Read the daily news to learn English

Kyiv attacks death toll rises to 20 as Russia warns it will ‘continue to increase pressure’ on Ukrainian capital – Europe live

Romanian president Nicușor Dan has condemned the Russian “reckless and irresponsible” attack on Kyiv overnight. In a post on X, he said: “Our condolences and deepest thoughts of compassion go out to the Ukrainian people and all the affected families. We also wish a swift recovery to the wounded. Russia has demonstrated once again that it does not want peace and is not engaging in reasonable behaviour to advance toward a comprehensive security situation. Romania will support Ukraine for as long as it takes to defend its freedom.”

At least nine monks killed in Thailand after boy drives truck into procession

An 11-year-old boy has driven his parents’ truck into a Buddhist procession in Thailand, killing at least nine monks. CCTV footage shared by a local rescue group showed the moment the monks, wearing orange robes, were run over as they walked in procession along a road. The timestamp on the footage was shortly before 11am local time on Thursday. The incident occurred in the town of Mukdahan in the country’s north-east, about 400 miles (650km) from the capital, Bangkok. The governor of Mukdahan province, ‌Vorayan Bunarat, said a group of 34 Buddhist monks and five lay followers had been undertaking a ⁠pilgrimage from a temple in the province to another in neighbouring Ubon ‌Ratchathani. Images from the scene showed people lying injured and the monks’ possessions strewn across the road. Buddhist monks are highly venerated in Thailand, where more than 93% of the population are followers of the religion. Monks often hold public processions and are widely seen receiving alms of goodwill from the public. Signage on public transport asks people to provide seats to monks as well as elderly and pregnant passengers. Bunarat said five monks had died ‌at the scene and three in hospital. The Mukdahan provincial office later announced the death of a ninth monk. At least three others were critically injured. Police said the boy had taken his parents’ pickup truck without permission and had driven it for about 6 miles (10km) when he lost control of the vehicle and crashed into the monks. The provincial police ⁠chief, Maj Gen Pairoj Thaiphutra, said the force had not filed any charges as investigators were still trying to establish the circumstances of the crash. Officers had not yet ‌been able to question the boy because he remained in a state of shock and was unable to provide a statement, he added. Deadly transport accidents are common in Thailand, which has one of the worst road safety records in the world, with speeding, drink-driving and weak law enforcement all contributing factors. Bunarat said: “We’ve been very strict on road safety in recent years. This case should be a lesson, not just for our province, but for the public in general when it comes to preventing road accidents. “I think everyone involved, especially parents, needs to help, because no one wants something like this to happen.” Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

‘I can still hear the children’: Canada’s residential schools survivors welcome chance to reclaim sites

