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By Lex Harvey, CNN Nigel Richards competing in a category of the Francophone Scrabble World Championships in 2015. Photo: AFP A New Zealand man hailed as a Scrabble phenom dominated the Spanish World Scrabble Championships - despite reportedly not speaking the language. Nigel Richards claimed victory at this year's tournament in Granada, Spain last month, Reuters reported, showcasing once again his remarkable abilities to outperform even native speakers in their own languages. "This is an incredible humiliation," Benjamín Olaizola, who came second to Richards, told Spanish radio network La Cadena SER, calling his opponent a "gifted man" with "very specific capabilities." Richards, who is in his 50s, bested more than 145 opponents from across the world, including Argentina, Venezuela,...

Photo: AFP Meta'sFacebook and Instagram were down for thousands of users across the United States on Wednesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. There were more than 105,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and over 70,000 with Instagram, in an outage that started around 6.50am NZT on Thursday. WhatsApp, Meta's messaging application, was also down for more than 12,000 users, according to Downdetector.com. The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Some Facebook and Instagram users posted on rival platform X that they were encountering an error that said "something went wrong" and that Meta was working to get it fixed. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were impacted globally for more than two hours ...

Rebel fighters standing next to the burning gravesite of Syria's late president Hafez al-Assad at his mausoleum in Latakia province, after it was stormed by opposition factions. Photo: AAREF WATAD / AFP The tomb of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez has been torched in his hometown of Qardaha, with rebel fighters in fatigues and young men watching it burn. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor told AFP the rebels had set fire to the mausoleum, located in the Latakia heartland of Assad's Alawite community. AFP footage shot on Wednesday showed parts of the mausoleum ablaze and damaged, with the tomb of Hafez torched and destroyed. The vast elevated structure atop a hill has an intricate architectural design with several arches, its exterior embellished wi...