#Israel announces plan to retake Gaza City in another escalation of the war. Israel’s air and ground war has already killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza, displaced most of the population, destroyed vast areas and pushed the territory toward famine. The timing of another major ground operation remains unclear since it will likely hinge on mobilizing thousands of troops and forcibly evacuating civilians, almost certainly exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier outlined more sweeping plans in an interview with Fox News, saying Israel planned to take control of all of Gaza. Israel already controls around three-quarters of the territory.

Hamas rejected Israel’s current plans in a statement and said people in Gaza would “remain defiant against occupation.”

“Expanding of aggression against our Palestinian people will not be a walk in the park,” the group said.
Netanyahu had signaled plans for even broader war

An expanded offensive could widen discord between Israel and international powers, which have intensified criticism of the war amid reports of famine in Gaza but largely stopped short of concrete action. Australia and the United Kingdom urged Israel to reconsider.

Israel’s “decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement. “It will only bring more bloodshed. ... Both parties must step away from the path of destruction.”

Tensions could rise further if Netanyahu follows through on the more sweeping plans to take control of the entire territory.

Israel’s current plan, announced after the Security Cabinet met through Thursday night, stopped short of that, and may be aimed in part at pressuring Hamas to accept a ceasefire on Israel’s terms.

It may also reflect the reservations of Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, who reportedly warned that expanding operations would endanger the remaining 20 or so living hostages held by Hamas and further strain Israel’s army after nearly two years of regional wars.

The military “will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement after the meeting.
`There is nothing left to occupy’

Israel has repeatedly bombarded Gaza City and carried out numerous raids there, only to return to neighborhoods again and again as militants regrouped. Today, it is one of the few areas in Gaza that hasn’t been turned into an Israeli buffer zone or placed under evacuation orders.

A major ground operation there could displace tens of thousands of people and further disrupt efforts to deliver food to the hunger-stricken territory.

It’s unclear how many people reside in the city, which was Gaza’s largest before the war. Hundreds of thousands fled under evacuation orders in the opening weeks of the war, but many returned during a ceasefire at the start of this year.

Palestinians were already anticipating even more suffering ahead of the decision, and at least 42 were killed in Israeli airstrikes and shootings on Thursday, according to local hospitals.

“There is nothing left to occupy,” said Maysaa al-Heila, who is living in a displacement camp. “There is no Gaza left.”

Of those killed Thursday, Nasser Hospital said at least 13 were seeking aid in an Israeli military zone in southern Gaza where UN aid convoys are regularly overwhelmed by hungry crowds and people stealing food to resell it. Another two were killed on roads leading to nearby sites run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American contractor, according to the hospital, which received the bodies.

GHF said there were no violent incidents at or near its sites on Thursday. Israel’s military said its forces did not fire in the morning and that it knew of no encounters in the area. The military zone, known as the Morag Corridor, is off limits to independent media.

Israel’s military offensive has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals.

The United Nations and independent experts view the ministry’s figures as the most reliable estimate of casualties. Israel has disputed them without offering a toll of its own.
`We don’t want to keep it’

Asked in the interview with Fox News ahead of the Security Cabinet meeting if Israel would “take control of all of Gaza,” Netanyahu replied: “We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there.”

“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter,” Netanyahu said in the interview. “We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life.”

Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 251 people. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals but 50 remain inside Gaza. Israel believes around 20 of them to be alive.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said on Friday that the Cabinet’s plan would endanger them and would not advance Israel toward its objectives.

“This is exactly what Hamas wanted: for Israel to be mired on the ground with no purpose, without defining the day after picture, in a pointless occupation that no one understands where it is leading,” he said in a statement on X.

Hamas official Osama Hamdan told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the group would view Netanyahu’s proposal of an Arab-led force in post-war Gaza as linked to Israel. He warned it could further “plunge the region into new trouble.”

___

Wafaa Shurafa, Sam Metz And Joseph Krauss, The Associated Press

Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip and Krauss from Ottawa. Associated Press writer Danica Kirka in London contributed.

US President Donald Trump is not conditioning face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on his meeting with Vladimir Zelensky.

In response to a reporter's question about whether Putin should meet with Zelensky for the talks to occur, Trump said: "No, he doesn't. No."

Trump was also asked if he thinks Putin should meet with Zelensky before talks between the Russian and US presidents could take place. "No," Trump replied.

According to the US president, both Putin and Zelensky would like to meet with him. "I'll do whatever I can to stop the killing," Trump pointed out.

