Hurricane Beryl has strengthened to a Category 5 status as it crosses islands in the south-eastern Caribbean.
In a post on X, the National Hurricane Center said “Beryl Becomes a potentially catastrophic Category 5 hurricane In the Eastern Caribbean. Expected to bring life-threatening winds and storm surge to Jamaica later this week.”
New president José Raúl Mulino has vowed to close the route through which thousands of migrants travel to the US every year
The US will cover the costs of repatriating migrants who enter Panama illegally, under a deal agreed with the Central American country’s new president who has vowed to shut down the treacherous Darién Gap used by people travelling north to the United States.
In his first address as president, José Raúl Mulino promised to seek international assistance to find solutions to what he described as a costly “humanitarian and environmental crisis”.
Israel’s army has ordered a mass evacuation of Palestinians from much of Khan Younis in Gaza’s south, prompting warnings that troops could launch a new ground assault on the territory’s second-largest city.
“For your safety, you must evacuate immediately to the humanitarian zone,” army spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted on X, in a call to residents and displaced people living in those areas.
More than 3,000 prisoners in Ukraine released on parole to boost military numbers; Hungary’s pro-Russian PM, Viktor Orbán, expected to visit Kyiv. What we know on day 860
Ukraine is turning to its prisoner population to help address battlefield shortages as Russian continues to build up forces in eastern Ukraine. More than 3,000 prisoners have been released on parole and assigned to military units after such recruitment was approved by parliament in a controversial mobilisation bill last month, Ukrainian deputy justice minister Olena Vysotska told the Associated Press. The news agency visited a rural penal colony in south-east Ukraine where several convicts were offered a chance at parole in return for battlefield service. “You can put an end to this and start a new life,” one recruiter, a member of a volunteer assault battalion, told them. Ukraine does not announce details of troop deployment numbers or casualties, but frontline commanders openly acknowledge that they are facing serious personnel shortages.
Viktor Orbán, one of Europe’s most pro-Russian leaders, is expected to head to Kyiv on Tuesday to meet Volodymyr Zelenskiy. It is the first visit by the Hungarian prime minister to his neighbouring country since Russia’s full-scale invasion began and comes as Hungary takes over the rotating presidency of the EU. In contrast, Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, has made at least fivetripsto Russia since the start of the war. Hungary has repeatedly questioned the need to support Ukraine militarily, and has instead called for a ceasefire. Last week, EU governments agreed to use €1.4bn (£1.2bn) of profits from frozen Russian assets to supply arms and other aid to Ukraine, bypassing the Hungarian veto that has so frequently held up EU decisions on Ukraine.
A Briton who founded a charity supporting Ukrainian soldiers has died while fighting Russian forces, his organisation has said. Peter Fouché set up Project Konstantin, which provides supplies such as drones and food to Ukrainian soldiers, evacuates civilians and delivers humanitarian aid to conflict zones near the frontline. Fouché had previously helped to build a field hospital in Kyiv before he founded Project Konstantin and later enlisted as a contracted soldier with the armed forces of Ukraine, according to the charity’s website.
Patriotic Russian poetry praising Vladimir Putin and backing his war in Ukraine has turned out to be translations of Nazi verses penned in the 1930s and 1940s. The 18 poems of Gennady Rakitin have attracted quite a following in Russia in the past year and been mentioned in poetry prizes, but pranksters have revealed they invented Rakitin and simply translated poems such as Führer and odes to Nazi stormtroopers, replacing references to Germany with Russia. “We read collections of Z poetry and saw straight-up nazism there. We suspected that they probably wrote exactly the same things in Nazi Germany, and we turned out to be right,” said the group behind the project, in written responses to questions from the Guardian.
Russia’s defence ministry claimed its forces had taken control of two villages in eastern Ukraine. The Russian ministry said its forces were in control of the settlement of Stepova Novoselivka in Kharkiv region, and of Novopokrovske in Donetsk region. Ukrainian military statements partly denied the Russian assertion. The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, in an evening report, said its troops had repelled 17 attacks in the Kupiansk sector near Kharkiv, including around Stepova Novoselivka. It said fighting was raging near Synkivka, farther west. Russia has announced a string of incremental gains since capturing the city of Avdiivka in Donetsk region in February. It was the second day in succession that Moscow has announced the capture of new localities.
The court has wrapped up its term, issuing blockbuster decisions with enormous implications and the conservative supermajority in the driver’s seat
The US supreme court has wrapped up its 2023-2024 term, issuing a string of blockbuster decisions with enormous implications for American democracy, individual and civil rights, and the basic functioning of the federal government.
