OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88

OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025. (AP)
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Updated 21 April 2025
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OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88

OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88
  • Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, has died Monday. He was 88.
“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church,″ Cardinal Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in an announcement.
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.
From his first greeting as pope — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.

GALLERY: Pope Francis: The world mourns
After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis’ election.
Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.
He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor.
“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square in March 2020. But he also stressed the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”
Reforming the Vatican
Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”
In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.
He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
Roles for women
But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.
“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.
The church as refuge
While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not for the privileged few. Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs.
“For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, whom Francis named as camerlengo, taking charge after a pontiff’s death or retirement.
Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.
After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.”
While progressives were thrilled with Francis’ radical focus on Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic.
A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence.
He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.
St. Francis of Assisi as a model
Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.
“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”
If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for nature and society’s outcasts.
Francis sought out the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the homeless. He formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward.
And he himself suffered: He had part of his colon removed in 2021, then needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. Starting in 2022 he regularly used a wheelchair or cane because of bad knees, and endured bouts of bronchitis.
He went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the grossly deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.
“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic.
His first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism.
Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern for the poor and disenfranchised was based on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.
“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.
Missteps on sexual abuse scandal
But more than a year passed before Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims’ groups initially questioned whether he really understood the scope of the problem.
Francis did create a sex abuse commission to advise the church on best practices, but it lost its influence after a few years and its recommendation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests went nowhere.
And then came the greatest crisis of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and summoned the leadership of the Chilean church to resign en masse.
As that crisis concluded, a new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to three popes.
Francis had actually moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican’s one-time US ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.
Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors. He changed church law to remove the pontifical secret surrounding abuse cases and enacted procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered for their pedophile priests, seeking to end impunity for the hierarchy.
“He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed a close friendship with the pontiff.
A change from Benedict
The road to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years — and it created the unprecedented reality of two popes living in the Vatican.
Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow. He embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church.
“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.
Francis praised Benedict by saying he “opened the door” to others following suit, fueling speculation that Francis also might retire. But after Benedict’s death on Dec. 31, 2022, he asserted that in principle the papacy is a job for life.
Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor.
He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.
Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing the spread of the Tridentine Rite was divisive. The move riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the US, and the Argentine pope.
Conservatives oppose Francis
By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.
“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement that was coddled under Benedict.
Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.
Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get with Beijing.
US Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”
Burke waged his opposition campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his vocal opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.
Twice, he joined other conservative cardinals in formally asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues reflecting a more progressive bent, including on the possibility of same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.
Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several personnel moves he made in both the Vatican and around the world to shift the balance of power from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.
Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful, voicing displeasure when they didn’t.
His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public papal reprimands ever: Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 ailments that he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.”
Trying to eliminate corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican bank and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.
He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency amid suspicions about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one.
The trial, though, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, showing deficiencies in the Vatican’s legal system, unseemly turf battles among monsignors, and how the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.
While earning praise for trying to turn the Vatican’s finances around, Francis angered US conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the global financial market that favors the rich over the poor.
Economic justice was an important themes of his papacy, and he didn’t hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.”
In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive, based on a mentality “where the powerful feed upon the powerless” with no regard for ethics, the environment or even God.
“Money must serve, not rule!” he said in urging political reforms.
He elaborated on that in his major eco-encyclical “Praised Be,” denouncing the “structurally perverse” global economic system that he said exploited the poor and risked turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”
Some US conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.
Soccer, opera and prayer
Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.
He credited his devout grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Weekends were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club. As pope, his love of soccer brought him a huge collection of jerseys from visitors.
He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. ... I realized that they were waiting for me.”
He entered the diocesan seminary but switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy.
Around this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removal of the upper part of his right lung. His frail health prevented him from becoming a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.
On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and immediately began teaching. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” given he was only 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.
Life under Argentina’s dictatorship
His six-year tenure as provincial coincided with Argentina’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.
Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.
He refused for decades to counter that version of events. Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount the behind-the-scenes lengths he used to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so he could say Mass instead. Once in the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, among the few to have survived prison.
As pope, accounts began to emerge of the many people — priests, seminarians and political dissidents — whom Bergoglio actually saved during the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.
Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to research a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba during a period he described as a time of “great interior crisis.” Out of favor with more progressive Jesuit leaders, he was eventually rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He became archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.
He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds of balloting before bowing out.


