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Poland threatens Putin with arrest if he flies through its airspace on way to Hungary
Poland warned Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on Tuesday against travelling through its airspace for a summit in Hungary with US president Donald Trump, saying it could be forced to execute an international arrest warrant if he did, Reuters reports.
Bulgaria, however, would be willing to let Putin use its airspace if the summit is held in Hungary, foreign minister Georg Georgiev was quoted as saying.
Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Radio Rodzina:
I cannot guarantee that an independent Polish court won’t order the government to escort such an aircraft down to hand the suspect to the court in The Hague.
And, therefore, if this summit is to take place, hopefully with the participation of the victim of the aggression, the aircraft will use a different route.
The ICC warrant obligates the court’s member states to arrest Putin if he sets foot on their territory.
Sikorski last week accused Russia of a “tactically stupid and counterproductive” escalation of the war in Ukraine, saying its drone incursion into Poland last month appeared to be deliberate.
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A Ukrainian citizen allegedly working for Russian intelligence services as part of a sabotage campaign was detained in Poland, while two others were arrested in Romania, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Prosecutors said the individuals acting on behalf of the Russian intelligence services were allegedly preparing acts of sabotage involving the sending of shipments containing explosives and incendiary materials to Ukraine, which were intended to spontaneously combust or explode during transport, AP reported.
The goal was to intimidate populations and destabilize EU countries supporting Ukraine, Polish prosecutors said, adding that two more Ukrainian citizens suspected of taking part in the same plot were detained in Romania.
Romanian authorities said Tuesday that two Ukrainians, aged 21 and 24, acting on behalf of Russian intelligence, deposited two parcels containing improvised explosive devices at an international courier company in Bucharest. Specialists from Romanian intelligence defused the devices, and the pair were placed under preventative arrest for 30 days.
The Ukrainian in Poland was one of eight individuals detained by authorities in recent days on suspicion of preparing acts of sabotage across the country, a spokesperson for the National Prosecutor’s Office said.
AI chatbots are “unreliable and clearly biased” when offering voting advice, the Dutch data protection authority (AP) has said, warning of a threat to democracy eight days before national elections.
The four chatbots tested by the AP “often end up with the same two parties, regardless of the user’s question or command”, the authority said in a report ahead of the 29 October election.
In more than half of the cases, the chatbot suggested either the far-right Freedom party (PVV) of Geert Wilders or the leftwing GroenLinks-PvdA led by the former European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans.
Some parties, such as the centre-right CDA, “are almost never mentioned, even when the user’s input exactly matches the positions of one of these parties”, the report said.
The deputy head of the AP, Monique Verdier, said that while chatbots may seem like clever tools, “as a voting aid, they consistently fail”. Voters were being pushed towards a party that did not necessarily align with their political views, she added.
“This directly impacts a cornerstone of democracy: the integrity of free and fair elections,” said Verdier. “We therefore warn against using AI chatbots for voting advice, as their operation is unclear and difficult to verify.”
You can read the full story here: Don’t use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog
Russia said on Tuesday its conditions for peace in Ukraine remained unchanged since the August summit between US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, Reuters reports.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters he was surprised by an “unscrupulous” CNN report which said that the anticipated meeting between him and US secretary of state Marco Rubio had been put on hold for the time being and that unidentified US officials felt that Russia still had a “maximalist stance”.
“I want to officially confirm: Russia has not changed its position compared to the understandings that were reached during the Alaska summit,” Lavrov told reporters, adding that he had told Rubio precisely that.
Lavrov said that the place and the timing of the next Trump-Putin summit was less important than the substance of implementing the understandings reached in Anchorage, Alaska.
The Kremlin said there was no clear date, with spokesperson Dmitry Peskov saying:
Listen, we have an understanding of the presidents, but we cannot postpone what has not been finalised.
Neither President Trump nor President Putin gave exact dates.
A court in Slovakia on Tuesday convicted the man in last year’s attempted assassination of the country’s populist prime minister Robert Fico of a terror attack and sentenced him to 21 years in prison, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
The shooting and the trial have shaken this small, EU and Nato-member country where Fico has long been a divisive figure, criticised for straying from Slovakia’s pro-western path and aligning it closer to Russia.
Juraj Cintula opened fire on Fico on 15 May 2024, as the prime minister greeted supporters after a government meeting in the town of Handlová, about 140km north-east of the capital of Bratislava.
Cintula, 72, was arrested immediately after the attack and ordered to remain behind bars. When questioned by investigators, he rejected the accusation of being a “terrorist.”
Fico was shot in the abdomen and was taken from Handlová to a hospital in nearby city of Banská Bystrica. He underwent a five-hour surgery, followed by another two-hour surgery two days later. He has since recovered.
