Belarus sent military reinforcements to its border with Ukraine Saturday after it said several Ukrainian drones crossed its airspace and were intercepted by the country’s air defenses on Friday, Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said in a statement.

“We suspect these are attack drones,” Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said during a separate briefing Saturday. He called the incident “a provocation” and said “the general staff of Belarus has been ordered to take relevant measures to ensure the security of the state.”

“Ukrainians show in this way that they are not ready for peace and continue to escalate this tension,” Lukashenko said, speaking of the recent Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory.

Khrenin told journalists “considering the situation in Ukraine and in the Kursk region of Russia” Lukashenko “has ordered to strengthen the grouping of troops” in the Gomel and Mozyr areas bordering Ukraine “in order to respond” to Ukrainian “provocations.”

“Military units of special operations forces, ground troops and rocket forces, including ‘Polonez’ systems and ‘Iskander’ (ballistic missile) complexes, have been tasked with marching to the designated areas. Air defense, rocket defense and aviation forces and assets have been built-up,” Khrenin said.

On Saturday, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned the Charge d’Affaires of Ukraine and “lodged a strong protest” in connection with the incident, the ministry said in a post on X.

“The Ukrainian diplomat was warned that in case of repetition of such provocations #Belarus reserves the right to take retaliatory steps to protect its territory,” the ministry said, adding it “may question the necessity of the continued presence of the #Ukrainian diplomatic mission in Minsk.”

The ministry blamed Ukraine for “criminal actions” to “radically escalate the situation and represent a dangerous attempt to expand the zone of the current conflict in our region.” It asked the rest of Europe to not escalate the situation.

Ukraine has not publicly commented on Belarus’ accusations.

“We appeal to the peoples of neighboring Europe: in the event of an expansion of the conflict, the fire will spread throughout the region, including to the EU countries. There will be no winners!” the ministry said on X.

Belarusian state media BelTA said Saturday the Foreign Ministry will initiate consultations with allies and partners, as well as international organizations following the incident.

A landslide at a landfill in Uganda’s capital Kampala has killed eight people, the city’s authorities said on Saturday.

The incident happened late Friday after heavy rainfall when sections of the landfill collapsed, covering some nearby houses, Ugandan media reported.

Kampala Capital City Authority said government and Red Cross personnel were searching the site and had rescued 14 people.

“On a very sad note, eight people have so far been found dead, six adults and two children. The rescue operation is still ongoing …,” the authority said on its X account.

The landfill, known as Kiteezi, has served as Kampala’s sole garbage dump for decades and had turned into a big hill. Residents have long complained of hazardous waste from the site polluting the environment and posing a danger to people.

Footage from NTV Uganda television showed people walking on a section of the landfill that had crushed parts of a house, while pictures from UBC Uganda showed an excavator attempting to dig up garbage.

Parts of Uganda have been experiencing heavy rains in recent weeks causing flooding and landslides, though no fatalities had previously been reported.

Vladimir Putin fixed the commander in chief of Russia’s military, General Valery Gerasimov, with a cold stare and a look of exasperation. The video, released Wednesday by the Kremlin, showed the Russian president was not happy with news from the southern region of Kursk.

At that moment, hundreds of Ukrainian troops, backed by tanks and protected by air defenses, were advancing into the region. Russian soldiers were surrendering; hundreds of Russian civilians in and around the town of Sudzha were fleeing with anything they could grab.

In two-and-a-half years of warfare, it was an unprecedented Ukrainian incursion into Russia. Putin told the Kremlin meeting that it was “another major provocation” by Kyiv. The region’s acting governor declared a state of emergency, describing the situation as “very difficult.”

Above all, it was humiliating for a Russian state that prides itself on protecting the motherland.

The Kursk attack was an audacious and counter-intuitive move from the Ukrainian military, what one analyst describes as “doing the least obvious thing.”

Despite steadily losing ground in eastern Donetsk, it chose to send elements of experienced brigades into Russian territory, with the apparent goals of embarrassing the Kremlin and forcing the Russian Defense Ministry to redeploy resources and providing the home front with a much-needed morale boost.

George Barros at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War says the Ukrainians “achieved operational surprise against great odds and are currently exploiting Russia’s lack of readiness in its border areas.” (The same tactic worked in September 2022 when they recovered much of occupied Kharkiv region within a week.)

The Russian regiment tasked with defending this part of the border abandoned its positions. Several dozen soldiers were taken captive, leading President Volodymyr Zelensky to express Friday “special gratitude to our warriors and units who are replenishing the ‘exchange fund’ – by taking the occupiers as captives and thus helping to free our people from Russian captivity.”

A column of Russian reinforcements was taken out by a missile attack near the town of Rylsk on Thursday night, possibly because the Ukrainians had managed to hack into multiple traffic cameras that are a feature of Russian highways. One Russian blogger, Aleksander Kots, said he had driven the route. “I noticed that there are cameras working along the entire highway. They are literally blinking their lights.”

Meeting little resistance, and with Russian communications in the region reportedly jammed by effective electronic warfare, the Ukrainian brigades pushed more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) inside Kursk in the first two days of the operation.

This wasn’t just a patch of empty Russian countryside. Among the places that came under Ukrainian control was a natural gas transit hub near the border through which Russia supplies Europe with substantial volumes of natural gas.

