Justice minister says two wounded prison guards in critical condition after van ambushed while transporting prisoner to meet an investigating judge in Rouen.
Armed assailants have killed two French prison officers and seriously wounded three others in a brazen attack on a convoy in Normandy during which a high-profile inmate escaped, officials have said.
The van was transporting prisoner Mohamed Amra to Evreux jail after a court hearing in Rouen when it was ambushed on Tuesday.
Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said he would join a crisis unit to address the emergency.
“All means are being used to find these criminals. On my instructions, several hundred police officers and gendarmes were mobilised,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin posted on X.
“This morning’s attack, which cost the lives of prison administration agents, is a shock for all of us,” French President Emmanuel Macron posted on X.
“The nation stands alongside the families, the injured and their colleagues.”
The attack prompted a significant law enforcement operation in the northwestern region of France as authorities worked to secure the area and apprehend the assailants. The assault took place on Tuesday morning on the A154 motorway, which has since been closed.
Amra was under high surveillance and had recently been sentenced for burglary. He was also under investigation for a kidnapping and homicide case in Marseille, according to public prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
French media reported that Amra was nicknamed “La Mouche” (The Fly).
Beccuau announced an investigation into the attack, now considered a case of organised crime and murder.
“At this stage, we mourn the death of two penitentiary agents in this armed attack, and two are in critical condition,” Beccuau said in a statement.
The investigation will also address organised escape attempts, possession of military-grade weapons, and conspiracy to commit crime.
Law and order is a major issue in French politics in the run-up to next month’s European elections and the incident prompted fierce reactions from politicians, especially the far right.
“It is real savagery that hits France every day,” said Jordan Bardella, the top candidate for the far-right National Rally (RN), which is leading opinion polls for the elections.
A decision by some major cities in Canada to raise Israeli flags to mark the country’s Independence Day has spurred outrage, with Palestinian rights advocates saying Israel should not be honoured as it wages a deadly military assault on the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli flag will be raised in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, as well as in Toronto, the country’s largest city, on Tuesday to mark Israeli Independence Day, also known as Yom Ha’atzmaut.
The Ottawa flag-raising will be a private event after a planned public ceremony at city hall drew widespread condemnation.
“This decision is based on recent intelligence that suggests hosting a public ceremony poses a substantial risk to public safety,” the city said last week.
In Toronto, municipal staff approved a request from the Consulate General of Israel to raise the Israeli flag, The Toronto Star newspaper reported.
Both events drew small protests on Tuesday morning by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
“As Jews, we scream it loud – Israel doesn’t make us proud,” protesters chanted outside the city hall building in Toronto. “As Jews, we say not in our name – it’s not our flag, we’re not the same.”
View of Israeli flag rising at Toronto city hall from Nathan Phillips, where a small group of pro-Palestinian protesters did their best, from an enforced distance, to disrupt it pic.twitter.com/zNWVKCV9Lq
The flag raisings come as Israel continues to bombard the Gaza Strip, killing more than 35,000 Palestinians since the war began in early October.
Israel’s siege on the coastal Palestinian enclave has also spurred a worsening humanitarian crisis, with Palestinians facing shortages of water, food, fuel, and medical supplies.
Amid global protests demanding a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinian rights advocates in Canada also noted that the Yom Ha’atzmaut flag-raising events come a day before what’s known as Nakba Day.
Held annually on May 15, Nakba Day commemorates the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their homes and communities when the State of Israel was created in 1948.
Jamila Ewais, a researcher with the anti-racism programme at advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), said that against that backdrop, the flag-raisings ignore “the pain and injustice experienced by countless Palestinian families”.
“Celebrating Israel’s violent founding, especially this year, is equivalent to a celebration of injustice against the Palestinians,” Ewais said in a statement last week.
The City of Ottawa justified its decision to raise the Israeli flag by saying it “celebrates national holidays and independence days and holds flag-raising events and activities, in collaboration with Global Affairs Canada, for more than 190 federally recognized countries”.
Dear Mayor Sutcliffe and Councillor Leiper,
I am an international human rights lawyer, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur and I have worked in the occupied Palestinian territories and continue to do so. I am an Arab-Canadian and I live in Mr. Leiper’s ward. My father is…
But rights advocates pointed out that the city has refused to hold flag-raising events in the past.
