Global News

By Maya Gebeily, Emily Rose and Simon Lewis Reuters An Israeli air strike targeted a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Tuesday in what the Israeli military said was retaliation for a cross-border rocket attack three days before that killed 12 children and teenagers. A loud blast was heard and a plume of smoke could be seen rising above the southern suburbs – a stronghold of the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah – at around 7:40 p.m. (1640 GMT), a Reuters witness said. A senior Lebanese security source said a senior Hezbollah commander had been the target of the air strike and his fate remained unclear. Lebanon’s state-run national news agency said an Israeli air strike had targeted the area around Hezbollah’s Shura Council in the Haret Hreik neighbourhood of the capital. Beirut has been on edge for days ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack in reprisal for the rocket strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday that killed the 12...

By Deisy Buitrago and Mayela Armas Reuters Venezuela’s opposition said it had voting-tally proof it had won the election claimed by President Nicolas Maduro, as anti-government protests erupted across the country, with police firing tear gas to disperse protesters in the capital Caracas. Protesters took to the streets after Maduro was declared winner of the disputed poll, including near the presidential Miraflores palace in Caracas. Many staged “cacerolazo” demonstrations across the country – a traditional Latin American protest in which people bang pots and pans. Some who later marched took their pots and pans with them. “I don’t want gold, I don’t want CLAP (the government food aid programme), I want Nicolas (Maduro) to leave,” chanted protesters banging pots. Many rode motorbikes and jammed streets or draped themselves in the Venezuelan flag, while others covered their faces with scarves as protection against tear gas. In Caracas, heavily armed police sent protesters running w...

By Nafisa Eltahir Reuters Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have committed widespread acts of sexual violence in the capital Khartoum, including gang rape and forced marriages, in its war with the armed forces, Human Rights Watch said on Monday. An HRW report said some attacks had also been attributed to the army, which the RSF has battled since April 2023. It cited accounts of the RSF holding women and girls in conditions that could amount to sexual slavery, and assaulting them in front of their families. Reuters has asked the RSF and the army for comment. Both sides have previously denied responsibility for abuses during the war, with the RSF saying it would take preventative measures against human rights violations. The HRW report quoted one woman living in an area controlled by the RSF as saying that for months she had slept with a knife under her pillow to defend herself, and a midwife saying that fear of RSF raids was constant. “They do not raid for just looting, th...

An Israeli drone strike killed two people and wounded three more in southern Lebanon on Monday, the Lebanese civil defence said, as Lebanon braced for Israeli retaliation following a rocket strike that killed 12 teenagers and children at the weekend. Late on Sunday, Israel’s security cabinet  authorized  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to decide on the “manner and timing” of a response to the rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel and the United States blamed Lebanon’s Hezbollah for Saturday’s strike. The Iran-backed group has denied any role. The incident in which a missile hit a sports field in the Golan Heights, has risked tipping the  fragile standoff  into a more serious escalation, drawing international calls on both sides to show restraint. There was no immediate indication of what action Israel may take but the country’s largest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted unnamed officials as saying the response would be “limited...

BY REGINA GARCIA CANO AND JOSHUA GOODMAN AP Venezuela’s opposition claimed victory in Sunday’s presidential election, setting up a showdown with the government, which earlier declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner. “The Venezuelans and the entire world know what happened,” opposition candidate Edmundo González said in his first remarks. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said the margin of González’s victory was “overwhelming” based on voting tallies it had received from campaign representatives from about 40% of ballot boxes nationwide. The National Electoral Council, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, earlier said Maduro had secured 51% of the vote to 44% for González. But it didn’t release the tallies from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering the ability to verify the results. Foreign leaders held off recognizing the results. “The Maduro regime should understand that the results it published are ...