On Friday, a Ukrainian military Telegram channel declared the facility “under the control of the 99th mechanised battalion of the 61st Mechanized Brigade,” one of the experienced units involved in the assault. A video showed soldiers in front of the building, but Gazprom said Saturday that the pipeline was still operating.

Inside Russia, the sort of anger that had greeted setbacks at the beginning of the war was rekindled.

Andrey Gurulyov, a former commander in the region, reposted a comment on Telegram that demanded military prosecutors investigate decisions by commanders to transfer units from the Kursk region ahead of the attack.

And there was resentment amongst Russian civilians in the region, thousands of whom fled their homes. The head of the city of Rylsk – some distance from the most advanced Ukrainian units – said Friday more than half the population of 15,000 had left. Social media videos illustrated the frustration among civilians at the sluggish response of the military; some appealed directly to President Putin.

An expeditionary force

Ukrainian troops, even if reinforced, cannot expect to occupy several hundred square kilometers of Russian territory. This is very much an expeditionary force, albeit a battle-hardened one, that has exploited the absence of organized resistance to make ground quickly.

But holding a large chunk Russian territory is beyond their capacity and probably beyond their goal. Russian reinforcements will eventually make their mark, even if it takes them longer than three days to begin effective defense. On Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said units had “thwarted the attempts of the enemy’s mobile groups to get to the depth” of Russian territory near Ivashkovsky, Malaya Loknya, and Olgovka in the Kursk region. Olgovka is 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) from the border.

There were also signs Saturday that Russian “Lancet” drones were beginning to degrade Ukrainian armour.

Emil Kastehelmi at the Black Bird group in Finland, which uses open-source intelligence to track the conflict says “time is running against Ukrainians – (the) Russians won’t be disorganized forever.”

Even if the Ukrainians need to pull back from more advanced positions, such an operation still serves several purposes. Barros says it “exposes some of Russia’s planning assumptions and critical vulnerabilities.” And Matthew Schmidt, who has taught strategic and operational planning at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, said the Ukrainians’ “creative use of force was designed to put pressure on the decision-makers in Moscow” – and possibly cost some of them their jobs.

Russian military blogger Vladislav Shurygin crystallized all this in a Telegram post Friday, saying that the enemy had “very skilfully and accurately chosen a different strategy – taking advantage of the bureaucratic rigidity and sluggishness of the Russian management system, to exhaust Russia with continuous unexpected strikes on sensitive infrastructure and the civilian population, provoking discontent, disappointment and apathy.”

The Kursk operation also demonstrates to Ukraine’s allies that it still has the energy and imagination to surprise its enemy and embarrass the Kremlin at a time when much of the news from the frontline was bleak for Kyiv.

That’s not lost on Shurygin. “The goal of this new strategy is to put Russia before the prospect of an increasingly costly war (financially, reputationally and organizationally) and to force it to negotiate peace by November-December.”

Daniel Fried at the Atlantic Council says there is a long history of such surprise military raids – some inconsequential and others impactful. He recalls George Washington’s daring maneuver to cross the Delaware River in 1776, when he returned with captured prisoners and supplies and raised morale for the fight against the British.

Fried, a former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, says that by demonstrating Russia’s failure of intelligence and weakness along its border, the raid had punctured the Kremlin’s narrative “that Ukrainian resistance is useless and support for Ukraine is futile.”

Ukraine’s Kursk gambit forces the Russian Defense Ministry into some tough choices. It appears that existing groups in Kursk such as the National Guard, FSB and irregular elements are unable to combat the Ukrainians.

Alternatively, it may call on Russia’s substantial reserves in a larger-scale operation – but these are critical for current Russian offensive operations inside Ukraine, where the continuous commitment of high numbers of troops has eroded Ukrainian defenses.

Or, Barros says, the Russians may turn to aviation to attack Ukrainian armor inside Kursk, thereby preventing Ukrainian forces from consolidating positions and assisting current Russian forces deployed in the area.

Whatever combination the Russians choose, they are trying to reverse a humiliating episode in the conflict just as sheer mass and air superiority in eastern Donetsk was beginning to deliver incremental progress, underpinning the Kremlin’s insistence that Ukraine give up four eastern regions as a condition for negotiations.

Across a southern border with Ukraine that is hundreds of miles long, that perception has been seriously, and unexpectedly, challenged.

Darya Tarasova and Maria Kostenko contributed reporting to this story.

For a few hours on Wednesday evening, tension pulsed through Britain’s streets.

Shops and businesses closed early in dozens of cities and towns, boarding up their storefronts and getting out. Police descended on high streets and residential roads, and locals showed up too, ready for the worst.

But then the counter-protests started. Anti-racism rallies stole back the narrative and kept away far-right antagonists, and a nervous country breathed a huge sigh of relief after a night that could have felt very different.

Wednesday felt like a turning point after a string of violence that had put a country on edge and thrown its new government into a sudden crisis.

But the government says it remains on high alert for more unrest this weekend. The fury simmering in a subset of White Britain remains a live danger; these riots were shocking, but not entirely surprising.

And the causes that aided and enabled the racist violence – misinformation, anti-migrant rhetoric in Britain’s media and politics, a hobbled police force and stuffed prisons and courts – will take far longer than a night to fix.

