Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold their first official summit in Helsinki on 16 July, the Kremlin and the White House have announced, scheduling an encounter that is certain to generate fresh controversy for the White House. The optics of the meeting are likely to be as important to the leaders as its results. Moscow is keen to show it is not isolated on the world stage, while Trump has ignored criticism at home to plot a course towards closer relations with Putin.

“I’ve said it from day one, getting along with Russia and with China and with everybody is a very good thing,” Trump said, adding that Syria, Ukraine and “many other subjects” would be discussed at the summit. “It’s good for the world, it’s good for us, it’s good for everybody.”

However, US allies are concerned that a show of warmth with Putin in Helsinki, especially if it follows a combative Nato summit in Brussels five days earlier, could undermine confidence in the strength of the transatlantic alliance. Those fears were deepened earlier this month in Quebec, when Trump railed at other leaders at a G7 summit that “Nato is as bad as Nafta”, comparing the alliance to the North American free trade agreement he constantly denigrates as being at expense of the US. An amicable Trump-Putin meeting could also cast a shadow back on the US president’s visit to the UK between the Nato and Helsinki summits, particularly if his encounter with Theresa May is as frosty as recent exchanges between the US and British leaders.(theguardian)…[+]

Spanish police have reportedly arrested four men and a boy on suspicion of drugging and sexually assaulting an underage girl at a resort in the Canary Islands. Local media reports said the five suspects called themselves la nueva manada (the new wolfpack), after a gang that was jailed for sexually abusing an 18-year-old woman in Pamplona two years ago and released on bail to widespread outrage last week.

In defiance of a travel ban imposed by the court, one of the Pamplona attackers was caught trying to obtain a new passport days after handing over his documents as a condition for his provisional release, police said on Thursday. Police have released few details about the latest incident, which took place last week, but El Diario reported that at least one of the suspects filmed the incident on his phone. The suspects are being held in the town of Maspalomas on Gran Canaria.

Marco Aurelio Pérez, the mayor of San Bartolomé de Tirajana where the incident took place, denounced what he described as “a totally intolerable, mean, vile” act, and said such incidents risked “dangerously awakening social anger”. Women’s groups and the Spanish media have linked the case to the early release the previous day of the original “wolfpack”. That group got its name from a WhatsApp chat the men used to discuss their plans during the San Fermîn bull-running festival in 2016.(theguardian)…[+]

Two women accused of murdering the estranged half-brother of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, must have been trained to carry out an assassination using a deadly nerve agent, Malaysian prosecutors have said.

Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong are charged with having common intent with four North Korean fugitives to kill Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur international airport in February 2017. Kim’s face was smeared with VX, a banned nerve agent developed as a chemical weapon.

“You have to be trained for it – there can be no room for error,” said the prosecutor Wan Shaharuddin Wan Ladin at the high court in Shah Alam on Thursday, likening the killing to something from a James Bond film. The two women, both in their 20s, are the only suspects in custody and could face the death penalty if convicted. They have pleaded not guilty, saying they believed they were acting in a prank reality show and did not know they were handling anything lethal.(theguardian)…[+]

Britain’s chief financial watchdog has warned that contracts worth trillions of pounds between UK and European Union banks remain at risk of collapse following Brexit, after Brussels’ failure to implement protective legislation. In a warning to EU officials that time is running out before next March to devise rules for EU banks, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) said £29tn worth of contracts could be declared void.
Derivatives contracts, which provide banks and corporations with protection from interest rate rises, could come to an end without fresh legislation from the UK and EU, the committee said in its latest quarterly health check on Britain’s financial services industry. The warning will be seen as a direct response to the European Banking Authority, which argued earlier this week that the UK was dragging its feet preparing for Brexit.(theguardian)…[+]