He also spoke in favor of speeding up negotiations to resolve the conflict.

Stone tool discovery could offer new clue in mystery of ancient ‘hobbit’ humans. Archeologists have uncovered primitive sharp-edged stone tools on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, adding another piece to an evolutionary puzzle involving mysterious ancient humans who lived in a region known as Wallacea.

Located beyond mainland Southeast Asia, Wallacea includes a group of islands between Asia and Australia, among which Sulawesi is the largest. Previously, researchers have found evidence that an unusual, small-bodied human species dubbed Homo floresiensis — also called “hobbits” due to comparisons with the diminutive characters in fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien’s books — lived on the nearby island of Flores from 700,000 years ago until about 50,000 years ago.

The newly discovered flaked stone tools, which date back between 1.04 million to 1.48 million years ago, represent the oldest evidence for human habitation of Sulawesi and suggest the island might have been inhabited by early human ancestors, or hominins, at the same time — or possibly earlier — than Flores. Researchers reported the findings in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Researchers are still trying to answer key questions about these Wallacea island hominins — namely when and how they arrived on the islands, which would have required an ocean crossing.

Flaked stone tools were earlier uncovered on Flores and dated to about 1.02 million years ago. The latest find suggests there might have been a link between the populations on Flores and Sulawesi — and that perhaps Sulawesi was a stepping stone for the hobbits on Flores, according to the authors of the new research, who have studied sites on Flores.

“We have long suspected that the Homo floresiensis lineage of Flores, which probably represents a dwarfed variant of early Asian Homo erectus, came originally from Sulawesi to the north, so the discovery of this very old stone technology on Sulawesi adds further weight to this possibility,” said co-lead study author Dr. Adam Brumm, professor of archeology at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution.
Discovering prehistoric tools

Excavations conducted by co-lead study author Budianto Hakim, senior archeologist at the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia, began on Sulawesi in 2019 after a stone artifact was spotted protruding from a sandstone outcrop in an area known as the Calio site in a modern cornfield.

The site — in the vicinity of a river channel — would have been where hominins made their tools and hunted 1 million years ago, according to the archeologists, who also found animal fossils in the area. Among the finds was a jawbone of the now-extinct Celebochoerus, a type of pig with unusually large upper tusks.

At the conclusion of excavations in 2022, the team uncovered seven stone tools. Dating of the sandstone and fossils resulted in an age estimate for the tools of at least 1.04 million years old to potentially 1.48 million years old. Hominin-related artifacts previously found on Sulawesi had been dated to 194,000 years ago.

The small, sharp stone fragments used as tools were likely fashioned from larger pebbles in nearby riverbeds, and they were probably used for cutting or scraping, Brumm said. The tools are similar to early human stone technology discoveries made before on Sulawesi and other Indonesian islands as well as early hominin sites in Africa, he added.

“They reflect a so-called ‘least-effort’ approach to reducing stones into useful, sharp-edged tools; these are uncomplicated implements, but it requires a certain level of skill and experience to make these tools — they result from precise and controlled flaking of stone, not randomly bashing rocks together,” Brumm said.

But who was responsible for making these tools in the first place?

“It’s a significant piece of the puzzle, but the Calio site has yet to yield any hominin fossils,” Brumm said. “So while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi a million years ago, their identity remains a mystery.”

The fossil record on Sulawesi is sparse, and ancient DNA degrades more rapidly in the region’s tropical climate. Brumm and his colleagues retrieved DNA a few years back from the bones of a female teenage hunter-gatherer who died more than 7,000 years ago on Sulawesi, revealing evidence of a previously unknown group of humans, but such finds are incredibly rare.

Another roadblock to unraveling the enigma has been the lack of systematic and sustained field research in a region of hundreds of separate islands, some of which archeologists have never properly investigated, Brumm said.
An ancient ocean crossing

The researchers do have a theory about the identity of this unidentified ancient hominin, who might represent the earliest evidence of ancient humans crossing oceans to reach islands.

“Our working hypothesis is that the stone tools from Calio were made by Homo erectus or an isolated group of this early Asian hominin (e.g., a creature akin to Homo floresiensis of Flores),” Brumm wrote in an email.

In addition to fossils and stone tools on Flores and the tools now found on Sulawesi, researchers have also previously discovered stone tools dating to around 709,000 years ago on the isolated island of Luzon in the Philippines, to the north of Wallacea, suggesting ancient humans were living on multiple islands.

