The Group of Seven's top financial leaders say they are united in their support for Ukraine and determination to enforce sanctions against Russia for its aggression

By Yew Lun Tian and Casey Hall BEIJING/SHANGHAI One joke by a Chinese comedian about the nation's military

Vladimir Putin has signed a record national budget aimed at boosting the military amid staggering losses on the battlefield. After the budget was passed by the lower house of the parliament, speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said it was developed specifically to fund the military and to mitigate the impact of international sanctions imposed after Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Part of the Russian budget is secret as the Kremlin tries to conceal its military plans and sidestep scrutiny of its operation in Ukraine. But independent business journalists Farida Rustamova and Maksim Tovkaylo said this month that around 39 per cent of all federal spending will go towards defence and law enforcement in 2024. It comes as data published by the UK Ministry of Defence, provided by Ukraine’s General Staff, showed the number of Russians casualties had risen to an average 931 a day this month. UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said: “Putin is stepping up his invasion - senselessly sending more Russians to die than at any time since the war began.” Read More Russian forces encircle Ukraine’s Avdiivka and ‘ready to storm city’ after months-long offensive Russian supermarkets are full of fruit, vegetables, cheese and meat. But shoppers can’t afford any of it A Dutch museum has sent Crimean treasures to Kyiv after a legal tug-of-war between Russia, Ukraine Ukraine and the Western Balkans top Blinken agenda for NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels

By Manya Saini (Reuters) -SoftBank Group's Arm is seeking a valuation of more than $52 billion in its initial public

LONDON (AP) — Every summer, British royals and thousands of others get dressed to the nines for Royal Ascot, a glamorous annual horse racing event that dates back to 1711, when Queen Anne founded Ascot Racecourse in southern England.

A group of 31 Harvard student organizations condemned Israel for Hamas' attack by releasing a joint statement

The coup in Niger, the third in as many years to topple an elected leader in Africa's troubled Sahel, threatens to further hamper efforts against jihadist...

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Women are heavily dominating the nominations process in the upcoming event, sweeping seven of the eight nominees

Eight people including seven members of one family were killed in Cairo on Monday when a residential building in Egypt's capital collapsed, the public...

Scores of cisgender men are accused of infiltrating the event by allegedly misrepresenting themselves as 'non-binary' attendees

Authorities in Iceland fear stormy weather conditions could affect monitoring systems as the country awaits an “imminent” volcanic eruption. Just 165 small tremors have been recorded in the affected region since midnight on Monday, compared to the thousands that jolted the town of Grindavik in the days prior. The Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) says the volcano could erupt with just 30 minutes’ notice as magma is now sitting just below the earth’s surface. The wait for the eruption is gripping the country, with thousands glued to a live stream showing a glowing red rift in the ground running through Grindavik. The IMO said it is likely the adverse weather conditions are impacting “both the sensitivity of earthquake detection and real-time GPS monitoring”. Kristín Jónsdóttir, a senior IMO official, said people will “just have to wait in suspense for the next few days” to see how events play out. She said decreasing earthquake activity could also be a sign that magma has reached very close to the earth’s surface, adding that the scenario is not unlike what was seen prior to a previous eruption in 2021. Read More When will the Iceland volcano erupt and what happens when it does? Iceland braces for ‘imminent’ volcanic eruption with just 30 minutes warning Is it safe to travel to Iceland? Your rights if you have a holiday booked ‘It’s like a dystopian movie’: Iceland residents describe ‘apocalyptic’ scenes as they flee volcano threat