World

US President Joe Biden on Monday said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not doing enough to secure a deal for the release of hostages taken by Palestinian armed group Hamas.

Asked by reporters at the White House -- where Biden was arriving for a meeting with US negotiators -- if he thought the Israeli leader was doing enough on the issue, the president responded: "No."

When GOP policy experts, strategists and national security officials attended a "peace in Ukraine" event co-sponsored by the Conservative Partnership Institute in October 2022, "they were given pamphlets pushing unabashedly pro-Russia talking points," according to Politico.

In a Sunday article published by the news outlet, Heidi Przybyla and Nicholas Vinocur report that former President George W. Bush Defense and State Department adviser Kristofer Harrison said that the pamphlets demonstrate how "corrupt authoritarians are accessing and abusing our system to undermine U.S. national security."

Germany's far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is projected to win in Sunday's statewide elections in a political earthquake—the first time a far-right party has won an election in Germany since the 1930s Nazi-era.

According to exit polls, AfD, founded in 2013 with an anti-migration and eurosceptic platform, won the most votes in the eastern state of Thuringia and is tied for first in the state of Saxony.

A Beluga whale whose strange harness sparked suspicions it was trained by Russia for spying purposes has been found dead in Norway, according to an NGO which tracks his movements.

Nicknamed "Hvaldimir" in a pun on the Norwegian word for whale, hval, and its purported ties to Moscow, the beluga first appeared off the coast in Norway's far-northern Finnmark region in 2019.

After wolves swooped from the forest and savaged her lambs, Austrian sheep farmer Renate Pilz feels like giving up. Others, to the anger of conservationists, are reaching for their rifles.

"I lost two ewes and two lambs" to the wolf attack last year, the 55-year-old said at her farm in the village of Arbesbach.

Floods and landslides killed 11 people after a fierce tropical storm dumped heavy rain on the Philippines for a second day, officials said Monday.

Tropical Storm Yagi slammed into the main island of Luzon on Monday after brushing past the Bicol region southeast of Manila overnight Sunday, with more heavy rain forecast which the state weather service said could cause flooding and more landslides.

Toddlers should not be allowed to watch screens at all, Sweden told parents on Monday.

Children under the age of two should be kept away from digital media and television completely, the country's Public Health Agency said.

Electric car sales in Norway took a 94-percent share of the market in August -- a new world record -- statistics showed Monday, as sales in the rest of Europe stagnate.

Boosted by the Tesla Model Y, which accounted for 18.8 percent of sales, and to a lesser extent Hyundai's Kona and Nissan's Leaf, electric vehicles made up 94.3 percent of new car registrations, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.

Kenyan prosecutors said Monday they extradited a man accused of murdering his girlfriend in the United States in a case that made headlines after he escaped police custody in Nairobi.

Kevin Kang'ethe was the subject of a three-month international manhunt after he fled the United States for his native Kenya following the killing of Margaret Mbitu, who was found stabbed to death in a carpark at Boston's Logan airport in November.

Moscow (AFP) – France's arrest of Telegram chief Pavel Durov has raised fears in Russia that the popular messaging app -- used both by the Kremlin and its opponents -- could be blocked, depriving them of one of the last sources of critical, uncensored news.

Since the start of its offensive in Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has cracked down on dissent and protest, leaving Russians without independent news outlets or access to Western social media such as Facebook, Instagram and X, formerly Twitter.

Washington (AFP) – US President Joe Biden said Saturday that the body of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin was among six recovered in Gaza by Israeli forces.

"Earlier today, in a tunnel under the city of Rafah, Israeli forces recovered six bodies of hostages held by Hamas," Biden said in a statement.