A fire at a shopping centre in the Siberian city of Kemerovo has left at least 64 people dead, many of them children. Russia’s emergency ministry said that six people are still trapped in the rubble of the smouldering Winter Cherry shopping centre in Kemerovo.

The fire broke out at the shopping centre on a busy Sunday afternoon and quickly engulfed the top floor of the building, spreading through a children’s ice-skating rink, play centre and a two-screen cinema. Images from the scene showed thick black smoke pouring from the white-and-yellow tile shopping centre, as firefighters continued to battle the flames after nightfall from four storeys up. It is still unclear what sparked the fire, which was put out on Sunday evening. Authorities on Monday said four arrests had been made in connection with the fire.(theguardian)…[+]

The former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont is to appear in court following his arrest in Germany, which triggered a wave of protests in Catalonia where thousands of separatists confronted police. Puigdemont, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Brussels since October, was travelling in a car on the way from Finland to Belgium on Sunday when he was detained, having visited Finnish lawmakers in Helsinki.

German police arrested him after he crossed the border from Denmark, under a European arrest warrant reactivated on Friday by Spain, where he is wanted on charges of sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds.

Puigdemont, who has been held in prison in the town of Neumünster since his arrest, will be brought before a German judge on Monday afternoon to confirm his identity and decide if he is to remain in custody. The state court in Schleswig-Holstein will rule at a later date on whether to put Puigdemont in formal pre-extradition custody on the basis of documents provided by Spain. German government officials have stressed that the case is a matter for the judicial system, but declined to say on Monday whether the government could ultimately overrule a court decision.(theguardian)…[+]

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) will provide a grant of GBP974, 000 to the Government of Jamaica, to prepare a feasibility and design study for the development of an agriculture project for communities in the parishes of St. Catherine and Clarendon. The St. Catherine and Clarendon Agricultural Development project is being funded through a grant from the United Kingdom Caribbean Infrastructure Partnership Fund (UKCIF), which is administered by CDB.

“The agriculture sector plays a significant role in Jamaica’s socioeconomic development, and provides employment opportunities for rural residents. In St. Catherine and Clarendon, there are large areas of land which are being underutilised, and which could provide opportunities for expanding the sector. The plans and designs developed under this feasibility study will lay the groundwork for a project to enhance the productivity of farmers in these parishes,” said Andrew Dupigny, Head of Infrastructure Partnerships, CDB.  The feasibility study will establish capacity for an agriculture project, including an irrigation system and associated production and marketing systems. Challenges for the agriculture sector in Jamaica include irregular rainfall patterns and an increase in the frequency of droughts. Clarendon and St. Catherine were among six areas identified for the development of major irrigation systems in Jamaica, of which three have been completed. One is being financed through a previously approved UKCIF grant. UKCIF provides grant financing to eight Caribbean countries eligible for Overseas Development Assistance, and UK Overseas Territory, Montserrat.

This project is consistent with CDB’s strategic objective of supporting inclusive and sustainable growth and development, as well as CDB’s corporate priority of supporting agriculture and rural development.(CDB)…[+]

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – Despite the high vulnerability of the Caribbean Region to natural disasters and the effect they can have on mental health and psychosocial well-being, social resilience is often overlooked in mitigation and rebuilding efforts.

In direct response to this issue, the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has announced that it will fund a programme to enhance capacity for mental health and psychosocial support in disaster management in the Caribbean.

“It is critical that a country’s response to any disaster includes a targeted psychosocial support and mental health component to rebuild individual and social resilience,” said Daniel Best, Director of Projects, CDB.

“We have witnessed first-hand how feelings of anxiety and distress can result from the inability to tolerate and withstand environmental and social threats, and lead to behaviours, including substance abuse, child and spousal abuse and gender-based violence. This can potentially have a long term debilitating impact on victims, and by extension, the development of Small Island Developing States,” he added.

Addressing mental health and psychosocial support has become increasingly relevant for governments and humanitarian actors. The grant from CDB will assist the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) with enhancing regional capacity to provide this kind of support in disaster management, and achieve three primary objectives:

• to build regional capacity for mental health and psychosocial support in disaster management within the health sector, other agencies outside the health sector, and the broader community;

to strengthen in-country competencies to conduct mental health and psychosocial support needs assessments, and develop or update action plans for such support in disaster management; and

to develop and implement a Caribbean awareness and communication campaign in preparation for the 2018 hurricane season to increase knowledge about, acceptance of and uptake of psychosocial support and mental health services.

Five CDB Borrowing Member Countries, including some affected by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, will be selected for participation in the programme, which is scheduled to be implemented from April 2018 to October 2019.(theguardian)…[+]

Russian intelligence agents and diplomats across the European Union will be expelled next week in response to the use of a nerve agent in Salisbury, described by Emmanuel Macron as an “attack on European sovereignty”.

At least 10 EU member states will order Russian officials to leave, with the number of countries answering the UK’s call for action expected to rise in the coming weeks. “What happened in Great Britain has clearly never been seen before,” the French president told reporters, at the end of a summit where EU leaders agreed unanimously that Moscow was “highly likely” to be responsible for the assault. “It is an aggression against the security and the sovereignty of an ally, today a member of the European Union, which demands a reaction.”

