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The northern Italian city of Padua has started removing the names of non-biological gay mothers from their children's birth certificates under new legislation passed by the "traditional family-first" government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Former president Donald Trump bashed his main rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination late Thursday evening. The former president posted on his Truth Social platform that businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is now beating Florida Gov Ron DeSantis in some polling. He also poked fun at former Arkansas Gov Asa Hutchinson and attacked former New Jersey Gov Chris Christie over his weight. “Vivek Ramaswamy is now beating DeSanctimonious,” he said. “Christie dead as his stomach band. ‘Aida’ Hutchinson a solid minus 1%. I’m up 44 points!!! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” In 2013, Mr Christie underwent bariatric surgery to help with his weight. Mr Trump in the past seemed to mock the former governor when he said he would no longer eat Oreo cookies. Mr Christie and Mr Trump have had a long and sordid relationship. In 2016, Mr Christie was one of a cadre of Republican presidential candidates running against Mr Trump for the Republican nomination for president. But shortly after the New Hampshire presidential primary, Mr Christie dropped out of the race and became of the first major elected officials to back Mr Trump. Since then, Mr Christie has mostly turned against Mr Trump and has largely staged his longshot presidential candidacy in an effort to neutralise the former president. Mr Trump also continued to use his preferred nickname for Mr DeSantis, calling him “DeSanctimonious.” But a new poll from Kaplan Strategies showed Mr Ramaswamy was tied, not beating, Mr DeSantis. Since announcing his candidacy in May, Mr DeSantis has failed to catch fire and his polling numbers have either stayed stagnant or even declined. Mr Hutchinson, for his part, has also largely run in opposition of Mr Trump and has failed to rise in the polls in a crowded field that also includes Sen Tim Scott (R-SC), former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and former vice president Mike Pence. Read More Truth Social’s merger partner reaches $18m settlement with SEC Trump taunts DeSantis and Christie as deadline to appear before Jan 6 grand jury passes – latest Trump shares sinister new video issuing apocalyptic threat to anyone who ‘f***s around with us’

