A famine inflicting “huge loss of life” could strike at any time in Yemen, as food prices soar and the battle rages over the country’s main port, the UN humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, has warned. Lowcock said that by the time an imminent famine is confirmed, it would be too late to stop it. Accelerating economic collapse has caused prices of staples to increase by 30% at a time many millions of Yemenis were already finding it hard to feed their families.

Meanwhile, fighting over the port of Hodeidah has limited its capacity, shut down its grain mills and closed the main road inland towards the capital, Sana’a, threatening a lifeline that has allowed aid agencies to reach 8 million people and stave off famine so far this year.

“One of the things about what happens in famines is there’s a sudden collapse of which you get no notice,” Lowcock, the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, told the Guardian on the eve of a UN general assembly meeting on Monday to discuss the Yemeni crisis. “When the collapse happens, it’s too late to do anything. There’s a huge loss of life very, very quickly. So that’s the issue we’re flagging.”(theguardian)...[+]

The board of the Italian state broadcaster, Rai, has for a second time nominated Marcello Foa, a Eurosceptic journalist who has often shared stories proved to be fake, to be its president. The nomination will now be put to the parliamentary committee that oversees Rai on Tuesday, where support for Foa’s candidacy is believed to be building.

Foa, who also holds anti-gay, anti-immigration, anti-vaccine and pro-Russia views, has been pushed for the role by the governing coalition of the far-right League and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S). The M5S leader, Luigi Di Maio, said Foa would help purge the “parasites” installed by mainstream parties who had led Rai for decades. His candidacy was blocked in August when he failed to receive the required two-thirds of votes from the oversight committee due to opposition from Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the centre-left Democratic party and the smaller leftwing party Free and Equal.

His appointment now appears more likely after Berlusconi said this week that his party would drop its opposition, and because Rai’s board consists of a majority of politicians from the League and M5S. Berlusconi’s change of heart came after a meeting with Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister and leader of the League, as the pair sought to revive a centre-right coalition, which also includes the smaller far-right party Brothers of Italy, before upcoming regional elections in Trentino Alto-Adige, Abruzzo, Basilicata and Sardinia.(theguardian)…[+]

Russian diplomats held secret talks in London last year with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, the Guardian has learned.

A tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder smuggled out of Ecuador’s London embassy in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to another country. One ultimate destination, multiple sources have said, was Russia, where Assange would not be at risk of extradition to the US. The plan was abandoned after it was deemed too risky. The operation to extract Assange was provisionally scheduled for Christmas Eve in 2017, one source claimed, and was linked to an unsuccessful attempt by Ecuador to give Assange formal diplomatic status.

The involvement of Russian officials in hatching what was described as a “basic” plan raises new questions about Assange’s ties to the Kremlin. The WikiLeaks editor is a key figure in the ongoing US criminal investigation into Russia’s attempts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel conducting the investigation, filed criminal charges in July against a dozen Russian GRU military intelligence officers who allegedly hacked Democratic party servers during the presidential campaign. The indictment claims the hackers sent emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton to WikiLeaks. The circumstances of the handover are still under investigation.(theguardian)…[+]

A ninth person has died in South Carolina because of Hurricane Florence bringing the total death toll for the massive storm and its subsequent record-shattering flooding to 42 people.The South Carolina state public safety department said in a Twitter message Thursday evening that the body of an 81-year-old man was found in a pickup truck submerged in water in Dillon county.

Highway patrol corporal Sonny Collins said the pickup ran off state highway 57, crashed and ended up in the water. Corner Donnie Grimsley said Friday morning that he’s still working to contact the victim’s family before he releases the name. Florence is blamed for at least 42 deaths in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Well over half of those killed were in vehicles.

In North Carolina, many people have started returning to flooded homes as the rivers receded. They were met by silty mud on walls and floors, blown out windows and terrible odors. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster estimated his state has already suffered $1.2bn in damage. He asked Congress for help. North Carolina governor Roy Cooper says the state is still tallying its storm damage, but says it will be in the billions.(theguardian)…[+]

Four children, including three from the same family, have died after a train struck an electric transport wagon in which they were travelling near the eastern Dutch town of Oss, local media have reported.

