Italy’s first black senator has said his election for the League has proved that the far-right party, whose anti-immigrant rhetoric helped it to its best ever result on Sunday, has no problem with legal migration.

Campaigning under the party slogan “stop the invasion”, Toni Iwobi, a 62-year-old businessman originally from Nigeria, won his seat in Spirano, a small town in the Lombardy province of Bergamo, as the party took almost 18% of the vote nationwide.

“It’s an incredible honour for me to be Italy’s first black senator,” he told the Guardian. He shared success in the region with his party colleague Attilio Fontana, the new governor of Lombardy, who at the start of the election campaign said Italy’s migrant influx threatened to wipe out “our white race”. Iwobi, who owns an IT company, came to Italy in the late 1970s to study in Perugia. He later moved to Spirano, where he said he found the two loves of his life: his Italian wife and the League, then known as the Northern League. He became a councillor for the party in 1995.(theguardian)…[+]

A Danish inventor denied murdering the Swedish journalist Kim Wall on his homemade submarine as he took to the stand on the first day of his trial in Copenhagen. “I deny that I am guilty of the murder of Kim Wall,” Peter Madsen said, having earlier entered a not guilty plea via his lawyer, Betina Hald Engmark. “There is nothing worse that can happen to a person like me than to sail out with another person and return alone.”

Under questioning by the prosecution, Madsen said he had offered shifting explanations for what happened because he wanted to spare Wall’s relatives details of her death. Madsen initially told authorities he had dropped Wall off on a Copenhagen island several hours into their submarine trip in August. Then he said that Wall died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion – a claim he repeated on Thursday without elaborating.(theguardian)…[+]

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, has condemned the poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Salisbury as a “brazen and reckless” attempted murder. Updating the House of Commons on the nerve agent attack, Rudd said Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, remain “unconscious and in a critical but stable condition”.

She confirmed that a police officer who came to their aid remains in a serious but stable condition but is “conscious, talking and engaging”. She did not reveal the identity of nerve agent involved but confirmed it had been “tested by experts at the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, who are world renowned experts in this field”. She added: “That forensic analysis has revealed the presence of a nerve agent and the incident is therefore being treated as attempted murder.” Amid mounting speculation that the attack was ordered by the Kremlin, Rudd said: “The use of nerve agent on UK soil is a brazen and reckless act. This was attempted murder in the most cruel and public way.”(theguardian)…[+]