Italy has condemned Egypt’s decision to rule out charging five state security officers over the torture and murder of an Italian student near Cairo.

Earlier this year Italian prosecutors named four suspects believed to be behind the death of Giulio Regeni.

But this week Egypt’s public prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence against the group.

Egyptian authorities have previously denied that any of their officials were involved in Regeni’s kidnap and murder.

They have suggested other explanations – including that he was the victim of a robbery by a criminal gang, or a gay crime of passion. Italian officials have dismissed these theories.

Mr Regeni, a Cambridge University student, had been researching independent trade unions, a sensitive issue in Egypt.

His murder has caused a diplomatic row, with Italian prosecutors accusing Egyptian officials of trying to mislead the investigation.

Earlier this year, Egypt’s public prosecutor said it was “temporarily closing” its investigation, with Mr Regeni’s killer “still unknown”.

On 1 December, Italian prosecutors formally accused four suspects over Mr Regeni’s death – Gen Tareq Sabir, Col Ather Kamal, Maj Magdi Sharif and Col Hisham Helmy.

But on Wednesday Egyptian public prosecutor Hamada al-Sawy said he had “ruled out” out charging the group, along with a fifth officer.

Mr al-Sawy also said there was no intention of pursuing a criminal case “because the perpetrator is unknown.”

In a statement, Italy’s foreign ministry called the decision “unacceptable,” and said it would “continue to act in all forums, including the European Union, so that the truth about the barbaric murder of Giulio Regeni can finally emerge.”

The PhD student disappeared on a research trip on 25 January 2016 – the fifth anniversary of the start of the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak, meaning there was a heavy police presence in Cairo.

His body was discovered on 3 February in a ditch by the side of a road. His mother told the Italian parliament in 2018 that her son’s body was so disfigured that she was only able to identify him by the tip of his nose.

An Italian post-mortem examination found that Regeni had been tortured “in stages” between 25 January and the day of his death

About 900 migrants from South Asia and other regions are struggling in bitter cold temperatures at a burned-out camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina after being denied proper shelter.

They remain at Lipa, a camp gutted by fire last week in the country’s north-west, amid a dispute over moving them to a military barracks.

They had been hoping to reach Croatia.

A migrant from Pakistan called Zahur told Reuters TV they had spent “36 hours [in the] bus, waiting… Does Bosnia government [have] no solution?”

The EU and aid agencies have warned of a humanitarian crisis as the migrants lack basic necessities, amid arguments between Bosnia’s central and local authorities.

A joint statement from the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), Save the Children and other aid groups said “the buses never left the site, following a deadlock in decision-making processes at different levels of authorities, and local population protests”.

The Lipa emergency camp, near the town of Bihac, “lacked the most basic conditions for hosting people in winter”, the statement said.

After its closure last week “hundreds of people spent the following week in the open at the Lipa location, in freezing temperatures, without access to basic facilities”.

Residents forced to leave Lipa, which was set up to provide temporary shelter during the Covid-19 pandemic, looted equipment and set fire to tents, police said last week.

The IOM said the blaze started minutes after the camp’s closure and almost 3,000 migrants were now in dire need of humanitarian aid near Bosnia’s border with EU member Croatia.

In recent years thousands of people, including refugees from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria, have entered Bosnia hoping to get asylum in the EU by crossing into Croatia. However, many have been forced to remain in Bosnia.

The EU has given the Bosnian authorities €60m (£54m; $74m) to manage the crisis and pledged €25m more, but bureaucratic hurdles remain, Reuters reports.

Samuel Little, a man described by the FBI as the most prolific serial killer in US history, has died aged 80.

Little died in a California hospital on Wednesday, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said.

He was serving a life sentence for the murder of three women. But by the time of his death, he had confessed to killing 93 women between 1970 and 2005.

Little targeted vulnerable individuals, many of whom were sex workers or drug users, officials say.

A former competitive boxer, Little would knock his victims out with punches before strangling them – meaning that there were not always obvious signs, like stab or bullet wounds, the person had been murdered.

Instead many deaths were incorrectly determined to be overdoses or accidental and were never investigated. Some bodies have never been found, the agency said.

Last year, the FBI said its analysts believed all of his confessions were “credible”.

They also released images of the victims he drew while in prison in an attempt to trace those he killed.

