Author: staff

Hundreds of Michael Jackson fans and impersonators gathered in Mexico City on Saturday to honour the King of Pop on what would have been his 68th birthday. At the “I Do Dance to Thriller 2026” event in the Mexican capital, participants performed the song’s famous choreography after weeks of rehearsals. Jackson impersonators also took to the stage, while fans arrived dressed as the singer or as zombies inspired by the iconic music video. The gathering brought together longtime admirers to celebrate Jackson’s music and lasting influence.

On 28 August, the MTG-I2 (Meteosat Third Generation Imager-2) satellite lifted off from Europes Spaceport in Kourou aboard an Ariane 6 rocket, on the launchers ninth mission and its first flight to a geostationary transfer orbit. With this launch, ESA and Eumetsat complete the first operational trio in the Meteosat Third Generation constellation, positioned 36,000 kilometres above the equator to keep constant watch over the weather in Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. To understand what is really changing with this satellite, we spoke to someone who has spent decades interpreting satellite images in his daily work: Panos Giannopoulos, a…

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met Stubb in Helsinki on July 5, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and European security among the issues discussed. China remains one of Moscow’s most important economic and diplomatic partners. Stubb also argued that Moscow benefits from keeping Europeans fixated on the prospect of nuclear escalation or a direct attack on NATO. “Russia wants us Europeans to sit here and discuss: Will Russia escalate? Will Russia use nuclear weapons? Will Russia attack NATO and Europe?” the Finnish leader said. His prescription was characteristically restrained: “Stay calm, stay cool, stay collected, stay vigilant. Don’t dramatize,…

Published on 31/08/2026 – 11:08 GMT+2•Updated 11:26 On 29 August, 52.8 percent of Icelanders voted “No” in a referendum on resuming membership talks to join the European Union. The EU had already opened accession negotiations in 2010, but Reykjavik dropped them in 2015 following a change of government. For the EU, Iceland’s membership was about whether the EU could still attract a wealthy, stable democracy that chooses to join for reasons beyond seeking financial and economic stability. With Russia’s war destabilising Europe, weakening ties with Washington, and the conflict in the Middle East, the EU views enlargement as vital to…

Published on 31/08/2026 – 10:25 GMT+2 Countries are legally obliged to provide broad reparations for harms resulting from both direct and indirect involvement in the transatlantic African slave trade, a United Nations committee said on Monday. Issuing a fresh interpretation of an important international rights treaty, the UN watchdog said the accord obliges countries to work to redress the harms caused by slavery and the continuing consequences. “States parties must implement comprehensive reparatory measures for people of African descent, covering all aspects of remedies,” the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) said in its findings, presented in…

Google has relabelled Lake Ontario “Lake America” for US map users after President Donald Trump ordered the Great Lake renamed, in a move Ontario Premier Doug Ford branded “absolutely backwards” as the US-Canada trade war deepens. Canadians will still see “Lake Ontario,” the Indigenous-rooted name used since the 17th century on their screens, the tech giant said. The nomenclatural spat erupted as the latest element of Trump’s “America First” narrative, with the longtime allies ramping up a trade war that has seen Washington and Ottawa slap tit-for-tat tariffs on each other. Trump launched a new salvo of criticism Sunday, taking…

Published on 31/08/2026 – 10:27 GMT+2 Move over, Jack Dawson – there’s a new “king of the world”. Peter Parker, aka: Spider-Man, has now officially dethroned Titanic out of the all-time global box-office Top 5, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day continuing its worldwide domination as the highest-grossing comic book film of the 2020s. According to recent box office numbers, Brand New Day has racked up $2.332 billion globally since its release on 31 July and has overtaken James Cameron’s Oscar-winning 1997 hit, which grossed approximately $2.264 billion worldwide across its original run and subsequent re-releases. It has also surpassed the…

Published on 31/08/2026 – 10:00 GMT+2•Updated 10:02 Europe must accept higher short-term costs to reduce its dependence on China for clean-energy technologies, EU Climate Action Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra has told Euronews, warning that delaying action will make the strategic vulnerability harder and more expensive to unwind. The EU should have confronted its reliance on China “five to ten years ago”, Hoekstra said, arguing that waiting longer would bring greater disruption and costs. “But it will be much cheaper and much more to our advantage to do it now than be wishy washy and wait another five to 10 years,” the…

Published on 31/08/2026 – 8:49 GMT+2 A car bomb exploded in front of a police station in Mexico on Sunday night, wounding six people, authorities said. The blast happened in the town of Ojocaliente in Zacatecas, a state with key routes for drug trafficking. “The explosive was placed in a private vehicle and caused physical damage to the station and properties located nearby,” state government secretary Rodrigo Reyes said in a post on Facebook. “Six civilians have been reported wounded, who are receiving medical care,” he said in an earlier post. Zacatecas is key to the drug trade because it…

TAP ended the first half of the year with a loss of 99.2 million euros, a 40% deterioration compared with losses of around 70 million euros in the same period last year, as rising fuel costs put pressure on the accounts. Despite the negative net result, the company increased revenue by 4% and carried a record number of passengers in the first six months of the year, according to a statement released on Monday by the airline. TAP carried 8.2 million passengers between January and June, 4.2% more than in the same period of 2025, operating 57.5 thousand flights, up…