Poland criticised over stranded migrants after seventh death at border

Identity documents suggest latest person to die was 24-year-old Syrian who arrived in Belarus last month

Polish police have found another body near the border with Belarus amid fresh allegations that Warsaw is breaking international law in its treatment of migrants stranded in harrowing conditions on the EU’s eastern frontier.

The man’s body was spotted in a field by a helicopter crew, police said, bringing to seven the number of people reported by Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Belarusian authorities to have died trying to cross the border since the summer.

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Czech hospital angered by unauthorised visit to see ailing president

Police on alert and inquiry launched after speaker of parliament pays visit to Miloš Zeman without permission

Police in the Czech Republic will stop unauthorised hospital visits to the country’s ailing president, Miloš Zeman, after doctors treating him in intensive care complained that a leading political figure had called on him without their knowledge or permission.

Prague’s central military hospital launched an internal inquiry after the speaker of the country’s parliament, Radek Vondráček, revealed he had seen Zeman on Thursday and described him as being in good spirits.

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Fast-flowing river of lava pours from La Palma volcano in Canary Islands – video

Hot lava continues to gush from the Spanish Cumbre Vieja volcano. About 300 more people fled their homes early on Thursday as flows of molten rock threatened to engulf another area in La Palma. Emergency crews gave people living between the towns of Tazacorte and La Laguna a few hours to collect their belongings and pets and go to a meeting point. Nearly 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of land and more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed since the eruption began on 19 September

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Hope and fear in EU as hardliner tipped to be German finance minister

Prospect of the FDP’s Christian Lindner taking charge has ‘half of Europe quaking in its boots’

Germany’s biggest neighbours are watching the formation of the country’s new government with a mixture of hope and fear, amid concerns that a fiscal hardliner hotly tipped to become the next finance minister could drag the continent back to the frosty standoffs of the eurozone crisis.

The Social Democratic party (SPD), the German Greens and the Free Democratic party (FDP) were expected to inch further towards a “traffic light” power-sharing deal on Friday, with formal coalition talks likely to start next week.

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Italy using anti-mafia laws to scapegoat migrant boat drivers, report finds

A decades-long policy of criminalising asylum seekers is filling prisons with innocent men, according to analysis by rights groups

Italian police have arrested more than 2,500 migrants for smuggling or aiding illegal immigration since 2013, often using anti-mafia laws to bring charges, according to the first comprehensive analysis of official data on the criminalisation of refugees and asylum seekers in Italy.

The report by three migrant rights groups has collected police data and analysed more than 1,000 criminal cases brought by prosecutors against refugees accused of driving vessels carrying asylum seekers across the Mediterranean.

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Court suspends Giulio Regeni murder and kidnapping trial

Decision follows hours of deliberation over whether it is fair for four Egyptian security officials to be tried in absentia

A court in Rome has suspended trial proceedings against four Egyptian security officials accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the Italian student Giulio Regeni in Cairo, following hours of deliberation over whether it is fair for the men to be tried in absentia.

The trial was returned to a preliminary court, after judges debated for seven hours about whether hearings could continue amid any doubt they were aware of proceedings against them.

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‘I saw a man walking with an arrow in his back’: witnesses recall Norway attack – video

A witness of a bow and arrow attack that killed five people in the town of Kongsberg recalled on Thursday seeing one of the victims walking on a street with an arrow in his back. Investigators named the suspect as Espen Andersen Braathen, a 37-year-old living in the municipality where the attacks took place. Police had been concerned about signs of radicalisation in the suspect before the attacks, carried out with a bow and arrow and other weapons, a senior officer said.

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Italy braced for unrest as Covid pass becomes mandatory for all workers

Strictest vaccine mandate in Europe expected to bring fresh protests and leave some industries struggling with staff shortages

Italy is bracing itself for further unrest and labour market mayhem as the strictest vaccine mandate in Europe takes effect on Friday.

All workers will be obliged to present a coronavirus health pass before entering their workplaces, a move that is expected to leave some industries struggling with staff shortages.

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Norway bow and arrow attack: suspect showed signs of radicalisation, say police

Danish man, who is in custody in connection with deaths of five people, is Muslim convert

A Danish man suspected of killing five people and injuring two more in a bow-and-arrow attack in Norway is a Muslim convert with previous criminal convictions who had been flagged as a possible Islamic extremist, police have said.

“We’re talking about a convert to Islam,” Norwegian police chief Ole Bredrup Sæverud said on Thursday. There were “previously fears linked to his radicalisation”, he said, but establishing motive would be “complicated … and will take time”.

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Giulio Regeni: trial of Egyptian security agents charged over death begins in Rome

The accused, all members of the National Security Agency, are being tried in absentia after the researcher’s kidnap and killing in Cairo

A court in Rome has begun the trial of four Egyptian security service officers accused of killing an Italian researcher, Giulio Regeni, five and a half years after his mutilated body was found in a ditch by a road in Cairo.

Italian prosecutors accuse Gen Tariq Saber, Col Aser Ibrahim, Capt Hesham Helmi, and Maj Magdi Abd al-Sharif of the “aggravated kidnapping” of Regeni, while Sharif is also charged with “conspiracy to commit aggravated murder”. Kidnap carries a potential sentence of up to eight years in Italy, while Sharif could receive a life sentence.

