Minds

Copies of Indian newspapers onboard an Air India jet that crashed into Mont Blanc in the 1960s have been revealed by melting ice on the mountain’s Bossons glacier

The papers, with headlines from when Indira Gandhi became India’s prime minister, were discovered by Timothée Mottin, who runs a cafe-restaurant, La Cabane du Cerro, at an altitude of 1,350 metres (4,455ft) above the French resort of Chamonix.

Air India flight 101 flew into the Europe’s highest mountain at 8am on 24 January 1966 after a verbal flight control miscommunication, leading to the loss of all 177 passengers and crew, although conspiracy theorists have offered other more lurid explanations.

Relatives of coronavirus victims in Italy have urged the European commission president to supervise an investigation into the deaths, as 100 new cases were submitted to prosecutors on Monday.

In a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, the legal commission of Noi Denunceremo (We Will Denounce), the group driving the investigation, said there appeared to be “signs of unspeakable crimes against humanity” in Lombardy, the region worst hit by the virus in Italy.

Last month, prosecutors in Bergamo, where the virus is estimated to have killed at least 6,000 people, questioned leaders of the Lombardy region and the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, over the failure by authorities to immediately quarantine the towns of Alzano Lombardo and Nembro, both in Bergamo province, and Orzinuovi, in Brescia, despite advice from scientists in early March.

Ten towns in the Lombardy province of Lodi went into lockdown on 21 February after Italy’s first locally transmitted case was confirmed, but Bergamo and Brescia were only quarantined with the rest of Lombardy on 8 March.

“Should prosecutors establish that the missed red zones pertain to the political domain rather than to criminal law, it will be clear how the decision not to contain the spread of the virus by following scientific advice was deliberate – a deliberate decision to sacrifice lives, tens of thousands of lives, to avoid the political repercussions of a lockdown in three economically productive towns in northern Italy,” Noi Denunceremo wrote in the letter.

The commission submitted the first 50 legal complaints in June and is expected to file around 120 more before September.

The groupgathered momentum after starting a Facebook page in April that now has 60,000 members, and it has inspired similar initiatives in the UK, US and France.

“We have so much support … this is a sign that people don’t want to forget what happened,” said Stefano Fusco, who founded Noi Denunceremo after his grandfather died from Covid-19. “They want answers, the truth and justice.”

Paris city hall has promised to fight a government decision to give the go-ahead to a €600m (£540m) redevelopment of Europe’s busiest railway station, the Gare du Nord, described by its opponents as an urban disaster.

“The city will explore all possible political and legal routes to block this project, using all the tools at our disposition,” Emmanuel Grégoire, the deputy mayor for urban development, said on Wednesday. “We will be appealing, obviously.”

Grégoire described the project as “an utter absurdity” and the timescale for its completion as “neither credible nor serious”. Serge Remy, the head of a local residents’ group, said the overhaul was “bad for users and bad for residents”.

Under the plans, the sprawling, 150-year-old station – whose SNCF national services to northern France, international Eurostar and Thalys trains to the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, four suburban RER lines and two Paris Métro lines serve about 700,000 passengers a day – is due to more than triple in size.

Who was Sergei Magnitsky?

Magnitsky was a Moscow lawyer and tax auditor hired to investigate a particularly murky case of corruption. In 2007 a group of interior ministry officials managed to obtain a $230m rebate from the Russian state. They had fraudulently taken over three companies belonging to Hermitage Capital, an asset management firm. Most Hermitage staff fled abroad but Magnitsky stayed in Moscow and figured out the scam. The officials he accused had Magnitsky arrested and thrown in jail, where prison guards beat him up. He died in custody in 2009 after being refused medical treatment or family visits. He was 37.

How did the UK’s Magnitsky law come about?

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, who is running for re-election in the conservative, Catholic EU member, said on Saturday that he wanted the constitution to explicitly forbid the adoption of children by same-sex couples.

He said he planned to propose a constitutional amendment on Monday.

The announcement marked the head of state’s latest reference to gay rights in the electoral campaign, after he stoked controversy by likening “LGBT ideology” to communism before the first round of the vote last month.

“In Poland’s constitution, it should be explicitly stated that anyone in a same-sex relationship is forbidden from adopting a child,” Duda said at a campaign event in the southern town of Szczawno-Zdrój.

“To ensure the safety of the child and a proper upbringing, for the Polish state to safeguard the rights of children … I believe such an entry should exist,” he added.

Duda, who is from the governing nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, said he would sign a presidential draft amendment to the constitution on the matter on Monday and submit it to parliament.

The incumbent and his rival in the run-off next weekend, the centrist Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, are currently polling neck and neck, with opinion surveys divided as to who has the edge.

On Saturday, Trzaskowski told reporters that he is also “against same-sex couples adopting children”.