“The chickens come home to roost,” he said. “As a country, this is a bed that we’ve made, and now we’re sleeping in it.”

Online provocateurs and far-right foot soldiers

Fittingly, after a week of misinformation-fuelled fury, the origin and authenticity of the list of supposed far-right targets on Wednesday isn’t clear.

The addresses included were mainly immigration centers and lawyers dealing with migration cases. It was a scattershot collection, seemingly collated with little knowledge of the local areas; some were offices based in non-descript business parks; others on quiet, residential streets.

But after a weekend of ugly anger on Britain’s streets, in which hotels housing asylum seekers were set on fire by racist mobs, it quickly went viral: first on Telegram channels used by the far right, then across social media, and among the communities that appeared to be targets. A huge police operation across the country was launched; in the end, few far-right disruptors showed up anywhere.

Misinformation on social media has added an element of unpredictability to the far right’s organization.

Leading platforms, especially X, have provided new soapboxes to incendiary figures intent on stirring anti-migrant sentiment. In many cases, their posts are eagerly shared and viewed by the far-right foot soldiers who joined the weekend’s riots – even if the authors quietly condemn violence after the fact.

Tommy Robinson, the figurehead of Britain’s far right, was reinstated to X (then Twitter) days after Elon Musk bought the platform. Robinson, whose profile picture shows him with tape across his mouth, has nearly a million followers.

Almost every one of his tweets is an anti-migrant tirade, frequently using dehumanizing and othering language to describe the high rate of legal and illegal migration to the UK.

Those themes are echoed by other high-profile Twitter users, like provocateur Laurence Fox, who hosted a show on the right-wing GB News TV channel until he was fired last October for demeaning the appearance of a female journalist on air. Amid the weekend’s riots, Fox told his followers: “Islam needs to be removed from Britain. Completely and entirely.”

Starmer has become an enemy in the eyes of the far right over the past week, but he has little ability to quell a right-wing and far-right online ecosystem that exists in private messaging apps and, increasingly, on public sites accessible by anyone.

And remarkably, the first spat that Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer found himself engaged in was with Musk himself, who has taken an interest in goading Starmer on his platform.

Musk tweeted Sunday that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain – a prediction most Brits would scoff at, and one that prompted an unusually direct rebuke from the prime minister’s spokesperson, who told reporters there was “no justification” for the comments.

A legal blitz

Britain’s far-right rioting broke out less than a month into the tenure of its new prime minister, but Starmer has been here before.

Formerly Britain’s highest-ranking prosecutor, Starmer oversaw a rapid legal response to the 2011 rioting that broke out after the shooting of a Black man by police in north London. Courts stayed open 24 hours and sentences were well publicized, in an effort not just to deal justice but to send a message.

He has reached for the same playbook this week. There have been hundreds of arrests, and already dozens of rioters have been charged and sent to begin hefty prison terms, ranging from several months to nearly three years. Their ages, so far, span from 16 to 69. Some judges’ sentencing remarks have been broadcast live, a novel tactic in a country where courtroom cameras are a recent and heavily restricted phenomenon.

Early signs suggest the legal blitz has worked in deterring far-right supporters from taking to the streets.

It has also led to a moniker – “two-tier Keir” – among those far-right groups, who claim Starmer is using tougher rhetoric on the far right than he did against other protesters, like climate activists.

Starmer will be unbothered by that fringe grievance. But there are wider inequalities that gave rise to the unrest which will take years to resolve.

Riots took hold disproportionately in cities and towns suffering from high levels of deprivation; places where, over recent years, people have increasingly seen the creaking foundations of the British state through a lens that focuses unforgivingly on migration.

The motives of the far-right stray well beyond concern about migration, and into hatred and racism. “We are losing our heritage to a Muslim situation that has got out of control. They want this country for their own,” McDermott also said. Referring to a larger crowd of counter-protesters in Sheffield, he added: “I don’t know what the hell’s going on with them. They’re not human.”

But the explosion of anti-migrant discourse on Britain’s airwaves and online, coupled with the breakdown of the country’s underfunded public services, has given Brits tempted by far-right discourse a more emotive, and socially acceptable, entry point.

The combination of those grievances with the proliferation of far-right material is a trend that Britain is not facing alone, but it is a force Starmer has pledged to counter.

Starmer styled himself as an antidote to populism at the start of his time in office, and told rioters in an address from Downing Street: “I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder.” How quickly he comes through on those promises may become a defining question of his premiership.

At least 90 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli strike on a school in Gaza, according to local officials.

Gaza Civil Defense said the Al-Tabi’in school was housing displaced Palestinians in the Al-Daraj neighborhood in the eastern part of Gaza City when it was hit overnight into Saturday.

In its statement, the military claimed the “command and control center served as a hideout for Hamas terrorists and commanders, from which various attacks were planned and advanced against IDF troops and the State of Israel.”

The military also said that before the airstrike, “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and intelligence information.”

Israeli military action in Gaza has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians and injured over 90,000, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. As of early July, nearly 2 million people had been displaced in the enclave – almost its entire population, according to figures from the United Nations.

Israel launched the military offensive on October 7, after militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel. At least 1,200 people were killed, and more than 250 others abducted in the Hamas-led assault, according to Israeli authorities.

A doctor working in a nearby hospital earlier said at least 50 people had been killed in Saturday’s strike.