 A pro-democracy group said Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 22 people in an attack on the city of al-Fashir in the western Darfur region on Saturday, though the paramilitary force denied launching an assault. The al-Fashir Resistance Committees said on Facebook that the RSF had fired artillery shells on markets, hospitals and apartments in a surge of violence after weeks of stalemate on that front in the country’s civil war. The activist group also said the RSF used a drone to target a hospital. It later said a total of 97 people were killed or injured in the assault. The RSF dismissed the report and said it did not clash with the army or allied groups in al-Fashir. The city is the national army’s last remaining position in the Darfur region, and a key front in its war with the RSF that has turned Sudan into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. More than 300,000 people have fled their homes in al-Fashir as a result of fighting that began in April, the Uni...

By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Emily Rose Reuters At least 30 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on a school in Deir al Balah in  central Gaza , Palestinian health officials said, and the Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas command centre. The Gaza health ministry and the Hamas-run government media office gave the toll for those killed in the strike on the school in Deir Al-Balah, one of the areas most populated with displaced families, and said over 100 others were wounded. The Israeli military said in a statement it had targeted a “Hamas command and control center inside the Khadija school compound in central Gaza”. The statement said the school was being used to launch attacks against troops and as a weapons cache and that it warned civilians before the strike. At Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, ambulances raced wounded Palestinians into the medical facility. Some of the wounded also arrived on foot, with their clothes stained with blood. In previous such s...

China has won the first gold medal of the Paris Olympics, but its athletes were nowhere near Paris. The Olympic shooting range, a three-hour drive from Paris in the city of Chateauroux, was the venue for Huang Yuting and Sheng Lihao to shoot for gold in the 10-meter air rifle mixed team event held Saturday morning. Huang and Sheng opened up an early four-point lead against South Korea’s Keum Jihyeon and Park Hajun in the head-to-head for the gold medal and stayed ahead from there to win 16-12. “My main feeling is just happiness. The match was quite hard, but being able to do a personal best performance helped a lot,” Sheng said. The 17-year-old Huang and 19-year-old Sheng’s celebrations were initially subdued — in contrast to their animated coach — but they smiled and Sheng gave a thumbs-up sign on the podium when bronze medalist Islam Satpayev took a selfie with his fellow medalists. China also won the event three years ago in Tokyo, when Yang Qian and Yang Haoran took the gold m...

By Elias Biryabarema and Aaron Ross Reuters Ugandan police detained several people in the capital Kampala on Thursday during a second day of anti-corruption protests that are demanding the resignation of the parliament speaker, footage broadcast by local media showed. Drawing inspiration from weeks of  youth-led protests  in neighbouring Kenya that forced the president there to withdraw proposed tax hikes, young Ugandans began demonstrating this week against alleged graft by elected leaders. The police quickly shut down a planned  march to parliament  on Tuesday. They arrested at least 73 young protesters, according to Chapter Four Uganda, an organisation providing legal services to those detained. On Thursday, more demonstrators took to the streets, according to video posted on X by the Daily Monitor newspaper. The footage showed police in riot gear forcing several young adults into the back of a truck as they shouted protest slogans. Footage broadcast by NTV U...

 Russian President Vladimir Putin met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the Kremlin, the president’s press service said on Thursday. “I am very interested in your opinion on how the situation in the region as a whole is developing,” Putin told Assad. “Unfortunately, there is a tendency towards escalation, we can see that. This also applies directly to Syria.” The Kremlin said the meeting took place on Wednesday. “Considering all the events that are taking place in the world as a whole and in the Eurasian region today, our meeting today seems very important to discuss all the details of the development of these events, to discuss possible prospects and scenarios,” Assad told Putin through a Russian translator. SOURCE- Reuters and agencies from The Times Of Earth https://ift.tt/c0u3A6M

BY BINAJ GURUBACHARYA AP  A domestic plane crashed Wednesday while taking off from the airport serving Nepal’s capital, killing 18 people and injuring a pilot who was the lone survivor. Police official Basanta Rajauri said authorities have pulled out all 18 bodies. The only survivor was the pilot, who was taken to Kathmandu Medical College Hospital for treatment, said a doctor at the hospital who was not authorized to speak to media. The pilot has injuries to the eyes but is not in any danger, the doctor said. The bodies have been taken to the T.U. Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu for autopsy. The airline manifest showed there were two pilots and 17 passengers on board, among them there was only one female. The crew and 16 passengers were Nepali nationals with one identified as foreigner but no nationality was disclosed. The Saurya Airlines plane was heading from Kathmandu to the resort town of Pokhara. It was not clear how it slipped. Local media images showed smoke rising an...

