Daughter confirms death of Don and Terry Turner, aged in their seventies, in eastern Spain
A British couple missing in Valencia after floods hit the region have been found dead in their car, their daughter has told the BBC.
Don Turner, 78, and his wife Terry, 74, had not been seen since torrential downpours caused flash floods in eastern Spain.
Continue reading...History teacher stabbed and decapitated near his school in a Paris suburb in 2020 in case that shocked France
Eight people have gone on trial in Paris for their alleged role in events leading to the beheading of the history teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, a case that horrified France and heightened fears of terrorist attacks on schools.
Paty, 47, was stabbed and then decapitated near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, by Abdoullakh Anzorov, a radicalised 18-year-old who arrived in France aged six with his Chechen parents and had been granted asylum.
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges TikTok’s algorithm exposed teenagers to videos promoting suicide, self-harm and eating disorders
Seven French families have filed a lawsuit against TikTok, accusing the platform of exposing their adolescent children to harmful content that led to two of them taking their own lives at 15, their lawyer said.
The lawsuit alleges TikTok’s algorithm exposed the seven teenagers to videos promoting suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, lawyer Laure Boutron-Marmion told broadcaster Franceinfo on Monday.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Maia Sandu’s victory amid claims of Russian interference boosts EU hopes and deals setback to Kremlin
Europe’s most powerful leaders have congratulated Moldova’s pro-western president, Maia Sandu, after she won a second term, cementing the country’s EU aspirations and dealing a setback to the Kremlin.
With nearly 98% of the vote counted in the second round of the presidential elections on Sunday, Sandu had 54% of the vote, ahead of Alexandr Stoianoglo, a Kremlin-friendly political newcomer, backed by the pro-Russia party of Socialists.
Continue reading...Day after king and PM pelted by angry residents, search focuses on areas where people could have been trapped
Hundreds of civil and military emergency workers are searching shopping centres, garages and underground car parks for more victims of floods in the Valencia region that have killed at least 214 people, as public anger mounts over Spanish authorities’ handling of the disaster.
Yellow and amber weather warnings were in place for parts of Valencia and neighbouring Catalonia on Monday, with people in the affected areas advised to stay off the roads and keep away from the coast and rivers.
Continue reading...Source says one person’s hand was severed in altercation involving several people at Ozoir-la-Ferrière station
Four teenagers were wounded, two of them seriously, after an axe was used during a fight on a suburban train outside Paris, French police sources have said.
One of the victims, all aged 16 or 17, had a hand cut off and another had their skull split open. The main suspect in the incident was later arrested.
Continue reading...Media reported stories of survivors including the woman trapped in her car in a flooded underpass for 72 hours
Her car was among the scores that were swept up in Spain’s deadly floods, tossed about by the mud-coloured waters that surged on to streets. But after 72 hours spent trapped in an underpass, the woman was hailed as one of the lucky ones.
“After three days, we found someone alive in their car,” Martín Pérez, the head of Valencia’s civil protection service, told volunteers on Saturday. The announcement prompted hearty applause.
Continue reading...King Felipe heckled in Paiporta, one of the municipalities worst affected by last week’s floods
Hundreds of people have heckled Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, as well as the prime minister and the regional leader of Valencia – throwing mud and shouting “murderers” – as the group attempted an official visit to one of the municipalities hardest hit by the deadly floods.
The scenes playing out in Paiporta on Sunday laid bare the mounting sense of abandonment among the devastated areas and the lingering anger over why an alert urging residents not to leave home on Tuesday was sent after the flood waters began surging.
Continue reading...Eight charged in connection with murder of Samuel Paty in Paris suburbs in 2020
It was a killing that started with a lie. In October 2020, an Islamist terrorist tracked down and decapitated professor Samuel Paty as he left school on the last day before half-term holidays.
In the days preceding his murder, Paty, 47, who taught geography and history, had been the subject of an intense campaign of online harassment sparked when a 13-year-old student claimed he had discriminated against his Muslim pupils during a class on moral and civic education.
Continue reading...Brutal economic situation has inflicted misery on farmers who struggle to turn a profit and forced some to look for alternative streams of revenue
When Coen van den Bighelaar first spoke to school friends about taking over their parents’ dairy farms, he was the only one of the four to voice serious doubts. Fresh out of university, he was making more money in a comfortable office than his father did toiling for twice as long in the field.
But six years later, Bighelaar has followed in his parents’ footsteps, while his friends’ enthusiasm has waned. One quit farming to take a job in logistics. Another opened a daycare centre to supplement the income from selling milk. A third is thinking about buying land and moving to Canada.