Coinbase warns of up to $400 million hit from cyberattack

Coinbase warns of up to $400 million hit from cyberattack
Updated 5 sec ago
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Coinbase warns of up to $400 million hit from cyberattack

Coinbase warns of up to $400 million hit from cyberattack
  • Hackers bribed staff overseas
  • Company rejected $20 million ransom demand

Coinbase forecast a hit of $180 million to $400 million from a cyberattack that breached account data of a “small subset” of its customers, the crypto exchange said in a regulatory filing on Thursday.
The company received an email from an unknown threat actor on May 11, claiming to have information about certain customer accounts as well as internal documents.
While some data — including names, addresses and emails — was stolen, the hackers did not get access to login credentials or passwords, Coinbase said. It would, however, reimburse customers who were tricked into sending funds to the attackers.
Hackers had paid multiple contractors and employees working in support roles outside the US to collect information. The company had fired those involved, it said.
Separately, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had begun scrutinizing whether Coinbase had misstated its user figures, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The agency had also been interested in whether any inaccurate user data could indicate the company had inadequate know-your-customer compliance that is required of firms registered with the SEC, the sources said.
A Coinbase spokesperson denied the SEC was probing the company’s compliance with know-your-customer and Bank Secrecy Act rules.
Another source familiar with the matter said that the SEC did not directly ask questions about such compliance and that it would not be a relevant topic since the SEC
dropped a separate case
against Coinbase alleging the firm failed to register with the SEC.
The inquiry into Coinbase’s “verified user” metric had continued even after the SEC abandoned its other lawsuit, the source said. The New York Times first reported the investigation into user data from past disclosures.
Coinbase shares extended losses after the report and were last down 6.5 percent.
“This is a hold-over investigation from the prior administration about a metric we stopped reporting two and a half years ago, which was fully disclosed to the public,” Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, said.
“While we strongly believe this investigation should not continue, we remain committed to working with the SEC to bring this matter to a close.”
The SEC declined to comment.

Cracks in crypto
The latest developments come days before the company is set to join the benchmark S&P 500 index, casting a shadow over what was expected to be a landmark moment for the crypto industry.
Security remains a challenge for the crypto industry despite its growing mainstream acceptance. In February, Bybit disclosed a hack in which around $1.5 billion of digital tokens were stolen — widely dubbed the biggest crypto heist of all time.
“The cyberattack may push the industry to adopt stricter employee vetting and introduce some reputational risks,” said Bo Pei, analyst at US Tiger Securities.
Funds stolen by hacking crypto platforms totaled $2.2 billion in 2024, according to a report from Chainalysis.
“As our nascent industry grows rapidly, it draws the eye of bad actors, who are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the scope of their attacks,” said Nick Jones, founder of crypto firm Zumo.
The firm now also faces a lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleging the world’s largest crypto exchange failed to secure and safeguard personally identifiable information of millions of former and current customers, the filing showed.
Coinbase has refused to pay a ransom demand of $20 million from the attackers and is working with law enforcement agencies. It has instead established a $20 million reward for information on the hackers.
The company is also opening a new support hub in the US and taking other measures to prevent such cyberattacks, it said.


Republican House bill would jack up cost of US solar home systems, PV panel makers warn

Republican House bill would jack up cost of US solar home systems, PV panel makers warn
Updated 42 min 25 sec ago
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Republican House bill would jack up cost of US solar home systems, PV panel makers warn

Republican House bill would jack up cost of US solar home systems, PV panel makers warn
  • Proposed measure would scrap 30 percent tax credit for homeowners with solar panels
  • Bill aligned with Trump move to undo Biden-era clean energy program

Companies that put solar panels on US homes say a Republican budget bill advanced in Congress this week would deal a massive blow to the industry by eliminating a generous subsidy for homeowners that had buttressed the industry’s growth.
The bill would scrap a 30 percent federal credit for taxpayers who put up rooftop systems, stifling an industry that has grown ten-fold over the last decade and which now employs more than 100,000 workers, industry players said.
“It certainly is a giant setback,” said Charlie Hadlow, president of EnergySage, an online solar marketplace. “I have solar installers in our large network passing around the contact information for bankruptcy attorneys. That’s not alarmist, that’s happening.”
Many of the biggest residential solar markets are in states that voted for President Donald Trump, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association trade group.
The House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee voted this week to allow the 25D tax credit to expire at the end of this year, nine years earlier than planned, as part of a Republican effort to roll back subsidies from former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.
A spokesperson for Republicans on the committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The bill still has several hurdles to clear before getting a broad package of tax cuts, spending hikes and safety-net reductions through Congress.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump wants to undo federal regulations and programs introduced by Biden that are aimed at expanding clean energy and combating climate change.
More than half of residential installations qualify for the 25D tax credit, according to EnergySage, which estimates that rooftop systems will be about $8,000 or $9,000 more expensive without it.
The subsidy has been critical for small installers whose customers pay cash or take out loans and then claim the credit on their tax returns.
For panels that are owned by a third party, such as a bank, and leased to homeowners, system owners are able to claim a separate tax credit that the House bill would leave in place until 2032 but start to phase out in 2029.
That market is dominated by large players like Sunrun.
“You want to just place a larger burden on the regular Joe who pays taxes? It doesn’t seem fair,” said Jack Ramsey, CEO of Altsys Solar in Tulare, California.
Ramsey anticipates cutting his nine-person staff to four or five people if the credit is eliminated.
At the end of 2024, the US boasted 36 gigawatts of residential solar capacity, up from 3 GW in 2014 and a level equivalent to a third of the nation’s nuclear power capacity.
Rooftop solar accounts for more than a third of solar industry jobs, according to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
Rob Kaercher, CEO of Absolute Solar in Lansing, Michigan, has 24 employees and wants to hire more, but will not if the credit goes away.
“I strongly urge the credits to be maintained, because it would do a tremendous amount for local businesses just like ours to be able to continue to hire and grow,” Kaercher told reporters.
The move to eliminate the credit caught many in the industry off guard.
Thomas Clark, the director of marketing and communications of Northstone Solar in Whitefish, Montana, met with staff from his state’s Congressional delegation in Washington earlier this year and came away from the meeting feeling the credit was safe.
“Obviously this happening so quickly after those meetings really hurts as a constituent,” Clark said.