Basal said many of the dead were yet to be identified.

“There are still large quantities of body parts and torn bodies inside Al-Ahli hospital,” he said. “Families are having a hard time identifying their children.”

Basal also said that many of the injured transferred to hospital are in very serious condition.

Saturday’s attack follows similar lethal strikes by Israel over the past week.

Airstrikes on multiple school buildings sheltering displaced Palestinians last weekend killed at least 47, including many children, and injured dozens more.

This is a developing story.

Parts of Port-au-Prince are showing signs of life again: On the once-desolate Boulevard Toussaint Louverture, a young couple could be seen hugging one recent afternoon. Down the street, a group of men danced as Bob Marley’s “One Love” came on the radio.

A few months ago, walking down this main artery in Haiti’s capital was inconceivable; a loose alliance of gangs was rampaging, kidnapping civilians, blocking shipments of food and water, and battling the Haitian National Police block by block. Since the arrival in late June of a foreign police force known as the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, criminal attacks here have slowed.

But in “red zones” across the city and beyond, a new war is just beginning, as gangs test the still-forming MSS. Haitians and the mission’s backers in Washington are watching closely for signs of weakness.

Rolling through downtown Port-au-Prince, the armored convoy came under intense fire in the dark. Inside one vehicle, the stifling metal cabin was quiet, except for the bullets rattling angrily at reinforced windows and doors. A Kenyan officer brushed it off as mere “rain” typical of a patrol in Port-au-Prince, but later took careful note of the close-range pocks and thick cracks left behind.

None of the troops returned fire; they could not – their vehicles had been delivered to Haiti without turrets from which to shoot. Making painfully slow three – and four, and five – point turns on the narrow street, the hulking fighting vehicles retreated under an echoing onslaught.

The next day, a Kenyan officer would become the mission’s first injury, struck in the arm as he attempted to shoot out of a half-open loading panel during a gang attack on a grain delivery truck.

Security experts panned the maneuver as unprofessional; Kenyan troops say it’s the only option with the equipment they currently have.

‘The arrival of the Kenyans has created expectations’

This mission was debated for years before it came into being.

Since at least 2022, Haiti’s neighbors have agonized openly over the spread of insurgent armed groups in the Caribbean nation. Responding with force became the only obvious option in March, when a series of coordinated gang attacks on government buildings and prisons forced the Haitian government to dissolve – threatening a state of anarchy just two hours from the Florida coast.

That’s how Garry Conille – a Haitian doctor, former regional director for the United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF, and self-described “non-political person” – ended up in charge of solving the crisis. Regional bloc CARICOM orchestrated the creation of a transitional governing council for Haiti, which in turn appointed Conille as interim prime minister in May.

In a rare interview, Conille summarized the situation with the ready statistics of a career humanitarian: Over 85% of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area is under gang control; around 600,000 people have been forced to flee their homes; some 2 million people live in fear of being raped or killed in their households, he estimated.

In other words, the MSS mission has no time to lose.

“People are living in under very bad circumstances. So, they want to see action. They want to see movement,” Conille said.

Public confidence in the mission’s ability to restore security is key to rebuild the Haitian state, says Conille, who works the phones “every single day” to expedite the delivery of hundreds of millions in funds and equipment pledged to the MSS by international donors. It needs to come faster, he says.

“The arrival of the Kenyans has created expectations, and we need to meet this expectation or the whole system crumbles, including the credibility of the transitional government,” he explained as we walked through piles of trash, abandoned prosthetics, and wrecked electrical generators.

“The concern is: Will we get the amount of resources we need so that this force can be deployed as quickly as possible, and that we can see in the next few weeks and months?” said Conille.

“My anticipation is that political interests will begin to use the sentiment of inertia or the lack of movement to mobilize frustration of population and destabilize what is still a very fragile consensus.”

Inside the MSS base

The creation of the MSS base is itself was an achievement. In just months, empty lots next to Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture International Airport have transformed from a battle zone to a bustling little town of men in camouflage.

Private security guards arrived first, camping under the wings of old aircraft as they secured the area. Then a wave of private contractors were brought in, working around the clock to build access roads and helipads, a gleaming mess hall, expansive field hospital, long domed tents for offices and barracks, and even a laundry room, where laminated signs warn against throwing body armor in the dryer.

A monumental reminder of the rush with which it all came together, a passenger jet from the now-defunct Planet Airways still sits rusting onsite – there was no time to move it before the first deployment of Kenyans arrived.

Four hundred Kenyan police live here, many of them selected from special units and border police. They are the vanguard of a force that could soon grow to 2,500 strong, with more troops expected from Jamaica, Benin, Chad, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados and Belize.

This mission is designed to break the mold; unlike previous peacekeeping missions in Haiti, the MSS is independent of the United Nations. Largely funded by the United States, along with France and Canada, it will consist mostly of police rather than militaries, and is mandated to bolster Haitian National Police operations rather than sideline them – hence the word “support” in the mission’s official name (though locals refer to the MSS as simply “the Kenyans.”)

Kenyan police are no strangers to allegations of human rights abuses, but they’re putting in guardrails to avoid the scandals of previous missions in Haiti, including allegations of sexual exploitation and the 2010 introduction of cholera by UN peacekeepers. On a tour of the base, Otunge highlighted its sanitation system and handwashing facilities. Troops are not allowed to leave the base during off-hours.

