In a muddy clearing at the foot of Nang Non mountain, soldiers, medics and rescue workers chattered over the hum of generators and falling water, hoping for the next piece of good news. Hours before, 12 Thai schoolboys between the ages of 11 and 16 and their 25-year-old football coach were found alive by divers in the nearby cave known as Tham Luang Nang Non, which flooded while they were exploring it on 23 June.

In an instant, an anxious nine-day search operation transformed into a rescue mission, but those spending their days at the rescue camp say they never lost hope that the missing children would be returned to safety. “One thing I’d like to note about the mood in this camp is that we’ve all been in here as a family, working together, and I never sensed anyone being demotivated. In fact, I sensed a strong hope,” said US Air Force Captain Jessica Tait, a member of a unit of divers, medics, and survival specialists sent to the rescue site last week at the request of the Thai government.

“When we found out the good news, it felt like it was out of a movie. I get chills when I think about that moment and being able to work hard and have such a positive outcome, because you don’t always get that,” she said.(theguardian)...[+]

Theresa May has been told by European leaders that an attempt to protect the UK’s industrial base by gaining single market access for goods alone after Brexit is a nonstarter, as the Irish prime minister warned: “We are not going to let them destroy the European Union.”

After being given a “broad brush approach” presentation at a Brussels summit of May’s long-awaited paper, yet to be signed off by her warring British cabinet, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, told her that unless the final document presented a departure from the UK government’s thinking over the last two years, it would be dead on arrival. The British government is continuing to push the idea of keeping frictionless trade on goods, claiming that it would be a good deal for Europe, given the large trade surplus it enjoys.(theguardian)…[+]

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has delivered his most trenchant criticism yet of the Russian government, describing it unequivocally as “corrupt”. His comments mean the proposed US-Russia summit in Helsinki on 16 July is potentially risky for him if Donald Trump was to request Vladimir Putin to hand him over. Snowden is wanted in the US on three charges under the Espionage Act, carrying a minimum of 30 years in jail. Putin could balance the propaganda value of having Snowden in Russia against providing Trump with an easy gift.

In an interview with the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung Snowden, who has lived in Russia since 2013, said: “The Russian government is corrupt in many ways, that’s something the Russian people realise. Russian people are warm. They are clever. It’s a beautiful country. Their government is the problem not the people.” Snowden faced criticism in the first couple of years after he arrived in Russia of not criticising the Putin government but he has gradually become more outspoken, including in his defence of journalists.(theguardian)…[+]

The alleged gunman who killed five people at a Maryland newspaper was investigated in May 2013 after threats were made against the paper, police said on Friday. Timothy Altomare, chief of Anne Arundel county police, said Jarrod Ramos was looked into over “online threatening comments” directed at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, but the newspaper management decided not to pursue criminal charges.

“There was a fear that doing so would exacerbate an already flammable situation,” Altomare said at a press conference. Ramos, 38, appeared by video at a county district court accused of murdering five people at the newspaper as part of a years-long feud that began when it reported on his harassment of a woman. He was held without bail.

Wes Adams, the county prosecutor, told the court Ramos barricaded a back entrance to the newspaper’s office before entering through the front door and shooting people as they tried to flee through the barricaded door.Speaking outside the court, Adams said this was “evidence that suggested a coordinated attack”. Police said evidence of planning for the shooting was found at Ramos’s apartment in the city of Laurel, about 25 miles from the newspaper office.(theguardian)…[+]

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold their first official summit in Helsinki on 16 July, the Kremlin and the White House have announced, scheduling an encounter that is certain to generate fresh controversy for the White House. The optics of the meeting are likely to be as important to the leaders as its results. Moscow is keen to show it is not isolated on the world stage, while Trump has ignored criticism at home to plot a course towards closer relations with Putin.

“I’ve said it from day one, getting along with Russia and with China and with everybody is a very good thing,” Trump said, adding that Syria, Ukraine and “many other subjects” would be discussed at the summit. “It’s good for the world, it’s good for us, it’s good for everybody.”

However, US allies are concerned that a show of warmth with Putin in Helsinki, especially if it follows a combative Nato summit in Brussels five days earlier, could undermine confidence in the strength of the transatlantic alliance. Those fears were deepened earlier this month in Quebec, when Trump railed at other leaders at a G7 summit that “Nato is as bad as Nafta”, comparing the alliance to the North American free trade agreement he constantly denigrates as being at expense of the US. An amicable Trump-Putin meeting could also cast a shadow back on the US president’s visit to the UK between the Nato and Helsinki summits, particularly if his encounter with Theresa May is as frosty as recent exchanges between the US and British leaders.(theguardian)…[+]

Spanish police have reportedly arrested four men and a boy on suspicion of drugging and sexually assaulting an underage girl at a resort in the Canary Islands. Local media reports said the five suspects called themselves la nueva manada (the new wolfpack), after a gang that was jailed for sexually abusing an 18-year-old woman in Pamplona two years ago and released on bail to widespread outrage last week.