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Isn’t it good, Swedish plywood: the miraculous eco-town with a 20-storey wooden skyscraper

Skellefteå has wooden schools, bridges, even car parks. And now it has one of the world’s tallest wooden buildings. We visit Sweden to see what a climate-conscious future looks like

As you come in to land at Skellefteå airport in the far north of Sweden, you are greeted by a wooden air traffic control tower poking up from an endless forest of pine and spruce. After boarding a biogas bus into town, you glide past wooden apartment blocks and wooden schools, cross a wooden road bridge and pass a wooden multistorey car park, before finally reaching the centre, now home to one of the tallest new wooden buildings in the world.

“We are not the wood Taliban,” says Bo Wikström, from Skellefteå’s tourism agency, as he leads a group of visitors on a “wood safari” of its buildings. “Other materials are allowed.” But why build in anything else – when you’re surrounded by 480,000 hectares of forest?

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‘Sophisticated’: ancient faeces shows humans enjoyed beer and blue cheese 2,700 years ago

Austrian Alps salt miners had a ‘balanced diet’, with an analysis of bronze and iron age excrement finding the earliest evidence of cheese ripening in Europe

It’s no secret that beer and blue cheese go hand in hand – but a new study reveals how deep their roots run in Europe, where workers at a salt mine in Austria were gorging on both up to 2,700 years ago.

Scientists made the discovery by analysing samples of human excrement found at the heart of the Hallstatt mine in the Austrian Alps.

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‘Many crime scenes’: at least five dead in bow-and-arrow attacks in Kongsberg – video

A police official describes bow-and-arrow attacks in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg that have killed five and wounded two others. The government said police had launched a large-scale investigation. Kongsberg police chief Øyvind Aas said police would investigate whether the attacks amounted to an 'act of terror'. The death toll was the worst of any attack in Norway since 2011, when far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers at a youth camp.

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Australian Chloë McCardel sets world record for most swims across the English Channel – video

Chloë McCardel finally achieved her dream of crossing the English Channel more times than anyone else. The 36-year-old Australian completed her 44th crossing a little after 2pm BST, eclipsing the previous record held by British swimmer Alison Streeter. ‘I’m buzzing right now, I feel like I could go again and swim the channel again tomorrow, although that's not a very good idea’, she said. After starting in the dead of night at Shakespeare Beach at Dover, she touched land at Wissant Beach on the French side, before returning to her support boat to celebrate

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At least five people killed in bow and arrow attack in Norway

Police say suspect has been apprehended after attack in town of Kongsberg, 70km from Oslo

At least five people have been killed and two others injured in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg by a man armed with a bow and arrow, police said.

Øyvind Aas, the police chief in the town, about 70km southwest of the capital, Oslo, told a press conference on Wednesday night that the attacker had been arrested and “according to our information, is the only person implicated”.

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Azor review – eerie conspiracy thriller about the complacency of the super-rich

Andreas Fontana’s debut feature is an unnervingly subtle drama about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and ‘disappearances’

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”.

It is set in 1980 in Argentina, at the time of the junta’s dirty war against leftists and dissidents, and you could set it alongside recent movies including Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) and Francisco Márquez’s A Common Crime (2020), which intuited the almost supernatural fear among those left behind when people they knew had vanished and joined los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. But Azor gives a queasy new perspective on the horror of those times, and there is even a nauseous echo of the Swiss banks’ attitude to their German neighbours in the second world war.

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EU offers to scrap 80% of NI food checks but prepares for Johnson to reject deal

Maroš Šefčovič attempts to end tussle at press conference but ‘big gap’ remains to UK’s demands

The EU will scrap 80% of checks on foods entering Northern Ireland from Britain but Brussels officials were “preparing for the worst” amid signs Boris Johnson is set to reject the terms of the deal.

Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s Brexit commissioner, also announced that customs checks on manufactured goods would be halved as part of a significant concession to ease post-Brexit border problems.

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Eritreans of Italian descent demand Rome finally grant them citizenship

Group of more than 300 descendants of people born under Italian rule accuse state of ‘crime of colonial racism’

Hundreds of Eritreans of Italian descent who trace their ancestry to the period of Italy’s colonial rule are demanding Italian citizenship, a right denied to them by Benito Mussolini’s racial laws.

A group of more than 300 grandchildren or great-grandchildren of people born to Italian fathers and Eritrean mothers have written to the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, and other government officials urging them to “finally examine and resolve an issue that has never really been addressed, a crime of colonial racism that marked the life of thousands of innocent women and men, and which continues to discriminate against generations of Italians”.

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EU says it will recognise NHS Covid pass ‘soon’

Constant Covid testing when travelling from the UK to countries such as the Netherlands should soon be a thing of the past

Trips to Europe over October half-term could become easier for British travellers after Brussels said a technical tie-up with the EU ensuring the NHS Covid pass is recognised across over 40 countries would be “going live soon”.

In some European countries, such as the Netherlands, tourists from the UK have faced constant Covid tests as the NHS app proving full vaccination status is not recognised at the Dutch border or in its bars, restaurants and museums.

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La Palma volcano: giant boulders float down rivers of lava – video

Drone footage shows lava flows carrying huge boulders from the Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma. The advancing rivers of molten rock prompted a lockdown on Monday, as houses in their path were destroyed. More than 1,000 homes have been destroyed since the eruption began on 19 September, and 6,000 people have been evacuated from the area

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