A fire ripped through a hotel in New Delhi on Wednesday, killing at least 21 people, many of them foreign nationals, police and local media said.
The fire broke out in the morning at Flourish Stay, a bed-and-breakfast in a congested neighbourhood in the south of the city, Delhi Police said in a statement.
“It is with profound sorrow that 21 persons have been declared dead in this tragic incident,” police said.
Several of those killed were foreigners, mainly from Central Asia and Africa, the Press Trust of India news agency reported, quoting unnamed officials.
Indian-origin Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi has hit back at Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe after he called for a ban on carrying the Sikh ceremonial kirpan in public spaces following the murder of British-Polish teenager Henry Nowak.Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough and one of Britain’s most prominent Sikh politicians, accused Lowe of targeting an entire community.”I was born and raised here. Countless brave Sikh soldiers died for Britain, proudly wearing their turban and kirpan,” Dhesi wrote on X.”Thankfully, Rupert and Restore don’t get to decide what is British.
Police issue warning over ‘extremely dangerous’ sewers as men emerge from manholes (Image: NC)
Police in New York have issued an urgent warning after mystery men were spotted climbing in and out of sewers through manholes, prompting fears that copycats could put themselves at serious risk. Officials say there have been at least three known incidents involving people entering the city’s vast underground sewer network since early May.
While no injuries have been reported, authorities described the activity as both illegal and “extremely dangerous”, warning that those venturing underground could face deadly hazards. A spokesperson for New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection said sewers contain numerous risks, including toxic gases, unstable surfaces, flooding and confined spaces.
An 18-year-old British boy was walking home from a pub in December when he was brutally stabbed by a Sikh man. Henry Nowak was mortally wounded, but what happened in the moments before he would ultimately succumb to his injuries is even more appalling. Police pinned Nowak down and began to handcuff him as he cried out for help all because his attacker accused him of racism.
Video footage from Nowak’s phone on December 3, 2025 shows him saying “Hello car” as he walks, before singing to himself. Eventually, Vickrum Digwa is seen in the video walking away from Nowak, with Nowak heard saying “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.” Notably, prosecutors said Digwa was wearing his knife “openly displayed over his clothing.”
Digwa replied “I am a bad man.” Digwa would then go on to stab Nowak five times, delivering a fatal chest wound.
Vladimir Putin has suffered a humilating blow after Ukraine struck his £120million warship in a huge attack near St Petersburg. The corvette Boykiy was hit in Kronstadt – headquarters of the Kremlin’s Baltic Fleet. The vessel was seen engulfed in flames in a Ukrainian video.
The 343ft-long vessel was like a “sitting duck” despite promises that defences had been tightened this week due to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum [SPIEF], hosted by the Russian dictator. One year ago, the Boykiy was guarding Putin’s sanctions-busting shadow fleet through the English Channel.
Gross domestic product advanced 0.3% in the first three months of the year, just one-third of the pace recorded in the final quarter of 2025 and missing estimates, government data showed Wednesday. Private investment climbed by almost 4%, led by higher outlays on data centers, with a 16% jump in spending on machinery and equipment the largest gain in almost 30 years.
In December, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party announced its intent to introduce legislation to add new restrictions to the ability of foreigners to purchase real estate in Japan. In March, a government expert panel began holding meetings to discuss possible changes legal changes in order to address the economic and security concerns being voiced by proponents of increased regulation, with the aim of making a proposal by the end of the currently ongoing parliamentary session, which is scheduled to end in midsummer.
That timetable is now getting shifted back, as the panel is now saying that it is postponing any possible recommended bans on foreigners purchasing property until this coming fall.
LONDON — The fatal stabbing last year in Britain of a teenager who was handcuffed by police while his killer stood nearby erupted into a debate on Tuesday about policing, race and knife crime.
The killing of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in December drew renewed attention after the killer was sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years in prison on Monday, and following the release of a video showing police dismissing Nowak when he said that he had been stabbed.
