France’s parliament yesterday ousted the government of Prime Minister Francois Bayrou after just nine months in office, leaving President Emmanuel Macron scrambling to find a successor and plunging the country into a new political crisis.

Italian fashion legend Giorgio Armani, king of a high-end lifestyle empire, has died at the age of 91 “surrounded by his loved ones”, his company said yesterday.

French judicial authorities have issued arrest warrants for ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and six other top former officials over the bombardment of a rebel-held city in 2012 that killed two journalists, lawyers said yesterday.

A Finnish court yesterday sentenced a Nigerian separatist leader to six years in prison for terrorism offences for promoting the Biafra region’s independence by “illegal means”.

France considers recent outside interference in Greenland “disrespectful and unacceptable”, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said yesterday, on a visit to the autonomous Danish territory.

Russia launched “massive” strikes across Ukraine overnight, rescue services said yesterday, a new blow to peace efforts that drew a fresh appeal from President Volodymyr Zelensky for US and European help.

A dinosaur dubbed one of the “strangest” ever boasted an elaborate armoury of long bony spikes and a tail weapon, according to findings published in the science journal Nature.

The UK government vowed on Sunday to overhaul its asylum system after weekend protests broke out across the country at hotels housing migrants, with more planned.

Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine give up all of the eastern Donbas region, renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country, three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking told Reuters.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned Tuesday that “difficult hours remain” in the fight against wildfires that have ravaged a record area of land, despite temperatures dropping.

Sweden’s landmark Kiruna Church will begin a two-day trip to a new home yesterday, inching down an Arctic road to save its wooden walls from ground subsidence and the expansion of the world’s largest underground iron ore mine.

The death toll from an unexplained blast last week at a factory in Russia’s Ryazan region has jumped to at least 20, with another 134 people injured, emergency services said yesterday.

Thousands of firefighters backed by the military and water-bombing aircraft yesterday battled dozens of wildfires across Spain and Portugal, as the death toll increased to six since the outbreaks began.

At least 11 people were killed and dozens more injured in a factory blast in a Russian region outside Moscow, Russian authorities said yesterday.

All of Spain was on a heatwave alert yesterday, while the weather agency warned that much of the country was at “very high to extreme risk” from wildfires.

England’s water shortfall was classed as “nationally significant” as it experienced its driest first six months of the year since 1976, the Environment Agency said yesterday.

World food commodity prices rose in July to their highest in over two years, as a jump for vegetable oils and record levels for meat outweighed falling cereal, dairy and sugar prices, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said.

A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” sold for 43,000 pounds ($57,000) at auction on Wednesday, after it was found during a house clearance in southwest England.

The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures, but many regions were devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday.

The Kremlin yesterday said that a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Ukraine was set for the “coming days” as US-led efforts to broker peace rumble on.