HellsBelle

North Korea sent troops to clear mines in Russia’s Kursk region earlier this year, leader Kim Jong-un said in a speech carried on Saturday by state media, a rare acknowledgement by Pyongyang of the deadly tasks assigned to its deployed soldiers.

According to South Korean and western intelligence agencies, North Korea has sent thousands of troops to support Russia’s nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine.

Analysts say Russia is giving North Korea financial aid, military technology, food and energy supplies in return, allowing the diplomatically isolated nation to sidestep tough international sanctions on its nuclear and missile programmes.

The British government threatened to defund the international criminal court and leave the Rome statute that set it up if it pressed ahead with plans to issue an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, the ICC’s prosecutor, has claimed.

Karim Khan made the allegation in a submission to the court defending his decision to prosecute Israel’s prime minister.

Khan does not name the individual who made the threats, saying the call on 23 April 2024 was with a British official, but reports have suggested the caller may have been the then British foreign secretary, David Cameron. Khan said the official had argued that issuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister, was disproportionate.

Under a UN treaty, all ships above a certain tonnage must have an onboard tracker called an Automatic Identification System (AIS). These trackers broadcast information about the ships, including their location, and can be followed on websites like MarineTraffic.

But there is an incomplete and misleading public record of the Skipper's movements. According to MarineTraffic, the Skipper's last known port call was at Soroosh in Iran on 9 July, where it arrived after stopping in Iraq and the UAE.

But Kpler suggests that this is part of a pattern of misleading entries by the Skipper. Analysts at the firm said the ship had previously loaded crude oil from Venezuela and Iran, while falsifying its position via its onboard tracker, a process known as spoofing.

Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years.

The takedowns and restrictions began in October and targeted the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of more than 50 organisations worldwide, some serving tens of thousands of people – in what appears to be a growing push by Meta to limit reproductive health and queer content across its platforms. Many of these were from Europe and the UK, however the bans also affected groups serving women in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship against movements focused on gender, health and justice, said that it had tracked 210 incidents of account removals and severe restrictions affecting these groups this year, compared with 81 last year.

Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.

A child bride who was due to be executed this month in Iran over the death of her husband has had her life spared by his parents, who were paid the equivalent of £70,000 in exchange for their forgiveness.

Goli Kouhkan, 25, has been on death row in Gorgan central prison in northern Iran for the past seven years. At the age of 18 she was arrested over allegedly participating in the killing of her abusive husband, Alireza Abil, in May 2018, and sentenced to qisas – retribution-in-kind.

Forced to marry her cousin at 12, Kouhkan became pregnant at 13 and gave birth to a son. She suffered physical and emotional abuse for years. On the day her husband was killed, Kouhkan found him beating their son, then aged five. She called her husband’s cousin, Mohammad Abil, for help. When he arrived a fight broke out which resulted in the death of her husband. According to Iran Human Rights, Abil remains on death row.

Kouhkan’s lawyer confirmed in a post on Instagram on 9 December that the original sum of 10bn tomans had been reduced to 8bn tomans and that amount had been raised through donations. In a video published by Mizan News Agency, Kouhkan’s parents-in-law are seen signing documents.

Meanwhile, (NATO Secretary General Mark) Rutte delivers a very stark warning in the opening lines of his speech in Berlin as he says:

“I’m here today to tell you where Nato stands and what we must do to stop a war before it starts. And to do that, we need to be crystal clear about the threat: we are Russia’s next target, and we are already in harm’s way.”

He says that while the decision to accelerate defence spending at Nato’s Hague summit earlier this year was welcome, “this is not a time for self-congratulation.”

“I fear that too many are quietly complacent. Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe that time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now. Allied defence spending and production must rise rapidly. Our armed forces must have what they need to keep us safe.”

Rutte says that Russia “has become even more brazen, reckless and ruthless towards Nato and towards Ukraine.”

Deported from the United States and then immediately dispatched to the front lines by Russia. Such was the fate of several Russian nationals who, after being detained and put on a plane in Arizona on Monday, December 8, eventually landed in Moscow on Tuesday, December 9, after a stopover in Cairo.

According to the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona, 64 Russian passengers were on board. The authorities have provided no information about their current status. However, several of them received military draft notices as soon as they arrived, the first step toward likely deployment to the front in Ukraine. The information was confirmed by the group Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR), an advocacy group established in the US by opponents to the Kremlin.

