South Korean court rules ex‑President Yoon Suk Yeol guilty in insurrection trial




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Billionaire Microsoft co-founder pulls out of India’s AI Impact Summit to ‘ensure the focus’ remains on event’s ‘key priorities’
Bill Gates has pulled out of a keynote address at the AI Impact Summit in India as he continues to face questions over his relationship with the deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder travelled to India, where his foundation works with the government on delivering AI for social good, earlier this week and was advertised as speaking at the international summit shortly after the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
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© Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters

© Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters

© Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters













Representatives of repressive regimes from around the world are flying to Washington for the inaugural meeting of the body
A grouping of largely oppressive and authoritarian world leaders and their envoys are flying to Washington for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s newly established Board of Peace.
The body was created to implement his vision for Gaza’s future after it was destroyed by Israel, but Trump has widened its scope, calling it “the most consequential international body in history”.
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© Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

© Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

© Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
While other countries are deep in a sex recession, the Danish drive shows no signs of stalling. How do they stay so frisky?
Copenhagen on the Thursday before Valentine’s Day is intoxicatingly romantic. That’s not hyperbole – you could breathe in and be drunk on it. The canals have frozen over, which only happens about once every 13 years, and couples are skating on them. You can see cosy bars from miles away because they’re strung with fairy lights – apparently not just a Christmas thing here. Everyone is beautiful.
But none of that comes close to explaining why young Danes in Denmark, unlike gen Z across the developed world, are still having sex. Winter isn’t even their frisky season. “You feel the atmosphere in the springtime,” says Ben, 35, half-British, half Danish. His friend Anna, also 35, originally Hungarian, says: “Post-hibernation fever, you can feel the sexual energy. Everyone is on. Everyone swims in the canals, a lot of the women will be topless – they’re like herrings.” (Which is to say: they are typically Danish, they love the water and they don’t wear clothes … I think.) Ben and Anna are millennials, of course, rather than gen Z: they provide the outsiders’ perspective.
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© Photograph: Valdemar Ren/The Guardian

© Photograph: Valdemar Ren/The Guardian

© Photograph: Valdemar Ren/The Guardian
People like me were targets of the Islamophobia that gripped the west after the US-led ‘war on terror’. Now I fear a chilling sequel is on the way
Twenty-five years ago, George W Bush persuaded European leaders to back his “war on terror”. That disastrous project cost millions of lives and caused mass displacement of people from across the Middle East. It normalised racism and hatred for Muslims, refugees and racialised minorities in the US and Europe. I fear Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, with its calls to defend white, western, Christian civilisation against supposedly contaminating racialised migrants – and the standing ovation he received from European elites – may mark a chilling sequel.
Rubio’s language of a shared and superior American and European civilisation differs from that of his bosses, Donald Trump and JD Vance. His tone is more emollient but his outreach is conspiratorial. Rubio talks of migration and identity and civilisational anxiety, rather than terrorism and hard security threats as Bush once did. In his Munich speech, Rubio flattered Europeans about the continent’s colonial past. He denied preaching a message of xenophobia or hate, and instead framed his call to defend national borders as entirely respectable, dutiful and a “fundamental act of sovereignty”.
Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company
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© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AFP/Getty Images
Banned from education, a clandestine reading circle meets every week to pour over novels by Abbas Maroufi, Zoya Pirzad and Ernest Hemingway
Four young women sit together, waiting for the phone to ring. When the call finally comes, their friend’s voice is crackly and hard to make out, but they wait patiently for the signal to improve so they can start discussing their chosen book.
Every Thursday, the five friends come together away from the disapproving gaze of the Taliban for a reading circle. They read not for entertainment but, as they put it, to understand life and the world around them. They call their group “women with books and imagination”.
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© Photograph: supplied

© Photograph: supplied

© Photograph: supplied