Throttling of mobile internet system will affect Kyiv’s air defences more than its strikes on oil refineries. Now Zelenskyy must be hoping that US intel holds

In Ukraine the situation was already jittery enough. Donald Trump has been inventing ceasefires and buying Russian diesel to shore up his flagging popularity, while a sinister new wave of faster, jet-powered drones are breaking through Kyiv’s stretched air defences. Casualties are rising as the weather turns.

Overnight, Russia bombed three power plants that supply Kyiv, aiming to cut off heating and electricity to the city. According to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for a second night in a row no warning came from Ukraine’s western allies of the incoming ballistic missiles – and so no air raid alert was issued.

Dozens of people detained after government building and two banks set on fire as tens of thousands march over education costs and corruption

Tens of thousands of students have taken to the streets of Tirana, the Albanian capital, setting alight a government building and two banks and hurling stones at police during a protest over rising education costs and ⁠corruption.

Police responded with water ⁠cannon and teargas to disperse protesters who started a fire at the ministry of education building, overturned bins and smashed the fronts of local businesses. A branch of Raiffeisen Bank near the education ministry also caught fire.

Pontiff has begun walking in his hospital room and is eating normally after operation to remove growth, doctors say

Pope Leo’s recovery from a lung cancer operation is progressing as planned, his doctors have said, as the pontiff received good wishes from around the world, including from Britain’s King Charles.

Leo, who had a cancerous mass removed from his right lung late on Tuesday, began walking in his hospital room after respiratory therapy on Wednesday. He was eating normally, his doctors Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritoria said in a statement issued by the Vatican.

Peak of French mountain now 4,807 metres high and fluctuates year by year due to changes in Alpine climate

Western Europe’s highest mountain shrank by more than a metre last year. The peak of Mont Blanc in France now stands 4,807.47 metres above sea level, a team of surveyors said on Wednesday, putting “the roof of Europe” 1.29 metres lower than in 2025.

The mountain is about 4,792 metres tall but the summit constantly shifts as heat, wind and precipitation change the thickness of snow and ice on top. The height scientists recorded during an expedition last month was 1.88 metres greater than it was in 2023, when it reached the lowest levels in recent memory.

Beneath a wave of school protests in France lies a more existential worry: the future prospects of an entire generation

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Say what you will about France’s high schools, they still produce world-class slogan writers. Here’s a brief selection spotted during three weeks of blockades and marches over chronic teacher shortages, overcrowded classes and crumbling buildings:

“Pas d’avenir, pas de calme” (No future, no calm). “Diplômés aujourd’hui, précaires demain” (Graduates today, insecure tomorrow). “Vous détruisez notre futur, on bloque votre présent” (You destroy our future, we block your present).

Exclusive: Douglas Alexander, on trade delegation to India, talks up economic benefits of joint trading arrangements with Europe

Britain will benefit from much closer trading relations with the EU even if that means giving up its ability to negotiate free trade agreements, the Scotland secretary has said.

Douglas Alexander helped negotiate deals with India and the US when he was a trade minister under Keir Starmer.

Ola Källenius says it will ‘weaken the industry on both sides’ ahead of act intended to counter non-EU competition

Locking the UK out of the EU’s flagship industrial “Made in Europe” legislation would amount to a “deliberate choice” by EU leaders to “hurt” the car industry across the bloc, the head of Mercedes-Benz has said.

Speaking in his capacity as president of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), Ola Källenius said such a move would “weaken the industry on both sides”.

Residents standing outside their burning block of flats described the overnight Russian missile attack that killed at least two people and left several others injured. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine received no early warning from its allies before the strikes

• Russian attacks on Ukraine leave 600,000 without power as Zelenskyy says Moscow ‘disrespecting’ US

Antalya (Brussels Morning Newspaper) October 14, 2026 – Archaeologists have discovered what is believed to be the world’s oldest known shipwreck, dating back approximately 4,400 to 4,700 years to the Early Bronze Age. Located off the coast of … Read more

Jean-Noël Barrot criticises X owner in speech attacking foreign efforts to destabilise France before 2027 election

France’s foreign minister has accused Elon Musk of using his social media platform to orchestrate “massive online harassment campaigns” against European leaders as he took aim at foreign efforts to destabilise the country before next year’s presidential election.

Speaking at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference on Tuesday, Jean-Noël Barrot pointed to the role that social media had come to play in the global battle over democracy. “The forces seeking to undermine democracy now dominate the information landscape, where they employ tactics designed to polarise public debate,” he said.

Firms turning crude oil into the ‘workhorse’ fuel stand to gain most despite economic fallout from record prices

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Days after Donald Trump announced a deal to import Russian diesel into the US in an effort to lower soaring pump prices, the world’s energy watchdog has warned that the global fuel shortage will drag into 2027.