Little was arrested in 2012 on a drugs charge in Kentucky and extradited to California, where officers carried out DNA testing on him.

He already had an extensive criminal record, with offences from armed robbery to rape across the US.

The DNA results linked him to three unsolved murders from 1987 and 1989 in Los Angeles County. He pleaded not guilty at trial, but was eventually convicted and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences, with no chance of parole.

France is to mobilise 100,000 police and gendarmes on New Year’s Eve to break up parties and enforce a curfew imposed to combat coronavirus.

The extra security also aims at halting the torching of cars that often takes place on the final night of the year.

France has confirmed 2.6m Covid-19 cases, the fifth highest total in the world, and more than 64,000 deaths.

Like other European countries, France will see muted celebrations for New Year’s Eve amid the pandemic.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has ordered a visible security presence in city centres and flashpoint suburbs from 20:00, when the curfew begins.

In Paris half of the metro lines will be closed in the evening, while Mr Darmanin also asked for a wider public transport shutdown across the country to be considered.

Despite rising cases, and concerns over a new more contagious strain of the disease, a government spokesman said there was no need for local lockdowns for now. France has had two national lockdowns and bars, restaurants and cultural attractions will remain closed into January.

Fou Ts’ong, the first Chinese pianist to win global acclaim and success, has died aged 86 after contracting Covid-19.

Fou died on Monday in London, where he had been living since the 1950s.

His death was confirmed by Jianing Kong, a professor at the Royal College of Music and student of Fou’s.

Responding to the news on Tuesday, the renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang described Fou as “a truly great pianist, and our spiritual beacon”.

Fou was born in China in 1934 to a family of China’s intellectual elite. He first heard western classical music at a young age when his father, the renowned translator Fu Lei, returned to China after several years living in France.

As a budding pianist, he studied with the founder and head of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Italian conductor Mario Paci, who had been crucial in bringing western classical music to China.

Aged 19, Fou left China to continue his musical education in Europe, moving to then-Communist Poland to study in Warsaw. Two years later, he won awards and international recognition at the prestigious Chopin competition in the city.

In 1959, Fou moved to London and grew into an internationally acclaimed soloist, playing both in Europe and the United States, and performing in 1967 at the BBC’s First Night of the Proms.

In 1960 he had married Zamira Menuhin, the daughter of the renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The couple had a son and divorced in 1969. Fou later married the Chinese pianist Patsy Toh and had another son.

While he was living in London, Fou’s parents were persecuted in Maoist China during the anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution. They took their own lives in 1966.

A landslide in a Norwegian village has buried homes under dark mud, injuring 10 people – one seriously – and leaving 11 missing.

Rescue workers are continuing to search for those missing, who include children, in the village of Gjerdrum, 25km (15 miles) north-east of the capital, Oslo.

About 900 people have so far been evacuated from the village.

Police said some people were feared to be trapped in mud and debris.

“We are quite certain that there are people in the affected area, but we don’t know if all 11 are there or if the number is smaller,” police spokesman Roger Pettersen told reporters.

The landslide began during the early hours of Wednesday, with residents calling emergency services and telling them that their houses were moving, police said.

On Wednesday afternoon two more houses collapsed into the crater formed by the landslide, while others remained perched precariously on its lip.

Prime Minister Erna Solberg said the situation was still so unstable that only rescues by helicopter could be carried out.

“There could be people trapped… but at the same time we can’t be sure because it is the New Year’s holiday, which means people could be elsewhere,” she told reporters.

Residents have been speaking to Norwegian media about what happened.

“There were two massive tremors that lasted for a long while and I assumed it was snow being cleared or something like that,” Oeystein Gjerdrum, 68, told broadcaster NRK.

“Then the power suddenly went out, and a neighbour came to the door and said we needed to evacuate, so I woke up my three grandchildren and told them to get dressed quickly.”

Large quantities of earth were continuing to move, Toril Hofshagen, the regional head of the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE), told reporters.

The local municipality warned that up to 1,500 people could need to leave the region because of concerns about the condition of the ground.

An NVE spokeswoman told AFP that the landslide was a so-called “quick clay slide” measuring about 300m by 700m (985ft by 2,300ft).

“This is the largest landslide in recent times in Norway, considering the number of houses involved and the number of evacuees,” Laila Hoivik said.

