Russia recorded more than 50,000 new daily COVID-19 cases for the second day running on Saturday, the government’s coronavirus task force said.
Over the last 24 hours, 51,699 cases were detected across Russia — the most in a single day since March 9.
On Friday, Russia’s caseload passed the 50,000 mark for the first time in almost six months.
Infections rose in July and August as new highly-transmissible variants of the coronavirus swept across the country.
The task force said 92 people had died with COVID-19 over the last 24 hours.
According to excess fatality statistics, Russia has been among the most severely affected countries by the pandemic, with vaccine uptake slow and the government reluctant to impose restrictions beyond a short lockdown in 2020.
Russia reports 50,000 COVID-19 cases for second day running
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Russia reports 50,000 COVID-19 cases for second day running
Russian strike kills 5 in Ukraine, including a 1-year-old, hours after Trump-Putin call
The child killed was the grandson of the local fire chief, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said
PRYLUKY, Ukraine: At least five people, including a 1-year-old child, his mother and grandmother, were killed Thursday in a nighttime Russian drone attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Pryluky, officials said.
Six drones hit a residential area in the city shortly before dawn, injuring nine others, according to authorities. The child killed was the grandson of the local fire chief, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
The fire chief, identified by local officials as 50-year-old Oleksandr Lebid, “arrived to respond to the aftermath right at his own home,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on Telegram. “It turned out that a Shahed drone hit his house.”
The attack came just hours after US President Donald Trump spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Trump, Putin said “very strongly” that Russia will retaliate for Ukraine’s stunning drone attacks on Russian military airfields on Sunday.
US-led diplomatic efforts to stop the more than 3-year-long war have delivered no significant progress, and the grinding war of attrition has continued unabated.
Child’s mother feared drone attacks
The mother of the 1-year-old killed in Pryluky was a police officer called Daryna Shyhyda, Ukraine’s National Police said.
“Today our hearts are scorched by pain,” the police force wrote on Telegram. “This is not just a loss — it is three generations of life uprooted.”
Liudmyla Horbunova, 55, who lives across the street from where the Shahed drone hit, said Shyhyda had moved with her son last weekend to her parents’ house from her home in Kyiv because she was scared of potential Russian attacks on the capital.
“She ran away from Shaheds in Kyiv, but they found her here, in Pryluky,” Horbunova told The Associated Press.
Firefighters worked through charred debris and extinguished the remains of a fire that engulfed the home of Shyhyda’s parents, leaving only a brick carcass and scattered toys, clothes and a family photo book.
Drones struck across regions
Pryluky, which had a prewar population of around 50,000 people, lies about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Kyiv, the capital. The city is far from the front line and does not contain any known military assets.
The last time Pryluky was struck was in November last year, when a Russian missile hit an administrative building and injured one person.
Zelensky said a total of 103 drones and one ballistic missile targeted multiple Ukrainian regions overnight, including Donetsk, Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy, Chernihiv, Dnipro and Kherson.
“This is another massive strike,” Zelensky said. “It is yet another reason to impose the strongest possible sanctions and apply pressure collectively.”
US peace effort remains stalled
Zelensky, who has accepted a US ceasefire proposal and offered to meet with Putin in an attempt to break the stalemate in negotiations, wants more international sanctions on Russia to force it to accept a settlement. Putin has shown no willingness to meet with Zelensky, however, and has indicated no readiness to compromise.
Germany’s new leader Friedrich Merz was due to meet with President Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday as he works to keep the US on board with Western diplomatic and military support for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s top presidential aide, Andriy Yermak, met with senior American officials in Washington on Wednesday and called for greater US pressure on Russia, accusing the Kremlin of deliberately stalling ceasefire talks and blocking progress toward peace, according to a statement on the presidential website.
Yermak, who traveled to the US as part of a Ukrainian delegation, met with senior American officials to bolster support for Ukraine’s defense and humanitarian priorities. He said Ukraine urgently needs stronger air defense capabilities.
More people wounded in Kharkiv
Hours later, 19 people were injured in a Russian drone strike on the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Those hurt included children, a pregnant woman, and a 93-year-old woman, regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov wrote on Telegram.
At around 1:05 a.m., Shahed-type drones struck two apartment buildings in the city’s Slobidskyi district, causing fires and destroying several private vehicles.
“By launching attacks while people sleep in their homes, the enemy once again confirms its tactic of insidious terror,” Syniehubov wrote on Telegram.
Russian aircraft also dropped four powerful glide bombs on the southern city of Kherson, injuring at least three people, regional authorities said.
Mali says two more army posts attacked as jihadist violence escalates
- Hundreds reported killed in recent attacks across West African country
- Junta has struggled to improve security since seizing power
BAMAKO: Islamist militants hit two more military installations on Wednesday and Thursday, Mali’s army said, the latest in a quick spate of attacks that the insurgents say have killed hundreds of soldiers and underscored their gains.
Ground and air reinforcements were being mobilized on Thursday morning to respond to an attack on a security post in Mahou, located in eastern Mali near the border with Burkina Faso, an army statement said.
