Author: staff

The North Koreans showed up on the battlefield in late October, and have since earned a grim reputation among Ukrainians for apparently preferring to kill themselves rather than surrender. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said North Korea has seen 4,000 dead or wounded soldiers since joining the war. On Jan. 11, Ukrainian forces managed to capture two North Koreans alive; they were taken to Kyiv, where South Korea’s spy agency has been assisting, for medical treatment and interrogation. Neither the Kremlin nor Pyongyang, which signed a limitless partnership treaty with each other last summer, have confirmed North Korea’s participation in the…

The provocative French filmmaker left his mark on 1970s and 1980s cinema. He won several awards, including an Oscar in 1979. Bertrand Blier, the French director and outspoken provocateur behind multi-César award-winning comedies, has died aged 85. Famous for his iconoclastic 1970s and 1980s comedies Les Valseuses, Tenue de soirée and Buffet froid, Blier died “peacefully at home in Paris, surrounded by his wife and children,” his son Léonard Blier told AFP. The son of actor Bernard Blier, he gave Gérard Depardieu his big break in 1974 with the cult film Les Valseuses (French for “the waltzers” but also a slang term for testicles),…

But Europe’s favorite secessionist telenovela appears to have come to an end — at least for now. Last May, nationalist parties failed to secure a majority in Catalonia’s regional parliament for the first time in 30 years. Instead, voters backed 58-year-old Salvador Illa, a pro-unionist socialist politician who campaigned on social issues instead of separatism. The bespectacled and soft-spoken Illa, who served as Spain’s health minister during the Covid crisis and is close to Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez, is often cast as a boring technocrat. “What I want is to govern,” Illa said in an interview with POLITICO on his…

Updated: 21/01/2025 – 14:34 GMT+1 The quake hit at 12:17 am local time, 38 kilometres southeast of Chiayi County Hall, at a depth of 10 kilometres, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration. The US Geological Survey recorded a slightly lower magnitude of 6. … More The quake hit at 12:17 am local time, 38 kilometres southeast of Chiayi County Hall, at a depth of 10 kilometres, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration. The US Geological Survey recorded a slightly lower magnitude of 6.In Tainan, six individuals, including a one-month-old baby, were rescued from a collapsed house. Rescue teams also freed…

The salute immediately generated a viral and divided response, with online critics attacking Musk for the gesture and supporters minimizing its significance. “I will start by talking about the response, or perhaps the lack of responses of the EU to Trump’s inauguration. It represents a threat to the whole of the European Union,” said French member of the European Parliament Manon Aubry, co-chair of The Left group, at a press conference Tuesday morning. “Let’s start by keeping things simple, I am sure everyone saw the Nazi salute, I select these words carefully, the Nazi salute of Elon Musk.” In Germany,…

Most of the world’s superpowers are members of the legally binding international treaty. President Trump wasted no time announcing a raft of executive orders after entering the Oval Office, and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is one of them.He pulled the US out of the global climate agreement during his first term in office, so it is no big surprise that he has done the same again. But with devastating extreme weather, partly driven by rising temperatures, taking lives and devastating communities the world over, many will question Trump’s decision. The iconic international climate treaty – the Paris Agreement -…

Flurry of activity And so on Monday night and Tuesday morning, just hours after Rudakubana’s guilty plea, came a flurry of government activity. In an early morning Downing Street press conference framed by Union Jacks, Starmer promised a probing public inquiry into the state’s handling of the case, vowing not to “let any institution of the state deflect from their failure, failure which in this case, frankly, leaps off the page.” In a detail disclosed since Rudakubana’s conviction, the prime minister pointed out that the killer had been referred three times to the British government’s de-radicalization Prevent program, only for…

While the City of Paris and the French government are at loggerheads over resolving the situation, many of the protesters say they are unaccompanied minors from sub-Saharan Africa. Almost 350 people are protesting at an iconic Parisian cultural venue located in the Marais district, sleeping on mattresses in cramped communal spaces. The demonstration at La Gaîté Lyrique in the city’s Marais district is the work of Belleville Park Youth Collective, an organisation founded by minors and young adults from sub-Saharan Africa who now live in France.The action began on 10 December, when members of the collective streamed into the venue,…

US President Donald Trump stopped short of imposing new tariffs in his initial executive orders but unveiled the External Revenue Service, a new agency tasked with collecting tariffs and duties in the coming months. Financial experts are growing more cautious about Germany’s economic outlook, as the spectre of a second consecutive year of recession and renewed trade tensions under the new US administration cast a shadow over expectations.The ZEW Economic Sentiment Index for Germany fell to 10.3 points in January, down from 15.7 in December and missing market forecasts of 15.3. While not an outright collapse, the decline underscores persistent…

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will go to India for the first trip of her new term to shore up relations with the world’s largest democracy, she said Tuesday. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, von der Leyen said Europe was an increasingly attractive partner from Africa to Asia. “Hence, the first trip of my new Commission will be to India,” she said. “Together with Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi we want to upgrade the strategic partnership with the largest country and democracy in the world.”