international environment agenda, Colombia’s environment minister has said, as the country prepares for the Cop16 summit.
Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, who is expected to be the Cop16 president, said the South American country would use the summit to ensure nature was a key part of the global environmental agenda in the year building up to the climate Cop30 in the Brazilian Amazon in 2025, where countries will present new plans on how they will meet the Paris agreement.
Continue reading...Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft Odysseus lands after a 73-minute descent, touching down near moon’s south pole
The United States has returned to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years after a privately-built spacecraft named Odysseus capped a nail-biting 73-minute descent from orbit with a touchdown near the moon’s south pole.
Amid celebrations of what Nasa hailed “a giant leap forward”, there was no immediate confirmation of the status or condition of the lander, other than it had reached its planned landing site at crater Malapert A.
Continue reading...Military industrial complex and companies aiding Moscow in third countries will be targeted, treasury says
The US will impose sanctions on more than 500 targets on Friday in action marking the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, deputy US treasury secretary Wally Adeyemo has said.
The action, taken in partnership with other countries, will target Russia’s military industrial complex and companies in third countries that facilitate Russia’s access to goods it wants, Adeyemo told Reuters news agency, as Washington seeks to hold Russia to account over the war and the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
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Odysseus has started its “powered descent initiative”, as it readies for a landing. The engine on the lander has started up, and it is slowing itself down. As it lowers, sensors on the it will look for a safe spot for a landing,
As an example of the mixed payloads that private space missions are taking, Nasa administrator, Bill Nelson said of today’s mission “Nasa scientific instruments are on their way to the moon, a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century.”
Continue reading...Alexander Smirnov, who claims to have Russian intelligence links, taken into custody after meeting at lawyers’ offices in Las Vegas
The former FBI informant who is charged with lying about a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving Joe Biden’s family was again taken into custody in Las Vegas, two days after a judge released him, his attorneys said.
Alexander Smirnov was arrested during a meeting on Thursday morning at his lawyers’ offices in downtown Las Vegas. The arrest came after prosecutors appealed the judge’s ruling allowing 43-year-old Smirnov, who holds dual US-Israeli citizenship, to be released with a GPS monitor ahead of trial. He is charged with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record.
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