Once again, the conservative supermajority, with half its justices appointed by Donald Trump, was in the driver’s seat – strengthening the power of the presidency in its immunity ruling for Trump, and overturning precedent in a dramatic blow to the administrative state. There were crumbs of comfort for liberals, including a gun rights ruling related to domestic violence and a unanimous decision upholding access to a key abortion pill, but what the US public increasingly sees as an activist court majority continues in full swing.
Meme-stock influencer Keith Gill disclosed a 6.6% share in the pet food and medicine e-retailer
Shares of Chewy rose 15% premarket on Monday, before reversing sharply, after a filing showed Keith Gill, the stock influencer known as “Roaring Kitty”, had picked up a 6.6% stake in the pet products e-retailer.
The turbulent rally comes days after the investor, known for triggering the meme-stock rally of 2021, posted an uncaptioned picture of a puppy on the social media platform X that briefly sent Chewy shares to a near one-year high on Thursday.
Ismail Kadare, the Albanian writer who explored Balkan history and culture in poetry and fiction, has died aged 88. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life
The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term. But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.
In a country of that kind, the first thing for a writer is the most important one, the most substantial one, it is: do not take the regime seriously. You are a writer, you are going to have a much richer life than they have, you are in some sense or another eternal by comparison with those kinds of people, and in the last analysis you don’t need to bother about them very much.
When Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union in 1962, he was ready to turn to Europe, but he was rejected, so he made an absurd short-lived alliance with China. When that went wrong he built thousands of anti-nuclear pillboxes, which he knew were useless, but he wanted to create a fear-psychosis. Albania suffered longer than any other eastern European country.
Hoxha fancied himself an intellectual and poet who had been to the Sorbonne, and he didn’t want to be seen as an enemy of writers. Of course, he could have killed me in a ‘car crash’, or by ‘suicide’, as he did many others.
I am of the opinion that I am not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.
I have never claimed to be a ‘dissident’ in the proper meaning of the term. Open opposition to Hoxha’s regime, like open opposition to Stalin during Stalin’s reign in Russia, was simply impossible. Dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance to the regime.
On the one hand it secured protection for me in relation to the regime, on the other hand I was constantly under observation. What excited suspicion was ‘why does the western bourgeoisie hold a writer from a Stalinist country in high esteem?’
For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression – rich, malleable, adaptable.
I hated the Soviet books, full of sunshine, working in the fields, the joyous spring, the summer full of hope. The first time I heard the words ‘hope’ and ‘hard work’, they made me yawn.
The founding father of Albanian literature is the 19th-century writer Naim Frashëri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania. After him came Gjergj Fishta. We can say that these two are the giants of Albanian literature, the ones that children study at school. Later came other poets and writers who produced perhaps better works than those two, but they don’t occupy the same place in the nation’s memory.
In the early 60s, life in Albania was pleasant and well organised. A writer would not have known he should not write about the falsification of history.
For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature, otherwise writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. In the west, the problem is not freedom. There are other servitudes – lack of talent, thousands of mediocre books published every year.
I have created a body of literary work during the time of two diametrically opposed political systems: a tyranny that lasted for 35 years (1955-1990), and 20 years of liberty. In both cases, the thing that could destroy literature is the same: self-censorship.
They say that contemporary literature is very dynamic because it is influenced by the cinema, the television, the speed of communication. But the opposite is true! If you compare the texts of the Greek antiquity with today’s literature, you’ll notice that the classics operated in a far larger terrain, painted on a much broader canvas, and had an infinitely greater dimension.
All this noise about innovations, new genres, is idle. There is real literature and then there is the rest.
I don’t work for more than two hours a day.
Writing is neither a happy nor an unhappy occupation – it is something in-between. It is almost a second life.
I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.
The US president met with his family at Camp David, after a disastrous debate performance last week led to calls for him to drop out of the election
Joe Biden’s family have urged him stay in the race after a disastrous debate performance last week, according to reports in the US media, as senior democrats and donors have expressed exasperation at how his staff prepared him for the event.
One person was killed and at least nine others injured in Kharkiv; a 14-storey apartment building in Kyiv was set on fire after Russia strikes. What we know on day 859
One person was killed and nine others including a baby were injured in a Russian strike on a post office in Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, local authorities said. “A man, a post office employee, was killed,” the head of Kharkiv’s regional administration, Oleg Synegubov said on Telegram. The city of Kharkiv has been regularly targeted by Russian troops in recent months, but military analysts say the frequency has dipped since the US authorised Ukrainian use of its weapons on certain Russian targets.
