World news | The Guardian

Without AI you will be a ‘weaker and poorer nation’, says former UK chancellor two months into job at US firm

The former chancellor George Osborne has said countries that do not embrace the kind of powerful AI systems made by his new employer, OpenAI, risk “Fomo” and could be left weaker and poorer.

Osborne, who is two months into a job as head of the $500bn San Francisco AI company’s “for countries” programme, told leaders gathered for the AI Impact summit in Delhi: “Don’t be left behind.” He said that without AI rollouts they could end up with a workforce “less willing to stay put” because they might want to seek AI-enabled fortunes elsewhere.

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Citizen Lab report suggests Cellebrite software was used to break into Boniface Mwangi’s phone while he was under arrest

When Boniface Mwangi, the prominent Kenyan pro-democracy activist who plans to run for president in 2027, had his phones returned to him by Kenyan authorities after his controversial arrest last July, he immediately noticed a problem: one of the phones was no longer password protected and could be opened without one.

It was Mwangi’s personal phone, which he used to communicate with friends and mentors, and contained photos of private family moments with his wife and children. Knowing that its contents could be in the hands of the Kenyan government made Mwangi – who has described harassment and even torture – feel unsafe and “exposed”, he told the Guardian.

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The Guardian’s community affairs correspondent, Chris Osuh, reports on the plot by two IS terrorists to massacre Jews in Manchester, and how it was thwarted by an undercover sting

Walid Saadaoui had once worked as a holiday entertainer, organising dance shows and quizzes at a resort in his native Tunisia. After moving to the UK and marrying a British woman, he became a restaurateur and an avid keeper of birds.

All the while, however – as the Guardian’s community affairs correspondent, Chris Osuh, explains – he was hiding a secret: he had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

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Residents who escaped violence tell of bandits riding in on motorbikes and shooting indiscriminately

Armed assailants on motorbikes killed at least 32 people and burned houses and shops during raids on three villages in north-west Nigeria’s Niger state early on Saturday, local officials and residents who escaped the violence said.

The dawn raids targeted the communities of Tunga-Makeri, Konkoso, and Pissa.

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Only two survivors rescued after boat overturned off Libyan coast, UN migration agency says

Fifty-three people are dead or missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast, the UN migration agency said on Monday. Only two survivors were rescued.

The International Organization for Migration said the boat overturned north of Zuwara on Friday, in the latest disaster involving people attempting the perilous Mediterranean crossing in the hope of reaching Europe.

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Kimberly Prost and Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza vow US reprisals will not affect work of international criminal court

When the Canadian Kimberly Prost learned Donald Trump’s administration had imposed sanctions on her, it came as a shock.

For years, she has sat as a judge at the international criminal court, weighing accusations of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity; now she is on the same list as terrorists and those involved in organised crime. “It really was a moment of a bit of disbelief,” she said.

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Three boats targeted in eastern Pacific and Caribbean as Trump continues pursuit of alleged ‘narco-terrorists’

US military officials have said American forces launched assaults on three alleged drug-smuggling boats, killing 11 in one of the deadliest days of the Trump administration’s months-long campaign against alleged traffickers.

The military action on Monday brought the number of fatalities caused by US strikes to 145 since September, when Donald Trump called on American armed forces to attack people deemed “narco-terrorists” on small vessels. There have been 42 known strikes in notorious drug-trafficking routes such as the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, according to the Associated Press reported.

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Interim president José Jerí voted out by country’s congress amid scandal concerning secretive meetings

Peru’s interim president has been forced out of office in an “express impeachment” after a political scandal over his secretive meetings with Chinese businessmen.

Lawmakers voted by 75 votes to 24 to proceed with the removal of José Jerí, who had been at the helm for just four months.

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Karime Macías, ex-wife of a state governor, is wanted for allegedly pilfering nearly £5m of public money and now lives in London

The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said her government will send a formal letter of complaint to officials in the United Kingdom after the wife of a former governor wanted for allegedly pilfering £4.8m of public money was granted asylum in Britain.

Karime Macías, ex-wife of jailed former Veracruz governor Javier Duarte, is wanted for extradition to Mexico for allegedly siphoning millions from the state welfare office, but has reportedly spent the last few years in London.

