Sudan's warring parties are in Switzerland for U.N.-led talks aimed at brokering possible local ceasefires to facilitate aid and protect civilians, but only one side showed up for the start of discussions on Thursday, the United Nations said.

War erupted in April last year between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over the integration of the forces in a transition to free elections.

Donald Trump said on Sunday he would accept home confinement or jail time after his historic conviction on criminal charges by a New York jury last week but that it would be tough for the public to accept.

Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, four days before Republicans gather to formally choose their presidential nominee to face Democratic President Joe Biden in November's election.

A few years after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, known as the “velvet divorce”, the newly independent Slovakian state to the south was already a cause of concern. The US secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, called it “the black hole” of Europe.

Eventually, in 2004 Slovakia joined the EU and Nato. The assumption then in the west was that the country, finally, had a settled identity and a settled set of alliances.

At the spot where a man tried to kill a prime minister there is a bullet hole and a small bloodstain.

Faint traces of a giant moment that has shocked Slovakia deeply. But the gunman’s target had seen this coming.

A month earlier, Robert Fico, Slovakia’s populist leader, was filmed predicting political tensions were so acute "a leading government politician" would end up getting murdered.

Then, the prime minister himself was shot. Hit four times in the stomach and arm at close range as he greeted supporters in a small former mining town.

The assassination attempt on Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, is unprecedented in the country’s history. 

But the attack, which the premier is likely to survive, speaks to an increasingly poisonous atmosphere in the central European nation of 5.5 million people.

In response to the attack, Zuzana Caputova, the country’s liberal outgoing president, and her successor Peter Pellegrini, an ally of the prime minister, have jointly called for calm.