World news | The Guardian

Leaked draft of $1bn memorandum of understanding reveals mandatory targets, sharing of data, and reported access to mining concessions

The US has been accused of “shameless exploitation” over a health financing agreement with Zambia worth more than $1bn (£740m), amid warnings that the country is getting a raw deal from the Trump administration.

A leaked draft of a five-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two countries, seen by the Guardian, reveals that Zambia may accept terms worse than health financing agreements the US has reached with 16 other African countries.

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‘Extraordinary’ golden lamb’s head pillaged in 1874 from what is now Ghana remains hidden in officers’ mess

The Royal Artillery is facing criticism after it emerged they are refusing public access to an “extraordinary object” looted by the British army in the 19th century from the Asante people in modern-day Ghana.

The glistening golden ram’s head would seemingly be worthy of any museum, but it remains hidden within the regiment’s mess at Larkhill in Wiltshire.

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Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe, known for lavish lifestyle, also accused of theft and being illegal immigrant after man allegedly shot in back

A son of the late Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has been charged with attempted murder after a 23-year-old man was allegedly shot in the back on 19 February in an upmarket area of Johannesburg.

Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe, 28, appeared in court on Monday for a brief hearing alongside co-accused Tobias Mugabe Matonhodze. Mugabe’s lawyer Sinenhlanhla Mnguni declined to comment when asked by reporters whether the two men were related. Mnguni said he would request bail for his clients at the next hearing on 3 March.

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Report details harrowing 18-month occupation of North Darfur capital, showing destruction aimed at ethnic communities

The siege and capture of the Sudanese city of El Fasher by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces group last October bore “the hallmarks of genocide”, a UN-mandated fact-finding mission has said.

In a report detailing the harrowing 18-month occupation of the capital of North Darfur, investigators concluded that the RSF and allied militias deliberately inflicted conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Zaghawa and Fur ethnic communities.

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Intelligence findings read to parliament say ‘rogue’ agencies and individuals recruiting Kenyan nationals to frontline

More than 1,000 Kenyans have been lured to fight for Russia in its war with Ukraine, according to an intelligence report to the Kenyan parliament that highlights the scale of a Russian operation taking African men to the frontline.

The majority leader of Kenya’s national assembly, Kimani Ichung’wah, said “rogue recruitment agencies and individuals in Kenya” were continuing to send Kenyan nationals to fight in the conflict, as he read MPs the summary of an investigation by Kenya’s National Intelligence Service.

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João Francisco Inácio Brazão and Domingos Inácio Brazão sentenced for murder of Marielle Franco, a gay Black woman and rising political star

Two influential Brazilian politician brothers have been convicted by Brazil’s supreme court of ordering the murder of Marielle Franco, the Rio de Janeiro city councillor, nearly eight years ago.

João Francisco Inácio Brazão, the former congressman known as Chiquinho, and the former adviser to Rio’s court of auditors Domingos Inácio Brazão were sentenced to 76 years and three months in prison for the murders of Franco, 38, and her driver, Anderson Gomes, 39.

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Four-day Caricom summit dominated by debate about US interventions in the region as military strikes against suspected drug boats continue

US interventions dominated speeches at a summit of 15 nations from the Caribbean and the Americas on Tuesday, as the region’s leaders met amid deadly military strikes against suspected drug boats and an oil blockade on Cuba.

During the opening ceremony of the four-day Caricom summit in St Kitts and Nevis, leaders of the regional bloc called for a strategic collaborations to deal with the impact of recent US policies.

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Firefighters search for 39 people missing in debris after river burst and houses were swept away

Three firefighters pulled a man’s body from the mud amid the rubble of houses swept away in a landslide in south-eastern Brazil, where 30 people died and 39 were still missing on Tuesday after torrential rains.

A river in the state of Minas Gerais burst its banks and streets became raging currents of brown water after an overnight downpour in a region that has seen record rain this month.

