47 Daily News Updates and Breaking News Headlines Across the Globe: World

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PENNSYLVANIA: Barack Obama just came out during the Democratic National Convention and gave one incredible speech that was full of wit, laughs, zingers and mic-drop moments, once again proving that he is a master public speaker.

During the DNC in Philadelphia, Obama opened with some funny remarks about getting older while his wife Michelle Obama hasn't, some heartfelt comments about the pride he has for his two daughters, and some outstanding praise about his choice as the next president, Hillary Clinton.

"You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the oval office. You can read about it, you can study it, but until you've sat at that desk, you don't know what it's like to manage a global crisis or send young people to war," Obama told the crowd. "But Hillary's been in the room. She's been part of those decisions. She knows what's at stake in the decisions our government makes, what's at stake for the working family for the senior citizen or the small business owner, for the soldier, for the veteran. And even in the midst of crisis, she listens to people and she keeps her cool and she treats everybody with respect."

BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel interrupted her vacation on Thursday to face down accusations at home and abroad that her open-door refugee policy allowed Islamist terrorism to take hold in Germany.

Merkel returns to Berlin to hold a news conference at 12 p.m. (07:00 a.m. EDT) after a spate of attacks since July 18 left 15 people dead - including four attackers - and dozens injured.
Two assailants, a Syrian asylum seeker and a refugee from either Pakistan or Afghanistan, had links to Islamist militancy, officials say. The attacks have burst any illusions in Germany that the country is immune to attacks like those claimed by Islamic State in neighboring France.

Politicians from left and right say Merkel's refugee policy is at fault, after more than a million migrants entered Germany in the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
"All our predictions have been proven right," Horst Seehofer, Bavaria's state premier and a long-standing critic of Merkel's open-door refugee policy, said on Tuesday. "Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany."

BEIJING: Chinese firms guilty of exceeding emissions limits or building plants without environmental permits will face tougher punishments including credit bans and land use restrictions, the country's environmental ministry said late on Wednesday.

China has been cracking down on polluting enterprises, raising fines and threatening criminal action against persistent offenders, but regulators have long struggled to impose rules on powerful industrial enterprises and local governments anxious to protect revenue and jobs.

The country has sought to beef up its traditionally underpowered environment ministry and spread the burden of enforcement to other agencies, including dedicated courts, police authorities and financial regulators.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection said in a notice published on its website that it has signed a cooperation agreement with 30 government departments, including the central bank, to broaden the range of punishments for offenders as well as improve information sharing. (http:///www.mep.gov.cn)
The 31 government departments will draw up a blacklist of offenders in order to create a "unified punishment mechanism", the ministry's official publication, China Environmental News, said.

TOKYO: A Hawaiian Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Tokyo, its second such incident in Japan this month, an official said Thursday.

Flight HA 442, which departed the northern Japanese city of Sapporo for Honolulu, made an emergency landing at Narita airport just outside the Japanese capital at 10:53 pm Wednesday (1353 GMT). The pilot cited an abnormality with the Boeing 767's hydraulics system, said an official at Narita International Airport Corp.

None of 248 passengers and crew members on board the flight suffered injuries, he added. "It is not clear whether there was in fact a problem or that signs indicating a possible problem came on," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

PARIS: Islamic State's news agency on Wednesday posted a video of two men it said were those who attacked a church in France in which they pledged allegiance to the group's leader.

The video was posted by Amaq news agency a day after two men burst into the Catholic church in Normandy during a service, forced the priest to his knees and slit his throat.

The two men who identified themselves as Abu Omar and Abu Jalil el-Hanafy appeared in the one-minute video sitting on a staircase pledging loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State's leader.

VIENNA - Austrian prosecutors said on Tuesday, they are probing a possible link between a Pakistani held in Salzburg in connection with last November's terror assaults in Paris and the 2008 attacks in Indian city of Mumbai.

