Author: Reporter

Three Israeli hostages who were mistakenly shot by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip had been waving a white flag and were shirtless when they were killed, an Israeli military official said on December 16. Anger over the mistaken killings is likely to increase pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to renew Qatar-mediated negotiations with Hamas over swapping more captives for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Hamas has conditioned further releases on Israel halting its punishing air and ground campaign in Gaza, now in its 11th week. The violent account of how the hostages died also raised questions about...

Donald Trump, the criminally indicted Republican presidential front-runner in 2024, delivered alarming anti-immigrant remarks about “blood” purity, echoing Nazi slogans of World War II to cheers at a political rally. Speaking in the early-voting state of New Hampshire, Trump drew on words similar to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kempf” as the former U.S. president berated Biden’s team over the flow of migrants. “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about the numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. without immediate legal status. Ironically, two of his three wives were immigrants who lived in America for years before becoming...

Joplin officials say they have big plans for $13.8 million of pandemic relief funds the tornado-ravaged southwestern Missouri city received under a two-year-old federal law. Yet the latest federal records show none of the money has been spent, or even budgeted. In fact, about 6,300 cities and counties — nearly 1 in 4 nationwide — reported no expenditures as of this spring, according to an Associated Press analysis of data released by the U.S. Treasury Department. About 5,100 of those listed no projects — either planned or underway. So what gives? Is the money not needed? Are cities just...

The European Union decided on December 14 to open accession negotiations with Ukraine, a significant moment and stunning reversal for a country at war that had struggled to find the backing for its membership aspirations and long faced obstinate opposition from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. European Council President Charles Michel, who was chairing a Brussels summit of the EU’s 27 leaders where the decision was made, called it “a clear signal of hope for their people and our continent.” Although the process between opening negotiations and Ukraine finally becoming a member could take many years, Ukrainian President Volodymyr...

Emboldened by minimal battlefield gains and flagging Western support for Ukraine, a relaxed and confident Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said there would be no peace until Russia achieved its goals, which he said remain unchanged after nearly two years of fighting. It was Putin’s first formal news conference that Western media were allowed to attend since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. The highly choreographed session, which lasted over four hours and included questions from ordinary Russians about things like the price of eggs and leaky gymnasium roofs, was more about spectacle than scrutiny. But while...

How do you cook a meal when a staple ingredient is unaffordable? This question is playing out in households around the world as they face shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions. That is because countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of the war in Ukraine, El Nino’s threat to food production and increasing damage from climate change. For Caroline Kyalo, a 28-year-old who works in a salon in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, it was a question of trying to figure out how to...