In 2022, for example, Ottawa rejected a request from the Russian embassy to fly Russia’s flag at city hall.
“I indicated that until the Russian army leaves Ukraine we will not have anything to do with the Russian government and their illegal invasion,” Ottawa’s then-mayor, Jim Watson, said on social media at the time.
Leilani Farha, an Ottawa-based human rights lawyer and former United Nations special rapporteur on the right to housing, said raising the Israeli flag at this time “is completely inappropriate and deeply hurtful”.
Farha noted that Israel has been accused of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in a case before the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice.
“Ottawa has a sizeable Palestinian, Arab and Muslim population,” she wrote in a letter sent to Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s chief of staff about the city’s plans to raise the Israeli flag, which she shared on social media.
“This action by the City is being viewed by this community – of which I am a member – as well as by many others who support Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian liberation, as a provocation and a direct attack.”
On May 14, 1954, Boeing, now one of the world’s largest commercial aerospace companies, unveiled its first commercial jet-powered passenger plane, the Model 367-80 prototype, at its Renton Field plant on the south shore of Lake Washington in Washington state, where jetliners are still produced today.
The 367-80 would eventually be retired on January 22, 1970 but not before its technology had been used to create the famous 707 model – and, later the hugely successful 737.
Initially, airlines were cautious about embracing jet technology, citing worries about expense and noise levels among other things. However, the successful test flights of the 367-80 demonstrated the advances aviation had made in increased speeds and altitudes.
Ultimately, this success laid the groundwork for Boeing’s 707 plane, which was launched in 1957. US airline group Pan Am began regular 707 flights on October 26, 1958, signalling the industry’s broader acceptance of jet airliners. Before the 707, propeller-driven aircraft had dominated commercial air travel.
Boeing’s 737 model was launched in 1967 and would become the most commercially successful aeroplane in aviation history.
However, in recent years, Boeing has suffered a string of technical failures. Most recently, a Boeing 737 carrying 85 people caught fire and skidded off a runway at Senegal’s main airport, injuring 10 people including the pilot, while a Boeing 767 cargo plane was forced to make an emergency landing following a front landing gear failure.
Last week, Boeing was forced to postpone the launch of its new CST-100 Starliner capsule, designed for launch into space, after engineers detected a problem with a rocket valve.
Here is a timeline of some of Boeing’s highs and lows over the past century.
(Al Jazeera)
A century in the air – some of Boeing’s highs
The company, which was first founded as Pacific Aero Products Co by William Boeing in 1916, was officially named Boeing Airplane Co in 1917, shortly after the US entered the war. During the war, Boeing provided Model C trainer planes to the US Navy, designed a new patrol “flying boat” and signed a contract with the US Navy to build 50 Curtiss HS-2L seaplanes.
In 1917, it also produced the first US-designed and built bomber plane and its Martin MB-1 bomber made its first flight.
During World War II, Boeing produced bombers such as the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress. The B-29 Superfortress planes, named Enola Gay and Bockscar, were the two aircraft used to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The atomic bombing caused almost 200,000 casualties. Long-term effects on survivors would lead to radiation sickness and such cancers as leukaemia, thyroid cancer and lung cancer, due to radiation exposure.
Launch of the 737 airliner
One of Boeing’s most significant contributions to commercial aviation was the 737 series of jetliners, launched in 1967. The model would become one of the best-selling commercial jetliners in aviation history. Nearly 12,000 have been built.
During the Apollo programme, which ultimately saw American astronaut Neil Armstrong become the first person to walk on the moon, Boeing built the Saturn V’s maiden rocket in 1967. That same model rocket would be used for the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, landing astronauts on the moon.
Boeing, the billion-dollar company
Boeing made $1bn in sales for the first time in 1956. It was publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the ticker symbol BA, in January 1978 and is currently valued at $109.5bn.
Which fatal crashes have involved Boeing planes?