Quick clay is a kind of clay found in Norway and Sweden that can collapse and become fluid when it comes under stress.

However Ms Hoivik said further slides were unlikely.

Broadcaster NRK said heavy rainfall may have made the soil unstable.

Norway’s King Harald, 83, said that the incident had “made a deep impression on me and my family”.

“My thoughts are with everyone affected, the injured, those who lost their homes and are now living in fear and uncertainty of the full extent of the disaster,” he said in a statement released by the royal palace

The Oyo State Government has admonished the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, Oyo State chapter to adhere strictly to the 12:00 AM to 4:00 AM curfew imposed by the federal government and conduct its cross-over services earlier, rather than the traditional midnight services on every 31st of December.

The technical team of the Oyo state Covid-19 task force gave the admonition on Tuesday while addressing newsmen on the outcome of a meeting held among the members of the Covid-19 task force at the state’s Emergency Operation Center, ‘Yemetu Ibadan.

While reading the communique of the state’s Covid-19 task force to the newsmen, the coordinator, Oyo State Isolation Centers, Professor Temitope Alonge, said the state government has banned street Carnivals in all the nooks and crannies of the state with immediate effect.

He added that the existing Nationwide curfew from 12 midnight to 4:00 AM will be reinforced, and advised worship centers, night-clubs, bars, and lounges to adhere strictly to the restriction, while event centers are reminded of the existing advisory on the recommend occupancy for events not exceeding 50% of capacity.

Also speaking, the state commissioner for health, Dr. Bashir Bello, and the clinical epidemiologist working with the state’s emergency operation center, Dr. Akindele Adebiyi, explained that Oyo state has recorded 90 cases within two weeks and cautioned residents of the state not to exploit the benevolence of government as younger ones have started to lose their lives as a result of complications from the dreaded virus.

The duo who noted that Orelope and Ibadan North local government areas have been identified as Covid hot spot maintained that necessary machinery has been put in motion to ensure that Covid-19 test results are released within 72 hours, while treatment of infected persons is guaranteed.

In his remarks, Professor of virology, David Olaleye, who confirmed the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, called on the Oyo state citizens to go for the Covid-19 test at 30 collection sites located in the state in a bid contain and curb the spread of the virus as the country battles the second wave of the pandemic.

A magnitude 6.4 earthquake has struck southern Croatia, with reports of many injuries and at least one death.

A 12-year-old girl was killed in Petrinja, the prime minister said as he visited the town.

The mayor said around half the town had been destroyed and people were being pulled from the rubble.

The earthquake could be felt in the Croatian capital Zagreb, in neighbouring Bosnia and Serbia, and as far away as Italy.

“We are pulling people from the cars, we don’t know if we have dead or injured,” Darinko Dumbovic, the mayor of Petrinja, told regional broadcaster N1.

“There is general panic, people are looking for their loved ones,” he added.

https://t.co/tEJ58O8eab https://twitter.com/IFRC_Europe/status/1343889908809814018?s=20

Pierre Cardin, the French designer whose famous name embossed myriad consumer products after his Space Age styles shot him into the fashion stratosphere in the 1960s, has died aged 98.

Cardin was born on 7 July 1922 in a small town near Venice, Italy, to a modest, working-class family. When he was a child, the family moved to Saint-Étienne in central France, where Cardin was schooled and became an apprentice to a tailor at age 14.

Cardin would later embrace his status as a self-made man, saying in the same 1970 interview that going it alone “makes you see life in a much more real way and forces you to take decision and to be courageous”.

“It’s much more difficult to enter a dark woods alone than when you already know the way through,” he added.

After moving to Paris, he worked as an assistant in the House of Paquin starting in 1945 and also helped design costumes for the likes of Jean Cocteau. He also was involved in creating the costumes for the director’s 1946 film Beauty and the Beast.

After working briefly with Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior, Cardin opened his own house

Cardin’s name was carried by thousands of products, from wristwatches to bed sheets, and in the brand’s heyday in the 1970s and 80s, goods bearing his fancy cursive signature were sold at 100,000 outlets worldwide.

That number dwindled dramatically in later years, as his products were increasingly regarded as cheaply made and his clothing, which, decades later, remained virtually unchanged from its 60s-era styles felt almost laughably dated.

