World

Members of the Republican Party who are hawkish when it comes to China should be prepared for President-elect Donald Trump to sell them down the river, warns Politico analyst Jonathan Martin.

Writing on X, Martin muses that the current drama over the fate of video app TikTok "is a nice little appetizer for the inevitable Trump-Hill tensions" about the United States' relationship with China.

A teen killed a fellow student and a teacher in a knife attack at a secondary school in northeastern Slovakia on Thursday and wounded a third woman.

The 18-year-old was detained shortly after the crime, police said.

Pope Francis has suffered his second fall in as many months and bruised his forearm, the Vatican said Thursday, adding that he was wearing a sling.

The 88-year-old, who has been in increasingly fragile health in recent years, fell at the Santa Marta residence where he lives in the Vatican but did not break any bones, the press office said in a statement.

The head of a leading Venezuelan human rights group was released from detention Thursday, his NGO said, after nine days in custody following a crackdown on critics of President Nicolas Maduro.

"In the early hours of January 16, our director Carlos Correa was freed," the Espacio Publico NGO wrote on the social network X.

Donald Trump's appointee to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, reportedly failed to impress key Republican Senators who would oversee her confirmation hearing. Now it's being revealed she may have previously bungled a key moment in the effort to recover American hostage Austin Tice.

The Economist's Steve Coll told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that while Gabbard and others were on a trip to Syria in 2017 a member of her team "was led by the Syrian regime to meet an American prisoner who that colleague of Miss Gabbard later identified as Austin Tice, the missing American journalist who was abducted near Damascus in 2012."

by Rigoberto DIAZ and Jordane BERTRAND

Cuba began releasing people Wednesday who had been jailed for protesting against the regime under a deal that saw departing US President Joe Biden remove the communist island from a list of terrorism sponsors.

Crowds of Gazans chanted and embraced on Wednesday as news spread that a ceasefire and hostage release deal had been reached between Israel and Hamas aimed at ending more than 15 months of war in the Palestinian territory.

After a US official and a source close to the negotiations first revealed the agreement, Israel cautioned that several points "remain unresolved" that it hoped would be addressed.

Impeached leader Yoon Suk Yeol made history this week as the first sitting South Korean president to be arrested, ending a weeks-long standoff. But analysts say the country's political crisis is far from over.

Yoon said he's cooperating to avert "bloodshed" but invoked his right to remain silent and his lawyers are using "every legal tactic" in the book, analysts say, against the insurrection probe into his ill-fated declaration of martial law.

A two-acre paddy field in northern Thailand has been transformed into an artwork depicting a dragon and a cat, symbols of hope and resilience as the community recovers from floods.

The farm owner, Tanyapong Jaikham, told AFP that the cat represents the residents of his hometown Chiang Rai who faced devastating floods during last year's monsoon season.