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By Nidal al-Mughrabi and James Mackenzie Cairo city, on 17 July, 2024, in Cairo, Egypt, where negotiations toward a ceasefire in Gaza are centred. Photo: AFP/Mahmoud Elkwas Gaza ceasefire and hostage negotiators discussed new compromise proposals in Cairo on Saturday, seeking to bridge gaps between Israel and Hamas as the UN reported worsening humanitarian conditions, with malnutrition soaring and polio discovered in the Palestinian enclave. Israeli military strikes in Gaza killed 50 people on Saturday, Palestinian health authorities said. Victims of hostilities over the past 48 hours remained lying on roads where fighting continued or trapped under rubble, the authorities said. A Hamas delegation arrived on Saturday to be nearer at hand to review any proposals that emerge in the mai...

By Matthias Inverardi, Petra Wischgoll and Tom Sims, Reuters People lay flowers and light candles in Neumarkt in memory of the victims of the knife attack at the Solingen town festival. Photo: HENNING KAISER / DPA / dpa Picture-Alliance via AFP Three were killed and eight injured in a knife attack at a festival in Solingen. Islamic State has claimed responsibility. The assailant remains at large. Police have detained a 15-year-old possibly linked to the attack. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility on Saturday (local time) for a knife attack in the German city of Solingen that killed three people and wounded eight others. Police have detained a teenager who may be connected with a knife attack, but the perpetrator was still at large on Saturday. Describing the man who carr...

Photo: JOE RAEDLE/Getty Images via AFP By Joey Roulette, RNZ Two NASA astronauts who flew to the International Space Station in June aboard Boeing's faulty Starliner capsule will need to return to Earth on a SpaceX vehicle early next year, NASA chief Bill Nelson said on Saturday, deeming issues with Starliner's propulsion system too risky to carry its first crew home. The agency's decision, tapping Boeing's top space rival to return the astronauts, is one of NASA's most consequential in years. Boeing had hoped its Starliner test mission would redeem the troubled program after years of development problems and over US$1.6 billion in budget overruns since 2016. Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both former military test pilots, became the first crew to ride Starliner...

Emergency services outside the synagogue in La Grande-Motte following the explosion. Photo: AFP / Pascal Guyot A policeman was injured when a blazing car exploded in the car park of a synagogue in the southern French town of La Grande-Motte on Saturday, officials said, calling the incident a terrorist attack and saying security at Jewish institutions would be stepped up. Police were hunting for a suspect and the anti-terrorism prosecutor's office was in charge of the investigation, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said. "This is an antisemitic attack. Once more, our Jewish compatriots are targeted," Attal said on X. "We won't give up. In the face of antisemitism, in the face of violence, we will never allow ourselves to be intimidated," he added. France, like other countries in Europe, has ...

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for two deadly bomb attacks on coptic Christian churches in Egypt Photo: 123.rf By Nazih Osseiran, Reuters Days after a deadly Islamic State (IS) attack on a Russian concert hall in March, a man clad in military fatigues and a helmet appeared in an online video, celebrating the assault in which more than 140 people were killed. "The Islamic State delivered a strong blow to Russia with a bloody attack, the fiercest that hit it in years," the man said in Arabic, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an organisation that tracks and analyses such online content. But the man in the video, which the Thomson Reuters Foundation was not able to view independently, was not real - he was created using artificial intelligence, according to SITE and other...

Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. Photo: Simon Wheatley After years of trying to throw their sound "50 miles down the road", Irish post-punk rockers Fontaines D.C. have crashed through a new sonic frontier on their fourth album Romance. Guitarist Conor Curley told Music 101's Charlotte Ryan that taking time off for the first time ever led the band into a more fluid and collaborative process. "We all put our heads together to work on Romance so that was cool," he said. The songwriting process was all about "trying to gather and arrange emotions to be as effective as possible", he said. "Always having a song that I'm writing in my head gives me a certain kind of sanity." Before Fontaines D.C's success, Curley and his bandmates had to get jobs and go back to their "old life" when not ...