Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar to navigate economic and political turmoil after Imran Khan conviction
A little-known senator from Pakistan’s least populous province has been announced as caretaker prime minister to see the country through to the next election, the leader of the opposition said.
The Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and opposition leader, Raja Riaz, agreed on Saturday to name senator Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar as caretaker premier.
Continue reading...The disappearance of a statue of the comic book artist in his Belgian birthplace was thought to be an act of decolonisation
It would have been a suitable assignment for Tintin, the intrepid Belgian boy reporter and his multi-talented, intuitive dog, Snowy.
Across Brussels, where Hergé, the creator of the eponymous comic books, was born, there are constant reminders of one of its most famous exports. A giant image of the character clinging to the back of a steam train from the book Tintin in America adorns one of the exits from the city’s Eurostar station, while a mural of Tintin, his seafaring friend Captain Haddock and Snowy covers the gable end of a house just over a mile away, surviving graffiti and vandalism.
Continue reading...Thirteen people rescued after Europe-bound vessel sank near city of Gabes, says coastguard
At least two Tunisians including a baby died when their Europe-bound boat sank off the north African country’s south-eastern shores, the coastguard said, adding five others were missing.
The vessel carrying 20 Tunisians went down at 2am 120 metres (395ft) from the beach in Gabes, a statement said, as search operations continue.
Continue reading...Analysts says key figures in new regime were underestimated as elected president remains confined to residence
The leaders of the military takeover in Niger remained defiant this weekend, apparently confident that disarray among regional opponents, support from other military regimes in neighbouring countries and a wave of popular mobilisation at home will allow them to keep power for the indefinite future.
Mohamed Bazoum, the democratically elected president of Niger, remains confined to his official residence in Niamey, the capital, amid faltering international efforts to convince the new rulers of the unstable but strategically important country to return to barracks two weeks after launching a coup.
Continue reading...Attacks keep up pressure on Vladimir Putin, although have become ‘not a big deal’ for many unmoved Russians
A new campaign of drone strikes has targeted the Russian capital in recent days as Kyiv has demonstrated its ability to hit Moscow and to keep the Kremlin’s war in the hearts and minds of the Russian elites and others seeking to ignore the invasion of Ukraine.
Video on Friday showed a drone slamming into the ground and exploding near a residential area in the north-west of the city, as rowers nearby participated in a national championship in the Krylatskoye district.
Continue reading...While meteors are active from July, Perseids will be most visible in northern hemisphere this Saturday and Sunday
Stargazers will be in for a treat this weekend as the best meteor shower of the year is expected to peak.
The Perseids are named after the Greek hero Perseus because the meteor shower appears to come from the eponymous constellation.
Continue reading...Water scarcity threatening agriculture faster than expected, warns Cop15 desertification president
The world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5C target, the president of the UN’s desertification conference has warned, as the impacts of the climate crisis combine with water scarcity and poor farming practices to threaten global agriculture.
Alain-Richard Donwahi, a former Ivory Coast defence minister who led last year’s UN Cop15 summit on desertification, said the effects of drought were taking hold more rapidly than expected.
Continue reading...Zelenskiy fires regional military recruitment chiefs in anti-corruption drive; Russia gains ground around north-east town of Kupiansk
Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the dismissal of all the heads of Ukraine’s regional military recruitment centres in the latest drive to root out corruption after officials were accused of taking bribes from those seeking to avoid the frontlines. Ukraine’s president described the taking of cash from people who wanted to avoid conscription while others suffered as a form of treachery.
Russia on Friday said it had improved its fighting positions around the north-east Ukraine town of Kupiansk, where its advance has prompted Ukrainian officials to urge residents to evacuate. Kupiansk and the surrounding areas of the north-east Kharkiv region were recaptured by Kyiv’s forces in September but Moscow has since pushed back.
Russian forces fired four Kinzhal hypersonic missiles on western Ukraine early Friday, targeting an airfield but killing an eight-year-old boy who lived nearby, Ukraine said. Of the missiles fired from southern and central Russia, one was shot down over the Kyiv region by air defences, but the rest struck close to an airfield in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region, the Ukrainian air force said.