In the foyer of the former Mohawk Institute residential school, a plaque makes a request to visitors: help us identify unnamed survivors. “We do not know the names of some of the people in the photos used in the exhibition. If you recognize someone, please share that information.” Similar requests are dotted throughout the museum, near photographs of the First Nations children who attended the school. Some show the youngsters labouring outdoors in identical colourless clothing; others show them back home with family members. For most of its existence – from 1828 to 1970 – the building in Brantford, Ontario, about 100km south-east of Toronto, was part of a network of institutions set up under a policy to “eliminate” First Nations in Canada as a distinct cultural group. Conditions were brutal: children were punished – and sometimes beaten with a strap – for speaking Indigenous languages. Meals consisted of watery oatmeal; one survivor described being beaten for picking an apple to eat. Those who tried to escape were kept in solitary confinement for days. Sexual abuse by school staff was rampant. Last year, the building reopened its doors as a museum, with the mission of documenting both the realities of the residential school system and the long shadow cast by Canada’s colonial structures. During the 140 years the school was in operation, thousands of children passed through its doors. The museum is still attempting to identify those who appear in the photographs in its collection, but it is likely that many will go unnamed. Across the country, survivors of the residential schools continue to make decisions on what to do with the physical spaces where horrific events took place. That question has been raised all over the world, from Poland – where the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau has been transformed into a museum and memorial – to Cambodia, where a notorious interrogation centre has been turned into a museum on the Khmer Rouge genocide. In Brantford, survivors voted in 2013 to reclaim the school site. “I am really grateful that the decision was made to keep the building,” said Heather George, the executive director of the Woodland Cultural centre, an Indigenous education centre that owns the school site. George says everything the centre does – from Indigenous art and languages, to social dancing and opening the school as a museum is a form of protest against the goals of the residential school system. Most days, students from local schools visit the centre to learn about what happened at the institute. The metamorphosis of the Mohawk Institute is all the more notable for coming amid what academics and activists describe as a “backsliding” in reconciliation: residential school deniers downplay the abuses of the residential schools, arguing that the institutions benefited Indigenous children. Meanwhile, the sovereignty of First Nations has come under increasing threat from new fast-tracked infrastructure legislation. Indigenous groups complain that they have not been properly consulted by federal and provincial governments over major construction projects. Sean Carleton, an Indigenous studies professor at the University of Manitoba, said commemoration could be used as a tool of public education. “If we look at other contexts of genocide, commemoration has played a really important role in facilitating that public awareness to combat things like denialism,” he said. Canada has close to 140 former residential school sites across the country – the last one closed only in 1997. Another site in Ontario, the Shingwauk residential schools centre, has also become an education centre. But at other former school sites, such as the Lower Post residential school on the Yukon-BC border, survivors have voted for the building to be torn down. Doug George-Kanentiio, now in his early 70s, is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk nation and a survivor of the Mohawk Institute. In 1967, he was kidnapped from his home by federal employees, made a ward of the state without his parents’ consent, and confined in the school for more than a year. Today, he works at the museum as an educator, talking to visitors about his experience. He recalls playing with the asbestos wrapped around the heating ducts with other boys. The water they drank flowed through lead pipes. They were malnourished because of the oatmeal diet, and would often get sick. Behind the boiler room in the school, and also sometimes in the headmaster’s office, children were sexually assaulted. George-Kanentiio argues that to understand the residential school system people need to be immersed in what he calls “the horrors of what human beings do to each other”. “That way there’s understanding, it gives us the best facility to enlighten people,” he said. “Why do I keep coming back? The basic reason is, inside the confines of that building, there are still remnants. There’s still children that are held, their spirits imprisoned,” he said. In 2021, ground penetrating radar used at the sites of former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan identified more than 1,000 “anomalies” that some experts suspect could indicate unmarked graves. Both church and government records, alongside the testimony of survivors of the schools, have long shown that children died at the sites across Canada and their remains have been left behind. Communities are debating whether to excavate those sites. In 2007, the Canadian federal government asked survivors to come forward and recount their experiences at the schools, if they wanted to receive compensation. It was called a Common Experience Payment. But survivors like George-Kanentiio say people were often denied compensation due to a lack of “proof”. Speaking of the Mohawk Institute, George-Kanentiio said: “How do you expect an 11 or 12-year-old kid to have evidence that they were sodomised?” Displaying what happened inside the museum makes these stories harder to erase, he says. “I can still hear the echoing of the children as they go up the stairwell. And I can still hear the remnants of the predators who used that same stairwell,” he said.

