Category Archives: Europe

Tory MP says no massive need for food banks in UK and real problem is people’s cooking skills – live

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Latest updates: Conservative Lee Anderson says people just need to be shown how to cook nutritious meals that cost less

Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s leader in Northern Ireland, has criticised the DUP for refusing to commit to backing the election of a speaker for the Northern Ireland assembly. (See 11.25am.) She said:

What we need to see is the positions filled - first minister, deputy first minister, all the ministerial positions filled, and let’s get down to doing business.

I don’t think it is good enough. It is not good enough for the people here that the DUP is holding society to ransom, punishing society, preventing the establishment of a speaker and an executive to actually respond to the things people are worried about.

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Kherson’s military administrators to call for Russian annexation

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Unclear if Kremlin will agree to annex captured Ukrainian territory or use threat to put pressure on Kyiv

The Russian-controlled administration in the Ukrainian city of Kherson has said it plans to request annexation by Moscow, a move that would confirm the Kremlin’s permanent occupation of Ukrainian territory captured since February.

If Russia attempts to annex the Kherson region it would make a peace agreement more unlikely, as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said that Russia’s withdrawal to prewar positions was a precondition for any successful negotiation.

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French TV news presenter faces multiple allegations of sexual offences

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Twenty women have accused Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, also known as PPDA, of sexual harassment and abuse

Twenty women have come forward to openly accuse one of France’s best-known television news presenters of sexual harassment and abuse – including rape – following an investigation by French journalists.

Patrick Poivre d’Arvor – known as PPDA – has faced a number of accusations that emerged after a writer first went to police to accuse him of rape, in February last year. The investigation was later dropped.

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Ukraine refugees who enter UK via Ireland may be sent to Rwanda, MPs told

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Minister also refuses to say whether Ukrainians who cross Channel in small boats could be sent to Africa

Undocumented people who travel from Ukraine to the UK via Ireland could be considered for removal to Rwanda, a senior Home Office official has told MPs.

During the same select committee hearing, a minister refused to say under repeated questioning whether Ukrainians who arrive in the UK across the Channel by boat could also be sent to the central African country.

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Tui tells holidaymakers not to expect last-minute deals despite surge in bookings

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Losses halve as travel bounces back from pandemic with reservations reaching 85% of summer 2019 level

The travel company Tui Group more than halved its losses over the past six months and is predicting a “strong travel summer” as customers continue to book long-awaited holidays despite cost of living pressures.

Europe’s largest holiday company said future bookings remained “unabatedly high” as international travel bounced back from the coronavirus pandemic, but said there would not be many last-minute deals because it was facing rising costs.

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US inflation dips to 8.3% but stays close to 40-year high –as it happened

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Rolling coverage of business, the world economy and the financial markets

National Grid has agreed to pay back £200m of revenues gleaned from subsea electricity cables early in an effort to cut painful household bills, reports Alex Lawson.

Under an agreement with watchdog Ofgem, the energy network operator must pay back revenues made from European ‘interconnector’ cables over a five-year period above a cap.

Since the price of materials is rising, we need to work to reduce the amount of materials we use as much as possible and to replace them with less expensive materials.

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Leonid Kravchuk, first president of Ukraine, dies aged 88

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Former leader relinquished his country’s Soviet nuclear arsenal, the third-largest in the world

Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk, who agreed to give up his country’s Soviet nuclear arsenal, the third-largest in the world, has died at the age of 88.

“Sad news and a great loss,” presidential aide Andriy Yermak said on Telegram, describing Kravchuk as “a wise patriot of Ukraine, a truly historical figure in gaining our independence”.

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John Kerry warns a long Ukraine war would threaten climate efforts

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Exclusive: US presidential envoy says limiting global heating to 1.5C could be made harder by conflict

The longer the war in Ukraine carries on, the worse the consequences will be for the climate, the US presidential envoy John Kerry has warned.

Many countries are struggling with an energy crisis while also urgently needing to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit global heating to 1.5C, he said.

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Former Guantánamo prisoner on trial in France for extremism

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Saber Lahmar has been charged with encouraging jihadists to fight for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

An Algerian preacher who spent eight years in the US-run Guantánamo Bay prison has gone on trial in France for allegedly encouraging several young men to join the Islamic State group.