He may be suing the governor of Texas, but Jessie Fuentes isn’t really a political guy. His disagreement with Greg Abbott is personal. Continental, in a sense. Spiritual even. On 7 July, Mr Fuentes, who owns a small kayaking business, sued the state for its decision to install a 1,000-foot buoy wall in the town of Eagle Pass, within a stretch of the Rio Grande river. In Texas, the river forms the legal border between the US and Mexico. More than just a legal argument that a state politician doesn’t have jurisdiction over an international borderline, Mr Fuentes, who grew up along the Rio Grande, feels Mr Abbott has crossed a moral line. The governor, he says, is violating a river that nourishes ecosystems, people, and a vibrant transborder culture that’s existed far longer and far more freely than the rolls of razor wire multiplying across the banks suggest. “I’m not a politician. I just say listen, I love that river. Nobody speaks up for it. I’m speaking up for the river. Man, I have the right to try to prosper from my love of the river, that allows me the opportunity to get out there, to bring people to the river,” he told The Independent. “They don’t live here. I do,” he added of Texas’s state leaders. “You’ve taken a beautiful waterway and you’ve converted it into a war zone.” Mr Fuentes is part of a group of local residents, human rights activists, and international officials who are pushing back on the floating barrier project. They face challenging waters ahead, though. Governor Abbott is a shrewd operator. He has combined media savvy and audacious use of government funds and powers to secure billions of dollars and heaps of political capital for his notion of a military-style crackdown at the border. He has charged ahead with little resistance, even though governors and presidents have spent decades taking this iron-fisted approach with little empirical success to show for it. In mid-July, state contractors were nearly complete installing the floating border barrier, a $1m, 1,000-foot pearl string of giant orange buoys with strong netting in between, anchored to the river floor. Discussing the plan in June, Mr Abbott described the floating wall as a key part of his larger buildup at the border, which has featured mass deployment of as many as 10,000 state troopers and national guardsmen at a time, as well as razor wire and sections of a new border wall on private lands. "When we’re dealing with 100 or 1,000 people, one of the goals is to slow down and deter as many of them as possible," Mr Abbott said on 8 June. "Some may eventually get to the border where they are going to face that multilayered razor wire and a full force of National Guard and DPS [Department of Public Safety] officers." An estimated 250 people died crossing the Rio Grande last year, but Texas officials have nonetheless claimed that installing what amounts to a giant net in the river will “prevent the loss of life due to drownings.” The barrier technology, like much of Mr Abbott’s border agenda, is a retrofitted version of what the Trump administration was pursuing. In 2020, the Border Patrol advertised on Twitter, then quickly deleted, a post showing a demo of a floating barrier system from the same company that built Mr Abbott’s wall, Cochrane USA, only the Trump version had large black spikes that wouldn’t look out of place in a dungeon. The Texas buoy plan dropped the spikes but kept the same controversy that Mr Trump’s attempts to seal off the border attracted. Last week, Mexico’s diplomat said the barrier plan may violate international treaties over the Rio Grande-based border, and said she will send an inspection team to investigate the buoy wall. Migrant advocates say the buoys, like generations of border installations before them, won’t actually slow down immigration, but rather will push migrants towards ever more remote places to cross the border, increasing the likelihood they will face a perilous and potentially lethal crossing. This strategy, known as “prevention through deterrence” has more or less been the explicit policy of the US government since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, a policy choice many on the ground say is causing unnecessary deaths. “It’s been proven time after time that these so-called prevention through deterrence strategies don’t work,” Fernando García of the Border Network for Human Rights told The Independent. “They have not stopped immigration flows, but what they have done is they have put immigrants at risk.” “It’s very likely that with [the floating buoy wall] they are looking for more remote and isolated places to come across so that whenever they are in danger by heat exhaustion, by drowning, they will not have anybody to help them,” he added, saying he worries it could be a record year for migrant deaths in the Rio Grande. “All of this is death by policy.” According to leaks from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state’s border scheme, this policy includes intentionally putting migrants into harm’s way. In a series of emails shared with news outlets including The Independent, a border medic described questioning orders from superiors to push exhausted migrants back into the river and to refrain from giving them water if captured. “We were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning,” the trooper wrote. The DPS source also claimed in the span of one week in late June, a teen mother was trapped in razor wire at the border while having a miscarriage, a 15-year-old broke his leg as he tried to find a way around the deterrence buoys, and a man lacerated his leg while trying to rescue his child from razor wire placed on a buoy. Texas officials have defended the use of the razor wire while denying reports troopers were told to push people into the river. “The Texas National Guard mission is to work alongside our Texas law enforcement partners to prevent, deter and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” the Texas Military Department told The Independent in response to news about the emails. “There is no order or directive instructing Service Members to push illegal immigrants back into the river or deny them drinking water.” “Texas is deploying every tool and strategy to deter and repel illegal crossings between ports of entry as President Biden’s dangerous open border policies entice migrants from over 150 countries to risk their lives entering the country illegally,” a spokesperson for the governor told The Independent earlier this week. