Science

French judges have ordered two men to stand trial for the brutal 2018 killing of an elderly Jewish woman that prompted an outcry over a rise in antisemitic acts.

Mireille Knoll, 85 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was stabbed in her Paris apartment by attackers who later set her body on fire, apparently to hide evidence of their crime.

She had escaped the mass deportation of Jews from France during the second world war by fleeing abroad.

Liam Fox, Britain’s former international trade secretary, will be nominated by the UK to be the next head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the government’s Department for International Trade has confirmed.

Fox was a cabinet minister in Theresa May’s government between July 2016 and July 2019, and has been a Conservative MP since 1992.

He is known as a prominent supporter of Brexit, and said in a 2017 interview that the UK’s free trade deal with the EU after leaving should be the “easiest in human history”.

The government described Fox as “the ideal candidate” to lead the WTO and listed his attributes including his advocacy for multilateralism, his “decades of experience in global politics, as well as first-hand experience of running a trade ministry” and his belief that global prosperity and security are underpinned by rules-based free trade.

Chechens in Europe have expressed renewed fears for their safety, after a strident critic of the Kremlin-backed Chechnya leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot dead in Vienna on Saturday.

“Everyone is scared. We all left to find safety and forget about home, and they find you and shoot you like a dog,” said a Chechen man who has received asylum in Austria and asked to remain anonymous, shortly after attending a wake for the dead man in Vienna on Monday afternoon.

Saturday’s attack was the latest in a string of brazen killings of critics of Kadyrov, or Chechens with a background in the anti-Russian insurgency, in locations across Europe. It was the fourth violent attack on Chechens living inside the European Union in the past year, three of which ended in murder.

Austrian police have named the victim as 43-year-old “Martin B”, but Austrian media, as well as friends and associates, identified him as Mamikhan Umarov, who was widely known online as “Anzor from Vienna”. He posted foul-mouthed tirades against Kadyrov on YouTube.

Umarov was shot three times on Saturday near a shopping centre on the outskirts of Vienna. Austrian police later apprehended a suspect, also a Chechen man, in the town of Linz. Another Chechen is also in custody. Both have lived in Austria for many years, according to prosecutors. A spokesman for the prosecutors’ office said it had not yet been established whether there was a political motive behind the killing.

In a statement on Monday, Austrian police said the victim had declined police protection, though did not specify when, or why it was offered. A friend of Umarov’s, a Chechen man living in Austria who asked to remain anonymous, said Umarov had in fact agreed to have a 24-hour police patrol stationed outside his house in order to protect his wife and children, after reporting a credible threat on his life in recent months.

“If you went to his house, the police would check your documents, they were always there. But he didn’t want personal security, he turned it down. I told him that it was dangerous, that it was crazy he was going around on his own,” said the friend.

Umarov told friends he left Chechnya in 2005, fearful of attacks against those like himself who had worked in the structures of the briefly independent Chechnya in the late 1990s, before Russia reasserted control after a brutal bombing campaign and installed Kadyrov’s father as head of the republic.

Kadyrov took over in 2007 after his father was killed in a bomb attack, and has been accused of rights abuses, torture, the rounding up of gay men, assassinations of rivals and critics, and revenge attacks on their family members. He has denied the allegations, though frequently makes public threats against his enemies.

Umarov was reportedly given the new identity Martin Beck when he received asylum in Austria, and claimed to be working as an informant for the Austrian security services. He was a witness in the murder in Vienna in 2009 of Umar Israilov, who fled Chechnya and made allegations about Kadyrov’s personal involvement in torture.

“Anzor met with people who came from Chechnya who wanted to plan hits and recorded them, and then handed the recordings over to Austrian intelligence. He claimed he had been working with them for the past decade,” said the friend.

In recent months, Umarov had gone public, posting a series of foul-mouthed monologues on his YouTube channel, criticising Kadyrov. In one video, recorded outside Bratislava airport, Umarov spends several minutes insulting Kadyrov in obscene terms, calling him “the head prostitute of Chechnya” and insulting his parents. He also dared Kadyrov to find him and kill him.

