Mexico's president says he rejected a U.S. request to set up migrant transit centers in Mexico

TAIPEI Taiwan Vice President William Lai will stop in New York and San Francisco in the United States

The world’s largest economy probably expanded at the quickest pace in nearly two years during the third quarter

South Korea’s ambassador to Japan said “high-level” talks are underway for a three-nation summit with China poised to

“If you’re a journalist and the government wants to kill you – you’re doing it right”. Those are the chilling words of broadcaster Irina Babloyan, who until Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine hosted Russia’s most popular morning radio show. But stalked by the FSB and taken off the air within days of the war starting, the journalist felt compelled to leave Moscow for her own safety. Little did she realise, like so many of Putin’s critics, she would also suffer symptoms of suspected poisoning that left her skin “burning all the time”. Established prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s sole major independent radio station Echo of Moscow was taken off air in March 2022, during the Kremlin’s clampdown on information, and then shut down completely. Events soon took an even darker turn. Late one evening, near her home, Ms Babloyan was out walking with her close friend, opposition politician Ilya Yashin, when he was arrested. He was later sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, over a YouTube livestream about Russian atrocities in Bucha. From that moment, she says Russian police and FSB agents followed her everywhere – even some 350 miles south to Belgorod – and openly sat outside her home, threatening her that “it’s probably better for you to leave”. It was as she began to investigate early reports of Ukrainian children being forcibly taken to Russia that the personal danger to Ms Babloyan intensified. She approached Russian government officials, who told her they were aware of the situation and that the children would remain in the country until the war was over. While she was initially aware of just one “school” housing Ukrainian children in Russia, the findings soon snowballed until she learned from a fellow journalist of dozens more facilities, holding thousands more. Ukraine’s current figures suggest at least 19,000 children have been taken. “I was really shocked and I understood: okay, probably it’s time for me to leave,” Ms Babloyan said, adding: “I was so tired and felt I couldn’t change the situation.” She returned to her home country of Georgia in October, amid another Russian exodus sparked by Putin’s mobilisation order. With Echo of Moscow set to resume programming via its app from Berlin, the journalist planned to move to there – in a journey requiring her to drive to Armenia, before flying from Yerevan to Moldova, and then on to the German capital. On the eve of the long trip, she suddenly “felt something strange going on”. “In a second”, she began to feel nauseous and tired. “I had dinner with friends – I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to drink, I ordered salad and wine, and didn’t [touch] it at all. I decided to go to bed, went to my hotel and fell asleep.” It was the last time she would sleep for three days. She awoke feeling “much worse”, recalling: “I couldn’t move normally – every single movement was very hard.” She felt a metallic taste in her mouth, with “crazy” pain in her head and “in a strange place” in her stomach, while her hands and feet had turned “wine red”. “I couldn’t move my fingers normally, and I felt like [I was] touching fire in [my] hands and feet,” Ms Boloyan said. Blaming hitherto dormant allergies, she bought some antihistamines, packed a bag and embarked on a four-hour taxi journey to Yerevan. Save for the border crossing, she lay on the back seat for the entire journey, unable to move. “Every single piece of my body was burning. I couldn’t think normally, couldn’t concentrate on anything.” At the airport after a sleepless night in a hotel, filled with anxiety, she arranged a phone appointment with a Russian doctor, who told her the symptoms were probably caused by stress. “I was sitting waiting my flight crying all the time I was talking because they didn’t understand what was going on,” she said. Ms Babloyan spent another sleepless night in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, before flying to Germany, where finally on the third day, she found she could walk, talk and eat again. “It was not all gone, but it was much better,” she said. Without health insurance, it was December by the time she saw a doctor, who prescribed her antidepressants and told her allergy tests would cost €6,000. Soon after, Ms Babloyan was forced to stop doing her radio show, as “something strange started happening with my skin”, which broke out in hive-like red spots, “burning all the time”. She took the tests for all known allergens, which came back negative. At this point, a Russian friend recommended another doctor, who upon seeing her skin immediately told her she needed toxicology tests for heavy metals – and said she knew of two other Russians, a journalist and activist, who had recently fallen ill in Europe with similar symptoms. The two other cases – Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, in Berlin, and US-based Free Russia Foundation president Natalia Arno, in Prague – were being looked into by Riga-based investigative outlet The Insider. Doctors and poison specialists have since told the outlet that poisoning is the only explanation for Ms Kostyuchenko’s symptoms, and is the most likely reason for Babloyan and Arno’s symptoms. She was tested at the Charité Hospital, where the now-jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was diagnosed in 2020. But she was later told that her toxicology tests had been “lost”, and although doctors also took a sample of her hair, she has still not been told the results. Ms Kostyuchenko is also still in the dark, despite claims by a source to The Insider that law enforcement carried out their own secret analysis of her blood. Having announced an investigation last month into Ms Kostyuchenko’s case, German prosecutors are now treating it as attempted murder. However, Georgia is yet to announce its own probe into Ms Babloyan’s case, and she is currently unable to return to Tblisi and formally trigger an investigation herself. For Ms Babloyan, it was while interviewing Ms Kosyuchenko on her radio show in mid-August that the stark reality truly began to set in. “When you are looking into the face and eyes of a person who felt the same [symptoms] and you understand it was real, it feels scary – very,” she said, adding that she is still “just trying to understand how to live when you know that someone wanted to kill you, and probably will do it again.” The journalist – who still has problems with her skin, and suffers pain in her fingers after opening a bottle or even a door – remains even more determined to offer an objective narrative on Russia’s affairs. “Work is like therapy for me,” she said. “I can’t stop working”, and noted that, as a journalist, if the government “wants to kill you, it means that, what you’re doing – you’re doing it right”. Asked whether she believed she had been targeted for her enquries into potential Russian war crimes, Ms Babloyan replied: “I just think that all Russian journalists and activists are a target for the Russian government. “But it’s hard to understand who’s going to be next because if you are trying to find logic, you can’t find it, and everyone can be a target.” Read More Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska’s interview with Bel Trew | An Independent TV Original Dodging a constant assault of Russian missiles – the war-weary keep fighting in Ukraine’s blood-soaked east Putin’s hit list: from poisoned tea to mysterious falls, the grisly fate of the Kremlin’s enemies Russia shuts down human rights group that preserved the legacy of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov

