A 19-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences at Liverpool John Lennon airport in connection with the Manchester Arena attack. The teenager was arrested on Friday and a property in Fallowfield, south Manchester, was being searched as part of the investigation, police said.

It is understood that the arrested suspect is not Hashem Abedi, the younger brother of suicide bomber Salman Abedi who is being held in Libya. The arrest is the 23rd under the investigation into the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert on 22 May in which Salman Abedi killed 22 other people. It comes a day after detectives said they believed the bomber did not act alone when preparing the deadliest attack on UK soil since the 7/7 bombings exactly 12 years ago.

Three police vans with riot shields attached, including one specialist operations vehicle, were stationed outside a red-brick semi-detached house on Thelwall Avenue on Friday, around the corner from Abedi’s family home in Fallowfield. Neighbours said police letters were put through their doors shortly before the afternoon raid, warning them that they might hear controlled explosions.(theguardian)…[+]

Police have moved more than 2,000 refugees and migrants off the streets of Paris, where they had been sleeping rough for weeks in squalid and insanitary conditions.

Riot officers watched the refugees as they were bussed to temporary shelters in school gymnasiums on Friday morning. Hundreds of refugees and migrants had arrived in the Porte de la Chapelle area of northern Paris, sleeping under road bridges and on the side of the road with almost no access to water, sanitation and food, outside Paris’s new aid centre for asylum seekers that was opened in November. The operation to move them began at dawn and took place calmly. Groups of men and women from countries including Afghanistan and Eritrea – some only with small rucksacks or plastic bags of belongings – were sent on to buses and driven out of Paris.

It was the 34th police removal of large numbers of refugees and migrants sleeping rough in the French capital since 2015. Aid workers warned that France needed to establish an efficient long-term strategy for processing and housing asylum seekers in decent conditions rather than constantly taking emergency action at the last minute.(Theguardian)…[+]

Militants killed at least 23 soldiers and injured dozens more in a car explosion and gun attack on an Egyptian military checkpoint in the north-eastern Sinai peninsula, officials have said. Among those killed in the attack on Friday – the deadliest on the country’s military this year – were five officers, including a high-ranking special forces colonel, Ahmed el-Mansi, according to security officials.

The assault started when an attacker rammed his vehicle into a checkpoint at a military compound in the village of el-Barth, south-west of the border town of Rafah. This was followed by heavy gunfire from dozens of masked militants on foot, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

As the attack unfolded, ambulances were heard rushing to the site. The officials initially put the death toll at 10 but later said more bodies were pulled from under the rubble of a nearby rest house for troops that was destroyed in the attack. The militants arrived at the checkpoint, which is in a remote desert area, in 24 SUVs, and shot at the soldiers with machine guns for nearly half an hour, the officials said. There were thought to be about 60 soldiers at the compound.(theguardian)…[+]

Sir John Chilcot has said he does not believe Tony Blair was “straight with the nation” about his decisions in the run-up to the Iraq war. The chairman of the public inquiry into the 2003 conflict said the former prime minister had however been “emotionally truthful” in his account of events leading up to the war, meaning he relied on both emotion and fact.

Breaking his long silence on the matter in an interview with the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, Chilcot said: “Tony Blair is always and ever an advocate. He makes the most persuasive case he can. Not departing from the truth but persuasion is everything.” Chilcot was later asked if Blair was as truthful with him and the public as he should have been during the seven-year inquiry. He replied: “Can I slightly reword that to say I think any prime minister taking a country into war has got to be straight with the nation and carry it, so far as possible, with him or her. I don’t believe that was the case in the Iraq instance.”(theguardian)…[+]

Bahrain has rearrested a prominent human rights advocate who has accused the country’s security services of torturing and sexually assaulting her during her previous arrest in May. Ebtisam al-Saegh, who works for Salam for Human Rights and Democracy, was detained during a night-time raid on Monday by about 25 security officers after she tweeted criticism of the country’s ruler and security forces, according to Amnesty International. Al-Saegh’s arrest comes amid a renewed crackdown on dissent in Bahrain, which is one of four countries behind the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. Her rearrest has raised concern among human rights groups, including Amnesty, that she is at risk of torture.

