Pareigūnams užblokavus kelią, vairuotojas bandė apvažiuoti tarnybinį automobilį ir sprukti toliau. Vis dėlto netrukus jo kelionę Tilžės gatvėje nutraukė kitas policijos ekipažas. Tai tik dalis nufilmuoto siužeto, kaip patruliai gaudė girtą „Maserati“ vairuotoją.

Rusija plečia savo hibridinį karą, vis dažniau vykdydama operacijas „pilkojoje zonoje“, siekdama destabilizuoti Europos vyriausybes ir institucijas. Be to, ji sistemingai naudoja dronus, kad patikrintų oro gynybos sistemas ir nustatytų silpnąsias vietas, kuriomis būtų galima pasinaudoti, pareiškė vienas aukščiausių Vokietijos kariškių.

A remarkably well-preserved motorcycle and identification tags were found alongside the bodies.

Robert Gilman, who was arrested in 2022, was left in "life-threatening condition" after being subjected to "harsh and abusive treatment", his family says.

The conflict in the Middle East has pushed up oil and fuel prices, and also disrupted supply chains.

Annual US inflation dipped to 3.4% in July, with food costs slowing and housing keeping prices slightly higher.

BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government is moving to turn the country’s foreign intelligence agency into a more potent weapon to counter mounting threats from adversaries including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ministers in the chancellor’s cabinet adopted the intelligence reform on Wednesday, marking a major step forward in long-running plans to strengthen the country’s intelligence agencies by giving its spies vast new powers. Under the proposed reform, spies working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, could carry out acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and pursue more aggressive espionage operations. Until now, those spies have been limited to information-gathering operations due to intentional restraints put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy apparatus. But with the threat of sabotage and influence operations from Russia growing — and concerns that U.S. President Donald Trump could halt or leverage the intelligence sharing Germany heavily relies on — Merz’s government has moved to push through a historic strengthening of the country’s foreign intelligence apparatus. “We are daily targets of espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks and covert actions by foreign powers aimed at destabilizing Germany, at harming our country and at bringing about political and social changes within our country,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters after the cabinet meeting in Berlin. “Our mission is to continually adapt the state’s protective mandate to these new threat scenarios,” he added. The reforms must still be passed by both chambers of parliament before going into effect by 2027. Nina Warken, the chancellery chief overseeing the BND reforms, suggested Germany can no longer afford to rely so heavily on foreign allies for sophisticated intelligence operations it has long been unable conduct itself. “So far — and this must be stated objectively — we have relied too heavily in too many security-related areas on our partners to help ensure our security,” Warken said. “In short, we are simply too dependent on the support of other countries’ intelligence services. And in too many areas, this assistance is a one-way street.” Germany’s postwar foreign intelligence service was founded in 1956 with far more legal constraints than intelligence agencies elsewhere. Those restraints have had the side effect of making Germany particularly dependent on the U.S. for intelligence gathering. In view of the growing threat from Russia, leading politicians now argue that it is time for Germany’s spies to be given the ability to hit back harder. That argument took on new urgency following the sighting of an explosive-laden drone at Leipzig-Halle Airport in eastern Germany last week that was found near a Ukrainian Antonov plane used to transport munitions. Dobrindt, in remarks after the incident, stopped short of naming Russia as responsible for the drone incursion, but said that “a hybrid threat is evident” and that such perils do not originate from amateurs but are “often linked to foreign powers.” On Wednesday, he said results of an investigation into the drone incident were still pending. Germany’s security “worsened significantly” in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a report by the country’s domestic intelligence agency last year. Germany’s intelligence reform would allow authorities to actively respond to hybrid threats such as the Leipzig drone incident. Measures could range from exposing those involved or destroying their property to sabotaging explosives before an attack or feeding adversaries false intelligence afterward, according to the proposed reform. Any response would have to be directly linked to the original incident and could not endanger life or physical safety. “We are expanding the technical capabilities of the intelligence services and granting them active, operational powers,” Dobrindt said. “This is not just about enabling the services to see and hear better in the future and analyze information more quickly. Above all, it is about being able to take active measures against our attackers and adversaries.” The BND will also face fewer data-protection restrictions, allowing it to make greater use of tools such as AI and facial recognition and to store data for longer periods of time, according to the proposed reform. The agency is also set to receive more funding in the coming years. Merz’s government increased the agency’s budget by about 26 percent to €1.51 billion this year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week publicly rejected President Donald Trump’s latest Gaza peace plan. The Trump administration can live with it — for now. The administration says it’s less concerned with what Netanyahu says than what the Israeli Defense Forces do. A U.S. official, who, like others in the story, was granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said that the administration was initially “disappointed” that Israel responded to the 15-point peace proposal by ramping up attacks in Gaza — but is pleased that it has since eased its assault. Now, the administration is willing to give the Israeli prime minister some leeway to message the peace plan in the way he needs to, the official said. There is broad understanding that he is two months from a tough reelection — and needs to please his own hard-right allies to win. Few expected the president’s roadmap to be wholesale embraced, even as Trump on Truth Social trumpeted it as a “major milestone” in the conflict. “We recognize the complexities that come from the Israeli elections, and we’re obviously going to give Bibi a space to try and navigate that,” the official said. But in turn, “they need to give us a little bit of space in terms of no targeted killings in order to allow us to try to get to the next phase, so there’s a lot more challenges to go to get there.” U.S. officials and Hamas negotiated the latest peace framework separately, with help from Middle East allies. The proposal, announced last month, called for Hamas to disarm and relinquish governance in Gaza and Israel to withdraw its military from the territory. The plan stalled when Hamas said it would not disarm until Israel withdrew, and Israel said it would not withdraw until Hamas disarmed. Even as skeptics of the Trump plan criticized the president for overhyping its achievement, U.S. officials believed that they needed to go public once Hamas was on board to lock in its pledge to disarm. Despite the president’s public confidence, administration officials privately expected that the proposal would likely face pushback from Netanyahu but that talks could continue with Israel. Still, they considered the roadmap a significant win. “Nobody’s ever gotten to this point where they got Hamas to agree to this, so that’s a necessary step before actually disarming it,” the U.S. official said. And there are signs that Israel is preparing for the possibility of withdrawal anyway, with Israeli media reporting Israel’s defense establishment began weighing contingencies to do so in the days after Netanyahu’s public rejection. Another administration official said the Board of Peace, a 27-country initiative formed as part of Trump’s deal last year to end the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has been “getting good cooperation on the ground of late.” “That’s what’s important,” the administration official said. And it’s not just Trump administration officials hailing the framework as a step in the right direction. Former ambassadors and administration officials, including some who served in the Biden and Obama administrations, see the recent commitment the U.S. secured from Hamas to disarm — a monthslong sticking point in the peace process — as a small, but meaningful step, even as doubts remain whether Hamas will follow through. A member of the Hamas political bureau, according to the Associated Press, said this week that Hamas remains “committed to the roadmap.” “For Netanyahu, his primary objective, of course, is getting through his election so he’s going to at least voice rejection even while he may allow some aspects of it to move forward,” said Dan Shapiro, a U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration. “It looks like Trump is tolerating the Netanyahu two-step. These two have done a dance like this before and as long as certain elements of it are moving forward … Trump seems to be willing to tolerate Netanyahu’s stated rejection.” Even Trump appeared in little hurry Monday to escalate the dispute with Netanyahu, insisting to reporters in the Oval Office that he had a “good relationship” with the Israeli prime minister despite the very public rejection of his peace proposal. The White House referred requests for comment to the Board of Peace. A Board of Peace official added that “separate discussions with Israel are continuing.” “The objective remains the full decommissioning of weapons and ensuring Gaza can never again pose the kind of threat Israel faced on October 7,” the official said. “Plans are moving forward in this regard. We have seen important elements of cooperation in recent days and we are intensifying our efforts to accelerate progress.” The U.S. official added that Israel remains skeptical that Hamas will follow through on their commitments, while noting the country was similarly skeptical that Hamas would release the Israeli hostages. “We basically have built a lot of credit with them. And I think that they’re willing to give us more of a shot to see if we can get to the next phase,” the official said. “We’re in an uncomfortable position for everyone, but I think that there’s a pathway to get through it.” The idea that Israeli troops are at least planning to withdraw — especially if that withdrawal goes to the yellow line in Gaza, a key point of the plan the Board of Peace proposed — is giving Trump allies hope that Netanyahu’s words are meant for a domestic audience, while his actions are meant to demonstrate he might consider a deal in the future. “Netanyahu’s playing a fairly tricky tightrope, where on the one hand he flexes his muscle for domestic audiences, given his situation at election eve, and on the other hand, he’s doing some baby steps in the direction of the 15-point plan — testing the tolerance of the American or Board of Peace team,” said Nimrod Novik, who served as senior diplomatic adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, said that “of course it’s a win” to get Hamas to agree to disarm. And, behind the scenes, he said there continues to be movement between the U.S and Israel. “Slowly we and Israel are moving forward on both Lebanon and Gaza even in the face of Israeli elections,” Jeffrey said. Still, the incremental movement leaves fundamental questions, which have repeatedly stymied efforts to create a lasting peace between Israel and Gaza. U.S. allies are also concerned that Netanyahu’s public rejection of the latest peace plan is undermining confidence in the Board of Peace and the broader Middle East peace efforts. Hamas’ willingness to disarm is conditioned on Israel withdrawing from Gaza, leaving unresolved how — and in what order — either side would carry out its commitments. Hamas is supposed to turn over its weapons to a United Nations-created body responsible for governing the day-to-day operation in Gaza, and that governing authority is supposed to eventually run the territory, supervised by the Board of Peace, though the timeline for leadership handover remains uncertain. And Israel, meanwhile, has not agreed to the withdrawal in the plan, even as its military is preparing for the possibility. But administration allies don’t really expect some big peace ceremony at Camp David or in Geneva. They’ll settle for dialogue, however tenuous. “You have to judge these things incrementally in the Middle East,” a person familiar with the White House’s discussions around the peace process said. Jerry Wu and Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.

