A member of the violent MS-13 street gang has pleaded guilty for his part in the murders of four people in New York, including two teenage girls who were attacked with a machete and baseball bats on a suburban Long Island street seven years ago

About 2,000 people mobbed Union Square in anticipation of a PlayStation 5 offer by influencer Kai Cenat.

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(Reuters) -United Parcel Service said on Tuesday it would hire more than 100,000 seasonal workers to handle the 2023 holiday

The Philippine military has condemned a Chinese coast guard ship's “excessive and offensive” use of a water cannon against a Filipino supply boat to block it from delivering new troops, food, water and fuel to a Philippine-occupied shoal in the disputed South China Sea

German police launch raids in seven states against a group involved in controversial stunts.

An independent monitoring group says a large convoy carrying fighters from the Wagner private army has been spotted entering Belarus from Russia

A powerful typhoon is blowing closer to the northern Philippines, forcing thousands of evacuations and a halt to sea travel ahead of torrential rains and tidal surges near 10 feet

The newfound presence of Wagner mercenaries in Belarus, exiled from Russia after their mutinous march on Moscow, has fuelled fresh anxieties in Ukraine and on Nato’s eastern flank. Belarus’s neighbours have moved to a heightened state of alert since dictator Alexander Lukashenko appeared to broker a last-minute deal with the Kremlin to defuse the shortlived mutiny on 23 June and host Wagner troops on Belarusian soil. During a recent meeting at the strategically important Suwalki Gap, a sparsely populated land corridor near their countries’ borders with Belarus and Russia’s enclave of Kaliningrad, Lithuania’s president Gitanas Nauseda warned that north of 4,000 mercenaries were believed to be in Belarus, while Poland’s premier Mateusz Morawiecki branded them “extremely dangerous”. Poland is sending 10,000 troops to its eastern border, and this week held its largest military parade in decades, as it warned that Wagner mercenaries had moved towards Grodno and set up camp in the Brest region, some six miles from Poland’s border. A group associated with Ukraine’s military has also warned that the construction of a “tent city” capable of housing 1,000 mercenaries some 15 miles from its border could be used to simulate a threat there, in a bid to detract from Kyiv’s efforts to make painstaking gains along the heavily mined frontline of Russia’s invasion in the south, and defend a push by Moscow’s forces near Kupiansk in the north. The true extent to which Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s guns for hire are now operating in Belarus – and their aims there – remains hard to determine. “We are dealing with layer upon layer of disinformation,” said Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House. “Not only the repeated information campaign trying to convince Ukraine that there is a renewed threat from the north, but also confusion over exactly what Wagner is doing, who they are reporting to, who they are following orders from, and where they might be.” These factors make it hard to distinguish how much of the threat is “manufactured” to pile pressure on Belarus’s neighbours, Mr Giles said, adding: “The simple answer is that we don’t know. We should watch what is actually being done rather than what is being said.” However, Mark Galeotti, director of the Mayak Intelligence consultancy, said he believed Ukraine’s military was not “in the slightest bit worried” about the threat of Wagner attempting to cross its northern border. Speaking of claims the mercenaries could try to cross into Poland or Ukraine, he said: “In some ways, Wagner is a victim of its brand name, and people are suggesting it’s going to do all types of crazy things that are totally beyond their capabilities, but also which frankly no one would even try.” Wagner has “lost all of its heavy equipment”, he added, with Russia’s defence ministry making “damn sure” to reclaim tanks and artillery handed to the mercenaries while in Ukraine, meaning “we’re talking about a bunch of guys with Kalashnikovs, rather than a sort of fully coherent mechanised force”. Citing reports that funding disputes have already seen some mercenaries bussed back to Russia, Mr Galeotti said Ukraine has “ample forces to stop 2,000 guys with guns wandering over” a border “carefully watched” due to its proximity to Kyiv, most likely including by Nato. While he believes Wagner would not pose much of a direct threat even if better equipped, Nick Reynolds, the Royal United Services Institute’s research fellow for land warfare, said the possibility of disruption “can’t be discounted”. Read more: Wagner tracker: Charting Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary group through the Ukraine war Wagner’s presence – along with that of Belarusian and Russian forces – means Ukraine does have to devote some troops to guard the border, which already comes under “a lot of artillery and drone strikes”, albeit not as heavily as troops along frontlines in the Donbas and further south, he said. While Poland’s concerns have been stoked by Mr Lukashenko’s jibes that the country should thank him for constraining Wagner mercenaries he claimed wish to “[smash] up Rzeszow and Warsaw”, the Belarusian leader vowed in February that Minsk would only enter the war if attacked by Ukraine – despite reports of pressure from Vladimir Putin to do so. Mr Reynolds said he did not foresee any real threat from Belarus this year due to the weakness of Minsk’s military and Russia’s presence there being “just not strong enough to credibly pose a threat of opening a second front” – although Moscow’s mobilisation efforts mean “that might change in time”. “Something I’d watch much more closely in the short-term is Wagner’s international footprint,” he said, adding that the group’s compromised position within Russia itself could see it lean more heavily on its activities in Africa and the Middle East, which are of “enormous value diplomatically” to the Kremlin. Mr Giles also warned that “forces taking orders from Russia or Belarus do not need to be large or well-equipped to cause disruption”. He pointed to the “migrant dumping campaign” initiated by Belarus in 2021, with its Baltic neighbours in Warsaw, Vilnius and Riga once again accusing Minsk in recent days of sending asylum-seekers en masse to the border to in a bid to pile pressure on them. And he highlighted the power of Wagner “as an information weapon”, whether to distract Ukraine or “throw some kind of provocation with Poland to try to back the fiction that Lukashenko presents to his people of Poland being an aggressive and threatening neighbour.” Dr Marina Miron, of King’s College London’s war studies department, agreed that an attempted incursion doesn’t make “any kind of sense” logistically, saying: “I think it’s more of a kind of psychological operation than anything else. At least for now.” While the risk is currently low, “at some point, they will be returning to Ukraine”, said Dr Miron. “That’s when there will be a definite threat.” Read More Wagner mercenaries issue a chilling message on Poland’s doorstep: ‘We are here’ Ukraine’s intelligence service claims responsibility for Crimean Bridge drone attack Lithuania to temporarily close two checkpoints with Belarus amid tensions on border Wagner tracker: Charting Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary group through the Ukraine war

