IS has stalled in Iraq and Syria, but officials believe it has been planning new operations against European targets

Islamic State (IS) remains defeated in its core strongholds of the Middle East but has made significant progress in Africa and parts of south Asia, winning territory and resources that could serve as a launchpad for a new campaign of extremist violence, analysts and officials believe.

European governments have moved to their highest levels of alert for years after the attack on a concert hall in Moscow last week by militants from IS which killed 140 people .

Media companies to combine publishing and advertising platforms to target gen Z and millennials

The Independent will take control of BuzzFeed and HuffPost in the UK and Ireland with the intention to create “Britain’s biggest publisher network for Gen Z and millennial audiences”, the publishers have said.

The two media companies will combine their publishing, data and advertising platforms “to allow commercial partners to seamlessly buy across their sites”.

Citizen-led commission suggests deaths may have been avoided if transfers to hospital were allowed

The lives of more than 4,000 care home residents in Madrid could have been saved if the regional government had allowed them to be treated in hospitals, the findings of a citizen-led Covid commission have suggested.

Launched in April last year, the commission spent months researching and compiling the testimonies of family members, care home staff and experts in an attempt to piece together how the region’s residential homes came to rank among Europe’s deadliest in the early months of the pandemic.

Draft law, which also affects redheads, blond people, and those with dreadlocks now goes to upper Senate

France’s lower house of parliament has approved a bill forbidding workplace discrimination based on hair texture , which the draft law’s backers say targets mostly black women wearing their hair naturally.

Olivier Serva, an independent National Assembly deputy for the French overseas territory of Guadeloupe and the bill’s sponsor, said it would penalise any workplace discrimination based on “hairstyle, colour, length or texture”.

La technologie de la fonction eCall repose sur la 2G du réseau mobile. Sauf que les opérateurs veulent couper ces vieux réseaux, devenus inutiles et couteux à leurs yeux. Un bras de fer qui va forcément coûter des millions d’euros aux opérateurs ou aux constructeurs automobiles.

Kyiv’s forces shoot down 26 drones overnight as Russian president dismisses idea of attacking nearby Nato states

Donald Tusk is working hard and fast on a great transformation, but travel the country and it’s clear what a difficult task that is

My formative journalistic years were spent reporting on the final freeze of the cold war – days of hard times and soft currencies. When I return to those countries now, I test myself on how well I guessed what would follow in the three decades since. On Poland in particular, I would have been hard pressed to predict the giddy zigzag of power still featuring a generation who marched to topple communism, but whose protagonists feud bitterly about how to govern the country in the 21st century.

We talk a lot about places that have recently bought a one-way ticket towards authoritarian politics – Russia and Turkey for the full-fat versions, and Hungary’s democratic backsliding and stifling of independent institutions.

Experts say the hybrids risk ‘polluting’ the genetic stock, but scientists disagree on how to deal with them. In Piedmont, Italy, the sight of a blond wolfdog signals the risk of another new litter

• Photographs by Alberto Olivero

From the moment the rangers first saw him on their trail cameras, the problem was apparent. The wolf, spotted deep in the woods of Italy’s Gran Bosco di Salbertrand park, was not grey like his companion, but an unusual blond. His colouring indicated this was not a wolf at all, but a hybrid wolfdog – the first to be seen so far into Piedmont’s alpine region. And where one hybrid is found, more are sure to follow.

“We thought he would go away,” says Elisa Ramassa, a park ranger in Gran Bosco who has tracked the local wolves for 25 years. “Unfortunately, he found a female who loves blonds.”

Elisa Ramassa and fellow ranger Massimo Rosso search for wolf tracks in Gran Bosco di Salbertrand park

Les Jeux Olympiques: Miroir des Sociétés opens ahead of Paris Olympics and puts previous games in context of conflicts and injustices

From the Nazi stadium propaganda in 1936 Berlin to the 1968 Mexico City podium protest of medal-winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were expelled from the competition after raising their gloved fists in a Black Power salute against racial injustice, the Olympic Games have held a mirror up to some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.

Now, as the Paris Olympics prepares to open this summer against a backdrop of war from Ukraine to the Middle East – with Emmanuel Macron saying Russia will be asked to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Games – a new exhibition in Paris takes an unflinching look at the social and geopolitical impact of the Games over the last century.