Exactly how our early ancestors could have reached the islands to begin with remains unknown.

“Getting to Sulawesi from the adjacent Asian mainland would not have been easy for a non-flying land mammal like us, but it’s clear that early hominins were doing it somehow,” Brumm wrote.

“Almost certainly they lacked the cognitive capacity to invent boats that could be used for planned ocean voyages. Most probably they made overwater dispersals completely by accident, in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done it, by ‘rafting’ (i.e., floating haplessly) on natural vegetation mats.”

John Shea, a professor in the anthropology department at Stony Brook University in New York, said he believes that the new study, while not a game changer, is important and has far-reaching implications for understanding how humans established a global presence. Shea was not involved in the new research.

#Homosapiens, or modern humans, are the only species for which there is clear, unequivocal evidence of watercraft use, and if Homo erectus or earlier hominins crossed the ocean to the Wallacean islands, they would have needed something to travel on, Shea said.

The waters separating the Wallacean islands are home to sharks and crocodiles and have rapid currents, so swimming wouldn’t have been possible, he added.

“If you have ever paddled a canoe or crewed in a sailboat, then you know that putting more than one person in a boat and navigating it successfully requires spoken language, a capacity paleoanthropologists think pre-Homo sapiens hominins did not possess,” Shea said. “On the other hand, just because some earlier hominins made it to these Wallacean islands does not mean they were successful.”

By success, Shea means long-term survival.

“They might have survived a while after arriving, left behind indestructible stone tools, and then became extinct,” Shea said via email. “After all, the only hominin that is not extinct is us.”
Searching for key fossils

Brumm and his colleagues are continuing their investigative work at Calio and other sites across Sulawesi to search for fossils of early humans.

There is also a growing body of evidence to suggest that tiny Homo floresiensis was the result of a dramatic reduction in body size over the course of around 300,000 years after Homo erectus became isolated on Flores about 1 million years ago. Animals can scale down in size when living on remote islands due to limited resources, according to previous research.

Finding fossils might help researchers understand the evolutionary fate of Homo erectus, if it is the human ancestor who made it to Sulawesi. The world’s 11th-largest island and an area more than 12 times the size of Flores, Sulawesi is known for its rich, varied ecological habitats, Brumm said.

“Sulawesi is a bit of a wild card. It is essentially like a mini-continent in of itself,” Brumm noted. “If Homo erectus became isolated on this island it might not necessarily have evolved into something like the strange new form found on the much smaller Wallacean island of Flores to the south.”

Alternatively, Sulawesi could have once been a series of smaller islands, resulting in dwarfism in multiple places across the region, he said.

“I really hope hominin fossils are eventually found on Sulawesi,” Brumm said, “because I think there’s a truly fascinating story waiting to be told on that island.”

Body of missing man found on melting glacier after 28 years. Khaplu, Pakistan -- The family of a missing man whose body was discovered on a melting glacier in Pakistan after 28 years said Thursday its recovery had brought them some relief.

The body of 31-year-old Nasiruddin was spotted by locals near the edge of the shrinking Lady Meadows glacier in the Kohistan region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

His family said he and his brother had fled to the mountains after a dispute in their village in 1997 when he fell into a crevasse. His brother survived.

“Our family left no stone unturned to trace him over the years,” Malik Ubaid, the nephew of the deceased, told AFP over the phone.

“Our uncles and cousins visited the glacier several times to see if his body could be retrieved, but they eventually gave up as it wasn’t possible.”

Nasiruddin, who went by one name, was a husband and father of two children.

His well-preserved body, still carrying an identity card, was found on July 31 by a local shepherd and buried on Wednesday.

“Finally, we have got some relief after the recovery of his dead body,” Ubaid said.

Kohistan is a mountainous region where the outer reaches of the Himalayas stretch.

Pakistan is home to more than 13,000 glaciers, more than anywhere else on Earth outside the poles.

Rising global temperatures linked to human-driven climate change, however, are causing the glaciers to rapidly melt.

AFP

#WORLD: #News. White House says #Trump could meet with #Putin, #Zelenskyy next week

The U.S. is auctioning a seized US$325M #Russian yacht with 8 state rooms, a helipad, a gym and a spa.

The auction, which closes Sept. 10, comes as U.S. President Donald #Trump seeks to increase pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war. The U.S. has said it’s working with allies to put pressure on Russian oligarchs, some of whom are close to Putin and have had their yachts seized, to try to compel him to stop the war.