More than 100 years after Boeing was first founded, Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 domestic passenger flight, crashed into the Java Sea 13 minutes after taking off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Tangerang in Indonesia, en route to Depati Amir Airport, Pangkal Pinang, killing all 189 people on board on October 29, 2018. An investigation by the Indonesian authorities blamed a combination of an aircraft design flaw which had forced the plane to dive down, inadequate training and maintenance problems, one year later.
Residents collect debris at the scene where Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in a wheat field just outside the town of Bishoftu, 62km southeast of Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019 [Jemal Countess/Getty Images]
Ethiopian Airlines crash, 2019
Less than a year after the Lion Air incident, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, also a Boeing 737 MAX 8 and a scheduled international passenger flight from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, crashed near the Ethiopian town of Bishoftu just six minutes after takeoff on March 10, 2019, killing all 157 people on board. The same technical issue which had been found in the Lion Air case was also discovered.
The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide due to concerns about a faulty sensor that had caused its Manoeuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to continually tilt the plane downwards, causing it to dive.
As a result of the controversy over the design flaw, Boeing’s board removed CEO Dennis Muilenburg as chairman but allowed him to remain chief executive.
The Boeing 737 MAX was finally cleared to resume flights by the FAA in November 2020, after the problem was fixed but Boeing had already been heavily criticised by the US House Transportation Committee for failing to take better safety measures.
What incidents involving Boeing planes have happened this year?
Alaskan Airlines door panel blowout, January
In January this year, a door panel on Alaskan Airlines flight 1282, a Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet, blew out, causing rapid decompression and forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport. Some passengers suffered minor injuries but nobody was killed or seriously harmed. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) immediately grounded the 737 Max 9, of which there were 171 in use worldwide. Loose hardware was reported in an initial investigation.
This photo released by the National Transportation Safety Board shows a gaping hole where the panelled-over door had been at the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, on January 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon [National Transportation Safety Board via AP]
The incident caused a flurry of conspiracy theories which have ramped up in the past three months because of the deaths of two Boeing whistleblowers.
John Barnett, a quality control engineer who worked for Boeing for more than three decades, was found dead in March 2019. His body was discovered with a gunshot wound and a suicide note in his truck, which was parked in a hotel car park in South Carolina.
Two weeks ago, Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier for Boeing, died in an Oklahoma hospital due to a staph infection that quickly developed into pneumonia.
Air Senegal plane skids off runway, May
A chartered Air Senegal Boeing B737-300 plane skidded off a runway before takeoff early on Thursday, May 9 at Blaise Diagne International Airport in the capital, Dakar. Eighty-five people – including two pilots and four cabin crew – were on board the flight operated by TransAir and bound for the Malian capital Bamako. At least 10 people were injured, the transport ministry said.
Photos showed the damaged plane at a standstill in a grassy field with a damaged wing, its emergency exit slides deployed.
Videos shared on social media appeared to show a left wing on fire.
A FedEx Express Boeing 767 cargo plane made an emergency landing at Istanbul Airport on May 8 without deploying its front landing gear but managed to stay on the runway and avoid casualties [Umit Bektas/Reuters]
FedEx flight makes emergency landing, May
On Wednesday, May 8, a Boeing 767 cargo aircraft belonging to FedEx made an emergency landing at Istanbul in Turkey after its front landing gear failed. No one was injured and the crew successfully evacuated the aircraft.
Corendon Airlines plane has burst tyre, May
Also in Turkey, 190 people – including six crew members – were safely evacuated from a Boeing 737-800 belonging to Corendon Airlines after one of the aircraft’s tyres burst on Thursday, May 9, during landing at Gazipasa, an airport near the Mediterranean coastal town of Alanya.
Boeing Starliner launch halted, May
Boeing called off the inaugural crewed flight CST-100 Starliner space capsule on Monday, May 7, after engineers detected an issue with the Atlas V rocket valve. The decision to call off the launch on Monday came two hours before the scheduled liftoff and about an hour after two NASA astronauts had strapped into the spacecraft.
NASA chief Bill Nelson posted on X. “Standing down on tonight’s attempt to launch. As I’ve said before, @NASA’s first priority is safety. We go when we’re ready.”
(Al Jazeera)
Is Boeing’s safety record being investigated?
