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In a snug, wood-paneled Jewish bookstore in Hungary's capital, Eva Redai carefully climbed the rungs of a ladder to arrange titles on the shelves. Among the books were volumes bound in plastic wrapping — titles containing LGBTQ+ content that the country's right-wing government has deemed unsuitable for minors under 18.

The 76-year-old has run the Láng Téka bookstore in central Budapest for nearly 35 years, since just before Hungary's democratic transition from state socialism. But never, until now, has she needed to segregate the books she sells to avoid violating a government ban.

“I consider this such a level of discrimination. This law is an act of force that can hardly be made sense of," Redai said. "As someone who’s been in this business for such a long time, even I cannot decide which books fall under the ban.”

Hungary's government under populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has in recent years taken a hard line on LGBTQ+ issues, passing legislation that rights groups and European politicians have decried as repressive against sexual minorities.

A “child protection” law, passed in 2021, bans the “depiction or promotion” of homosexuality in content available to minors, including in television, films, advertisements and literature. It also prohibits the mention of LGBTQ+ issues in school education programs, and forbids the public depiction of “gender deviating from sex at birth.”

The son of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been arrested for money laundering and illicit enrichment by the country's attorney general.

Nicolas Petro, a politician in Atlantico province, was detained over allegations he was paid by drug traffickers to fund his father's peace efforts and election campaign.

He has denied the claims and welcomed the inquiry when it was launched.

The younger Mr Petro's ex-wife has also been arrested as part of the probe.

President Petro, the country's first left-wing leader, has denied taking money from Colombia's drug traffickers and ordered prosecutors to investigate his son in March.

Writing on social media on Saturday, he said it was painful for one of his children to be sent to prison, but also that he would not interfere with the investigation.

"To my son I wish luck and strength. May these occurrences forge his character and may he reflect about his own errors," Petro said.

The attorney general's office said the allegations against Nicolas related to illegal contributions diverted from his father's election campaign last year.

Nicolas and his former wife, Daysuris del Carmen Vásquez, are being transferred from the Caribbean coast to Colombia's capital Bogotá.

Ms Vásquez has previously alleged in local media that her former husband was given large amounts of money by drug cartels last year, during the political campaign that led to Gustavo Petro's victory in the presidential election.

Around 450,000 people are believed to have been killed as a result of 60 years of internal conflict in Colombia.

President Petro vowed to secure peace or surrender in deals with both Colombia's notorious armed rebel groups and drug cartels as part of his campaign - efforts which have seen intermittent success over his first year in office.

A negotiated ceasefire is set to begin with the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group in August, but talks with major crime gang the Clan del Golfo have failed because of ongoing violence.

At least nine people have been killed, including three children, in a blast at a fireworks warehouse in a market in southern Thailand on Saturday.

The explosion in Sungai Kolok, on the Malaysian border, seriously injured at least 115 people and is thought to have been caused by construction work.

Residents described hearing a huge explosion at around 15:00 (09:00 BST).

The force shook buildings, shattered windows and collapsed rooves, sending a massive plume of smoke into the air.

The explosion has also destroyed a large part of the town in Narathiwat province.

The market fire has been brought under control and a preliminary investigation indicates a "technical error" in steel welding during construction work on the building was responsible, local governor Sanon Pongaksorn said.

Seksan Taesen, an eyewitness who lives 100m (330 ft) from the market, said he was at home when he heard a "loud, thunderous noise and my whole house shook".

Wagner fighters in Belarus could pose as migrants and enter the EU, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has warned.

Wagner could also facilitate illegal migration from Belarus, which Poland describes as "hybrid warfare", he says.

About 100 Wagner troops have moved near the city of Grodno, close to the Polish and Lithuanian borders, the PM added.

Some Wagner troops have moved to Belarus under a deal to end a brief mutiny in Russia in June.

Warsaw says it sees Wagner's presence in Belarus as a potential threat and is seeking to shore up its eastern flank.

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has previously denied provoking a migrant crisis in Europe by luring would-be migrants to its borders with EU nations.

But Mr Morawiecki said on Saturday that more than 100 members of the Wagner group had moved to north-western Belarus near the Suwalki gap - Poland's 60-mile (95km) border with fellow EU state Lithuania, which separates Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

He claimed the mercenaries might pose as Belarusian border guards in order to help migrants cross into the EU, or even pretend to be migrants themselves to enter the bloc.