Saber Lahmar, a 52-year-old Algerian released by the US in 2008 and taken in afterwards by France, has been charged with encouraging jihadists to head to Iraq and Syria to fight for the extremist group in 2015.

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Couple face Belarus prison and loss of surrogate child amid UK visa delays

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Graeme Batsman says his Filipina wife’s passport has been caught up in an ‘admin issue’ in Britain

A British man and his Filipina wife say they are facing imprisonment in Belarus and will miss out on starting a family via surrogacy because of UK delays in visa processing.

Graeme Batsman, a data security expert from Harrow, north London, and his wife, Maura Mendez Arganda, travelled to Vitebsk oblast, Belarus, in February to arrange a surrogate birth that would cost them £25,000.

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‘I almost got hit’: the Ukrainian journalists turned war correspondents overnight

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Initially writing stories and making television reports was secondary for the journalists as many focused on survival

When the war started journalists in Ukraine found themselves at the centre of the biggest story in the world. They became war correspondents overnight.

Ukrainian journalists were spotlighted this week when the Pulitzer prize board awarded them with a special citation, hailing the country’s reporters for the “courage, endurance and commitment to truthful reporting” they have shown since the Russian invasion.

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Putin could use nuclear weapon if he felt war being lost – US intelligence chief

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Avril Haines says Russian leader could see prospect of Ukraine defeat as existential threat, potentially triggering escalation

Vladimir Putin could view the prospect of defeat in Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime, potentially triggering his resort to using a nuclear weapon, the top US intelligence official has warned.

The warning on Tuesday came in an assessment from intelligence chiefs briefing the Senate on worldwide threats. The prediction for Ukraine was a long, gruelling war of attrition, which could lead to increasingly volatile acts of escalation from Putin, including full mobilisation, the imposition of martial law, and – if the Russian leader felt the war was going against him, endangering his position in Moscow – even the use of a nuclear warhead.

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Russia-Ukraine war: Ukrainian forces gradually pushing occupiers ‘away from Kharkiv’, says Zelenskiy – live

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Ukraine’s president cautioned against creating a pressure of expecting ‘certain victories’, however, in his nightly address

The Ukrainian MP Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a former head of the security services in the country, has been interviewed on Sky News in the UK from Kyiv. He said that yesterday “we saw again the Victory Day madness in Moscow”. He told viewers:

The same day in Ukraine, in the city of Odesa, the city of Mykolaiv, Russians shelled our cities, our civilians. In Putin’s speech we did not hear any news, any good news for anybody, for us, for the whole world. It’s still the same Soviet kind propaganda. Conducting a war on our soil because of this “Russia’s motherland”. It sounds really like madness, especially on Victory Day.

How can we use civilians as a shield when the Russian Black Sea fleet, the Russian Caspian Sea fleet are shelling missiles, Kalibr and others, against civilians? There is no protection.

The war will continue until Vladimir Putin wants to stop it. We understand any night in any city we can expect shelling at any minute, any hour. That is Putin’s responsibility and his decision.

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China’s pro-Russia propaganda exposed by online activists

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Mistranslations falsely blame Ukrainians for atrocities perpetrated by Russian forces against civilians

A number of Chinese government-linked media outlets and pro-Russia social media accounts are spreading pro-Kremlin sentiment on the Chinese internet by mistranslating or manipulating international news about the war in Ukraine.

In response, online, anonymous volunteers – such as those under the Twitter account Great Translation Movement – have exposed China’s pro-Russia propaganda by highlighting mistranslations that falsely blame Ukrainian troops for bombings and atrocities perpetrated by Russian forces against civilians.

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Zelenskiy calls for end to blockade of Odesa port to prevent global food crisis

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Concern after Russian missiles struck the Black Sea port on Monday as Biden accuses Putin of ‘revisionist history’ in his Victory Day speech

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has urged the international community to take immediate steps to end a Russian blockade of his country’s ports in order to allow wheat shipments and prevent a global food crisis.