The 348-foot-long (106-metre-long) yacht, seized three years ago and currently docked in San Diego, was custom built by the German company Lürssen in 2017. Designed by François Zuretti, the yacht features an interior with extensive marble work, eight state rooms, a beauty salon, a spa, a gym, a helipad, a swimming pool and an elevator. It accommodates 16 guests and 36 crew members.

Determining the real ownership of the Amadea has been an issue of contention because of an opaque trail of trusts and shell companies. The yacht is registered in the Cayman Islands and is owned by Millemarin Investments Ltd., also based in the Cayman Islands.

The U.S. contends that Suleiman Kerimov, an economist and former Russian politician, who was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018 for alleged money laundering, owns the yacht. Meanwhile, Eduard Khudainatov, a former chairman and chief executive of the state-controlled Russian oil and gas company Rosneft, who has not been sanctioned, claims to own it.

U.S. prosecutors say Khudainatov is a straw owner of the yacht, intended to conceal the yacht’s true owner, Kerimov. Litigation over the true ownership of the yacht is ongoing.

A representative of Khudainatov said in an emailed statement Wednesday that the planned sale of the yacht is “improper and premature” since Khudainatov is appealing a forfeiture ruling.

“We doubt it will attract any rational buyer at fair market price, because ownership can, and will, be challenged in courts outside the United States, exposing purchasers to years of costly, uncertain litigation,” said the representative, Adam Ford.

The yacht has been virtually untouched since the National Maritime Services took custody of it in 2022. To submit a sealed bid on it, bidders must put in a 10 million euro deposit, the equivalent of roughly $11.6 million, to be considered.

Ford said Khudainatov would go after any proceeds from the sale of the yacht, estimated to be worth $325 million.

“Should the government press ahead simply to staunch the mounting costs it is imposing on the American taxpayer, we will pursue the sale proceeds, and any shortfall from fair market value, once we prevail in court,” Ford said.

A U.S. aid package for Ukraine signed into law in May 2024 gave the U.S. the ability to seize Russian state assets located in the U.S. and use them for the benefit of Kyiv, which was attacked by Russia in February 2022.

Fatima Hussein, The Associated Press

The Western Cape High Court is currently mediating discussions between the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Cape Union Mart to determine how to proceed with the retailer’s court application against ongoing protests at its stores.

Prince Harry cleared of ‘bullying’ in African charity row. The charity Sentebale was at the centre of an explosive boardroom dispute in late March and April when its chairperson Sophie Chandauka publicly accused Harry, the youngest son of the U.K.’s King Charles III, of “bullying”.

Days earlier, Harry and co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho had announced they were resigning from the charity they established in 2006, after the trustees quit when Chandauka refused their demand to step down.

Harry, also known as the Duke of Sussex, launched the charity in honour of his mother, Princess Diana, to help young people with HIV and AIDS in Lesotho and later Botswana.

After its months-long inquiry, the U.K.-based Charity Commission “found no evidence of widespread or systemic bullying or harassment, including misogyny or misogynoir at the charity,” it said in its conclusions published Wednesday.

But it “criticised all parties to the dispute for allowing it to play out publicly” saying the “damaging internal dispute” then “severely impacted the charity’s reputation”.

It added there was “a lack of clarity in delegations” and added this led to “mismanagement in the administration of the charity”.

It has issued the charity with a plan to “address governance weaknesses”.

Harry said in an April statement that the events had “been heartbreaking to witness, especially when such blatant lies hurt those who have invested decades in this shared goal”.

Chandauka had accused Harry of trying to force her out through “bullying (and) harassment” in an interview with Sky News.

In one example, Chandauka, who was appointed to the voluntary post in 2023, criticised Harry for his decision to bring a Netflix camera crew to the charity’s polo fundraiser last year, as well as an unplanned appearance by his wife Meghan at the event.

The accusations were a fresh blow for the prince, who kept up only a handful of his private patronages including with Sentebale after a dramatic split with the British royal family in 2020, leaving the U.K. to live in North America with his wife and children.

“Moving forward I urge all parties not to lose sight of those who rely on the charity’s services,” said the commission’s chief executive David Holdsworth, adding improvements should now be made.

Harry chose the name Sentebale as a tribute to Diana, who died in a Paris car crash in 1997 when the prince was just 12. It means “forget me not” in the Sesotho language and is also used to say goodbye.

#Mystery deepens after police ID body of boy found under bridge in 1972.

