BBC News with Sue Montgomery.
Police in Istanbul have clashed with anti-government protesters as huge crowds again defied a ban on gatherings to support the city’s mayor who’s been formally charged by Turkish prosecutors with corruption.
Ekrem İmamoğlu has described his imprisonment as a political execution without trial. Emily Wither reports from Istanbul.
Mr. İmamoğlu was seen as the opposition’s main hope to try and defeat President Erdoğan in future elections. He is a very popular, charismatic mayor. He’s been in charge of Istanbul since 2019.
Last year, the opposition party that he belongs to, the CHP, made an enormous gain against President Erdoğan’s AK Party by winning many towns and cities in municipal elections, which implied that the opposition was gaining in popularity.
The opposition say that the charges against İmamoğlu were a political coup, and that this is a chance for President Erdoğan to take out his main political rival.
Canada’s new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has said he hopes a snap election next month will give him a strong mandate to deal with President Trump. Announcing the vote, he said Canadians were facing the most significant crisis of their lifetimes. Merlyn Thomas has more.
Carney is really surging off the momentum that he’s got from the way that the Liberal Party have bounced back from the polls, thanks largely to President Trump and his treatment of Canada. He’s threatened to annex it and make it the 51st state. And he’s also launched a trade war with very painful tariffs against Canada, which is its closest ally. So it’s really hard to overstate the sheer impact that President Trump is having on this election against a backdrop of severe instability.
Hamas officials have told the BBC another of their leaders has been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. Ismail Barhum, head of the group’s financial affairs, had been receiving treatment for wounds sustained four days ago.
The U.S. special envoy, Steve Witkoff, says he’s confident that real progress will be made at talks in the conflict in Ukraine this week. He says negotiations in Saudi Arabia could secure a cease-fire in the Black Sea. The two nations will not meet face-to-face. From Riyadh, here’s Frank Gardner.
The Ukrainian delegation, headed by their defense minister, Rustem Umerov, has been leading a team of technical experts, of energy specialists from the Ministry of Energy, military specialists and diplomats. And what they’re talking about with the Americans is how to safeguard the critical national infrastructure in Ukraine and energy facilities with a view to a partial cease-fire.
World News from the BBC.
Residents of Omdurman, the twin city of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, say they’ve come under some of the heaviest shell fire in months. Doctors say the paramilitary RSF was responsible for the barrage, in which at least two children were killed.
The RSF was driven from the presidential palace on Friday, but has not given up the fight for greater Khartoum.
M23 rebels appear not to have fulfilled their promise to withdraw from the Congolese town of Walikalli.
Residents say fighters are still present, 24 hours after a promise to reposition them. But a medic in the town told the French news agency there had been no further bombardment by the Congolese army.
A diary belonging to the Scottish artist Duncan Grant, a member of London’s influential Bloomsbury group, has been discovered nearly 50 years after his death in 1978. Rebecca Drought has more details.
Duncan Grant was a central member of the influential Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, which included the artist Vanessa Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the authors Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf.
Events with his friends are noted in the diary, which was discovered among the belongings of the art historian and biographer John Woodson. Its entries date from 1911, beginning with, “Mother gave me this book as a present also a cushion plus a sponge.”
It goes on to contain notes and sketches by Grant for artworks, such as the murals he created for the dining room of Borough Polytechnic, widely considered his big break.
The diary is due to be auctioned in Sussex tomorrow.
The Canadian government says three religious artefacts, including bone fragments of the third century saint who inspired Santa Claus, have been returned to Italy after being seized by customs officers.
A Winnipeg man had attempted to import the objects illegally after buying them on eBay.
BBC News