World News

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris steps off Air Force Two upon arrival at Charlotte Douglas International Airport with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's plane in the background in Charlotte, North Carolina, on 3 November 2024. Photo: AFP / Charly Triballeau The two United States presidential candidates will head to North Carolina on Sunday (NZT) to try and clinch support in the battleground state. It will be the fourth day in a row that Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump visit the same state on the same day. North Carolina is one of seven swing states where opinion polls are on a knife's edge, with just three days until the election. More than 70 million Americans have already cast the...

By Susana Vera and Guillermo Martinez Locals struggle to clean up after flooding in the town of Massanassa, in Valencia, eastern Spain. Photo: AFP / Jose Jordan The deadliest flash floods in Spain's modern history have killed at least 211 people and dozens were still unaccounted for, four days after torrential rains swept the eastern region of Valencia, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said. In a televised statement, Sanchez said the government was sending 5000 more army troops to help with the searches and clean-up in addition to 2500 soldiers already deployed. "It is the biggest operation by the Armed Forces in Spain in peacetime," Sanchez said. "The government is going to mobilize all the resources necessary as long as they are needed." The tragedy is already Europe's worst flood-rel...

Photo: AFP / Kamil Krzaczynski By Antoinette Radford and Zachary B. Wolf, CNN Seven states are expected to be key to electing the next president of the United States: Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. So what is a battleground state, and why is their vote so important? There are 538 Electoral College votes split among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each state gets at least three votes, depending on the size of their congressional delegation. Congressional seats are assigned to each state based on their population. So, the smallest states get three electoral college votes (they have two senators and one member of Congress). Washington, DC, also gets three. The most populous states get a lot more: California gets 54 electoral votes...

By Vyshnavee Wijekumar, ABC Entertainment The Diplomat has returned for season two on Netflix. It's already been renewed for season three. Photo: Supplied / Netflix With the US presidential elections around the corner, it's never been a better time to tune into a political drama. The Diplomat - which has just dropped its second season - is the sharply funny and fast-paced thriller you need in your life; and parallels with real-life events makes this an even more compelling watch. And the world agrees, with season one debuting at No.1 on the streaming charts, and appearing in the Netflix Top 10 in 86 different countries. As the title suggests, the protagonist here is ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell; The Americans), a career diplomat who's spent most of her working life in boots-on...

New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Photo: AFP / Angela Weiss By Luc Cohen, Reuters New York City Mayor Eric Adams will go on trial on corruption charges starting 21 April, 2025, a US judge ruled on Friday, placing the proceedings in the middle of what promises to be a bruising reelection campaign for the embattled Democrat. US District Judge Dale Ho set the date at a hearing in Manhattan federal court over the opposition of Adams' defence lawyer Alex Spiro, who wanted the trial over the mayor's alleged dealings with Turkish officials to end by March, well before the Democratic primary election in June. Adams, 64, pleaded not guilty last month. Spiro predicted he would be acquitted at trial, and warned of "grave, grave democratic concerns" if he does not have enough time to clear his name b...

By Elizabeth Piper and Andrew MacAskill, Reuters Kemi Badenoch smiles beside her husband Hamish (left) after being announced as the Conservatives' new leader in London. Photo: AFP / Benjamin Cremel Kemi Badenoch has won a race to become the new leader of Britain's Conservative Party, vowing to return the once dominant party to its founding principles to win back voters who handed the Conservatives their worst election defeat in July. Badenoch, 44, replaces former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and has pledged to lead the party through a period of renewal, saying it had veered towards the political centre by "governing from the left" and must return to its traditional ideas. The first Black woman leader of a major political party in Britain, Badenoch will bring a right-wing tone to the ro...

The US Supreme Court rejected on Friday a Republican bid to block the counting of provisional ballots cast by voters in the election battleground state of Pennsylvania who make mistakes on their mail-in ballots in a decision that could affect thousands of votes in Tuesday's presidential election. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Donald Trump has been labelled a "tyrant" for suggesting a former Republican politician should face a firing squad for her foreign policy stance. Trump called Liz Cheney - one of the highest-profile Republicans to turn against Trump and endorse his opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris - a "very dumb individual" and a "radical war hawk" at a campaign event in Arizona. "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she fe...

Farmers harvest peanuts at the New Halfa irrigated agricultural project in Kassala state in eastern Sudan. Photo: AFP Ahmed Othman's farm has been spared from the deadly fighting that has spread across Sudan, but the war's toll on the economy and labour market has still reached him. "I had to sell two vehicles" to afford to harvest this season's crops, he told AFP from his large sesame farm in eastern Sudan's Gedaref state. A year and a half of war in Sudan between the army and paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has triggered one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and devastated harvests. Last month, United Nations experts accused the warring sides of using "starvation tactics" against 25 million civilians, and three major aid organisations warned of a "historic" hun...

By Brianna Morris-Grant, ABC Twenty-two tonnes of clothbound cheeses have seemingly vanished into thin air Photo: Screenshot / Instagram nealsyarddairy When a French supermarket placed an order at Neal's Yard Dairy in London, it seemed too good to be true. The London-based artisan cheese seller was ecstatic - the order for 22 tonnes of cheddar was one of the largest they had ever received. The sheer size of the order forced them to enlist three different cheese producers to meet the demand. But their initial reaction - that the whole thing was just too good to be true - turned out to be correct. There was no deal with a French supermarket chain. The 300,000 British pounds (NZ$650,367) owed was never going to be paid. And the 22 tonnes of clothbound cheeses have seemingly vanished int...

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are turning their attention to the key "blue wall" states, and are likely to remain there in the final days of the election, says RNZ's Corin Dann. Dann has been providing updates for RNZ's listeners and visitors to rnz.co.nz and spoke from Philadelphia International Airport shortly after landing at 6pm, local time (11am NZT). The candidates had finished their swing through the "sun belt" states of Nevada and Arizona and headed back to the blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania -the latter being "really critical" in this election for its 19 votes in the US Electoral College, he said. RNZ presenter Corrin Dann at the US-Mexico border near Nogales, Arizona for his coverage of the US presidential election. Photo: Nick Monro Dann was among...