(LONDON) — British officials announced Wednesday that they have charged two alleged Russian military intelligence agents with the nerve agent poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury — though they held out little hope of being able to bring them to justice.

The Crown Prosecution Service said the men, who entered the U.K. under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, are being charged in absentia with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and use of the nerve agent Novichok.

Prime Minister Theresa May told lawmakers that British intelligence services have concluded the two men were officers of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.

May said the attack “was not a rogue operation” and was almost certainly approved at a “senior level of the Russian state.”

Russia denies involvement in the attack on Sergei Skripal — a former Russian agent who had been convicted in his homeland of spying for Britain — and his daughter.

Sue ..

Two Russian intelligence officers are suspected to have carried out the attempted murder of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal, which was almost certainly approved “at a senior level” of the Russian state, British prime minister Theresa May revealed Wednesday.

Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, named earlier on Wednesday by police and prosecutors, were charged with conspiracy to murder Sergei Skripal, with possessing a chemical weapon, and with the attempted murder of Skripal, his daughter Yulia, and a police officer who fell ill after attending the scene. Police released images and CCTV of the pair who, they said, spent a total of three days in the U.K.

May said that the U.K. was right to name the Russian state responsible for the attack in March. “Now we have identified the individuals involved we can go even further,” she told parliament. “Based on a body of intelligence the government has concluded the two individuals … are officers from the Russian military intelligence service, a..

(RIO DE JANEIRO) — Firefighters found bone fragments from a collection in the still-smoldering National Museum, an official said Tuesday, raising hopes that a famed skull might somehow have survived a massive blaze that turned historic and scientific artifacts to ashes.

Flames tore through the museum Sunday night, and officials have said much of Latin America’s largest collection of treasures might be lost. Aerial photos of the main building showed only heaps of rubble and ashes in the parts of the building where the roof collapsed.

The firefighters “found fragments of bones in a room where the museum kept many items, including skulls,” said Cristiana Serejo, the museum’s vice director. “We still have to collect them and take them to the lab to know exactly what they are.”

In its collection of about 20 million items, one of the most prized possessions is a skull called Luzia, which is among the oldest fossils ever found in the Americas.

Museum spokesman Marcio Martins noted that th..

“Memory is one thing, but demanding justice is another,” says Youk Chhang.

Chhang has devoted his life to balancing this tension, honoring those killed by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime while holding the genocide’s perpetrators accountable.

His mission is deeply personal: as a teenager, Chhang was tortured for picking plants to feed his pregnant and starving sister, who was later killed when a soldier split open her stomach to see if she had stolen rice. She hadn’t. The regime ultimately killed a quarter of all Cambodians, about 2 million people, between 1975 and 1979. Chhang’s own life was saved by a stranger — “a hero without a name,” he says — who was killed in his place.

Now 57, Chhang is the executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), the country’s only genocide research center, and the keeper of Cambodia’s traumatic past. On Friday in Manila, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, known as “Asia’s Nobel Prize,” for his work “preserving the memory” of ge..

Japan awoke Wednesday to massive damage caused by the strongest typhoon to strike the country in a quarter of a century.

At least nine people have died and more than 300 were injured since Typhoon Jebi made landfall around noon Tuesday, bringing gusts of wind and driving rain across Japan’s western coast.

Dramatic videos of the storm on social media Tuesday showed winds lifting cars, toppling trees, and tearing scaffolding and cladding off buildings. Among of those killed are older people believed to have been blown down by wind or hit with flying or falling objects, and more than 1.6 million households lost power in Osaka, Kyoto and four other prefectures Tuesday, AP reports.

Authorities had advised more than 1 million people to evacuate and cancelled hundreds of flights as Japan braced for Typhoon Jebi, its strongest storm since 1993, which slammed into Shikoku island around midday before continuing north to Kobe on Japan’s main island of Honshu towards the Sea of Japan.

Hitoshi ..

Mary Beard is reclining at such a steep angle that her toes hang several feet above her head. Typing leisurely on her laptop, the Cambridge University historian is polishing off a paragraph of her next book on Ancient Rome. It’ll be one more to add to the hundreds of hefty volumes on classics that jostle for space with mock-Greek busts on the walls of her light-filled home office. When she finally swings back into a more conventional relationship with gravity, she tells TIME that her devotion to the ancient world doesn’t mean she’s out of touch. “I wouldn’t work on Rome if I didn’t think it had something to do with the present. Why would you spend your life buried in the past?”

