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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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