‘Leads pointing to this are being looked into,’ prosecutors in Salzburg said, adding however that the identity of the Pakistani suspect, who has been in custody since December in the western Austrian city, has not been confirmed.

"Wide-ranging investigations on this question, among others, are ongoing, although the public prosecutors' office has been waiting for information on this from Pakistan since December 2015," they said in a statement.

A source in Paris and the Sunday Times said that the man is thought to be a bomb maker for Pakistani extremist organisations Lashkar-e-Taiba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

CAIRO: Saudi King Salman announced Friday an agreement with Egypt to build a bridge over the Red Sea connecting the two countries, on the second day of his visit to Cairo.

The monarch made the announcement in televised comments after meeting Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and before representatives of the two countries began signing investment deals.
“I agreed with my brother his Excellency President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to build a bridge connecting the two countries,” Salman said.

“This historic step to connect the two continents, Africa and Asia, is a qualitative transformation that will increase trade between the two continents to unprecedented levels,” he added.
A beaming Sisi, who had minutes before presented the king with the ceremonial Nile Collar, suggested they name the bridge “King Salman bin Abdel Aziz Bridge”.

WASHINGTON: Hillary Clinton’s private server was temporarily unprotected by security features in December 2010, when the then-secretary of state had technical problems with her email.
In 2011, Clinton’s server was hacked multiple times, newly-disclosed papers show, the Russia Today television channel reported on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the legal advocacy group Judicial Watch published a batch of back-and-forth emails between high-level State Department technical support and Clinton staffers as they tried to fix a serious problem with the secretary’s private home email server.

According to December 2010 emails, one of Clinton's closest aides, Huma Abedin, reported that some people within the State Department, using the state.gov domain, were not receiving emails sent from the Clintons’ private clintonemail.com server.

“There are many messages and responses not received,” one of the officials, Cindy Almodovar, wrote to S/ES-IRM staff, delivering Huma’s complaint.

KABUL: Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for twin explosions on Saturday that ripped through crowds of Hazara community in Kabul, killing at least 61 people and wounding 207 others in apparently their deadliest attack in the Afghan capital.

The scene of the attack was littered with charred bodies and dismembered limbs, with ambulances struggling to reach the scene as authorities had overnight blocked key intersections with stacked shipping containers to impede movement of the protesters.

“The death toll has jumped to 61 and 207 others have been wounded,” Health Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ismail Kawoosi told AFP, adding that the toll could rise further. The wounded overwhelmed city hospitals, officials said, with reports emerging of blood shortages and urgent appeals for donors circulating on social media.

ANKARA: Turkey issued arrest warrants Wednesday for 47 former staff of the Zaman newspaper, an official said, in a growing crackdown on people suspected of links to alleged coup mastermind Fethullah Gulen.

The official, declining to be named, said the swoop covers "executives and some staff including columnists", describing Zaman as the "flagship media organisation" of the movement led by Gulen, a US-based preacher.

In March, Zaman and its sister English-language newspaper Today's Zaman were taken over by state-appointed administrators and it has since taken a strongly pro-government line. The official insisted the warrants were not related to what individual columnists had previously said or written.

But "prominent employees of Zaman are likely to have intimate knowledge of the Gulen network and as such could benefit the investigation", the official explained. Gulen strongly denies Ankara's accusations that he masterminded the attempted putsch of July 15, since when some 13,000 people have been detained.

Israel’s national museum is set to display a 2,200-year-old Egyptian mummy of a man who was afflicted with some modern-day illnesses such as osteoporosis and tooth decay, the museum said on Tuesday.

The illnesses, discovered using a CT scan, indicate that during his lifetime, the man was largely sedentary, avoided manual labour in the sun and probably ate a carbohydrate-heavy diet.
The mummy is the only such relic in Israel, named the “Protective Eye of Horus,” after a pharaonic deity. It was kept for decades at a Jesuit institute in Jerusalem before it was loaned to the Israel Museum. It will be displayed in a museum setting for the first time starting on Wednesday.

