Abdiwahab Ahmed

Under mounting pressure, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer admitted he made the wrong call in appointing Labour grandee Peter Mandelson as Britain’s envoy to Washington, as he tried to contain a crisis tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-time associate. Already deeply unpopular with voters and facing discontent among Labour MPs, Mr Starmer is battling a controversy that has cast a long shadow over his leadership and raised fresh doubts about his judgment. Speaking in parliament as the row intensified, Mr Starmer said: "At the heart…

Slovenia’s post-election deadlock deepened today after Prime Minister Robert Golob said he had been unable to assemble a governing coalition, despite his party’s razor-thin victory in last month’s parliamentary vote. The setback now gives an opening to runner-up Janez Jansa, a supporter of US President Donald Trump, to try to build a coalition in the EU member state of two million people. "We are looking forward to our work in the opposition," the liberal Mr Golob, 59, told reporters after meeting the president, saying he…

A burst of domestic violence in Shreveport, Louisiana, turned catastrophic when a man killed eight children — seven of them his own — across a rampage that unfolded at three locations, police said. The early-morning attack at a home in the city marked the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in more than two years, according to figures compiled by the Gun Violence Archive. Two women were also shot and critically wounded, among them the mother of several of the children who were killed. Investigators said initial…

Ukraine struck Russia’s Tuapse oil refinery for the second time in less than a week, according to Robert Brovdi, commander of Kyiv’s drone forces, who announced the attack in a social media post. Russian officials said a Ukrainian drone assault on the Black Sea port city of Tuapse triggered a fire and killed at least one person, coming only hours after authorities had put out a blaze caused by a similar strike on 16 April. Rosneft’s Tuapse refinery, which is geared toward exports, can process about 240,000 barrels of crude a…

Iran has not yet decided whether it will join a fresh round of peace talks with the United States, clouding efforts to prevent the Middle East war from flaring up again. US President Donald Trump said he was dispatching negotiators to Pakistan for discussions aimed at ending a conflict that has engulfed the region and shaken global markets, even as he renewed threats to strike Iran's infrastructure if no agreement is reached. An initial round of talks in Islamabad earlier this month ended without a breakthrough, and both…

Volodymyr Zelensky has denounced the loosening of restrictions on Russian oil, warning that revenue from those sales feeds Moscow’s war machine just as Washington moves to ease pressure on energy markets rattled by the conflict in the Middle East. "Every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war" and is used for devastating strikes on Ukraine, Mr Zelensky said in a post on X. Without naming the United States directly, the Ukrainian president’s remarks came after President Donald Trump's administration on Friday…

The wreckage still held the signatures of everyday life: a bottle of washing-up liquid, a packet of cucumber and vitamin E wax strips, baby talc, a tube of La Roche-Posay face wash. This was one of the buildings hit in central Beirut on a Wednesday at lunchtime, without warning. It was among the targets of 100 Israeli strikes launched in just 10 minutes, part of what became the deadliest day of the conflict in Lebanon so far. But even amid those intimate traces of lives interrupted, something else stayed with me more…

Bulgaria appears headed for its most decisive political reset in decades after former president Rumen Radev, a critic of the European Union who has urged a renewal of ties with Russia, won an outright majority in parliamentary elections, near complete official results showed. Radev's Progressive Bulgaria alliance captured 44.7% of the vote in yesterday's election, with 91.7% of ballots counted, according to official figures, leaving the grouping on track to secure about 130 seats in the 240-member parliament. The sweeping…

Bound by grief that might once have kept them apart, an Israeli father and a Palestinian father are instead using friendship as their strongest argument for peace. Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, who stood on opposite sides of the conflict as young men, now describe themselves as "family" and say they have devoted their lives to fostering respect and understanding between their peoples. The pair were in Dublin to address an event hosted by the charity Trócaire. They are no strangers to Ireland, having travelled across the…

Austrian authorities have found rat poison in a jar of HiPP baby food, escalating a product recall that pulled the brand from 1,500 SPAR supermarkets across the country amid urgent safety concerns. Police in Burgenland said a 190g jar of carrot with potato baby food, flagged by a customer in the Eisenstadt-Umgebung district, tested positive for rat poison after being examined. HiPP said yesterday that it could not rule out the possibility that a dangerous substance had been introduced into the product, warning that its HiPP…