Russia has said new US sanctions against it approved by the House of Representatives on Tuesday will take relations between the two countries into “uncharted territory”, and said it is close to taking retaliatory measures.

The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favour of imposing new sanctions on Moscow and requiring Donald Trump to obtain lawmakers’ permission before easing any sanctions. The sanctions package, which also targets Iran and North Korea, “tightens the screws on our most dangerous adversaries in order to keep Americans safe,” the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, said after the bill passed by 419 votes to three. It now heads to the Senate before Trump faces the choice of whether to veto the bill, which has been opposed by the White House. Moscow had initially hoped Trump would work to repair a relationship that has slumped to a post-cold war low, but has watched with frustration as allegations that it interfered with last year’s US presidential election and concerns over Trump associates’ Russia ties have killed off hopes of detente. Russia denies the meddling accusations.(theguardian)…[+]

Brussels has accused EU member states of offering a “measly” level of funding for efforts in north Africa to halt the migration crisis. The European commissioner for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said the €200m produced so far was too little. “The member states need to get serious on this,” he said.

On Wednesday the European court of justice backed attempts by Austria and Slovenia to deport asylum seekers back to their point of entry in the EU. The court ruled that a law requiring refugees to seek asylum in the first country they reach applied even in exceptional circumstances. The case could affect the future of several hundred people who arrived in 2015-16. But Avramopoulos said he was pleased by an increase in the number of refugees relocated from Italian and Greek camps to other states, and a sense of growing solidarity within the bloc. A record number of refugees were transferred in June, and the total number of relocations under an initiative agreed in 2015 now stands at 24,676 – 16,803 from Greece and 7,873 from Italy – with “almost all member states pledging and transferring regularly”, the commission said.(theguardian)…[+]

For the past seven months, Abu Hassan, an army medic, has treated the damaged and desperate people of the Iraqi city of Mosul as they arrived from the cauldron of war.

Soldiers, women and children often trembled in fear in front of him, hours after escaping the bloody clashes, as Iraqi forces battled to wrest control of the city from Islamic State fighters. But not nine-year-old Mohammed. “He wasn’t a normal boy – he didn’t seem scared,” Hassan said shortly after treating Mohammed, one of the last to flee west Mosul earlier this month. “I chatted with him. I asked him normal questions, like: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ He said: ‘I want to be a sniper.’”“I was shocked,” said Hassan. “It’s not a normal thing for a child to say. I asked him: ‘What did your dad do?’ He said he was a sniper emir – the emir of snipers.

“[Later] I received a lot of information from people from Mosul saying his father was important. The special forces found the boy in a basement with several [dead] Isis fighters. The soldiers brought the boy to me.” Since the recapture of Iraq’s second city earlier this month, the toll the terror group’s occupation took on the city’s residents – and especially its young – has begun to emerge.(theguardian)…[+]