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More than 130,000 people considered missing or disappeared in Mexico as drug cartels expand

It was a bright morning in August 2022 when Ángel Montenegro was taken. A 31-year-old construction worker, Montenegro had been out all night drinking with some work buddies in the city of Cuautla and was waiting for a bus back to nearby Cuernavaca, where he lived.

At about 10am, a white van pulled up: several men jumped out and dragged Montenegro and a co-worker inside before speeding off. Montenegro’s co-worker was released a few hundred meters down the street, but Montenegro was driven away.

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Lunar new year has ushered in a rare zodiac symbol with a reputation for energy and independence

As the lunar new year begins, the focus has turned to the Chinese zodiac and the arrival of the year of the fire horse – a rare pairing in the 60-year lunar cycle.

Drawing on Chinese metaphysics, the fire horse blends the horse’s reputation for energy and independence with the intensity of the fire element, giving it a distinct place in the zodiac tradition.

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Sara Duterte, daughter of a former president who is facing charges of crimes against humanity at the Hague, pledged to offer her ‘life, strength and future’ in service of the Philippines

Philippine vice-president Sara Duterte, daughter of the imprisoned former leader Rodridgo Duterte, has announced she will run for president in the country’s 2028 election.

Sara Duterte, 47, said she would offer her “life, strength and future” in service of the Philippines, in a speech on Wednesday that accused President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, of presiding over a period marked by rampant corruption.

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Donald Trump says deals ‘end our foolish dependence on foreign sources’, while Japanese PM hails enhanced economic security

Japan has drawn up plans for investments in US oil, gas and critical mineral projects worth about $36bn under the first wave of a deal with Donald Trump.

The US president and Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, announced a trio of projects including a power plant in Portsmouth, Ohio, billed by the Trump administration as the largest natural gas-fired generating facility in US history.

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Eye-catching martial arts performance at China gala had viewers and experts wondering what else humanoids can do

Dancing humanoid robots took centre stage on Monday during the annual China Media Group’s Spring Festival Gala, China’s most-watched official television broadcast. They lunged and backflipped (landing on their knees), they spun around and jumped. Not one fell over.

The display was impressive, but prompted some to wonder: if robots can now dance and perform martial arts, what else can they do?

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CEO said services have restarted after termination of grants led to criticism that US was ceding ground to China

Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its chief executive said on Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced the US-funded outlet to cease operations.

For years, RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America (VOA), had been financed with funding approved by the US Congress and overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

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Save the Children boss says children in Syrian camp ‘desperate’ to leave. Follow today’s news live

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Jonno Duniam, the shadow home affairs minister, spoke about the passports this morning as the opposition seeks to hammer the government on the matter. He told Channel Seven’s Sunrise reports those in the group had travel documents was “of incredible concern, I think, to most Australians that these people want to come back to Australia”, adding:

And if one person has been hit with a temporary exclusion order for going to this part of world and doing what they’ve done, why is it not the case that the others have not had the same order applied against them?

I would be very interested to know what advice there is on the others because I think the fact that they’ve all gone to the same place for the same purpose … I’m not sure how you can differentiate between them.

But putting that to one side, if our laws aren’t strong enough to protect us, to prevent people who’ve gone to support Isis from coming back to this country, then the government should look at expanding and strengthening those laws and we stand as an opposition ready to work with them.

I think I’m giving the very practical answer that if anyone applies for a passport as a citizen, they are issued with a passport, in the same way that if someone applies for a Medicare card, they get a Medicare card. These are automatic processes done by public servants.

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Former minister helped develop Australia’s first Aboriginal education policy in the 1980s and brings decades of expertise to embattled university

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Linda Burney has been appointed to her first public role since leaving federal parliament, joining the board of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in a move the New South Wales government hopes will restore faith in the embattled institution.

Burney, the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the federal House of Representatives, ended her two-decade career in politics in early 2025, departing as the minister for Indigenous Australians in mid-2024 and formally leaving office at the end of the 47th parliament.

