Couple stumble upon unusual occurrence that is result of very particular weather conditions
A rare collection of “ice eggs” has been spotted in Finland, a phenomenon experts say only occurs in highly particular conditions.
Risto Mattila, who photographed the eggs, said he and his wife were walking along Marjaniemi beach on Hailuoto island on Sunday when they came across the icy balls covering a 30-metre (98ft) expanse of shoreline.
Continue reading...More than 1,000 people have been sleeping rough for months in squalid conditions
Hundreds of French police have begun clearing more than 1,000 migrants and refugees from a makeshift camp in northern Paris, where they had been sleeping rough for months in squalid conditions.
Police arrived at the site near Porte de La Chapelle before 6am local time (0500 GMT) on Thursday, after the country’s centrist government set out Emmanuel Macron’s tougher stance on immigration this week and vowed to clear the camps.
Continue reading...US officials said Trump would not ‘sign a check’ for military aid without investigation into Joe Biden, Bill Taylor tells inquiry
For a second time in two days, newly released testimony in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump has produced a firsthand account of US officials negotiating a quid pro quo in Ukraine in which military aid would be used to pay for a political hit against Joe Biden, the president’s potential 2020 adversary.
Related: Trump-Ukraine scandal: Taylor transcript details direct quid pro quo via irregular channels – live
Continue reading...Thirty years from the fall of the Berlin Wall, new global tensions are polarising our world – and our cities feel more divided than ever. From today and for the next four weeks, our international film series will tell the stories of five cities that reflect these divisions in surprising and troubling ways
Thirty years ago, a rapt world watched the unfolding of one of the great city stories of all time. Every hammer blow chipping away the imposing grey blocks of the Berlin Wall, which had come to embody global geopolitical divisions, seemed to herald a more united future.
Since then, however, our world has fractured anew and our cities feel more divided than ever. When the Berlin Wall fell, there were two border walls in Europe; now there are 15. Nor is this fracture merely physical: many cities are havens of wealth and privilege for those who hold the access codes, hives of struggle and poverty for those who do not. Wherever I travel to report I have always been struck by how different people can have such contrasting experiences of the same city – and it’s no different at home, in my neighbourhood of Camberwell, south London, where upscale coffee shops and gang violence occupy the same stretches of road.
Continue reading...Everyone in Melilla has some connection to the city’s most visible and controversial feature: a huge barbed-wire fence, which separates this Spanish port city from the rest of north Africa. Asylum seekers like Aboubacar wait for months in hidden forest camps to scale the fence, populist politicians like Jesús want to strengthen it, and both the Moroccan and Melillan economy depend on the 30,000 Moroccans like Youssra who cross through it every day to work. Will Melilla embrace its fate as a city embedded in Africa – or will it succumb to populist Trump-style demands to build a wall?
Three decades on, the country’s unification is still a source of sadness and trauma – which the far right know how to exploit
I was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. Everything changed: the east adopted not just the West German currency, but all its laws and rules and values. Thousands of companies were privatised within four years of the wall falling – millions lost their jobs, and millions more migrated to the west in search of better paid work. In 1994, only 18% of East German employees still worked at the same place as they had in 1991, according to the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk.
There were new and often completely disorientating experiences for many: unemployment had not existed in the GDR. No one even knew the meaning of betriebsbedingte kündigung – compulsory redundancy – or where unemployment benefits came from. In the GDR, work had been so much more than a source of income; life revolved around the workplace. Companies often had their own singing or sports clubs, and their own childcare and health services. My dad, a metal worker, lost his job after the unification. It was a shock – he felt guilty and ashamed. But it took him years to find the words to express his feelings. “I didn’t realise the gravity of the situation,” he said to me 20 years later.
Continue reading...Ramil Shamsutdinov opened fire on eight fellow soldiers on Siberian military base
The father of a Russian conscript who allegedly shot and killed eight fellow soldiers on an army base last month has blamed a culture of brutal bullying for driving his son to carry out the attack, raising fresh concerns over a poisonous culture of hazing that Russia claimed to have eliminated from its army.
Ramil Shamsutdinov opened fire from his service weapon last week on a military base in Russia’s Transbaikal region, killing two officers and six soldiers. Some media reports said he targeted the heads of his victims during the rampage.
Continue reading...Kevin Lunney says kidnappers had sadistic ‘checklist’ in latest and most brutal act against QIH executives
The business executive who was abducted and tortured near the Irish border has spoken for the first time about a crime that has shocked and bewildered Ireland.
Kevin Lunney said the gang that kidnapped him went through a checklist of sadistic acts which left him in agony.
Continue reading...Exclusive: European experts fear WHO recognition will encourage use of unproven therapies
Europe’s leading doctors are to call for tighter regulation of traditional Chinese medicine, anxious that recent recognition by the World Health Organization will encourage the use of unproven therapies that can sometimes be harmful.
The Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM) and the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council will issue a joint statement on Thursday urging the WHO to clarify how traditional Chinese medicine and other complementary therapies should be used.
Continue reading...Former Speaker tells foreign media UK is better off as part of EU power bloc
Days after bowing out as Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow has described Brexit as the biggest mistake Britain has made since the second world war.
Bercow, who was persistently accused of bias by Brexit-backing MPs during his term as Speaker, gave a valedictory speech to the Foreign Press Association, revealing himself to be a remainer.