A fifth child and the woman driving the wagon, known as a bolderkar or Stint, were critically injured. The ANP news agency said the accident happened at about 8.25am on Thursday on a manned level crossing as the woman was taking the children, aged between four and 11, from the before-school daycare centre where she worked to local primary schools.

Witnesses told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper that the barriers on the level crossing had been lowered but that the vehicle – a mode of transport popular with daycare centres in the Netherlands and Belgium for ferrying young children around – passed underneath them and became stranded on the tracks. Some witnesses said the the driver appeared to have lost control and was calling for help as the train approached.(theguardian)…[+]

Authorities in Zimbabwe are struggling to control a deadly cholera outbreak, underlining the enormous challenges that face the country’s new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. More than 5,000 people have been infected and 30 killed in the outbreak. A state of emergency has been declared and all public events cancelled, but the disease has nevertheless spread to five of the country’s 10 provinces.

In July, Mnangagwa won Zimbabwe’s first election since Robert Mugabe was ousted by the military last year. Observers criticised the poll, which the opposition claimed was rigged. The health emergency has shone a light on the appalling state of Zimbabwe’s infrastructure after decades of Mugabe’s autocratic and corrupt rule.(theguardian)…[+]

The World Anti-Doping Agency is facing the gravest crisis in its 19-year history after it lifted Russia’s suspension, despite pleas from the rest of the anti-doping community that such a decision would be unwise and premature.

The news, officially announced by Wada on Thursday afternoon after a meeting of its executive committee in the Seychelles, means that Russia will be free to test its own athletes again and issue therapeutic use exemption certificates. The decision makes it more likely that its track and field athletes will return to competing under the Russian flag, while the country is likely to start bidding for sporting events again too.However Wada’s critics are furious that it has secretly shifted the goalposts for the return of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) – especially as Russia has still not accepted that it was running a massive state-sponsored doping programme across major events such as the London 2012 Olympics, the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.(theguardian)…[+]

A woman has died after Storm Ali began to make itself felt with winds of up to 90mph across Ireland and parts of Scotland and England, as the first named storm of the season arrived in time for the morning rush-hour.

Irish police confirmed the woman died after a caravan was blown off a cliff in the west of Ireland. They said: “Gardaí at Clifden, County Galway, are investigating an incident which occurred at Claddaghduff, County Galway, this morning. “At approximately 7.45am, a report was received that a caravan had blown off the cliff at the above location. A search was carried out at the scene on the beach and after a short time the body of a female in her 50s was recovered.” About 55,000 homes and businesses, mainly in the south-west of Ireland, had been left without power due to the weather, the Electricity Supply Board said.(theguardian)…[+]

Cécile Kyenge, an MEP who had bananas thrown at her and was likened to an orangutan during her time as Italy’s integration minister, is being sued for defamation by the far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, for calling his party, the League, racist.

Kyenge will face trial in the northern city of Piacenza over comments made in an interview in 2014 during the Festa de l’Unità, a social democratic event celebrated across Italy each year. She was responding to a photograph posted on social media by Fabio Rainieri, who at the time was party secretary in the Emilia-Romagna region, depicting her as an orangutan.

On being notified of the trial on 14 September, Kyenge, who moved to Italy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1983 to study medicine, wrote on Facebook: “Today in Piacenza: Salvini has summoned me to court because I said the League is racist. Judge for yourselves.”(theguardian)…[+]

Theresa May will reject Michel Barnier’s revised Irish backstop border proposals at the Salzburg summit because the EU is still insisting on customs checks down the Irish Sea if the two sides cannot strike a free trade agreement after Brexit.

The prime minister foreshadowed the argument she will make to the other EU leaders over dinner on Wednesday evening in an article in Die Welt, which said the proposed backstop was “unacceptable” because it did not respect “the constitutional and economic integrity of the UK”. May will arrive in Salzburg on Wednesday afternoon at an informal EU council during which will she will address Brexit over dinner and where EU leaders will discuss the issue again at lunch on Thursday in her absence.

The prime minister will also hold bilateral meetings on Thursday with the EU president, Donald Tusk, and Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, as she seeks to end the impasse over the future of the UK’s only land border.(theguardian)…[+]