Pink Floyd singer wore costume during performance in which he imagines himself as fictional fascist dictator
Police in Germany have launched a criminal investigation into the Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters over a Nazi-style uniform he wore at a recent concert in Berlin.
“An investigation has been opened over the costume displayed at the concerts on 17 and 18 May,” Berlin police spokesperson Martin Halweg told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Ciro Maiello, whose home is adorned with a painting of the player, says Napoli’s first Serie A win since Diego’s days heralds a new dawn for the city
At 10.37pm on 4 May the man who lives in Diego Maradona’s head threw open the window of his flat in the Spanish Quarter district in Naples for the first time in months, erupting in a cathartic scream as the city celebrated another moment in its rebirth.
Ciro Maiello, a 50-year-old pork butcher, moved to the apartment block featuring a giant mural of the Argentinian in 2006 and lived there through a period he called the “dark days [when] dozens of people were killed in these streets.” The mural was painted more than a decade earlier, in honour of the player who gave the city’s football team the most successful period in its history, including its first Serie A title win, and whose veneration by Neapolitans is comparable only to the adoration of its patron saint, Gennaro.
Continue reading...Companies with direct links to Russian military set to attend, which is likely to heighten tensions with US
Seven sanctioned Russian companies, including a manufacturer of military helicopters deployed in the war in Ukraine, are visiting Saudi Arabia next week as part of a trade mission to increase business with the Gulf state.
Companies including weapons manufacturers with direct links to the Russian military, state corporations involved in the invasion of Ukraine, and the agency overseeing a Ukrainian nuclear plant in the country seized by the Russian military last year, are set to attend.
Continue reading...Zelenskiy says rocket attack on Friday morning hit medical facility after night of heavy bombardment across country
Ukraine struck two regions in southern Russia with a rocket and a drone, though the missile was shot down by air defences, according to Russian officials and media reports.
In the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, a blast damaged a residential and office building, officials said. Reuters reports they did not say what caused the blast, though Russian media said it was a drone attack. Unverified videos on social media showed a drone flying over the city.
A peace summit is needed today. Everyone understands this fact. Also, everyone accepts as an absolutely logical and fair argument that the basis should be the Ukrainian peace plan: 10 points of President Zelenskiy.
Now Ukraine’s position is clear: our plan is the basis, but we are ready to listen to all those countries that respect our sovereignty and territorial integrity. We are ready to accept some elements of other proposals.
1. Radiation and nuclear safety.
2. Food security.
3. Energy security.
4. Release of all prisoners and deportees.
5. Restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia reaffirming it.
6. Withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities, restoration of Ukraine’s state borders with Russia.
7. Justice, including the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.
8. Prevention of ecocide.
9. Prevention of escalation of conflict.
10. Confirmation of the war’s end, including a document signed by the involved parties.
Wind and rain bring island to a standstill but eye replacement cycle fortuitously weakens it temporarily
Earlier this week, Typhoon Mawar whipped up a storm in western Micronesia as the category 4 storm came close to landfall on the island of Guam. Starting out as a tropical depression over the weekend, Mawar rapidly deepened and intensified over the following couple of days, almost reaching category 5 by Tuesday evening. Wind gusts peaked at 155mph (250km/h), briefly making Mawar a super typhoon about 100 miles south-east of the US island territory.
In a stroke of luck an eyewall replacement cycle occurred overnight, hours before the then super typhoon was due to reach Guam. The cycle involves the slight degradation of the storm’s structure as a new eye develops around the old eye. Consequentially, the storm’s intensity weakened temporarily while simultaneously spreading strong winds over a larger area. Mawar’s winds dropped to a sustained speed of 140mph as the typhoon brushed the northern edge of Guam at about 7am local time (2200 BST) Had Mawar made landfall, it would have been the first category 4 typhoon to do so since Typhoon Pamela in 1976.
Continue reading...Russia moving nuclear weapons to Belarus; Wagner begins withdrawing forces from Bakhmut
Russia has moved ahead with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, claimed on Thursday that the relocation of some of the weapons from Russia to Belarus had already started, according to reports.
Dutch prosecutors have seized a plot of land near Amsterdam that belongs to Vladimir Putin’s former son-in-law, a joint investigation by the Guardian and two other media organisations revealed. The plot of land in Duivendrecht is owned by Jorrit Faassen, a Dutch businessman who was married to Maria Vorontsova, the Russian president’s elder daughter.
Britain is likely to keep Russian state assets immobilised for some time after the war in Ukraine ends, and certainly until Moscow has agreed to pay compensation for the damage it has inflicted, British officials have confirmed. The Council of Europe summit last week established a digital register of damage for Ukraine as the first step towards an international compensation mechanism for victims of Russian aggression.