“I believe that is the stance of most of the political parties … On this particular matter I agree with the president,” he added in the central city of Kalisz.

Trzaskowski is generally seen as favourable to gay rights. He has said he is open to the idea of civil partnerships between same-sex couples, which are currently banned in Poland.

He also signed an “LGBT+ declaration” promising to protect gay people when he was elected mayor of Warsaw.

Just 9% of Poles believe that gay and lesbian couples should have the right to adopt children, according to a 2019 opinion poll by the CBOS institute. Twenty-nine percent support gay marriage.

The UK is assessing whether to join an EU programme to help secure a potential coronavirus vaccine in what could mark a bellwether for post-Brexit cooperation.

In what the Daily Express described as a “Brexit backtrack”, UK officials are thought to be considering the advantages of being part of the EU plan because the bloc would have greater purchasing power to strike deals with multinational drug companies.

The first details of the controversial Brexit checks Boris Johnson insisted would not apply to trade across the Irish Sea have emerged, with mandatory paperwork for businesses in Great Britain supplying goods to Northern Ireland from January.

An HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) document marked “sensitive”, seen by the Guardian, reveals that firms in Great Britain will be obliged to complete three rounds of customs, security and transit forms on all goods.

The electronic documents will need to be completed whether there is a Brexit trade deal or not and will apply to all suppliers.

An 11-page slide presentation from HMRC, outlining the new system, states: “To achieve customs control, we need to ensure that all goods are presented and declared to customs.”

Under a new “Goods Vehicle Movement Service” (GVMS) system, hauliers or the owners of the freight will be obliged to pre-lodge three types of electronic paperwork before getting on a ferry from British ports such as Liverpool or Cairnryan in Scotland to Northern Ireland.

The first paperwork applying to suppliers is an import declaration form setting out the customs code or codes for all the goods being transported to Northern Ireland.

Second, the supplier will have to complete a safety and security declaration, paperwork that is currently waived on all goods being sold within the EU’s single market.

The former French prime minister François Fillon and his Welsh wife, Penelope, were sentenced to jail on Monday for embezzling public funds as part of a “fake jobs” scandal.

A court found the couple guilty of fraud after a trial heard he had paid her and two of the couple’s children about €1m for non-existent jobs as his parliamentary assistants.

In a scathing verdict, the judge said Fillon, 66, who was prime minister under the centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy, had eroded trust in France’s political class.

The court said Mrs Fillon, 64, was paid “the maximum possible” and that the sums were “out of proportion to her activities”.

“Nothing could have justified the remuneration she received,” said Nathalie Gavarino, the leading judge.

Mrs Fillon, née Clarke, from Llanover near Abee.avenny, was also found guilty of having a “fake” job at a French-language monthly literary, cultural and political affairs magazine, Revue des Deux Mondes, run by one of her husband’s friends.

The couple, who have five children, were additionally convicted of employing their two eldest, Marie and Charles, in bogus jobs.

The court sentenced Fillon to five years in jail, three of them suspended, and ordered him to pay a €375,000 fine. He was disbarred from public office for 10 years. His wife was given a three-year suspended sentence. Immediately afterwards, the couple, who had denied the accusations, said they would appeal against the verdict.

A third accused, Marc Jouland, who took over Fillon’s constituency as MP in the Assemblée Nationale while he was prime minister and also “employed” Mrs Fillon, was given a three-year suspended sentence and fined €20,000.

In January 2017, Fillon was on a fast track to become France’s next leader in a presidential election in which he was the clear favourite to win.

The scandal that became known as “Penelopegate” erupted when the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé alleged that the veteran centre-right politician had paid his wife and children out of public funds to work as his assistants. This in itself is neither unusual nor illegal in France, where MPs and ministers can employ members of their own family and have them paid for by the state. The question was: exactly what did Mrs Fillon do?

Fillon insisted his wife had been properly and gainfully employed, opening his letters and helping with vital parliamentary work. However, a recording of an interview with Penelope Fillon published 10 years earlier emerged in which she claimed she did “bits and pieces” for her husband but declared: “I have never actually been his assistant or anything like that. I don’t deal with his communication.”

The accusations were especially damaging as Fillon had campaigned as a clean-hands candidate who had never been embroiled in any wrongdoing or put under investigation.

The incumbent Andrzej Duda won the most votes in Sunday’s Polish presidential election, but fell short of the 50% he needed to win without a second round of voting.

Duda, allied with Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, had received 43.7% of the vote with 99.78% of ballots counted and the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, was in second place on 30.3%.

The results mean Duda and Trzaskowski will go head to head in a second round a fortnight from now, on 12 July, in a vote that will determine Poland’s political future. Polls before Sunday’s vote suggested a runoff between the two candidates would be too close to call.