World

A strong earthquake shook Lima and regions of central coastal Peru late Tuesday, causing fear among the population and some damage, but no deaths or serious injuries.

Peru's Seismological Center said the quake was magnitude 6 and 32 kilometers deep, while the US Geological Survey recorded the magnitude as 5.8.

Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The training was provided by Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, and was defencive in nature and devised to protect Saudi leaders, the Times reported.

Politico is reporting that Iran state-run news has been taken down, apparently by the United States.

"The U.S. seized roughly three dozen websites, the majority of which are linked to Iranian disinformation efforts, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case had not yet been officially announced by the American government," said the report.

Much of the brittle, upper crust of Venus is broken into fragments that jostle and move – and the slow churning of Venus' mantle beneath the surface might be responsible. My colleagues and I arrived at this finding using decades-old radar data to explore how the surface of Venus interacts with the interior of the planet. We describe it in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 21, 2021.

Planetary scientists like me have long known that Venus has a plethora of tectonic landforms. Some of these formations are long, thin belts where the crust has been pushed together to form ridges or pulled apart to form troughs and grooves. In many of these belts there's evidence that pieces of the crust have moved side to side, too.

From Australia's Great Barrier Reef to the city of Budapest and the watery wonderland that is Venice, several beauty spots risk losing their treasured UN World Heritage status because of environmental damage, excess development or overtourism.

In a draft report released ahead of a key meeting next month, the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recommended Monday a major revamp of the heritage list.

His bald head glistening with sweat, Zhi Xiang peers into the eyes of a stray dog whose coat has become matted in heavy rain and says soothingly: "Let me cut your hair, cutie."

The bedraggled pooch is among scores of dogs hauled off the streets of Shanghai by police and packed in metal cages in a foul-smelling holding area.

The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Tuesday that Washington had "wrong" expectations for dialogue with Pyongyang and was facing "greater disappointment", state media reported.

Kim Yo Jong's comments came after US national security advisor Jake Sullivan described her brother's first reaction to Washington's recent review of its approach to the North as an "interesting signal".

An arachnid invasion left swathes of Australia's Gippsland region covered in webs as the spiders sought higher ground to escape flooding.

A sea of silk engulfed an area in Australia's southeast hit by flooding earlier in June, caused by sheet web spiders that normally live on the ground looking for shelter according to ecologist Dieter Hochuli.

In the feverish rush to study the coronavirus as it scorched its way across the planet, the unprecedented demand for information has put any mistakes under the glare of world attention and tested public trust in science, experts say.

Although serious problems are rare, in a health emergency even small errors can ripple through scientific research and onto the internet, magnifying people's uncertainty.

Iran's President-elect Ebrahim Raisi ruled out on Monday a meeting with US President Joe Biden but said there were "no obstacles" to resuming diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, Shia Iran's Sunni arch-rival, which have been severed for five years. Raisi added that he will not allow nuclear negotiations for the sake of negotiations, in his first news conference since winning election last week.

Raisi, 60, won Friday's election in which more than half the voters stayed away after many political heavyweights had been barred from running and as an economic crisis driven by US sanctions has battered the country.

On Monday, Newsweek reported that a new bombshell investigation has revealed e-commerce corporation Amazon destroys "millions" of unsold items every year.

"An investigation by ITV News at one of Amazon's 'fulfilment centres' in the U.K, where items are processed before they are shipped and delivered, found that all sorts of items — from TVs and laptops to drones, hairdryers and books — were placed in boxes marked 'destroy,'" wrote Jack Dutton.

Italy said Monday it had recovered from a Belgian collector hundreds of illegally gathered archeological finds dating as far back as the sixth century BC, worth 11 million euros.

The nearly 800 pieces "of exceptional rarity and inestimable value", including stelae, amphorae and other works, came from clandestine excavations in Apulia in Italy's southeastern tip, according to the Carabinieri police in charge of cultural heritage.

As Brazil's Covid-19 death toll surpassed 500,000 on Saturday, at least hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of more than 400 cities across the nation and around the world to blame President Jair Bolsonaro for the grim pandemic milestone and demand his ouster.

"There are half a million people dead due to the negligence and denial of Bolsonaro."
—Benedita da Silva, PT