Cintula has claimed his motive for the shooting was that he disagreed with government policies. He refused to testify before the Specialized Criminal Court in Banská Bystrica, but confirmed that what he had told investigators about his motive remains true.
Jon Henley
Jon Henley is the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, based in Paris
Perhaps France’s most fabled jail, La Santé – where the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has begun a five-year jail term for criminal conspiracy to raise campaign funds from Libya – is the last remaining prison inside the Paris city limits.
Located in the southern Montparnasse district of the capital, it opened in 1867 and was the scene of at least 40 executions, the last in 1972. Partially closed for renovation in 2014, the prison reopened five years later and houses more than 1,100 inmates.
Famous former detainees include the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel, the civil servant and Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, the businessman and politician Bernard Tapie, the 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and model agent Jean-Luc Brunel.
Prominent or at-risk prisoners are generally held in the jail’s QB4 ward for “vulnerable people” – the so-called “VIP quarters” – in single cells, not the usual three-person units, and kept alone during outdoor activities for security reasons.
Located on the first floor, the ward has 19 identical cells and a dedicated exercise yard so inmates are not obliged to mingle with other prisoners – although they remain subject to whistles, jeers and smartphone photos from nearby cells.
You can read the full piece from Jon Henley here: What can Sarkozy expect in La Santé prison and what has he taken with him?
Poland threatens Putin with arrest if he flies through its airspace on way to Hungary
Poland warned Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on Tuesday against travelling through its airspace for a summit in Hungary with US president Donald Trump, saying it could be forced to execute an international arrest warrant if he did, Reuters reports.
Bulgaria, however, would be willing to let Putin use its airspace if the summit is held in Hungary, foreign minister Georg Georgiev was quoted as saying.
Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Radio Rodzina:
I cannot guarantee that an independent Polish court won’t order the government to escort such an aircraft down to hand the suspect to the court in The Hague.
And, therefore, if this summit is to take place, hopefully with the participation of the victim of the aggression, the aircraft will use a different route.
The ICC warrant obligates the court’s member states to arrest Putin if he sets foot on their territory.
Sikorski last week accused Russia of a “tactically stupid and counterproductive” escalation of the war in Ukraine, saying its drone incursion into Poland last month appeared to be deliberate.
A tornado tore through districts north of Paris on Monday, toppling three construction cranes and killing one person and critically injuring four others, authorities said.
The town of Ermont, about 13 miles (20km) north-east of Paris, was worst hit by the sudden twister that caused damage across 10 districts overall.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday it was unclear when a summit between US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin on seeking an end to the war in Ukraine would take place, and that no dates had been mentioned by anyone, Reuters reports.
Trump has repeatedly said he wants to end the Ukraine war, the deadliest in Europe since the second world war, though he has said that finding peace has been harder than reaching a ceasefire in Gaza or ending a conflict between India and Pakistan.
After speaking to Putin on 16 October, Trump said US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov would meet this week before a possible summit in Budapest within two weeks.
French president Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday said any negotiations regarding Ukraine’s territory must be handled only by president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
Macron told reporters when asked about a planned meeting between US president Donald Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to discuss and end to the war in Ukraine:
No one else can do this. Therefore, it is up to Ukraine to decide for itself and its territory
Deborah Cole
Deborah Cole is a Berlin correspondent for the Guardian
Critics have accused Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, of adopting “dangerous” rhetoric on immigration, after he championed “very large scale” expulsions of people from cities – and claimed that anyone with daughters would agree with him.
Merz, who took office in May with a pledge to beat back the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, on Monday chastised a reporter who asked if he wished to revise his hardline remarks on migration from last week in light of widespread criticism, or apologise for them.
“I don’t know if you have children, and daughters among them,” Merz said to the journalist. “Ask your daughters, I suspect you’ll get a pretty loud and clear answer. I have nothing to take back; to the contrary I stress: we have to change something.”
The left-leaning opposition accused Merz of taking a page from extremist parties, whose claims that women and girls are being targeted by migrants with sexual violence has become a global far-right rallying cry.
You can read the full piece from Deborah Cole here: ‘Ask your daughters’: Merz defends his call for large-scale deportations
Russian strikes cause blackouts in Chernihiv
Russian strikes caused widespread blackouts and cut off phone networks in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, with repairs stalled by ongoing drone attacks on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
The Chernihiv region, which was briefly occupied when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, has come under particularly heavy bombardment in recent weeks.
“Critical infrastructure like hospitals have had to turn to autonomous power supply,” a spokesperson for the regional authorities told AFP, adding the severe outages began late Monday.