The Chechens targeted in Europe appear to break down into two broad categories: some are outspoken anti-Kadyrov bloggers, while others have a history of supporting the insurgency, which morphed over the years from an independence movement into a more Islamist organisation that used terrorist methods.

In the latter cases, such as the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin last August, Russian federal forces may be involved. Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen of Chechen origin who had fought against Russian forces in the early 2000s, was shot dead in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten. German authorities accused the Russian government of being behind the hit and expelled two Russian diplomats.

In cases where the victims are noisy critics of Kadyrov, the evidence trail seems to point towards Grozny rather than Moscow. In January, 44-year-old blogger Imran Aliev, known as Old Mansur, was murdered in a hotel room in Lille. He had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck.

A few weeks later, the well-known Chechen blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov reportedly attacked in Sweden, but was able to overpower his attacker. He posted a video online of him standing over the bloodied body of his assailant. “They have my mother,” the man said, when questioned. A year before, the head of the Chechen parliament, Magomed Daudov, known as Kadyrov’s right-hand man, had publicly declared a “blood feud” against Abdurakhmanov.

France’s new prime minister, Jean Castex, has made few major changes to the cabinet after President Emmanuel Macron gambled on a reshuffle to reboot his presidency and tighten his grip on government before seeking re-election in 2022.

The Élysée Palace had promised “new faces and talents”, but key ministers from the outgoing government stayed, including the centre-right Bruno Le Maire at economic affairs and finance and Jean-Yves Le Drian, a former Socialist, at foreign affairs.

Health minister Olivier Véran, who helped lead France’s response to the pandemic, also kept his job, as did Florence Parly at defence.

But the interior minister, Christophe Castaner, widely criticised for his handling of the anti-government gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protest and protests over police brutality, was replaced by accounts minister Gérald Darmanin.

An MP from Macron’s centrist La République en Marche (LREM) party, Barbara Pompili, was promoted to the environment portfolio, a major priority for the last two years of Macron’s term, and a high-profile criminal defence lawyer was appointed to justice.

Analysts said Castex, a relatively unknown career bureaucrat and provincial mayor who successfully ran France’s exit from its coronavirus lockdown, would now need to move decisively to convince voters he was the right choice for the job.

The 55-year-old was named successor to the popular Édouard Philippe on Friday as Macron seeks a fresh start. The country faces a deep recession forecast to shrink its economy by 11%, wiping out any gains from the pro-business reforms he pushed through in the first three years of his term.

The president tweeted on Sunday that he was aiming for a “new path” focused on “reviving the economy, continuing to overhaul social and environmental protections, re-establishing a fair republican order and defending European sovereignty”.

Observers have said that by replacing Philippe with Castex, who also hails from the centre-right Les Républicains (LR) party, Macron had taken a high-stakes gamble on taking fuller control of government in the final two years of his presidency.

With most of Macron’s efforts since 2017 to create jobs, boost investment and relax labour likely “to be buried by an avalanche of bad news”, the president “has decided, in effect, to be his own prime minister for the last two years of his mandate”, said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Castex, who speaks with a marked south-west accent that the Élysée Palace hopes will connect with ordinary people, “will be the manager and de facto chief of staff, while Macron takes direct control of government in a lightning attempt to create a new record which he can present to the electorate in 2022”, Rahman said.

Bruno Cautrès, a researcher at the Cevipof thinktank, told French radio the president needed to move fast. “He is 60% through his mandate,” Cautrès said. “He has very little time to translate his policies into concrete differences in people’s daily lives.”

The new prime minister “will have to shift up a gear, especially on the economy, against a likely context this autumn of rising unemployment, young people arriving on the labour market … He has to show this change of prime minister was useful.”

Many analysts had predicted that Macron would choose his new prime minister from the more leftwing, pro-ecology side of French politics, especiallyafter a disappointing LREM performance in local elections last month.

Much of the French left feels the president, having promised a politics that was “neither of the right nor of the left”, has drifted rightwards since sweeping to victory in presidential and parliamentary elections in 2017.