The only official statement from Moscow came after the plane landed: The Office of the Prosecutor General announced the arrest of Zair Saimullin, age 69, who was charged with fraud and whose extradition from the US had been requested by Russia. According to RADR, he was likely on board the flight from Cairo.

Scientists have issued an urgent warning that some of the synthetic chemicals that help underpin the current food system are driving increased rates of cancer, neurodevelopmental conditions and infertility, while degrading the foundations of global agriculture.

The health burden from phthalates, bisphenols, pesticides and Pfas “forever chemicals” amounts to up to $2.2tn a year – roughly as much as the profits of the world’s 100 largest publicly listed companies, according to the report published on Wednesday.

Most ecosystem damage remains unpriced, they say, but even a narrow accounting of ecological impacts, taking into account agricultural losses and meeting water safety standards for Pfas and pesticides, implies a further cost of $640bn. There are also potential consequences for human demographics, with the report concluding that if exposure to endocrine disruptors such as bisphenols and phthalates persists at current rates, there could be between 200 million and 700 million fewer births between 2025 and 2100.

In that spirit, let us parse a deal just struck by the governments of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. You may not have heard much about this agreement on medicine, but it is huge in both financial and political significance – and Downing Street could not be more proud.

A “world-beating deal,” boasts the science minister, Patrick Vallance. It “paves the way for the UK to become a global hub for life sciences,” claims the business secretary, Peter Kyle, with the government press release adding: “Tens of thousands of NHS patients will benefit.”

Britain 1, America 0! Except that’s not the view from Washington. “A major win for American workers,” says the trade secretary, Howard Luttnick, which “ensures that the breakthroughs of tomorrow will be built, tested, and produced on American soil.” The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, acclaims “results that put Americans first”.

One deal, two diametrically opposed readings: who is right? The answer, I regret to inform you, is the Trumpettes. Take this headline from the liberals at the New York Times: “To avoid tariffs, UK agrees to Trump’s demand to pay more for drugs”.

Ukrainian sea drones on Wednesday hit and disabled a tanker involved in trading Russian oil as it sailed through Ukraine’s exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea to the Russian port of Novorossiysk, a Ukrainian official said. The attack is the third sea drone strike in two weeks on vessels part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of unregulated and often western-sanctioned ships helping Moscow export oil to fund the war.

The Dashan tanker was sailing at maximum speed with its transponders off when powerful explosions hit its stern, inflicting critical damage, the official at the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said. The strike on the Dashan, which is under EU and British sanctions and is sailing without a known flag registry, was also confirmed by three maritime security sources. “The SBU continues to take active measures to reduce petrodollar revenues to the Russian budget,” said the official.

Four Afghan men were ordered to report to the Taliban government's department of vice and virtue for dressing in costumes inspired by the TV series Peaky Blinders.

The friends were told that their clothing was "in conflict with Afghan and Islamic values", a Taliban spokesman told the BBC, adding the values in Peaky Blinders went against Afghan culture.

In videos posted online, the men, who have been released, can be seen posing in flat caps and three-piece suits similar to those worn in the series set in England soon after World War One.

In an interview with YouTube channel Herat-Mic uploaded at the end of November, before they were summoned, the friends said they admired the fashion displayed in the series, adding that they had received positive reactions from locals.

Russia has not only threatened Europe through drone incursions and hybrid interference operations, but also in court. By exploiting old commercial treaties dating back to the end of the Cold War, Russian companies and oligarchs have multiplied arbitration proceedings to challenge the European Union's sanctions policy, posing an increasingly serious financial risk to member states.

This warning was issued by a coalition of European NGOs, including the Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms, Friends of the Earth Europe and PowerShift, in a report published on Tuesday, December 9 titled "Frozen Assets, Hot Claims: How Russian oligarchs and other investors sue over sanctions." These organizations estimate that at least $48 billion (€41 billion) has been claimed from the EU and its allies (the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Canada) in compensation for these sanctions – a minimum figure, as most of the 24 proceedings identified in the report have not disclosed the amounts sought.

After their villas, yachts and works of art were frozen following the invasion of Ukraine, several oligarchs have retaliated through legal proceedings, with varying degrees of success. In 2024, Piotr Aven and Mikhail Fridman won a case in the EU's court, which found their contribution to the war to be too indirect to justify the sanctions imposed on them.