Vijay Mallya, the multimillionaire co-owner of the Force India Formula One team, has been arrested in London on behalf of Indian authorities investigating allegations of fraud in connection with the collapse of Kingfisher Airlines.

Scotland Yard said Mallya, who fled to the UK from India to avoid arrest in relation to £1bn of unpaid debts, was arrested on an extradition warrant on Tuesday. Mallya, 61, was “arrested on behalf of the Indian authorities in relation to accusations of fraud”, the police said. Mallya appeared before Westminster magistrates court and was bailed to return for an extradition hearing at a later date. On Twitter he dismissed excitement surrounding his arrest as “expected” before an extradition hearing. He denies the fraud allegations.(guardian)…[+]

Marwan Barghouti, the leader of a mass hunger strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, has been moved to solitary confinement amid warnings by Israeli officials that they will not negotiate with the striking detainees.

As the strike involving more than 1,100 prisoners in eight prisons entered its second day, the Israeli authorities moved swiftly to contain the protest, dispersing key figures to different prisons and ordering searches to prevent inmates sending messages.

Gilad Erdan, the country’s public security minister, vowed that the authorities would not negotiate with prisoners and said Barghouti had been moved from Hadarim jail, the initial centre of the hunger strike, to another prison – reportedly in Haifa – and placed in solitary confinement. “They are terrorists and incarcerated murderers who are getting what they deserve and we have no reason to negotiate with them,” Erdan told army radio. While Palestinian prisoners have mounted hunger strikes before, it has rarely on such a large scale. The protest also comes before the 50th anniversary of the Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, giving added significance.(guardian)…[+]

In a bid to court working class voters, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to revamp a temporary visa programme used to bring foreign workers to fill jobs in the US. The president will use a visit to a manufacturing company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial state he snatched from Hillary Clinton in the election, to promote his latest “Buy America Hire America” offensive. This includes an attempt to redress alleged abuses in the H-1B visas, which are used largely by the tech industry, and on which has Trump shifted position several times during the election campaign.

H-1B visas admit 65,000 workers and another 20,000 graduate student workers each year. Most of the visas are awarded to outsourcing firms, which critics say exploit loopholes to fill lower-level IT jobs with foreign workers, often at lower pay. The White House intends “a total transformation” of the programme from a lottery to a merit-based system, a senior administration official said.

Trump’s executive order will call on government departments to introduce reforms to ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the “most skilled or highest paid applicants”, the official told reporters.(guardian)…[+]

A team of researchers at an Israeli university has successfully tested a technology using fluorescent bacteria and lasers that could become a safer system for detecting buried landmines. An estimated 100m landmines are scattered in some 70 countries, a legacy of often long-past conflict, and the devices injure up to 20,000 people a year.

Mine clearance work is typically dangerous, labour-intensive and costly. The team at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University has tested mine detection using bacteria genetically modified to give off a fluorescent signal when mines – often made out plastic – are close, which can then be detected with a laser.

Reporting the findings in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the researchers say their approach relies on tiny amounts of vapour given off by the explosives in the mines.

It was recognised that some plants reacted to those vapours, and the research used modified bacteria that essentially glow in contact with the explosive vapour. Encased in polymer beads scattered on the suspected minefield, that fluorescence is then detected by a laser system that researchers suggest could be mounted on a vehicle – including drones.(guardian)…[+]

Cyclone Cook has struck New Zealand with power outages, fallen trees and landslides reported around much of the central and eastern North Island, which bore the brunt of the storm.