With the mission still in “phase one” of its deployment, Otunge says it’s a good sign that his men are already able to perform patrols to establish a public presence, while waiting to reach full strength.

“Once we now reach the full operational capability of the mission, there will be nothing to worry about in the issue of gangs in this country,” he says.

Otunge’s confidence is infectious. No wonder his officers pooh-pooh Haiti’s gangs as amateurs compared to their previous foes, like Al Shabaab – though the al Qaeda affiliate hasn’t been entirely vanquished back home in Kenya.

Managing expectations

Several expressed worry that the mission is already struggling to live up to expectations abroad, with viral videos by local journalists in Port-au-Prince showing Haitian and Kenyan police handling some engagements ham-handedly and shouting at each other in apparent frustration.

Tactical victories are hoped to help validate foreign governments’ commitments to the MSS, and even persuade more international partners to open their purses. According to a July 30 press conference by Normil, the police chief, over 100 alleged gang members have been “stopped” – an apparent euphemism for killed – in exchanges of fire with police and an additional 65 arrested in recent operations.

Still, those kinds of numbers barely begin to address the scale of crime and impunity in the Port-au-Prince area.

Last week, a gang raided a boarding school for deaf children, the Institut Monfort, in the western outskirts of the capital. The attack scattered the nuns who work there and 47 of their charges into the night, forcing them to shelter with other religious organizations across the city, according to Sister Lamercie Estinfort.

“The kids could not stop crying. The gang screamed at them and made them lie on the floor and threatened to shoot them if they didn’t stop crying, but our kids couldn’t understand anything that was happening. They are deaf.”

No one came to help, she said – not the police, and not the MSS forces. She and the children are now among the hundreds of thousands of Haitians made homeless by gang attacks.

The incident is one of several fueling fears that as the MSS settles into Port-au-Prince, criminal groups are now shifting their focus to the city’s outskirts.

An MSS spokesperson said they were not called to respond to the incident, and Haitian National Police did not respond to request for comment.

Further west, in the town of Ganthier, a joint response last week by Haitian National Police and MSS forces to an assault by the gang 400 Mawozo was touted as a victory, but has proven inconclusive, with the group still attacking in the area.

“I’m even waiting for orders myself, to hear the order: ‘It’s time to dismantle Barbeque. To dismantle Lanmo Sanjou. To dismantle Izo. To dismantle Chen Mechan,’” he said listing the nicknames of notorious Port-au-Prince gang bosses.

Breakfast with the US ambassador

Hankins promises that more equipment is on the way, but argues the MSS has already had a powerful psychological impact.

“When I arrived in Haiti four months ago, I had to come in by helicopter, because the gangs had attacked the airport. The city was essentially under siege. And there were realistic concerns that the security forces would collapse totally, and that we might by now have a de facto President Barbecue,” Hankins says, referring to one of the most outspoken gang leaders in the city.

“So, if you move forward four months, huge political progress, huge security progress. A lot of challenges ahead and certainly no guarantees of the future. But we’re just in a much better place than when I arrived.”

And it’s not just about what the Haitian public and funders think, he says. In addition to material support, the symbolism of the MSS and its gleaming base also sends an important message to Haiti’s police that the world is with them. And that could make a difference in their operations, Hankins suggests.

“As soon as you get confidence and at least some equipment for the security forces, the gangs tend to back off … half the gang members are kids. They don’t have military training.”

The list of what remains to be done is long and complicated. The mission aims to establish forward operating bases, including in the volatile Artibonite region, an agricultural powerhouse in central Haiti, to eventually defend territory seized from the gangs. The Haitian Justice Department is looking into possible mobile courts to speedily process arrested gang members, in a country where many prisoners have never seen a judge.

Prisons must be built – there isn’t space to put all the gang members that the MSS hopes to arrest. And the country’s child protection agency IBESR and UNICEF just signed a protocol for handling children affiliated with armed groups, who are estimated by the Haitian government to make up 30% to 50% of the gangs’ ranks.

But first, MSS troops say they need the basics – like turrets for their vehicles.

As Haiti becomes once again a laboratory for international intervention, its gangs are waiting and watching. Some have called for dialogue, offering a potential avenue toward a negotiated peace, which Conille has not ruled out. Others have already thrown down the gauntlet, posting videos on social media of fresh weapons shipments smuggled into the country, and ceiling-high stacks of ammunition.

An investigation by Amnesty International alleges that a US-made weapons guidance system was used in two Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in October in which 43 civilians are said to have been killed.

Fragments of the US-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions guidance system were found in the rubble of destroyed homes in the neighborhood of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, according to a report released Tuesday by the human rights organization.

Israel uses a wide variety of American weapons and munitions, but Amnesty International’s report is one of the first attempts to tie an American-made weapon to a specific attack that left a significant number of civilians dead.

The JDAM is a “guidance tail kit that converts existing unguided free-fall bombs into accurate, adverse weather ‘smart’ munitions,” according to the US Air Force.

Amnesty International said its weapons experts and a “remote sensing analyst” examined satellite imagery and photos of the homes that show the “fragments of ordnance recovered from the rubble” and the destruction, the report explains. Amnesty’s fieldworkers took the photos.

As a result of these two attacks, 19 children, 14 women, and 10 men were killed, the report claims.