The United States has long asked Ukraine not to use US-provided military equipment to carry out attacks inside Russian territory, the top US general said on Thursday, following accusations by Russia that pro-Ukrainian militia had used US armoured vehicles.
Russia has signalled that if demands to improve its grain and fertiliser exports are not met then it will not extend the Black Sea grain deal before 17 July. It made the same threat and demands in March, then agreed last week to renew the export pact for 60 days.
Unverified footage appears to show a drone speedboat attack on the Russian naval vessel the Ivan Khurs in the Black Sea on Wednesday. The video appears to show at least one of the drones getting extremely close to the ship, though it remains unclear whether or not any damage was done.
Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has begun withdrawing its forces from the devastated Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and transferring its positions there to regular Russian troops, according to its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The US has said the Wagner Group may be working through Mali and other countries to hide its efforts to acquire military equipment for use in Ukraine, and accused it of supplying a Sudanese paramilitary with surface-to-air missiles.
Ukraine secured the release of 106 captured soldiers in a prisoner exchange with Russia on Thursday, according to Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff. The soldiers, including eight officers, were reportedly said to have been captured fighting in Bakhmut.
Russia’s foreign ministry said it had summoned the ambassadors of Germany, Sweden and Denmark over what it described as the “complete lack of results” in the Nord Stream investigation. Several unexplained underwater explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines that link Russia and Germany across the Baltic Sea in September 2022. The blasts occurred in the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark and both countries say they were deliberate, but have yet to determine who was responsible. Germany is also investigating.
Ukraine said on Thursday it had shot down all 36 Iranian-made drones launched by Russia in overnight attacks it claims likely targeted key infrastructure and military facilities.
Russia has denied a fire broke out at the ministry of defence in Moscow, after social media users and reports in the state-owned Tass news agency said emergency services had been called to the building. Tass initially reported on a fire at the ministry early on Thursday morning, but later reported the ministry saying there was none.
Continue reading...Anti-corruption campaigner says he was asked bizarre questions on call apparently with former Ukrainian president
The Kremlin critic Bill Browder has said he was targeted by a deepfake hoax when he participated in a bizarre video call this week with somebody impersonating the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
The anti-corruption campaigner was invited to discuss “anti-Russian sanctions,” but ended up being asked if he favoured lifting sanctions on Kremlin oligarchs, and even to perform a salute to a rap song performed by the current president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Continue reading...Council of Europe has established digital register of damage as first step towards compensation mechanism
Britain is likely to keep Russian state assets immobilised for some time after the war in Ukraine ends, and certainly until Moscow has agreed to pay compensation for the damage it has inflicted, British officials have confirmed.
The Council of Europe summit last week established a digital register of damage for Ukraine as the first step towards an international compensation mechanism for victims of Russian aggression.
Continue reading...Police spent three days scouring reservoir after request by German authorities hoping to prove case against convicted rapist
Portuguese police have said material unearthed from a reservoir in Algarve will be sent to Germany for analysis after the first major search for Madeleine McCann in a decade came to a close.
After three days of excavation on a spit of land jutting into the Barragem do Arade reservoir in south Portugal, officers were stood down and a spokesperson for the Polícia Judiciária said the collected material would be delivered to the German authorities.
Continue reading...This live blog has now closed, you can read more on this story here
Overnight the New York Times has reported that US intelligence officials believe that Ukraine was responsible for the drone attack which slightly damaged the Kremlin, and which Russia labelled an assassination attempt on Vladimir Putin, despite the Russian president not being in the building at the time.
US officials said the drone attack on the Kremlin earlier this month was likely orchestrated by one of Ukraine’s special military or intelligence units, the latest in a series of covert actions against Russian targets that have unnerved the Biden administration.
US intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation.
US officials say their level of confidence that the Ukrainian government directly authorised the Kremlin drone attack is “low” but that is because intelligence agencies do not yet have specific evidence identifying which government officials, Ukrainian units or operatives were involved.
The attack appeared to be part of a series of operations that have made officials in the US – Ukraine’s biggest supplier of military equipment – uncomfortable. The Biden administration is concerned about the risk that Russia will blame US officials and retaliate by expanding the war beyond Ukraine.
Continue reading...Committee highlights serious problems with residence schemes affecting Brits already living in the EU before Brexit
An influential House of Lords committee has urged Suella Braverman to step up efforts to protect the rights of vulnerable British citizens in the EU after the case of an elderly woman with dementia who was threatened with deportation from Sweden.
It also said more needed to be done to ensure the rights of EU citizens in the UK – also guaranteed under the Brexit withdrawal agreement – were protected to prevent a “Windrush-type scenario”.
