Author: staff
By Euronews Published on 02/01/2026 – 9:34 GMT+1 Investigators have continued their efforts on Friday to identify the victims of a fire that ripped through a bar in the Swiss Alps town of Crans-Montana, turning a New Year’s celebration into one of the country’s worst tragedies. It is not yet clear what set off the blaze at Le Constellation, killing at least 40 people and injuring about 115 others, many seriously. Swiss President Guy Parmelin, who took over on Thursday, called the fire “a calamity of unprecedented, terrifying proportions”, and announced that flags would be flown at half mast for five…
Published on 02/01/2026 – 7:59 GMT+1 Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in a post on X a series of important meetings and diplomatic proceedings in early January aimed at bringing the war in his embattled country, well into its fourth year, to an end. Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov is maintaining contact with a slew of key partners, from the US and across Europe, as Kyiv looks to prepare new formats and host meetings in the coming days. The first such meeting is scheduled to take place on Saturday, where Ukraine’s national security advisors and cabinet members…
Published on 02/01/2026 – 8:00 GMT+1 Tiny crabs have secretly been playing an “unheralded role” in cleaning up the planet by hoovering up microplastics. A new study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, tracked a population of Fiddler crabs – which grow no bigger than the width of a Post-It note – in a highly polluted mangrove forest on the north coast of Colombia. Here, years of urban and agricultural expansion have degraded the mangrove systems, resulting in some of the highest levels of plastic contamination reported anywhere in the world. Despite this, researchers found that the arthropods were…
This tiny utopian community in Ethiopia’s Amhara region has spent decades championing equality, peace, and pacifism. Today, it lives under the shadow of civil war in the area. The Arwa Amba is a pacifist pocket of around 500-600 people nestled in the northern mountains of Amhara, over 550 kilometres from the capital, Addis Ababa. Founded in the 1970s, this pioneering community has been praised by organisations including the UN for its efforts to combat poverty, exploitation and gender inequality. As its prominence grew, the Arwa Amba would welcome thousands of visitors every year and guide them in its foundational ideas,…
A shadow banking crisis erupts And spare a worrying thought for the unregulated private credit market and the so-called shadow banks. The usually staid Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has already tolled the alarm bell. In October, he warned of parallels with the 2008 financial crash, which was sparked by an American housing bubble fueled by easy credit and the issuance of risky subprime mortgages, with their subsequent bundling into opaque financial products that spread risk throughout the global financial system. Risk turned to contagion. Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, warned of parallels with…
Published on 02/01/2026 – 6:28 GMT+1 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said he is willing to negotiate an agreement to combat drug trafficking with the United States, in a pre-taped interview aired on Thursday on state-run television, but declined to comment on last week’s CIA strikes on a docking port. Maduro reiterated that Washington wants to force a government change in Venezuela and gain access to his country’s vast oil reserves, through the months-long pressure campaign, which began with a major military deployment in the Caribbean Sea in August. “What are they seeking? It is clear that they seek to impose…
Zum Start ins neue politische Jahr spricht Gordon Repinski mit Ulf Poschardt, Herausgeber der „Premium-Gruppe“ des Axel Springer Verlags, zu der neben der WELT-Gruppe auch POLITICO Deutschland und Business Insider Deutschland gehören, über den Zustand der deutschen Politik und die Frage, ob vor dem Land ein Umbruch aus der Mitte oder von den Rändern steht. Im Zentrum des Gesprächs: die Zukunft der demokratischen Mitte, die Rolle des Journalismus und die wachsende Fragilität des politischen Systems.Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt: Die Wirtschaft und Reformpolitik. Poschardt fordert eine radikale wirtschaftspolitische Wende. Steuervereinfachung, Abbau von Bürokratie, Neuordnung des Sozialstaats und Orientierung an Modellen wie Dänemark…
Zohran Mamdani has pledged to “reinvent” New York during his first speech as mayor, where he has vowed to govern “expansively and audaciously” during his swearing-in ceremony. After working part of the night in his new office, the new mayor returned to City Hall in a taxi cab around midday local time for a grander public appearance, where US Senator Bernie Sanders – one of Mamdani’s self-declared political heroes – administered the oath for a second time. “Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage…
“The Lives of the Twelve Caesars,” by Suetonius The historian of ancient Rome’s early imperial era, who chronicled 12 successive Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian, would surely have been fascinated by our current crop of larger-than-life rulers — including Trump, Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Take away our technology and advances in medical science and we can read about our era in the most important work of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus — his full, gloriously Latin name. Here is caprice and malice, vanity and cruelty, whim and tyrannical ambition. The Victorians were so scandalized by the sex lives of the…
His discovery in 2018 proved a serious setback to an initiative begun four years earlier under David Cameron’s government, which set up a commission to plan a monument to ensure that “in 50 years’ time the memory and lessons of the Holocaust will be as strong and as vibrant as today.” Twelve years and several changes of prime minister later, construction on the site, on the north side of the River Thames, has not yet begun. Ministers were forced to legislate to repeal the building ban discovered by Gerhold — and that bill is still crawling its way through parliament.…