A savvy businessman, Cardin used the fabulous wealth that was the fruit of his empire to snap up top-notch properties in Paris, including the Belle Epoque restaurant Maxim’s, which he also frequented.

The number of patients hospitalized across the US with Covid-19 is the highest it’s ever been — and at this rate health experts warn they may have to ration nurses, respirators and care.

“When you run out of capacity, physicians and bioethicists in these hospitals will need to decide which patients are salvageable — potentially salvageable — and which patients aren’t,” CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner explained.

The US reported 121,235 patients hospitalized with coronavirus Monday, the highest it has been since the start of the pandemic, according to the Covid Tracking Project. ICU coronavirus patients have increased from 16% in September to 40% last week, and health experts anticipate holiday travel could mean a “surge on top of a surge”

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Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France’s president from 1974 to 1981, has died at the age of 94.

He died of complications from coronavirus, surrounded by his family at his estate in central France.

A centre-right, pro-Europe politician, Giscard d’Estaing also liberalised laws on divorce, abortion and contraception during his seven years in power.

President Emmanuel Macron said his presidency had transformed France and his direction still guided its way.

“A servant of the state, a politician of progress and freedom, his death has plunged the French nation into mourning,” he said in a statement.

The late president’s family said his funeral would take place amid “strict intimacy”.

His career in politics

In later life, Giscard d’Estaing liked to portray himself as the grand old man of French politics.

As one of France’s youngest presidents – he was 48 when he came to power, he had a longer career in politics after he left high office than he had enjoyed on his way to the Élysée Palace.

He was seen by many as arrogant and aloof; his presidential popularity was short-lived and he was eventually squeezed out of office by a strengthening of opposition from both the left and the right.

He was also caught up in a scandal surrounding his support for a corrupt African dictator.

Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d’Estaing was born on 2 February 1926 in Koblenz, in what was then French-occupied Germany.

His father was a civil servant who worked for the French occupying forces, while his mother was descended from King Louis XV of France via one of his mistresses.

Giscard d’Estaing’s education was disrupted by World War Two. He was just a teenager when he joined a French resistance group in occupied Paris before enlisting in a tank battalion in 1944, earning the Croix de Guerre in the last months of the war.

He worked for a while as a teacher in Montreal before graduating from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and joining the tax and revenue service.

In 1955 he spent some time on the staff of prime minister Edgar Faure before winning the seat of Puy-de Dome in the National Assembly, the area from which his mother’s family came.

He became secretary of state for finances in 1959, a post he held for almost four years until his party broke with the ruling Gaullists with whom they were in a coalition. However, Giscard d’Estaing refused to leave the government and founded the Independent Republicans, which allied itself to the majority Gaullists.

He was sacked from the cabinet in 1966 but, as chairman of the National Assembly committee that scrutinised the country’s finances, he remained a powerful voice, latterly increasingly critical of the De Gaulle government.

Thrown out of his chairmanship by the Gaullists in 1968, he gained his revenge by supporting Georges Pompidou in the 1969 presidential elections, whereupon he was reappointed to the finance ministry.

When Pompidou died suddenly in 1974, Giscard d’Estaing announced he would run for the Élysée Palace, presenting himself as a modern and moderate alternative to the austere conservatism of Gaullism.

Death sentences

He successfully gained the support of the centre while, at the same time, taking advantage of divisions among the Gaullists, some of whom – notably Jacques Chirac – announced their support for Giscard d’Estaing as the only hope of defeating the left.

Giscard d’Estaing narrowly defeated the socialist François Mitterrand in the second round of voting with just 50.7% of the poll, becoming the third youngest president in French history.

After years of Gaullist stagnation, he made his intentions plain: “You want a deep political, a deep economic and a deep social change. You will not be disappointed,” he said.

At home, he made several reforms early on in his term in office. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, while divorce and abortion laws were relaxed, in spite of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church.

He also saw through laws on equal pay and opportunities for women, reduced the retirement age to 60 and allowed Paris to elect its own mayor.

Although he voiced his opposition to the death penalty, he refused to commute three of the death sentences passed during his term, and the last use of the guillotine in France took place in 1977.

A fan of technology, Giscard d’Estaing was a strong advocate of the French high-speed train network, the TGV, construction of which began in earnest in 1976.

He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the drive to increase France’s dependence on nuclear power, following the oil crisis of 1973.

