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Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.

Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.

Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”

Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.

European industry has hit back at Donald Trump’s “ludicrous demands” to hand over Greenland or face a trade war.

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Trump’s shock threat on Saturday to impose additional tariffs of 10% in February with a further 25% in June have derailed a period of relative transatlantic trade calm after the EU-US agreement struck at the US president’s Scottish golf course last July.

European leaders are expected to meet in Brussels on Thursday for an emergency summit to discuss the prospect of imposing counter-tariffs on US exports on 7 February that would hit everything from liquid gas to aircraft and machinery.

The German engineering trade group, whose members include vital tool machine exporters, urged the EU to face Trump down. “If the EU gives in here, it will only encourage the US president to make the next ludicrous demand and threaten further tariffs,” said Bertram Kawlath, the president of the German engineering association VDMA.

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Ter Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.

When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.

Many of the American refugees, like Jane-Michelle Arc, a 47-year-old software engineer from San Francisco, are transgender. In April last year she flew into Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and, sobbing, asked a customs officer how to claim asylum. “And they laughed because: what’s this big dumb American doing here asking about asylum? And then they realised I was serious.”

Arc said the US had become such a hostile environment for trans people that she had stopped leaving the house “unless there was an Uber waiting outside”. She said she had been abused on the street and using the ladies’ toilets, and resolved to leave the country after a frightening incident when she feared a woman was going to run her over with her truck.

Not far from a camp in Dunkirk where hundreds of asylum seekers sleep, hoping to cross the Channel to the UK, are some chilling pieces of graffiti. There is a hangman’s noose with a figure dangling next to the word “migrant” and, close by, another daubing: a Jewish Star of David painted in black surrounded by red swastikas.

Utopia 56, a French group supporting migrants in northern France, posted the image on X on Christmas Day with the comment: “This is what comes from normalising the extreme right’s rhetoric, a visible, unapologetic, unabashed hatred.”

It is not known who was responsible for the graffiti. But one thing is clear: it comes after a period of growing activity on French soil by far-right British activists, some of whom have harassed and intimidated asylum seekers in the places where they sleep, or boasted of slashing dinghies to prevent crossings. And to many of those who work to support asylum seekers in northern France, that activity has been hothoused by the rightward shift of mainstream British politics.

"The reason why they’re coming out and doing this stuff is because they’re emboldened,” said Lachlan Macrae, of the group Calais Food Collective. He said his group had found water containers stabbed, or with soap poured in to render the water undrinkable. “They come with bulletproof vests and they go on to the beaches. They’ve been harassing people and streaming this content. As the ground is ceded to the far right, the far right has grown in response. Far-right groups in Calais are the norm now.”

Russian authorities have detained an Indigenous climate advocate, accusing her of participating in a terrorist organization in what international observers are calling “retribution” for her United Nations advocacy on behalf of Indigenous peoples.

Daria Egereva, an Indigenous Selkup woman from the city of Tomsk in western Siberia, has been involved in international advocacy at the United Nations for several years and has been a co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change since 2023—an official forum that facilitates the participation of Indigenous peoples in UN meetings and gatherings, including the annual Conference of the Parties climate change conventions. During COP30 in Brazil, Egereva advocated for the inclusion of Indigenous women in climate negotiations. “If we don’t protect women, we don’t have a future,” she said in a video published on social media on November 21.

According to the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, on December 17, Russian authorities searched Egereva’s home, confiscated her digital devices, and arrested her, in what the organization called “a direct retaliation for her Indigenous rights advocacy,” which included her work at COP30.

On Saturday in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, a pro-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and anti-Muslim hate rally organized by racist Jake Lang was abruptly aborted after Lang was swarmed by local residents and counterprotesters. The robust community response to the rally underscores the unpopularity of Trump’s “mass deportation” policies and attacks on immigrants.

footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AuLhDJnaEk

Experts probing the cause of Sunday's derailment of a high-speed train in Spain, which killed at least 39 people, found a broken joint on the rails, according to a source briefed on initial investigations into the disaster.

