US President Joe Biden has ordered a Chinese-owned cryptocurrency miner and its partners to sell land they own near a US nuclear missile base, citing spying concerns.

MineOne Partners, which the White House says is majority-owned by Chinese citizens, has been given 120 days to sell the property, where it runs a crypto-mining operation.

The land is less than a mile (1.6km) away from an air force base in Wyoming, where intercontinental ballistic missiles are stored.

BBC News has contacted MineOne Partners and China's embassy in the US for comment.

"The proximity of the foreign-owned Real Estate to a strategic missile base... and the presence of specialised and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities, presents a national security risk", the White House said in a statement.

Governor, plagued by dog-killing story, unwelcome in 20% of her state after she accused tribal leaders of benefiting from cartels

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who was once considered one of Donald Trump’s top vice-presidential contenders, has been banned from nearly one-fifth of the state after two more tribes voted to prohibit her from their lands.

The move by the Yankton Sioux tribe and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe last week follows criticism from the governor who has – without evidence – accused tribal leaders of “personally benefiting” from drug cartels. The Oglala, Rosebud, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux tribes banished Noem earlier this year.

Noem has been the subject of controversy in recent weeks after the Guardian reportedthat the governor described killing a family dog, and a goat, in her new book.

European Broadcasting Union says Anders Vistisen cannot debate because the far right does not endorse the Spitzenkandidat system.

The organizer of the scandal-hit Eurovision Song Contest is facing another controversy after excluding the far right from a debate in the European Parliament next week due to disagreement over how the EU should nominate the European Commission president.

The European Broadcasting Union invited five political factions — the far left, Greens, socialists, liberals and center-right — to take part in its big debate on May 23, two weeks before the EU election, when voters will choose 720 MEPs and kick off negotiations for the most powerful jobs in the bloc’s institutions.

But neither the far-right Identity & Democracy faction — on course to be the third-largest force in the assembly, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — nor the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists will be allowed to take part, due to their refusal to nominate an official candidate to be president of the Commission, a role currently held by Ursula von der Leyen, who is seeking a new term.

There is a perception in society that men are safer drivers than women, according to the Victims and Citizens association. But French road accident statistics suggest otherwise.

A new campaign aimed at having men reflect upon their driving behavior is now online in France. The Victimes et Citoyens association has issued a plea for men to "Drive like a woman!"

Victimes & Citoyens provides support to victims of traffic accidents and tries to create awareness about road safety.

What is the main cause of traffic accidents in France?

According to the French road safety observatory 84% of fatal car accidents in 2022-2023 were caused by men.

The annual report also noted that men were responsible for 93% of accidents under the influence of alcohol.

To the campaigners this refutes the common sexist notion of men being the safer drivers. Their solution: Adopting the driving style of women will help people "stay alive."

Children were inside St. Mary Magdalen in Abbeville, Louisiana, waiting to take their first Holy Communion, the church said.

Churchgoers thwarted a teenager armed with a rifle from entering a Louisiana church full of children Saturday in a service that was being livestreamed, authorities said.

Police were called to St. Mary Magdalen Church in Abbeville, 20 miles south of Lafayette, at 10:35 a.m. when the 16-year-old suspect tried to get in via the back door.

Around 60 children were inside the Catholic church at the time waiting to take their first Holy Communion, the church said.

…

The suspect was arrested and later charged with terrorizing the church and two counts of possession of a firearm by a juvenile. Witnesses told KADN of Lafayette that he was dressed all in black and armed with the rifle.

U.S. airlines are suing to block the Biden administration from requiring greater transparency over fees that the carriers charge their passengers, saying that a new rule would confuse consumers by giving them too much information during the ticket-buying process.

The U.S. Transportation Department said Monday it will vigorously defend the ruleagainst what it called “hidden junk fees.”

American, Delta, United and three other carriers, along with their industry trade group, sued the Transportation Department in a federal appeals court on Friday, asking the court to overturn the rule.

With over 100 active wildfires burning in Canada, wildfire smoke has drifted across the border into the United States, prompting Minnesota officials to issue the state's first air quality alert of 2024.