The killer, Vickrum Digwa, 23, who is Sikh, had reported to police that he was the victim of a racist attack by Nowak, who was white.
American military forces carried out strikes on an Iranian island abutting the Strait of Hormuz in response to attempted Iranian drone and missile attacks, the latest clash between the two countries as President Trump pushes to strike a longer-term agreement with Iran.
U.S. Central Command said in a statement Tuesday it shot down three Iranian drones that targeted civilian mariners. Iran also launched ballistic missiles at U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf region that “all failed to hit their intended targets,” according to CENTCOM, including three missiles that were fired at Bahrain but were shot down by air defenses, and two missiles that “fell short or broke apart enroute” before hitting Kuwait.
The US military said on Tuesday that it had intercepted and defeated a series of Iranian missile and drone attacks targeting regional neighbours, including Kuwait and Bahrain, while also carrying out self-defence strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island, according to US Central Command. Follow our liveblog for the latest developments.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards say they attacked US Fifth Fleet and regional bases
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has attacked the US Fifth Fleet headquarters and an airbase and helicopters in a regional country using missiles and drones, Iranian media reported on Wednesday, in response to what the IRGC described as a US attack on a communications tower south of Qeshm Island.
IRGC navy also targeted a vessel it identified as Panaya with missiles in response to what it said was a US attack on an Iranian tanker near the Strait of Hormuz with a projectile that damaged the engine room, Iranian media reported.
“Disrupting the security of the Strait of Hormuz will carry a heavy price for the US military,” local media cited the IRGC as saying.
US military says it intercepted Iranian missile and drone attacks
The US military said on Tuesday that it had “successfully defeated” a series of Iranian missile and drone attacks on its regional neighbours, and conducted self-defence strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island.
“Iran launched several ballistic missiles towards regional neighbours; however, all failed to hit their intended targets,” US Central Command said in a statement.
“Two Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait fell short or broke apart en route, and three missiles launched at Bahrain were immediately intercepted by US and Bahrain air defence forces.”
Welcome to the France 24 liveblog covering events in the Middle East. Catch up on yesterday’s events here.
• US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said President Donald Trump’s negotiating team has not offered Iran any sanctions relief in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
• The first day of direct talks between ambassadors of Israel and Lebanon in Washington made no headway, after President Donald Trump said he had received commitments to de-escalation from both sides.
• Israel kept up strikes on southern Lebanon just a day after Trump ask
Key Democratic leaders appeared to continue their support for embattled Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner on Tuesday after meetings in Washington DC.
Platner is contending with yet another revelation – this time about sexually explicit texts with women outside of his marriage – threatening his campaign, which is at the center of his party’s hopes of regaining control of Congress.
“I met with Graham Platner today. We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate,” the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.
Five years ago, a moral panic gripped Canada over a story that was obviously fake but that so perfectly confirmed the biases of anti-Catholic liberals, no one in the media or the political establishment bothered to check its veracity.
This of course was the hoax about the purported discovery of “mass graves” of indigenous children at what was once a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In late May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed hundreds of graves near the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tribal leaders cited the radar survey as proof that scores of indigenous Canadian children had been buried in unmarked mass graves at the school.
Following the release of disturbing body-cam footage in relation to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak, Keir Starmer is refusing to ban the religious knife used to murder Nowak.
BREAKING:
Keir Starmer says he won’t remove the exemption which allows Sikhs to carry large ceremonial knives on them.
Meanwhile, English women are being prosecuted for carrying regular pepper spray on them when out on the streets at night pic.twitter.com/d8PF2NkdSL
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says the UK won’t ban Sikhs carrying ceremonial knives following Henry Nowak killing.
“Carrying a knife for the purpose of religious observance is one thing- using it as so tragically occurred in this case is quite another.” pic.twitter.com/Qi15qIH33j
🚨The dumbass government of Keir Starmer said they are not looking into the issue of Sikh ceremonial knives because they agree with the judge who said it only became a murder weapon when it was unsheathed by Vikram Digwa when he killed Henry Nowak.
