Short news
Andy Murray can dream of a third successive Olympic tennis singles title after the former world number one was selected in the British team for the Tokyo Games. The 34-year-old Scot's career has been blighted by injury since beating Juan Martin del Potro in a memorable final in the 2016 Rio Games. Murray will also play in the men's doubles in Tokyo, but with Joe Salisbury and not his doubles specialist brother Jamie.
Source: france24.com
China's escalating military intimidation of Taiwan shows the self-governed island "needs to prepare" for a possible military conflict, Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said. His warning came one week after the island reported the largest daily incursion by Chinese military planes into Taiwan's self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ).
Source: cnn.com
A huge rescue operation is under way in Miami-Dade County, Florida, after a 12-storey building partially collapsed, killing at least one person. Images from Surfside, north of Miami Beach, show a huge pile of rubble hanging down one side of a residential apartment building. A woman died, at least eight people were injured and there are fears that others are trapped, US media report. The collapse is said to have occurred at around 02:00 (07:00 GMT).
A court in Ivory Coast has sentenced former rebel leader and Prime Minister Guillaume Soro to life imprisonment in absentia on charges of plotting a coup against President Alassane Ouattara in late 2019. The verdict on Wednesday came after 49-year-old Soro, who has been in exile in Europe for about two years, was charged with conspiracy and an attempted attack on state authority.
Source: aljazeera.com
A First Nation in southern Saskatchewan has discovered hundreds of unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school for Indigenous children. A statement from the Cowessess First Nation and the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations, which represents Saskatchewan’s First Nations, said on Wednesday that “the number of unmarked graves will be the most significantly substantial to date in Canada.” Last month the remains of 215 children, some as young as three, were found buried on the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.
Source; theguardian.com
Torrential rain pours down, waves break and big puddles splash as visitors enter the new children’s museum at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. No surprise there, because the exhibit is dedicated to the ancient story of Noah’s Ark and begins in the middle of the biblical deluge.
Source: apnews.com
US Vice-President Kamala Harris will on Friday make her first trip to the US southern border since taking office. She has faced questions about why she has not visited the boundary since the White House assigned her in March to address the "root causes" of migration. The visit was announced a week after former President Donald Trump said he would go to the border on 30 June. The number of undocumented migrants reaching the US-Mexico border is at the highest level in more than 20 years.
Source: bbc.com
Former Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, the son of pro-democracy icons who helped topple dictator Ferdinand Marcos and had troublesome ties with China, died Thursday, a cousin and public officials said. He was 61. Details of his death were not immediately made public by members of his family, who were seen rushing to a metropolitan Manila hospital in the morning. But one of his former Cabinet official, Rogelio Singson, said Aquino had been undergoing dialysis and was preparing for a kidney transplant.
Source: apnews.com
Harrison Ford has suffered a shoulder injury while rehearsing a fight scene for the latest Indiana Jones film. The Hollywood star has returned to the role of the all-action archaeologist at the age of 78. Film studio Disney did not disclose the severity of Ford's injury, but said the filming schedule would be adjusted over "the coming weeks". The fifth and final movie in the series has been filming in the UK in recent weeks and is due for release in 2022.
Source: bbc.com
An airstrike hit a busy market in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray village of Togoga on Tuesday and killed at least 51 people, according to health workers who said soldiers blocked medical teams from traveling to the scene. An official with Tigray’s health bureau told The Associated Press that more than 100 other people were wounded, more than 50 seriously, and at least 33 people were still missing. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation.
Source: apnews.com
Antivirus creator John McAfee, 75, was found dead in his prison cell in Barcelona after the Spanish high court had authorised his extradition to the U.S., the Catalan justice department said, confirming an earlier report from El Mundo newspaper. Everything points it could be a death by suicide, the department said in a statement. The high court had agreed to extradite him back to the U.S. where he faces tax evasion charges.
Source: reuters.com
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven's hopes of surviving a political crisis looked slightly brighter on Wednesday after his allies in the Centre Party said they would drop a contested proposal for rent reform. Lofven has led a fragile centre-left minority government of Social Democrats and Greens, supported by former political rivals the Centre Party and the Liberals, since 2018, but lost a vote of no-confidence in parliament on Monday.
Source: reuters.com
Seven men and a woman have gone on trial over a string of thefts carried out against celebrities in Paris. The defendants, aged between 27 and 31, are accused of targeting high-profile figures including footballer Thiago Silva in 2018 and 2019. An estimated €4.2m (£3.6m; $5m) in jewellery and other valuable items were taken from homes in the French capital. Stolen items were later discovered at a flat, alongside a list of potential targets and their addresses.
Source: bbc.com
Scientists in New York found that when people with grey hairs avoided stress, new hair growth was closer to their natural colour. The team took hairs from the heads of volunteers and created an imaging method that detects pigment throughout a hair, from base to tip. Stress-induced changes in the mitochondria – the 'powerhouse' of each human cell – causes changes to hundreds of proteins in the hair, causing greying, they say.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
A child who went missing in Italy has been found by a reporter sent to cover his disappearance, several kilometres from the boy's home. The 21-month-old toddler was last seen in his bedroom on Monday night and was reported missing by his parents the next day. Journalist Giuseppe Di Tommaso heard noises from a gorge near the road while on his way to their home on Wednesday.The child has been taken to hospital and is said to be in good health. It is believed the toddler, identified as Nicola Tanturli, woke up in the middle of the night and walked out of the house.
Source: bbc.com
A bomb killed three people in Pakistan's eastern megacity Lahore on Wednesday, in an attack officials believe targeted police and security forces. The blast happened outside a house near a checkpoint in an affluent neighbourhood, the province's police chief Inam Ghani said.
Source: france24.com
Chris Brown has been accused of hitting a woman after a row in Los Angeles. The R&B star, 32, is alleged to have struck the woman on Friday 18 June. Officers were called to an area in the San Fernando Valley, southern California, at 7.30am local time, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said. The US singer wasn't present when police arrived at the scene, the spokesman said. "The victim advised that she and the suspect argued and the suspect struck her," he added. Chris Brown's representatives have not yet responded to Newsbeat's request for comment.
Source: bbc.com
One of Rembrandt van Rijn’s biggest paintings just got a bit bigger. A marriage of art and artificial intelligence has enabled Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to recreate parts of the iconic “Night Watch” painting that were snipped off 70 years after Rembrandt finished it. The printed strips now hang flush to the edges of the 1642 painting in the museum’s Honor Gallery. Their addition restores to the work the off-center focal point that that rebellious Golden Age master Rembrandt originally intended.
Source: apnews.com