The human rights organization said it “did not find any indication that there were any military objectives at the sites” of the airstrikes or that the individuals living in the homes were legitimate military targets.

“The organization found that these air strikes were either direct attacks on civilians or civilian objects or indiscriminate attacks,” the report says, calling for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.

“The assumption that intelligence regarding the military use of a particular structure does not exist unless revealed is contradictory to any understanding of military activity, and the report uses this flawed assumption to imply equally flawed and biased conclusions regarding the IDF, in line with existing biases and prior problematic work by this organization,” the IDF said.

The statement said that the military “regrets any harm caused to civilians or civilian property as a result of its operations, and examines all its operations in order to learn and improve.”

Amnesty International, in its report, said that the use of American weapons for such strikes “should be an urgent wake-up call to the Biden administration.”

“The US-made weapons facilitated the mass killings of extended families,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, according to the report.

US reviewing report

The US State Department is reviewing Amnesty International’s report, spokesperson Matt Miller said Wednesday.

“We have made clear in our discussions with Israeli leaders that we are deeply concerned about the protection of civilians in this conflict,” Miller said. “We expect Israel to only target legitimate targets and to adhere to the laws of armed conflict.”

The Pentagon on Tuesday said it too was reviewing the report.

“We are going to continue to consult closely with our Israeli partners on the importance of taking civilian safety into account in conducting their operations,” spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told journalists.

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II, according to the Congressional Research Service. The US on average gives Israel $3 billion in military aid per year, and the Biden administration sought an additional $10.6 billion in military aid in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel.

The first attack referenced by Amnesty International occurred about 8:30 p.m. on October 10, hitting the al-Najjar family home and killing 21 of its members, as well as three of their neighbors, the report says.

That bomb most likely weighed about 2,000 pounds, based on the amount of damage to the home and surrounding buildings, Amnesty claims. The year 2017 is also stamped into the plate, photos from the report show, indicating the bomb was manufactured in that year.

“JDAM is a guided air-to-surface weapon that uses either the 2,000-pound BLU-109/MK 84, the 1,000-pound BLU-110/MK 83 or the 500-pound BLU-111/MK 82 warhead as the payload,” according to the US Air Force.

‘A scene of utter destruction’

Suleiman Salman al-Najjar, who survived the attack, told Amnesty he had been ill and returned from the hospital to find his home bombed and family killed. “I was shocked. I rushed home and saw a scene of utter destruction. I could not believe my eyes. Everybody was under the rubble. The house was completely pulverized. The bodies were reduced to shreds,” he said.

The second attack occurred about midday on October 22 and hit three houses belonging to three brothers in the Abu Mu’eileq family, the report says. In total, 18 members of the Mu-eileq family were killed, including 12 children and six women, as well as one of their neighbors, the report says.

Bakir Abu Mu’eileq told Amnesty he lost his wife and four of their children in the attack. Abu Mu’eileq – an ear, nose and throat specialist – said that he had been working at the nearby hospital when the attack occurred.

“We are three brothers married to three sisters, living among ourselves, focused on our families and work, and far from politics. We are doctors and scientists,” Abu Mu’eileq said, adding, “we cannot understand why our homes were bombed. … There is nobody armed or political here. Our lives, our families, were destroyed completely, obliterated. Why?”

Amnesty says photos show the bomb that hit the homes of the Mu-eileq family weighed about 1,000 pounds and was manufactured in 2018, according to the year stamped into the plate.

“The US may share responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by Israel with US-supplied weapons, as all states have a duty not to knowingly contribute to internationally wrongful acts by other states,” Amnesty warned.

The human rights organization is urging the US government and other governments to stop transferring arms to Israel “that more likely than not will be used to commit or heighten risks of violations of international law.”

“A state that continues to supply arms being used to commit violations may share responsibility for these violations,” Amnesty said.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ running mate has a decades-long connection with China. But in the eyes of Beijing, that may not necessarily be good news.

Tim Walz moved to China fresh out of college in 1989 to teach high school for a year, and then frequently returned to the country during a decade of taking American students on summer cultural exchanges.

The 60-year-old Minnesota governor has spoken fondly of his time in China and the people he met there, and his familiarity with the country and empathy for its people bring a personal, nuanced perspective on the United States’ biggest strategic rival that is rare among his political peers.

Some Republican opponents have seized on that experience to accuse Walz of being “pro-China,” but the Democratic vice-presidential nominee has a long history of criticizing authoritarian Chinese leadership.

Walz moved to China at a tumultuous and politically charged time, shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the ruling Communist Party sent tanks in to violently quell peaceful student-led democracy protests in Beijing. Upon returning home to Nebraska in 1990, he told a local newspaper he felt the Chinese people had been mistreated by their government for years.

“If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish. They are such kind, generous, capable people,” he told the Star-Herald at the time.

During his time in Congress from 2007 to 2019, Walz rallied support for imprisoned Chinese activists. He met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader loathed by Beijing, and Joshua Wong, the young Hong Kong democracy activist now jailed for his activism against Beijing’s tightening grip.

“The more he understands China, the more he feels pity for the Chinese people, and the more critical he becomes of the rulers who govern them,” said Shen Dingli, a foreign policy analyst in Shanghai.

