Category Archives: World News

Racist jokes about Puerto Rico at rally bring anger and disgust: ‘Truly how the Trump party sees us’

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Tony Hinchcliffe’s series of racist jokes at Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday were widely condemned

Some Americans, particularly those of Puerto Rican descent, said that the racist remarks aired at Donald Trump’s Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden in New York helped them decide who to vote for.

The speaker and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe took aim at Puerto Rico, in a series of racist jokes including one in which he called it “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean”.

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Lost Maya city with temple pyramids and plazas discovered in Mexico

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Archaeologists draw on laser mapping to find city they have named Valeriana, thought to have been founded pre-AD150

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have stumbled on a lost Maya city of temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

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Puerto Rico Republican chair demands Trump apology for rally’s racist remarks

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Angel M Cintrón, party’s chair on island, says he will not vote for Trump unless he says sorry for speaker’s comments

The president of the Republican party’s branch in Puerto Rico has said he will not vote for Donald Trump unless he apologises for racist remarks made at his rally referring to the US island territory as a “floating island of garbage”.

Outrage even among fellow Republicans is continuing to mount after the racist insult at the Republican nominee’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, with the podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe coming under fire for his inflammatory comments made about Puerto Rico in the opening speech.

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Kamala Harris delivers ‘closing argument’ in Washington – as it happened

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Most Americans are prepared to accept the election results as legitimate, according to a new ABC/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

The poll, conducted between 18 October to 22, 2024, states 83% of Americans surveyed and 86% of registered voters surveyed are prepared to accept the outcome of the presidential election as legitimate, regardless of which candidate they support.

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Israeli airstrike on Beit Lahiya kills 93, says Gaza rescue agency

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Medical staff and emergency services say those killed in the attack include many women and children

Scores of Palestinians including many women and children have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a crowded apartment building in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said 93 people had been killed and 40 were still missing, as emergency workers dug through the rubble looking for the dead and injured on Tuesday morning. Many of those present at the time of the attack were members of the extended Abu Nasr family.

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Colin Farrell’s Dublin marathon run raises €774,000 for charity

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Actor ran last part of course pushing friend Emma Fogarty who has genetic condition known as butterfly skin

Colin Farrell has raised €774,000 (£644,000) for a charity supporting people with a rare skin condition by running the Dublin marathon while pushing one of the oldest survivors of the disease in Ireland around part of the course in her wheelchair.

The actor, who was born in the Irish capital, raised the money for Debra Ireland, an organisation that supports people with the incurable genetic condition epidermolysis bullosa (EB), or “butterfly skin”, which causes people to have very fragile and blistering skin.

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Steve Bannon released from prison early a week before US election

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Trump ally served four-month sentence for defying subpoena in investigation into 6 January attack

Longtime Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon has been released from prison early, after serving a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Bannon left the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut, according to Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons. He planned to hold a news conference later in the day in Manhattan, his representatives said. He is also expected to resume his podcast on Tuesday.

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Hezbollah elects new leader following Israeli strike that killed Nasrallah

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Naim Qassem replaces group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah after he was killed by Israel

Hezbollah has elected its deputy secretary general, Sheikh Naim Qassem, as its new head, ending a month-long leadership vacuum after the group’s long time leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by Israel.

Since Nasrallah’s death, Qassem has filled in for him, giving a public address earlier this month in which he vowed that Hezbollah would continue fighting Israel in what it described as a war of attrition, despite painful losses.

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Petrol and food prices will fall thanks to oil glut, says World Bank

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Downward trend in oil price from higher production, falling demand in China and clean energy to continue

Petrol and food prices will fall over the next two years thanks to a glut in oil production, the World Bank has said, offering hope to consumers that the cost pressures of the past three years could start to ease.

Its analysis found that this year’s downward trend in the oil price resulting from increased production, falling demand in China and the transition to clean energy is set to continue even if the conflict in the Middle East worsens.

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Trudeau facing ‘iceberg revolt’ as calls grow for embattled PM to step down

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The scale of what lurks beneath the surface could be vast – can the Liberal leader defy the odds and win a fourth term?

Justin Trudeau, who promised “sunny ways” as he won an election on a wave of public fatigue with an incumbent Conservative government, is now facing his darkest and most uncertain political moment as he attempts to defy the odds – and a bitter public – to win a rare fourth term.

The Canadian prime minister appears to have ignored both the demands of a handful of his own MPs calling for him to resign and threats from a separatist party looking to unravel his party’s tenuous hold on power.

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‘Carved on bodies and souls’: survivor tells of Russia’s use of male sexual torture in Ukraine

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Oleksii Sivak has set up a support group for others who have suffered widespread but unspoken abuse

Russian troops tortured Oleksii Sivak for weeks, applying electric shocks to his genitals in a freezing basement in his home city of Kherson in punishment for resisting their rule.

