Blog

By Kate Holton and Andrew MacAskill, Reuters Former US president Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Georgia in the lead up to the 2024 elections. Photo: Brandon Bell / Getty Images via AFP Donald Trump's campaign has accused British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour Party of "blatant foreign interference" in the US presidential election after some volunteers travelled to help campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris. The Republican candidate's camp has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in Washington, and has called for an investigation into what it termed apparently illegal contributions from Labour to the Harris campaign. British political activists had long travelled to the US ahead of elections, with those from the centre-left Labour Party typica...

By Krishn Kaushik and Ethan Wang, Reuters Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the BRICS summit in Russia on 23 October. Photo: AFP/ Pool/ Maxim Shipenkov Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed on Wednesday to boost communication and cooperation between their countries and resolve conflicts to help improve ties that were damaged by a deadly military clash in 2020. The two leaders met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia for their first formal talks in five years, signalling that ties between the Asian giants had begun to recover from the diplomatic rift caused by the clash along their disputed Himalayan frontier. India and China, two of the world's biggest economies, ...

By Maya Gebeily and Maayan Lubell, Reuters US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has again been speaking with leaders in the Middle East. Photo: Nathan Howard / POOL / AFP Israel has launched strikes on the Syrian capital Damascus and a military site near the western city of Homs, the Syrian defence ministry says, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the region pushing for a halt to fighting. The Israeli strikes targeted the central Damascus neighbourhood of Kafr Sousa and a military site in the Homs countryside, killing one soldier and injuring seven other people, the ministry said in a statement. The ministry said the strikes caused "material damage", but did not elaborate. Earlier in the day, Syrian state media said explosions were heard in Damascus after Israel struck a r...

Kea. Photo: Tim Norman Dr Eric Buenz is a biomedical researcher at NMIT, the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. He's also a recreational hunter. For the past decade Eric and his colleague Professor Gareth Parry have been interested in lead and its impact on human and animal health, with a focus on lead ammunition. Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts Every year in New Zealand, recreational hunters shoot more than half a million wild game animals. Eric says three types of ammunition are used with centrefire rifles: lead bullets, lead-free copper bullets, and - most commonly - copper-jacketed bullets with a lead core. Lead is a very useful metal. It is soft, versatile and cheap. It is also very toxic. The World Health O...

By Jarrett Renshaw and James Oliphant, Reuters Photo: DUSTIN FRANZ / AFP With millions of US voters already heading to the polls, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris will seek support from undecided voters at a televised town hall in battleground Pennsylvania, while Republican Donald Trump swept through Georgia. Nearly 25 million voters have cast ballots, either through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots, according to tracking data from the Election Lab at the University of Florida. Several states, including the battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, set records on their respective first day of early voting last week. "The votes in Georgia are at record levels," Trump told a religious-themed "ballots and believers" event in Zebulon, Georgia. "The votes in ever...