Attacker stabs German tourist to death in Paris

Update An attacker stabbed one person to death and wounded another in Paris on Saturday. (X/@Life_Info)
An attacker stabbed one person to death and wounded another in Paris on Saturday. (X/@Life_Info)
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Updated 03 December 2023
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Attacker stabs German tourist to death in Paris

Attacker stabs German tourist to death in Paris
  • A police source said the attacker was known for psychiatric disorders

PARIS: A person known to the French authorities as a radical Islamist with mental health troubles stabbed a German tourist to death and wounded two people in central Paris on Saturday before being arrested, officials said.
The attack took place close to the Eiffel Tower during a busy late weekend night and came with the country on its highest alert for attacks as tensions rise against the background of the war between Israel and Hamas.
“We will not give in to terrorism,” Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne wrote on X, formerly Twitter, after the attack.
French anti-terror prosecutors said that they would now take on the investigation.
The attacker was known to authorities as a radical Islamist and was being treated for mental illness, a police source told AFP.
He shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest“) before being arrested, the source added.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said the attacker is French, born in 1997, and has been arrested in an investigation into murder and attempted murder.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin who visited the the scene by the River Seine’s Bir Hakeim bridge said the man had already been sentenced in 2016 to “four years in prison” for planning another attack which he failed to carry out.
“A man attacked a couple who were foreign tourists. A German tourist who was born in the Philippines died from the stabbing,” he said.
A taxi driver who witnessed the scene intervened, Darmanin said. The attacker then crossed the Seine attacking others and injuring one with a hammer, while police chased in pursuit.
Police used a taser to neutralize the man who was then arrested.
“He had threatened them very violently... he will now have to answer for his actions before justice,” Darmanin said.
The suspect told police he could not stand Muslims being killed in “Afghanistan and Palestine,” according to the minister.
Joseph S., 37 years old, a supermarket manager who asked not to give his last name, witnessed the scene, as he sat in a bar.
He heard screams and people shouting “help, help” as they ran. A man wielding an object attacked a man who had fallen down, and within 10 minutes the police arrived, he told AFP.
The country has suffered several attacks by Islamist extremists, including the November 2015 suicide and gun attacks in Paris claimed by the Daesh group in which 130 people were killed.
There had been a relative lull in recent years, even as officials have warned that the threat remains.
But tensions have risen in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations, following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
Security in Paris is also under particular scrutiny as it gears up to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
In October, teacher Dominique Bernard was killed in the northern French town of Arras by a young radicalized Islamist from Russia’s Caucasus region.


Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast

Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast
Updated 58 min 47 sec ago
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Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast

Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast
  • Man shared the keys of the flat with the couple involved in the blast but denied any involvement in the explosion

ATHENS: Greek police have arrested a 31-year old man for his role in an strong home-made bomb explosion which killed one man and seriously injured a woman in an apartment in Athens this week, police said on Saturday. The case, according to police officials, is linked to anti-establishment guerrilla groups. Anti-terrorism police suspect the blast occurred while the bomb was being made.
The Greek man arrested had testified regarding the case on Friday night. According to police sources, he said he shared the keys of the flat with the couple involved in the blast but denied any involvement in the explosion.
He is expected to appear before a prosecutor later on Saturday.
Several left-wing and anarchist guerrilla groups, declaring war on all forms of governments, have emerged in Greece over the past two decades after the dismantling of its most lethal group, “November 17.”
Small bomb and arson attacks against politicians, police, judges and businesses were frequent during the country’s 2009-18 debt crisis. They have abated in recent years but still occur.


Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend

Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend
Updated 02 November 2024
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Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend

Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend
  • Kamala Harris is bidding to become the country’s first woman president
  • Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states