Continue reading...Thousands of small farms have closed according to analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states
The European Union gave generous farming subsidies to the companies of more than a dozen billionaires between 2018 and 2021, the Guardian can reveal, including companies owned by the former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš and the British businessman Sir James Dyson.
Billionaires were “ultimate beneficiaries” linked to €3.3bn (£2.76bn) of EU farming handouts over the four-year period even as thousands of small farms were closed down, according to the analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states.
Continue reading...Pro-EU president Maia Sandu faces Alexandr Stoianoglo in polls marred by accusations of Kremlin vote-buying
Moldovans are going to the polls for a second-round vote to choose between the incumbent pro-EU president, Maia Sandu, and a Russia-friendly challenger.
Despite securing 42% of the vote in the first round, Sandu faces a tough challenge in Sunday’s runoff against an opposition bloc led by Alexandr Stoianoglo of the Socialist party, which aligns with Moscow.
Continue reading...Ukrainian president calls on countries to step in before troops sent to Russia by Pyongyang reach battlefield
Ukraine’s president urged allies to stop “watching” and take steps before North Korean troops deployed in Russia reach the battlefield, while the army chief said his troops were facing “one of the most powerful offensives” by Moscow since the full-scale war began.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy raised the prospect of a pre-emptive Ukrainian strike on camps where the North Korean troops are being trained and said Kyiv knows their location. But he said Ukraine can’t do it without permission from allies to use western-made long-range weapons to hit targets deep inside Russia.
Continue reading...The devastating flooding should spur this month’s Cop29 climate conference to press for immediate action, not look away
Move on. Nothing to see here. Just another ordinary, everyday apocalypse.
If past experience is any guide, the world’s reaction to the floods in Spain last week will be similar to that of motorway drivers at a crash scene: slow down, take in the horror, outwardly express sympathy, inwardly give thanks that fate picked someone else – and foot on the accelerator.
Continue reading...Thousands lined streets of Irish capital waiting for falsely advertised Mácnas parade after website’s ‘human error’
A Pakistan-based company has issued an embarrassed apology to Dubliners after a “human error” on its events website led to thousands of people turning up on the Irish capital’s main thoroughfare for a nonexistent Halloween parade.
Footage on Thursday night showed throngs of people lining both sides of O’Connell Street waiting for a supposed procession of giant Halloween puppets made by one of Ireland’s best known theatre groups, the Galway performance company Mácnas.
Continue reading...Pedro Sánchez orders largest peacetime troop deployment to deal with flooding that has killed 211 people
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has ordered the country’s largest peacetime military deployment, announcing that 10,000 troops and police officers will be drafted in to help deal with the aftermath of this week’s devastating floods, which have killed at least 211 people in eastern, southern and central regions.
Speaking after chairing a meeting of the flood crisis committee, Sánchez said the government was mobilising all the resources at its disposal to deal with the “terrible tragedy”, which stuck hardest in the eastern region of Valencia. He also acknowledged that much of the help still wasn’t getting through and called for unity and an end to political bickering and blame games.
Continue reading...The steep and stark environmental decline was not supposed to happen under the common agricultural policy
Revealed: the growing income gap between Europe’s biggest and smallest farms
The Rhine overflowed last winter, covering fields miles from the river and in some places leaving just the tops of trees visible.
But Thomas Bollig, who farms just a few miles from the banks of the Rhine, was not worried. Even as floods inundated the fields of his neighbours, making sowing impossible, his holdings were largely unaffected. Bollig farms organically, and the natural methods he uses to improve his soil allow his fields to hold more water when it rains, and release it gradually, coping well with floods and droughts.
Continue reading...Big farms rake in record profits when food prices soar, while small farms struggle on razor-thin margins
‘Welfare for the rich’: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes
The income gap between the biggest and smallest farms in Europe has doubled in the past 15 years and hit record levels at the same time as the number of small farms has collapsed, a Guardian analysis of agricultural income data has found.
Figures from the European Commission’s Farming Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and Eurostat suggest farmers across the continent raked in record profits when the war in Ukraine sent food prices soaring, boosting a long-running trend of rising average incomes that has outstripped inflation.
Continue reading...Young child among the dead at Novi Sad’s main station as country’s president vows to punish those responsible
At least 14 people have been killed after part of an outdoor roof collapsed at a train station in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, the country’s president has said.
The roof, which provided shade over benches near the station’s entrance, came crashing down early on Friday.
Continue reading...Piotr Kucharski wore insignia for proscribed terror group on combat clothing at Suffolk Viking re-enactment
A builder has been jailed for claiming at a Viking re-enactment that he had fought for the Wagner group in Ukraine.
Piotr Kucharski, 49, wore combat clothing bearing badges with insignia for the proscribed terror organisation to an event in Stonham Aspal, in Suffolk.
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