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Proposal to replant inside a different type of protected woodland would not replicate diversity of cleared sites used by threatened cockatoo species, conservationists say

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Property developers in Perth plan to bulldoze an endangered banksia ecosystem used by threatened black cockatoo species, and conservationists have warned the damage cannot be mitigated by proposed offsets.

The developers want to replant the banksia ecosystem within a different type of protected woodland – a proposal that a leading botanist said was doomed to fail.

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Almost 70% of companies, including BYD and Toyota, beat their initial target for the average emissions efficiency of the new cars they sold

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Major auto brands including Mazda, Nissan and Subaru face the possibility of millions of dollars in penalties after failing to meet climate targets for new vehicles in Australia.

The first six months of data since the Albanese government introduced a new vehicle efficiency standard shows 40 companies – 68% of the total – beat their initial target for the average emissions efficiency of the new cars they sold.

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Gina Cass-Gottlieb says one of the regulator’s main priorities is to ensure price claims are ‘clear and truthful’

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The head of Australia’s consumer regulator says she is concerned by the growing practice of major supermarkets charging customers for fresh produce by item, rather than by weight, leaving some shoppers confused and shortchanged.

Guardian Australia has recently reported several examples of price discrepancies by supermarkets charging fruit and vegetables per item.

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Kerstin G froze to death on Großglockner when Thomas P descended mountain to fetch help

An Austrian mountaineer is to appear in court accused of gross negligent manslaughter after his girlfriend died of hypothermia when he left her close to the summit on a climb that went dramatically wrong.

The 33-year-old woman, identified only as Kerstin G, froze to death on 19 January 2025, about 50 metres below the summit of the Großglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain, after an ascent of more than 17 hours with her boyfriend, Thomas P, 36.

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Unresolved ‘sensitive’ issues in peace talks are fate of occupied territories in east Ukraine and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant

The peace talks ended abruptly today after about two hours, according to reports, in contrast with yesterday’s negotiations that apparently took place over six hours.

Neither side have offered any public sign of progress, but instead said the talks were “difficult” with Russian news agencies quoting sources describing the negotiations as “very tense”.

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Xalet del Catllaràs contains elements of architect’s naturalistic style, expressed in works such as Park Güell and Sagrada Família

An elegant modernist building in the mountains north of Barcelona, originally constructed to house engineers establishing a nearby mine, has been confirmed as a work of Antoni Gaudí, Catalonia’s most celebrated and distinctive architect.

The Xalet del Catllaràs, about 80 miles from Barcelona in the county of Berguedà, was built in 1905 and commissioned by Eusebi Güell, Gaudí’s lifelong patron. Güell was the owner of a cement company with mines in the region and he needed somewhere to house the engineers, many of them British, who would help extract the coal for his factories.

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US ambassador accused of interference after labelling inquiry into suspected illegal circumcisions ‘antisemitic’

A diplomatic row is escalating between Belgium and the US, with Donald Trump’s ambassador refusing to apologise for accusing his host country of antisemitism and reportedly threatening to bar a socialist politician from travelling to the US.

Bill White, a staunch ally of the president like many US ambassadors, on Monday demanded Belgium drop a “ridiculous” and “antisemitic” investigation into three Jewish men suspected of performing circumcisions without medical qualifications.

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Exclusive: UK graduates in Germany, Belgium and possibly other countries informed of rises as salary threshold is cut

Britons living in some European countries face a huge rise in their student loan repayments later this year, the Guardian can reveal, in a move that threatens to trigger a fresh backlash for Rachel Reeves.

UK graduates working in Germany and Belgium – and possibly other countries – have been told that their monthly repayments will increase from April, the Guardian can reveal.

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Research suggests more than 75,000 killed in the first 16 months of conflict, 25,000 more than announced at the time

More than 75,000 people were killed in the first 16 months of the two-year war in Gaza, at least 25,000 more than the death toll announced by local authorities at the time, according to a study published on Wednesday in the Lancet medical journal.

The research also found that reporting by the Gaza health ministry about the proportion of women, children and elderly people among those killed was accurate.

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Dozens of world leaders head to Washington for what White House says will largely be a fundraiser on Thursday

Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate.

The White House has indicated that the summit for his new ad hoc council at the renamed Donald J Trump Institute of Peace will heavily function as a fundraising round, with Trump announcing on social media that countries have pledged more than $5bn toward rebuilding Gaza, which has been devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis.