Over the last decade, Beard’s ability to seamlessly weave her knowledge of Ancient Rome and Greece into lessons on modern politics, culture and society has turned her into the world’s most famous classicist. She has written 18 books and hosted nine TV shows. Along the way, she’s gained a reputation for upending..

One of Latin America’s most important museums was gutted by a fire Sunday night in a disaster that may have destroyed more than 20 million scientific and historical artifacts.

It remains unclear how many of the irreplaceable treasures housed at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro were lost in the blaze, but authorities expect a catastrophic blow has been dealt to Brazil’s cultural nucleus. One museum director estimates as much as 90% of the inventory may have been razed.

The timing of the fire couldn’t have been worse. As firefighters battled the flames — reportedly using lake water because the nearest fire hydrants failed — museum officials revealed that the underfunded institution had been slated for a $5 million upgrade, including to its fire prevention system.

As investigators continue searching for clues as to what may have started the blaze, here’s what to know.

What was lost?
By Monday morning, museum directors began to survey the damage. Underneath the rubble of lumber, s..

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has voided the amnesty of one of his most outspoken critics, ordering police to arrest the Senator who has accused him of profiting from the illegal drugs trade and plotting to assassinate him.

Senator Antonio Trillanes IV said he would remain in the custody of the Senate President until his lawyers could petition against the measure he called “illegal and unconstitutional.”

“What Mr. Duterte wants to happen is to order a warrantless arrest which seems to declare a de facto martial law,” Trillanes said in a statement.

Duterte issued a proclamation Tuesday morning empowering security forces to “employ all lawful means to apprehend him.” At least 40 members of the police and military arrived at the Philippine Senate building in Manila shortly after, according to the local news site GMA News.

Trillanes, a retired naval officer, was granted amnesty by former president Benigno Aquino III over his role leading two mutinies in 2003 and 2007 against Aqu..

Japan announced evacuation warnings affecting more than 1 million people and canceled hundreds of flights Tuesday as Typhoon Jebi, the strongest storm to hit the nation in 25 years, battered the country’s west coast.

Jebi, which means “swallow” in Korean, collided with the country’s Shikoku island around noon, with heavy rain and gusting winds recorded at up to 208 km/h (129 mph), Reuters reports. A few hours later, the storm made a second landfall on Honshu, Japan’s main island, and headed north, according to national broadcaster NHK.

Around 3.9 in. of rain fell in Kyoto in the storm’s first hour, with as much as 20 in. expected by noon Wednesday; a few people have already been injured by heavy winds.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe urged Japanese citizens “to take action to protect your lives, including preparing and evacuating early,” while Japan’s weather agency has issued warnings for landslides, flooding and high tides as well as lightning and tornadoes across western Japan, includi..

(CHEMNITZ, Germany) — German authorities said Monday they’re stepping up surveillance of the far-right Alternative for Germany amid growing concern the third-largest party in parliament is closing ranks with extremist groups.

Activists for AfD, the nationalist party’s German acronym, marched in the eastern city of Chemnitz alongside leading figures in anti-migrant group PEGIDA and members of the area’s militant neo-Nazi scene in the past week, after two refugees were arrested in a German citizen’s fatal stabbing.

“Parts of AfD are openly acting against the Constitution,” Justice Minister Katarina Barley told the RND media group. “We need to treat them like other enemies of the Constitution and observe them accordingly.”

Authorities in northern Germany’s Bremen and Lower Saxony said Monday they have begun monitoring the party’s youth wings in the two states.

Boris Pistorius, Lower Saxony’s interior minister, said the decision to keep an eye on the AfD’s local youth wing, was unrelat..

(RIO DE JANEIRO) — Firefighters dug through the burned-out hulk of Brazil’s National Museum on Monday, a day after flames gutted the building, as the country mourned the irreplaceable treasures lost and pointed fingers over who was to blame.

The museum held Latin America’s largest collection of historical artifacts, and the damage was feared to be catastrophic. One official told a Brazilian news outlet that as much as 90% may have been destroyed. Some parts of the collection were stored at other sites.

For many in Brazil, the state of the 200-year-old natural history museum quickly became a metaphor for what they see as the gutting of Brazilian culture and life during years of corruption, economic collapse and poor governance.

