Author: Disha Mishra

(Reuters) – Business was brisk at Teddy’s Cocina in Pasadena as wildfire evacuees ate lunch and passersby ducked indoors to escape from the brown, smoky air blanketing the city. “It’s not breathable,” said Dulce Perez, a cook at the restaurant, as an eye-watering haze hung overhead on Thursday about two miles (3.2 km) away from one of the multiple fires burning around Los Angeles. “We just try to stay indoors.” This week, as the wildfires raged and smoke billowed across Los Angeles, officials issued air quality alerts, schools canceled classes and scientists warned about the dangerous – even fatal -…

NEW YORK, Jan 10 (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will not go to jail or face any other punishment for his criminal conviction stemming from hush money paid to a porn star, a judge ruled on Friday but said Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration would not erase the jury verdict. Justice Juan Merchan’s sentencing of Trump, 78, to unconditional discharge places a judgment of guilt on his record and closes a case that had loomed over Trump’s bid to retake the White House. Trump will be the first president to take office with a felony criminal conviction. Merchan said he…

ISTANBUL/ANKARA, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Talks aimed at ending a 40-year-old militant conflict have fostered peace hopes in Turkey but the precarious situation of Kurdish forces in Syria and uncertainty about Ankara’s intentions have left many Kurds anxious about the path ahead. Abdullah Ocalan, jailed head of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, has been cited as indicating a willingness to call on the PKK to lay down arms in a peace process to end the insurgency he launched against NATO-member Turkey in 1984. The conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, stunted development in the mainly Kurdish southeast…

JERUSALEM, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Israel confirmed on Friday that a hostage found killed in Gaza was Hamza Ziyadne, the son of deceased hostage Youssef Ziyadne, whose body was found alongside him in an underground tunnel near the southern city of Rafah. On the ground in Gaza, meanwhile, Israeli forces continued to pound the tiny coastal enclave. Palestinian medics said seven people were killed outside a mosque in an airstrike on the Bureij camp in central Gaza, while three others were killed in two separate incidents in the north of the territory. There was no immediate comment on the latest…

At least three women were killed and five children injured in a stampede in the landmark Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Friday, the Syrian civil defence said. The children suffered fractures, severe bruises and fainting, said the civil defence in a statement. Authorities were investigating to determine the causes of the incident and will hold those responsible accountable, Damascus Governor Maher Marwan told the Syrian state news agency (SANA). “We are working to take urgent measures to ensure that such incidents are not repeated in public places in the future,” SANA quoted him as saying. Syria’s new rulers seized control…

WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (Reuters) – The Biden administration on Friday imposed its broadest package of sanctions yet targeting Russia’s oil and gas revenues in an attempt to give Kyiv and the incoming administration of Donald Trump leverage to reach a deal for peace in Ukraine. The move is meant to cut Russia’s oil revenues for the war that started in February, 2022, and has killed or wounded tens of thousands and reduced cities to rubble. The measures are “the most significant sanctions yet against the Russian energy sector, the largest source of revenue for the Kremlin’s war machine,” a senior…

BEIRUT, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati will meet Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus on Saturday, two Lebanese sources said, becoming the first head of government to visit Syria’s capital since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The visit will also be the first by a Lebanese premier to neighbouring Syria in 15 years. Lebanon’s new president, Joseph Aoun, said on Thursday there was a historic opportunity for “a serious and equal dialogue” with Syria, which had big sway over its neighbour during much of the Assad family’s five decades in power, maintaining troops…

MOSCOW, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Emergency workers toiling to clean up an oil spill in the Black Sea have detected seven new slicks, a Russian official told the TASS state news agency on Friday, as authorities struggle to mitigate the effects of the nearly month-old disaster. Approximately 2,400 metric tons of oil products have spilled into the sea since Dec. 15, when two ageing tankers were hit by a storm in the Kerch Strait. President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the clean-up efforts so far have been insufficient to deal with the scale of the situation, which he called…

(Reuters) – An official Palestinian tally of direct deaths in the Israel-Hamas war likely undercounted the number of casualties by around 40% in the first nine months of the war as the Gaza Strip’s healthcare infrastructure unravelled, according to a study published on Thursday. The peer-reviewed statistical analysis published in The Lancet journal was conducted by academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions. Using a statistical method called capture-recapture analysis, the researchers sought to assess the death toll from Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end…

Jan 10 (Reuters) – Moldova’s Moscow-backed separatist region of Transdniestria extended its state of emergency on Friday for another month as it grapples with an energy crisis after losing access to Russian gas supplies that had propped up its economy for decades. Russia’s Gazprom suspended gas exports to Transdniestria on Jan. 1, citing unpaid Moldovan debts of $709 million. Moldova disputes that debt and says Moscow is engineering a crisis to undermine its pro-Western government. Russia used to supply gas to Transdniestria via Ukraine and Moscow blames the crisis on Kyiv, which refused to roll over a gas transit deal…