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Mehdi Mahmoudian released 17 days after arrest for signing a statement condemning Iran’s supreme leader and regime’s protest crackdown

Mehdi Mahmoudian, the Oscar-nominated co-writer of It Was Just an Accident, has been released from an Iranian prison 17 days after his arrest, according to local media reports.

Mahmoudian was arrested in Tehran shortly after signing a statement condemning Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the regime’s violent crackdown on demonstrators. On Tuesday, he was released from the Nowshahr prison, along with two other signatories of the statement, Vida Rabbani and Abdollah Momeni.

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At least 80 film-makers and stars sign open letter after German festival jury president Wim Wenders says they should keep out of politics

More than 80 current and former participants of the Berlinale, including Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton and Adam McKay have signed an open letter condemning the festival’s “silence” on Gaza.

It comes after the film festival was swept up in what it called a “media storm” over the alleged sidelining of political discourse at the event.

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Hamdan Ballal says violence on West Bank as bad as ever, nearly a year after his Oscar-winning film shocked the world

The co-director of the Oscar-winning No Other Land has said his home and family have come under renewed attack, almost a year after the documentary on Israeli settler and army violence in the West Bank received an Academy Award.

Hamdan Ballal said a group of settlers who had conducted a long-running campaign of harassment against Palestinian villagers came on Sunday to his home in Susya, in the Masafer Yatta area on the southern edge of the West Bank.

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Google, Anthropic and OpenAI bosses to mingle with global south leaders wrestling for control over technology

Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, where leaders of the global south will wrestle for control over the fast-developing technology.

During the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI safety experts, tech companies valued at trillions of dollars will rub along with leaders of countries such as Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages dip well below $1,000 a month.

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Many voice hope that moment will mark move away from repression and unrest and a chance to revive economy

Bangladesh’s new prime minister has been sworn in, sealing a dramatic comeback for the Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) and formally closing the turbulent chapter that toppled Sheikh Hasina in 2024.

The swearing-in of Tarique Rahman restored an elected government after 18 months of caretaker rule led by the Nobel peace prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.

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Mohan Karki – one of many people ICE has deported to countries with which they have little connection – leaves behind his wife and seven-month-old baby he has yet to hold

Tika Basnet sat facing the glow of her iPhone, a red tika pressed into the center of her forehead. Seven-month-old Briana slept on her lap, her breathing soft and uneven. On the other side of the screen was Mohan Karki, Basnet’s husband, who had yet to hold his daughter.

For Karki, nearly 9,000 miles (14,500km) away, it was already morning. He was in hiding in south Asia, his exact location withheld for his safety, his face breaking into pixels as he watched his daughter sleep.

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Voting was largely peaceful in an election seen as a test of Bangladesh’s democracy after years of political turmoil

The Bangladesh Nationalist party, led by Tarique Rahman, has won a sweeping victory in the country’s first election since a gen Z uprising toppled the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina.

Results from the election commission confirmed the BNP alliance had won 212 seats, returning the party to power after 20 years, while the rival alliance, led by the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, won 77 seats.

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Destined to a perilous life with no right to an education or to vote, state recognition ‘gives them hope’, campaigners say

Through the decades that the Daulatdia brothel in Bangladesh has existed, children born there have been invisible, unable to be registered because their mothers were sex workers and their fathers unknown. Now, for the first time, all 400 of them in the brothel village have their own birth certificates.

That milestone was reached after a push by campaigners who have spent decades working with Bangladesh’s undocumented children born in brothels or on the street. It means they can finally access the rights afforded to other citizens: the ability to go to school, to be issued a passport or to vote.

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Police arrest four after incident in the Briar Hill area that left a man in his 20s dead

A man is dead and a teenage boy is in a critical condition in hospital after they were stabbed at a Northampton skate park.

Northamptonshire police launched a murder investigation after emergency services were called to the park in Ringway in the Briar Hill area on Wednesday following reports that two people had been stabbed “during an altercation”.

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Coalition of refugee support groups says board’s ‘traumatic’ and ‘flawed’ processes are putting children at risk

A coalition of refugee support groups has called for a Home Office organisation to be axed, claiming it is putting hundreds of children at risk.