“It’s a crime that the museum was allowed to get to this shape,” said Laura Albuquerque, a 29-year-old dance teacher who was in a crowd protesting outside the gates. “What happened isn’t just regrettable, it’s devastating, and politicians are responsible for i..

(NAURU) — Shaped like a peanut and smaller than some big-city airports, this tropical Pacific island has an unusual history. Thanks to rich deposits of a fertilizer ingredient, Nauru’s 11,000 citizens were once among the wealthiest people on earth. But after much of the phosphate was plundered, Nauru squandered its wealth on bad investments, like a 1993 musical about Leonardo da Vinci.

That left the island searching for new sources of income, and in recent years it found an answer by becoming a holding station for hundreds of refugees who tried to reach Australia by boat. Australia designed a policy of keeping boat refugees and asylum seekers far from its shores to deter more of them from trying to make the voyage, but many critics say the policy violates human rights.

The fate of those refugees, including a growing number of children who advocates say are suffering from life-threatening medical conditions, is casting a shadow over the Pacific Islands Forum conference that starts in ..

Two women were publicly caned by a Malaysian Shariah court on Monday for allegedly having sex, a punishment that drew international rebuke as both cruel and indicative of growing concerns about LGBT discrimination in the country.

The two unnamed women, ages 22 and 32, were arrested in April after Islamic enforcement officers spotted them in a car together in northeast Terengganu state, according to Agence France-Presse. Earlier this month, they pleaded guilty to charges of lesbian sex, and were sentenced to six strokes and a RM 3,300 (U.S.$800) fine in a verdict the judge called a lesson for society.

After a week-long delay due to “technical difficulties,” the whippings reportedly occurred Monday in front of over 100 onlookers at the Sharia High Court in the state capital.

Amnesty International called the sentence “a dreadful reminder of the depth of discrimination #LGBTI people face in the country and a sign that the new government condones the use of inhuman and degrading punishme..

U.S. forces have killed the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State (ISIS) branch in Afghanistan, according to a statement posted Sunday by the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan.

During an Aug. 25 strike on Nangarhar province near the Pakistan border, U.S. forces said they targeted and killed Abu Saad Orakzai. He is the third leader of the Islamic State–Khorasan group to have been killed by U.S. forces since July 2016, according to the statement.

“America and her allies are in Afghanistan to maintain pressure on the networked, trans-regional terrorists attempting to plot, resource and direct attacks from here,” said U.S. Army Gen.Scott Miller, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. “This is only part of the coalition’s work towards and Afghan security solution, but it is a vital part.” Miller took over the post from Army Gen. John Nicholson on Sunday.

Orakzai, also known as Abu Saad Erhabi, was the emir of the Islamic State–Khorasan, the ISIS affiliate ..

(RIO DE JANEIRO) — A massive fire tore through a 200-year-old museum in Rio de Janeiro late Sunday, lighting up the night and sending large plumes of smoke into the air.

Firefighters worked to put out the blaze at the esteemed National Museum in northern Rio, which houses artefacts from Egypt, Greco-Roman art and some of the first fossils found in Brazil.

In a statement, the museum said the blaze began around 7:30 p.m. There were no reported injuries and the fire began after it had closed to the public, said the statement. It wasn’t immediately clear how the fire began.

In a statement, President Michel Temer said it was “a sad day for all Brazilians.”

“Two hundred years of work, investigation and knowledge have been lost,” said Temer.

According to the museum’s website, it has more than 20,000 items related to the history of Brazil and other countries, and that many of its collections came from members of Brazil’s royal family.

Connected to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro..

(VATICAN CITY) — The Vatican is starting to push back against Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, author of the bombshell accusation of sex abuse cover-up against Pope Francis, with a statement Sunday from its former spokesman about a controversial 2015 meeting Vigano organized.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi and his English-language assistant, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, issued a joint statement disputing Vigano’s claims about the encounter he organized with American anti-gay marriage campaigner, Kim Davis, during Francis’ September 2015 visit to the United States.

News of the Davis audience made headlines at the time and was viewed by conservatives as a papal stamp of approval for Davis, the Kentucky clerk at the center of the U.S. gay marriage debate. The Vatican furiously sought to downplay it, with Lombardi saying the meeting by no means indicated papal support for Davis and insisting that the only private audience Francis held in Washington was with his former student: a gay man and his par..