The derailed carriages smashed into an oncoming train, pushing it off the tracks and down an embankment in one of the worst train disasters in Europe in modern times.

The accident happened near Adamuz, in the southern province of Cordoba, about 360 kilometres south of the capital, Madrid.

Technicians on site analyzing the rails identified some wear on the joint between sections of the rail, known as a fishplate, which they said showed the fault had been there for some time, the source said.

They found that the faulty joint created a gap between the rail sections that widened as trains continued to travel on the track.

What no one says aloud, at least not in official transcripts or press conferences, is that the Middle East’s geopolitical architecture is being quietly restructured not because conscience finally awakened in the imperial capitals, but because the balance sheet no longer closes. The numbers simply do not add up anymore. The debts are too high, the costs too visible, the returns too uncertain. What the world is witnessing is not a moral awakening but a foreclosure. The repossession of a region by creditors who were once clients. The quiet disposal of an asset, Israel, that has turned toxic on every ledger that matters to the men who actually move capital around the world.

This is not a story anyone in power particularly wants told. It cuts too close to the bone, exposes too many comfortable lies, implicates too many respectable institutions. But the numbers, the bond spreads, the capital flight, the downgrades from ratings agencies, and the trillion-dollar deals being signed in desert palaces suggest it is the story being written nonetheless, whether we choose to read it or not.

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Since the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2025, Israel has violated the agreement with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people.

Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 1,244 times from October 10, 2025 to January 15, 2026, through the continuation of attacks by air, artillery and direct shootings, the Government Media Office in Gaza reports.

The office said Israel shot at civilians 402 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 66 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 581 times, and demolished people’s properties on 195 occasions. It added that Israel had also detained 50 Palestinians from Gaza over the past month.

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Listen to Donald Trump and you would think Moscow and Beijing were lying in wait off the coast of Greenland, ready to pounce to boost their power in the Arctic.

"There are Russian destroyers, there are Chinese destroyers and, bigger, there are Russian submarines all over the place," President Trump said recently.

That is why, according to America's president, US control of Greenland is essential.

So how do you think Moscow has reacted to its alleged plot being uncovered and potentially thwarted by a US takeover of Greenland?

The Russians can't be pleased. Right?

Wrong.

Israel routinely confiscates what it calls uncultivated Palestinian land. In the West Bank towns of Beit Furik or Beit Dajan, farmers who refuse to be driven from their territory are subject to constant attacks by armed settlers and the Israeli army.

Need some happy news in here occasionally...

The vote will decide all 465 seats in parliament’s lower house and mark Takaichi’s first electoral test since becoming nation’s first female leader.

By Al Jazeera Staff and News Agencies

Japan’s Prime Minister ⁠Sanae Takaichi has ​said she ‍will dissolve parliament ‍on Friday ⁠and call a general election ​to ‌seek voter backing for her ‌spending ‌plans and ⁠other policies.

The snap election announcement on Monday comes just three months into her tenure as the nation’s first female prime minister. ……

According to the account provided to Payam, Eli was standing next to her older sister during a protest in Karaj, about 44km from Tehran, when she was shot dead on 8 January.

“She passed away straight away there … and the sister is going through a really rough time at the moment,” he says.

Payam says another relative was required to open hundreds of body bags before she discovered the 39-year-old’s body.

“She found her after 700 bodies,” Payam says, referring to claims made by his family in Iran.

At least 39 people have died in a train collision in southern Spain and dozens more have been injured in the country's worst rail crash in more than a decade, Spain's Civil Guard has said.

Carriages on a Madrid-bound train derailed and crossed over to the opposite tracks, colliding with an oncoming train in Adamuz on Sunday evening.

Four hundred passengers and staff were onboard both trains, the rail networks said. Emergency services treated 122 people, with 43, including four children, still in hospital. Of those, 12 adults and one child are in intensive care.