More than a dozen US and European companies have been importing timber from a Brazilian logging firm whose owner is implicated in one of the most brutal Amazonian massacres in recent memory, according to a Greenpeace Brazil investigation.

The first-world buyers allegedly continued trading with Madeireira Cedroarana after police accused its founder, Valdelir João de Souza, of ordering the torture and murder of nine people in Colniza, Mato Grosso, on 19 April, claims the report by the NGO.

The state attorney alleges de Souza organised the assassinations to gain access to the forest where the victims – all smallholders – lived. Since the indictment on 15 May, the suspect has been on the run. During this period, the fugitive’s company allegedly sold products to foreign firms who shipped them to the US, Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada and Japan.(theguardian)…[+]

An abnormal sound detected in the South Atlantic ocean hours after an Argentinian navy submarine sent its last signal last week was “consistent with an explosion,” a navy spokesman said on Thursday.

Captain Enrique Balbi described the blast in the morning of 15 November as “abnormal, singular, short, violent” and “non-nuclear” and said it was detected at 10.31am along the route the ARA San Juan was following when it last made radio contact three hours earlier. The sound has been pinpointed to within a radius of 125km. Six vessels are currently attempting to locate the submarine, in an area that was previously searched. The explosion was detected by US sensors and by international agencies responsible for the detection of nuclear explosions around the world, Balbi said.(theguardian)…[+]

The pier in County Donegal, Republic of Ireland, where five members of the same family drowned last year was the scene of at least three similar incidents in which vehicles lost control, an inquest has heard. Sean McGrotty; his sons Mark, 12, and Evan, eight; his mother-in-law Ruth Daniels, and her 14-year-old sister, Jodie-Lee, died in March 2016 after McGrotty’s Audi Q7 slid off Buncrana pier into Lough Swilly.

The inquest into their deaths, being held at the Lake of Shadows hotel in Buncrana, heard on Thursday that the pier was covered in algae, making the slipway into the lough as “slippery as ice”. John O’Raw, a Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) volunteer said that in his 17 years in the role he could recall three other incidents in which vehicles lost control on Buncrana pier. O’Raw said he reached the sinking Audi about 40 minutes after the emergency services were called, but his attempts to get inside were hampered by a smashed window.(theguardian)…[+]

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have arrived in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi for talks with Vladimir Putin that are expected to focus on a political settlement for postwar Syria.

The mini-summit of the three countries – which this year helped broker a truce between Syrian government troops and the opposition in several areas – comes two days after Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, visited the Russian president in Sochi. Russia, which holds a military advantage in Syria, appears to want to bypass the UN process and focus on diplomatic efforts with the other regional guarantors to end the six-year war. Iran and Russia have been Assad’s main backers, while Turkey supports the Syrian opposition.

The Kremlin said Putin had assured the Iranian and Turkish leaders before the Assad meeting that Russia would “work with the Syrian leadership” to make sure any agreements that could be reached on Wednesday between Russia, Iran and Turkey “would be viable”.(theguardian)…[+]

The Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, has said he is suspending the resignation that he announced two weeks ago from Saudi Arabia, easing a crisis that had deepened tensions around the Middle East.

“Our nation today needs at this sensitive time exceptional efforts from everyone to protect it against danger,” Hariri said during independence day celebrations, having returned to Beirut late on Tuesday. “We must dissociate from wars, external struggles and regional conflicts.” The unusual nature of Hariri’s surprise resignation on 4 November prompted fears that he had been forced to leave office under the orders of his regional backers. It came against the backdrop of a regional power tussle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and renewed Saudi condemnation of Hezbollah, Hariri’s partners in government.

The postponement of his resignation will offer a brief respite for the Lebanese, who are struggling with the spillover from the war in Syria and a large refugee population in a country already rife with sectarian divisions. After his announcement, Hariri supporters marched through central Beirut, chanting “Saad” and waving the blue flag of his Future Movement political party.(theguardian)…[+]

NEW YORK – On Monday, in New York, the Commissioner in charge of International Cooperation and Development, Neven Mimica and the President of the Caribbean Development Bank, Dr. W^m. Warren Smith, announced the formalisation of an EU grant contribution to the Geothermal Risk Mitigation Programme for the Eastern Caribbean. The Programme will facilitate the development of up to 60MW of geothermal energy capacity in up to five countries – Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

The project launched Tuesday  will help geothermal energy development in the five small island states with isolated electricity markets and high dependency on energy imports. They lack the necessary scale to import cheaper fuels, and rely on expensive diesel and heavy fuel oil. As such, electricity tariffs in these states are among the highest in the world. Geothermal energy is heat energy generated and stored in the Earth, and is therefore an indigenous energy resource that would be able to meet national electricity demand. This would relieve these five states from oil imports, by up to 722,000 barrels per year, as well as lower current electricity prices. Additionally, it is a clean and renewable energy technology that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to climate change mitigation.