Vatican excommunicates all members of ultra-conservative rebel group SSPX

The Vatican has excommunicated a rebel group of ultra-conservative Catholics who defied Pope Leo by ordaining bishops without his consent, creating a schism in the Roman Catholic church. In a statement on Thursday, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who heads the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the group from the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), founded in the Swiss village of Ecône in 1970, had “committed an act of a schismatic nature” which, under canon law, is punishable with automatic excommunication. The Vatican went further than expected and said that all priests of the SSPX and all Catholics who “adhere formally” to the group were in schism and excommunicated. A schism is a term to indicate a severe, formal rupture within the church. Andrea Vreede, Vatican correspondent for NOS, the Dutch public radio and TV network, said: “The Vatican hopes that by being harsh on the bishops, the priests and faithful, maybe some of them will repent and turn back to mother church. Because it’s not nice to be excommunicated.” Pope Leo had made a last-ditch effort to persuade the society to halt the ordinations, which took place during a ritual-filled ceremony on Wednesday, calling them a “schismatic act” and a “sin of extreme gravity”. But the society said the ordination of bishops who “are entirely faithful” to the Catholic church’s “tradition” was “a sacred duty”. An estimated 16,500 people flocked to Ecône for the ceremony, including members of Forza Nuova, an Italian neofascist political party, and Futuro Nazionale, a new far-right force threatening the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s chances of winning a second mandate in general elections next year. Despite being a splinter group, the SSPX, which has nearly 1,500 priests, seminarians and other vocational members, has made strides in attracting a following estimated at 150,000-200,000 people around the world, especially in the US, France and Argentina. The society rejects central changes that emerged from the Second Vatican Council – a landmark Vatican gathering of cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, theological experts and others between 1962 and 1965 – including allowing mass to be celebrated in local languages. Until then it had been said only in Latin. It also rejects dialogue with other religions and does not recognise other Christian churches. “It’s a very minor group but they are very loud and very ultra-right,” said Vreede. The ordinations mark the first significant crisis for Leo. Since he was elected in May last year, the first North American pope has made church unity a priority and has worked especially hard to heal rifts with traditionalists, which had deepened during the papacy of his predecessor, Francis. The society has pursued the ordinations for three reasons, said Vreede. First, with only two ageing bishops left, the order needed new ones. It bided its time after Leo was elected and, seeing that he wore the classic papal vestments and revived the tradition of going to the summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, close to Rome, had hoped he would be more tolerant of them than Francis was, only to discover he mostly followed in his predecessor’s footsteps. Last, the order is hoping it can gain traction from the global far-right resurgence. “The world is so much turning towards extremism, and they think they might flourish with that,” added Vreede, who expects Leo to continue to prioritise unity and not try to appease the traditionalists. The clash is the first between the Vatican and the SSPX since 1988, when Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the society’s founder, and four bishops he had ordained without the permission of the then pope, John Paul II, were excommunicated, including a British bishop, Richard Williamson. In 2009, the conservative Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications. Shortly before, Williamson had caused uproar by denying the Holocaust. “Leo will be very unhappy about [what’s happened], but he saw it as inevitable,” she added. “It has happened in the past and it might happen again. It’s a nuisance but it won’t damage him. It’s not a very importance schism and I think people will appreciate his coherence.”

Côte d’Ivoire floods kill 59 as west Africa endures torrential rains

Floods in Côte d’Ivoire have killed 59 people since May, the communication minister told a cabinet meeting in Abidjan. There are fears the toll could further rise as rescue teams continue to search for victims during the rainy season, which runs from May until July, the minister, Amadou Coulibaly, added. The deaths are the latest in coastal west Africa, which is enduring relentless, deadly rains that authorities predict could intensify in the coming days. Footage emerged on social media of neighbourhoods submerged in water as residents waded through in search of drier areas. In neighbouring Ghana, at least 13 people have died even as more than 400 others were rescued on Tuesday, the Ghana fire service said. The president, John Mahama, posted on X that the downpour had been approximately 140mm of rain”, significantly higher than the “highest single-day rainfall recorded last year [of] about 56mm”. Authorities say the floods have become deadlier as climate breakdown exacerbates the frequency and impact of extreme weather. Despite Africa contributing only minimally to greenhouse gas emissions, the World Meteorological Organisation has said the continent is especially vulnerable to extreme weather events. However, the impact of poor waste management and urban population growth on existing infrastructure has also been acknowledged as a factor. After an aerial tour of affected areas on Monday, Mahama explained that Accra was built between the Akwapim mountain range and the Atlantic Ocean, which was not a problem when it had been a small city. “As the population continues to increase and people continue to build, it restricts the path of the streams on the way to the Atlantic … there is also human behaviour [of] dumping garbage in the drains … Even in the air, we discovered many illicit dumping sites where wetlands are,” he added. In Accra and the nearby city of Tema, rains submerged buildings and roads, cutting off access. In some areas fires started after electrical installations were flooded. Floods also hit parts of Benin, Togo and Nigeria, with no confirmed casualties. In Lagos, Nigeria, where several islands are connected to a large mainland area, flooding halted operations at a transmission substation, disrupting electricity supply to several neighbourhoods. The Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) has predicted “above normal” rainfall in Abuja and nine states this year. Some of the states are in the north, which experienced what was described as the worst flood in 60 years last year. Between last December and February, southern and northern Africa were similarly affected by deadly floods.

