Seven miles of the Garden State Parkway were shut down in both directions in New Jersey, as firefighters battled a forest fire on March 14.
Indonesia's parliamentary budget committee has approved additional 15 trillion rupiah ($1.01 billion) to speed up construction of the flagship new capital Nusantara, a senior lawmaker said on Friday. Said Abdullah, the committee's chair, said the additional 15 trillion will go to this year's construction, on top of the 22 trillion rupiah previously allocated for developing Nusantara on Borneo island in 2023. "Therefore, in June (2024) the president can live there," he told a hearing with the government's senior ministers.
One month into a much-touted programme to heal the country's deep political rifts, Egyptian authorities have arrested dozens of dissidents, opposition supporters and football fans in a wave of repression.Since then, authorities have released 1,000 political prisoners amid much fanfare, but almost 3,000 more have been detained, Egyptian rights monitors said.
Munyaradzi Mushawatu, an electrician in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, was both ecstatic and jittery after President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced recently that national elections would be held on Aug. 23. Allegations of fraud, violence and harassment of opposition members have characterized elections held in Zimbabwe since independence from white minority rule in 1980. The 2018 elections were the first following a coup that replaced Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's longtime autocratic ruler, with Mnangagwa, amid promises of reform.
Fresh off the debt ceiling fight, the next task for the White House is simple salesmanship. But is it that simple?
Like his mentor, the former speaker, Aguilar is building support from the bottom up, starting with a vow to flip five GOP-held seats in his home state.
Stocks mostly advanced on Friday, fired by renewed optimism that the Federal Reserve will hold off lifting interest rates next week as fresh data indicated further tightening in the US labour market.Thursday's figures came after last week's key non-farm payrolls data for May, which was taken as being healthy enough to suggest the economy was in good shape but weak enough to give the Fed room to hold fire for now.
China is canvassing public opinion on draft guidelines to punish cyber violence, authorities said on Friday, as concern grows over online bullying and attacks targeting women and children in the world's largest internet community. Cyber violence, unlike traditional crimes, often aims at strangers so that victims face "extremely high" costs to protect their rights, the guidelines showed, leading to consequences such as social death, insanity and suicides. June 25 is the deadline set for comment on the guidelines drafted jointly by the public security ministry, the supreme people's procuratorate (SPP) and the supreme people's court.
Pope Francis had a second good night in the hospital recovering from surgery to remove intestinal scar tissue and repair a hernia in his abdominal wall, the Vatican said. The Holy See press office said early Friday that further medical updates were expected later in the day. The Vatican has said Francis’ condition is stable and his post-operative recovery deemed normal.
France's president was heading Friday to the Alps to be at the side of families traumatized by the savage stabbings of four very young children and two adults, as investigators worked to unravel the motives of a Syrian man taken into custody. President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte were traveling together to comfort victims wounded in Thursday's attack, meet their families and people who came to their aid in Annecy, a lakeside town ringed by mountains, the president's office said. The four critically injured child victims — aged between 22 months and 3 years old — were rushed to hospitals in the French city of Grenoble and Geneva in neighboring Switzerland.
KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine's domestic security service said on Friday it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian "sabotage group" blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam in southern Ukraine. Russia and its proxy officials in Ukraine have blamed Kyiv for destroying the dam but have offered varying explanations. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) posted a one-and-a-half minute audio clip on its Telegram channel of the alleged conversation, which featured two men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian.
Ten years after a giant inflatable yellow duck captivated crowds in Hong Kong, the art installation returned to the city's Victoria Harbour on Friday as a double-bill exhibition.Setting sail in front of Hong Kong's landmark Convention and Exhibition Centre, the mighty ducks moved through the harbour before stopping to nest near the city government's headquarters.
Unhealthy air in parts of the U.S. was forecast for another day Friday as smoke from Canada wildfires continued to be brought south by winds, but some improvement has been seen.
For days, the Ukrainian teenager has waited in the attic, just down the street from the cemetery of her flooded town, marking time with her 83-year-old grandfather and two other elderly people and hoping for help to escape the deluge of a catastrophic dam collapse. Russian forces are taking rescuers' boats, they say. “Russian soldiers are standing at the checkpoints, preventing (rescuers) from approaching the most-affected areas and taking away the boats,” said one volunteer, Yaroslav Vasiliev.
Donald Trump said Thursday he has been indicted over his handling of classified documents after leaving office, the US ex-president's most serious legal threat yet as he pursues a second White House term.The Twitter account of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee posted a repeated Trump slogan: "WITCH HUNT." Special counsel Jack Smith, named by US Attorney General Merrick Garland, has been looking into a cache of classified documents that Trump had stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence in F
Sweden will allow NATO to base troops on its territory even before it formally joins the defence alliance, the prime minister and defence minister said on Friday. Sweden applied last year to join NATO as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Objections from Turkey and Hungary have delayed the bid and Sweden now hopes to join by a NATO summit in Lithuania next month.
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is expected to maintain ultra-loose monetary policy next week and its forecast for a moderate economic recovery, as robust corporate and household spending cushion the blow from slowing overseas demand, sources said. But any upgrade in its inflation view is unlikely to automatically trigger an interest rate hike, as BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda has stressed the need to maintain ultra-loose policy until durable wage growth accompanies the price rises. Ueda told parliament on Friday that corporate price-setting behaviour was showing changes that could work to push up inflation more than expected.
BEIJING (Reuters) -A former deputy governor of China's central bank, Fan Yifei, has been expelled from the Communist Party and removed from his post for serious violations of discipline and law, state media CCTV reported on Friday. Fan, 59, held the deputy governor post of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) since early 2015 but was suspended and under investigation by China's top anti-corruption watchdog since November last year.
Non-stop heavy rains lashed parts of southwest China on Friday, triggering floods in cities, engulfing roads and partially submerging buildings. A particularly harsh first bout of summer rains known locally as "dragon boat water" saw the city of Beihai in Guangxi log 453 millimetres on Thursday. Cars were half underwater in flooded Beihai streets and at one multi-storey building, water cascaded down a staircase as firefighters raced to rescue its residents, videos circulating on social media showed.
Deep in South Africa's semi-desert Karoo region, a glittery drag show in an old hilltop hotel brings a burst of weekly excitement to a sleepy conservative town.Every Saturday night, Mark Hinds and Jacques Rabie, the owners of the Karoo Theatrical Hotel, amaze their guests with a night-long cabaret and drag show in the small town of Steytlerville in the Eastern Cape.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro arrived in Shanghai on Friday on her first visit since China established ties with Honduras, pulling it away from former diplomatic ally Taiwan. Castro, whose visit extends until June 14, will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping “to jointly plan for the future development” of ties, China's official Xinhua News Agency said.
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