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Chiquinho and Domingos Brazão accused of ordering shooting of Marielle Franco and her driver in 2018

Brazil’s supreme court has opened the trial of politicians accused of ordering the 2018 murder of Rio de Janeiro councillor Marielle Franco, a case that exposed deep ties between politics and organised crime in the city.

Franco, an activist who grew up in a favela and became an outspoken critic of Rio’s powerful militia groups, was 38 when she was shot dead in the city centre alongside her driver, Anderson Gomes.

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Mexico’s president says there is ‘no risk’ for those visiting for Fifa games after military killed drug lord ‘El Mencho’

• Violence in Mexico after military kills notorious drug cartel boss – a visual guide

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said that there is “no risk” for visitors coming to Fifa World Cup games scheduled to be held in the country, after the death of a top cartel boss triggered a wave of retaliatory violence from gunmen who blocked roads and attacked security forces across the country.

The Mexican military attempted to detain “El Mencho”, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in a dawn raid on Sunday, leading to a firefight in which he was fatally wounded, before dying while being airlifted to hospital.

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Tommy Schaefer released early from 18-year sentence for 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack during luxury holiday

Indonesia has freed and deported a US man after he spent 11 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his then girlfriend’s mother on the tourist island of Bali.

Tommy Schaefer was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, the mother of Heather Mack, during a luxury holiday in a case that became known as the Bali suitcase murder.

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Surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, will be located on Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island

Japan will deploy missiles to a tiny island near Taiwan within five years, its defence minister has said, in a move that is likely to inflame tensions with China.

The surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, will be located on Yonaguni – Japan’s westernmost island – by March 2031, Shinjiro Koizumi said.

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Rebound in the country – which has been having demographic crisis – said to be partly because of 3.6 million born between 1991 and 1995 having children

South Korea recorded 254,500 births in 2025, the largest annual increase in 15 years, driven largely by a temporarily enlarged generation – known as “echo boomers” – now in their early thirties, alongside marriage rates recovering from Covid-era delays.

The country’s fertility rate – the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – rose to 0.80 from 0.75 last year, returning to the 0.8 range for the first time since 2021, according to provisional figures released by South Korea’s ministry of data and statistics on Wednesday.

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Critics say proposal to fold department into a new ‘mega ministry’ will dilute accountability and put nature protections at risk

New Zealand’s government is seeking to abolish its dedicated environment ministry to cut down on bureaucracy, a move critics say could dilute environmental protections.

Under the plan, the department would be folded into a new “mega-ministry” that will cover housing, urban development, transport, local government and the environment.

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Not enough support for freed victims, say aid agencies, with growing numbers sleeping on the streets, unable to travel home without passports or money

Charities and aid workers have called for urgent international government support for victims of south-east Asia’s deadly scam compounds, following a damning report by Amnesty International.

The numbers of survivors of cyberscam “farms” left destitute and abandoned on the city streets of Cambodia and Myanmar is an “international crisis”, according to the research published in January.

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Cars with higher real-world consumption may add to Australia’s difficulties in reducing transport emissions

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Another 10 cars have failed to live up to fuel efficiency promises when tested in the real world, adding to Australia’s difficulties in reducing emissions from transport.

The Australian Automobile Association’s latest test confirmed 76% of new petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles are still using more fuel on roads than in mandatory lab testing.

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Jess Wilson’s housing plan offers little that is truly new – but Jacinta Allan claims it draws a line through Melbourne and locks millennials out

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A genuine policy contest has finally broken out over housing in Victoria – but it is as much about politics as it is about planning.

The opposition leader, Jess Wilson, on Wednesday announced a plan to expand Melbourne’s capital city zone – effectively expanding the CBD to take in Collingwood, Fitzroy, Fishermans Bend, North Melbourne, Parkville and parts of Southbank not already included. This will mean height limits can be lifted, density increased and development encouraged to “restore vibrancy” to the city.

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Police says ‘others involved’ in killing of Chris Baghsarian whose body was found near a golf club in Pitt Town

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Two men have been charged with the kidnapping and murder of 85-year-old Chris Baghsarian whose body was found on the outskirts of Sydney after disappearing from his home in North Ryde last week.

