The relatives of 89 previously unidentified Argentinian soldiers killed during the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands will travel there this month to put names on their graves. Their identification has been made possible due to painstaking DNA testing and the humanitarian initiative of a British captain who in 1982 gathered more than 120 dead soldiers, with their effects, and placed them in graves each marked with the words “Argentine soldier known only to God”.

The testing of the exhumed bodies by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was agreed by the British and Argentinian governments in 2016 after a campaign led by both British and Argentinian veterans. Key figures behind the campaign, including forensic experts from the ICRC, Roger Waters from the band Pink Floyd, and relatives of the unidentified soldiers, met on Friday at the Argentinian embassy in London to celebrate their joint act of reconciliation. Osvaldo Ardiles, the former Tottenham Hotspur footballer whose cousin was a pilot killed in the war, was also present.(theguardian)…[+]

Hundreds of people who visited the pub and the restaurant in Salisbury where the Russian spy Sergei Skripal may have been poisoned have been told to wash their clothes and possessions. The advice from Public Health England is aimed at as many as 500 customers who ate at Zizzi restaurant or were in the Mill pub last Sunday and Monday.

The public health notice says that although the risk is very low, repeated contact with clothing or items exposed to the nerve agent could be a danger. Dr Jenny Harries, PHE’s regional director for the south of England, said at a press conference on Sunday: “We have learned that there has been a limited contamination in both the Mill pub and in Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury. “The immediate risk to the general public, on the evidence we have, remains low … The news today doesn’t alter the general risk at all.”(theguardian)…[+]

Spain’s supreme court has ruled that the jailed Catalan independence leader chosen to run for the regional presidency cannot leave prison to attend an investiture debate next week. Jordi Sànchez, the former head of the influential grassroots organisation Catalan National Assembly (ANC), has been in custody for five months over allegations that he and another civil society group leader used huge demonstrations to try to stop Spanish police officers from following a judge’s orders to halt the unilateral independence referendum held on 1 October last year.

Last week, the deposed Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, announced he was “provisionally” abandoning his attempts to return to office and anointed Sànchez, an MP in his Together for Catalonia party, as his preferred candidate. On Friday afternoon, a supreme court judge refused an application for Sànchez to be released temporarily to attend Monday’s debate. The judge, Pablo Llarena, said there was a risk Sànchez could reoffend by seeking to carry on pushing for secession from Spain. He also said that Sànchez’s legal predicament meant his candidacy “would not offer voters the leadership that is now required”.(theguardian)…[+]

About 180 military personnel have been called in to remove evidence potentially contaminated by a nerve agent in Salisbury as investigators try to establish where and when aBritish police officer was poisoned.

DS Nick Bailey is seriously ill in hospital having visited the home of Sergei Skripal after the former Russian spy and his daughter, Yulia, were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday afternoon. Investigators are trying to establish whether Bailey visited the scene where the two Russians were found, and was poisoned there or by items there, or whether the officer was contaminated by his visit to Skripal’s home. Sources say that while it is not certain, it is believed more likely Bailey became contaminated by his visit to the home. Uncertainty about how and where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were also poisoned led to police requesting military assistance on Friday to secure contaminated evidence on Friday. It is understood that personnel from the Royal Marines, the RAF and chemical teams were helping to remove vehicles from the scene.(theguardian)…[+]

The Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, will attempt to pull her divided far-right party together when it meets this weekend for its first conference since she lost to Emmanuel Macron in the final round of the French presidential election.

Beset by political and personal rifts, and with her popularity in the post-election doldrums, Le Pen is facing opposition to her plan to rename the party in an attempt to improve its electoral chances. The move is seen by the traditional wing of the FN, founded by Le Pen’s father in the 1970s, as a betrayal of the party’s heritage. The new name will be voted on after it is unveiled on Sunday. Ten months ago, the party was on a high after Le Pen saw off the Socialist candidate to take the FN into the second round of the presidential election with unprecedented support, though not enough to defeat Macron. However, this weekend’s conference to transform and “refound” the party is threatening to fall short of its goals of unity and optimism. Bruno Cautrès of the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po, said the party was undergoing a “crisis of Marine Le Pen’s leadership”.(theguardian)…[+]

Italy’s first black senator has said his election for the League has proved that the far-right party, whose anti-immigrant rhetoric helped it to its best ever result on Sunday, has no problem with legal migration.