Japan’s economy expanded at a faster pace than expected as a further easing of pandemic regulations boosted consumption,

A Star Wars fanatic who was encouraged by a chatbot girlfriend to slay Queen Elizabeth II has been sentenced to nine years in prison for taking his plot to Windsor Castle

A Washington DC grand jury has voted to charge former president Donald Trump with TK counts of violating three sections of the federal criminal code as he and a group of allies schemed to find a way to somehow keep him in the White House for a second term despite losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. The grand jurors, who have spent months hearing evidence and witness testimony as part of a long-running probe into Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the January 6 attack on the Capitol which sprung from those efforts, approved the indictment against Mr Trump on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding, and deprivation of rights under colour of law on Tuesday after a four-hour presentation by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors. Specifically, the indictment alleges that the ex-president engaged in a “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government,” conspired to “corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified,” and conspired against “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted”. The latest charges against Mr Trump are some of the most serious allegations levied against the twice-impeached, now thrice-indicted former president, and are just the first of two possible sets of charges that he could face as a result of his efforts to unlawfully reverse the result of his defeat nearly three years ago. A separate grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia has also been hearing evidence about efforts by Mr Trump and his allies to pressure Peach State officials into reversing his loss to Mr Biden there, and the district attorney who has been supervising that process has said charges be approved against multiple targets in the coming days. The addition of a second federal indictment to the legal troubles facing Mr Trump is certain to complicate his quest to return to the White House by winning next year’s presidential election. He is scheduled to be tried in two separate criminal cases against him, including on the federal charges against him and co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira which are pending in a Florida federal court as a result of their alleged roles in the ex-president’s alleged unlawful retention of national defence information and obstruction of justice. A separate case against him for allegedly falsifying business records in his former home state of New York is set to go to trial in March 2024, while the federal case in Florida is scheduled for trial in late May 2024. The ex-president has maintained that the multiple investigations against him amount to “election interference” and a politically motivated “hoax,” and has repeatedly attacked the prosecutors investigating him in extremely personal terms. These latest charges against Mr Trump are the result of an eight-month investigation by Mr Smith, who was appointed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 to supervise a pair of probes focusing on the ex-president’s conduct. In addition to investigating the ex-president’s alleged unlawful retention of national defence information, Mr Smith was also handed control long-running probe into the events leading up to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, when a riotous mob of Mr Trump’s supporters stormed the seat of the US legislature in hopes of blocking the final certification of his loss to Mr Biden. While prosecutors in the office of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia have charged more than 1,000 people for various crimes committed during the riot — including rare seditious conspiracy charges against members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers extremist groups — the charges against Mr Trump [and his co-defendants] are the first to be brought against anyone for the efforts to overturn the election which arguably led to the Capitol attack. Mr Trump was impeached for inciting the attack with just days left in his presidency, and though a majority of senators voted to convict him, they fell short of the two-thirds supermajority required to sustain a conviction. But the ex-president and his co-defendants are not being charged for organising, inciting or fomenting what was the worst attack on the Capitol since British troops set it ablaze in 1814. Instead, the charges against them are for crimes which prosecutors allege to have been committed as Mr Trump sought to employ a variety of strategies by which he and his allies thought he could reverse or override the will of voters, including pressuring state legislatures to use their own authority to replace swing state electors for Mr Biden with electors for Mr Trump. Mr Trump and his allies also pushed state officials, most notably Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to act to decertify Mr Biden’s wins in swing states, according to prosecutors. Figures connected to Mr Trump’s campaign also spearheaded an effort to submit forged electoral college certificates to the National Archives and to the Senate, while Mr Trump personally sought to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into unilaterally throwing out the legitimate electoral certificates for Mr Biden in favour of the forged ones listing Mr Trump as the winner. The case currently pending against him in the Southern District of Florida arose out of a criminal referral from the National Archives and Records Administration after officials discovered documents bearing classification markings in a set of 15 boxes which the agency had retrieved from Mr Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, the 1920’s-era Palm Beach mansion turned private beach club where he maintains his primary residence and post-presidential office. Investigators later discovered more than 100 additional documents with classification markings during an 8 August 2021 search of Mr Trump’s property, and in June charged him with unlawfully withholding the documents from the government and obstructing efforts to determine whether all the classified documents in his possession had been returned. Read More Trump indicted for his efforts to overturn 2020 presidential election results. Follow live updates Prosecutor involved in Jan. 6 cases says indictment has been returned as Trump braces for charges It's Kamala Harris vs. Ron DeSantis in the fight over Florida's new teachings on slavery Trump begs Congress to help save him from his legal troubles Who is Jack Smith? The ex-war crimes prosecutor who is coming for Trump Donald Trump is the first former president arrested on federal charges. Can he still run in 2024?

