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This blog is now closed. Read our full report here:Erin Patterson loses appeal as harsher sentence imposedPatterson showed no emotion on the video feed as McLeish outlined why her appeal had failed, and how the director of public prosecutions had succeeded in seeking a longer sentence.Patterson’s actions mean it is ‘inappropriate’ to fix non-parole period, justice saysThe applicant’s murderous intent dated back to the invitations to lunch, it persisted through the lunch that the poison was administered …We have concluded that the case involved such calculated criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period. Continue reading...

If Netanyahu loses office, he would face accountability for long-standing corruption charges, and a formal investigation would almost certainly be launched into the security lapses surrounding the devastating Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023.

Report calls for an effort to tackle harms in similar way to obesity and smoking, and stresses need to ‘offer boys something better’The manosphere and online misogyny should be treated by the government as a public health issue, in the same way as obesity or smoking, experts have said.Writing in the Lancet, the authors of a new report argue that a coordinated response is needed, involving governments, schools, health services and community organisations, similar to the public-health response to tobacco use and ultra-processed food. Continue reading...

Israel Election Results Live: Benjamin Netanyahu, greeting cheering supporters on Wednesday morning, called for a "strong government of the right" and said the "Jewish and Zionist majority must unite".

President Donald Trump's administration quietly agreed to arm a foreign military unit with a gruesome human rights record, a new report revealed.The Trump administration agreed to send about $35 million in military aid, including armored personnel carriers, to Cameroon's Rapid Intervention Battalion, known as the BIR, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. U.S. officials and congressional aides told The Journal that State Department officials negotiated the aid alongside a deal for the Central African nation to accept deportees from the U.S. who aren't Cameroonian.The unit has a brutal past. A 2017 Amnesty International report accused the BIR of war crimes during its fight against the Boko Haram terrorist group, finding that members beat and drowned detainees and tortured some of them to death. Trump's first administration cut off some aid to the unit in 2019 and booted Cameroon from a U.S.-Africa trade pact over its forces' ongoing abuses, which Cameroon denied at the time.Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, placed a hold on the aid package earlier this year, according to The Journal. That stalled the deal for months until April, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio's team told her the administration was overriding her and pushing ahead.Shaheen this week tore into the arrangement as "grotesque" and said Rubio had let her down by signing off on it.In a statement, Shaheen argued that the U.S. has no business handing sensitive military gear to governments with shaky human rights records, let alone as payment for taking in people.Cameroon started accepting U.S. deportation flights in December and has taken in at least 36 people since, according to Refugees International, a humanitarian advocacy group. Some officials told The Journal the Trump administration intends to ramp up flights to African countries in the coming months. Around the time the aid was disclosed to Congress in January, the U.S. also steered $30 million to the United Nations refugee agency's operations in Cameroon, even as it slashed foreign aid elsewhere.The State Department wouldn't discuss the details of any agreement but praised its partnership with Cameroon on security and counterterrorism, and said it follows the Leahy Law, which prohibits military aid to forces tied to human rights abuses. Cameroon's embassy in Washington did not respond to The Journal's request for comment.

t was not immediately clear when the incidents occurred or which flags the tankers were flying.

The war began on February 28 with US-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior military commanders.

Television footage showed heavy machinery digging through the rubble as rescue teams gathered at the site in an effort to recover people.