Boeing has been the subject of 32 whistleblower complaints lodged with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the workplace safety regulator, in the United States during the past three years
Air safety officials in the US are also currently investigating whether employees at Boeing falsified inspection records for the 787 Dreamliner.
Sam Salehpour, another whistleblower and quality engineer who worked for Boeing for 10 years has stated he had safety concerns regarding the 787 Dreamliner. Last month, Salehpour testified at a congressional hearing with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the safety of the 777 and 787 aircraft.
He stated: “I have analysed Boeing’s own data to conclude that the company is taking manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 programme that may significantly reduce the airplane’s safety and the life cycle.”
Boeing strongly refuted the claims and stated that it is “fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner”.
Qatar says mediation efforts are being hampered by Israel’s offensive on Gaza’s southern city.
Israel’s military operation in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah has set ceasefire negotiations with Hamas “backward”, mediator Qatar has said, adding that the talks have lost steam.
“Especially in the past few weeks, we have seen some momentum building but unfortunately things didn’t move in the right direction and right now we are on a status of almost a stalemate,” Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani told the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha on Tuesday.
“Of course, what happened with Rafah has set us backward.”
Qatar has been engaged in months of mediation between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, along with Egypt and the United States.
On Tuesday morning, Israeli forces pushed deeper into eastern Rafah, entering the neighbourhoods of al-Jnaina, as-Salam and Brazil, as it prepared to expand its military operation.
The Israeli army issued evacuation orders, forcing tens of thousands more Palestinians to flee, despite US warnings against a full-scale assault on the southern city that is crowded with displaced people.
Israeli forces were also continuing to operate with extreme force in Jabalia city, Jabalia refugee camp and surrounding areas in northern Gaza.
Israeli tanks, bulldozers and armoured vehicles were surrounding United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools that were turned into shelters for hundreds of displaced families.
An air strike on a residential building to the south of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed at least 14 people, while Israeli fighter jets also attacked a school in the refugee camp where a fire broke out, according to reports.
Sheikh Mohammed said there was no clarity on how to stop the war from the Israeli side. “I don’t think that they are considering this as an option … even when we are talking about the deal and leading to a potential ceasefire,” he said.
Israeli politicians were indicating “by their statements that they will remain there, they will continue the war”, he said, adding that “there is no clarity on what Gaza will look like after this”.
Sheikh Mohammed said the fundamental difference between the two parties was over the release of captives and ending the war. “There is one party that wants to end the war and then talk about the hostages and there is another party who wants the hostages and wants to continue the war,” he said.
“As long as there is not any commonality between those two things it won’t get us to a result.”
Israel is determined to press ahead with its offensive on Rafah – considered the last refuge in Gaza, where more than 1.4 million displaced Palestinians were sheltering – in defiance of warnings from the UN and its allies, including its key backer, the US.
Israeli military operations have forced some 150,000 people to flee over the past week to areas devastated by previous attacks.
The displaced were mainly heading towards Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, and Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza. Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said Deir el-Balah was running out of space as people poured in, looking for shelter.
Palestinians will mark the 76th anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.
Palestinians refer to the anniversary, which they will observe on Wednesday, as the “Nakba”, Arabic for “catastrophe”. Some 700,000 Palestinians, a majority of the pre-war population, fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.
After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some six million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In the Gaza Strip, the refugees and their descendants make up about three-quarters of the population.
Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right to return has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago.
Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale.
All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to already overcrowded tent camps as Israel expands its offensive once again.
The war on Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, making it by far the deadliest round of fighting in the history of the long conflict.
About 1.7 million Palestinians, three-quarters of the besieged enclave’s population, have been forced to flee their homes, most of them multiple times. That is well more than twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.
Even if Palestinians are not expelled from Gaza en masse, many fear that they will never be able to return to their homes or that the destruction wreaked on the territory will make it impossible to live there. A recent United Nations estimate said it would take until 2040 to rebuild destroyed homes in the enclave.
Israel has unleashed one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history in Gaza, dropping 900kg (2,000-pound) bombs on densely populated areas. Entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to wastelands of rubble and ploughed-up roads, many littered with unexploded bombs.