A 4-year-old boy who was found dead in Lorton, Va., more than 50 years ago, and whose name has remained a mystery, has finally been identified after a flood of tips, a series of DNA tests and decades of twists and turns.

Fairfax County police Chief Kevin Davis announced the breakthrough Monday, saying the child’s identification has led police to two people who are believed to have been involved in his killing, and another missing boy whose body has never been discovered.

The case of the boy, identified as 4-year-old Carl Matthew Bryant, confounded police and the public for decades. According to Assistant Chief Brooke Wright, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more tips on Bryant’s case than any other in the state of Virginia.

Bryant’s body was found under the Old Colchester Road Bridge in Lorton on June 13, 1972, by a boy who was biking home from school. Bryant was killed by blunt force trauma and remained unidentified, as there were no matching missing person reports.

In 2003, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children put out a computer-generated sketch of the boy that led to numerous tips, but no answer.

Police then turned to the smallest clippings of hair, which one of the original case detectives saved during the child’s autopsy. The hair was barely visible — no more than specks resembling razor stubble — but the FBI was able to extract some DNA from the hair in 2004.

“Why he collected hair back in 1972? He certainly wasn’t forecasting, I believe, that science would be available down the road, but maybe it was just the hair color. Who knows why he did it, but thank God he did do it,” Davis said.

Still though, initially no match was found, and the case stalled.

“There was no match, so I want to say 2016, they tried to get more DNA, so we thought to try to exhume Carl’s body from Coleman Cemetery in Alexandria, but unfortunately his tombstone had been washed away from the derecho that happened in 2012,” cold case detective Melissa Wallace said.

Then, recently, a breakthrough. A forensics company called Astrea was able to use genetic genealogy to trace the boy’s DNA to his mother, a woman named Vera Bryant, who had died in 1980.

She lived in Philadelphia, and relatives told police that on June 13, 1972 — the day Carl Bryant was found dead — she had driven from Philadelphia to Middlesex County, Va., with her boyfriend James Hedgepeth and her son Carl Bryant. But there was another passenger police hadn’t known about, 6-month-old James Bryant, Vera’s second son.

When James Hedgepeth and Vera arrived in Middlesex to meet with Hedgepeth’s family, the couple had no children with them, according to Assistant Chief Wright. On Thanksgiving that same year, Vera’s children were not with her, and she told her family her boys were with Hedgepeth in Virginia.

It was a disturbing twist in the case. After speaking with Vera’s relatives, police discovered it wasn’t just Carl who was gone, but baby James Bryant, whose body still hasn’t been found.

Vera Bryant and James Hedgepeth are both now dead, leaving police with unanswered questions as to what happened on that trip from Philadelphia to Virginia, and how 6-month-old James Bryant could disappear without a trace.

Authorities did extract DNA from Vera’s remains and confirm her as the mother of Carl Bryant, bringing a decades-old mystery to a close while unearthing entirely new ones.

According to Wright, police believe both boys were killed on that road trip down the East Coast, and that 6-month-old James Bryant’s body was also discarded along the way. Upon discovering Carl Bryant’s body, police had searched the area in Lorton for days, but did not find any other remains, nor did they know there was a second child they should have been looking for.

“We ask the public’s help in filling in the missing information,” Wright said. “Perhaps somebody witnessed something along that route that day, or maybe Vera or James confided in someone before they had died. Maybe another jurisdiction had recovered a 6-month-old baby’s remains, and didn’t have any way to tie it to this case.”

Chief Davis said police want to know much more about James Hedgepeth, but what they do know is that he was previously convicted of murder in 1962 and had served time in prison. He met Vera after that prison stint, according to police, and was not the father of either of her boys.

“In the event that he shared any information with family or friends since 1972, even though he’s now deceased, we’d like to know about that,” Davis said. “Our plea is for people to come forward, even if they think they know him but they’re not sure what information about him would be helpful, call us anyway.”

With baby James’ body missing and Carl’s tombstone swept away by a storm, police have also talked about a way to memorialize the case with a bench in Coleman Cemetery.

“This case was always important to me,” detective Wallace said. “To see the extent of that boy’s injuries and what he had suffered through, I’m happy to be here today announcing that at least we’ve identified him. He can have his name, we can get him his name back on his gravestone, and the family can have some semblance of closure.”

By Thomas Robertson.

New Zealand’s former deputy police commissioner lost the right to anonymity Monday after he was charged with possessing child sexual exploitation and bestiality material.