Authorities in Uganda deployed military and police on Tuesday around parliament and the centre of Kampala, the capital, a Reuters witness said, aiming to deter a protest against the government planned by young people. Military armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets around parliament in images broadcast by NTV Uganda television after police banned the protest, citing intelligence showing criminally-minded youth may hijack it to loot and vandalise. All roads to parliament were blocked off, with security officials permitting access only by lawmakers and other parliamentary staff. Those with businesses near parliament were experiencing difficulty getting to their premises, the Reuters witness said. “It’s like a war zone,” Edwin Mugisha, who works in Kampala, told Reuters, describing the patrols around parliament and other roads. Young people in Uganda have planned a march on parliament to protest what they say are rampant corruption and human rights abuses by the government...

By Nidal Al-Mughrabi Reuters Israeli forces battled Palestinian fighters in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Sunday, striking areas in the centre of the coastal enclave where thousands of Palestinians displaced from their homes have been seeking shelter. Residents in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, said fierce  battles, opens new tab  raged between Hamas-led fighters and Israeli forces, especially in the centre and in western areas where tanks had advanced in the previous two days. The armed wings of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas Islamist militant groups said fighters confronted Israeli forces with anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs. The Israeli military said its soldiers had killed a group of fighters who were moving towards them, and destroyed ammunition, tunnel shafts and infrastructure in Tel al-Sultan, in the eastern part of the city. A ceasefire effort led by Qatar and Egypt and backed by the United States has so far failed because of disagreements between the co...

By Nandita Bose , Jarrett Renshaw and Jeff Mason Reuters Vice President Kamala Harris wasted no time launching her 2024 presidential campaign, seeking the support of fellow Democrats with the backing of President Joe Biden after he pulled out of the race amid concerns about his age and health. Her campaign officials and allies made  hundreds of calls  on behalf of Harris on Sunday, urging delegates to the Democratic Party convention next month to join in nominating her for president in the  Nov. 5 election  against  Republican Donald Trump . Multiple sources said the calls, aimed at blocking would-be Democratic challengers, began almost immediately after the 81-year-old  Biden abandoned the race . At the same time, Democratic state party chairs backed Harris in a phone call, several participants said. Harris spoke with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro,  a potential vice presidential running mate , House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Con...

Ecuador and a subsidiary of Chile’s state-owned oil company ENAP renegotiated an existing agreement for the exploitation of an oil block in the Ecuadorian Amazon, with an additional investment of $90 million until 2035, the Ministry of Energy in Quito said on Saturday. The new agreement, signed on July 15 between the ministry and the company ENAP SIPEC, which already operates the block, will allow an increase in reserves by 5.6 million barrels of crude oil, Energy and Mine minister Antonio Goncalves said in a statement. “Ninety-eight percent of the new investments committed by the operator will be carried out during the first five years following the signing of the document,” the minister said. ENAP signed a service contract in 2010 with the Andean country for the operation of three blocks. The operation of block 46, located in the province of Orellana in the northeast with a production of 16,700 barrels per day (bpd), had already been renegotiated in early 2021. ENAP’s production ...

BY WAFAA SHURAFA AND JACK JEFFERY AP At least 13 people were killed in three Israeli airstrikes that hit refugee camps in central Gaza overnight into Saturday, according to Palestinians health officials, as cease-fire talks in Cairo appear to make progress. Among the dead in Nuseirat Refugee Camp and Bureij Refugee Camp were three children and one woman, according to Palestinian ambulance teams that transported the bodies to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital. The 13 corpses were counted by AP journalists at the hospital. The latest casualties follow a rare moment of hope in war ravaged Gaza, after a medical teams recovered a live baby from a heavily pregnant Palestinian mother killed in an airstrike that hit her home in Nuseirat late Thursday evening. Heavily pregnant Ola al-Kurd, 25, was killed along with six others in the blast, but was quickly rushed by emergency workers to Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza in the hope of saving the unborn child. Hours later, doctors told The ...