The research on the mummy builds on previous international studies that have shown that people in ancient Egyptian times suffered from some of the modern-day diseases.

BEIRUT: A large truck bomb blast claimed by Islamic State killed nearly 50 people and wounded scores more in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli near the Turkish border on Wednesday, a monitoring group and state television reported.

The attack, which hit near a Kurdish security forces headquarters, was the deadliest of its kind in the city for years, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The blast, which took place early on Wednesday, killed at least 48 people. The death toll expected to rise because of the number of people seriously injured, the Observatory said. State media put the death toll at 44.

Kurdish forces control much of Hasaka province, after capturing vast areas from the jihadist group last year. The Kurdish YPG militi, which has proved the most effective partner for a U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State, is also involved in fighting the extremists farther west, in Aleppo province.

ISLAMABAD: President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani said that Pakistan and Afghanistan were tied in deep historical bonds and both the countries should work together for regional peace and stability.

In an interview with Geo television channel aired on Saturday night, the Afghan president said Afghanistan was pursuing the policy of good neighbourly relations with Pakistan.

He said there was dire need for unity against terrorism to purge the region from this menace.
Ghani said Afghan forces were bravely fighting against terrorism in partnership with the international forces.

He said Afghan government was thankful to Pakistan for hosting millions of Afghan refugees; however, his government was keen to manage their return to their homeland.

Ghani said in order to ensure refugees return his government would have to improve the national economy up to 9 percent of growth rate.

NEW YORK: If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.

Christie, who is governor of New Jersey and leads Trump's White House transition team, said the campaign was drawing up a list of federal government employees to fire if Trump defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

“As you know from his other career, Donald likes to fire people,”

Christie told a closed-door meeting with dozens of donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, according to an audio recording obtained by Reuters and two participants in the meeting.

Christie was referring to Trump's starring role in the long-running television show "The Apprentice," where his catch-phrase was "You're fired!"

KABUL: Twin explosions tore through a demonstration by members of Afghanistan's mainly Shi'ite Hazara minority in Kabul on Saturday, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 230 in a suicide attack claimed by Islamic State.

Graphic television footage from the site of the attack showed many dead bodies lying on the bloodied road, close to where thousands of Hazara had been demonstrating against the route of a planned multi-million-dollar power line.

"Two fighters from Islamic State detonated explosive belts at a gathering of Shi'ites in the city of Kabul in Afghanistan,"

said a brief statement on the group's Amaq news agency.

If confirmed as the work of Islamic State, the attack, among the most deadly since the U.S.-led campaign to oust the Taliban in 2001, would represent a major escalation for a group hitherto largely confined to the eastern province of Nangarhar.

The explicit reference to the Hazara's Shi'ite religious affiliation also marked a menacing departure for Afghanistan, where the bloody sectarian rivalry between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims typical of Iraq has been relatively rare, despite decades of war. Islamic State is an ultra-hardline Sunni group.

Officials in Afghanistan's main intelligence agency, the National Directorate for Security (NDS), said the attack was planned by an individual named Abu Ali, an Islamic State militant they said was based in Achin district in Nangarhar.

Barack Obama says Hillary Clinton is more qualified to be President than him

After attacks, Merkel cuts short holiday to face refugee policy storm

Chinese polluters to face more business, financing restrictions

Hawaiian Airlines makes another emergency landing in Japan

Islamic state posts video of men it says were French church attackers

Links between Paris, Mumbai attacks under investigation

King Salman, Sissi agree to build Saudi-Egypt link bridge

Clinton’s email server ran without security software

80 dead as IS claims deadliest attack in Kabul

Turkey issues warrants for 47 ex-staff of Zaman daily

Israel to exhibit antique mummy with recent diseases

Truck bomb blast kills dozens in northeast Syria city

Ashraf Ghani stresses Pak-Afghan intensive efforts to sustain peace

Trump could seek new law to purge government of Obama appointees

Islamic State takes responsibility of Kabul attack, 80 dead

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