But centre-right voters have, in the main, applauded his firm handling of the gilets jaunes protests and supported LREM in last year’s European election. “He is counting on them, it seems to me, for re-election in 2022,” Jean Garrigues, a political scientist at the University of Orleans, told Agence France-Presse.

LREM failed to win a single major municipality in the local elections, with the Greens seizing control of several of France’s biggest cities, depriving the president of a powerful local power base before 2022. The most notable win was Philippe’s convincing victory in his Normandy bastion of Le Havre, from where he could emerge as a potential Macron rival in years to come.

Campaigners are calling for an advertising boycott of Facebook in the US to be extended to Europe, after its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, dismissed the effects of the campaign in a meeting with staff.

A growing number of companies have halted advertising on Facebook after criticism that the platform was not doing enough to counter hate speech on its sites.

Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the British nonprofit the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said: “There’s a very strong argument to be made that advertisers should be boycotting Facebook in Europe as well.

Italy is carrying out tests on 180 migrants rescued in the Mediterranean with a view to transferring them to a quarantine vessel in Sicily, an interior ministry source has said.

The migrants have been on the Ocean Viking ship operated by SOS Méditerranée for over a week, with fights and suicide attempts onboard prompting the charity to declare a state of emergency on Friday.

A medical team sent by authorities in Pozzallo, Sicily “ascertained the absence of particular health problems and also reported that some tensions that had been registered on the ship are being overcome”, the ministry source said on Saturday.

The medical team is testing the migrants for the Covid-19 virus after which they will be transferred to a quarantine ship currently in Porto Empedocle, also in Sicily.

“The situation is carefully monitored in view of the transhipment of migrants, scheduled for Monday 6 July, on the Moby Zaza ship,” the source said.

The Ocean Viking, which has been in limbo in the Mediterranean south of Sicily, has been waiting for permission from Italy or Malta to offload the migrants at a safe port.

Tensions have risen in the past week, as witnessed by an AFP reporter aboard the boat, as migrants have become increasingly desperate to reach land. Others have become distraught at not being able to telephone their families to let them know they were safe.

SOS Méditerranée said in a statement on Saturday: “The only assistance proposed has been a visit by a medical doctor and a cultural mediator who spoke to the survivors but are not in a position to present a solution for their disembarkation.”

The migrants, which include Pakistanis, north Africans, Eritreans, Nigerians and others, were picked up after fleeing Libya in four separate rescues by the Ocean Viking on 25 and 30 June.

The migrants include 25 minors, most of whom are unaccompanied by adults, and two women, one of whom is pregnant.

More than 100,000 migrants tried to cross the Mediterranean last year with more than 1,200 dying in the attempt, according to the International Organization for Migration.

French people have chosen Hunspach, which was once part of Sweden, as their favourite village of 2020.

The Alsace village of 652 inhabitants, on France’s eastern border with Germany, was selected in a TV poll of 700,000 viewers.

At least half the Hunspachois, as they are known, turned out in the centre of the village to celebrate the result, relayed via a giant screen on Wednesday evening.

Viewers said they had chosen Hunspach for its picturesque black and white half-timbered houses – similar to British Tudor architecture. Many of them have baroque-era convex glass windows, allowing inhabitants to see out without being seen.

Guide books describe Hunspach, also a stop on the Haguenau to Wissembourg railway, as “peaceful”, but it is unlikely to remain so for long. In 2013, Eguisheim, also in Alsace, was voted favourite village and promptly attracted hundreds of thousands tourists.

Hunspach is situated in north-east Alsace near the German border, in the northern part of the Vosges nature park, near the Fort de Schoenenbourg, one of the largest structures of the Maginot Line.

The village was first mentioned in a document in 1298. During the Reformation it became a Protestant village and in 1619 came under Swedish administration. After being attacked and destroyed by imperial troops in 1633 it was repopulated by immigrants from Switzerland. In 1787, Sweden handed the village back to the French crown.

The entire Alsace region was annexed to the new German empire in 1871 after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. But in 1918, after Germany’s defeat in the first world war, Alsace was handed back to France under the treaty of Versailles. The region was occupied by Germany again during the second world war when inhabitants were ordered to become German citizens under Nazi decree.