The attack was claimed by Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa Al-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group active in Mali and Burkina Faso. Information on a death toll was not immediately available.
A military spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday afternoon, “armed terrorists” struck a military camp in Tessit, near the border with Burkina Faso and Niger, and Mali’s military sent in aerial reinforcement, a separate statement said.
There has been no claim of responsibility for that attack, though security analysts said it could have been perpetrated by fighters from the Islamic State branch active in the Sahel region.
“The camp was attacked, and there was a violent exchange of fire. We learned that the attackers had taken control of the camp, and the population was leaving Tessit,” said an official from the nearby town of Ouattagouna, who spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.
Widespread attacks
Mali’s junta seized power following coups in 2020 and 2021, promising to restore security in a country that has grappled with jihadist militancy for more than a decade. But attacks continue in large swathes of the country.
An army statement on Thursday described “a resurgence of cowardly and barbaric attacks” in recent weeks and said it was responding with a “counter-offensive,” listing operations in six locations on Wednesday alone.
An attack on Sunday on a military base in Boulkessi, in central Mali near the frontier with Burkina Faso, killed dozens of soldiers, security sources told Reuters this week. JNIM said in a statement the death toll was more than 100 soldiers and mercenaries, with more than 20 others captured.
On Monday, JNIM said it targeted a military airport and Russian mercenaries in the northern city of Timbuktu, where residents described taking cover from explosions and gunfire.
Like neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso, Mali has cut military ties with Western nations and turned to Russia for support.
JNIM also claimed to have bombed Malian and Russian soldiers on the outskirts of Bamako on Wednesday, though Reuters could not independently confirm that incident and the army has not commented on it.
Consulting firm Control Risks said in a note on Thursday the claim was “reliable” and that further attacks on and near Bamako were likely as JNIM seeks to undermine Mali’s military rulers.
Brazil’s president accuses Israel of ‘premeditated genocide’ in Gaza
- “It’s a premeditated genocide from a far-right government,” da Silva said
PARIS: Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Thursday during a trip to Paris accused Israel of carrying out “premeditated genocide” in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
“It’s a premeditated genocide from a far-right government that is waging a war against the interests of its own people,” he said at a joint press conference with France’s President Emmanuel Macron.
While Lula has previously used the term “genocide,” Macron has refused to, saying last month it was not for a “political leader to use to term but up to historians to do so when the time comes.”
Detained Greenpeace activists to face judge over Macron waxwork
- Activists stole a 40,000-euro statue of Macron and placed it in front of the Russian embassy and later outside the headquarters of French electricity giant EDF to protest France’s economic ties with Russia
PARIS: Two Greenpeace activists who stole French President Emmanuel Macron’s waxwork from a Paris museum to stage anti-Russia protests have been detained and were set to appear before an investigating judge on Thursday, their lawyer and prosecutors said.
On Monday, several activists stole a 40,000-euro statue of Macron from the Grevin Museum and placed it in front of the Russian embassy and later outside the headquarters of French electricity giant EDF to protest France’s economic ties with Russia.
The statue, estimated to be worth 40,000 euros ($45,500), was returned to police on Tuesday night but two activists, a man and a woman, were detained on Monday, their lawyer Marie Dose said.
Jean-François Julliard, head of Greenpeace France, said that the detained pair were people who drove a truck during the protest in front of the Russian embassy, and not those who “borrowed” the statue from the museum.
“They have spent three nights in a cell,” said Dose, denouncing the detention as “completely disproportionate.”
The lawyer denounced the “deplorable” conditions in which the two activists were being held, “attached to benches for hours and dragged from police station to police station.”
One activist spent the night without a blanket and was unable to lie down because her cell was too small, the lawyer said.
“The other had to sleep on the floor because there were too many people in the cell,” she added.
“This treatment is worrying for Greenpeace activists and raises the question of a dangerous shift in the criminal response to acts of civil disobedience,” she said.
The pair will appear before an investigating magistrate on Thursday as part of a judicial inquiry into the “theft of a cultural object on display,” the Paris prosecutor’s office told AFP.
The judge will decide whether to charge them.
The lawyer argued that “no harm resulted from the non-violent action,” arguing that “all offenses” ceased to exist once the statue has been returned to the museum.
The Grevin Museum filed a complaint on Monday but subsequently took the matter in good humor. “The figures can only be viewed on site,” it said on its Instagram feed.
The activists managed to slip out through an emergency exit of the museum by posing as maintenance workers.
Suspect in murder of Tunisian man to appear before French judge: prosecutors
PARIS: A Frenchman accused of murdering his Tunisian neighbor in the south of France will appear before an anti-terrorism judge on Thursday, the national anti-terror prosecutor’s office said.
Christophe B. is accused of killing Hichem Miraoui in an attack Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau described as both “racist” and “anti-Muslim.”
Anti-terrorism prosecutors have taken over the case, the first time a far-right racist attack has been treated as a “terrorist” offense since the unit was created in 2019.
