The polls in the Scottish independence referendum have closed and ballots will now be counted.
The vast amount of rubble including unexploded ordnance left by Israel's devastating war in the Gaza Strip could take about 14 years to remove, a United Nations official said on Friday. Israel's military campaign against Gaza's ruling Palestinian Islamist group Hamas has reduced much of the narrow, coastal territory of 2.3 million people to a wasteland with most civilians homeless, hungry and at risk of disease. Pehr Lodhammar, senior officer at the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), told a briefing in Geneva that the war had left an estimated 37 million tons of debris in the widely urbanised, densely populated territory.
The European Union on Friday added Chinese-founded online retailer Shein to its list of digital companies that are large enough to come under stricter safety curbs.The company joins Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube in a list of 23 "very large online platforms", which have more than 45 million monthly active users in the European Union.
The U.S. government's auto safety agency is investigating whether last year's recall of Tesla's Autopilot driving system did enough to make sure drivers pay attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents posted on its website Friday that it has concerns about the December recall of more than 2 million vehicles. The agency pushed the company to do the recall after a two-year investigation into Autopilot's driver monitoring system, which measures torque on the steering wheel from a driver's hands.
Sergei Shoigu, Russia's defence minister, has tried to send a "business as usual" message since his deputy was arrested on a bribery charge. On the surface, the timing of the detention on Tuesday of Timur Ivanov, one of Shoigu's 12 deputy ministers, was unexpected, coming when Russia is waging war in Ukraine and the authorities have made discrediting the army a jailable offence. Allegations of graft funding a lifestyle way beyond his means made against 48-year-old Ivanov by the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation had been in the public domain for more than a year with no apparent fallout.
Students blocked access to Paris' prestigious Sciences Po university over the war in Gaza on Friday, demanding the institution condemn Israel's actions, in a protest that echoed similar demonstrations on U.S. campuses. Chanting their support for the Palestinians, the students displayed Palestinian flags at windows and over the building's entrance. Several wore the black-and-white keffiyeh head scarf that has become an emblem of solidarity with Gaza.
The practice of giving sedatives to people detained by police spread quietly across the nation over the last 15 years, built on questionable science and backed by police-aligned experts, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. Supporters say sedatives enable rapid treatment for drug-related behavioral emergencies and psychotic episodes, protect front-line responders from violence and are safely administered thousands of times annually to get people with life-threatening conditions to hospitals.
Millions of people across South and Southeast Asia sweltered through unusually hot weather on Thursday, as the Thai government said heatstroke has already killed at least 30 people this year.April is typically the hottest time of the year in Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia but conditions this year have been exacerbated by the El Nino weather pattern.
Cybersecurity firm Darktrace said Friday it had accepted a $5.3-billion takeover bid from US private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which highlighted the British group's "capability in artificial intelligence"."Darktrace is at the very cutting edge of cybersecurity technology, and we have long been admirers of its platform and capability in artificial intelligence," Thoma Bravo partner Andrew Almeida said in a statement.
Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived. Elijah McClain’s 2019 death in Aurora, Colorado, was a rare exception: Two paramedics were convicted of giving McClain an overdose of ketamine, the same drug given to Jackson.
A Colorado judge on Friday is expected to sentence a paramedic convicted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, the last defendant to face jail time for the young Black man's death. McClain, 23, died after police slammed him to the ground soon after stopping him and put him in a chokehold at least twice. Paramedics injected him with an excessive dose of ketamine, an anesthetic used for sedation, after police said he was in a state of "excited delirium."
Azerbaijan, host of this year's U.N. climate summit, will defend the right of oil and gas producing nations to invest in the sector, the country's president said on Friday, noting that despite climate targets, fossil fuel demand remains strong. As the host of the United Nations COP29 climate summit in November, Azerbaijan will oversee negotiations among nearly 200 countries on how to raise more finance to combat climate change and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet.
A former researcher working in the U.K. Parliament and another man charged with spying for China were granted bail Friday after an initial court appearance in London. Christopher Cash, 29, and Christopher Berry, 32, were charged with violating the Official Secrets Act by providing information or documents that could be “useful to an enemy” — China — and “prejudicial to the safety or interests” of the U.K. between late 2021 and February 2023. Cash, a parliamentary researcher who worked with senior lawmakers from the governing Conservatives, was ordered not to enter Parliament or contact members of the House of Commons.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) -A Turkish court sentenced Ahlam Albashir, a Syrian national, to life in prison on Friday over a 2022 bombing that killed six people in Istanbul's main shopping street, Demiroren news agency (DHA) and other media said. Six Turkish citizens, two members each of three families, were killed in the attack on Nov. 13, 2022. DHA said the court imposed a total of seven life sentences on Albashir, who was previously identified by police as the person who planted the bomb.
Syria has avoided getting embroiled in the Gaza war, experts said, despite a strike on Iran's Damascus consulate, blamed on Israel, that threatened to ignite a regional conflagration.Recent months have seen a series of strikes on Iranian targets in Syria, widely blamed on Israel, culminating in an April 1 raid that levelled Tehran's consulate in Damascus and killed seven Iranian Revolutionary Guards, two of them generals.
Egypt sent a high-level delegation to Israel on Friday with the hope of brokering a cease-fire agreement with Hamas in Gaza, two officials said. At the same time, it warned that a possible Israeli offensive focused on Gaza's city of Rafah — on the border with Egypt — could have catastrophic consequences for regional stability. Egypt's top intelligence official, Abbas Kamel, is leading the delegation and plans to discuss with Israel a “new vision” for a prolonged cease-fire in Gaza, an Egyptian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the mission freely.
Zuckerberg's track record of making money only after achieving a kind of critical mass is a harder sell for AI.
South Korean police said Friday they searched the office of the hard-line incoming leader of an association of doctors and confiscated his mobile phone as he faces accusations that he incited the protracted walkouts by thousands of medical interns and residents. The office of Lim Hyun-taek, who is to be inaugurated as head of the Korean Medical Association next week, called the raid politically motivated and questioned whether the government is sincere about its offer for dialogue to end the strikes. Police said they sent officers to Lim's office in Seoul and residence in the southern city of Asan on Friday to confiscate his mobile phone and other unspecified materials.
Philippine forces killed an Abu Sayyaf militant, who had been implicated in past beheadings, including of 10 Filipino marines and two kidnapped Vietnamese, in a clash in the south, police officials said Friday. Philippine police, backed by military intelligence agents, killed Nawapi Abdulsaid in a brief gunbattle Wednesday night in the remote coastal town of Hadji Mohammad Ajul on Basilan island after weeks of surveillance, security officials said.
The Burkinabe army has repeatedly committed mass atrocities against civilians in the name of fighting terrorism, HRW said, calling on authorities to investigate the massacres. However, the country's communication council said HRW's report contains "peremptory and tendentious" declarations against the army likely to create public disorder and it would suspend the programmes of the broadcasters over their coverage of the story.
Burkina Faso suspended the BBC and Voice of America radio stations for their coverage of a report by Human Rights Watch on a mass killing of civilians carried out by the country's armed forces. Burkina Faso's communication spokesperson, Tonssira Myrian Corine Sanou, said late that Thursday that both radio stations would be suspended for two weeks, and warned other media networks to avoid reporting on the story. According to the report published by Human Rights Watch on Thursday, the army killed some 223 civilians, including 56 children, in villages accused of cooperating with militants.
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