Trump’s temporary sanctions reprieve was criticised for offering “too little, too late” to temper the sky high pump prices triggered by the shutdown of war-damaged refineries in the Middle East and Russia – once the world’s second-largest diesel exporter behind the US.

Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe

Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.

Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

The popularity of Hand’s book Not the Perfect Victim is the latest twist in a story that puts the spotlight on how society responds to sexual assault allegations

Nikita Hand had a compelling reason to not pursue a civil rape case against Conor McGregor. She was, in her own view, an imperfect victim.

The day of the assault, she had been partying with alcohol and cocaine before contacting McGregor, who took her to a Dublin hotel.

European Commission declined to comment on reported disruption to Starlink’s services in Ukraine

• Ukrainian soldiers have access to Starlink satellite internet restricted

Rutte gets asked “is Russia foolish enough to consider attacking any of Nato countries?”

He says “we don’t think so” and that there is “no imminent threat against Nato territory,” but stresses that “if we see a build up, we will react to it.”

“We will never, ever mount a attack towards anyone else because that is not in our interest. We are a defensive alliance.”

“But here’s the main thing: we are stronger. Russia is not in a good place. These hybrid attacks, whatever it is, are a sign of weakness. What they allow us to do is to talk about it the whole day and to be rattled and to have press conferences on it. We’re not going to do that. We will react where we need to react.”

Launch of Russian ballistic missiles on Ukraine, with no US warning, coincides with outage of Starlink managed by Musk’s SpaceX

Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.

The terminals, which are produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

With no ‘home’ games in Ukraine, Arda Turan’s side hit the road again, with Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge hosting their Champions League campaign

The morning has thinned out into low, wispy cloud. Beneath it, Shakhtar Donetsk’s players are going through their paces. It is a light session for those who did not start against Veres Rivne the previous day; that means Arda Turan observes from the side, watching with the director of football, Darijo Srna. A stray ball zips towards them and Srna, after juggling it up, bends it into the goal with a familiar right-footed arc. “Modric!” exclaims Turan. But the two men are football legends in their own right and, as they continue to joke before Srna dashes away to take another phone call, the thought occurs that this happy scene could be played out almost anywhere else. Nearby, just beyond the team’s accommodation, a lake shimmers under the emerging sun.

It masks the fact that, around dawn, air raid sirens disrupted the peace for everyone in view. Even here, in Shakhtar’s bucolic spa hotel base 15 minutes outside Lviv, nobody is safe from the threat of Russian rockets and drones. In Rivne, three hours’ drive to the north-east, another alarm had sent the players and staff down to the stadium’s shelter. The second half was delayed by 20 minutes and that, no matter the corner of the country or the vividness of the autumn colours, is a weekly reality.

Special forces officer Serhii Kuznetsov denies involvement in the 2022 blasts that left pipelines badly damaged

A Ukrainian soldier has gone on trial in Hamburg accused of taking part in one of the most brazen acts of sabotage in postwar European history – the 2022 attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany.

Serhii Kuznetsov, a special forces officer from the Ukrainian military, is accused by prosecutors of being an accomplice to war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, causing an explosion, damaging property and disrupting public services.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with intelligence and police officers across two continents, a Guardian investigation reveals the murderous cost of our insatiable appetite for cocaine

Read more: Latin American organised crime ‘may operate in 16 European countries’
Explainer: What is state capture and why does it matter?

As abductions go, few have been more brazen. Alan Jalloh was with two friends outside Goodies supermarket, frantic as usual with late afternoon shoppers. Rush hour in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, was under way with familiar gusto.

A black Toyota Rav4 forced its way through the Peninsula highway traffic. Witnesses describe burly white men leaping out, yanking on balaclavas. Jalloh, 40, seemed to freeze. As did his two friends, one a famous Freetown footballer. All three were dragged into the waiting SUV. None of them have been seen since.

The final season of the TV epic Babylon Berlin is taking us back to 1933. Our confidence is falling apart, but that’s where the parallels end

There is one experience we in Germany can all find mildly satisfying this autumn, as we watch the dark and terrifying final season of the hit TV series Babylon Berlin. We know everything those fearless (a few of them) or frightened (many more) and opportunistic (the majority) people on the screen do not. We know their future.

Made by the public broadcaster ARD, Babylon Berlin has run for over 10 years, brilliantly fictionalising how Germany sleepwalked into nazism and the second world war. The fifth and last season begins in January 1933 with Adolf Hitler appointed Reichskanzler.

Faced with deadlier threats, demining groups are coming up with new ways of working using drones and AI

Crouched over on her hands and knees in a field of weeds, Olena Kabanova is digging into the ground. With a shovel and a steady hand, the 58-year-old digs out a neat square around the spot where a mine detector has sensed a suspicious object.

Four years ago, this field in eastern Ukraine was occupied by Russian soldiers. Now back under Ukrainian control, it is littered with landmines. Civilians such as Kabanova are trying to make the land usable again.