The Black Sea export port of Odesa was struck by missiles on Monday. Zelenskiy said: “For the first time in decades there is no usual movement of the merchant fleet, no usual port functioning in Odesa. Probably this has never happened in Odesa since world war two.

The United States cited “anecdotal reports” that some Russian troops in Ukraine were not obeying orders. “Mid-grade officers at various levels, even up to the battalion level” were refusing to move forward in the Donbas offensive.

The UN human rights council is due to hold a special session on Thursday to address alleged Russian human rights violations during its war in Ukraine. More than 50 countries, including Britain, Germany, Turkey and the US, backed a request by Ukraine and demanded an extraordinary meeting of the UN’s top rights body.

A mine-sniffing dog credited with detecting more than 200 explosives since the start of the war in Ukraine has been given a medal. Patron, a two-and-a-half-year-old jack russell whose name means “ammo” in Ukrainian, was presented with the award by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv.

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Russian forces conducting ‘storming operations’ on the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine says – as it happened

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This blog has now closed. You can find our latest coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in our new live blog

As Vladimir Putin wages a bloody and unrelenting war in Ukraine, Guardian foreign correspondent Luke Harding has examined Putin’s unlikely path to the Russian presidency.

From his humble beginnings in St Petersburg to his mysterious and “mediocre” career in the KGB, in this video report we chronicle how Putin deftly manoeuvred himself to become one of the most powerful autocrats in modern history:

Chinese exports to Russia fell in April for the second month as China’s northern neighbour grappled with economic sanctions, while Russian shipments to China surged, a balm to hard-hit Russian firms facing international economic isolation.

Shipments to Russia fell 25.9% in April from a year earlier in dollar terms, worsening from a 7.7% decline the previous month, according to Reuters calculations based on customs data on Monday.

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‘People laugh but think twice’: Belgian cartoonist takes on plastic pollution

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Pieter De Poortere is putting his best-known character, Dickie, to work to help galvanise opposition to a giant plastics plant in Antwerp

Belgian cartoonist Pieter De Poortere was trying to do his bit for the environment: eating less meat and diligently sorting his rubbish – glass, paper, plastics. He realised it wasn’t enough. “I thought if we all sort out our trash, then everything will be recycled, everything will be OK, then we are doing great. But actually that is not true,” he said pointing to the problems of the global waste industry, where wealthy countries’ plastic may be dumped, or burned on open fires in poorer countries.

So he put his best-known character to work, as part of an international art project that launched in April, aiming to draw attention to the problem of plastic production.

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Sri Lanka is the first domino to fall in the face of a global debt crisis

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The south Asian country is the first to buckle under economic pressures compounded by Russia’s war on Ukraine, but it won’t be the last

The departure of Sri Lanka’s prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, follows weeks of protest and a deepening crisis. There is no bankruptcy system for states but if there was then the south Asian country – down to its last $50m (£40m) of reserves – would be first in line to use it.

A team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week started work with officials in Colombo over a bailout that will include a tough package of reforms as well as financial support. But as the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, know full well, this is about more than the mismanagement of an individual country. They fear Sri Lanka is the canary in the coalmine.

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Locust swarms destroy crops in Sardinia’s latest infestation

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Farmers on Italian island say they are disillusioned after previous damage and want compensation

Huge swarms of locusts are wreaking havoc on the Italian island of Sardinia, arriving a month earlier than in previous years.

The worst-affected area is the province of Nuoro, where the winged insects have decimated crops across 25,000 hectares (62,000 acres) of land, following swarms in 2019 said to be the worst in decades and further infestations in 2020 and 2021.

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Jill Biden makes unannounced visit to Ukraine and meets first lady

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Surprise trip on Mother’s Day as Biden meets with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenskiy

US first lady Jill Biden made an unannounced visit to western Ukraine on Sunday, holding a surprise Mother’s Day meeting with the nation’s first lady, Olena Zelenskiy, as Russia presses its punishing war in the eastern regions.

US president Joe Biden has not visited the country, though he expressed a desire to when he was in Poland this spring, following Russia’s invasion in February, but at that time Russian tanks were advancing on the capital, Kyiv, and he hinted that his security advisers held him back.

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