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, which consists of more than 100 organisations including the Refugee Council, Barnardo’s and the NSPCC, has published a report analysing the performance of the Home Office’s national age assessment board (NAAB), which was set up in March 2023 to determine the ages of young asylum seekers newly arrived in the UK, often on small boats.

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PM says measure, also applied to deepfake nudes, is needed owing to a ‘national emergency’ of online misogyny

Deepfake nudes and “revenge porn” must be removed from the internet within 48 hours or technology firms risk being blocked in the UK, Keir Starmer has said, calling it a “national emergency” that the government must confront.

Companies could be fined millions or even blocked altogether if they allow the images to spread or be reposted after victims give notice.

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Sign-ups to Student Group Claim in England and Wales escalate amid reports of £21m payout by University College London

Tens of thousands more students who were at university during the pandemic have joined a group claim for compensation, amid reports of a £21m payout by one of the UK’s leading institutions.

Lawyers acting for student claimants said a further 30,000 from different universities had signed up to the Student Group Claim this week, taking the total to almost 200,000.

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US president had recently said the plan was the best deal Starmer could make

Donald Trump has urged Keir Starmer not to hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius, warning he was “making a big mistake”.

Under the deal agreed last year, Britain would cede control over the British Indian Ocean Territory but lease the largest island, Diego Garcia, for 99 years to continue operating a joint US-UK military base there.

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Reports say move could come this weekend as White House urges Iran to ‘make a deal’ with Trump on nuclear program

The US military is ready for possible strikes on Iran as soon as this weekend, multiple news outlets reported Wednesday citing unnamed sources.

However, the reports said, Donald Trump has yet to make a final decision on whether to carry out an attack. Trump has repeatedly demanded Iran cease its nuclear program, and has warned he intends to use force if no deal is reached.

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‘Iran would be very wise to make a deal,’ says Karoline Leavitt on possibility of US strikes against Iran; multiple news outlets report strikes could begin as soon as this weekend

• Trump news at a glance: president’s ‘board of peace’ set to meet, minus some key US allies

On a recent morning Eric Taylor, city manager for a small Georgia town of about 5,000 residents called Social Circle, was contacted by a staffer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“They asked me to turn on the water,” he said of a 1m sq ft warehouse nearby that the federal government recently purchased for $128m, with plans to use it for locking up as many as 10,000 detainees as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan.

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Actor allegedly also made remarks to man who dresses in drag, and was seen dancing on Bourbon Street after arrest

The actor Shia LaBeouf allegedly aimed homophobic slurs at two men – one who identifies as queer and the other who dresses in drag – as the Transformers star was arrested for purportedly battering them at a bar early on Tuesday morning in New Orleans, the victims said.

Jeffrey Damnit – who was born with the last name Klein and was listed as one of the victims by New Orleans police – said in an interview on Wednesday that he was wearing mascara, eye shadow and lipstick when LaBeouf tried to beat him up “while screaming, ‘You’re a fucking faggot’”. He also shared a cellphone video showing LaBeouf in the back of a vehicle being examined by first responders, glancing over at Damnit and saying: “Faggot.”

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Lawsuit is first by Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over workplace DEI in Trump’s second term

A US civil rights agency has sued a bottler and distributor of Coca-Cola products it accuses of sex discrimination over an employee networking event that excluded men, its first lawsuit over workplace diversity programs since Donald Trump took office. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast violated federal law when it hosted the event for about 250 female employees at a casino in Connecticut in September 2024.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is owned by Kirin Holdings, a Japanese company. Coca-Cola is not a defendant in the case.

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After crew on flight 543 reported smoke in the cockpit, passengers and crew exited Airbus A320 via slides

Traffic was temporarily disrupted at Newark Liberty international airport in New Jersey on Wednesday after a Florida-bound JetBlue flight suffered an engine failure on takeoff and returned to the airport, officials said.

Crew on flight 543 reported smoke in the cockpit, and after an emergency landing, passengers and crew exited the Airbus A320 on a taxiway via slides, the Federal Aviation Administration said. No injuries were reported.

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