Other programmes

Giscard d’Estaing was committed to the European ideal and developed a close relationship with Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Together they turned their dream of a more integrated Europe into reality.

His main contribution was the formation of the European Council in 1974 – bringing together the heads of states of all member countries – which, in 1979, pushed forward a European monetary system.

However, his domestic reforms worried his more conservative political allies, with Jacques Chirac resigning as prime minister in 1976. His successor, Raymond Barre, introduced a programme of austerity and unemployment began to rise.

The right won a majority in the 1978 coalition elections and Giscard d’Estaing responded by founding the Union for French Democracy (UDF).

Giscard d’Estaing’s popularity began to wane. His standing was not enhanced after he was accused of accepting a gift of diamonds from the self-styled Emperor of the Central African Republic, Jean-Bedel Bokassa.

Bokassa’s brutal dictatorial regime had received a great deal of support from the French government, with Giscard D’Estaing declaring in 1975 that he was a “friend and family member” of Bokassa.

France played a major part in Bokassa’s lavish coronation ceremony in 1977, which cost more than the annual gross domestic product of the impoverished country.

In 1979, the French satirical magazine, Le Canard enchaîné, alleged that Giscard d’Estaing had received the diamonds in 1973, when he was finance minister.

His initial explanation that he had sold them and given the proceeds to a number of charities was undermined when one of the alleged recipients, the Red Cross, denied having received any funds.

Giscard d’Estaing lost the 1981 presidential election to Francois Mitterrand. He defeated Jacques Chirac in the first round of voting, but Chirac’s failure to call on his supporters to support Giscard d’Estaing in the second round widened the gulf between the former allies.

Subsequently, he based himself in his political heartland – the Auvergne region of central France – delivering regular pronouncements to newspapers and on television about the state of the nation.

His national standing sank so low that he became known as Monsieur Ex in Parisian political circles.

His hopes of becoming prime minister under Mitterrand in 1986 were dashed and he refused to support either right-wing candidate in the 1988 presidential elections.

Between 1989 and 1993, he served as a member of the European Parliament and seemed destined to end his days in political obscurity.

But, in 2002, he returned to the limelight when he was chosen to head up the convention tasked with drawing up a constitution for the European Union

His selection for the job was the result of intensive lobbying by French President Jacques Chirac, who is said to have insisted on it at the EU’s summit in the Belgian town of Laeken in December 2001.

Profound embarrassment

Many criticised the choice of a man in his late 70s for a job designed to bring the EU closer to the people, and especially the young.

There was also criticism over Giscard d’Estaing’s reported demands for a salary in excess of €20,000 per month, plus expenses. He is said to have asked for a luxury suite of rooms in a Brussels hotel for a year and for a handpicked private staff.

However, he denied that he was being greedy. “It is simply that things should be comfortable,” he told Le Monde newspaper.

In 2004, European heads of state signed a European Constitution that was based primarily on the work carried out by Giscard d’Estaing’s convention.

A year later, and to Giscard d’Estaing’s profound embarrassment, the constitution was roundly rejected by the French people. He later complained that “the rejection of the Constitutional treaty by voters in France was a mistake that should be corrected”.

In 2005, he and his brother purchased the castle of Estaing in the French district of Aveyron, which had previously been owned by Admiral d’Estaing. Giscard d’Estaing’s family had no direct connection with the deceased naval officer and there was much criticism that he was attempting to buy his way into the nobility.

In 2009, he published a novel about a relationship between a fictional French president and the fictional Princess of Cardiff. It led to speculation that it was based on a relationship between Giscard d’Estaing and Diana, Princess of Wales, although he eventually poured cold water on those suggestions.

Earlier this year, he was accused of groping a German reporter during a 2018 interview – charges he denied.

Valery Giscard d’Estaing was something of an enigma. Intellectually gifted, he lacked the common touch and never became popular with the French people.

His single-minded approach to greater European integration was not to everyone’s taste and his aloof nature meant he often fell out with his allies.

Bitterly disappointed that Britain decided to leave the European Union in 2016, he described it as a “backward step”. But the enthusiastic architect of European unity was, by now, in his nineties. He felt, he said, inclined to take the long view.

“We functioned without Britain during the first years of the European Union,” he said, with a Gallic shrug. “So we will rediscover a situation that we have already known.