A former millionaire nicknamed the “Black Widow” over the untimely deaths of her lovers admitted poisoning her last partner at her trial this week in a multiple murder case that has gripped Japan.

Chisako Kakehi, 70, has become notorious over accusations she killed a number of elderly men she was involved with, drawing comparisons with the spider that kills its mate after copulation. Kakehi is on trial for the murders of three men – including a husband – and the attempted murder of another, all to allow her to collect on insurance policies. Prosecutors suspect she used cyanide to get rid of her lovers, amassing a reported ¥1bn (£6.9m) in payouts over 10 years.

Her trial began in late June, but this week she stunned the court by telling judges she had murdered another man in 2013. “I was waiting for the right timing as I wanted to kill him out of deep hatred,” the Asahi newspaper quoted her as saying on Monday. The Fuji television network quoted her saying the crime was just “an issue of money”. But on Wednesday, Kakehi appeared to retract her statements. “I don’t remember [what I said],” she testified, according to the Mainichi newspaper.(Theguardian)…[+]

Melinda Gates said she is “deeply troubled” by Donald Trump’s decision to cut funding for family planning, a move that threatens to reverse progress made on expanding services to women in some of the poorest parts of the world.

At the opening plenary of the global family planning summit in London on Tuesday, Gates said: “This is a difficult political climate for family planning. I’m deeply troubled, as I’m sure you are, by the Trump administration’s proposed budget slash.

“If empowering women is more than just rhetoric for the president, he will prove it by funding family planning.” Earlier in the day she said she hoped the US Congress would step up to block Trump’s proposed cuts. The US is the largest donor for family planning, giving more than $600m this year alone.But in May, Trump decided not to allocate any funding for international family planning in his proposed budget. The move followed a decision in April to defund the UN Population Fund. The UNFPA is already facing a funding hole of $700m (£543m) until 2020. At the time of the budget, Gates tweeted that the move “would come at a tremendous cost to families around the world”.(theguardian)…[+]

US aviation authorities are investigating a near miss at a San Francisco airport after an Air Canada plane almost landed on a crowded taxiway rather than the runway.

The Air Canada Airbus 320 was cleared to land at a runway at San Francisco international airport late on Friday. The pilot, however, inadvertently began descending toward one of the taxiways, where four airplanes laden with passengers and fuel sat waiting for permission to take off, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration. Audio of the conversations between air traffic control and pilots, posted on the Live ATC website, captured the confusion. The Air Canada pilot can be heard asking if he’s clear to land, given that he can see other lights on the runway. He’s told there are no other planes on the runway.

Another voice chimes in, sounding the alarm over Air Canada’s trajectory: “Where’s this guy going? He’s on the taxiway.” The pilot was immediately instructed to pull up, circle around and approach the landing again. “It looks like you were lined up for Charlie [Taxiway C] there,” the air traffic controller told the pilot. The taxiway sits parallel to the runway. A United Airlines pilot then weighed in: “United One, Air Canada just flew directly over us.” The air controller responded: “Yeah, I saw that, guys.”(theguardian)…[+]

A British man has been killed alongside two Americans fighting against Islamic State in Syria. Luke Rutter, 22, from Birkenhead, was fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) when he died last Wednesday evening during an ambush in a suburb of the Isis stronghold of Raqqa, his Kurdish commanders said. The YPG announced his death in a statement that described him as a “martyr” who “participated actively in the collective life, which is promoted within the YPG”.

It added: “At the end of training in the academy, when asked the usual question addressed to every volunteer: ‘Are you ready to fight?’ He firmly responded ‘Yes’ and said he wanted to fight the fascist organisation of IS.” It is believed Robert Grodt, an Occupy Wall Street activist from Santa Cruz, California, also died in the attack. A relative, Elizabeth Clarke, said on Facebook that Grodt had “passed away unexpectedly in Syria”.“He was there helping oppressed people, his lifelong passion,” she wrote. “I will always remember Rob for his commitment to his ideals. He and Kaylee taught me how to chain myself to another person when protesting during their Occupy Wall Street days and I shall always remember the correct Greek pronunciation of my favourite sandwich, the gyro. (Theguardian)…[+]

Investigators have revealed that targets of high-tech spying in Mexico included an international group of experts backed by the Organization of American States who had criticized the government’s investigation into the disappearance of 43 students.

Previous investigations by the internet watchdog group Citizen Lab found that the spyware had been directed at journalists, activists and opposition politicians in Mexico.  But targeting foreign experts operating under the aegis of an international body marks an escalation of the scandal, which so far involves 19 individuals or groups. The experts had diplomatic status, making the spying attempt even graver.

“This must be investigated to find out who sent these messages, because they could put at risk a lot of contacts and sources,” said the former Colombian prosecutor Angela Buitrago, a member of the group of experts. Buitrago said she and another expert, Carlos Beristain, had received the messages. She said she hadn’t opened them.

“I didn’t open it because I am used to spying,” Buitrago said. “When you work in a prosecutors’ office, a government office, there are strange messages and you pass them on to the analysts.”

