US President Donald Trump said Thursday that the Board of Peace he chairs had reached an agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Friday that Beijing had asked Kuwait to take effective measures to protect Chinese institutions in the country and that no Chinese nationals had been hurt, after Kuwait’s defense ministry said an Iranian strike hit a building belonging to a Chinese company in northern Kuwait and killed one worker, a Nepalese driver.
Iranian Kurdish opposition parties said drones struck their camps north of Erbil on Monday evening, hitting a Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran site at Jiznikan in the Bahrka area and a Komala base in Khalifan without causing casualties.
Spain’s interior ministry said roughly 49,000 people crossed from Morocco into the enclave of Ceuta by land and sea in the 24 hours to Friday, and at least 18 died after which Madrid sent troops to reinforce the border and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to the crossing with Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
The US Government Accountability Office has begun reviewing the fund into which the Trump administration deposits proceeds from US-controlled sales of Venezuelan oil.
Power cuts of five to eight hours a day are running across most of Venezuela with no schedule published by the state utility Corpoelec or the electricity ministry, while Caracas continues to be spared the rationing and gets only voltage drops.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told a meeting of Liberal Democratic Party executives Thursday that the consumption tax on food and drink will fall from 8 percent to 1 percent for two years from April 2027, costing roughly 5 trillion yen a year in revenue, and pledged to fund it without deficit bonds. Tokyo University emeritus professor Tsutomu Watanabe said raising household purchasing power this way risks accelerating inflation.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called Japan’s National Intelligence Bureau another negative development in Japanese security policy on Friday, saying Japanese intelligence bodies had historically paved the way for militarism and wars of aggression.
All 25 cats left inside the Cat Cafe MOFF branch at the Aeon mall in Kashima, Kumamoto Prefecture, were carried out unharmed on Wednesday by the cafe’s manager, allowed back into the building by fire services and police, and reached the company’s Hiroshima cafe by about 10pm the same night.
Anthropic said Thursday that three of its models gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three organizations during capture-the-flag exercises run with the testing partner Irregular, after a misconfiguration left evaluation machines connected to the internet while the models were told they had none.
Liberian security agencies burned 4.2 metric tons of cocaine at Caraysburg, northeast of Monrovia, on Thursday.
Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday that the 1,055-kilometer Tiznit–Dakhla expressway, which runs down the Atlantic coast through Western Sahara, had been named the President Donald J. Trump Highway, thanking King Mohammed VI for the honor.
Nauru is now formally the Republic of Naoero, a change its parliament made unanimously by constitutional amendment, certified by Speaker Marcus Stephen on May 13 and notified to the United Nations on June 26, after President David Adeang told parliament on July 20 that a planned referendum had been dropped because the name is already on the coat of arms and in everyday use among the island’s roughly 12,000 people.
Additional sources:
Hamas disarmament agreement: CBS News and The National and Axios
Kuwait strike and China’s response: Xinhua and Kuwait Times and Al Arabiya
Kurdistan drone strikes: Middle East Monitor and FDD’s Long War Journal
Ceuta crossings and deaths: RTÉ and CBS News and Al Jazeera and The Irish Times
Venezuela oil fund audit: La Patilla (Spanish) and Office of Representative Joaquín Castro and Congress.gov
Venezuela power rationing: Alertas24 (Spanish) and La Patilla (Spanish) and El Nacional (Spanish)
Japan food consumption tax cut: Nikkei Asia and Japan Today and Kyodo News
Japan intelligence bureau and China’s objection: Prensa Latina (Spanish) and China News Service and Al Jazeera
Kumamoto mall cat rescue and quake toll: Cat Cafe MOFF and AFP and Nippon.com and Al Jazeera
Anthropic evaluation breaches: TechCrunch and CNBC and CSO Online and The Hacker News
Liberia cocaine burning: The New Dawn Liberia and The Liberian Investigator and Africanews
Morocco highway naming: Bloomberg and Al Jazeera and Medias24 (French)
Nauru renaming to Naoero: Al Jazeera