"Now the situation is becoming even more dangerous," he told a news conference on a visit to an arms factory in Gliwice, southern Poland.

"This is certainly a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory," he added.

Several thousand Wagner fighters have moved to Belarus since the group's short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin in June. They were offered a choice of joining the regular Russian army or heading to Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

On Thursday Poland's interior minister said Poland, Lithuania and Latvia could jointly decide to shut their borders with Belarus if there were incidents involving the Wagner group along their frontiers.

Last weekend Mr Lukashenko insisted he would keep the Wagner mercenaries in central Belarus.

"They are asking to go west... to go on a trip to Warsaw... " Mr Lukashenko joked in a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"But of course, I am keeping them in central Belarus, like we agreed."___

The EU has suspended all security cooperation with Niger after the country's army took power in a coup.

It comes shortly after the US declared its "unflagging support" for ousted president Mohamed Bazoum - seen as a key Western ally in the fight against Islamist militants.

On Friday the head of the presidential guards unit Gen Abdourahmane Tchiani declared himself Niger's new leader.

He said insecurity, economic woes and corruption led him to seize power.

But there are now concerns in the West about which countries the new leader will align with.

Niger's neighbours, Burkina Faso and Mali, have both pivoted towards Russia since their own coups.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell joined the US and France in refusing to recognise the coup leaders and said security cooperation and budgetary aid was being suspended indefinitely.

Also on Saturday France, the former colonial power which had moved its regional military headquarters to the country after being forced to leave Mali, said it had suspended all development aid and budgetary support.

Meanwhile the African Union called on the Niger army to return to base within 15 days.

On Friday evening US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned those detaining Mr Bazoum - Niger's first elected leader to succeed another since independence in 1960 - that "hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance" was at risk.

However, the leader of Russia's Wagner mercenary group has reportedly described the coup as a triumph.

"What happened in Niger is nothing other than the struggle of the people of Niger with their colonisers," Yevgeny Prigozhin was quoted as saying on a Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel.

"With colonisers who are trying to foist their rules of life on them and their conditions and keep them in the state that Africa was in hundreds of years ago."

He added: "Today this is effectively gaining their independence."

The BBC has not been able to verify the authenticity of his reported comments.

Wagner is believed to have thousands of fighters in countries including the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali, where it has lucrative business interests but also bolsters Russia's diplomatic and economic relations.

Wagner fighters have been accused of widespread human rights abuses in several African countries.

LA PAZ, July 28 (Reuters) - Bolivia's government is determined to curb dependence on the U.S. dollar for foreign trade, instead turning to the Chinese yuan, officials said, as Latin American support for alternative currencies grows.

Economy Minister Marcelo Montenegro said the Andean country was following "a pattern at the level of international trade, that is generating a progressive increase in the use of the yuan in foreign trade," during a press conference on Thursday in La Paz.

Bolivia has faced months of severe dollar shortages, driven in part by falling natural gas production, a key national export. Net foreign currency reserves have fallen to roughly $4 billion from a peak of $15 billion in 2014, pressuring state finances and threatening Bolivia's long-defended currency peg with the dollar.

"China has become the world's largest exporter. And in what currency would a large exporter want to receive everything it produces? Not in dollars, but in its own currency," Montenegro said.

Through Bolivian state-owned bank, Banco Union, importers and exporters have been able to trade in yuan since February, and the Russian rouble since March, bank officials have said.

Financial transactions worth 278 million Chinese yuan ($38.7 million) accounted for 10% of Bolivia's foreign trade in May through July, Montenegro said.

Russia's ambassador to Bolivia, Mikhail Ledenev, has said that the transactions between Banco Union and Russia's Gazprombank facilitate "the work of Russian companies in the market" despite economic sanctions imposed on Moscow by Western nations since 2022.

China and Russia are stepping up investments to develop Bolivia's huge but largely untapped lithium resources to meet growing demand for the metal used to make electric vehicle batteries.

Three lithium deals with two Chinese and one Russian firm were signed earlier this year, pledging to invest a total of $2.8 billion, which could be made partly in yuan, Montenegro said.

The Chinese currency could also be used to pay off the government's outstanding loans from Beijing and improve trade integration among Latin American countries, the minister added. Brazil and Argentina have also made it easier to trade in yuan.