‘Like good Mexicans, we laugh’: the cartoonist drawing humour from Sinaloa’s brutal drug cartels

Spare a thought for the mid-level narco. What to do with all the bodies? Where to find a corrupt cop worth his salt? And how to catch the eye of that former beauty queen? Such are the struggles of El Ñacas and El Tacuachi, the two sicarios – cartel gunmen – who are the stars of a cartoon that has been satirising the underworld of Mexico’s Sinaloa state for two decades, even as the reality has darkened by the day. “Here in Sinaloa we’ve always lived with drug trafficking – you know if you honk your horn at the wrong truck someone with an AK-47 might get out,” said Ricardo Sánchez Bobadilla, the cartoon’s creator. “Still, like good Mexicans, we laugh at the situation we live in.” The drug trade first took root in Sinaloa more than a century ago, and today its homegrown cartel ranks among the most powerful organised crime groups in the world. Bobadilla grew up in the state capital, Culiacán, so when he became a cartoonist he had the ideal subject matter to hand: something ripe for social commentary, and a bottomless well of black humour. Still, in his home studio, with a chihuahua nestled in his lap, Bobadilla seems extraordinarily laid back for someone in his line of work. “My neighbours must think I’m a kept man,” he laughed. The cartoon debuted almost 20 years ago in an irreverent magazine called La Locha, with El Ñacas, the lanky one with ideas, and El Tacuachi, the stumpy sidekick who admires him, figuring out where to hide a body so no one would find it. They end up wedging it into a seat in Congress with one arm pinned up, voting for every proposal. When La Locha disappeared after nine issues the cartoon was picked up by Ríodoce, a local newspaper, where it has run every week since. Over the years Bobadilla has populated his cartoon universe with a cast of narco-archetypes, from kingpins and politicians to alucines and buchonas – wannabe narcos and glamorous girlfriends – all speaking vividly vulgar Sinaloan slang. There’s the grizzled sicario who can’t stop weeping after the death of Juan Gabriel, the Mexican pop diva. The old man who cheats death again and again as sicarios are seduced by his daughters. The schoolfriend who haunts El Ñacas not for murdering him, but for burying him in a cheap outfit. Narcos don’t always take kindly to being mocked – but Bobadilla has always avoided naming names. Even so, thinking back to his early work, he winces. “Maybe my frontal lobe was a bit less developed back then,” he said. El Ñacas was created around the time that Mexico’s then president, Felipe Calderón, declared “war on drugs”, sending the army to engage the cartels and ultimately unleashing a surge of violence across the country. “That’s when decapitated heads started getting left in public,” said Bobadilla. In Sinaloa, the violence has in some way touched almost everyone – including Bobadilla, whose brother, Miguel, was shot dead outside his home in 2008. Bobadilla remembers going to the prosecutor’s office. “And the guy there asked me: ‘Are you rich? Do you have powerful friends? No? In that case don’t push this, because they will kill you.’ “But I knew who killed my brother – and not much later they were killed themselves,” he said. “I guess justice arrived another way.” The death of his brother changed his work – as did the murder of Javier Valdez, his friend and editor at Ríodoce, in 2017. “When they kill a journalist, it muzzles all of us a bit,” said Bobadilla, leafing through a notebook with sketches of Valdez and Humberto Millán, a Sinaloa radio host who was abducted and murdered in 2011. “In all the newspapers where I’ve worked, someone has been murdered, or at least shot.” The older generation of the Sinaloa cartel are themselves mostly dead or in US prisons. But for the past two years their sons have been fighting a war that has left more than 6,000 people dead or missing – and then, in April, the US government accused the governor of Sinaloa and nine other current and former high-level officials of ties to the cartel. Bobadilla says the current war is the most “vicious” he has experienced. Yet Sinaloa’s journalists and cartoonists continue to cover it – and El Ñacas and El Tacuachi have, in their way, been living through it, too. “When something horrible happens – which is almost every day – I try not to make fun of it soon after,” said Bobadilla. “Like Woody Allen said, tragedy needs a certain distance for us to find it funny.”

