A gunman firing from a car killed one person and wounded five – including a 12-year-old girl shot eight times – in the Paris suburbs on Friday, in what the French president called a “racist terrorist attack”. The man was “firing at random, wanting to cause a bloodbath” as he drove through the working-class town of Trappes southwest of Paris and neighbouring La Verriere, Trappes mayor Ali Rabeh said. Most of the victims were from foreign backgrounds and prosecutors are investigating whether the...

Gunmen killed at least seven people and wounded dozens at a church in southern Jordan on Friday, with the king vowing retaliation for the rare attack on Christians in the majority Sunni Muslim kingdom. Assailants stormed the compound of a Greek Orthodox church in the village of Hammoud in Karak governorate and opened fire, authorities said. The gunmen got out of a vehicle and started shooting during a funeral procession, the public security directorate said in a statement, adding that a hunt was...

France will deploy some 70,000 police nationwide as it braces for new protests this weekend after some of the worst urban violence in years erupted on the sidelines of demonstrations a week ago, the government said on Friday. President Emmanuel Macron, who, according to aides, is postponing a visit later this month to Nigeria and Senegal amid the crisis, held a meeting of his defence council of top ministers and officials and was to meet security forces. He was also set to host for the first...

Ante Milicic has left his post as coach of China’s national women’s team, the football association said on Friday, eight months before the World Cup. The 52-year-old Australian had been in charge since May 2024 and led the team to the semi-finals of the Women’s Asian Cup in March. That finish earned them a spot at next year’s World Cup in Brazil. Milicic also recently took China to fourth place at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games in Japan after losing 2-0 to North Korea in the semi-finals. “After...

The Philippine government put a bounty on Friday on the head of the top enforcer of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody anti-drug crackdown, nearly a year after the International Criminal Court (ICC) ordered his arrest. Former Philippine police chief and sitting Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa had mostly been in hiding for months before The Hague-based tribunal unsealed the November 2025 arrest warrant against him in May and put him into flight. The bounty comes just over a month before...

Ukrainian police said on Friday they had detained a 17-year-old girl suspected of helping Russia’s security services to poison Ukrainian soldiers and that two had died. Ukraine and Russia have throughout their war since 2022 accused each other of recruiting minors for sabotage acts including poisoning. The girl, who was not named, is suspected of having packaged deadly drugs and sending them to Ukrainian soldiers she contacted by Telegram, a police statement said. She was arrested by police in...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a military operation in the occupied West Bank on a scale unseen in decades after Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers on Friday in an attack near Hebron days before the national election. A first step would see residents displaced, homes searched and “terrorist infrastructure” destroyed, said Netanyahu, who is in the midst of a tight race for a new term in Tuesday’s vote. Militant group Hamas, without claiming responsibility, praised the...

The World Health Organization has warned that Africa faced a “complex” Ebola outbreak after the virus crossed from east Africa to Nigeria, marking the first case in the west of the continent. Nigeria on Tuesday had announced an imported case of the Bundibugyo strain, currently causing a major Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was detected in the wife of a diplomat who had travelled from Uganda to the Nigerian capital Abuja. Health minister Muhammad Ali Pate said Thursday the...

Australia said on Friday it had sanctioned two North Korean individuals and companies over the use of “fraudulent” IT workers and cybercrime to earn cash for the isolated nuclear-armed state. The two men are alleged to be key operators in Pyongyang’s cybercriminal activities overseas, estimated by analysts to bring in billions for the country’s weapons programme. “The North Korean entities and individuals sanctioned today facilitate North Korea’s use of fraudulent IT workers to raise revenue for...

The son of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi said she sounded “fairly healthy” after speaking to the detained ex-democratic leader on Thursday for the first time in more than five years. Suu Kyi, 81, is under house arrest in the capital, Naypyidaw, according to Myanmar authorities, where she has been sequestered since being unseated in a 2021 military coup. “She was sounding fairly healthy,” Kim Aris, who lives in the UK, said after the telephone conversation. It was the first time he had spoken to his...

The United Nations’ climate loss and damage fund moved to provide US$20 million in aid sought by flood-stricken Nepal – the first time it has set aside money for any country – in a key test of the body’s credibility. In an extraordinary meeting on Thursday, the fund’s board agreed to earmark the modest sum for the Himalayan country, which was hit in August by tsunami-like floods triggered by a climate-induced ice and rock avalanche that killed more than 1,400 people and left over 5,000...

With one eye on her baby in a stroller, Minae Kamata operates an arcade machine in a Tokyo suburb, manipulating a claw to grab not a stuffed toy but a pack of toilet paper. As inflation weighs on Japanese households, huge arcades on the outskirts of major cities are installing claw machines filled with eggs, rice, laundry detergent and other necessities. The “shop-and-play destinations” merge essential buying with entertainment so that families do not feel a choice between bringing home the...