Cook, which forecasters feared could be the worst storm to strike New Zealand in decades, made landfall just after 6pm local time but by then many coastal villages were abandoned as five-metre swells combined with high tide and smashed against the deserted shoreline. Although a few rogue spectators braved the elements to gape at the raging surf, most residents seemed to heed civil defence warnings and had moved to higher ground hours before. Schools and offices closed in Auckland at about lunchtime as civil defence staff urged residents to leave the city immediately and remain at home. Extra public transport was laid on for the thousands of people escaping the city. By late afternoon, however, the MetService said Cook had just bypassed New Zealand’s largest and most populated city, and the weather warning was dropped. Further south in the Coromandel and Bay of Plenty regions, power remains out in tens of thousands of homes, and gale-force winds have been reported.(guardian)…[+]

Russian authorities failed to take sufficient steps to stop the 2004 Beslan school siege in North Ossetia in which more than 330 people were killed, the European court of human rights has ruled. The court said Russian authorities had received information that a terror attack was being planned and security at the school was not increased sufficiently. Chechen militants stormed the school on 1 September 2004, beginning a three-day hostage crisis involving more than 1,100 hostages. The death toll included 184 children.The authorities had been in possession of sufficiently specific information of a planned terrorist attack in the area, linked to an educational institution,” the court said in its judgment. “Nevertheless, not enough had been done to disrupt the terrorists meeting and preparing.”

It added that “insufficient steps had been taken to prevent them [the terrorists] travelling on the day of the attack; security at the school had not been increased; and neither the school nor the public had been warned of the threat”.

The court also ruled that Russian authorities breached European human rights laws when they stormed the school. A further 750 people were wounded when security forces – using “tank cannon, grenade launchers and flamethrowers”, the court said – moved in to free the hostages.(guardian)…[+]

Japan is preparing to send several warships to join a US aircraft carrier strike group heading for the Korean peninsula, in a show of force designed to deter North Korea from conducting further missile and nuclear tests.

Citing two well-placed sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, Reuters and the Kyodo news agency said several destroyers from Japan’s maritime self-defence forces would join the USS Carl Vinson and its battle group as it enters the East China Sea.

The move comes as the Chinese president called for calm in the region in a phone conversation with Donald Trump.

China “is committed to the goal of denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula, safeguarding peace and stability on the peninsula, and advocates resolving problems through peaceful means,” Xi Jinping said, according to CCTV, the state broadcaster.(guardian)…[+]

Israeli politicians and commentators have reacted with fury and incredulity to comments made by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, in which he suggested Hitler had not used poison gas on his own people and called Nazi extermination camps “Holocaust centres”.

During a White House press briefing on Monday, Spicer tried to suggest that even Adolf Hitler, in contrast to the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, had not used poison gas on his own people, ignoring the Nazi extermination of German Jews and non-Jews using gas chambers and trucks.

“We didn’t use chemical weapons in the second world war,” said Spicer. “You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”(guardian)…[+]

The Daily Mail and Mail Online will pay damages to settle a libel claim brought by the US first lady, Melania Trump, over false claims about her work as a professional model. An agreed statement was read out to Mr Justice Nicol in court 14 of the Royal Courts of Justice in London on behalf of both parties. Trump will be paid damages understood to be under $3m (£2.4m); the amount was not disclosed in the hearing.

The statement said the article published in a double-page spread and online last summer included “false and defamatory claims about [Mrs Trump] which questioned the nature of her work as a professional model and republished allegations that she provided services beyond simply modelling”.(guardian)…[+]

Two gay Indonesian men have been arrested and face 100 lashes in a case that is drawing international attention to the enforcement of controversial new Islamic bylaws in the semi-autonomous Aceh province. Mobile phone footage, showing vigilantes slapping one of the young men as he sits naked on the ground awaiting arrest by local sharia police, has been shared on social media in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

Human Rights Watch has demanded their immediate release, saying their possible punishment – a public beating with a stick – constitutes torture. The sentence has already been meted out for crimes such as adultery, but it is believed this would be the first time Aceh’s new statutes concerning religion and morality could be enforced against homosexuality. Aceh is the only region in Indonesia, a plural democracy, which allows local authorities to maintain parallel laws and police forces based on religious interpretations.(guardian)…[+]