WORLD

Three Israelis and five Thai captives are slated for release Thursday under a ceasefire deal aimed at ending the Gaza war.

The figure broke the previous high of 89.1 million in 2018, Dubai Airports said, despite regional tensions caused by the Gaza war and last April's unprecedented floods which badly disrupted operations.

A Stockholm court was due to rule on Thursday whether Salwan Momika, a Christian Iraqi who burned Korans at a slew of protests, was guilty of inciting ethnic hatred.

The agency, UNRWA, will be banned from operating on Israeli soil, and contact between it and Israeli officials will also be forbidden.

The hole suddenly opened up in Yashio during the morning rush hour on Tuesday, swallowing the lorry.

Signaling a shift in the US position on the agency by the administration of President Donald Trump, a US envoy voiced support for the decision and called for a probe into Israeli claims UNRWA sites were used by Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The Ukrainian leader responded by saying that Putin was "afraid" of negotiations and was using "cynical tricks" to prolong the nearly three-year conflict.

Kim recently visited a nuclear-material production facility, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said, where Kim warned of an "inevitable" confrontation with hostile nations and said 2025 would be a "crucial year" for bolstering North Korea's nuclear forces.

The M23 armed group and Rwandan troops have seized the airport and most of the center and neighborhoods since marching into the eastern provincial capital on Sunday after a lightning offensive.

The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have invited US President Donald Trump to visit this year for the 80th anniversary of the World War II atomic bombings, officials said Wednesday.

Despite opposition from environmentalists and some Labour MPs, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is determined to deliver major infrastructure projects to grow a UK economy which has struggled to take off since the party came to power in July.

President Gustavo Petro on Sunday stepped back from the brink of a full-blown trade war with the United States after Trump threatened Colombia with sanctions and massive tariffs for turning back two US military planeloads of deported migrants.

The raid began two days after a truce took hold in the Gaza Strip, seeking to put an end to more than 15 months of the Israel-Hamas war that ravaged the Palestinian coastal territory.

Lightning strikes on Monday evening ignited several fires in the Grampians National Park, a forested mountain range about 300 kilometers (186 miles) west of Victoria's state capital Melbourne.

The main city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has become a battleground since fighters from the Tutsi-led M23 armed group and Rwandan forces entered central Goma on Sunday night after a weeks-long advance through the region.

Helicopters are a key means of transport and crucial for emergency rescue in many remote regions around mountainous Nepal, vast stretches of which are often inaccessible by road.

Trump has signaled his desire for the Arctic island, which is believed to hold large untapped mineral and oil reserves, to become part of the United States.

The toll brought to 54 the total number of confirmed deaths from fighting in the cocaine-growing Catatumbo region -- lower than the figure of about 80 reported last week based on local counts, officials said.

Bessent, a Wall Street veteran who was born and raised in South Carolina, has defended the Republican president's tax cutting and tariff proposals while urging efforts to secure supply chains and the dollar's global status

The bitter arbitration case over sandeels is seen as a bellwether for other potential litigation between London and Brussels in a perennial hot-bed industry, experts said.

Trump ordered the defense secretary to submit within 60 days an implementation plan for the "next-generation missile defense shield" designed to guard against ballistic, hypersonic and advanced cruise missiles, including by the development of space-based interceptors.

Xi addressed the gathering of top Communist Party officials as China gears up for its biggest public holiday, which this year runs from January 28 to February 4 and will see people bid farewell to the Year of the Dragon and ring in the Year of the Snake.

The stricter regime comes after a Cameroon-flagged vessel was briefly detained by Taiwan's coast guard earlier this month on suspicion of damaging an international cable northeast of the island.

His indictment on Sunday makes him the country's first sitting head of state to face a criminal trial for his short-lived martial law declaration on December 3.

Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps and has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.

At a time when Moscow's military-industrial complex is occupied with the ongoing war in Ukraine, India has made the modernization of its armed forces a top priority.

The Boeing 737-800 was flying from Thailand to Muan in South Korea on December 29 when it crash landed and exploded into a fireball after slamming into a concrete barrier.

The Ukraine conflict has plunged relations between the two nuclear powers to their lowest levels since the Cold War, with Trump repeatedly promising to end the fighting with a "deal".

The Israeli military is still deployed in parts of Lebanon's south, days ahead of a January 26 deadline to fully implement the terms of the truce.