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Israeli soldiers have entered Lebanon in an unprecedented escalation of events which global leaders fear could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. The southern suburbs of the capital Beirut are also being bomarded by warplanes, with thousands told to evacuate, as soliders began their ground invasion of the country’s southern border in the early hours of Tuesday morning local time...

A "breakthrough" has been made in efforts to negotiate a framework agreement for a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that might end months of fighting in Gaza and lead to the release of hostages, a senior Biden administration official said Thursday. "We've had a breakthrough on a critical impasse," the official said on a media briefing call, attributing the development to a shift in Hamas' stance on a framework deal, which the official said was now "fully consistent" with the U.S.-drafted agreement passed by the United Nations Security Council last month. "Now we’re on to the implementation steps," the...

The release of Shifa Hospital director Mohammad Abu Salmiya from custody today was “a severe mistake and an ethical failure,” says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as various ministers and senior security officials have traded blame, each claiming they had nothing to do with the controversial move. ... This morning, Netanyahu ordered an investigation into how the release happened, the statement says. Shin Bet director Ronen Bar will present his findings to the premier tomorrow, ...

Israeli forces on Monday released the director of Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al Shifa, after more than six months in detention during which he claimed he was brutally “tortured” and “beaten” by the military. Dr Mohammad Abu Salmiya, who was released along with about 50 other detained Palestinians ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticised plans announced by the military on Sunday to hold daily tactical pauses in fighting along one of the main roads into Gaza to facilitate aid delivery into the Palestinian enclave.The military had announced the daily pauses from 8am local time (3pm AEST) until 7pm in the area from the Kerem Shalom Crossing to the Salah al-Din Road and then northwards."When the prime minister heard the reports of an 11-hour humanitarian pause in the morning, he turned to his military secretary and made it clear that this was unacceptable to him," an Israeli official...

The Israeli military says it will hold daily tactical pauses in military activity in parts of southern Gaza to allow more aid to flow into the area, where international aid organisations have warned of a growing humanitarian crisis among Palestinian civilians.The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the pause would begin in the Rafah area at 8am local time (3pm AEST) and remain in effect until 7pm. It said similar pauses would take place every day until further notice.The pause is aimed at allowing aid trucks inside Gaza to reach the nearby Israel-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing ...

Israeli troops will “very soon go into action” near the country’s northern border with Lebanon, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Monday, as tensions surge amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Gallant told troops near the border with the besieged Gaza Strip that others were being deployed to Israel’s north. ...

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has told troops gathered at the Gaza border that they will soon see the Palestinian enclave "from inside," suggesting an expected ground invasion with the aim of annihilating Hamas could be nearing. Israel pounded Gaza with more air strikes following the 7 October rampage by Hamas gunmen who killed 1,400 Israelis ...

The former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has died, aged 67, after being shot while making a speech in the western city of Nara. ...

Something was off about the memorial service for the anonymous anthropology professor who’d died of COVID-19. ... That made sense, in retrospect, because McLaughlin had fabricated her whole cloth. According to a report in The New York Times, since 2016, she’d been posting about sexual harassment in the science community using the Twitter handle @Sciencing_Bi, which she passed off as a Native American professor who’d “fled the south because of their oppression of queer folk.” McLaughlin is white. She constructed a person of color to guard herself against criticism from actual people of color, who were beginning to come forward...

isitors to St. Mary’s Church, a 12th-century parish in Yorkshire, England, will soon be welcomed by a cast of characters from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. As Harriet Sherwood reports for the Guardian, 14 limestone sculptures depicting Aslan the lion, Jadis the White Witch, Reepicheep the talking mouse and other magical creatures are set to replace worn medieval carvings on the church’s exterior. ...

The US has come with strong words in support of Turkey’s policies in northern Syria, hoping to push Turkey to greater action against the Syrian regime and Russia in Syria’s northern Idlib province. US envoy James Jeffrey landed in Turkey on Tuesday where he commemorated Turkey’s “martyrs” who had been killed by the Syrian regime and pledged support for Ankara. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Jeffrey have been seeking to pivot the US back to a Turkey-first foreign policy in regards to Syria, to slowly jettison parts of what they see as the problematic Kurdish region ...

A Kansas police officer has resigned after he admitted to making up a story that a McDonald's employee wrote an expletive and the word "pig" on a coffee cup, the police chief announced Monday. ...

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey will carry out an "air and ground military operation" east of the Euphrates River, prompting US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to warn of an "all-out war" to defend the region they control. It was Erdogan's most direct indication of a unilateral incursion into Syria since Ankara and Washington decided to establish a "safe zone" there. The operation, which aims to clear groups Turkey considers "terrorists" from the border region ...

Last month, 12-year-old Amari Allen appeared on television to share how she had been brutalized by racist white boys at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia. .... When the story first broke, left-wing politicians and activists raged. Rep. Rashida Tlaib published a personalized message on Twitter to the girl: “You see, Amari, you may not feel it now but you have a power that threatens their core. I can’t wait to watch you use it and thrive.” On Twitter, some even found a way to blame the Trump administration, noting ominously that Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, teaches art...

"Child sacrifice is real — it's not a myth. It's a reality and it's happening on a huge scale in Uganda." Fifteen years ago, young Ugandan pastor Peter Sewakiryanga travelled to Kyampisi, a village he describes as the country's "epicentre of witchcraft". "I saw, with my own eyes, three children who had been sacrificed from the same family," he tells RN's Counterpoint. ... Witchcraft has long been practiced throughout Uganda, and traditionally involves the sacrificing of animals like goats or chickens. But witch doctors, he says, now claim their work is "more powerful when you sacrifice the blood of a...

BAREILLY: A 4-year-old boy was allegedly sacrificed in a tantric ritual and his body and his body – with both the ears missing and hands and feet bound with a rope was found abandoned near a temple ...

This month, an Ohio jury awarded the owners of Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery in Oberlin $44 million in combined punitive and compensatory damages in its defamation action against Oberlin College and a top university administrator. The incident at the heart of the lawsuit stems from a 2016 hate-crime hoax involving three black students, occurring the day after Donald Trump’s presidential victory. ...

... Indefatigable truth seekers -- such as independent journalist Andy Ngo, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze network and the Daily Caller news website -- have chronicled a list of roughly 20 prominent “hate crimes” that enthralled the media but, after further review by the booth, were phonier than a used car salesman’s smile. Mostly, said cases involved black, Muslim or LGBT folks claiming an assault by the MAGA brigades. ...

When the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” comes on the pre-show soundtrack, it’s a tipoff that C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is going to be a diabolically delightful evening of theater and infernally amusing. The script is deftly adapted for the stage by Max McLean (who also directs) and Jeffrey Fiske from Lewis’ popular epistolary novel wherein the moral universe is turned upside down: God is “The Enemy” and the Devil-in-chief is “Our Father.” The Screwtape Letters is obliquely a story about the vicissitudes of faith and the joke is that it’s set in Hell, where Screwtape is a...