BY JULHAS ALAM and SHEIKH SAALIQ, Associated Press Police imposed a strict curfew with a “shoot-on-sight” order across Bangladesh as military forces patrolled parts of the capital Saturday after scores were killed and hundreds injured in clashes over the allocation of civil service jobs. The curfew began at midnight and was relaxed from noon to 2 p.m. for people to run essential errands, and is expected to last until 10 a.m. Sunday, allowing officers to fire on mobs in extreme cases, said lawmaker Obaidul Quader, the general secretary of the ruling Awami League party. The demonstrations — called for mainly by student groups— started weeks ago to protest a quota system that reserves up to 30% of government jobs for relatives of veterans who fought in Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. Violence erupted Tuesday, with the Daily Prothom Alo newspaper reporting the death of at least 103 people. Friday was likely to be the deadliest day so far; Somoy TV reported 43 killed, while an...

BY CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY and ELAINE KURTENBACH AP A widespread Microsoft outage was disrupting flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world on Friday. Escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services. The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines including American Airlines and Delta. News outlets in Australia reported that airlines, telecommunications providers and banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Some New Zealand banks said they were also offline. Microsoft 365  posted on X  that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.” The com...

Russia and Ukraine conducted a major exchange of prisoners on Wednesday, 190 in all, in their third such  swap  over the past seven weeks, following negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said all 95 Ukrainians who were freed were from the military, and thanked the UAE for its help. Russia’s defence ministry, in a statement on Telegram, said the returning soldiers would receive medical examinations and physical and psychological rehabilitation. It said the freed troops had faced “mortal danger” in Ukrainian captivity. The prisoner exchange was the third over the past seven weeks, with the first announced at the  end of May . Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Russian Defense Ministry reported the exchange. Kyiv has secured the return of 3,405 people from Russian captivity since the start of  Russia’s invasion  in February 2022, the Ukrainian Coordinating Committee on Dealing with Prisoners of War said...

By Ruma Paul Reuters  Police fired tear gas to scatter protesters in Bangladesh on Thursday, while authorities cut some mobile internet services as violent clashes that have killed six and injured hundreds this week showed no signs of slowing. Shops and offices were open in Dhaka, the capital, but there were fewer buses on the streets, as a call for a nationwide shutdown from students demanding abolition of a quota of 30% reservations drew little response. Police fired tear gas to disperse stone-throwing students who blocked a major highway in the southern port city of Chittagong as mobile services were halted across most of the South Asian country. “Mobile internet has been temporarily suspended due to various rumours and the unstable situation created … on social media,” Zunaid Ahmed Palak, the junior information technology minister, told reporters. Services would be restored once the situation returned to normal, he added. The protests are the first significant challenge t...

More than 10 million Sudanese, or 20% of the population, have been driven from their homes since the war there began, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday, as the world’s largest displacement crisis continues to worsen. The number is the latest dire figure out of the east African country, devastated by a conflict that began in April 2023. The war has left half the population of about 50 million facing a  hunger crisis  and in need of humanitarian aid, the most of any country. More than 2.2 million people have fled to other countries since the war began, while almost 7.8 million sought refuge inside the country, the IOM said in a bimonthly report. An additional 2.8 million people were already displaced by previous conflicts in the country. Fighting between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that broke out in the capital Khartoum last year quickly expanded across Darfur to the west, with the RSF taking control of most centres. UN expe...

By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Ramadan Abed Reuters Israel struck the southern and central Gaza Strip on Monday to put more pressure on Hamas, following a  weekend strike  targeting the militant group’s leadership, which killed scores of Palestinians who had sought shelter in a makeshift camp. Two days after the Israeli strike turned a crowded swathe of Mawasi near the Mediterranean coast into a charred wasteland littered with burning cars and mangled bodies, displaced survivors said they had no idea where they should go next. “Those moments as the ground shook underneath my feet and the dust and sand rose to the sky and I saw dismembered bodies – was like nothing I have seen in my life,” said Aya Mohammad, 30, a market seller in Mawasi, reached by mobile text message. “Where to go is what everybody asks, and no one has the answer.” Mawasi on the western outskirts of Khan Younis has been sheltering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled to the area after Israel declared...