Macron calls for peace in first talk with new pope

Macron calls for peace in first talk with new pope
Updated 16 May 2025
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Macron calls for peace in first talk with new pope

Macron calls for peace in first talk with new pope

PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday he had called Pope Leo XIV and talked about efforts to reach peace in Ukraine and Gaza in his first conversation with the new pontiff.
In their “first exchange,” the pair “addressed the efforts to let the weapons fall silent wherever conflicts rage in the world, and in particular for a solid and lasting peace in Ukraine and Gaza,” Macron said on X.
“We share the ambition to reconcile the fight against poverty and the protection of the planet,” the French leader said, adding that he had “once again congratulated” the pontiff on his election as head of the Catholic Church last week.
While Macron is not scheduled to join the ranks of the world leaders attending Pope Leo’s inaugural mass in Rome on Sunday morning, France’s Prime Minister Francois Bayrou is due to attend.


Nigeria army head vows to counter jihadist attacks

Nigeria army head vows to counter jihadist attacks
Updated 16 May 2025
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Nigeria army head vows to counter jihadist attacks

Nigeria army head vows to counter jihadist attacks

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria: Nigeria’s top military officer on Thursday told troops in a region battling increased jihadist unrest that the attacks would be quickly resolved.
The Islamic State West Africa Province group and its rival Boko Haram have intensified assaults on military bases in recent weeks, notably in the northeastern state of Borno, epicenter of an insurgency dating back to 2009.
According to an AFP tally, at least 10 bases have been attacked in two months. At least 100 people, including civilians, were killed in attacks in April.
“Actions have been taken to ensure that we address the series of attacks,” chief of defense staff General Christopher Musa told troops in Borno’s capital Maiduguri, promising new material was being drafted in.
Musa said conflict in the Sahel states including Mali, Chad and Niger “has put a lot of pressure on Nigeria and that’s why you see recent attacks have occurred.”
“Whatever is going on is just for a short while,” he said.
Musa suggested fencing Nigeria’s borders, saying “there are countries that have fenced over a 1,500 kilometer (930 mile) stretch” — roughly the length of the Nigeria-Niger frontier.
While violence has fallen from its 2014-2015 peak, the governor of Borno recently warned that the military was losing ground to jihadists, and the latest attacks have put the conflict back in the spotlight.
More than 40,000 people have been killed and two million displaced in northeast Nigeria since 2009, according to the United Nations.
A Multinational Joint Task Force, a coalition created by Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Benin and Chad to fight cross-border armed groups, has been hampered by the withdrawal of Niger and threats by Chad to do the same.
According to a recent Nigerian intelligence report seen by AFP, there are also internal problems.
Late payment of salaries “has been a recurring problem,” particularly in the northeast, it said.
The report warned of “frustration and demotivation among security personnel, which could potentially lead to mutinies or unrest, if not urgently addressed.”
President Bola Tinubu this week called for the creation of a “forest guards” unit “to flush out terrorists and criminal gangs.”
Nigeria’s vast, often inaccessible forests have become havens for jihadist and armed criminal groups.
While the Nigerian army often works with local self-defense groups, questions remain over how the proposed forest guard be financed, work with existing security forces and even how long it would take to set up.


13 hurt when car plows into crowd before Spanish football match

13 hurt when car plows into crowd before Spanish football match
Updated 52 min 1 sec ago
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13 hurt when car plows into crowd before Spanish football match

13 hurt when car plows into crowd before Spanish football match
  • Police ruled case as an accident, described all injuries as "minor"
  • Driver arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving and causing injury

BARCELONA: At least 13 people were hurt when a driver lost control and plowed into a crowd gathered outside a football match between RCD Espanyol and city rivals FC Barcelona, police said on Thursday.
Police said people were hurt when the vehicle rammed into the crowd outside RCD Españyol soccer stadium in Barcelona at the start of the game.
Police added in a statement on social media site X that the incident did not present any danger to the crowd inside the stadium.
Salvador Illa, the Catalan regional president, said on Thursday all the injuries were “minor” and ruled out any deliberate attack.
The driver has been arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving and causing injury.