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Wildfire raging for a week in eastern Australia claims a life, razes more than 50 homes

A wildfire is suspected to have killed a man, destroyed more than 50 homes and razed 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of farm and scrubland in eastern Australia, authorities said on Tuesday.

Firefighters have been battling the blaze that has scorched the Queensland state town of Tara for more than a week.

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UN report urges Russia to investigate attack on Ukrainian village that killed 59 civilians

U.N investigators on Tuesday urged Russia to acknowledge responsibility for a missile strike on a Ukrainian village that killed 59 civilians, conduct a transparent investigation into what happened, provide reparations for victims and hold those responsible to account.

The strike on a cafe in the village of Hroza on Oct. 5 was one of the deadliest strikes since the Kremlin's forces launched a full-scale invasion 20 months ago. Whole families perished while attending a wake for a local soldier who died fighting Russian troops. The blast killed 36 women, 22 men and an 8-year-old boy. Numerous bodies were found torn to pieces, and it took nearly a week to identify all the dead.

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Cyprus proposes sea corridor to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza

Cyprus is working out with partners in the European Union and the Middle East the logistics to establish a sea corridor to deliver a stream of vital humanitarian aid to Gaza from the island's main port of Limassol once the situation on the ground permits it, authorities said Tuesday.

A senior government official — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to publicly discuss details of the proposal — said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "wasn't opposed" to the idea pitched by Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides last week.

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War plunges Israel's agricultural heartlands into crisis

The soldiers guarding Avi Chivivian's organic vegetable farm in southern Israel must first scour every corner of his fields for militants before they give him the all clear: He has six hours to work.

It's potato planting season for the farms of southern Israel, a region near the Gaza border that the Agriculture Ministry calls the country's "vegetable barn" because it supplies at least a third of Israel's vegetables. But Chivivian — one of the few remaining farmers in the area since the brutal Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas militants — no longer lives by the harvest cycle. He's on the military's timetable.

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Paris police open fire on woman who made death threats on train

Paris police opened fire Tuesday on a woman suspected of making death threats and speaking in support of terrorism on a train into the French capital, the latest security incident in the country that has been on heightened anti-terror alert since a fatal stabbing at a school on Oct. 13 blamed on an Islamic extremist.

Police fired one shot, hitting and seriously injuring the woman, the Paris prosecutor's office said. It said she was hospitalized for emergency treatment.

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Messi wins record-extending 8th Ballon d'Or, Bonmati takes women's award

The list reads 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2019, 2021, and now 2023.

Lionel Messi won the men's Ballon d'Or for a record-extending eighth time on Monday after fulfilling his life's ambition by leading Argentina to the World Cup title in Qatar last year.

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Israel's economy recovered from previous wars, but this one might hit harder

Just last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted a new era of peace and prosperity in the Middle East, based on growing acceptance of Israel within the region.

Today, with the Israel-Hamas war in its fourth week, that vision is in tatters.

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Israeli ministry proposes transferring Gaza civilians to Egypt's Sinai

An Israeli government ministry has drafted a wartime proposal to transfer the Gaza Strip's 2.3 million people to Egypt's Sinai peninsula, drawing condemnation from the Palestinians and worsening tensions with Cairo.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office played down the report compiled by the Intelligence Ministry as a hypothetical exercise — a "concept paper." But its conclusions deepened long-standing Egyptian fears that Israel wants to make Gaza into Egypt's problem, and revived for Palestinians memories of their greatest trauma — the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were forced from their homes during the fighting surrounding Israel's creation in 1948.

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Biden's Cabinet secretaries to push divided Congress to send aid to Israel, Ukraine

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will make the case Tuesday that the United States should immediately send aid to Israel and Ukraine, testifying at a Senate hearing as the administration's massive $105 billion emergency aid request for conflicts in those countries and others has already hit roadblocks in the divided Congress.

President Joe Biden's Cabinet secretaries will be advocating for the foreign aid to a mostly friendly audience in the Senate, where majority Democrats and many Republicans support tying aid for the two countries together. But it faces much deeper problems in the Republican-led House, where new Speaker Mike Johnson has proposed cutting out the Ukraine aid and focusing on Israel alone, and cutting money for the Internal Revenue Service to pay for it.

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Israel forces battle Hamas in Gaza as PM rejects ceasefire

Israeli ground forces attacked Hamas militants and infrastructure on Tuesday in northern Gaza, which the military said some 800,000 people have fled since the war began more than three weeks ago, even as warplanes continued to strike from end to end of the sealed-off territory.

Buoyed by the first successful rescue of a captive held by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for a cease-fire and again vowed to crush the militant group's ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following its bloody Oct. 7 rampage, which ignited the war.

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