LONDON: British police faced a national backlash on Tuesday (Jun 2) over the inflammatory case of an 18-year-old student who was handcuffed as he lay dying from stab wounds after his killer falsely alleged a racist attack.
Henry Nowak died after the knife attack in the southern England city of Southampton in December last year.
His murderer Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man, was sentenced to life in prison on Monday, having lied to police at the time that Nowak had assaulted him.
President Trump has decided to not recognize the sovereignty of the state of Somaliland. The administration went further in a report from the State Department claiming the U.S. recognizes Somalia as having sovereignty over Somaliland. The report also claims the U.S. is open to cooperating with Somaliland on security issues.
After President Trump had signaled the U.S. might scale back its military presence in Europe, he is now signaling both continued troop rotations AND increases in nuclear weapons deployment.
For months, the loudest voices in artificial intelligence—including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei—warned that entry-level white-collar jobs were headed for extinction. In recent weeks, both have walked back those statements.
And according to Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S., who oversees a workforce of more than 350,000 employees, the outcry wasn’t just a prediction gone wrong—it was fearmongering.
“There was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there’s going to be a collapse of jobs,” Kumar said at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona on Monday. “I think there will be more jobs.”
Restore Britian’s Rupert Lowe delivered a heartbreaking report on the national tragedy of the Pakistani child rape gang epidemic. Reform UK responded by calling the report foolish while the other political parties called it irrelevant and pointless.
Poland’s Catholic Bishops are warning a recent court ruling recognizing foreign gay marriages will undermine Poland’s constitution, which strictly forbids it.
LONDON — British authorities said Monday they blocked Hasan Piker, a Turkish American online streamer, and another political commentator from entering the U.K. to speak at public events.
Piker, a liberal political commentator who is frequently critical of U.S. President Donald Trump, Israel and the war in Gaza, has 2.8 million followers on Twitch.
The Home Office said that the electronic travel authorization, or ETA, for Piker and Cenk Uygur, who hosts the “Young Turks” online political talk show and is reportedly Piker’s uncle, were canceled “on the grounds that their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.”
“I’m saving your a**. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”
The report about Trump’s explosion comes after tensions in the Middle East escalated when Iran threatened to attack Israel if strikes on Lebanon continued.
Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging strikes despite a ceasefire in place.
Trump said that after “a very productive call” with Netanyahu and later with Hezbollah chiefs, “any [Israeli] troops that are on their way” to Beirut had been turned back.
In April, a former contributor to the Beijing Normal University student media outlet 京师学人 (Jīngshī Xuérén, “Capital Scholar”) noted that its WeChat public account had been deregistered. Although updates had halted in 2023, the account and its content—more than 600 existing articles—had remained online, and “The Snowman” (雪人 Xuěrén, a pun on 学人 Xuérén) was warmly remembered as an eccentric campus institution and a training ground for emerging journalism students. News of its final demise prompted reflection and criticism online.
Australia’s economy minister said Monday that “legitimate” concerns were driving a rise in support for the far right after a bombshell opinion poll showed the populist One Nation is now the country’s most popular party.
For decades a fringe outfit led by provocateur Pauline Hanson, polling released over the weekend by the Australian Financial Review showed One Nation has overtaken the ruling Labor Party in support.
“I think people have legitimate concerns about where they fit in the economy,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said when asked what was driving that. “People are responding to legitimate pressures and legitimate concerns and anxieties they have.”
The United Nations has issued an urgent plea for calm and respect for the agreed ceasefire after Israel pushed its offensive into Lebanon, a move that puts fragile US-Iran peace talks on the brink of collapse.
“We are deeply alarmed by the escalation in military activities across southern Lebanon and beyond,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said. “We urge all actors to respect the cessation of hostilities and avoid further escalation.”
The UN call came amid Israeli government ordered strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut on Monday, a day after its ground forces reached their furthest point in Lebanon in 26 years and as Hezbollah fired rockets at northern Israel, including the outskirts of the coastal city of Haifa.