In Kyiv’s Obolon suburb, the local military administration said falling fragments from a Russian missile started a fire and damaged balconies on a 14-storey apartment building. Emergency services, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said five female residents were treated for stress, and mayor Vitali Klitschko said 10 residents had been evacuated. The head of the military administration of Kyiv region said missile fragments had also fallen outside the capital, causing injuries and damage, though no details were provided.
Drone footage from Ukraine’s military has shown what appears to be bodies in a civilian area in the embattled eastern town of Toretsk, which has come under heavy Russian bombardment in recent days. The attacks in the war-torn Donetsk region have prompted a scaled-up evacuation effort by Ukrainian rescue services. Local officials said that powerful Russian glide bombs have also been used in the town. Glide bombs are heavy Soviet-era bombs fitted with precision guidance systems and launched from aircraft flying out of range of air defences.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a post on Telegram, said Russia had used more than 800 glide bombs on Ukrainian targets in the past week. He issued a fresh plea in his nightly video address for better weapons systems. “The sooner the world helps us deal with the Russian combat aircraft launching these bombs, the sooner we can strike – justifiably strike – Russian military infrastructure … and the closer we will be to peace,” he said.
Bulgaria’s Orthodox Church on Sunday elected Metropolitan Daniil – who experts see as pro-Russian in a church traditionally considered very close to Moscow – as its new leader. Daniil supported the Kremlin in a lengthy video message published in 2023. The Bulgarian patriarch is elected for life unless he himself decides to step down.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report
From newly published novels to timeless classics, Elizabeth Strout, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Irvine Welsh, Tessa Hadley and other writers choose their holiday favourites
Booker prize-nominated author of Caledonian Road and Mayflies
President cites daily strikes in appeal to allies; Russian attack on Donetsk villages kills four while five dead in Ukrainian strikes on Russian village. What we know on day 858
Russian forces fired missiles at the town of Vilniansk, outside the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing seven people and injuring 31 others on Saturday, officials said. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy repeated his appeal to allies to provide Ukraine with more long-range weapons and enhanced air defences to stop what he said were daily attacks on his country. The prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said two missiles were fired on the town in Ukraine’s south-east, damaging infrastructure, a shop and residential buildings. Emergency services put the death toll at seven, including two children, and said eight of the 31 injured were also children. Firefighters had put out blazes in several buildings and completed rescue operations.
Zaporizhzhia’s regional governor, Ivan Fedorov, said the Vilniansk strike was “yet another dreadful terrorist act against the civilian population”. It occurred in “the middle of the day, a non-working day, in the town centre, where people were out relaxing, where there were no military targets”, he said in a video posted on Telegram. Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram its missiles had struck a nearby area in the Zaporizhzhia region where it said Ukrainian trains unloaded arms and military equipment, killing soldiers and destroying armoured vehicles and missiles. Neither side’s battlefield accounts could be independently verified.
Russian attacks on frontline villages in the Donetsk region in the east killed four people, Ukrainian officials said. Three were in the village of Zarichne, the region’s head, Vadym Filashkin, said on social media. Another person, a resident of the frontline village of New York, “also sustained fatal injuries”, Ukraine’s general prosecutor said later.
Ukrainian forces shelled parts of southern Russia’s Kursk region throughout Saturday after carrying out an overnight drone attack on a village which killed five people, including two children, the regional governor said. Alexei Smirnov posted on Telegram that the five fatalities occurred in a house in the village of Gorodishche, east of the regional centre of Kursk. Two family members were being treated in hospital. A video posted on Smirnov’s Telegram channel showed him at a destroyed house amid piles of rubble and building materials.
Ukraine and Russia said priests were among the dozens of captured soldiers and civilians they had exchanged earlier this week. Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that two Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests taken captive in Moscow-occupied Berdiansk were handed back to Ukraine thanks to the mediation of the Vatican. Russia said a high-ranking Ukrainian Orthodox cleric was handed over to Moscow along with two other priests. Moscow and Kyiv exchanged 90 prisoners of war and some civilians each earlier this week.
Rescuers in Dnipro said several residents remained missing after at least one person was killed and 12 wounded, including a seven-month-old girl, after a Russian strike destroyed the top four floors of the apartment block in central Ukraine on Friday evening.
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