The World Bank estimates that $18.5bn in damage has been inflicted, roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of the entire Palestinian territory in 2022. And that was in January, in the early days of Israel’s devastating ground operations in Khan Younis and before its military went into Rafah.
Conflicts in Sudan and Gaza drove millions from their homes in 2023.
The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) around the globe hit a record 75.9 million in 2023, an NGO monitor has found.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in a report released on Tuesday that 7.7 million people were displaced by disasters and 68.3 million by conflict and violence. The wars in Sudan and Gaza helped push the numbers to the new record.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen alarming new levels of people having to flee their homes due to conflict and violence, even in regions where the trend had been improving,” IDMC director Alexandra Bilak said.
“Conflict, and the devastation it leaves behind, is keeping millions from rebuilding their lives, often for years on end.”
While refugees are those who have fled abroad, internal displacement refers to the forced movement of people within the country in which they live.
The end-of-year record was a significant increase from 71.1 million recorded at the end of 2022.
Over the last five years, the figure increased by more than 50 percent, the IDMC said.
Conflict-driven
The number of IDPs resulting from conflict increased by 22.6 million last year, with the two biggest increases in 2022 and 2023.
Sudan has the highest number of IDPs recorded for a single country since records began in 2008, the monitor said, with an estimated 9.1 million people displaced. Almost half of all IDPs live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Fighting in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Palestinian territory accounted for nearly two-thirds of new movements of people due to conflict in 2023.
In the Gaza Strip, 1.7 million Palestinians were internally displaced by the end of 2023, after Israel launched a war following an attack by Hamas on October 7.
The monitor, which also keeps track of each new forced movement of a person within their borders, said there were 3.4 million new movements as people were displaced several times over in the enclave.
Of the 26.4 million forced movements due to disasters, a third were in China and Turkey as a result of severe weather events and strong earthquakes.
The report warned that displacement often lasts for long periods due to infrastructure damage and institutional disruption.
In Syria, the number of internally displaced people reached a peak of 7.6 million in 2014. However, the number still stood at 7.2 million last year, despite a significant reduction in violence.
The IDMC was created by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in 1998. Jan Egeland, NRC’s chief, said the monitor had never recorded so many people forced away from their homes and communities.
“It is a damning verdict on the failures of conflict prevention and peace-making,” Egeland said. “The lack of protection and assistance that millions endure cannot be allowed to continue.”
United Nations says about 400 women die from domestic violence in Kazakhstan each year, but many cases go unreported.
Warning: This article contains details of violent domestic abuse that some may find upsetting.
Kazakhstan’s top court has sentenced a former economy minister to 24 years in prison for torturing and murdering his wife, following a widely watched trial that many saw as a test of the president’s promise to strengthen women’s rights.
Kuandyk Bishimbayev, 44, was found guilty and sentenced by the Supreme Court on Monday.
His trial, which has been broadcast live over the past seven weeks, has been seen as an attempt by authorities to send a message that members of the elite are no longer above the law.
Surveillance footage played during the trial showed Bishimbayev repeatedly punching and kicking his wife, 31-year-old Saltanat Nukenova, and dragging her by her hair, near naked, into the VIP room of a restaurant owned by his family in the country’s largest city, Almaty.
As she lay dying in the suite with no security cameras covered in her blood, Bishimbayev phoned a fortune teller, who assured him his wife would be fine. When an ambulance finally arrived 12 hours later, Nukenova was pronounced dead at the scene.
Videos were also found on Bishimbayev’s mobile phone in which he insulted and humiliated the visibly bruised and bloodied Nukenova in the hours before she lost consciousness on the morning of November 9 last year.
This June 2017 photo provided by Aitbek Amangeldy shows a selfie taken by his sister, Saltanat Nukenova, in Astana [Courtesy of Aitbek Amangeldy via AP]
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has said he wants to build a fairer society including improved rights for women.
The case has helped rally public support behind a law criminalising domestic violence, which parliament passed last month.
Days after Nukenova’s death, her relatives launched an online petition urging authorities to pass “Saltanat’s Law” to bolster protection for those at risk of domestic violence. When the trial began, more than 5,000 Kazakhs wrote to senators urging for tougher laws on abuse, according to local media reports.