Reporting by Daniel Ramos; Writing by Lucinda Elliott; Editing by Richard Chang

MEXICO CITY, July 28 (Reuters) - Mexico's peso on Friday hit its highest level against the dollar since early December 2015, as the greenback lost steam after a slowdown in U.S. inflation bolstered the case for the Federal Reserve to end its interest rate hikes.

The currency, which has been dubbed the "super peso" in some quarters, including by its most prominent cheerleader, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, strengthened by more than 1.3% in morning trading to 16.63 per dollar.

"What's happening with the peso right now is due to weakness in the dollar, but also because of optimism surrounding the Mexican peso," said Banco Base analyst Gabriela Siller.

"And with this international investors keep buying Mexican pesos and it may keep appreciating," she added.

Data pointing to softening U.S. inflation on the one hand and better-than-expected growth data on the other has helped weaken the dollar and boost the peso, which could continue firming to 16.40 to the dollar, Siller said.

In a research note this week, JPMorgan analysts wrote that while the peso has been considered a "high-beta risk proxy currency for much of the past two decades, we think it is time investors shed this outdated perception."

"The peso has entered a new chapter that will likely be accompanied by lower for longer volatility and a decoupling from the risk profile of its peer currencies in Latin America," they forecast in the note called "MXN: Not your padre's peso."

Some analysts have warned that a prolonged peso run could eventually be more harmful than beneficial to Mexico's economy because it makes Mexican exports more expensive and lowers the value of remittances sent back from the United States.

Reporting by Anthony Esposito and Aida Pelaez-Fernandez, editing by Deepa Babington

PARIS, July 29 (Reuters) - Booksellers along the river Seine say the Olympics threaten to erase a symbol of Paris, after they were told by local authorities that they will have to remove their stalls for the Summer Games opening ceremony in 2024 for security reasons.

Around 570 of the famous old stalls that line the river in the capital need to be dismantled and moved, or almost 60% of the riverside booksellers, according to the city authorities.

"People come to see us like they come to see the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, (but) they want to hide us during a ceremony that is supposed to represent Paris," said Jerome Callais, the president of the Paris booksellers association.

Paris police have told the booksellers their stalls are within the perimeter of protection for the opening ceremony and need to be removed for "obvious security reasons," the police said in a statement.

Paris 2024 organisers expect at least 600,000 people to attend the opening ceremony on the Seine, during which athletes and delegations will sail along the river. It will be the first time the public have free access to the opening ceremony, and not in a stadium.

The French government is making plans to ensure the security of the event, for which 35,000 security agents and the military will be deployed.

But Albert Abid feels that he and his fellow booksellers are being excluded from the celebrations, and says he is worried that his 100-year old wooden stall will be damaged in the process.

"(They) are very fragile.. our stalls will not be able to withstand this operation, nor will the morale of the booksellers," said the seller of 10 years in front of his riverside stall holding around 100-150 books.

The Paris authorities said in a statement that they met with the booksellers earlier this month and offered to pay for the costs of removing the stalls and to pay for any repair work in the event of damage, in what they called a "renovation".

"This renovation is part of the Games' heritage and will help support the application to have the Seine booksellers recognised as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO," the authorities said.

It was not clear whether the booksellers had been told they must move for the duration of the Games or only for the opening ceremony. But the city has invited them to move to a specially created "bookseller village" in a "literary neighbourhood near to the Seine" for the duration of the Games.

However, Callais, the bookseller association president, said the proposed location of Bastille square was not a viable solution and that no other compensation had been proposed.

Chromecast has been one of those smaller hardware products that have brought about a meaningful experience upgrade. The first Chromecast solved the pain point of clunky TV software interfaces, making it easier to locate content on your handy smartphone and then play it on your big-screen TV. However, a Court in the US has ruled that Google has infringed upon patents with its Chromecast products and that it should pay $338.7 million in damages because of it.

A Western District of Texas jury has ruled that Google has violated three patents held by a company called Touchstream Technologies, as reported by ArsTechnica. The complaint points to several Chromecast products, including the Chromecast Ultra, the Chromecast with Google TV, and other Chromecast-integrated products.

The first patent application in this complaint was filed in April 2011. The three patents relate to “a system for presenting and controlling content on a display device.”

Further, the complaint claims that Touchstream met with Google in December 2011 but was told that the tech giant wasn’t interested in partnering with it in February 2012. For reference, the first generation Google Chromecast was released in 2013. The latest Chromecast with Google TV (HD) was launched in September 2022, while the 4K variant was launched earlier in September 2020.

