Rescue services say they saved 27 of the 84 people aboard the vessel believed to have come from Mauritania

Nine people are confirmed drowned and at least 48 are missing after a boat carrying migrants capsized off Spain’s Canary Islands overnight, rescue services said on Saturday, the latest in a series of such disasters off the west coast of Africa.

Sea rescue teams said in a statement they had answered a distress call off El Hierro, one of the islands in the Atlantic archipelago, shortly after midnight. They managed to save 27 of the 84 people on board.

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Sergei Lavrov accuses west of using Ukraine ‘to defeat’ Russia days after Putin shifts Moscow’s nuclear posture

Russia’s top diplomat warned on Saturday against “trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power”, delivering a UN general assembly speech packed with condemnations of what Russia sees as western machinations in Ukraine and elsewhere – including inside the United Nations itself.

Three days after Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, aired a shift in his country’s nuclear doctrine, his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the west of using Ukraine – which Russia invaded in February 2022 – as a tool to try “to defeat” Moscow strategically, and “preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade”.

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Since last week, wildfires have been raging in central and northern Portugal. At least seven people have died and 50 have been injured. More than 5,000 firefighters have been mobilised to battle the blazes

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In Marseille, I find agency bosses desperate to fill shifts, families desperate to secure care for loved ones and a system that places no value on the work

• Who keeps Europe’s wealthy west going? Underpaid, invisible migrants from its east – and I went undercover to find them
• Undercover as a farm worker in Germany: ‘My hands are numb. No one knows when the shift will end’
• Undercover as a hotel cleaner in Ireland: ‘Lifting the heavy mattress, I cry tears of rage and exhaustion’

I have been in Marseille for three weeks, working undocumented in the social care sector . There’s a heatwave and it is hard to breathe. I chose caring for older people because it is badly paid across the EU. Nevertheless, women from poorer eastern European countries often move for such jobs because there is a shortage of staff and wages are still higher in the west.

When I finally get all the paperwork together to get a legally recognised job, I approach two agencies in the city. Both call me immediately to arrange a date for a job interview.

Saša Uhlová is a staff writer at the Czech online daily Deník Alarm. Her reporting was supported by The Endowment Fund for Independent Journalism . Names have been changed and the project has been made into a film directed by Apolena Rychlíková

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The country, which has more 300 days of sunshine a year, has embraced rooftop systems that harness the sun’s energy

The Thriamvos company truck pulls up at noon outside the four-storey building in the heart of Nicosia.

It’s the third rooftop installation of a solar-powered water heating system that Petros Mihali and his assistant, Soteris, have made in the Cypriot capital since their working day began at 7am.

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Socialist and veteran climate campaigner will be one of six executive vice-presidents in European Commission team

At the beginning of May, Teresa Ribera sounded the alarm over the future of the EU , warning that war, discord, disinformation, social media manipulation and the increasing normalisation of the far right had put the European project at risk of “an implosion”.

It did not help centrist political unity, Spain’s environment minister added, that some people – namely the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen – were refusing to rule out working with rightwing and far-right nationalists .

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The ministry of justice has added 55 Indigenous organisations to a list of terrorists and extremists, leading many to leave for Nordic countries

Sami people in Russia are being forced to hide their identity and live “outside the law” for fear of imprisonment and persecution, leading figures from the community have warned, after the government labelled dozens of Indigenous organisations terrorists and extremists.

In July, Russia’s ministry of justice added 55 Indigenous organisations to a list of terrorists and extremists, meaning that representatives of the groups – and anyone who takes part, cooperates or communicates with them – risk being sentenced to years in prison.

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Exclusive: Documents contain months of warnings about possible Ukrainian advance and also reveal concerns about morale

Russia’s military command had anticipated Ukraine’s incursion into its Kursk region and had been making plans to prevent it for several months, according to a cache of documents that the Ukrainian army said it had seized from abandoned Russian positions in the region.

The disclosure makes the disarray among Russian forces after Ukraine’s attack in early August all the more embarrassing. The documents, shared with the Guardian, also reveal Russian concerns about morale in the ranks in Kursk, which intensified after the suicide of a soldier at the front who had reportedly been in a “prolonged state of depression due to his service in the Russian army”.

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Lionel R, 44, one of 50 men accused, apologises to his victim and tells the court: ‘I have no choice but to accept the facts’

One of 50 men accused of raping the French woman Gisèle Pélicot after she was drugged by her husband accepted the charges on Thursday, saying he was sorry for what he did.

Lionel R, a 44-year-old supermarket worker and father of three, was among dozens of men accused of participating in the mass rape of Pélicot over a decade in a trial that has shocked France.

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