The V12 Astons have been since the DB11 came out, but we are genuinely looking forward to this leaner, meaner swan song of a car, and while we wish it could be had with a different gearbox, we expect it will still be a real experience to drive.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund its operations in Ukraine.

For more on Apple’s latest, check out our roundup of all the features iOS 15.4 will bring to your iPhone. Here’s everything announced at Apple’s recent event, including the new iPad Air and the new green color options for iPhone 13 models. Plus, is the iPhone SE 2020 still a good buy in 2022?

LONDON, April 9 (Reuters) – A 50-year-old man and his 11-year-old daughter were killed after Russian forces struck a residential building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia early on Sunday, authorities said.

Those aero tweaks include a wider body, a big wing at the back and a new, vented hood. The overall look is pretty aggressive, befitting a car wearing the Vantage name, and Aston claims it produces 450 pounds of downforce at 200 mph, which is pretty good for a road car. The majority of the new body bits are made of carbon fiber to help cut weight. Aston also made the exhaust out of 1mm-thick stainless steel tubing to shave nearly 16 pounds off the car compared to the exhaust in the V8 Vantage.

‘This is a very interesting sign that there’s a degrading of their capabilities,’ Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagner who is a senior director at New America, a Washington think tank, told the New York Times.

The V12 Vantage also gets some extra goodies for its last go around the carousel. It will be the most powerful Aston Martin Vantage ever with 690 horsepower and 555 pound-feet of torque. Those figures, plus new aerodynamic body tweaks mean that this Vantage is good for 200 mph and will make the sprint to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds. An eight-speed ZF automatic transmission is the only gearbox on offer, though Aston claims it’s been recalibrated to be more sporty. 

* Russia threatened to bypass a U.N.-brokered grain deal unless obstacles to its agricultural exports were removed, while talks in Turkey agreed removing barriers was needed to extend the agreement beyond next month.

In November 2022, a video surfaced online that showed a former Wagner contractor Hamadi Bouta, a Syrian army deserter, getting beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was recaptured.

military documents posted on social media that offer a partial, month-old snapshot of the war in Ukraine, three U.S. officials told Reuters on Friday, while the Justice Department said separately it was probing the leak.

* Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova is due to visit India on Monday and will seek humanitarian aid and equipment to repair energy infrastructure damaged during Russia’s invasion, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

One of the last holdouts of V12 engine production has been Aston Martin with its twin-turbocharged 5.2-liter unit in the DB11 and, now, as a farewell, in the V12 Vantage, after a 15-year run, according to an announcement made by the company on Wednesday. The 2023 V12 Vantage will be strictly limited to 333 units, and it’s already sold out.

Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.

The Wagner Group has taken an increasingly visible role in the war in Ukraine as regular Russian troops suffered heavy attrition and lost control over some previously captured territory in a series of humiliating setbacks.

The world used to be filled with magic and mystery and V12 engines. There’s still plenty of the former two, but the latter is rapidly going the way of the thylacine, and while we get it — it’s hard to justify the cost and complexity of a big V12 engine in a world where going electric makes a lot more sense — we’re still sad to see them go. 

The long-awaited successor to the iPhone SE (2020) was announced by Apple during its March 8 “Peek Performance” event. It features Apple’s A15 chip (which is the same one found in the iPhone 13 series), 5G and stronger glass, but the same overall design as the previous generation.

Aston has made handling a priority for the V12 car and, as such, has increased its body stiffness by using added bracing for things like the fuel tank, the strut towers and more. Spring stiffness was also increased, so don’t expect this thing to ride like a DB11. Carbon-ceramic brakes are standard on the V12 Vantage, which, in addition to resisting brake fade in repeated high-speed stops, also shave around 51 pounds of unsprung weight from the car.

Some Russian media have alleged Wagner’s involvement in the July 2018 killings of three Russian journalists, who were shot dead in the Central African Republic while investigating the group’s activities there.