Chromecast with Google TV HD box 2 Google opposed the complaint, arguing that the patents are “hardly foundational and do not cover every method of selecting content on a personal device and watching it on another screen.” Further, the Chromecast is said to differ in technologies detailed in Touchstream’s patents.

The jury agreed with Touchstream’s allegations and ordered the company to pay $338.7 million in damages for its patent violations.

Google intends to appeal this decision, as mentioned by their spokesperson in their statement to ArsTechnica.

Google has rolled out the Nearby Share app for Windows, which has been in beta since March. The new tool lets you easily send and receive files -- photos, videos, music documents and more -- between nearby Android devices and Windows computers.

During the Nearby Share beta program, 1.7 million people downloaded the application, sending over 50 million files between their Android and Windows devices, according to Google.

Nearby Share isn't close to being the first file-sharing feature between Android and Windows. It's not even the only file transfer tool that Google currently has -- you can transfer files via Google accounts, such as Drive and Photos, or even via USB.

However, it's easy to use. Nearby Share doesn't involve cables, and it doesn't require uploading files to any existing accounts. Instead, much like Apple's AirDrop feature, you can quickly send a file from your Android phone to your Windows computer, as long as the two devices are nearby and connected. It's simply less complicated to use than other existing file transfer methods.

A while back, Google announced that it would let Google Play users access their favorite gaming titles via desktop computers, via the Google Play Games for PC Beta program. It’s been quite some time now since the initial unveiling of the service, and it looks like we’re getting some pretty big updates soon.

Google says that it has taken feedback from gamers and devs, and rolled out some snazzy new features to improve the beta program. For one, hundreds of games have now been made available to the catalog, Cookie Run: Kingdom, Eversoul, Summoners War, Homescapes, Evony: The King’s Return, Call of Dragons, Arknights, and more recently Free Fire Max.

With regards to Free Fire Max, Google says that the title is now available for users in Malaysia and Taiwan, and will be making its way to more regions in the following weeks. Of course, save syncing between different devices is supported, as long as you have the same account signed in.

Google adds that it’s opened its beta program to more than 60 new regions across Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. This means that up to 120 countries that can now access the service. More PCs can now access the service as well (although compatibility might vary).

Google has also added keyboard remapping functionality, so users can now further customize their control inputs when playing.

If you’ve immersed yourself in to the world of Pokémon you’ll be excited to find out that you can add another level to your obsession thanks to the debut of the Pokémon Sleep app on the Play Store. Ostensibly aiming to help you get a better sleep routine, the Pokémon Sleep app will track your sleeping habits via your smartphone and use Pokémon to show how you slept and let your research them to achieve a ‘Sleep Style Dex’.

All you need to do is to download the Pokémon Sleep app to your smartphone (or buy a Pokémon Go Plus+ companion device) and place said device next to your pillow (not under) so it can track your sleep.

The Pokémon Sleep app has the following features:

See Your Sleep Score and Sleep Type: You can get a sense of what your sleep was like by checking your sleep score, which is based on how long you slept. And how about your sleep type? You may be deemed to be “dozing,” “snoozing,” or “slumbering” type for the night, based on how much you moved in your sleep. Check Out Your Sleep Trends: You can look back in detail on how regular your sleep has been on a week-by-week basis. You may discover new insights into your sleep as you check your past trends, such as what time you tend to hit the hay on different days of the week.

Let Soothing Sounds Support Your Sleep: With features like Pokémon-inspired music to relax you into sleep, plus smart alarms that wake you when you’re in a shallow stage of sleep, Pokémon Sleep may help you to rest your very best.

Review Audio Recorded When You Sleep: Various noises detected during your sleep tracking will be automatically recorded. You can play these recordings back and hear your snores and sleep talk or environmental noises, such as from traffic or wind. What A Day Looks Like in Pokémon Sleep:

When Night Falls…: It’s time to track your sleep! All you need to do is place your smart device by your pillow, then call it a night. A New Day Dawns: By the time you wake, Pokémon will have gathered in Pokémon Sleep based on your sleep type and how long you slept. Carry out research on these Pokémon’s sleep styles to complete your Sleep Style Dex!

And the Rest of the Day…: Raise Snorlax big and strong! Snorlax will grow larger by receiving Berries from the Pokémon you befriend. The more you raise Snorlax, the greater your odds will be of encountering Pokémon with rare sleep styles!