When Ukrainian troops freed the city in the autumn of 2022, Sivak was presented with a long list of medical specialists who could help his recovery and asked to tick the ones he needed.

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Climate crisis caused half of European heat deaths in 2022, says study

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Researchers found 38,000 fewer people – 10 times number of murders – would have died if atmosphere was not clogged with greenhouse pollutants

Climate breakdown caused more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022, a study has found.

Researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found 38,000 fewer people would have died from heat if humans had not clogged the atmosphere with pollutants that act like a greenhouse and bake the planet. The death toll is about 10 times greater than the number of people murdered in Europe that year.

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Kamala Harris calls for a ‘new generation of leadership’ in Washington speech

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Vice-president strikes hopeful tone in remarks delivered from site of Trump’s speech before deadly January 6 attack

With the White House illuminated behind her, Kamala Harris asked the vanishing slice of undecided Americans to elect a “new generation of leadership”, likening Donald Trump to a “petty tyrant” who had stood in the very same spot nearly four years ago and, in a last-gasp effort to cling to power, helped incite the mob that stormed the US Capitol.

The choice between her and Trump in the deadlocked presidential contest was “about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division”, Harris said, from the Ellipse near the White House’s South Lawn, where tens of thousands of supporters gathered one week before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast.

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If Trump wins the election, Nato can expect more turbulence ahead

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Past threats former president – and present Russian ones – have spurred Europe to invest in self-defence, but as conflicts rise the alliance still looks vital

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Politeness and convention dictate that European leaders try to sound noncommittal when asked whether a Donald Trump presidency would hurt Nato. But despite the rhetoric about “Trump-proofing”, Nato cohesion will be at risk from a hostile or isolationist Republican president, who has previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defence spending did not increase.

“The truth is that the US is Nato and Nato is the US; the dependence on America is essentially as big as ever,” said Jamie Shea, a former Nato official who teaches at the University of Exeter. “Take the new Nato command centre to coordinate assistance for Ukraine in Wiesbaden, Germany. It is inside a US army barracks, relying on US logistics and software.”

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US calls on Israel to tackle ‘catastrophic humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza

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Failure to help improve the situation on the ground could be met by restrictions on US military aid

Israel is not addressing the “catastrophic humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, the US envoy to the United Nations has said as a deadline imposed by Washington looms for the Israelis to improve the situation or face potential restrictions on military aid.

“Israel’s words must be matched by action on the ground,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the security council. “Right now, that is not happening. This must change – immediately.”

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Russia to deploy 10,000 North Korean troops against Ukraine within ‘weeks’, Pentagon says

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Addition of North Korean soldiers will stoke regional tensions and further stretch Ukraine’s weary army in the almost three-year war

North Korea has sent about 10,000 troops to Russia to train and fight in the Ukraine war within “the next several weeks,” the Pentagon has said, in a move that western leaders say will intensify the almost three-year war and jolt relations in the region.

Some of the North Korean soldiers have already moved closer to Ukraine, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said on Monday, and were believed to be heading for the Kursk border region, where Russia has been struggling to push back a Ukrainian incursion.

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Deadly airstrikes reported in Lebanon – as it happened

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The Israeli army told residents in parts of Lebanon’s southern city of Tyre to leave immediately, warning that it would attack Hezbollah targets there.

“Hezbollah’s activities force the (Israeli army) to act against it forcefully,” military spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote in a post on X that included a map of targeted areas in the coastal city.

Hezbollah’s activities force the IDF to act against it forcefully, as we do not intend to harm you.

You must immediately move out of the area marked in red and head north of the Awali River.

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Iran executes German-Iranian dissident after years in captivity

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Berlin warns of ‘serious consequences’ for ‘inhumane regime’ after 69-year-old Jamshid Sharmahd put to death

Iran has executed a 69-year-old German-Iranian political scientist after years in captivity, sparking outrage in Germany and beyond.

Berlin warned of “serious consequences” for Iran’s “inhumane regime” after Jamshid Sharmahd was put to death on Monday, while a Norway-based human rights group labelled the execution the “extrajudicial killing of a hostage”.

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Outcry over Trump’s hint at ‘little secret’ with House Republicans

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Critics condemn ‘sinister’ remark that suggests potential Trump-Mike Johnson plot to settle contested election

Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.

The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.

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Anita Hill empathizes with ‘irritatingly familiar’ insults against Harris in op-ed

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Professor who was impugned for allegations against Clarence Thomas says the sexist, racist remarks ‘must sting’

Anita Hill, former clerk to US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexist insults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”.

In a New York Times opinion piece published Monday, the Brandeis University professor who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators, wrote that she sympathizes with the US vice-president.

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