Prosecution of three high-ranking Syrian officials to be tried in absentia could pave way for president’s case
At midnight on 3 November 2013, five Syrian officials dragged arts and humanities student Patrick Dabbagh from his home in the Mezzeh district of Damascus.
The following day, at the same hour, the same men, including a representative of the Syrian air force’s intelligence unit, returned with a dozen soldiers to arrest the 20-year-old’s father Mazzen.
Continue reading...Media is barred from hearing as 71-year-old man appears in closed session over attempted assassination of prime minister
The suspect in the shooting of Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico appeared in a closed court hearing on Saturday outside Bratislava amid growing fears about the future of the deeply divided nation.
The media was barred from the hearing, and reporters were kept behind a gate by armed police officers wearing balaclavas.
Continue reading...Researcher uncovers vast Facebook campaign and accuses Meta of ‘lack of willingness’ to counter it
The stories are doom-laden, laced with vitriolic sneers about Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ursula von der Leyen. Ukrainians are “ready to depose” their leader, Macron is breaking French “rules” with aid to Ukraine, an “uncontrolled influx” from the east is “seriously harming the Germans”.
According to new research, these are just a few examples of a vast pro-Russian propaganda campaign washing over Facebook accounts of French and German citizens, before the European parliament elections next month.
Continue reading...About 60 flights cancelled after members of Letzte Generation glue themselves to ground at Munich
Eight climate activists have been arrested after causing Munich airport to close, leading to about 60 flight cancellations.
Six activists broke through a security fence and glued themselves to access routes leading to runways, officials and local media reported.
Continue reading...Ukraine’s president says air defences must quadruple to halt Russian advance as morale falls among troops
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said he expects Russia to step up its offensive in the north-east and warned Kyiv has only a quarter of the air defences it needs to hold the front line.
Russian forces, which had made only moderate advances in recent months, launched a surprise assault in Kharkiv region on 10 May that has resulted in their biggest territorial gains in a year-and-a-half.
Continue reading...‘Bakery scent’ added via microcapsules to postage stamp celebrating ‘jewel of French culture’
The French Post Office has released a scratch-and-sniff postage stamp to celebrate the baguette, once described by President Emmanuel Macron as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.
The stamp, which costs €1.96, depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. It has a print run of 594,000 copies.
Continue reading...Speaking at Cannes, the director says Megalopolis, his reworking of ancient Rome’s Catiline conspiracy, has become ever more prescient
Megalopolis review – Coppola’s passion project is megabloated and megaboring
The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
Continue reading...Updated guidelines strip bishops of power to recognise ‘supernatural’ nature of purportedly divine events
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary and weeping statues have been part of Catholicism for centuries, but the age of social media has prompted the Vatican to issue a crackdown against potential scams and hoaxes.
New rules issued on Friday say that only a pope, rather than local bishops, can declare apparitions and revelations to be “supernatural”. The document, Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, updates previous guidance issued in 1978 that is now considered “inadequate”.
Continue reading...Attack on prime minister lifts lid on divided politics of ‘one of the most polarised countries in Europe’
On Friday morning, Father Tomáš stood solemnly in the small Catholic church nestled near a park along the banks of the Danube River in Bratislava.
He had seen an increase in visitors since Wednesday’s shock shooting of Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, which has prompted soul-searching among the country’s deeply divided society. The priest, who did not wish to give his full name, planned to hold his weekly Sunday service to pray “for peace in Slovakia, so that we find mutual respect and understanding”.
Continue reading...The country’s foreign ministry said the supply of long range weapons to Ukraine by the UK and US had led to an escalation in the conflict
A long-range Ukrainian strike on the Moscow-controlled Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea destroyed three Russian warplanes and a fuel facility near its main runway this week, US commercial satellite company Maxar said.
The company cited satellite imagery taken on Thursday as showing that two MiG-31 fighter jets and an Su-27 fighter jet had been destroyed. It said one MiG-29 fighter aircraft also appeared to have been damaged.
Continue reading...‘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.”
Continue reading...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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Chmouel Lubecki, a rabbi in Rouen, said today’s incident was “shocking.”
“It is important to light the candles of Shabbat to exactly show that we are not afraid,” he said.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...Adrian Coghill ordered to leave in response to UK expelling Kremlin’s attache to London for alleged spying
Russia is expelling Britain’s defence attache to Moscow in the latest diplomatic tit for tat, after the UK accused it of sponsoring espionage and hacking attacks against top British officials in a years-long campaign of “malign activity”.
The Russian foreign ministry said it had declared the British defence attache, Adrian Coghill, as “persona non grata. He must leave the territory of the Russian Federation within a week.”
Continue reading...Peter Pellegrini says PM ‘escaped death by a hair’ and urges people to temper their emotions after ‘we crossed a red line’
The Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, is in a stable condition but “not out of the woods yet”, officials have said, as the country’s president-elect pleaded for unity after a shooting that laid bare the deep political divisions of recent months.
The shooting, the first major assassination attempt on a European political leader in more than 20 years, sent shockwaves across the continent, with leaders linking the violence to an increasingly febrile and polarised political climate across its countries in the run-up to European parliament elections in June.
Continue reading...Strong quarterly results and hope of interest rate cuts drive DJIA to new alltime high
A group of business leaders have warned Rishi Sunak that the government’s migration policies risk weakening the UK university sector, the Financial Times reports, undermining a key reason for companies to invest in the country.
The FT explains:
In a letter to Rishi Sunak, bosses at groups including miners Anglo American and Rio Tinto and industrial conglomerate Siemens, said they were “deeply concerned” by widening funding gaps and declining international student applications that were “a result of government policy”.
They said this risked “undermining the positive impact that international students have on our skills base, future workforce, and international influence”, as well as reducing the funding available for research and industry collaboration.
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