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said she agreed there should be further measures, beyond the recall earlier on Friday of the EU’s ambassador to Moscow. France and Germany were among the first countries to back the UK and do not expect the investigation by experts at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to change their conclusions.(theguardian)…[+]

A ceasefire deal that will allow the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians and fighters under Russian guarantees has been reached in the besieged Syrian enclave of eastern Ghouta. The agreement, which was confirmed by the spokesman of the second-largest rebel group in the area, will allow civilians and fighters to either leave for northern Syria or remain in their homes and reconcile with the regime of Bashar al-Assad, with guarantees from Moscow that they will not be prosecuted for opposition activities.

In effect, the deal will displace thousands of civilians to the northern province of Idlib, which is under partial control by al-Qaida-linked militants, as few are likely to trust guarantees by a Russian government whose fighter jets participated in the month-long bombardment of eastern Ghouta.(theguardian)…[+]

The Syrian rebel commander Abu Ahmed was smiling. His troops had played a key role in Turkey’s assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria, a fight they have won. Abu Ahmed is a senior officer in the 10,000-strong rebel force that, with Turkish backing and instigation, took control of Afrin on Sunday after a two-month battle. His name has been changed, along with others, to freely discuss their sensitive relations with their backers in Ankara. Amid the series of defeats at the hands of the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and its Russian backers, victory in Afrin is one of the rare successes for rebel fighters in recent years.Their quick victory in a fight against an adversary trained and armed by the US, which had ousted Islamic State from vast tracts of territory, underlined the growing power of a rebel army in Syria’s north, armed and paid by Turkey, that now comprises three legions and controls a growing swathe of territory.(theguardian)…[+]

Reports that Joe Biden is preparing a run for the White House in 2020 seemed to draw a response from Donald Trump on Thursday. The former vice-president would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way”, the president tweeted, if he ever acted on a repeatedly expressed wish to “beat the hell” out of Trump over his comments about women.

Talk of a Biden run for the presidency has persisted since the 2016 campaign, in which it has been claimed he was considered as a last-minute replacement for Hillary Clinton. Biden, who has said he thinks he could have won in 2016, has not counted out a run in the next election. He has also opened two policy organisations and a political action committee. On Thursday he announced a three-point “Plan to Put Work – and Workers – First” and a roster of big-name advisers including senior figures from the Obama administration. The former acting US attorney general Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump for opposing his first travel ban, is on the list.

The former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus said in a speech in Hong Kong this week that Biden “could be a pretty serious candidate”, although he added that he did not think a Democratic party moving left in opposition to Trump would “embrace” such a centralist figure. Biden, 75, spoke on Tuesday, telling students at an anti-sexual assault event at the University of Miami: “A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.’(theguardian)…[+]

As many as 20 Russian-language media outlets have withdrawn their journalists from covering Russia’s lower house of parliament or limited their coverage in protest at a sexual harassment scandal involving an MP.

RBC, TV Rain, RTVI and Echo of Moscow have withdrawn their journalists from the Duma in the past 24 hours after an ethics committee cleared Leonid Slutsky of any wrongdoing over a series of alleged unwanted sexual advances towards reporters.

The boycott is an unusual show of solidarity over sexual harassment, a problem that is often laughed off in Russia and recently has been painted as a pet issue of western liberals at odds with traditional Russian values. RBC announced on Wednesday it would recall its journalists. “This decision by the ethics committee, in fact, admits the norm of the possibility of sexual harassment toward journalists by newsmakers,” it said in a statement. “We do not agree with this approach and refuse to consider the Duma’s position in this question to be adequate.”

Two popular business dailies, Kommersant and Vedomosti, said they would limit their correspondents’ interactions with Slutsky. Three female journalists have publicly accused Slutsky, the head of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, of making unwanted sexual advances towards them while they negotiated with him over interviews. One said she had an audio recording of the encounter.(theguardian)…[+]

A whistleblower at the centre of a corruption scandal surrounding Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, has handed herself in to police in Athens. Maria Efimova, who claimed a private bank where she worked had been used to move funds for Maltese politicians and the children of the president of Azerbaijan, voluntarily attended a police station in Syntagma Square on Monday night.

Maltese authorities issued a European arrest warrant for the Russian national in November, alleging she had made false claims against local police. This was followed by an arrest warrant in Cyprus, where Efimova had lived and worked four years ago, over allegations of defrauding her employer. Efimova was transferred to court custody on Tuesday morning and a judge will consider her case. She had earlier contacted friends and supporters saying she was in emotional distress and feared for her life. The MEP Stelios Kouloglou, who had been helping Efimova with an application for residency in Greece, spoke to her and to the police officer dealing with her case on Monday night. He told the Guardian: “She called me last night from the police station. She told me she turned herself in because she was afraid. Her husband called this morning. He said she was terrorised and saying she was going to die.”(theguardian)…[+]