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Premier League clubs have voted to temporarily block teams agreeing lucrative sponsorship deals linked to a club's owners after the Saudi Arabia-backed £305m takeover of Newcastle. Eighteen clubs voted in favour of the ban at an emergency meeting on Monday.Premier League clubs have voted to temporarily block teams agreeing lucrative sponsorship deals linked to a club's owners after the Saudi Arabia-backed £305m takeover of Newcastle. Eighteen clubs voted in favour of the ban at an emergency meeting on Monday. Newcastle voted against and Manchester City abstained, with both questioning the legality of the move. It means a temporary one-month ban on deals linked to club owners while the issue is debated further. That prevents Newcastle signing sponsorship deals with companies linked to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), which owns 80% of the club.Newcastle voted against and Manchester City abstained, with both questioning the legality of the move. I...

North Korea has fired a suspected submarine-launched ballistic missile into waters off the coast of Japan, South Korea's military has said. Pyongyang unveiled the missile in January, describing it as "the world's most powerful weapon". It comes weeks after South Korea unveiled a similar weapon of its own. North Korea has carried out a flurry of missile tests in recent weeks, including of what it said were hypersonic and long-range weapons. Some of these tests violate strict international sanctions. The country is specifically prohibited by the United Nations from testing ballistic missiles as well as nuclear weapons. The UN considers ballistic missiles to be more threatening than cruise missiles because they can carry more powerful payloads, have a longer range and can fly faster. On Tuesday South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said one missile had been launched from the port of Sinpo, in the east of North Korea where Pyongyang usually bases its submarines. It l...

A Massachusetts man who tried to scam a Covid-19 business aid scheme and faked his own death to evade authorities has been sentenced to 56 months in prison. David Staveley falsely claimed to co-own four large businesses in need of nearly $544,000 (£399,000) in support from a federal government programme. After being charged last year, Staveley staged a suicide and fled using false identities and stolen licence plates. He is the first person to be charged with fraudulently seeking the loans. Prosecutors condemned his actions in their sentencing memo: "He saw the economic emergency created by the pandemic simply as an opportunity to make himself rich by taking for himself what was meant for those in need." Enacted between March 2020 and May 2021, the US Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) allowed small businesses hit hard by the pandemic to apply for low-interest private loans to cover payroll and other costs. Staveley, 54, and his accomplice, David Andrew Butziger, 5...

A Russian film crew are back on Earth after wrapping up scenes for the first movie shot in space. Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild left the International Space Station and landed in Kazakhstan - to be met by a crew filming touchdown scenes. The ISS shooting was not without drama - suitable for a film called Challenge. On Friday the ISS unexpectedly tilted after a glitch in its thrusters, pausing filming. It was not thought to be part of the script. In a farewell tweet from the ISS, Peresild showed off a weightless hairdo likely to thwart any conspiracy theorists who think it was all shot on Earth. The movie has been in its own kind of space race - with Tom Cruise. He is apparently part of a Hollywood filming-in-space project involving Nasa and Elon Musk's SpaceX. The module carrying Peresild and Shipenko, along with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, parachuted down to Earth at about lunchtime on Sunday in the Kazakhstan steppe. Their departure was not delayed by Friday's glitch, ...

At least 24 people have been killed in floods in southern India after heavy rains caused rivers to overflow, cutting off towns and villages. Five children are among the dead. There are fears the death toll could rise further as many people are missing. Several houses were washed away and people became trapped in the district of Kottayam in Kerala state. Video from the area showed bus passengers being rescued after their vehicle was inundated with floodwater. Kottayam and Idukki are two of the worst affected districts in the state. Days of heavy rainfall has also caused deadly landslides. Military helicopters are being used to fly in supplies and personnel to areas where people are trapped, officials said. Thousands of people have been evacuated and more than 100 relief camps have been set up across the state, Kerala's chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said on Sunday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted on Sunday, saying that he had spoken to Mr Vijayan about the situatio...

Conservative British lawmaker David Amess was killed on Friday after being stabbed “multiple times” during an event in his local constituency in southeast England, in the second death of a UK politician while meeting voters since 2016. Local police did not name Amess but said a man had been arrested “on suspicion (of) murder” after the stabbing in Leigh-on-Sea. “We are not looking for anyone else in connection with this incident,” said Essex police, adding that the man in custody was aged 25, and a knife was recovered. The force said officers had earlier responded to “reports of a stabbing” shortly after 12:05 pm (1105 GMT). British media, including Sky News and the BBC, identified the victim as the 69-year-old politician from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ruling Conservative Party. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps called Amess “a dedicated, thoughtful man and a true Parliamentarian, who lost his life while serving the constituents who he worked relentlessly for throughout his career”...

The Socio-Economic Rights Accountability Project (SERAP) has criticised a declaration made by President Muhammadu Buhari that the ban on the operations of Twitter in the country would be lifted it certain conditions were met by the American company. SERAP urged Buhari to withdraw the conditions imposed on the microblogging site pending the final ruling of ECOWAS Court on the case. It further stated that such a pronouncement by the Nigerian government might affect the expected judgement. SERAP had sued the Buhari-led government at the ECOWAS Court in Abuja, challenging the legality of the suspension of Twitter in Nigeria. Buhari had during Nigeria's 61st Independence Day anniversary on October 1, 2021, said the ban on Twitter would only be lifted if certain conditions including the ones surrounding national security, were met. SERAP noted that the conditions given by the Nigerian government make a mockery of the case pending before the ECOWAS Court and...

Watford have parted company with head coach Xisco Munoz after just seven games of the Premier League season. The club said in a statement that recent results “strongly indicate a negative trend at a time when team cohesion should be visibly improving”. Diego Llorente scores the winner for Leeds past Watford's Ben Foster Diego Llorente returns to help break Leeds’ league duck against Watford Read more Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at Leeds left the club with seven points from a possible 21. Since beating Aston Villa on the opening day of the season, the club’s only other league victory came against bottom side Norwich last month. Advertisement Munoz, who took charge at Vicarage Road last December, had successfully guided the club back to the top flight with a second-placed finish in the Championship last season. Yet he has become the latest to pay the price for a downturn in form by joining a long list of managers whose tenure at the club has proved short-lived. His departure means the ...

Rape victims in Britain are badly served, Boris Johnson has admitted, as he promised to “stop at nothing to make sure we get more rapists behind bars” and to overhaul the policing of sexual violence after Sarah Everard’s murder. The prime minister said the rape and murder of Everard by a serving police officer had “triggered feelings of huge numbers of people” about the handling of sexual crimes, domestic violence and rape. Advertisement Only 2% of reported rapes in England and Wales result in prosecution, and rape convictions are at an all-time low, while many instances of sexual harassment are not fully investigated – failings the Guardian has highlighted repeatedly. Courts are also experiencing long backlogs in hearing cases after struggling with cuts to the criminal justice system and 18 months of Covid-related delays. Speaking before the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Johnson said policing and prosecution of such crimes was “going wrong”. Rape victims “need to ge...