At least 37 of the 141 active fires burning in Canadian wildfires have been labeled "out of control," including one that started on Friday in British Columbia and has since spread to 4,200 acres, forcing the evacuation of the small town of Fort Nelson, and the Fort Nelson Indian Reserve, officials said.

Most of the active wildfires, at least 90, are in British Columbia and Alberta provinces.

...

The effects of wildfire smoke are an increasing worry across the United States that is only expected to worsen, according to a study released in February.

By mid-century, the effects of wildfire smoke could bring startling health risks to 125 million Americans, according to the First Street Foundation, a climate-risk data provider.

Amazon's self-driving robotaxi unit is being investigated by the U.S. government's highway safety agency after two of its vehicles braked suddenly and were rear-ended by motorcyclists.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted on its website Monday it will evaluate the automated driving system developed by Zoox.

Both crashes happened during daytime hours, and the motorcyclists suffered minor injuries. In both cases, the agency confirmed that the Amazon vehicles were operating in autonomous mode leading up to the crashes.

ury selection was scheduled to start Monday in the trial of Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat charged with accepting bribes of gold and cash to use his influence to deliver favors that would aid three New Jersey businessmen.

Menendez, 70, will stand trial in Manhattan federal court along with two of the businessmen — real estate developer Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. All three have pleaded not guilty. A third businessman has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the other defendants. The senator’s wife is also charged, but her trial is delayed until at least July.

Opening statements were possible, but unlikely, before Tuesday for a trial that has already sent the senator’s political stature tumbling. After charges were announced in September, he was forced out of his powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge overseeing former President Donald Trump's classified documents case, "represents a special kind of governmental insanity," attorney and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said on Saturday.

Trump is facing dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally keeping classified documents that he took with him after he left the White House in 2021 at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and then obstructing the government's efforts to get them back. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has denied wrongdoing.

Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, postponed the May 20 trial indefinitely on Tuesday.

In a five-page order, Cannon wrote that it would be "imprudent" to finalize the new trial date due to a "myriad and interconnected pre-trial" issues remaining.

In a Saturday YouTube video on his channel in which he discussed the trial's postponement, Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and frequent critic of the former president, said that "Judge Aileen Cannon is single-handedly depriving the American people of our right to a fair and timely trial of Donald Trump on those most dangerous criminal offenses he committed...That represents a special kind of governmental insanity." In response to Cannon's move, he urged viewers to "roll up our sleeves and we can fill out and submit a judicial misconduct complaint form."

The European Commission has expressed anger over a ban on EU flags at the Eurovision Song Contest and demands explanations.

The allegations, made by several spectators who attended the Grand Final on Saturday and were told off for carrying the flags, quickly turned viral and prompted a stern rebuke from Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas.

"Eurovision is first and foremost a celebration of European spirit, of our European diversity and talent. The EU flag is a symbol of this," Schinas said on X on Saturday evening.

"Less than a month to the European elections, there should be no obstacles, big or small, to celebrating what unites all Europeans."

Finding that clearance of fluid in mice brains is lower in sleep and anaesthesia runs counter to dominant view in neuroscience

The restorative effect of a good night’s rest is widely recognised and the popular scientific explanation has been that the brain washes out toxins during sleep.

However, new findings suggest this theory, which has become a dominant view in neuroscience, could be wrong. The study found that the clearance and movement of fluid in the brains of mice was, in fact, markedly reduced during sleep and anaesthesia.

“It sounded like a Nobel prize-winning idea,” said Prof Nick Franks, a professor of biophysics and anaesthetics at Imperial College London, and co-lead of the study.

“If you are sleep-deprived, countless things go wrong – you don’t remember things clearly, hand-eye coordination is poor,” he added. “The idea that your brain is doing this basic housekeeping during sleep just seems to make sense.”

However, there was only indirect evidence that the brain’s waste-removal system ramps up activity during sleep, Franks said.

In the latest study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers used a fluorescent dye to study the brains of mice. This allowed them to see how quickly the dye moved from fluid-filled cavities, called the ventricles, to other brain regions and enabled them to measure the rate of clearance of the dye from the brain directly.

It was 7 a.m. on a recent Friday when Wang Gang, a 36-year-old Chinese immigrant, jostled for a day job in New York City’s Flushing neighborhood.