The US has imposed new sanctions on four “prominent members of Russia’s financial elite”, the US treasury department said in a statement on Friday. All four have served on the supervisory board of the Alfa Group Consortium, one of Russia’s largest financial and investment conglomerates.
The European Union has delivered 223,800 shells to Ukraine under the first part of a plan to provide a million artillery rounds to aid Kyiv’s fight against Russia, a spokesperson said on Friday.
At least 499 children have been killed and 1,097 injured so far in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukraine prosecutor general’s office said on Friday. The office, tasked with tallying Russia’s war crimes, counted at least 81 new crimes registered this week, bringing the total to 102,849.
Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko said he had ordered “contact” with Poland and that he was ready to talk amid rising border tensions between the Nato member and the Moscow ally. “We need to talk to the Poles. I ordered the prime minister to contact them,” Lukashenko said on Friday, according to state news agency Belta.
Russian media has reported that the Kremlin is considering closing some or all Moscow airports as Kyiv continues its drone attacks on the Russian capital.
Repairs to the Chonhar Bridge that links Crimea to Kherson will take at least a month, the Russian-imposed acting governor of the occupied portion of Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, was quoted as saying. The bridge was damaged in a Ukrainian strike on 6 August.
Russian authorities have taken Ukrainian teenagers from occupied territories of the country to a military education camp in Russia, where they received military training, Ukraine’s Centre of National Resistance said. The camp opened in the town of Penza on 1 August, it said.
Ukrainian border guards have stopped a number of Ukrainian men attempting to leave the country, apparently to avoid conscription in the war. The State Border Guard Service said that in Odesa, guards found two Ukrainian men of military age hiding in a vehicle after paying two Moldovans $4,500 each to get them to Moldova. In Zakarpattia province in Ukraine’s west, border guards stopped a vehicle in which four men had paid smugglers $4,000 each to cross into Romania.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, vowed that any Taurus cruise missile supplied to Kyiv would be used only within Ukrainian borders. This has been a point of contention between Kyiv and its western allies – Kyiv has been asking for Taurus missiles, which can travel more than 500km (300 miles), but nations such as Germany have balked at the request over concerns about the long range.
Continue reading...Court filing alleges Jeffrey Ferguson, accused over death of wife Sheryl earlier this month, texted court clerk to say ‘I just lost it’
A southern California judge accused of killing his wife during an argument while drunk texted his court clerk and bailiff afterward to say he had shot her, prosecutors said Friday as they charged him with murder and sought new bail conditions.
A court filing from prosecutors says Orange county superior court judge Jeffrey Ferguson texted: “I just lost it. I just shot my wife. I won’t be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I’m so sorry.”
Continue reading...Lewis Kaplan says he has cause to believe defendant ‘had tried to tamper with witnesses at least twice’ since December arrest
Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail has been revoked ahead of his October fraud trial after prosecutors accused the indicted founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX of tampering with witnesses.
Bankman-Fried is expected to report to jail later on Friday after Judge Lewis Kaplan announced the decision at a hearing over Bankman-Fried’s bail conditions in federal court in Manhattan. Bankman-Fried was taken directly into custody at the conclusion of the hearing. He was led out of the courtroom by members of the US Marshals Service.
Continue reading...Governor says it’s too early to tell if siren system failed; Lahaina subject to curfew from 10pm-6am and west Maui remains without water and power
CNN’s chief climate correspondent, Bill Weir, has visited stricken Lahaina, and had this to say:
It looks like a bomb went off in Lahaina town. All the iconic buildings are either flattened or just scorched skeletons of their former self. Flames came so fast, entire structures went up in a matter of minutes. Anything in the town center here is just completely devastated. The fire was so hot, it burned everything all the way to the ground. [It’s] just lifeless, smoky, and sooty devastation where Lahaina town used to be.
