Here are the latest updates and insights for all the latest Current Affairs, Sports, Health, Weather, Entertainment, Business and Travel News from around the world. We aim to deliver timely, accurate, and engaging content, keeping you informed about the world around you.
Hungary to withdraw from International Criminal Court
Hungary’s government has announced it is withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The move was announced by a senior official in Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government hours after Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who is sought under an ICC arrest warrant, arrived in Hungary for a state visit.
Orban had invited Netanyahu as soon as the warrant was issued last November, saying the ruling would have “no effect” in his country.
In November, ICC judges said there were “reasonable grounds” that Netanyahu bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Netanyahu has condemned the ICC’s decision as “antisemitic”.
Trump’s tariffs are a longtime goal fulfilled – and his biggest gamble yet
Donald Trump’s politics have shifted considerably over his decades in the public sphere. But one thing he has been consistent on, since the 1980s, is his belief that tariffs are an effective means of boosting the US economy.
Now, he’s staking his presidency on his being right.
At his Rose Garden event at the White House, surrounded by friends, conservative politicians and cabinet secretaries, Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on a broad range of countries – allies, competitors and adversaries alike.
In a speech that was equal parts celebration and self-congratulation, regularly punctuated by applause from the crowd, the president recalled his longtime support of tariffs, as well as his early criticism of free trade agreements like Nafta and the World Trade Organization.
The president acknowledged that he will face pushback in the coming days from “globalists” and “special interests”, but he urged Americans to trust his instincts.
“Never forget, every prediction our opponents made about trade for the last 30 years has been proven totally wrong,” he said.
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Trump’s tariffs on China, EU and more, at a glance
US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping new set of tariffs on Wednesday, arguing that they would allow the United States to economically flourish.
These new import taxes, which Trump imposed via executive order, are expected to send economic shockwaves around the world.
But the US president believes they are necessary to address trading imbalances and to protect American jobs and manufacturing.
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Marine Le Pen’s ban outraged France’s far right – and they may well take revenge
Outrage is a precious political currency and France’s far right has spent this week attempting, furiously and predictably, to capitalise on the perceived injustice of a court’s decision to block its totemic leader, Marine Le Pen, from standing in the 2027 presidential election.
The airwaves have been throbbing with indignation.
“Be outraged,” said one of Le Pen’s key deputies, on French television, in case anyone was in doubt as to what their reaction should be.
But it remains unclear whether Le Pen’s tough sentence will broaden support for her party, the National Rally (RN), or lead to greater fragmentation of the French far right. Either way, it has created a feverish mood among the nation’s politicians.
Le Pen and her allies have boldly declared that France’s institutions, and democracy itself, have been “executed”, are “dead”, or “violated”. The country’s justice system has been turned into a “political” hit squad, shamelessly intervening in a nation’s right to choose its own leaders. And Marine Le Pen has been widely portrayed, with something close to certainty, as France’s president-in-waiting, as the nation’s most popular politician, cruelly robbed of her near-inevitable procession towards the Élysée Palace.
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Hollywood remembers ‘wonderful’ actor Val Kilmer
Directors including Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann have paid tribute to actor Val Kilmer, following his death aged 65.
Kilmer starred in some of the biggest movies of the 1980s and 90s, including Top Gun and Batman Forever.
Coppola described Kilmer as “a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know”, while Howard praised his “awesome range as an actor”.
Singer Cher, a former girlfriend of Kilmer’s, summed him up as “funny, crazy, pain in the ass, GREAT FRIEND” and “brave” during his illness.
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Survivor challenges Israeli account of attack on Gaza paramedics
“I’m the only survivor who saw what happened to my colleagues,” Munther Abed says, scrolling through pictures of his fellow paramedics on his phone.
He survived the Israeli attack that killed 15 emergency workers in Gaza by diving to the floor in the back of his ambulance, as his two colleagues in the front were shot in the early hours of 23 March.