Andriy Podorvan, the representative of Chernigiv regional military administration said:
There are also water problems for those living on the upper floors. The whole city and the surrounding area in the north is blacked out.
The Ukrainian energy ministry said repair crews were unable to begin restoring damaged facilities due to “relentless” Russian drone attacks.
It said in a statement:
The Russians deliberately launch unmanned aerial vehicles that continuously fly over damaged facilities, making it impossible to safely carry out repairs and intentionally prolonging the humanitarian crisis.
The Kremlin claims its forces only target military facilities and have blamed continued civilian suffering on Kyiv for refusing Russian terms for ending the war.
The cable that snapped and caused a Lisbon funicular railcar to hurtle down a hill in September, killing 16 people, was not certified for use in passenger transport, according to a preliminary report that also pointed to maintenance flaws, Reuters reports.
Portugal’s Office for Air and Rail Accident Investigations (GPIAAF) said in the report late on Monday it was still impossible to say whether the use of an inadequate cable had caused the crash, as other factors were also at play.
GPIAAF’s final report is due by next September. The yellow tram-like carriage, which carries people up and down a steep hillside in the Portuguese capital, hit a building after leaving the track on 3 September.
The office said the maintenance procedures, designed by Carris, have not been updated for many years and “the use of cables that did not comply with the specifications and usage restrictions was due to several accumulated failures in the process of acquiring, accepting, and using them by Carris”.
Carris’ internal control mechanisms “were not sufficient or adequate to prevent and detect such failures.”
“There is evidence that maintenance tasks recorded as completed do not always correspond to the tasks actually performed,” it said.
Carris said in a statement “it is not possible at this stage to say whether the nonconformities in the use of the cable are relevant to the accident or not”.
European leaders back Trump's call for Ukraine peace talks
Elsewhere, European leaders issued a joint statement with Ukraine on Tuesday backing US president Donald Trump’s call for peace talks to begin based on the current frontline with Russia, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
Trump is seeking to broker a peace deal to end the three-and-a-half-year war, triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion. Last week, he called on Moscow and Kyiv to stop the fighting “where they are” after talks with both sides.
“We strongly support president Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” said a statement signed by Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, EU chiefs Antonio Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Britain’s Keir Starmer and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.
“We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force,” said the leaders, who also included those of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Poland.
EU leaders are set to close ranks in support of Ukraine at a Brussels summit on Thursday – followed a day later by a “coalition of the willing” meeting of European leaders in London to discuss the next steps to help Kyiv.
Trump has announced his intention to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Budapest in coming weeks, but it was not clear whether Zelensky – who was shut out from the previous meeting in August in Alaska – would attend.
The leaders on Tuesday said:
We are clear that Ukraine must be in the strongest possible position – before, during, and after any ceasefire.
We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defence industry, until Putin is ready to make peace.
Sarkozy’s lawyer Christophe Ingrain said the ex-president will remain in prison for at least three weeks to a month, after confirming a request had been immediately filed for his release, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
The Paris appeals court in theory has two months to decide whether to free him pending an appeals trial, but the delay is usually shorter.
Sarkozy has faced a flurry of legal woes since losing his re-election bid in 2012.
He has been convicted in two separate trials. In one, he served a sentence for graft under house arrest while wearing an electronic ankle tag, which was removed after several months in May, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
In the so-called “Libyan case”, prosecutors said his aides, acting in Sarkozy’s name, struck a deal with the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2005 to illegally fund his victorious presidential election bid two years later.
Investigators believe that in return, Gaddafi was promised help to restore his international image after Tripoli was blamed for the 1988 bombing of a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, and another over Niger in 1989, killing hundreds of passengers.
The court convicted him of criminal conspiracy over the plan.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant, Sarkozy became president in 2007, pledging to shake things up with pro-business reforms that would reinvigorate France’s stagnant economy and elevate the country to the top table of global players, Reuters reports.
Those efforts were quickly upended by the 2008-2009 economic crisis, and voters gave him little credit for raising the retirement age to 62 from 60 and loosening rules requiring a maximum 35-hour work week.
The sentencing of Nicolas Sarkozy reflected a shift in France’s approach to white-collar crime. In the 1990s and 2000s, many convicted politicians avoided prison altogether, Reuters reports.
Despite his legal troubles, Sarkozy’s political influence has proved resilient as French society has shifted to the right.
President Emmanuel Macron, who had warm relations with Sarkozy and Bruni, said on Monday he had met Sarkozy ahead of his incarceration. Justice minister Gérald Darmanin said he would visit him in prison.
That angered left-wing politicians who said Macron and Darmanin were breaching judicial independence.
