Author: DW

A US federal judge has dismissed a criminal case accusing Donald Trump of illegally holding onto classified documents after his time in office. The former US president had been indicted on charges that he retained highly classified national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida after he left office. Judge Aileen Cannon, who had been appointed by Trump, ruled on Monday that lead prosecutor Jack Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his role and did not have the authority to bring the case. Trump called Monday’s verdict a “first step” and said that all criminal cases against him should be dismissed. What…

A suspected member of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has been arrested in Germany, prosecutors said on Monday. He was accused of procuring components for drones believed to be used in attacks on Israel. What else do we know about the suspected Hezbollah member? Prosecutors said the Lebanese man, identified only as Fadel Z. in line with German privacy laws, was detained on Sunday in the town of Salzgitter in the northwestern state of Lower Saxony. He was “strongly suspected of membership of a foreign terrorist organization,” federal prosecutors said in a statement. The man was accused of procuring “components,…

The discovery of what police in Tenerife believe is Jay Slater’s body appears to have brought to an end a search that lasted for almost a month.Whether it curtails the relentless stream of online speculation that has made the suffering of the Slater family all the more unbearable remains to be seen. Only on Sunday Slater’s mum, Debbie Duncan, felt compelled to speak of “awful comments and theories filling social media”.Within days of his disappearance, a number of Facebook groups dedicated to the case had been set up – with some going on to attract hundreds of thousands of members.Many…

It came as no surprise that there was plenty of anticipation ahead of Argentina’s match against Columbia in the Copa America final in Miami on Sunday. Would it be Lionel Messi’s last competitive match for Argentina? Or perhaps Colombia would win their first Copa America? It was also no surprise that many fans would turn up to try to somehow catch a glimpse of their heroes – despite the sometimes absurdly high resale prices of between $2,000 (€1,833) and €7,000 ($6,414) on the official Ticketmaster sales platform in the few days they were on sale. Latin American supporters are real…

Until a few months ago, Kaja Kallas, who resigned as Estonia’s prime minister on Monday, was a lead candidate in the race to replace Jens Stoltenberg as secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but her reputation as a Russia hawk scuttled her chances.  Influential NATO member states, many from the European Union, agreed that, with the war in Ukraine, it was no longer possible to keep eastern member states on the fringe of the Brussels hierarchy. However, there were concerns that handing the top security job to a Baltic leader was too strong a message for Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Moreover, the possibility of a…

European Parliament lawmaker Fredi Beleri, an ethnic Greek mayor of an Albanian town who is currently serving a jail sentence for vote-buying, was temporarily released from prison on Monday to attend the inaugural session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Beleri, 52, a representative of the ethnic Greek community in Albania, was elected mayor of his Albanian hometown of Himare in May 2023, but was subsequently arrested and imprisoned after being found guilty of buying votes. A month later, from jail, he was elected to the European Parliament as a member of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ conservative New…

Rescue workers searching for missing British teenager Jay Slater in Tenerife have found a body and are trying to identify it, Spanish police have told Sky News.”Evidence strongly suggests” the remains are those of the 19-year-old, officers said. The body “does look to be that of Jay Slater” said LBT Global, a British overseas missing persons charity which has been working with the Slater family.It added in a statement: “It is understood the body was found close to the site of [Jay Slater’s] mobile phone’s last location.”Although formal identification is yet to be carried out, the body was found with…

Donald Trump, face covered in blood, raising his fist militantly in the air as security guards try to push the ex-president down to protect him — an iconic image. “In the worst situation a person can find themselves, in the face of death, the person shot at is not thinking first and foremost about themselves, but about their mission,” media analyst Marion Müller told DW. And it’s effective. Trump’s clenched fist — not a victory sign, but a gesture of fierce determination and enormous anger — makes him a martyr in the eyes of his supporters, one with a messianic message.…

A cooking oil contamination scandal in China that came to light earlier in July highlights the long-standing struggle to improve food safety measures.  The scandal, first revealed by state-backed media The Beijing News on July 2, involves two Chinese companies, which allegedly used fuel trucks to transport edible oil without any cleaning process between loads.  Authorities announced a high-level investigation amid public outrage. “What’s most important is how to convince the people that similar incidents will never happen again,” read one comment that got thousands of likes on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo.  This is not the first nationwide scandal over food safety issues. In…

Kenyan police on Monday said they had arrested a man who was suspected of dumping several dismembered bodies in a Nairobi slum. The head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Mohamed Amin, said the 33-year-old suspect confessed to killing 42 women, including his wife, since 2022. What else do we know about the suspected serial killer? “We are dealing with a serial killer, a psychopathic serial killer who has no respect for human life,” Amin told reporters. He said the suspect was arrested early in the morning on Monday near a Nairobi bar where he had been watching the Euro…