“He has some understanding of Chinese culture and respects it in his heart, but he definitely does not accept China’s political (system),” Shen added. “Beijing is probably more fearful and uncomfortable with such a foreigner who understands China.”

‘It was more about the people’

Walz was among the first groups of young Americans to teach in high schools in China under a Harvard University volunteer program, just a decade after the two countries established diplomatic relations.

As a fresh graduate, he spent a year teaching English and American history at the Foshan No. 1 High School, in the southern province of Guangdong.

There, he was met with industrious and welcoming students who applauded him each time he used a Chinese word correctly, and friendly strangers who offered to help whenever he stopped in the streets looking bewildered, he told the Star-Herald in 1990.

“I was treated exceptionally well,” he told the newspaper. “There was no anti-American feeling whatsoever. American is ‘It’ in the eyes of the Chinese. Many of the students want to come to America to study.”

That was a different era in China. The impoverished country was curious about the world after emerging from decades of self-imposed isolation and tumultuous rule under Mao Zedong. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping unleashed market reforms and, along with an economic opening, calls for political liberalization gathered pace in the 1980s.

Such calls coalesced into a student-led movement in the spring of 1989, which was brutally put down by the Chinese military weeks before Walz’s trip.

“I remember waking up and seeing the news on June 4 that the unthinkable had happened,” Walz told Voice of America in an interview in 2014.

“Many of my colleagues decided to go home and not to go on [to China]. I thought it was more important than ever to go, to make sure the story was told and to let the Chinese people know we were standing there, we were with them.”

From Guangdong, Walz took a 40-hour cross-country train ride to the Chinese capital to see Tiananmen Square, the site of the democracy protests.

He made sure he would always commemorate the crackdown in a personal way – by getting married on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the massacre.

“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” his wife and fellow high-school teacher, Gwen, told a local newspaper in Minnesota before their wedding.

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon taking students on two-week tours in China for sightseeing and classes on culture, education and history. These trips became a summer tradition for the couple through 2003.

“I would go back in a heartbeat,” said Cara Roemhildt, who went on such a trip in 1998. “It was an educational trip with one of our favorite teachers. It was more about the people. It wasn’t about the politics.”

Roemhildt said she and her classmates still talk about the trip decades later.

A nuanced critic

After entering politics in 2006, Walz continued to devote time and attention to China in Congress.

He served more than a decade on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the rule of law in the country – a role Beijing would not be happy about.

“The Chinese government has always viewed that commission as ‘anti-China,’” said Liu Dongshu, an assistant professor of public and international affairs at the City University of Hong Kong.

In Congress, Walz co-sponsored a series of resolutions calling on China to release its jailed rights activists, including Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who eventually died in custody of liver cancer.

In 2015, Walz joined a congressional delegation on a trip to China, which included a rare stop in Tibet, which he had also visited decades earlier during his time teaching at the Chinese high school.

The following year, Walz met the Dalai Lama in Washington for what he called a “life-changing lunch.” He also welcomed Lobsang Sangay, then leader of Tibet’s government in exile, into his congressional office to meet a group of Minnesota high-school students.

At a congressional meeting that year, he called on Beijing to “ensure the preservation of traditional Tibetan culture” and “provide less regulated religious freedom to the Tibetans.”

Walz has also been a vocal supporter of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

In 2017, when Wong, the student protest leader, was jailed for his political activism, Walz posted a photo of himself and the young activist standing side by side to show solidarity with “all advocating for democracy in Hong Kong.”

Walz also threw his support behind the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which sanctions officials responsible for human rights violations in the city, when the legislation appeared to be languishing in Congress.

“We knocked on every door when the #HKHRDA lacked momentum. Only Walz answered his,” Jeffrey Ngo, a Hong Kong democracy activist now based in Washington, said on X.

“Walz is perhaps the most solid candidate when it comes to human rights and China on a major-party ticket in recent memory,” Ngo said.

On the diplomatic front, Walz has criticized China’s unfair trade practices and its growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.

In Chinese nationalist circles, which have an outsized voice on policy debates in China, there are no rosy illusions about Walz.

“On human rights and ideological issues, he has basically crossed all the possible red lines out there,” Shen Yi, an international relations scholar known for his fiercely nationalistic views, wrote on social media.

But unlike more hawkish politicians, Walz does not believe in decoupling, and instead holds a more nuanced view on the geostrategic rivalry between the US and China.

“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree,” he said in an interview in 2016.

“We’re on the same sheet of music, two of the world’s great superpowers, there’s many collaborative things we can do together.”

Stephen Roach, former chief of Morgan Stanley Asia, said the Harris-Walz ticket may provide “an important counterweight to the current venom of American Sinophobia.”

Walz’s empathy for the Chinese people and appreciation of China’s non-political aspects make him a harder case for Beijing to “villainize as an ‘anti-China’ foil” than politicians that are hawkish on all dimensions, Eric Fish, a former Beijing-based journalist and author of “China’s Millennials: The Want Generation,” said on X.

‘A complex country’

Walz’s extensive experience with China makes him a rare figure in the race for the White House – at least since George H. W. Bush, who served as America’s unofficial ambassador to Beijing in the mid-1970s before running for vice president and later president.

Bush’s stint in Beijing would go on to influence his foreign policy – and help steer US-China relations through the tumultuous fallout of the Tiananmen crackdown.