Russia ‘mounted drone surveillance of European nuclear sites over 18 months’

The Kremlin orchestrated a concerted surveillance campaign using drones launched from shadow fleet vessels over an 18-month period which targeted nuclear sites in the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, researchers have said. Analysis by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) of 144 incidents in more than a dozen countries beginning in late 2024 concluded Russian intelligence had operated with “substantial impunity”, leaving authorities across Europe flat-footed and confused. Drones were repeatedly spotted over airbases and airports, yet none were captured or shot down by western militaries, exposing a strategic failure in Nato air defences that the thinktank said had been quietly acknowledged across Europe. RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, a UK base that was being prepared to house US nuclear weapons, and France’s nuclear submarine base at Île Longue in Brittany were among the sites targeted by unarmed drones believed to have been launched at sea. European governments have been reluctant to accuse Russia of being behind the incidents, but Charlie Edwards, a senior IISS fellow, said “every government we spoke to said they would welcome the report being published”. The incidents analysed include: • Unusual drones flew low into RAF Lakenheath, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and at least two other US air force bases in England in late November 2024. US nuclear weapons were deployed at Lakenheath in July 2025. The drones may have been piloted from the Seasons 1 tanker in the North Sea near Essex, or the Hav Dolphin , a cargo vessel that was docked at Hull at the time of the incidents. The Hav Dophin was also suspected of being behind drone sightings at a submarine base in northern Germany the following May. A police helicopter attempted to track drones flying into the UK on one occasion but pulled back for safety reasons. Firing an anti-drone laser “was suggested but ultimately not progressed”, the report said. • Five drones were detected over France’s Île Longue base, home to the country’s sea-launched nuclear missile arsenal, in December 2025. Three Russia-linked shadow fleet vessels were between 60 and 120 miles (100 to 200km) off shore, and the Hav Dolphin was 220 miles away near the Isle of Wight. • Drone incursions in November and December 2025 over Kleine-Brogel airbase in Belgium and Volkel in the Netherlands, where air-launched US nuclear weapons are stored, at a time when Russia-linked shadow fleet vessels were in international waters in the North Sea. Drones were likely to have been launched from “dark sailing” vessels operating off the coast of target countries with their transponder tracking devices switched off, the report said. Other ships are thought to have acted as recovery vessels or signal repeaters using drone control techniques first learned during the war in Ukraine. “It is our assessment that it is highly likely that the Kremlin conducted a coordinated UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] campaign over Europe” spanning more than a dozen Nato countries and Ireland, Edwards said. It represented “a series of tactical successes for the Kremlin” and “a strategic failure of allied defences” which were designed for conventional military threats rather than low-cost, low-flying and relatively small drones, he said. Russian motivations are considered to be a mixture of nuclear surveillance, general reconnaissance, mapping military logistics and supply chains and “economic attrition and psychological warfare”, he said. Significant drone sightings across Europe peaked last year at more than 30 in September and again in November, with the most occurring in Germany. They appeared to have fallen off since European navies began to seize shadow fleet vessels in 2026. Other incidents include a series of drone sightings in September 2025 in Denmark that forced the closure of Copenhagen airport and others in the country. Four shadow fleet tankers were sailing near Denmark at the time, including the Boracay, which French commandos seized four days later. The Boracay was released a few days later, but the boarding revealed that the tanker had a Chinese captain and two Russian nationals employed by the Moran Security Group, a Russian private military company. “The identification of two Russian private military contractors confirmed the militarisation of shadow fleet tankers, not as hypothesis but as operational practice,” the IISS report said – in a campaign that it is believed to have been orchestrated by the GRU, Russia’s main foreign military intelligence agency. The researchers also suggested four drones had been spotted flying over an Irish navy ship towards the country’s coast in December 2025, on the evening after a visit by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Maltese-flagged Vezhen was sailing about 30 miles north-east of Dublin. Swedish authorities had detained the vessel in January 2025 in connection with damage to an undersea fibre-optic cable but released it after the incident was deemed to have been accidental. Several drone models are believed to have been used in the campaign, though none have been confirmed. The Orlan-10, a reconnaissance drone, has an operating range of 300 miles and can fly for about 12 hours, allowing it to be launched and piloted at a considerable distance from targets.