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South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t immediately say what type of missile it was or how far it flew.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, with the both the pace of North Korean weapons demonstrations and South Korea’s combined military exercises with Japan intensifying in a cycle of tit-for-tat.

The weapons North Korea tested this year included intercontinental ballistic missiles that demonstrated potential range to reach the U.S. mainland and a series of launch events that the North described as simulated nuclear attacks on targets in South Korea.

The landmark verdict marks a monumental step in a four-decade struggle for Indigenous land rights and a long, bitter legal battle, which has at times spilled into the streets of northern Guatemala.

According to a verdict read from Costa Rica in the early hours of the morning, the Guatemalan government violated the rights of the Indigenous Q’eqchi’ people to property and consultation by permitting mining on land where members of the community have lived at least since the 1800s.

In its written sentence, the court linked the human rights violations to “inadequacies in domestic law,” which fail to recognize Indigenous property and ordered the state to adopt new laws.

Guatemala first granted massive exploratory permits at the Fenix mine in eastern Guatemala to Canadian company Hudbay just under two decades ago. In 2009, the mine’s head of security shot Tot’s son dead. Hudbay sold the site to a local subsidiary of Swiss-based Solway Investment Group two years later.

“Losing your life doesn’t matter, but only for something important,” Tot said. “Within our anthem there is a part where it says ‘overcome or die.’ If I die defending my land, then I believe it is something that will remain as the history of our struggle.”

The comparison in a recent New Yorker article was viewed as controversial in Germany, where government authorities strongly support Israel as a form of remorse and responsibility after Adolf Hitler’s Germany murdered up to 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

Gessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

In Gessen’s article, titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the author explores German Holocaust memory, arguing that Germany today stifles free and open debate on Israel.

Gessen also is critical of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

“The ghetto is being liquidated,” the article added.

(Here's a non-paywall link to the article.) It is profound.

A Ukrainian military drone unit near Stepove, a village just north of Avdiivka, where some of the most intense battles have taken place, shot the video this month.

It’s an apocalyptic scene: In two separate clips, the bodies of about 150 soldiers — most wearing Russian uniforms — lie scattered along tree lines where they sought cover. The village itself has been reduced to rubble. Rows of trees that used to separate farm fields are burned and disfigured. The fields are pocked by artillery shells and grenades dropped from drones. The drone unit said it’s possible that some of the dead were Ukrainians.

The footage was provided to the AP by Ukraine’s BUAR unit of the 110th Mechanized Brigade, involved in the fighting in the area. The unit said that the footage was shot on Dec. 6 over two separate treelines between Stepove and nearby railroad tracks and that many of the bodies had been left there for weeks.

The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud.

“I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.

“I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the election interference case, declined Thursday to comment on the contents of the letters.

The decision came in April after the utility sought advice from the National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of the nation's signals intelligence agency GCHQ, the newspaper quoted a Whitehall official as saying.

The FT said an employee at the Nari subsidiary NR Electric UK had said the company no longer had access to sites where the components were installed and that National Grid did not disclose a reason for terminating the contracts.

It quoted another person it did not name as saying the decision was based on NR Electric UK components that help control and balance the grid and minimise the risk of blackouts.

It was unclear whether the components remained in the electricity transmission network, the report said.

Quaker, which is owned by PepsiCo, said in a news release that it has not received any reports of salmonella infections related to the recalled granola products. The full list of recalled foods includes granola oats cereals and Quaker Chewy Bars, which are also sold in PepsiCo’s snack mixes.

The affected products have been sold in all 50 U.S. states, as well as U.S. territories, Quaker said. The company is asking customers with recalled products to throw them away and contact its customer support line or visit the recall website for more information and reimbursement.

According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 1.35 million cases of salmonella infection occur in the U.S. each year, causing approximately 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths.

List of recalled items here (about halfway down the page).

The trial, which exposed infighting and intrigue in the highest echelons of the Vatican, lasted for 86 sessions over two-and-a-half years.

It revolved mostly around the messy purchase of a building in London by the Secretariat of State, the Vatican's key administrative and diplomatic department.

Becciu, then an archbishop, held the number two position there in 2013 when it began investing in a fund managed by Italian financier Raffaele Mincione, securing about 45% of the building at 60 Sloane Avenue, in an upmarket district of the city.

Mincione was found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering and given the same sentence as Becciu.

An architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords with Israel that raised hopes of Palestinian statehood, Abbas has seen his legitimacy steadily undermined by Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank, which he oversees. Many Palestinians now regard his administration as corrupt, undemocratic and out of touch.

But in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, President Joe Biden has made it clear that he wants to see a revitalized Palestinian Authority – which Abbas has run since 2005 - take charge in Gaza once the conflict is over, unifying its administration with the West Bank.

Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, met with Abbas on Friday, becoming the latest senior U.S. official to urge him to implement rapid change. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters after meeting the Palestinian leader in late November that they discussed the need for reforms to combat corruption, empower civil society and support a free press.

Three Palestinian and one senior regional official briefed on the conversations said that Washington's proposals behind closed doors would also involve Abbas ceding some of his control over the Authority.

Volunteer James Free was sorting through items in the Portland Rescue Mission's donation bin when something shiny caught his eye.

Amid all the usual hand-me-downs was a pair of bright gold men's sneakers without so much as a scuff on them.

He didn't yet know it, but he'd stumbled upon a pair of extremely rare Nike Air Jordan 3s, custom made for director Spike Lee ahead of the 2019 Academy Awards.

The shoes are now up for auction by Sotheby's, which estimates they will fetch as much as $20,000 US (about $26,750 Cdn) for the mission. The organization has helped people struggling with homelessness, hunger and addiction since 1949.

"Those shoes are going to provide thousands of meals for people that we serve," Erin Holcomb, the mission's director of staff ministry, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"It's just a really beautiful picture of generosity."

“We were treated like cattle, they even wrote numbers on our hands,” said Ibrahim Lubbad, a 30-year-old computer engineer arrested in Beit Lahiya on Dec. 7 with a dozen other family members and held overnight. “We could feel their hatred.”

The 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.

The doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face “significant risk” of death, according to records of her case.

That was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.