An International Atomic Energy Agency team is in Fukushima for the agency's first marine sampling since treated radioactive wastewater started being released from the area's damaged nuclear plant into the sea

Asian equities looked set to open higher Wednesday after a rally on Wall Street that was fueled by

Donald Trump told an audience of MichiganRepublicans that the push for electric vehicles will mean the “decimation” of the state’s traditional auto industry. The former president made the comments as he appeared at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner on Sunday night, his first appearance in the battleground state in the 2024 cycle. “It’s going to be a level that people can’t even imagine,” Mr Trump said during his address inside the Suburban Collection Showplace, in Novi, Michigan. Mr Trump told the crowd that the “maniacal push” for electric vehicles would kill auto jobs in the United States, and mocked the range of the vehicles, saying that they were a win for “tow truck companies.” “If somebody wants an electric car, I’m all for it. But you should be able to have a choice,” Mr Trump told the crowd. The event came the day after he told a crowd of evangelicals on Saturday that the federal government has a “vital role” in the restriction of abortion access while he once again took credit for overturning Roe v Wade. But the former president did not detail his proposal for national abortion restrictions, in contrast to his 2024 rival Mike Pence, who supports outlawing care nationally at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mr Trump’s remarks to a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington DC came on the one-year anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s decision to revoke constitutional protections for abortion. Though he has repeatedly taken credit for the ruling, he has avoided questions about whether he would back a national ban if Republican lawmakers managed to pass one through Congress. Read More Trump news – live: Trump makes first 2024 campaign visit to battleground state of Michigan Republicans try to thread the needle on abortion on anniversary of the death of Roe Trump quietly changes political fundraising site to funnel funds toward legal woes Trump celebrates anniversary of anti-abortion ruling as he tells religious crowd ‘I’m getting indicted for you’ Trump is returning to Michigan with hopes of repeating the battleground success he found in 2016