Samah Hadid, director for Campaigns at Amnesty International in the Middle East, said: “The Bahraini authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Ebtisam al-Saegh, whose only crime is speaking up against a government committed to crushing all forms of dissent. “We are deeply concerned about Ebtisam’s wellbeing. When she was arrested in May 2017, she was beaten and sexually assaulted by members of the Bahraini National Security Agency. Bahraini authorities have failed to investigate those claims and we fear that she is at high risk of torture as long as sheremains in custody.”(thegaurdain)…[+]

A rare “pale tiger”, whose fur conservationists say could be the fairest of any in the wild, has been photographed in southern India. “It is the palest tiger I have ever seen on the record or heard about in literature,” said Belinda Wright, the founder of the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

The animal was spotted last week by wildlife photographer Nilanjan Ray while driving in Nilgiri biosphere reserve in Tamil Nadu state. Pale tigers, distinct from white tigers, are thought to have a genetic mutation that results in what biologists call colour morphism. It occurs in environments with large, random mating pools that allow for the varied exchange of genes. Parvish Pandya, a doctor of zoology, said the birth of a tiger with pale fur was “quite a genetic chance”. He ruled out the possibility the tiger was albino, citing the lack of pinkish hue around its eyes.Wright, who has spent decades in India tracking tigers, said she recalled only ever seeing one before, in the Ranthambore national park in Rajasthan in the 1980s. “But it wasn’t nearly as pale as this one,” she said.(theguardian)…[+]

The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.(theguardian)…[+]

Hamburg is bracing itself for an escalation of violence on the eve of Friday and Saturday’s G20 summit after a fleet of hi-tech water cannons was used to disperse crowds partying near the conference venue, and police warned that protesters could be hoarding weapons at secret locations across the city. Authorities in Germany’s second-largest city are preparing for the arrival of an unprecedented lineup of controversial world leaders including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as thousands of international protesters ranging from anti-capitalist activists to middle-class families keen to voice dissent.

Police say they expect a core of about 5,000 violent protesters to gather in the city’s historic port area for a “Welcome to Hell” march just as world leaders and international delegates start arriving at Hamburg airport on Thursday afternoon.

The Hamburg police chief, Ralf Martin Meyer, expressed concerns that the city would see “not just sit-in protests but massive assaults”, as anarchists from Scandinavia, Switzerland and Italy joined up with local activists in a city with a long tradition of leftwing protest and annual May Day riots. In the run-up to the summit, German police have seized knives, baseball bats and containers presumed to be filled with flammable liquid and unknown chemicals from various locations in and around Hamburg. Jan Hieber, a senior officer, said police had probably only found a small proportion of the weapons that had been stockpiled for use in the protests.(Theguardian)…[+]

The Canadian government is going to apologise and give millions to a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who pleaded guilty to killing a US soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15, with Canada’s supreme court later ruling that officials had interrogated him under “oppressive circumstances”. An official familiar with the deal said on Tuesday that Omar Khadr will receive 10.5 million Canadian dollars (US$8 million). The official was not authorised to discuss the deal publicly before the announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity. The government and Khadr’s lawyers negotiated the deal last month.

The Canadian-born Khadr was 15 when he was captured by US troops following a firefight at a suspected al-Qaida compound in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of an American special forces medic, US army Sgt Christopher Speer. Khadr, who was suspected of throwing the grenade that killed Speer, was taken to Guantanamo and ultimately charged with war crimes by a military commission. He pleaded guilty in 2010 to charges that included murder and was sentenced to eight years plus the time he had already spent in custody. He returned to Canada two years later to serve the remainder of his sentence and was released in May 2015 pending an appeal of his guilty plea, which he said was made under duress.(theguardian)…[+]