The €12 million in grant funding will be used to provide investment grants at the exploration phase, as well as technical assistance to support capacity-building initiatives and studies that explore opportunities for, and the feasibility of, interconnection between islands to facilitate the export of electricity by geothermal energy producers.(CDB)…[+]

Measures aimed at slashing vehicle emissions will be introduced two years early, the Indian government has announced in its first major policy response to the Delhi smog crisis.

As the haze improved slightly on Wednesday – albeit to levels still considered “very poor” – the Indian petroleum ministry said it would introduce Bharat VI fuels from April next year, instead of April 2020 as originally planned. The Bharat standards govern the volume of toxic materials permitted in the fuels that power the estimated 10 million cars that operate in the Indian capital and contribute significantly to its dangerously poor air quality.

The new fuels will have one-fifth the sulphur count of the existing standards, and 1,000 times less sulphur than fuels used in 1995. Polash Mukherjee, an air pollution researcher at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, said the fuel standards would need to be paired with equally stringent technology standards to be fully effective. The combination of the two could reduce particulate matter from diesel vehicles by 90%, and petrol vehicles by around 60%, he said.(NU.nl)…[+]

The husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has described a meeting with Boris Johnson as “positive and constructive” but faced a new setback on Wednesday as the Foreign Office questioned the usefulness of granting her diplomatic protection. Richard Ratcliffe, whose wife has been imprisoned in Iran since April 2016, was speaking after he was granted a first face-to-face meeting with the foreign secretary.

As Tehran indicated that it would not entertain the idea of diplomatic protection, which would escalate the case of the jailed British-Iranian mother, Ratcliffe acknowledged the legal and practical difficulties it would entail. But he said it would send a strong signal, arguing that soft diplomacy had not worked and that he deemed it appropriate for her case to be escalated. “I said I thought it would be important and helpful,” he said. “The foreign secretary and the Foreign Office expressed reservations, and we agreed that there are some questions that we have sent from the lawyers.

“They have agreed to answer the questions and then for the lawyers to sit down and talk it through. Both legally and then also practically. But certainly, I think it is an important thing for us to be pushing for.”(NU.nl)…[+]

Robert Mugabe remains in detention at his home in Zimbabwe more than 12 hours after the military declared on national television that it had temporarily taken control of the country to “target criminals” around the head of state. The move by the armed forces appears to have resolved a bitter battle to succeed the 93-year-old president, which had pitted his former vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, against Mugabe’s wife, Grace.

Mnangagwa was reported to have returned to Zimbabwe on Tuesday evening from South Africa, where he fled last week after being stripped of his office by Mugabe in an apparent attempt to clear Grace Mugabe’s path to power. There were unconfirmed reports that Grace Mugabe was in Namibia on Wednesday on business.(theguardian)…[+]

A new law that could legalise marriage for children as young as nine in Iraq would be “catastrophic”, setting back women’s rights by half a century, activists said. The proposal, an amendment to Iraq’s personal status law, would allow clerics of Muslim sects to govern marriage contracts. Public demonstrations were held last weekend by civil society and women’s rights groups against the amendment. The United Nations in Iraq (Unami) called for wider consultations and for women’s rights to be fully recognised and protected.

An earlier, more extreme version of the bill, provoked an international outcry when it was proposed, ahead of the elections in 2014. The earlier version also restricted women’s rights in terms of divorce, parenting and inheritance. Opposition to the current proposals, which were approved this month, has so far concentrated on their impact on child marriage. Suad Abu-Dayyeh, of Equality Now, based in Jordan, told the Guardian: “This bill contradicts international conventions and the national law in Iraq. If it is approved, in effect, each and every religious sect will follow their clerics. It will be catastrophic for women’s rights.(theguardian)…[+]