Until now, Hunspach was best known for its annual Fête du Folklore, held during the last weekend in spring. The annual France’s Favourite Village competition is a showcase for little-known communes in France to encourage tourism.

After months in self-isolation, he’s back. Vladimir Lenin, embalmed and entombed, has reopened to the Russian public, luring bold tourists back to Red Square and down a steep set of mausoleum stairs to his resting place for most of the last 96 years.

From early on Wednesday morning, a queue of dozens of people stretched around the mausoleum, past the Kremlin walls and up to the red-bricked historical museum. To see the preserved corpse of the former Soviet leader you must wear a mask, gloves, and pass a temperature check. Inside, visitors reported a pungent smell of cleaning solution, perhaps due to a recent sanitisation.

Coming after a three-month break due to the coronavirus pandemic, attendance was subdued. “I’ve never seen the queue so short,” said one young mother, who was taking her daughter and friends from out of town for the first time. It is joked of as a tourist trap. “Muscovites never come here without visitors [from out of town].”

The reopening is another sign that life is getting back to normal in Russia, if normal means displaying a leader who died in 1924 in a glass case to tourists. In a year that has been dominated by coronavirus and a vote to reset Vladimir Putin’s terms as president, the age-old debate over what to do with the Soviet founder’s remains seems quaint, though still divisive.

“I always think how much longer are we going to get to joke about this,” said Ivan Urgant, a late-night television comedian. “Turns out there are more and more places in Moscow opening up where we can spend time with our families.”

The cramped mausoleum’s hasty reopening, even as theatres and cinemas remain closed, however, seemed another instance of Russia’s rushed exit from its coronavirus lockdown.

Already, restrictions have been lifted for political reasons: to hold a military parade marking Victory Day and then a nationwide vote to amend the constitution and allow Putin to run for reelection until 2036. The vote, which ends on Wednesday, would leave the president in power longer than Stalin (whose body was also on display alongside Lenin’s until 1961).

“Even Lenin’s self-isolation regime was cancelled so that he’d vote for the amendments,” joked Anecdotes from Russia, a popular social media account with 1.4 million followers.

Outside, police officers detained eight activists, including members of Pussy Riot, who protested against the vote by lying down on Red Square and using their bodies to spell out “2036”, the year Putin’s sixth term as president could end if he wins the vote as expected.

The mausoleum on Red Square has seen several controversies during the coronavirus lockdown.

Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist party leader who has run and lost in four presidential elections since 1996, and dozens of his supporters defied a shelter-in-place order in mid-April to lay carnations at Lenin’s mausoleum on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Key test flights that could help revive the grounded Boeing 737 Max began on Monday after being given the green light by US regulators, more than a year after the plane was banned from the skies.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Monday confirmed the manufacturer was carrying out a series of certification flights to check changes made to flawed software by Boeing.

Boeing 737 Max planes have been grounded since March 2019 after design flaws led to two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. Since then Boeing, previously the world’s largest planemaker, has been scrambling to implement fixes to allow its bestselling plane to fly again.

A Russian mining giant said on Sunday it had suspended workers at a metals plant who were responsible for pumping wastewater into nearby Arctic tundra.

Independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta published videos from the scene showing large metal pipes carrying wastewater from the reservoir and dumping foaming liquid among nearby trees.

A source told Interfax news agency on Sunday that about 6,000 cubic metres of liquid used to process minerals at the facility had been dumped, and that the discharge had lasted “several hours”.

Norilsk Nickel cited a “flagrant violation of operating rules” in a statement announcing it had suspended employees responsible for dumping wastewater from a dangerously full reservoir into the natural environment.

The incident occurred at the Talnakh enrichment plant near the Arctic city of Norilsk, the company said.

It comes a month an unprecedented fuel leak at one of the company’s subsidiary plants near Norilsk saw President Vladimir Putin declare a state of emergency. More than 21,000 tonnes of diesel leaked from a fuel storage tank, with the fuel seeping into the soil and dying nearby waterways bright red.