France's President Emmanuel Macron says he has "proof" that the Syrian government attacked the town of Douma with chemical weapons last weekend.

He said he would decide "in due course" whether to respond with air strikes.

Urine and blood samples from victims of the attack have tested positive for chlorine and a nerve agent, media reports quote US officials as saying.

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde on Wednesday issued a stern warning to governments to avoid undermining global growth with protectionist trade policies. In a less than thinly-veiled warning to US President Donald Trump, who has locked horns with China on trade, the head of the IMF said countries should open trade further by reforming their own domestic practices rather than putting up new barriers to trade.

Peter Gruenberg, a joint Nobel Prize winner whose work revolutionised digital data storage, has died aged 78, his research centre said Monday. Professor Gruenberg died last week, said a statement by the Research Centre Juelich near Cologne, mourning the loss of “an excellent researcher” and “well-respected and popular colleague”.

The global chemical weapons watchdog concluded on Thursday, that the lethal poison that struck down a former Russian spy and his daughter last month in England was a highly pure type of Novichok nerve agent, thus backing Britain’s position. Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who betrayed dozens of agents to Britain’s MI6 foreign spy service, and his daughter were found unconscious on a bench in the English cathedral city of Salisbury on March 4.

Kensington Palace announced on Tuesday that the royal couple, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, would not be inviting political leaders to the event. The development means that neither US President Donald Trump nor his predecessor Barack Obama will be there.

Not even British Prime Minister Theresa May was deemed worthy of a place on the guest list.

Instead, only personal friends of the couple will be inside Windsor Castle for the royal event of the year on May 19.

Hungary’s anti-immigration Prime Minister, Viktor Orban was set for a third straight term Monday after a crushing election victory, in which the nearest opposition got below 20 per cent of the votes. Critics said they feared Orban will use his third consecutive term and the Fidesz party’s two-thirds control of Hungary’s national legislature to intensify his attacks on migration and to strengthen his command of the country’s centralized power structure.