The heist has been branded ‘the theft of the decade’

Justice minister says ‘we have failed’ after thieves take seven minutes to steal priceless jewels from museum

The French government is under increasing pressure over museum security as police continue to search for thieves who took seven minutes to steal priceless jewels from the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum.

“What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels, and give France a terrible image,” the justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, told France Inter radio on Monday.

The likely new Czech government will add one more state opposed to the EU’s green deal and migration and asylum pact

If you open your window on a quiet street in central Prague, the first sound you hear is the trrrrk-trrrrk-trrrrk of carry-on suitcases trundling across paving stones, as tourists walk to their hotel or Airbnb. (The Czech capital had 8 million visitors last year.) As they trek around Prague Castle and fill the Old Town bars with cheerful chatter, these visitors – many of them probably unaware of the recent election victory of rightwing populist nationalist parties – may think this is just another normal European country. And you know what: they will be right.

Some more extensively informed newspaper commentators, reaching for an attention-grabbing generalisation, tell a different story. This is eastern Europe reverting to type, they say. After Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, now Czechia as well! The truth is more interesting – and more worrying.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Manuel Álvarez Escudero, from Spain, describes how the board game has provided him with a lifetime of fun and friendship

The year Manuel Álvarez Escudero learned to play chess, fascist bombs rained down on Guernica, echoing across Pablo Picasso’s enormous, monochrome canvas, the Hindenburg exploded in the sky over Lakehurst, and John Steinbeck published a short book called Of Mice and Men.

Nine decades later, Álvarez’s love of the game has only increased. A little after 10am on Saturday, the 104-year-old madrileño – believed to be the oldest active registered chess player in the world – stepped off a bus in the south of the city and pushed his homemade walker towards the door of the cultural centre where he comes for his weekly matches.

Eight pieces stolen, but crown of Napoleon III’s wife dropped by the fleeing thieves

Thieves made off with priceless Napoleonic jewels during a spectacular daylight heist on Sunday at the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum.

The museum in Paris, whose extensive collections include the Mona Lisa, was closed for a second day on Monday as police hunted for the suspects in the robbery, which has reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums.

Trump made the comments after a tense meeting with Zelenskyy in which the Ukraine leader failed to secure supplies of Tomahawk missiles

Donald Trump has suggested the best way to end the war in Ukraine would be to “cut up” the country’s Donbas region in a way that would leave most of it under Russian control, after reportedly pushing Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a White House meeting to give up swaths of territory.

“Let it be cut the way it is,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “It’s cut up right now,” he said, adding that you can “leave it the way it is right now”.

Russian attacks hit coal mine in Dnipropetrovsk region and Chernihiv power grid; Trump flips back to accommodating Putin. What we know on day 1,335

Veteran leftwinger Tufan Erhürman wins after campaign on reviving stalled talks to reunify island

Turkish Cypriots have handed the pro-European leftwing leader Tufan Erhürman a resounding victory in a presidential poll likely to inject renewed vigour into the deadlocked peace process on Cyprus.

Erhürman, 55, who campaigned on reviving stalled UN-brokered talks to reunify the island, defeated the incumbent nationalist, Ersin Tatar, by nearly 27 percentage points – a landslide win that surprised even his most ardent supporters.

The Louvre, where jewellery was stolen on Sunday, has a long history of thefts

Former French president set to start five-year sentence for scheme to obtain campaign funds from Muammar Gaddafi’s regime

The former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will go to prison on Tuesday after a court sentenced him to five years for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Sarkozy, who was the rightwing president of France between 2007 and 2012, will become the first former head of an EU country to serve time in prison, and the first French postwar leader to be jailed.

The mayor of Paris said the robbery was ‘a shock’ and resembled the plot of the mystery thriller ‘Lupin’