When a potential employer pulled up near the street corner, home to a Chinese bakery and pharmacy, Wang and dozens of other men swarmed around the car. They were hoping to be picked for work on a construction site, at a farm, as a mover — anything that would pay.

Wang had no luck, even as he waited for two more hours. It would be another day without a job since he crossed the southern U.S. border illegally in February, seeking better financial prospects than he had in his hometown of Wuhan, China.

The daily struggle of Chinese immigrants in Flushing is a far cry from the picture former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have sought to paint of them as a coordinated group of “military-age” men who have come to the United States to build an “army” and attack America.

Thousands of Canadians have been ordered to leave their homes in Fort Nelson, British Columbia due to the threat of a wildfire.

The blaze began on Friday night and was described by officials as "exhibiting extreme fire behaviour".

Wildfires have also led to evacuation alerts and orders in the neighbouring province of Alberta.

The Canadian government has warned this year's weather conditions would mean a greater wildfire risk in the country.

The Parker Lake fire, as it's been called by the British Columbia Wildfire Service (BCWS), was 8sq km (3 sq miles) in size as of Saturday morning after growing rapidly overnight.

A French official said there is no record of a scheduled meeting with the South Dakota governor – nor had they invited her

The French government has joined the chorus of detractors taking aim at South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s political autobiography No Going Back, which many now see as having eliminated her chances of being Donald Trump’s vice-presidential selection.

Days after Noem removed a passage claiming she had met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, officials at the Élysée Palace in Paris are questioning a passage that describes a cancelled meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron.

Republicans are using a narrative of chaos and ‘philosophical divisions on Israel’ among Democrats to sink Biden’s campaign

Republicans have identified recent college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza as the core of an election campaign narrative of chaos that they hope can be used to sink Joe Biden’s presidency.

The approach was bluntly crystallised by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator Arkansas, in a recent television interview when he mocked the encampments that have sprung up in recent weeks as “little Gazas” and lambasted the president for a perceived failure to unequivocally denounce instances of antisemitism.

Alfred ‘Al’ Blaschke, who first broke the Guinness World Record for at 103 in 2020, reached an altitude of 9,000ft in November

After retaking – at age 106 – the Guinness World Records (GWR) mark for oldest person to tandem skydive out of an airplane, Alfred “Al” Blaschke hailed his feat as living evidence that “everyone is more capable than they think”.

“If you think you can’t, you’re just underestimating yourself,” the resident of Georgetown, Texas, remarked. “[You] just need to make the decision to try.”

Blaschke’s motivational comments came in a write-up published recently by the GWR website, whose organization is known for maintaining a database of more than 40,000 world records.

The particular record which Blaschke has now captured twice made international news because of an entirely different person altogether this past fall. On 1 October, 104-year-old Dorothy Hoffner of Chicago made a tandem skydive aimed at landing her the world’s record for essentially being the oldest person ever to jump from a plane.

Common infections will kill millions if drug resistance through misuse of antibiotics is not curbed, says England’s ex-chief medical officer

The Covid-19 pandemic will “look minor” compared with what humanity faces from the growing number of superbugs resistant to current drugs, Prof Dame Sally Davies, England’s former chief medical officer, has warned.

Davies, who is now the UK’s special envoy on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), lost her goddaughter two years ago to an infection that could not be treated.

She paints a bleak picture of what could happen if the world fails to tackle the problem within the next decade, warning that the issue is “more acute” than climate change. Drug-resistant infections already kill at least 1.2 million people a year.

“It looks like a lot of people with untreatable infections, and we would have to move to isolating people who were untreatable in order not to infect their families and communities. So it’s a really disastrous picture. It would make some of Covid look minor,” said Davies, who is also the first female master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The designation could allow Germany's intelligence agency to surveil and investigate members of the far-right party. The AfD says it plans to appeal the ruling.

A higher regional court in western Germany rejected on Monday an appeal by the  Alternative for Germany (AfD) party against its classification as a "suspected" far-right extremist organization.

The judges at the court in Münster said the designation was appropriate and did not violate the constitution or European law.

"The court finds there is sufficient evidence that the AfD pursues goals that run against the human dignity of certain groups and against democracy," they wrote.