Government data show that one in six women in the Central Asian nation has experienced violence by a male partner.
According to the United Nations, about 400 women die from domestic abuse in the country each year. These figures could be higher as many cases go unreported.
During the trial, Bishimbayev admitted to beating his wife, but said some of her injuries were self-inflicted. He denied torturing or planning to murder her.
He served as the oil-rich nation’s economy minister from May to December 2016.
Bishimbayev was convicted of bribery in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but walked free after less than three years thanks to an amnesty and parole.
Kuandyk Bishimbayev, the country’s former economy minister, is escorted into court in Astana, Kazakhstan. [File: The Kazakhstan Supreme Court Press Office Telegram channel via AP]
The billboard collapsed on some houses and a petrol station next to a busy road in the eastern suburb of Ghatkopar following gusty winds and rain.
At least 14 people have been killed and dozens of others injured after a huge billboard fell on them during a thunderstorm in India’s financial capital Mumbai, according to local authorities.
The billboard collapsed on some houses and a petrol station next to a busy road in the eastern suburb of Ghatkopar following gusty winds and rain late on Monday.
Many others were trapped following the incident, with rescue operations continuing till early Tuesday. Mumbai’s municipal corporation said 74 people were taken to hospital with injuries following the accident, of which 31 were discharged.
Rescuers look for victims under the billboard that collapsed in Mumbai [Rafiq Maqbool/AP]
The rains, accompanied by strong winds, caused the 30-metre-tall (100-foot) billboard located next to a busy road in the Chheda Nagar area of Ghatkopar to fall over a petrol station and some houses on Monday evening.
The Press Trust of India news agency, quoting police officials, reported the billboard was installed illegally.
On Monday night, Devendra Fadnavis, the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra state, said a high-level inquiry had been ordered into the incident and strict action would be taken against those responsible.
A “high-level inquiry has been ordered into the incident”, Fadnavis said in a post on X.
A resident reacts as she speaks on the phone during the rescue operation [Punit Paranjpe/AFP]
Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, was hit by strong winds accompanied by rain and dust storms that uprooted trees and caused brief power outages in parts of the city, along with disruptions to the city’s train network.
The thunderstorm brought traffic to a standstill in parts of the city and disrupted operations at its airport, one of the country’s busiest, with at least 15 flights diverted.
India records heavy rains and severe floods during the monsoon season between June and September, which brings most of its annual rainfall. The rain is crucial for agriculture but often causes extensive damage.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Kyiv after travelling overnight by train from Poland.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Kyiv in a surprise diplomatic visit designed to underline the United States’s support for Ukraine as it battles to push back Russian troops who have opened a new front line in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
The trip is the first by a senior US official since Congress passed a long-delayed $61bn military aid package for the country last month, and amid concerns that the US government has been preoccupied with Israel’s war on Gaza.
Blinken, who arrived in Kyiv by train early on Tuesday morning, hoped to “send a strong signal of reassurance to the Ukrainians who are obviously in a very difficult moment”, said a US official who briefed reporters travelling with Blinken on condition of anonymity.
Blinken will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other senior Ukrainian officials “to discuss battlefield updates, the impact of new US security and economic assistance, long-term security and other commitments, and ongoing work to bolster Ukraine’s economic recovery,” the State Department said in a statement.
Blinken’s arrival coincides with a renewed Russian push in the Kharkiv region and on the eastern front line as it seeks to take advantage of Ukraine’s weaknesses in munitions and manpower.
On Monday, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Washington was trying to accelerate “the tempo of the deliveries” of weapons to Ukraine and reverse the disadvantage that resulted from Congress sitting on the aid package for months.
“The delay put Ukraine in a hole and we’re trying to help them dig out of that hole as rapidly as possible,” Sullivan said, adding that a new package of weapons was going to be announced this week.
Artillery, air defence interceptors and long-range ballistic missiles have already been delivered, some of them to the front lines, said the US official travelling with Blinken.
Russia occupies about 18 percent of Ukraine.
It launched a new offensive in the Kharkiv region on Friday, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people.
