FRANCE
Cars explode at synagogue
Two vehicles set on fire outside a synagogue in southern France yesterday caused an explosion in which a police officer was injured, authorities said. Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin called the incident near the Beth Yaacov synagogue in La Motte, near Montpellier on the southern coast, “an obviously criminal act.” He said that “all means are being deployed to find the perpetrator.” Darmanin and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal were to travel to the site of the explosion later yesterday. The explosion was likely caused by a gas canister hidden in one of the vehicles, police said.
ITALY
Sicily opens yacht probe
Sicilian prosecutors yesterday said they were investigating potential crimes of negligent shipwreck and manslaughter after a superyacht sank, killing seven people, but added that their probe was at the early stages. In a news conference, state prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio identified no suspects and said “we do not exclude anything” after the Bayesian went down in a storm on Monday. UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his teenage daughter and five others were killed.
NIGERIA
Kidnapped students freed
Twenty Nigerian medical students kidnapped as they went to a convention have been freed more than a week after their abduction, police said yesterday. Gunmen seized the 20 on Thursday last week as they traveled to a conference in Benue State, in the center of the country, and later demanded a ransom, police said in a statement. Police said they had “confirmed the release of the 20 students from the University of Maiduguri and University of Jos.” No details were given on how the students were freed, but the country’s police chief had this week deployed a “tactical squad” in Benue as part of efforts to find the latest victims of a rising wave of abductions in Africa’s most populous country.
UNITED STATES
Meta warns campaigns
Meta on Friday said it had warned US presidential campaigns to be wary after it discovered an Iran-linked hacking attempt using the WhatsApp messaging service. The announcement is the latest from a tech giant of hacking threats ahead of the November election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, after Google and Microsoft earlier uncovered similar attempts attributed to Iran. WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian “threat actor” sent messages pretending to be technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, Meta said. “This malicious activity originated in Iran and attempted to target individuals in Israel, Palestine, Iran, the United States and the UK,” it said in a post online. “This effort appeared to have focused on political and diplomatic officials, and other public figures, including some associated with administrations of President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.”
RUSSIA
Snipers kill inmates
National Guard snipers on Friday killed four inmates who had stabbed four prison guards to death and held others as hostages while declaring allegiance to the Islamic State group. The Federal Penitentiary Service said the inmates took eight prison guards and four inmates hostage. They stabbed four of the guards, three of whom died on the spot and the fourth one later died at a hospital, it said. Three other guards were hospitalized with injuries, it added. The National Guard said its snipers “neutralized” all four attackers, freeing all the hostages.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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