A widening deficit and Ukrainian strikes are testing Russia's economy, even as war in the Middle East lifts oil revenue.

The US health secretary has spent years saying the MMR vaccine caused autism despite no medical evidence.

Financial regulator may be given greater powers to intervene at troubled banks and levy fines

Big claims from new US explorer have run into permitting realities and a rebuke from island nation’s government

Voters in six US states went to the polls to choose their preferred candidates in primaries and special elections ahead of November’s midterms. In Wisconsin, moderate David Crowley narrowly defeated Democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the race for governor. On the Republican side, Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, advanced to a runoff in the Senate primary. Yuka Royer has the story.

Lebanon’s parliament voted on Tuesday to abolish the death penalty, making the country the first in the Middle East to do so. Lebanon has not carried out an execution since 2004, but death sentences have continued to be handed down, with the latest issued on Monday. Amnesty International says at least 85 people were still on death row as of January this year. Capital punishment in Lebanon has typically applied to serious crimes including murder, terrorism and espionage. France 24 correspondent Renée Davis reports the latest from Beirut.

Health officials say misinformation and delayed treatment continue to fuel the outbreak.

HYROX is gaining momentum across Asia, drawing everyone from elite athletes to first-time competitors into a fast-growing fitness phenomenon. In Bangkok, packed training sessions are preparing participants for a race combining running and functional workouts.