World

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 …

The United States paused a shipment of bombs to Israel amid concerns over their potential use in a Rafah incursion, according to a US official. The shipment, which was held back last week, includes 1,800 bombs weighing 2,000 pounds and 1,700 bombs weighing 500 pounds. “We are especially focused on the end-use of the 2,000-pound bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we …

JERUSALEM — An Israeli tank brigade seized control Tuesday of the Gaza Strip side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, authorities said, moving forward with an offensive in the southern city even as cease-fire negotiations with Hamas remain on a knife’s edge. The move comes after hours of whiplash in the Israel-Hamas war, with the militant group on Monday …

NEW YORK— The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him $1,000 on Monday and, in his sternest warning yet, told the former president that future gag order violations could send him to jail. The reprimand opened a revelatory day of testimony, as jurors for the first time heard the details of the financial transactions at the center of the case …