Israel-Gaza war: Netanyahu vows to intensify campaign
By Raffi Berg BBC News
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will intensify its fight against Hamas in the coming days.
He told members of his party that he had visited Gaza on Monday morning and that Israel’s military campaign there was “not close to being over”.
His comments come days after the US secretary of state said Israel should lower the intensity of its strikes.
The war began on 7 October after Hamas led a deadly attack on communities inside Israel.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said on Monday that some 20,674 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli bombardments since then. It says most of the fatalities have been women and children.
Alexei Navalny discovered in remote Arctic penal colony
Jailed Russian opposition leader ‘doing well’, according to aides, nearly three weeks after going missing
The jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been located in a remote prison colony above the Arctic Circle after going missing for nearly three weeks, his aides have said.
Navalny was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said on Monday. “We have found Alexei Navalny,” she wrote on Twitter/X.
Germany: Drunken ‘Santa’ crashes into house delivering gifts
Police in Thuringia reported a man dressed as Santa who was “absolutely incapable of driving” crashing his car into a house facade and another vehicle overnight. He was trying to deliver gifts — and still plans to.
A man in eastern Germany dressed up as Santa Claus had his driver’s license confiscated overnight after crashing into the facade of a house while trying to deliver gifts around the town of Mühlhausen.
The sloshed Santa was on a central street in the town of around 36,000 people, not far from the town’s church, when he lost control of his vehicle and hit the front of a house and a parked car, police from the larger nearby town of Nordhausen said in a press release.
“The house facade was seriously damaged, however, the Christmas gifts belonging to ‘Santa Claus’ were undamaged,” police wrote, only ever referring to the suspect as the St. Nicholas-inspired bringer of presents in quotation marks.
Indian passenger plane held in France over human trafficking concerns takes off
A plane with close to 300 Indian passengers detained near Paris over suspicions of human trafficking took off Monday for Mumbai after being cleared for departure by French police, an AFP reporter said.
The Airbus A340 carrying 303 Indians had been bound for Nicaragua when it was detained last Thursday at Vatry airport, east of Paris, where it had stopped for refuelling.
It had arrived from Dubai and there was an anonymous tip-off that it was carrying potential victims of human trafficking.
Of the original 303 people on the passenger list, 276 were on the plane that took off just before 3:00 pm (1400 GMT).
Among the passengers staying behind were two people questioned by French police over suspected people trafficking, but a judicial source said they had now been released after establishing that the 303 passengers had boarded the plane of their own free will.
Christmas in China brings glittering decor and foreign influence concerns
Giant Christmas trees adorned with lights, tinsel and gift boxes greet shoppers at glittering malls in big Chinese cities like Shanghai and Chongqing, but in many parts of China, extending season’s greetings is out of the question.
In southwest Yunnan province, a property management company issued a notice to shopping mall tenants urging them not to sell Christmas cards and presents and to even refrain from hanging decorations, saying foreign traditions should not be “blindly” followed, and one should be confident in one’s own culture.
Schools in some cities from Dongguan in the south to Harbin in the northeast similarly called on students and parents not to follow foreign traditions and culture without thinking.
Iceland’s ‘bike whisperer’: the vigilante who finds stolen bicycles – and helps thieves change
Bjartmar Leósson says at first he was motivated by his anger at Reykjavík’s bike thieves. Now he empathises with them
I
t all started in 2019, when Bjartmar Leósson started to see a rise in bike theft in Reykjavík. Rather than accepting that once a bicycle was stolen it had disappeared forever, the bus driver and self-confessed “bike nerd” decided to start tracking them down and returning them to their rightful owners.
Four years and, he estimates, hundreds of salvaged bikes later, the 44-year-old has developed a reputation in the Icelandic capital among cyclists and potential bike thieves. Known as the Reykjavík “bike whisperer”, people across his home city turn to him for help to find their missing bicycles, tools and even cars. Often, he says, bike thieves hand over bikes without being asked and some former bike thieves have started to help him.
Recent Comments