A 29-year-old man from Kenthurst and a 24-year-old man from Castle Hill were charged on Wednesday night with murder and taking/detaining in company with intent to ransom and occasion actual bodily harm, police said in a statement.

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The artist, who was controversially revoked and then reinstated by his government, is planning a ‘nurturing experience’ to bring people together

Australia’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in May will be a “nurturing experience” designed to bring people together – in the aftermath one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in the country’s 72-year history at the prestigious international art festival.

Artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, who were controversially dumped and then reinstated as Australia’s representatives, will present not one but two major works at the Venice Biennale in May – both informed by Sabsabi’s practice as a Sufi Muslim and exploring “spirituality, migration, and the vastness of shared humanity”.

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End of government subsidies drives electricity costs up by 19% in the month and leaves power bills nearly a third higher than they were a year earlier

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The Reserve Bank governor has denied inflation is “taking off” after new data showed price rises had persisted into 2026 and boosted bets on two more interest rate hikes.

Annual inflation stayed at a high 3.8% in January, as the end of government subsidies drove electricity costs up by 19% in the month and left power bills nearly a third higher than they were a year earlier.

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Controversy over pro-Palestinian speeches at closing gala criticising Germany as ‘partners in genocide’

The organisation that manages the Berlin film festival is to meet for crunch talks amid reports that its American director faces dismissal after a series of rows over Gaza.

In a statement on Wednesday, the office of Germany’s federal government commissioner for culture and media said the emergency meeting on Thursday had been called to debate the “future direction of the Berlinale”.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was looking to repair the Druzhba oil pipeline but “it was not so fast,” Reuters reported.

Shipments of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia have been cut off since 27 January, when Kyiv says a Russian strike hit pipeline equipment in western Ukraine.

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Drinks maker cuts annual sale and profit forecast for second time in four months amid weak demand in US and China

Diageo has slashed its dividend and cut its annual sales and profit forecast for the second time in four months, as the maker of Guinness warned of capacity constraints affecting drinkers of “the black stuff” in London pubs.

The world’s largest spirits maker – which owns brands including Smirnoff vodka, Johnnie Walker whisky and Don Julio tequila – lost more than £5bn of its market value on Wednesday as it reported weak demand in the US and China in the first results released under the new chief executive, Sir Dave Lewis.

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I looked back to discover the untold story of how western intelligence was misread, even in Kyiv. The conclusion offers a stark warning for the future

Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and at this time of year it’s hard not to recall memories of the morning of 24 February 2022, when the fate of Ukraine and the history of Europe were irrevocably changed by the decision of the man in the Kremlin.

Around 9pm the evening before, I had received a message from a colleague at another news outlet. It was an unequivocal warning from an intelligence source that the war would start that night. We discussed it among the Guardian’s Ukraine reporting team and international editors. My colleague Emma Graham-Harrison, who was on an overnight train from Kyiv towards the frontline city of Mariupol, decided she would get off halfway, in the middle of the night, and beg a spot on the first train heading back to Kyiv. It turned out to be a wise move: Mariupol was soon under siege and the scene of much of the worst carnage of the war. Emma remained in Kyiv, part of our team covering the initial Russian attack on the capital.

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Coalition government agrees to remove parts of controversial law and allow homes to rely on fossil fuels

Germany’s coalition government has been accused of abandoning its climate targets after agreeing to scrap parts of a contentious heating law mandating the use of renewables in favour of a draft law allowing homeowners to rely on fossil fuels.

While the previous law required most newly installed heating systems to use at least 65% renewable energy, often with a heat pump, the amended legislation will allow households to keep using oil and gas.

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Israel welcomes move described by Palestinian Authority as undermining possibility of an independent state

The US will provide on-site consular services in two Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank for the first time, breaking with previous policy in a move that has been criticised by Palestinian officials as “a clear violation of international law”.

In a post on X, the US embassy in Jerusalem said that as part of an initiative to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence, it would provide Americans with routine passport services in the West Bank settlement of Efrat on Friday, “for one day only”.

