News of the Day From Around the World
Turkey’s military on Wednesday ended a three-month operation against Kurdish militants in the largest city in the country’s mostly Kurdish southeast, which had raised concerns about civilians being caught up in the fighting and the possible destruction to monuments and heritage.
Interior Minister Efkan Ala said security forces have concluded their offensive in Diyarbakir against militants linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
Hoping to capture a high-profile target, U.S. special forces hopped off helicopters a couple of miles from an al-Shabab-controlled town, slipped through the dark and then got into a fierce firefight that reportedly killed more than 10 Islamic extremists in Awdhegle town in southern Somalia.
A Somali intelligence official said the person they wanted to get was apparently killed during the fight.
The World Health Organization says traditional insecticide spraying methods have had no significant impact in slowing dengue, raising significant questions about how officials might stop the spread of the Zika virus, also spread by mosquitoes.
At the conclusion of a Zika research and development meeting in Geneva on Wednesday, WHO’s Marie-Paule Kieny said “evidence is missing” that the classical ways of fighting dengue have made any substantial dent in reducing cases.
[...] Zika has triggered outbreaks in 41 countries, although confirmed cases linking the virusto babies with birth defects have only been seen in Brazil and French Polynesia.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled Wednesday that new rules introduced by the new government to regulate how the court functions are unconstitutional.
The ruling deepens a legal crisis that has upended politics in Poland and brought sharp condemnation from European and U.S. authorities.
While it bolsters the moral position of government critics alarmed at what they see as an attack on democracy, the judgment is nonetheless powerless to resolve the crisis because the conservative government of Prime Minister Beata Szydlo says it won’t treat it as valid.
Extremist gunmen raiding a construction site in search of food battled Tunisian security forces on Wednesday, leaving a soldier and two of the attackers dead in the area’s third day of fighting, the government said.
The latest gunbattle around Ben Guerdane comes as security forces supported by helicopters are trying to track down armed attackers who are thought to be holed up in uninhabited houses.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in a region near lawless Libya where the Islamic State group has a growing presence.