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment on this story from The Independent. Beyond just putting migrants at risk, the border barriers are cutting into the deep cross-border cultural ties in the region, residents said. Mr Fuentes, the business owner suing the state, said the locked-down border is only a recent historical development. His grandfather used to be able to casually ride into Mexico on a donkey to get supplies. He says that Texas politicians fomenting fear about immigration miss the fact that many who live along the US-Mexico border don’t feel the same way. The walls aren’t stopping some hypothetical invasion of immigrants. They’re dividing a community that’s older and bigger than boundaries on a map. “That’s the beautiful thing about America,” he said. “We’ve got our culture on the border. The way it’s being misinterpreted right now, them saying we’re a war zone, things are out of control. We’re not that. We’re a community on the river. We get along with our neighbours.” “I don’t think we’re under siege from an inflow of immigrants,” he added. “We’re under siege by law enforcement.” When Mr Fuentes encounters migrants on the river, he offers them a blessing and any spare water if it he has it. You wouldn’t know about these sorts of ties by watching the governor on TV. The Fox News regular frequently describes the situation in places like Eagle Pass as an “invasion” of drug-pushing cartel members, though drugs like fentanyl are overwhelmingly brought across the border by US citizens at official points of entry. It’s not an accidental choice of words calling the situation an “invasion.” In November, the governor invoked a clause in the US Constitution allowing states to take military actions if they are under “invasion” to defend his policies, a theory legal scholars and critics say is both nonapplicable to immigration and an echo of the white-supremacist rhetoric that fueled incidents like the 2019 El Paso shooting, where 23 mostly Latino people were killed. It may not be legally bulletproof, but it’s another savvy move from Mr Abbott, who has proved adept at using crises in recent years to further his border agenda. The governor declared a state disaster at the US-Mexico border in 2021, freeing him up to use additional emergency powers, and used creative accounting to funnel an estimated $1bn in federal Covid relief funds to Operation Lone Star, the umbrella plan Mr Abbott has used to send troopers to the border and bus thousands of migrants out of Texas to liberal states. Despite massive investments from the state and the federal government over decades from leaders of both parties, immigration levels at the US-Mexico border in late 2022 and 2023 are about the same as they were during their previous most recent peak around the year 2000. A spokesperson for the governor’s office declined to answer specific questions from The Independent about the floating border barrier, and criticisms that it’s illegal and dangerous for migrants. The governor’s office said Operation Lone Star had led to the apprehension of more than 393,000 unauthorised immigrants and the repelling of more than 49,000 illegal immigrants, as well as over 31,000 arrests, “all of which would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and our country thanks to President Biden’s open border policies,” according to spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris. The Department of Justice is investigating Operation Lone Star for alleged civil rights abuses. Immigration is a concern of federal law, but thousands of immigrants have been arrested by state personnel for trespassing on private property, allegedly being held in jail for weeks without facing charges. According to an investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and The Marshall Project, state officials were arresting far more trespassers than cartel members, and allegedly inflated data on Operation Lone Star by citing arrests on crimes like cockfighting, sexual assault, and stalking in their success statistics, even though these offences had no clear link to immigration enforcement. “We’ve spent $12bn over the last decade, and we have nothing to show for it,” Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity programmes at the advocacy group Every Texan, which monitors the state budget, told The Independent. “People are not being deterred from coming to the US to seek a better life and opportunities…no matter how deadly we make that journey.” Ironically, according to Mr Puente, the governor’s border crackdown has finally driven resources towards borderland communities that have historically suffered from under-investment. However, these resources are coming in the form of armed police officers and contracts to build military infrastructure, rather than investments in things like education or healthcare. “Texas has historically undervalued and underserved border communities over the last century or more, and now, because it’s politically viable, because it makes for a great 7pm Fox News clip, these communities are being inundated with billions and billions of dollars,” Mr Puente said. He points to the example of Uvalde, Texas, the site of a horrific 2022 school shooting, as a place that needs a different kind of investment from the state. “That community doesn’t have a hospital,” he said. “That community doesn’t have some basic services, but they have 350 DPS troopers and Border Patrol agents just roaming around. That didn’t help 19 kids and 2 teachers a year ago.” In fact, according to some local residents, the influx of state personnel to border communities has made the residents there feel less safe. Operation Lone Star has driven a spike in the racial profiling of Latinx drivers in South Texas, according to the ACLU. According to an analysis from NBC News of Latinx-majority border areas, traffic citations have shot up, in one county by a factor of six, since Operation Lone Star came online in 2021. Despite the governor’s ever-expanding footprint on the border, Jessie Fuentes still believes in the magic of the Rio Grande. He ends our interview by inviting me to come onto the river with him sometime, though he notes it’s getting harder and harder for him to access the water because of all the fences, walls, and razor wire deployed around Eagle Pass. He has a bitter chuckle at the difference between the US and Mexico sides of the river. On the Mexico side, it’s parkland, with families out for walks or fishing on the river. On the US side, it’s a practically medieval tableau of walls and spikes, overseen by a group of state officials, one of whose title is literally Border Czar. “I invite anyone to come if they’ll let me,” he said. That’s the thing about the US border: what happens there often has deep roots. Border walls, once built, are rarely taken down, and connections to the land, built over generations, don’t disappear from one administration to the next. Governor Abbott has vowed to fight Mr Fuentes all the way to the US Supreme Court. In the coming months, we will see whose vision of this complicated, beautiful region prevails. Read More Texas trooper's accounts of bloodied and fainting migrants on US-Mexico border unleashes criticism Border Patrol fails to assess medical needs for children with preexisting conditions, report says Mexico files border boundaries complaint over Texas' floating barrier plan on Rio Grande Inside Greg Abbott’s controversial plan to wall off the Rio Grande from immigration Texas trooper's accounts of bloodied and fainting migrants on US-Mexico border unleashes criticism Texas troopers allegedly told to push migrant children into the Rio Grande