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Committee to Protect Journalists report says Israel also to blame for 81% of ‘intentionally targeted’ journalist killings

• The deadly toll on journalists in the Gaza war

A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, and two-thirds of them were killed by Israel, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said.

It was the second straight year that killings set a record and the second straight year that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of them, the CPJ, a New York-based independent organisation that documents attacks on the press, said in its annual report.

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Hamas to almost certainly reject plan described in Israeli press, say experts, as no guarantee Israel will withdraw on surrender of weapons

Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.

The second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire, which Washington declared had begun in January, was meant to involve Hamas disarming, Israeli forces withdrawing, and a Palestinian interim administration moving into Gaza backed by a Palestinian police force and an international stabilisation force (ISF).

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Opposition campaigners claim top figures in regime use state wealth to fund lifestyles counter to those they preach

Members of Iran’s ruling elite have been accused of brazen hypocrisy by allegedly using the state’s wealth to help to fund their adult children’s lives in the west while presiding over growing economic misery and repression at home.

Opposition campaigners made the accusation against some of the clerical regime’s most powerful figures as a military confrontation with the US appears increasingly likely. Donald Trump has deployed a vast armada in the Middle East and confirmed he is considering strikes.

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Secretary of state makes rare briefing to so-called ‘gang of eight’ as US deploys largest force of aircraft and warships to Middle East since 2003

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Marco Rubio delivered a rare briefing to top US lawmakers on Iran, just a few hours before Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to say that Tehran would never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

Amid the largest deployment of aircraft and warships to the Middle East since the 2003 buildup to the Iraq war, Trump said he wanted to solve the confrontation with Iran through diplomatic means while claiming that Tehran was seeking to develop ballistic missiles that could reach the US, without providing further details.

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Proposal approved by Modi government will bring official English name into line with Malayalam language

The Indian state of Kerala, known as “God’s own country” for its golden beaches and lush tea plantations, is to be given a new name.

Narendra Modi’s cabinet has approved a proposal to change the southern coastal state’s name from Kerala to Keralam. The move will bring the official English name into line with how it is pronounced in Malayalam, the primary language spoken by the state’s estimated population of 35 million.

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Dominic Ethan Stewart was among 19 killed when vehicle veered off road and plunged down mountainside

Tributes have been paid to a young British hiker who was among 19 people killed when a packed passenger bus veered off a treacherous stretch of road and plunged 200 metres down a steep mountainside in Nepal.

Twenty-five others were injured in the pre-dawn crash in the Himalayan foothills on Monday. The bus was carrying 44 people, including a number of tourists.

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Motorway stretch plays music as a safety feature but those close to it say ‘intrusive’ noise is constant and distressing

Residents of one of India’s most upmarket neighbourhoods say the country’s first “musical road” has turned their daily lives into a nightmare soundtrack.

A stretch of Mumbai’s recently opened Coastal Road seafront expressway has been engineered to play the pulsating Oscar-winning tune Jai Ho from the movie Slumdog Millionaire when vehicles drive on it at lower speeds.

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‘Intelligence-based, selective operations’ carried out against Pakistani Taliban camps, says information ministry

Pakistan launched multiple airstrikes on Saturday night targeting militants in neighbouring Afghanistan, where the government reported children were among dozens of people killed and wounded.

Islamabad did not say precisely where the strikes were carried out or provide other details.

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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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Corporation says broadcasting of N-word by Tourette syndrome campaigner was ‘serious mistake’ as anger at error rises

The BBC is to undertake a fast-track investigation into how a racial slur broadcast during its coverage of the Bafta film awards was not edited out, amid rising anger inside the corporation over the error.

Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has now instructed the corporation’s complaints unit to investigate what the BBC describes as a “serious mistake”.

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The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published figures showing that local authorities in England dealt with 1.26m flytipping incidents in 2024/25 – 9% increase on the previous year.

And there was an 11% increase in incidents involving a “tipper lorry load” amount of rubbish. There were 52,000 of these, up from 47,000 in 2023/24. Defra said these alone cost councils £19.3m.