By Gram Slattery , Alexandra Ulmer , Steve Holland and Nathan Layne Reuters Donald Trump  chose Ohio U.S. Senator J.D. Vance on Monday  to be his vice presidential running mate , as the Republican Party officially nominated the former president to run again for the White House at the start of the party’s national convention in Milwaukee. “As Vice President, J.D. will continue to fight for our Constitution, stand with our Troops, and will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. The four-day convention opened in downtown Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum two days after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, and hours after he secured a major legal victory when a federal judge  dismissed one of Trump’s criminal prosecutions . Trump is due to formally accept the party’s nomination in a prime-time address on Thursday and will challenge Democratic  President Joe Biden  in  the Nov....

A car bomb exploded outside a restaurant in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu on Sunday night, killing five and injuring 20 as patrons were watching the final of the Euro 2024 football tournament on TV, police said, blaming Islamist insurgents. The bomb destroyed 10 cars and damaged several buildings nearby in a well-guarded area near the Presidential Palace, a Reuters reporter said. Al Shabaab militants claimed responsibility for the attack on an affiliated radio station, saying the bombing targeted a place where security and government workers meet at night. The Islamist group, which once ruled much of Somalia, has been fighting for years to impose its strict interpretation of Islam on Somalia. The insurgents have frequently launched raids and deadly attacks in Mogadishu and other regions controlled by the federal government in the last two years, despite losing large swathes of territory to government forces and their allies. SOURCE: Reuters and Agencies from The Times Of Earth ht...

By Kanishka Singh Reuters World leaders have rapidly condemned Saturday’s  attack on Donald Trump  at a rally in Pennsylvania in which the former president was shot in the ear, expressing shock, denouncing political violence and wishing him a quick recovery. The Trump campaign said later that Trump, who is running again for the White House in November’s U.S. election, was “doing well.” The FBI identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, as the “subject involved” in what it termed an attempted assassination. A spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the shooting and called it an “act of political violence.” Japanese Prime Minister  Fumio Kishida, opens new tab  said: “We must stand firm against any form of violence that challenges democracy.” British Prime Minister  Keir Starmer, opens new tab  said he was “appalled by the shocking scenes” at the rally. “Political violence in any form h...

By Tom Westbrook and Vidya Ranganathan Reuters Saturday’s shooting at U.S. former President Donald Trump’s election rally raises his odds of winning back the White House, and trades betting on his victory will increase this coming week, investors said on Sunday. Trump was shot in the ear during the rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday in what the authorities were treating as an assassination attempt. Trump, his face spattered with blood, pumped his fist moments after the attack and his campaign said he was fine after the incident. Before the shooting, markets had reacted to the prospect of a Trump presidency by pushing the dollar higher and positioning for a steeper U.S. Treasury yield curve, and those trades could strengthen in the coming week, said Rong Ren Goh, a portfolio manager in the fixed income team at Eastspring Investments in Singapore. The first shooting of a U.S. president or major party candidate since a 1981 assassination attempt on Republican President Ronald Reagan co...

By Ange Adihe Kasongo Reuters U.N. peacekeepers are unlikely to proceed with an agreed withdrawal from Congo’s conflict-torn North Kivu for as long as Rwandan troops remain in the eastern province, the Congolese foreign minister said on Saturday. North Kivu is battling a two-year insurgency by the Rwanda-backed M23 militia that has displaced more than a million people, and a U.N. report said this week  3,000-4,000 Rwandan troops  were fighting the Congolese army with “de facto control” over M23 operations. Rwanda has in the past denied allegations from Congo and Western powers that it supports M23 with troops and weapons. On Tuesday, Congo’s government said  conditions had not been met  for the U.N. mission to leave the province, and Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner said the withdrawal – while still a priority – should take place in an orderly way when conditions allow. “The current situation with the presence of Rwandan troops, the aggression by Rwand...