Foreign

Emma Thompson has accepted Academy Awards, Baftas and even a damehood over a glittering career, but there was one offer she had to turn down. The actor says she once got asked out on a date by Donald Trump on the same day her divorced was confirmed. Thompson said she was in her trailer filming Primary Colors in 1998, a political satire based on Bill Clinton’s presidential rise, when the phone rang. “It was Donald Trump,” Thompson told an audience on Saturday, August 9, 2025, at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland, where she received the Leopard Club award for…

*Ekweremadu Case In View Most foreign criminals convicted by a UK court will be deported immediately, instead of 30% of the way through their prison sentences, under plans announced by the government. Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has proposed a change in legislation that will give the government the power to deport most foreign prisoners as soon as they are convicted and incarcerated. However, foreign terrorists, murderers and other serious offenders who have been given indeterminate sentences will continue to serve their time in the UK before being considered for deportation. It is not clear if this proposal will in any…

*Following Newspaper Report Microsoft is investigating how Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, is using its Azure cloud storage platform, amid concerns the company’s staff in Israel may have concealed key details about its work on sensitive military projects. Senior executives are scrambling to assess what data Unit 8200 holds in Azure after a UK Guardian investigation revealed how the spy agency has used the cloud platform to store a vast collection of intercepted Palestinian mobile phone calls. The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found Unit 8200 has used a customised and…

Twin cathedral bells rang in unison in Nagasaki, Japan, for the first time in 80 years today, August 9, commemorating the moment the city was destroyed by an American atomic bomb. The two bells rang out at Immaculate Conception cathedral, also called the Urakami cathedral, at 11.02am, the moment the bomb was dropped on August 9, 1945, three days after a nuclear attack on Hiroshima,also in Japan. The imposing redbrick building, with its twin bell towers atop a hill, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous explosion just a few hundred metres away. Only…

*As Tragedy Rocks Family Within Months The family of the dead pilot of the military helicopter that crashed on Wednesday in Ghana killing the country's Defence Minister, Dr Edward Kofi Boamah, his cabinet colleague, and other top officials, has lost three siblings in the last couple of months. The country has declared three days of mourning with investigation ongoing into the cause of the mishap. In a tragic tale on the pilot's family, the pilot, Squadron Leader Peter Abaafeme Anala, had recently lost two siblings before he perished in the crash. The first was on March 31, 2025, when his…

All eight persons on board a military helicopter that crashed in the Adansi area of Ashanti Region, Ghana, this morning have passed on. A Ghana Air Force Z9 helicopter carrying the eight persons went missing after taking off from Accra, the country's capital, in the morning. On board were three crew members and five passengers. The aircraft departed the capital at 0912 hours en route to Obuasi but lost radar contact shortly after, according to the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF). At 2:30 pm, Ghana's Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah, at a press briefing from the presidency named the victims and…

By Harry Davis and Yuval Abraham One afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft’s Chief Executive, Satya Nadella, met with the Commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. On the spy chief’s agenda: moving vast amounts of top secret intelligence material into the U.S company’s cloud. Meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle, a former chicken farm turned hi-tech campus, the spymaster, Yossi Sariel, won Nadella’s support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a customised and segregated area within Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance…

*Suggests Secretary of State/NSA Rubio As Vance's Running Mate Though the United States (U.S) presidential election and parties' primaries are about three years away, President Donald Trump has suggested that Vice President (VP) JD Vance is "most likely" his heir apparent to serve as the Republican nominee in 2028. This is the furthest he has gone in backing Vance as a future presidential candidate. "Well, I think most likely," Trump told reporters yesterday when asked whether Vance was the heir apparent to the movement he has inspired. "In all fairness, he's the Vice President." In a country where general elections…

Rescuers in Norway have resumed the search for an award-winning environmental journalist who has gone missing in bad weather during a solo hike in the remote Folgefonna national park, home to one of the country’s biggest glaciers. Alec Luhn, a U.S-born reporter who has worked for the New York Times and The Atlantic and was a regular Russia correspondent for the UK Guardian from 2013 to 2017, was reported missing on Monday after he failed to catch a flight from Bergen. The Norwegian broadcaster NRK said Luhn, 38, was holidaying with his family and had set out on his hike…

*African Countries Targeted, List Out Soon The U.S State Department has prepared plans to impose bonds as high as $15,000 (about N22,857,000) for some tourism and business visas, according to a draft of a temporary final rule. The bonds would be issued to visitors from countries with significant overstay rates, under a 12-month pilot program. Many African countries are said to be in the list,soon to be unfurled. It renews an initiative issued by the first Trump administration in November 2020, the month that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election. That rule would have required a $15,000…