These figures show the equivalent of 142 monster landfills a day took place, confirming what communities across the country know all too well – our beautiful countryside is being used by criminal gangs as their personal landfill.

For far too long, waste gangs have pocketed millions in illegal earning, poisoning our environment and our health without consequence. The Liberal Democrats are demanding an end to this environmental vandalism.

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Unimpressed tech equity campaigners compare move to ‘inviting in foxes to consult on the future of the henhouse’

Ministers have called in Tony Blair’s thinktank and private tech companies to guide them on deploying AI across the UK government in a move campaigners compared to “inviting in foxes to consult on the future of the henhouse”.

James Murray, chief secretary to the Treasury, chaired a meeting on Wednesday with the director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), the chair of IBM and senior executives at AI companies including Faculty AI, now part of Accenture, and Dex Hunter-Torricke, a former communications adviser at Google, Facebook and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

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Government looking at options such as increasing loan repayment thresholds amid growing pressure

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Ministers are examining ways to ease the burden of student loans after weeks of pressure over a policy pulling more people into repayments, the Guardian understands.

The Treasury and the Department for Education are reviewing different options to offer relief to those with plan 2 student loans, which often leave graduates in England and Wales paying tens of thousands more than the original loan amount.

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Minister ‘misspoke’ by telling MPs UK was ‘pausing for discussions with our American counterparts’, officials say

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Plans to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius are still on track, the UK government has insisted, after a minister caused confusion by telling MPs that the deal was “paused”.

Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, made the comment on Wednesday as the deal came under increasing pressure from opposition parties in the UK and from Donald Trump.

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Officers say flood of low-quality reports is draining resources and slowing cases amid New Mexico lawsuit

Meta’s use of artificial intelligence software to moderate its social media platforms is generating large volumes of useless reports about cases of child sexual abuse, which are draining resources and hindering investigations, said officers from the US Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) taskforce.

“We get a lot of tips from Meta that are just kind of junk,” Benjamin Zwiebel, a special agent with the ICAC taskforce in New Mexico, said last week during his testimony in the state’s trial against Meta. The state’s attorney general alleges the company’s platforms are putting profits over child safety. Meta disputes these allegations, citing changes it has introduced on its platforms, such as teen accounts with default protections. The ICAC taskforce is a nationwide network of law enforcement agencies coordinated with the US Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute online child exploitation and abuse cases.

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Chuck Schumer says Democrats were right not to stand for Trump; Mike Johnson criticizes congresswomen’s verbal protests during speech

• The ‘golden age of America’? Trump delivers the State of the Union address – podcast

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A newly revealed diplomatic cable calls on US diplomats to work against attempts by foreign nations to regulate how US tech companies handle their citizens’ data, as “data sovereignty initiatives” gather steam in Europe over security concerns.

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President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services.

Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information - initiatives often described as “data sovereignty” or “data localization.“

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News of former Harvard president’s resignation comes ‘in connection with ongoing review’ of Epstein files

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Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian.

The news of his formal resignation comes “in connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government”, a Harvard spokesman, Jason Newton, said in a statement to the Guardian.

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Spokesperson for Rolling Stones tells Guardian band did not liaise with Marc Beckman and his team on use of Gimme Shelter in first lady documentary

A source close to Mick Jagger has cast doubt on a claim by Melania producer Marc Beckman that his team was closely involved with the singer over the use of a Rolling Stones song in the film.

The film, which follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, opens with a sequence in Mar-a-Lago soundtracked to the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Despite being owned by music company ABKCO, Beckman told Variety that Jagger “was actually involved” and “gave us his blessing”.

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Critics concerned as Casey Means, aligned with RFK Jr on vaccine stance, does not have active medical licence

Casey Means, Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general of the United States, appeared before lawmakers on the Senate committee for health, labor and pensions on Wednesday, after her initial confirmation hearing was postponed in October when she went into labor hours before she was set to testify.

Means is the president’s controversial pick for the role of the nation’s top doctor, responsible for disseminating the latest public health guidance.

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