Continue reading...Yevgeny Prigozhin announces ruined Ukrainian city will be handed over to Russian military by 1 June
The head of the Wagner group said his Russian paramilitary organisation had begun to withdraw from the city of Bakhmut and would hand all its positions over to the regular Russian army by 1 June.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Vladimir Putin, made the announcement during a visit to the ruined city, telling tank crews and other commanders that they would receive new orders soon and should withdraw to the rear.
Continue reading...At least a dozen victims were found to have been hacked by Pegasus during clashes in the region in 2021
Researchers have documented the first known case of NSO Group’s spyware being used in a military conflict after they discovered that journalists, human rights advocates, a United Nations official, and members of civil society in Armenia were hacked by a government using the spyware.
The hacking campaign, which targeted at least a dozen victims from October 2020 to December 2022, appears closely linked to events in the long running military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Continue reading...Fears biodiversity proposals could be abandoned amid opposition from lobby groups and some countries
MEPs have been accused of whipping up “a culture war against nature” after the fisheries and agriculture committees voted against the EU’s biodiversity restoration law.
Last June, the European Commission revealed proposals for legally binding targets for member states to restore wildlife on land, in rivers and the sea. The nature restoration law was announced alongside separate legislation proposing a crackdown on chemical pesticides with the aim of reversing the catastrophic loss of wildlife on the continent.
Continue reading...Member states vote to relocate the office to Denmark by the end of the year, in response to health impacts of Ukraine conflict
Member states of the World Health Organization voted on Wednesday to move a Moscow-based office of the WHO to Copenhagen, and urged Russia to stop attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine.
At the 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva, 80 member states voted to request the WHO secretariat to relocate the European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases to Denmark before the new year.
Continue reading...Ales Bialiatski has been in jail for 20 months following mass protests over regime of Alexander Lukashenko
The Nobel peace prize laureate Ales Bialiatski has been transferred to a notoriously brutal prison in Belarus and has not been heard from in a month, his wife has said.
Natalia Pinchuk said that Bialiatski, who is serving a 10-year sentence, has been kept in an information blackout since his transfer to the N9 colony for repeat offenders in the city of Gorki, where inmates are beaten and subjected to hard labour.
Continue reading...Yevgeny Prigozhin says children of Russian elite ‘shook their arses’ in sun while sons of poor returned in coffins
The head of the Wagner mercenary force has said that 20,000 of its fighters have been killed in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and warned that Russia could face another revolution if its leadership does not improve its handling of the war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.
Continue reading...Washington has been clear with Kyiv it does not support use of US-made equipment outside Ukraine, White House spokesperson John Kirby says. This live blog is closed
Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass is reporting some quotes from Denis Pushilin, who has said that the situation for Russian forces on the flanks of Bakhmut has stabilised.
Pushilin, the Russian-imposed leader in occupied Donetsk, which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed, is quoted as saying on the Solovyov Live TV channel:
The peak of anxiety, when there was the most active phase, when the enemy tried to attack on the flanks and surround the guys in Bakhmut itself, has passed, according to my information.
I was talking with the guys who are there, including with Wagner, and they also say that combat-ready units have approached there, and this work is being done.
The night was not entirely peaceful. There have been a large number of drone attacks. Most of the air defence systems coped, but there are damages in Belgorod: cars, private houses, office buildings. The most important thing is that there are no casualties at all.
A gas pipeline was damaged in the Grayvoron District, a small fire is going on. Also, the restoration of electrical networks, which were damaged during the entry of the sabotage and reconnaissance group, is under way. All work to restore power supply in the Grayvoron district will be completed today. After that, water supply and cellular communications will be restored.
Continue reading...The paramilitaries who raided Belgorod include guerrillas with far-right connections, anti-Kremlin veterans and former members of Russia’s security services
As Russian militias opposing the Kremlin readied a daring cross-border raid into the Belgorod region this week, a man with slicked-down hair, in full camouflage and holding an automatic rifle stared into a camera lens.
“We are Russians just like you,” the man said in the video, later posted online. “We are people just like you. We want our children to grow up in peace and be free people so they can travel, study and were just happy in a free country. But this has no place in modern Putin’s Russia, rotten through and through from corruption, lies, censorship, restrictions on freedoms and repression.”
Continue reading...Ioannis Sarmas appointed to replace outgoing prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis after inconclusive ballot
Greece will hold fresh elections on 25 June, with the country led by a caretaker government headed by a senior judge until the vote, after an inconclusive ballot last weekend.
The president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, appointed Ioannis Sarmas, 66, to replace the outgoing prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose centre-right New Democracy party triumphed over the leftist opposition in Sunday’s poll but failed to secure a parliamentary majority.
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