World

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Wednesday agreed to hold two campaign debates — the first on June 27 hosted by CNN and the second on Sept. 10 hosted by ABC — setting the stage for their first presidential face-off to play out in just over a month. The quick agreement on the timetable followed the Democrat’s announcement that he would …

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip on Thursday, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war. The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process more than two months after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered …

BANSKA BYSTRICA, Slovakia — Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was in serious but stable condition Thursday, a hospital official said, after the populist leader was shot multiple times in an assassination attempt that shook the small country and reverberated across the continent weeks before European elections. A suspect was in custody, and Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok said Wednesday that an initial …

Hong Kong – Chinese leader Xi Jinping will welcome Vladimir Putin to China on Thursday for the Russian president’s second visit in less than a year – the latest sign of their growing alignment amid hardening global fault lines as conflict devastates Gaza and Russia makes advances in Ukraine. Putin will arrive in China just over a week since entering a new term in …

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump was intimately involved with all aspects of a scheme to stifle stories about sex that threatened to torpedo his 2016 campaign, his former lawyer said Monday in matter-of-fact testimony that went to the heart of the former president’s hush money trial, the Associated Press reports. “Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off,” said Michael Cohen, Trump’s …

The changing language used by the Ukrainian military in 72 hours of daily updates tells the story: “Ongoing defensive fighting.” “Significantly worsened.” Russian “tactical success.” You rarely ever hear Kyiv’s top brass sounding downbeat, but their steep southerly trajectory reflects the grave place Ukraine finds itself in. Russia is not just advancing slowly in one place; it appears to be advancing in …

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israel ordered new evacuations in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah on Saturday, forcing tens of thousands more people to move as it prepares to expand its operation and adding that it is also moving into an area in northern Gaza where Hamas has regrouped. Israel has now evacuated the eastern third of Rafah, pushing the operation …

At a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him. Rows of men in gray tracksuits are seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights. …

WASHINGTON — Hardline Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried and failed in sudden action Wednesday to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson, her long-shot effort swiftly and resoundingly rejected by Democrats and Republicans tired of the political chaos. One of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress, Greene stood on the House floor and read a long list of “transgressions” she said Johnson had committed as …

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said Wednesday that it has reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, a key terminal for the entry of humanitarian aid that was closed nearly three days earlier after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers nearby. Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike on buildings near the separating wall between Egypt and Rafah, southern …