Continue reading...One missile strike was destroyed but probability of airstrikes remains high, says general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces
Daniel Boffey is in Ukraine for the Guardian:
There have been four major explosions in the last few minutes in Kyiv. The blasts could be heard across the Ukrainian capital.
Continue reading...Gathering in Jeddah offers Beijing chance to placate global south and limit damage with west over Russia relations
When the Chinese envoy Li Hui arrived in Saudi Arabia, to join international talks on a peace deal for Ukraine this week, it was a pointed contrast with Beijing’s decision to skip a similar forum in Copenhagen in June.
At the summit, which excluded Russia, Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy promoted his vision for ending the war to a large gathering of countries from the global south.
Continue reading...UK-backed move could help spread cost of developing fighter jet and drones, but may prove controversial
Saudi Arabia has asked the UK, Japan and Italy to be made a full partner in their joint effort to build the next generation of fighter jets, in a move backed by the British government.
Companies from the UK, Japan and Italy are working together to build a new fighter jet and other systems such as drones under the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), also known as Tempest. The programme aims to deliver the first planes by 2035, a tight turnaround.
Continue reading...X owner in talks with government over historic site for event – though Colosseum and Rome ruled out
Elon Musk is in talks with Italy’s government about hosting his proposed cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg at a historic site in the country, but the Colosseum has been ruled out as a venue.
The owner of X Corp and the chief executive of Facebook-owner Meta first raised the idea of a one-on-one scrap in a series of social media posts back in June. The challenge came as Zuckerberg prepared to launch Threads, a rival microblogging site to Musk’s now rebranded Twitter platform.
Continue reading...Hakeem Jeffries was accused of giving cover to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he tried to curtail Israeli judiciary power
A Democratic congressional delegation is under fire for a visit to Israel funded by the hardline lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), which is working to defeat other members of the party in next year’s elections.
Critics have accused the most senior Democrat on the tour, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, of giving political cover to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has faced months of huge demonstrations against his far-right government’s power grab.
Continue reading...Campaigners criticise renovation and call for better protection for the city’s distinctive architecture
A Bangkok landmark known as the “robot building” has been stripped of its identity, heritage campaigners have said, as they called for the city’s distinctive architecture to preserved.
The building – in the form of a giant robot made up of stacks of cubes and inspired by the architect watching his son play with a toy – has loomed over one of Bangkok’s busiest commercial districts for decades. Its design included oversized bolts and antenna, and windows shaped like cartoonish eyes.
Continue reading...Anti-fascist novelist was a campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights and had recently made her illness public
Michela Murgia, the Italian writer and civil rights campaigner, has died at the age of 51.
Murgia, who was born in Cabras, Sardinia, and was known for her campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights and euthanasia, publicly revealed (in Italian) a few months ago that she had been diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer. The award-winning writer and intellectual decided to speak openly about her illness, continuing to write articles and speak at public debates.
Continue reading...Ceremony at Seoul’s World Cup stadium wraps up event beset by heatwave, unsanitary conditions and threat of typhoon
The 25th World Scout Jamboree has concluded with a concert in Seoul after a tumultuous 11-day journey across South Korea that was marred by a heatwave, unsanitary conditions and an evacuation owing to a typhoon threat.
“The last few days have not been easy, to say the least,” said Ahmad Alhendawi, the secretary general of the World Organisation of the Scout Movement during the closing ceremony on Friday at Seoul’s World Cup stadium.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Zazia Bazoum says Mohamed Bazoum and other family members denied electricity after coup and have little to eat
Niger’s overthrown leader and his family are being held under inhumane conditions by their military captors, who have cut off the electricity to the presidential residence, leaving them to rapidly lose weight while food rots in the fridge, the president’s daughter has told the Guardian.
Zazia Bazoum, who was on holiday in France when Mohamed Bazoum was detained by his own presidential guard last month, said she is in near daily phone contact with her father, mother and brother, who she says are living without clean water and relying on supplies of rice and pasta, although their gas oven is running out of fuel.
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