Former Australian Army lawyer David McBride has been sentenced to five years and eight months for revealing information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
Supporters of McBride have long expressed his concern that the Australian government was more interested in punishing him for revealing information about war crimes rather than the alleged perpetrators.
“It is a travesty that the first person imprisoned in relation to Australia’s war crimes in Afghanistan is not a war criminal but a whistleblower,” said Rawan Arraf, the executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, in a statement released after the sentencing.
“This is a dark day for Australian democracy,” Kieran Pender, the acting legal director of the Melbourne-based Human Rights Law Centre, said in the same statement, noting McBride’s imprisonment would have “a grave chilling effect on potential truth-tellers”.
McBride, who arrived at the Supreme Court in Canberra, Australia this morning with his pet dog and surrounded by supporters, will remain behind bars until at least August 13, 2026, before he is eligible for parole.
In an interview with Al Jazeera before his trial began last year, McBride said he had never made a secret of sharing the files.
“What I want to be discussed is whether or not I was justified in doing so,” McBride stressed.
The former Australian Army lawyer’s sentencing comes almost seven years after Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, published a series of seven articles known as the Afghan Files based on information McBride provided.
McBride has attracted support from Australian human rights advocates, journalists and politicians who fear his sentencing has consequences for freedom of speech [Mick Tsikas/EPA-EFE/]
The series led to an unprecedented Australian Federal Police raid on ABC headquarters in June 2019 but details published in the series were also later confirmed in an Australian government inquiry, which found there was credible evidence to support allegations war crimes had been committed.
A Spokesperson for the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) told Al Jazeera that a former Australian Special Forces soldier who was charged with one count of the war crime of murder on March 20, 2023, is on bail with a mention scheduled for July 2, 2024.
“This is the first war crime arrest resulting from [joint investigations between the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) and the Australian Federal Police]”, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said the investigations were “very complex” and “expected to take a significant amount of time” but that they were conducting them as “thoroughly and expeditiously as possible”.
In a separate case last year, an Australian judge found Australia’s most decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith was “complicit in and responsible for the murder” of three Afghan men while on deployment. The finding was made in defamation proceedings brought by Roberts-Smith against three Australian newspapers who had reported on the allegations against him.
Roberts-Smith has appealed against the defamation ruling.
‘Greyer, murkier, messier’
McBride’s sentencing comes four months after Dan Oakes, one of two ABC journalists who wrote the Afghan Files, was awarded an Order of Australia Medal, with the citation simply saying he was recognised “for service to journalism”.
Oakes was quoted by the ABC at the time as saying, “I’m very proud of the work we did with the Afghan Files and I know that it did have a positive effect in that it helps bring some of this conduct to light.
“If [this medal] is at least partly due to that reporting then I do feel some sense of satisfaction.”
But Oakes, who has reportedly not spoken to McBride in six years, later told the ABC’s Four Corners programme that the story was “much greyer and murkier and messier than people appreciate”.
While Oakes and McBride have not stayed in touch, the whistleblower has attracted the support of a wide range of Australians, including human rights lawyers, senators and journalists.
Ben Roberts-Smith was ‘complicit in and responsible for the murder’ of three Afghan men, an Australian judge found in 2023 [Dan Himbrechts/EPA]
On Tuesday, supporters gathered outside the court, with speakers on McBride’s behalf including Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge.
It would be “an indelible stain on the Albanese Labor government” if McBride “walks into the Supreme Court this morning” and is then “taken out the back to jail”, Shoebridge said before the sentencing hearing.
In a joint statement from several Australians issued after the hearing, Peter Greste, the executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, said that “press freedom relies on protections for journalists and their sources”. He also noted that Australia had recently dropped to 39th in the global press freedom rankings.
Greste is a former Al Jazeera reporter who was jailed with two colleagues in Egypt from 2013 to 2015 on national security charges brought by the Egyptian government.
“As someone who was wrongly imprisoned for my journalism in Egypt, I am outraged about David McBride’s sentence on this sad day for Australia,” said Greste.
McBride is one of several Australians facing punishment for revealing information, while high-profile Australian Julian Assange will face hearings on his potential extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States later this month.
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