A report released by the University of Toronto-based analysts found that someone sent emails with links to the spyware to the International Group of Independent Experts, named by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The experts had been critical of the government’s investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Guerrero state – a politically sensitive incident that deeply embarrassed the government.(theguardian)…[+]

Saudi Arabia’s pre-conditions for restoring diplomatic and economic relations with Qatar are not realistic, even if some elements could form the basis for an eventual deal, the senior adviser to US secretary of state Rex Tillerson has said.

In his first foray into shuttle diplomacy since his appointment, Tillerson is planning to spend most of the week in the Gulf in a bid to mediate in a month-long dispute between Qatar and four neighbouring countries: Saudia Arabia; Bahrain; Egypt; and the United Arab Emirates. Tillerson travelled on Monday to meet senior figures in Kuwait, the regional mediating power that has so far failed to de-escalate the dispute.

Tillerson’s communications adviser, RC Hammond, said the complete set of Saudi demands were not viable even though constituent elements were worth discussing. But he added that the international community was losing patience with the Gulf’s funding of extremist groups. Hammond said that at the G20 summit last week, European countries had voiced their concern that the Gulf crisis was affecting security efforts and that all countries in the region needed to act against terror funding. “This is a two-way street,” he said. “There are no clean hands.”(theguardian)…[+]

Seven Hindu pilgrims have died in a firefight between militants and police in Kashmir during a highly sensitive religious procession. Six women and one man were killed in Monday evening’s attack in the southern district of Anantnag. It was the deadliest assault on Hindu pilgrims in the majority-Muslim region since 2000, and comes amid heightened religious tensions across northern India and another summer of violence in Kashmir. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, tweeted he was “pained beyond words at the dastardly attack” on Hindus participating in the Amarnath Yatra, an annual pilgrimage to a cave shrine near the hill station of Pahalgam.

The pilgrimage, which has grown enormously in popularity since the early 1990s and been a source of tension in the past, went ahead this year despite police intelligence of a planned militant attack. Unprecedented security measures, including surveillance cameras, bulletproof bunkers and phone jammers, had been implemented to protect the estimated 115,000 pilgrims. It was suspended on Saturday because of security fears on the one-year anniversary of the killing of Burhan Wani, an anti-India militant whose death triggered weeks of protests and the longest curfew in the history of Indian-controlled Kashmir.(theguardian)…[+]

“I try to stay out of politics,” Ivanka Trump said in a recent interview. But the US president’s daughter spent part of her weekend sitting around a table with the Chinese, Russian and Turkish presidents, the German chancellor and the British prime minister.

The former businesswoman and fashion model briefly took her father’s seat during a G20 session in Hamburg, prompting claims of nepotism and a heavy dose of sarcasm about her diplomatic credentials. Ms Trump, 35, sat around the table with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Angela Merkel and Theresa May. One official who was watching the session told the Bloomberg news agency she had taken her father’s place on at least two occasions on Saturday but had not spoken.A spokesman for the first daughter told Bloomberg that she had been sitting in the back of the room and then briefly joined the main table when the president stepped out. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, addressed the meeting, which dealt with African migration and health – issues relevant to a fund that Ms Trump and the World Bank had just announced.(theguardian)…[+]

The actor Nelsan Ellis, best known for his portrayal of Lafayette Reynolds on HBO’s series True Blood, has died at the age of 39. Ellis’ manager, Emily Gerson Saines, confirmed the actor’s death on Saturday. The Hollywood Reporter, which was first to report Ellis’s death, quoted her as saying he had died from complications of heart failure.The Illinois-born actor played Lafayette, a gay short order cook, on the HBO drama from 2008 to 2014, and more recently appeared in the CBS detective series Elementary. He was also a playwright and a stage director.Ellis appeared as Martin Luther King Jr. in Lee Daniels’ film The Butler and as singer Bobby Byrd in the James Brown biopic Get On Up. He also appeared in The Help, and his fellow cast member Octavia Spencer mourned his death on Instagram. “My heart breaks for his kids and family,” she wrote.(the guardian)…[+]

The Church of England’s ruling body is to vote on whether to provide special services for transgender people during their transition. The General Synod is considering a motion on the need for transgender people to be “welcomed and affirmed in their parish church” as part of the “long and often complex process” of transition. The vote comes after bishops overwhelmingly backed a motion calling for a ban on “unethical” conversion therapy for gay Christians.

While the synod debated and voted on the private member’s motion on Saturday, an estimated 1 million people were celebrating Pride weekend in London, marking 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality. On Sunday the meeting in York will decide on a diocesan synod motion on “welcoming transgender people”, tabled by the Rev Chris Newlands of Blackburn. The church has stated its “fundamental belief” is that baptism can only be received once, therefore there is “no possibility” of the synod approving a service re-baptising individuals in their new gender.

Newlands’s motion “seeks to ensure that the C of E engages seriously with the issue of providing the opportunity of a liturgical marking of a person’s transition, which has the full authority of the C of E, as an appropriate expression of community and pastoral support to trans people”.(theguardian)…[+]