Continue reading...Catalan question again dominates campaign ahead of Sunday’s general election
Barcelona no longer goes to bed to the smell of smoke, the whoop of sirens or the clattering of helicopters. Three weeks after violent unrest greeted the Spanish supreme court’s decision to jail nine Catalan separatist leaders for sedition over their roles in the failed push for regional independence two years ago, the city is slowly returning to something resembling normality.
While sporadic roadblocks set up by protesters have become just another irritation of urban life and rubbish piles up on the streets after most of the bins in central Barcelona were burned on the barricades, the true impact may be more accurately measured on Sunday when Spain holds its fourth general election in as many years. The Catalan question is once again dominating the political debate and could help the far-right Vox party surge into third place, its best-ever result.
Continue reading...EU envoy acknowledges in updated testimony he told Ukraine it would likely not receive aid unless it announced investigations into Trump’s rivals
Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell appears to have bulldozed directly through protocol by forecasting, before the articles of impeachment have even been drafted in the House and Trump put on trial in the Senate, that the president will be acquitted.
“If it were today, I don’t think there’s any question — it would not lead to a removal,” @SenateMajLdr McConnell says of a potential impeachment trial in the Senate.
/2 McConnell: “I’m pretty sure I know how it’s going to end.” Says Trump will be acquitted by Senate like Clinton & Andrew Johnson
Sondland was asked, with respect to the “demands” made by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani to investigate the 2016 election and Burisma, if “those conditions would have to be complied with prior to getting a meeting.”
Continue reading...Officer Giorgios Marietakis describes sailor Kushila Stein’s rescue after she lost an oar
On a rescue mission, Capt Giorgos Marietakis only ever has one rule: to tune into his senses and envision the person he is out to save. On Sunday, he put himself into what he imagined would be the mindset of Kushila Stein, a 45-year-old New Zealand woman lost at sea for close to three days.
“I had an image of her being hungry and thirsty,” he said. “I tried to get into her head and think of what she would do. I imagined her beginning to despair and I thought of her doing whatever she could to survive.”
Continue reading...President says user-edited site should be replaced with Big Russian Encyclopaedia
Vladimir Putin has called for the creation of a more “reliable” Russian version of Wikipedia.
The president told a Kremlin meeting on the future of the Russian language: “As for Wikipedia … it’s better to replace it with the new Big Russian Encyclopaedia in electronic form,” RIA Novosti news agency reported. “At least that will be reliable information, presented in a good, modern way.”
Continue reading...Star accuses Christophe Ruggia of abuse when she was making her first film aged 12
The acclaimed French actor Adèle Haenel has alleged she was sexually harassed from the age of 12 by the director who made her first film.
Haenel, 30, who has won a string of awards for her work, including two French Oscars, said she was subjected to “permanent sexual harassment” by Christophe Ruggia from the age of 12 to 15 when she was making and promoting her debut 2002 film, The Devils, in which she played a girl with autism.
Continue reading...The Guardian’s political sketch writer is supposed to make up his own jokes. But politics has been so ludicrous and psychedelic that he’s just written down what happened and taken credit for the laughs
I didn’t think twice when I was asked to become the Guardian’s political sketch writer. Not only was it a huge honour to follow in the footsteps of so many great writers, such as Norman Shrapnel and Simon Hoggart, but what better job could there be for a satirist and lifelong politics nerd? Yet in February 2014, I imagined it would be a niche slot. Centre-stage, certainly, for the big set pieces of elections and budgets, but otherwise strictly for obsessives like me who could find humour in exchanges over proposed improvements to the Kettering bypass at transport questions on a Thursday morning.
Yet almost from the day I started, it was as if our politicians had chosen to overdose on psychedelics. The surreal rapidly became the all too real. Sketches that used to be comedic diversions, lighthearted puncturing of pomposity, incompetence and duplicity through exaggeration and flights of imagination, became almost straightforward reportage. I didn’t have to make anything up, I just had to more or less write down what people said and claim the laughs for myself. A transcription service, if you like.
Continue reading...Boys, now 15, are youngest people in Irish history to be convicted of murder
Two teenage boys have been sentenced to life and 15 years respectively for murdering a schoolgirl who was lured to an abandoned house, savagely beaten and sexually assaulted in a case that has horrified Ireland.
A judge in the central criminal court in Dublin on Tuesday sentenced one boy to life in detention, with the sentence to be reviewed after 12 years. The other received 15 years, with the sentence to be reviewed after eight years.
Continue reading...Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police regarded punks as the most dangerous youth element in the country and ‘the leading force’ behind anti-government activities. These unnamed police mugshots from the former DDR demonstrate the lengths to which the security services would surveil, harass and detain punk ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathisers’.
Testimony of veteran diplomat Marie Yovanovitch exposes Trump’s paralysing hold on the administration
What shines through the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch is her disorientation. She is a veteran diplomat at the peak of her career, and in one of the most challenging but important posts in US foreign policy. But she had no clue what was happening inside her own government.
On 24 April this year, she received a call from Carol Perez, the director general of the foreign service, speaking to her in cryptic tones as if Yovanovitch’s life was in danger if she remained at her ambassadorial post in Kyiv. She spoke as if there was a threat too awful to describe clearly on a phone line.
Continue reading...Experts warn of dangerous consequences as nuclear deal continues to unravel
Iran has announced a tenfold increase in enriched uranium production as Tehran backs away from its nuclear deal with the west.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, said enriched uranium production was now at 5kg per day, up from 450g two months ago. The announcement coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Iranian takeover of the US embassy.
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