Campaigning under the party slogan “stop the invasion”, Toni Iwobi, a 62-year-old businessman originally from Nigeria, won his seat in Spirano, a small town in the Lombardy province of Bergamo, as the party took almost 18% of the vote nationwide.

“It’s an incredible honour for me to be Italy’s first black senator,” he told the Guardian. He shared success in the region with his party colleague Attilio Fontana, the new governor of Lombardy, who at the start of the election campaign said Italy’s migrant influx threatened to wipe out “our white race”. Iwobi, who owns an IT company, came to Italy in the late 1970s to study in Perugia. He later moved to Spirano, where he said he found the two loves of his life: his Italian wife and the League, then known as the Northern League. He became a councillor for the party in 1995.(theguardian)…[+]

A Danish inventor denied murdering the Swedish journalist Kim Wall on his homemade submarine as he took to the stand on the first day of his trial in Copenhagen. “I deny that I am guilty of the murder of Kim Wall,” Peter Madsen said, having earlier entered a not guilty plea via his lawyer, Betina Hald Engmark. “There is nothing worse that can happen to a person like me than to sail out with another person and return alone.”

Under questioning by the prosecution, Madsen said he had offered shifting explanations for what happened because he wanted to spare Wall’s relatives details of her death. Madsen initially told authorities he had dropped Wall off on a Copenhagen island several hours into their submarine trip in August. Then he said that Wall died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion – a claim he repeated on Thursday without elaborating.(theguardian)…[+]

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, has condemned the poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Salisbury as a “brazen and reckless” attempted murder. Updating the House of Commons on the nerve agent attack, Rudd said Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, remain “unconscious and in a critical but stable condition”.

She confirmed that a police officer who came to their aid remains in a serious but stable condition but is “conscious, talking and engaging”. She did not reveal the identity of nerve agent involved but confirmed it had been “tested by experts at the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, who are world renowned experts in this field”. She added: “That forensic analysis has revealed the presence of a nerve agent and the incident is therefore being treated as attempted murder.” Amid mounting speculation that the attack was ordered by the Kremlin, Rudd said: “The use of nerve agent on UK soil is a brazen and reckless act. This was attempted murder in the most cruel and public way.”(theguardian)…[+]

Pope Francis has cleared the way for Óscar Romero, the Salvadoran priest who championed the struggles of poor and dispossessed people and was murdered by a rightwing death squad, to be made a saint. The Vatican announced on Wednesday that Francis had approved a miracle attributed to Romero, meaning the former archbishop of San Salvador could be canonised early next year. The move follows longstanding efforts to block Romero’s canonisation from conservatives within the church who opposed his association with liberation theology.

Francis began the process of declaring Romero a saint soon after becoming pope. About 250,000 people attended Romero’s beatification ceremony in San Salvador in May 2015. Romero was shot through the heart by a sniper while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel on 24 March 1980, a day after he called on the military to stop killing innocent civilians in El Salvador’s dirty war. Numerous death threats had been made against him. In his final sermon, he said: “In the name of God and this suffering population, whose cries reach to the heavens more tumultuous each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you, in the name of God, cease the repression.” In his diaries, he wrote: “Between the powerful and the wealthy, and the poor and vulnerable, who should a pastor side with? I have no doubts. A pastor should stay with his people.”(theguardian)…[+]

The TV anchor was rattling off Italy’s general election results in the early hours of Monday morning and Zak could not fall asleep. He had been restless and sick with worry for weeks, ever since a neo-fascist had shot six Africans in the city of Macerata and the leaders of rightwing parties had vowed to kick 600,000 migrants out of the country if elected.

Zak, 17, comes from the Gambia and lives in a community for minors in Catenanuova, in the heart of Sicily. He made the perilous sea crossing from Libya in a wooden boat and has been waiting for months for a decision on his refugee status. He bears the scars of torture from eight months of beatings in Libya. His father is Gambian, his mother Senegalese. In Senegal he had been forced to attend Islamic schools. Feeling deprived of his liberty, he had decided to flee.

As the hours went by on Monday, his worst nightmare became a reality: an anti-immigrant coalition of rightwing parties took 37% of the vote. It was not enough to govern, but it gives them a powerful hand in the coalition horse-trading that has already begun. Zak now fears he will never get his papers and that he will soon be deported.(theguardian)…[+]