WASHINGTON: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter the final weekend of the most tense US presidential campaign of modern times with a flurry of swing-state rallies that will test their stamina — and ability to persuade the country’s last undecided voters.
Harris, bidding to become the country’s first woman president, will use rallies in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan to drive home her message that Trump is a threat to US democracy.
Trump — seeking a sensational return to the White House after losing in 2020 and then becoming the first presidential nominee to have been convicted of crimes — promises a radical right-wing makeover of the government and aggressive trade wars to promote his policy of “America first.”
The 78-year-old, who rallied in Milwaukee, Wisconsin late Friday just miles from Harris’s event there, will all but cross paths with her again as Trump makes whistle-stops in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Their frenetic schedule will run right into Monday, culminating with late-night rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris.
Election Day is Tuesday but Americans have been voting early for weeks, with more than 70 million ballots already cast — including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats seek to pull out all the stops to keep the state in their column.
Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states likely to determine the result in the US electoral college system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival fighting hard to peel off even slivers of support from one another’s camps.
Harris, currently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing that by appealing to centrist voters and propelling her base to the polls with a robust ground game and get-out-the-vote effort.
And by painting Trump as a toxic authoritarian, she is also encouraging voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president.
“He is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance — and the man is out for unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin.
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric in hopes of firing up his loyal base to turn out in massive numbers.
“Kamala’s closing message to America is that she hates you,” Trump fumed on Friday night in Warren, Michigan, where he trashed the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — which economists say it clearly is not — and warned that “a 1929-style economic depression” would ensue if Harris were elected.
Citing her hawkish foreign policy views, Trump earlier had conjured the image of former Republican representative turned Harris supporter Liz Cheney being shot.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.
Despite the rhetoric, Trump waxed nostalgic on Friday about how his experience campaigning over the past nine years has been “the thrill of a lifetime.”
“And now we want to take that thrill and turn it into ‘let’s do business,’ right?“
Harris, the nation’s first Black and first Asian-American vice president, meanwhile has sought to harness celebrity star power like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the campaign’s waning days.
Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican heritage, joined Harris onstage Thursday, amid a firestorm triggered by a Trump rally warm-up speaker branding the US territory a “floating island of garbage.”
Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B appeared with the candidate Friday night, asking the crowd in Milwaukee, “Are we ready to make history?“
With the election just days away — and Trump refusing to say whether he would accept its results if he loses — businesses in the capital Washington have begun boarding up shop fronts as city authorities warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” in the days after the polls close.
Trump is already alleging fraud and cheating in swing states such as Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what many fear will be more unrest, following the violence that erupted at the US Capitol in the wake of the 2020 vote.


Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video

Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video
Updated 02 November 2024
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Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video

Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video
  • Russian embassy in the United States: ‘We view these allegations as baseless’

MOSCOW: Moscow on Saturday denied it was behind fake videos about the US election after American intelligence said Russia was behind a fake video showing a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times.
Three US intelligence agencies on Friday said in a joint statement that “Russian influence actors” created the video as part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election.”
The statement also said Russian actors were behind another fake video.
“We have noticed the statement of the US intelligence services accusing our country of disseminating fabricated videos about electoral violations in the United States. We view these allegations as baseless,” the Russian embassy in the United States said in a statement on Telegram.
The 20-second clip features a man saying in a stilted, robotic delivery: “We are from Haiti. We came to America six months ago, and we already have our American citizenship — we’re voting Kamala Harris.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in the swing state, said Friday the video was an example of “targeted disinformation.”
Raffensperger said the “obviously fake” video was likely a production of “Russian troll farms.”
The embassy said that Russia had not received “any proof for these claims during its communications with US officials.”
“As President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed, we respect the will of the American people. All insinuations about ‘Russian machinations’ are malicious slander,” the embassy said in a statement also released by the Russian foreign ministry.


Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit

Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit
Updated 02 November 2024
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Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit

Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit

LAHORE: Air pollution in Pakistan’s second biggest city Lahore soared on Saturday more than 80 times over the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization (WHO), with an official calling it record high.
The level of deadly PM2.5 pollutants — fine particulate matter in the air that causes the most damage to health — peaked at 1,067, before dropping to around 300 in the morning, with anything above 10 considered unhealthy by the WHO.
“We have never reached a level of 1,000,” Jahangir Anwar, a senior environmental protection official in Lahore told AFP.
For days, Lahore has been enveloped by smog, a mix of fog and pollutants caused by low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal agricultural burning and winter cooling.
“The air quality index will remain high for the next three to four days,” Anwar said.
On Wednesday, the provincial environmental protection agency announced new restrictions in four “hot spots” in the city.
Tuk-tuks equipped with polluting two-stroke engines are banned, as are restaurants that barbecue without filters.
Government offices and private companies will have half their staff work from home from Monday.
Construction work has been halted and street and food vendors, who often cook over open fires, must close at 8 pm.
Smog is particularly pronounced in winter, when cold, denser air traps emissions from poor-quality fuels used to power the city’s vehicles and factories at ground level.


Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain

Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain
Updated 02 November 2024
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Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain

Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain
  • Japan’s highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred

Tokyo: Nearly 200,000 people in western Japan were urged to evacuate on Saturday as authorities warned of landslides and floods while the remnants of a tropical storm trickle over the country.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said “warm, moist air... was causing heavy rainfall with thunderstorms in western Japan” partly due to Kong-rey, which was downgraded to an extratropical low-pressure system from a typhoon.
The city of Matsuyama “issued the top-level warning, urging 189,552 residents in its 10 districts to evacuate and immediately secure safety,” a city official told AFP.
While the evacuation was not mandatory, Japan’s highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred.
Forecasters warned that landslides and floods could affect western Japan on Saturday and eastern Japan on Sunday.
Due to rain, shinkansen bullet trains were briefly suspended between Tokyo and southern Fukuoka region in the morning before resuming on a delayed schedule.
Kong-rey smashed into Taiwan on Thursday as one of the biggest storms to hit the island in decades. It claimed at least two lives and knocked out power to tens of thousands of households.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.