“We left the headquarters roughly at dawn,” he told one of the BBC’s trusted freelance journalists working in Gaza, explaining how the response team from the Palestinian Red Crescent, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) gathered on the edge of the southern city of Rafah after receiving reports of gunfire and wounded people.
“Roughly by 04:30, all Civil Defence vehicles were in place. At 04:40 the first two vehicles went out. At 04:50, the last vehicle arrived. At around 05:00, the agency [UN] car was shot at directly in the street,” he says.
The Israeli military says its forces opened fire because the vehicles were moving suspiciously towards soldiers without prior co-ordination and with their lights off. It also claimed that nine Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives were killed in the incident.
‘Not the act of a friend’: Australia angry over Trump tariffs
Australia has been hit with a tariff of at least 10% on all exports to the US, as Donald Trump announced his new sweeping global trade regime.
Trump cited “trade barriers” such as Australia’s biosecurity laws – singling out a ban on the import of US beef – as the reason for what he called a “reciprocal tariff”.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the measure “totally unwarranted”, but said the nation would not introduce its own tariffs – also known as import taxes – in return.
The 10% dealt to Australia was the “baseline” measure, with the most severe tariffs – of up 49% – hitting countries like China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia.
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Myanmar leader heads to Bangkok as quake deaths climb to 3,000
Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaingwill travel to Thailand for a regional summit as his country reels from an earthquake that killed thousands and left cities in ruins.
The earthquake in central Myanmar last Friday killed 3,085 people and injured 4,715, the junta has said. Hundreds more are missing and the toll is expected to rise.
A spokesman for the Myanmar army said Min Aung Hlaing is scheduled to fly to Bangkok on Thursday, on the eve of a summit that will gather leaders of the seven countries that border the Bay of Bengal.
His attendance will be unusual as sanctioned leaders are typically barred from these events.
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Indian parliament’s lower house passes controversial bill on Muslim properties
The lower house of India’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that seeks to change how properties worth billions of dollars donated by Indian Muslims over centuries are governed.
The Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 – which brings in dozens of amendments to an existing law – was passed late on Wednesday night after a heated debate that went on for over 12 hours.
The government says the bill will introduce transparency into the management of waqf, as the properties are called.
But opposition parties and Muslim groups have called it an attempt to weaken the constitutional rights of India’s largest religious minority.
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Syria condemns ‘unjustified’ Israeli strikes as tensions rise over Turkey
Syria has strongly condemned a fresh wave of Israeli strikes on airbases and other military sites overnight as an “unjustified escalation”.
The foreign ministry said the attacks almost destroyed Hama airbase and injured dozens of people. A monitoring group reported that four defence ministry personnel were killed.
Israel’s military said it hit “capabilities that remained” at the western Hama and central T4 airbases, along with military infrastructure in Damascus. It also said Israeli forces killed gunmen during a ground operation in Deraa province, where authorities put the death toll at nine.
It came amid reports that Turkey was moving to station jets and air defences at Syrian airbases.
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Republican rebels try to stop Trump’s Canada tariffs
Four Republican US senators have broken ranks and voted with the Democrats in an effort to block President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada.
In a rare display of opposition to the president, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul and Susan Collins helped to vote through a resolution 51 to 48 to end Trump’s emergency declaration on fentanyl trafficking that he has used to justify tariffs on Canadian imports.
“As I have always warned, tariffs are bad policy, and trade wars with our partners hurt working people most,” McConnell said.
But the vote was largely symbolic, as the resolution is unlikely to pass through the Republican-held House of Representatives and be signed by Trump himself.
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Russia not on Trump’s tariff list
One country that did not feature on Donald Trump’s list of tariffs on US trade partners was Russia.
US outlet Axios quoted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as saying this was because existing US sanctions on Russia “preclude any meaningful trade” and noting that Cuba, Belarus and North Korea were also not included.
However, nations with even less trade with the US – such as Syria, which exported $11m of products last year according to UN data quoted by Trading Economics – were on the list.
The US imposed large-scale sanctions on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Trump has generally taken a friendlier approach to Russia since his return to the White House.