But US-China relations are at a very different place now from the honeymoon period of engagement. Being tough on China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in the US, and Beijing is unlikely to be counting on Walz to improve bilateral ties.

“The direction of US policy towards China is very clear. As an individual, regardless of your attitude towards China, there’s not much room for maneuver,” said Liu, the expert at the City University of Hong Kong.

“And vice presidents can have a varied level of say in foreign policy, depending on the president they serve,” he added.

Walz’s experience living and teaching in China could serve as a useful diplomatic ice breaker to warm up the room if that’s what the two sides wish to do, Liu said. But even then, he added, the Chinese would need to dance around the awkwardness in the timing and avoid all mention of the Tiananmen crackdown – which remains a political taboo in China.

On China’s tightly controlled social media, Walz’s early ties to the country have raised eyebrows and generated considerable interest. The hashtag “Harris’ VP pick once taught in China” racked up 15 million views on microblogging site Weibo.

The year of Walz’s arrival in China – 1989 – was not lost among those who understand the sensitivity of the date, despite decades of effort by the Chinese government to erase the brutal crackdown from public memory.

But, perhaps reflective of the different era China now finds itself in under leader Xi Jinping, who has fanned nationalist sentiment and suspicion against foreigners over national security, many questioned the “real motive” of Walz’s first trip to China.

“Heh, 1989-1990, Americans teaching in China during this period – it’s something worth pondering carefully,” said a top comment on Weibo.

“Must be a spy,” said another.

Liu said that, given how drastically China has changed over the past decades, Walz’s understanding of the country from his younger days may offer limited help on American policy toward China today.

Walz himself has conceded that he’s by no means a China expert.

“I lived in China, and as I said I’ve been there about 30 times,” he said in the 2016 interview. “But if someone tells you they’re an expert on China, they’re probably not telling you the truth because it’s a complex country.”

Refugee athlete Manizha Talash was disqualified from the B-Girl breaking competition at the Olympics for wearing a cape with the words “Free Afghan Women” during her breaking battle on Friday.

The 21-year-old, who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban began seizing control in 2021, now lives in Spain and represents the Refugee Team at the games as B-girl Talash.

As she made her debut during the pre-qualifier battle, Talash revealed a baby blue cape under her jumper emblazoned with the words calling for Afghan women’s emancipation.

World DanceSport Federation, which governs the sport, issued a statement later on Friday saying “B-Girl TALASH (EOR) was disqualified for displaying a political slogan on her attire during the Pre-Qualifier battle. Results have been updated accordingly.”

“I didn’t leave Afghanistan because I’m afraid of the Taliban or because I can’t live in Afghanistan,” Talash said before action got underway. “I left because I want to do what I can for the girls in Afghanistan, for my life, my future, for everyone.”

Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan became the most repressive country in the world for women’s rights, according to the United Nations. The hardline Islamist group has closed secondary schools for girls, banned women from attending university, restricted their travel without a male chaperone, and banned them from public spaces such as parks and gyms.

The Taliban’s so-called morality police have also disproportionately targeted women and girls, creating a “climate of fear and intimidation,” according to a UN report published last month.

Talash found the sport of breaking through watching videos on social media. Her ability to train, however, was disrupted as she looked for somewhere to settle.

The breaker became one of 37 athletes representing the Refugee Olympic Team in Paris, and is proud to do so.

“All refugees have a very difficult life, but they will go to the Games,” she said. “So to me, to be part of the team, it means strength.” She added: “People from my country and also girls would tell me: ‘You need to learn how to cook and clean the house.’

Breaking has been flourishing on the streets of New York and other US cities since the 1970s, but Paris marks its first time its athletes, known as B-boys and B-girls, freestyled their moves on the world’s biggest stage.

Talash’s slogan may have fallen foul of rules against political slogans at the Olympics but it has also found her fans.

“I would like to say that it’s only been 11 minutes of breaking and a competitor already pulled out a surprise jacket that says “Free Afghan Women”—THAT is breaking. THAT is hiphop culture,” Nadira Goffe, an associate writer at Slate magazine, wrote on X.

A passenger plane carrying 62 people crashed on the outskirts of São Paulo on Friday, according to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with dramatic footage from the scene showing the plane’s destroyed fuselage in flames on the ground.

Interrupting a speech at a naval event, Lula said it “appears” that everyone on board the flight may have died. It is not clear what caused the twin-engine turboprop plane to crash.

“I would like everyone to stand up so that we can observe a minute of silence because a plane has just crashed in the city of Vinhedo, in São Paulo, with 58 passengers and 4 crew members and it appears they all died,” he said, in a video of his statement shared on X.

Flight 2283 left Cascavel, in the Brazilian state of Parana, and was en route to São Paulo when it lost signal shortly before 1:30 p.m. local time (12:30 p.m. ET), according to data on Flightradar24.

Social media videos of the crash showed the plane spiraling out of the sky before hitting the ground as people in the neighborhood shouted in fear. Another video showed the wreckage of the plane in flames on the ground.

“There is still no confirmation of how the accident occurred or the current situation of the people on board,” according to a statement by airline Voepass.

She ducked down in terror and started praying, she said, calling it a “moment of panic” for the whole city. The private roads leading toward the crash site are now closed off, and first responders are in the area, she said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.