The Florida federal judge overseeing the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice case against former president Donald Trump has rejected the disgraced ex-president’s bid to delay his trial until after the 2024 election. US District Judge Aileen Cannon on Friday issued an order granting the government’s request to set a speedy trial date and schedule for pretrial motions, with a start date of 20 May 2024. More follows...

Authorities call off a search for a suspected big cat spotted near the German capital.

Alabama executed a man on Friday for the 2001 beating death of a woman as the state resumed lethal injections after failed executions prompted the governor to order an internal review of procedures. James Barber, 64, was pronounced dead at 1:56 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection at a south Alabama prison. "Justice has been served. This morning, James Barber was put to death for the terrible crime he committed over two decades ago: the especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel murder of Dorothy Epps," Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement. Barber was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2001 beating death of Epps. Prosecutors said Barber, a handyman, confessed to killing the 75-year-old with a claw hammer and fleeing with her purse. Jurors voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed. Before he was put to death, Barber told his family he loved them and apologized to Epps' family. "I want to tell the Epps' family I love them. I'm sorry for what happened," Barber said. "No words would fit how I feel." Barber said he wanted to tell the governor "and the people in this room that I forgive you for what you are about to do." It was the first execution carried out in Alabama this year after the state halted executions in November. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced a pause on executions to conduct an internal review of procedures. The move came after the state halted two lethal injections because of difficulties inserting IVs into the condemned men's veins. Attorneys for inmate Alan Miller said prison staff poked him with needles for more than an hour as they unsuccessfully tried to connect an IV line during Miller's aborted execution in September, at one point leaving him hanging vertically on a gurney. State officials called off the November execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith after they were unsuccessful in connecting the second of two required lines. Advocacy groups claimed a third execution, carried out after a delay because of IV problems, also was botched, a claim the state has disputed. Barber's execution came hours after Oklahoma executed Jemaine Cannon for stabbing a Tulsa woman to death with a butcher knife in 1995 after his escape from a prison work center. Alabama's governor announced in February that the state was resuming executions. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said prison system had added to its pool of medical professionals, ordered new equipment and conducted additional rehearsals. The last-minute legal battle centered on Alabama's ability to obtain intravenous access in past executions. Barber's attorneys unsuccessfully asked the courts to block the execution, saying the state has a pattern of failing "to carry out a lethal injection execution in a constitutional manner." The state wrote in legal filings that it was using different IV team members. The state also changed the deadline to carry out the execution from midnight to 6 a.m. to give more time for preparations and to carry out last-minute appeals. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the two intravenous lines were connected to Barber with "three sticks in six minutes." The Supreme Court denied Barber's request for a stay without comment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent from the decision that was joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She said the court was allowing "Alabama to experiment again with a human life." "The Eighth Amendment demands more than the State's word that this time will be different. The Court should not allow Alabama to test the efficacy of its internal review by using Barber as its 'guinea pig,'" Sotomayor wrote. The Alabama attorney general's office had urged the Supreme Court to let the execution proceed. The state wrote that the previous executions were called off because of a "confluence of events including health issues specific to the individual inmates and last-minute litigation brought by the inmates that dramatically shortened the window for ADOC officials to conduct the executions." In the hours leading up to the scheduled execution, Barber had 22 visitors and two phone calls and ate a final meal, a prison spokesperson said. After his last words, Barber spoke with a spiritual adviser who accompanied him into the death chamber. As the drugs were administered, Barber's eyes closed and his abdomen pulsed several times. His breathing slowed until it was no longer visible.

The search is intensifying for a suspected wild animal in the southern outskirts of Berlin.

The mayor of Mykolaiv told BBC Jersey how Russia launched missiles on his town killing two.

Donald Trump has been busy bullying his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, including Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, on Truth Social as he braces for an imminent grand jury indictment over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his role in inciting the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021. Mr Trump announced on Tuesday that he had been sent a letter by special prosecutor Jack Smith informing him that he is the “target” of the investigation, citing three statutes under which he could be charged, including conspiracy to commit offence or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under colour of law and tampering with a witness, victim or informant. That indictment, Mr Trump’s third in four months, could be handed down as soon as this week, The Independent has learned. William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for the Trump presidential campaign and spent much of 6 January with the then-president, is believed to have testified before the grand jury on Thursday. The former president was given until midnight on Thursday to report to the Washington, DC, federal courthouse but did not appear. Read More Trump shares sinister new video issuing apocalyptic threat to anyone who ‘f***s around with us’ Deadline for Trump to give evidence in Jan 6 probe passes as third indictment looms Trump bid to toss E Jean Carroll ruling backfires as judge says ex-president did ‘rape’ columnist DeSantis says he’d accept Trump being prosecuted for a ‘traditional crime’ like ‘robbing a bank’

After David and Janice Hunter moved to Cyprus 20 years ago, he has been convicted of her manslaughter.

By Clara Denina and Sarah McFarlane LONDON Major brands, including the investment arm of the IKEA group, are

In a Donald Trump-influenced era of through-the-looking-glass politics, everything seems upside down, traditional loyalties are scrambled, history can be rewritten and truth is just what anyone wants it to be.