Rivian Automotive Inc. started delivering the electric vans it makes for Amazon.com Inc. to Europe in the EV

The Dutch government has collapsed after failing to reach a conclusion on controlling high immigration rates. The four-party coalition government was unable to reach a consensus on talks about asylum policies that were led by prime minister Mark Rutte on Friday. Mr Rutte held an emergency cabinet meeting where he said he would hand in his resignation to King Willem-Alexander on Saturday. “The decision was very difficult for us”, Mr Rutte told reporters after announcing his cabinet’s resignation. The differences in views between the coalition partners were “irreconcilable”, he said. “All parties went to great lengths to find a solution, but the differences on migration are unfortunately impossible to bridge.” “The four parties decided that they cannot reach an agreement on migration,” said Tim Kuijsten, a spokesperson for the Christian Union party that was in coalition with Mr Rutte’s conservative VVD party. “Therefore they decided to end this government.” Mr Rutte’s party has in the past year been working towards reducing the flow of asylum seekers due to the issue of overcrowded migration centres in the Netherlands. Last year, hundreds of asylum seekers were forced to sleep outdoors in squalid conditions near an overcrowded reception centre as the number of people arriving in the Netherlands outstripped the available beds. Just over 21,500 people from outside Europe sought asylum in the Netherlands in 2022, according to the country’s statistics office. Thousands more moved to the Netherlands to work and study. The numbers have put a strain on housing that already was in short supply in the densely populated country. The coalition tried for months to hash out a deal to reduce the flow of new migrants arriving in the country of nearly 18 million people. The proposals on hand included creating two classes of asylum and reducing the number of family members allowed to join asylum seekers The two asylum classes were a temporary one for people fleeing conflicts and a permanent one for people trying to escape persecution. Mr Rutte’s coalition government had been in power for a year and a half. He has been Netherlands’s longest-serving prime minister and has been in office since 2010. Until a new government is elected, the current ministers will continue their work as a caretaker cabinet. Elections in the Netherlands will now reportedly take place in November this year. Additional reporting by agencies Read More Top BBC presenter taken off air ‘after paying teen £35,000 for explicit pictures’ Ukraine-Russia war – live: Zelensky’s forces make ‘significant gains’ against Putin in Bakhmut UK weather: Three-day ‘danger to life’ thunderstorm warning as temperatures soar to 30C How to rein in migration to the Netherlands is dividing the Dutch government The leaders of the Netherlands and Luxembourg tell Kosovo and Serbia to normalize ties for EU hopes Jens Stoltenberg’s term as Nato chief extended after Ben Wallace’s hopes dashed

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will begin two days of hearings before Congress on Wednesday that will likely focus on the question that consumed the central bank last week: How far and how fast will the Fed raise its key interest rate from here

Chinese authorities told state-owned banks to step up intervention in the currency market this week, in a push