Author: staff

The European Commission has deployed a team of migration experts to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, two weeks after around 80,000 migrants crossed into the territory from Morocco triggering an unprecedented humanitarian and political crisis, and amid reports that further large-scale attempts to cross into the enclave could be imminent. Speaking on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Commission said the mission was intended to “understand the first-hand needs on the ground” and how the EU can bolster its support for the Spanish authorities. Yet, the executive declined to say whether the visit would also cover preparations for a potential fresh…

Published on 13/08/2026 – 15:50 GMT+2 Iran’s military rejected as “lies” on Thursday remarks by US President Donald Trump claiming control of the Strait of Hormuz, saying the strategic waterway was fully under Iranian control. “The false claims of the United States that ships are passing through the Strait of Hormuz normally…are nothing more than lies and fabrications,” said Ebrahim Zolfaghari, the spokesperson for Iran’s central military command. “The Strait of Hormuz is, as in the past, under the complete management and control of the Islamic Republic of Iran and no commercial ship or tanker without the permission and supervision…

Missed this year’s eclipse and have serious FOMO? Don’t worry, because there’s another one coming up in 2027 – and it’s being described as the ‘eclipse of the century’. Taking place on 2 August 2027, this eclipse will be the longest on easily accessible land until 2114, with totality lasting six minutes and 23 seconds at the point of the greatest eclipse in Egypt. For context, yesterday’s eclipse lasted for two minutes and 18 seconds at its maximum point. You don’t have to travel all the way to Egypt to see it either, as the path of totality will pass…

Published on 13/08/2026 – 15:01 GMT+2 Romania halted operations of its only nuclear power plant on Thursday, a rare shutdown due to a drought scorching Europe that has caused the Danube river, whose waters cool the plant, to fall to record lows. Much of Europe is facing another heatwave this summer amid droughts that have driven rivers to historic lows. The Cernavodă plant, which usually generates a fifth of Romania’s electricity, has been shut down just once before, in 2003, due to drought. The national nuclear energy company Nuclearelectrica had already shut down one of the plant’s two reactors last…

Azerbaijan exported €48.2 million worth of pomegranates and pomegranate products in 2025, making the fruit one of the country’s fastest-growing non-oil exports. Around 23,000 hectares of orchards now supply fresh fruit, juice, concentrate, wine and seed oil to 26 countries, from Gulf states to markets across Asia. That puts Azerbaijan up against established exporters such as Iran, Turkey and Spain, all of which sell pomegranates at scale. “For Azerbaijan, the pomegranate is an integral part of our nation’s cultural heritage, with a history spanning nearly 2,000 years, symbolising abundance, prosperity, and well-being,” Farhad Garashov, chairman of the Pomegranate Producers and…

For travellers to Lisbon, a new boutique hotel has opened offering a different kind of hospitality from most city centre accommodation. Villa Dorothéa lies in the Portuguese capital’s Lapa district, occupying a carefully restored 19th-century hamlet. It is spread across five interconnected houses set between cobbled pathways, quiet courtyards, and terraces scented with jasmine and bougainvillaea. The hotel has no formal lobby. Instead, guests follow footpaths paved with traditional Portuguese stonework, passing ceramic tributes to the area’s fishing heritage and historic tiled plaques that connect the house, hotel, and surrounding city. A micro-neighbourhood in busy Lisbon Villa Dorothéa is designed…

This year has seen her battle shared trauma through the exorcism of shimmering red fabric in Mother Mary. 2026 has also witnessed her navigate corporate threats to save a fashion magazine (The Devil Wears Prada 2) and fight off pesky suitors hungry for her husband’s throne (The Odyssey). Now, Anne Hathaway is striving to survive the suburban anxiety of 1980s America by taking a stotgun to a dinosaur’s face in David Robert Mitchell’s The End Of Oak Street. Seriously, what can’t this woman do? She’s certainly making it clear that while Tom Holland and Zendaya may be the ideal poster…

“Defence stocks make millionaires 95% of the time,” a man tells his followers in a TikTok video before pointing viewers towards a handful of companies in the defence sector. It’s one of several videos offering investment tips: some feature creators while others use AI-generated personas to offer stock picks and financial advice to users scrolling through social media in Europe. But how much of this advice should you actually trust? A new analysis of 150 popular finance-related TikTok videos by broker comparison website BrokerListings.com suggests that viewers should be cautious. The videos it studied amassed at least 100,000 views each,…

One of the founding figures of Iran’s IRGC Mohsen Rezaei has been appointed secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council — giving one of the country’s most controversial senior figures formal authority over the institution responsible for Tehran’s strategic decisions. The appointment was made in a presidential decree signed by Masoud Pezeshkian on Sunday. Hours earlier, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei had separately appointed Rezaei as his personal representative on the council. With nearly five decades at the top of the Islamic Republic’s security and military apparatus, Rezaei, 71, succeeds Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a veteran IRGC commander who resigned after around four…

China’s push into orbital data centres risks leaving Europe behind, according to a new policy brief from the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). Orbital data centres are increasingly seen as key strategic assets for processing the vast amounts of data generated by AI and satellite systems. The brief, titled “Constellating Compute: China’s Domestic Policy Towards Orbital Data Centre Leadership,” warns that if the technological gap widens significantly, Europe risks having to compute its own space data through third-party actors and losing access to orbital information. European efforts are under way but remain limited in scale. The EU-funded research project ASCEND,…