In defiance of a travel ban imposed by the court, one of the Pamplona attackers was caught trying to obtain a new passport days after handing over his documents as a condition for his provisional release, police said on Thursday. Police have released few details about the latest incident, which took place last week, but El Diario reported that at least one of the suspects filmed the incident on his phone. The suspects are being held in the town of Maspalomas on Gran Canaria.

Marco Aurelio Pérez, the mayor of San Bartolomé de Tirajana where the incident took place, denounced what he described as “a totally intolerable, mean, vile” act, and said such incidents risked “dangerously awakening social anger”. Women’s groups and the Spanish media have linked the case to the early release the previous day of the original “wolfpack”. That group got its name from a WhatsApp chat the men used to discuss their plans during the San Fermîn bull-running festival in 2016.(theguardian)…[+]

Two women accused of murdering the estranged half-brother of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, must have been trained to carry out an assassination using a deadly nerve agent, Malaysian prosecutors have said.

Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong are charged with having common intent with four North Korean fugitives to kill Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur international airport in February 2017. Kim’s face was smeared with VX, a banned nerve agent developed as a chemical weapon.

“You have to be trained for it – there can be no room for error,” said the prosecutor Wan Shaharuddin Wan Ladin at the high court in Shah Alam on Thursday, likening the killing to something from a James Bond film. The two women, both in their 20s, are the only suspects in custody and could face the death penalty if convicted. They have pleaded not guilty, saying they believed they were acting in a prank reality show and did not know they were handling anything lethal.(theguardian)…[+]

Britain’s chief financial watchdog has warned that contracts worth trillions of pounds between UK and European Union banks remain at risk of collapse following Brexit, after Brussels’ failure to implement protective legislation. In a warning to EU officials that time is running out before next March to devise rules for EU banks, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) said £29tn worth of contracts could be declared void.
Derivatives contracts, which provide banks and corporations with protection from interest rate rises, could come to an end without fresh legislation from the UK and EU, the committee said in its latest quarterly health check on Britain’s financial services industry. The warning will be seen as a direct response to the European Banking Authority, which argued earlier this week that the UK was dragging its feet preparing for Brexit.(theguardian)…[+]

The lower house of the Polish parliament has voted to decriminalise the false attribution to Poland and Poles of crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, signalling a partial retreat on contentious legislation enacted earlier this year. During an emergency parliamentary session on Wednesday morning, the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, of the ruling rightwing Law and Justice party, told MPs that the legislation had succeeded in its aim of raising international awareness of Poland’s role during the second world war.

“The purpose of this law was and still is one fundamental message: fight for the truth, fight for the truth of world war two and postwar times,” Morawiecki said.
“A publisher in the United States or in Germany will think twice before publishing today an article using the expression ‘Polish SS’, ‘Polish gestapo’ or ‘Polish concentration camps’ if he risks a lawsuit and a fine of 100m euros or dollars.”(theguardian)…[+]

Butchers in France have asked the government for police protection from animal rights activists, claiming their security was being threatened and that vegans were trying to impose a meat-free lifestyle on the nation. The French federation of butchers wrote to the interior minister saying shops had been sprinkled with fake blood and covered in graffiti. It claims that a growing media focus on veganism was threatening butchers’ safety.

The letter said France’s 18,000 butchers were worried about the consequences of “excessive media hype around vegan lifestyles”, and that vegans wanted to “impose their lifestyle on the immense majority of people”. “We count on your services and on the support of the entire government so that the physical, verbal and moral violence stops as soon as possible,” the federation wrote.

Seven butcher shops were vandalised and sprayed with fake blood in the Hauts-de-France region in the north of the country in April. Other incidents were reported in southern France. A butcher and a fishmonger in the north had seen windows broken, with the slogan “Stop speciesism” left behind in spray-paint by the vandals.

It is not only purveyors of meat who have faced the wrath of the animal rights activists: last year a cheesemonger in Lyon said his shop was painted with the words “milk is rape” and “milk is murder”. In March, a vegan cheesemaker was given a seven-month suspended jail sentence for condoning terrorism after she said on Facebook that she had no compassion for the supermarket butcher killed in a terrorist attack on a store in Trèbes and likened being a butcher to being a murderer.(theguardian)…[+]