Category: World
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Pope Leo XIV has devoted his September prayer intention to the care of water, opening the five-week Season of Creation with a Mass at Castel Gandolfo. Behind the appeal sits a figure the Vatican cited directly: a quarter of the world’s population without safe drinking water.
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France recorded 53 days of heatwave conditions this summer, a figure Météo-France calls unprecedented, and its hottest June-to-August period since measurements began in 1900. The environment minister has promised adaptation measures and a five-year funding plan by the end of September.
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At the G20 innovation ministerial in North Carolina, the world’s largest economies unanimously adopted US-proposed guidelines favouring lighter-touch AI governance. Four weeks earlier, the European Commission had begun enforcing the AI Act. Both things are now true at once, which is the actual state of global AI regulation.
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A new systematic review estimates 402 to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning among farmers and farmworkers every year — around 46 per cent of the world’s farming population. The figure is large, the method involves substantial extrapolation, and both facts matter.
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The Gang Suppression Force authorised for Haiti last September expires on 30 September, and the United States and Panama are expected to ask the Security Council to renew it. Around 1.5 million Haitians are displaced, and the conduct of the operations themselves has become part of the argument.
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Dozens of masked men in black blocked the approach roads to the Port of Dover on Saturday, halting ferry traffic and causing a four-mile queue. The government condemned it, the local MP called it disruption by outsiders, and the geography of the protest sits oddly with its stated cause.
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US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, then travelled to Kyiv to see Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday. European national security advisers joined part of the Kyiv talks. Nothing was announced, and former US ambassadors caution against reading activity as advance.
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Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon on Sunday killed at least four people and injured around twenty, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The Lebanese presidency says a hospital was destroyed. The Israeli military says it hit a Hezbollah command centre inside a building formerly used as a hospital.
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Alternative für Deutschland took 43.8 per cent in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election, more than double the CDU’s share. Winning the most votes and being able to form a government are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where German politics now sits.
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Three people died in a shooting outside a Tucson bar frequented by LGBTQ people. Five days later, investigators confirmed it was motivated by homophobia. What that classification changes when the perpetrator is already dead.