Britain ordered a new probe into an Abu Dhabi-backed plan to buy the influential Telegraph newspaper on Friday, stepping in a second time after Redbird IMI revised the deal to allay concerns of foreign interference in one of the country’s oldest dailies.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned yesterday that global disruptions and volatility are the “new normal”, with more geo-economic tensions on the horizon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday gave the green light for a new nuclear-powered icebreaker, as Moscow seeks to step up commercial trade across its Arctic north.

Russia yesterday accused Ukraine of deliberately shooting down a Russian military transport plane carrying 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers to a prisoner exchange in what it called a barbaric act of terrorism that had killed a total of 74 people.

A record number of people sought asylum in France last year, a rise of more than eight percent on the previous year, the county’s refugee protection authority said yesterday.

A wave of Russian missiles hit Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities yesterday, killing seven people and wounding dozens, setting ablaze and toppling apartment blocks and creating new panic among exhausted residents.

Canada will temporarily cap new international student permits by one-third this year compared to 2023, the country’s immigration minister announced Monday.

Kyiv said yesterday that Russian forces had attacked Ukraine with eight Iranian-designed attack drones but that its air defence systems had repelled the barrage.

The head of the World Health Organization yesterday voiced fears that countries will fail to strike a pandemic preparedness agreement by May, saying “future generations may not forgive us”.

Large swaths of Australia sweltered again yesterday through a widening heatwave, which the national weather forecaster said raised the bushfire risk in an already high-risk fire season as the country endures an El Nino weather pattern.

Microsoft MSFT.O said on Friday that a Russian state-sponsored group hacked into its corporate systems on January 12 and stole some emails and documents from staff accounts.

Police in Canada are investigating a series of extortions and related crimes that they believe are orchestrated by a suspect in India and involve criminals in Edmonton, Alberta, targeting the region’s affluent South Asian people.

Ukraine hit targets in Russia during a drone attack on an oil terminal in St Petersburg yesterday as part of a “new phase” in the region, a Ukrainian military source told Reuters.

The James Webb space telescope has discovered the oldest black hole ever detected, which was thriving so soon after the Big Bang that it challenges our understanding of how these celestial behemoths form, astronomers said Wednesday.

The number of study permits Canada issued to Indian students fell sharply late last year after India ejected Canadian diplomats who would process the permits and fewer Indian students applied due to a diplomatic dispute over the murder of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada, a top Canadian official told Reuters.

Around 40 Tunisian migrants attempting to reach Italy by sea have been missing for five days, the Tunisian National Guard said.

Births in France fell last year to their lowest annual number since World War II, the national statistics bureau said yesterday. Around 678,000 babies were born in 2023, INSEE said, a drop of 6.6 percent from the previous year and the lowest number for any year since 1946.

The first refugee to be elected to New Zealand’s parliament resigned yesterday over alleged shoplifting, which she said was related to personal stress and trauma.

The number of adult tobacco users has dropped steadily in recent years, the World Health Organization said yesterday but it warned Big Tobacco was working hard to reverse that trend.

Britain yesterday declared global Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir as a proscribed terrorist group, making it a criminal offence to belong to what it described as an antisemitic organisation.