Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia has a “sufficient stockpile” of cluster bombs and reserves the right to use them in retaliation against Ukrainian forces, after Washington supplied Kyiv with the widely banned munitions. The Russian president’s threat, during an interview with state TV, came as an Estonian intelligence chief claimed that Ukraine was on the brink of a major breakthrough in its counteroffensive, after destroying Kremlin command posts and making gains near Bakhmut. Meanwhile, pro-Russian authorities in Crimea claimed to have thwarted a Ukrainian drone attack overnight at the port of Sevastopol, which houses Moscow’s Black Sea fleet, as Ukrainian officials said one civilian had been killed and eight wounded in Russian attacks in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Elsewhere, Ukrainian and Polish officials said that a large convoy carrying fighters from the Wagner private army was spotted entering Belarus from Russia, as Minsk’s defence ministry released footage showing what it claimed were Wagner fighters instructing Belarusian soldiers at a military camp. Polish deputy minister Stanislaw Zaryn said Warsaw believed there “may be several hundred” Wagner fighters currently in Belarus. Read More Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin ‘dead or in prison’ after Putin meeting, former US commander claims Russian general says he has been fired for telling truth about dire situation on Ukraine frontlines What to know about the harrowing Ukraine war doc '20 Days in Mariupol'

Russia's foreign ministry said on Friday it was expanding the list of people banned from visiting in response

Cameron Brink is already an NCAA Champion, a two-time All-American, and Pac-12 Co-Player of the Year

On a sunny street in Hiroshima, a tourist looks around, but instead of seeing a bustling riverside, they face a scene of horror, with...

On the eve of Indian independence in 1947, India's 562 princes ruled over a third of its population.

Follow our live blog and see the live results as election data come in. Argentina’s outsider congressman Javier

Can President Joe Biden bring the mercurial North Korean leader to the table?

WASHINGTON U.S. producer prices barely rose in June and the annual increase in producer inflation was the smallest

A man charged with attacking two congressional staffers with a metal baseball bat is being held pending an initial court appearance

Damar Hamlin competed in the Buffalo Bills' preseason opener on Saturday, marking the safety's first taste of competitive

A renowned glass artist in Mexico played a key role in the creation of a football field-sized church window in the U.S. The 81-year-old Narcissus Quagliata is the master of the glass-fusion technique that made the Kansas church’s colossal stained-glass artwork possible

The biggest explosion ever seen has been spotted in space – and scientists don’t know for sure where it came from. The blast was brighter than almost anything ever seen and has been going on for years, making it by far the most powerful such event witnessed by scientists. It has been ongoing for more than three years, and took place nearly 8 billion years away. Astronomers have proposed a host of possible explanations for the blast: it may be a vast cloud of gas that was torn apart by a black hole, for instance. But nothing on such a scale has ever been seen before and the explosion may have come from something else entirely. It is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole. The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, took place when the universe was around six billion years old, and is still being detected by a network of telescopes. The astronomers, led by the University of Southampton, believe the explosion is a result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, that has been violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole. Fragments of the cloud would be swallowed up, sending shockwaves through its remnants, as well as into a large dusty “doughnut” surrounding the black hole. Such events are very rare and nothing on this scale has been witnessed before, the researchers say. Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion on record – a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A. Although this was brighter than AT2021lwx, it lasted for just a fraction of the time, meaning the overall energy released by the AT2021lwx explosion was far greater. AT2021lwx was first detected in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, and subsequently picked up by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in Hawaii. But until now the scale of the explosion had been unknown. Dr Philip Wiseman, research fellow at the University of Southampton, who led the research, said: “We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova. “Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual.” The Southampton-led team believe the most feasible explanation for what caused the explosion is an extremely large cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen) or dust that has come off course from its orbit around the black hole and been sent flying in. Dr Wiseman added: “With new facilities, like the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, coming online in the next few years, we are hoping to discover more events like this and learn more about them. “It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they are key processes to how the centres of galaxies change over time.” The findings are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Additional reporting by agencies Read More Biggest explosion ever seen spotted in space – and we don’t know what it is Scientists think they have explained a ‘mysterious structure in the universe’ Astronomers spot the largest cosmic explosion ever seen Astronomers spot the largest cosmic explosion ever seen Astronomers see ‘objects that no one has ever seen before’ in incredible observations ‘Meteorite? shooting star? missile?’: Officials explain strange ‘fireball’ over Japan