Israeli settlers attack West Bank villages
- Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank as a missing teenage settler is found dead.
- The Israeli army says it has attacked a Hezbollah military compound in Lebanon after the armed group launched dozens of rockets into Israel in one of the biggest barrages since the start of the war.
- Tensions remain high in Israel with the army on high alert for an expected attack from Iran that would risk escalating the war on Gaza into a regional conflict.
Israeli settlers expand attacks
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards seize Israeli-affiliated ship
State news agency says MSC Aries was taken in strait of Hormuz and is being transferred to Iran’s territorial waters
A vessel has been seized by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards in the strait of Hormuz, 50 nautical miles off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.
Commandos dropped from a helicopter on to an Israeli-affiliated container ship, the Portuguese-flagged MSC Aries, and Iran’s state news agency said the vessel was being transferred to Iran’s territorial waters.
It said the special forces unit of the guards’ navy carried out the attack on the container ship, which is associated with the London-based Zodiac Maritime ship management company, part of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s Zodiac Group.
Germany has detained 700 people smugglers — minister
German authorities stepped up border checks, arresting hundreds of people smugglers, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said. The operation has stopped nearly 18,000 migrants entering the country, she added.
Germany is having more success in tackling illegal migration, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told a regional newspaper group on Saturday.
"Our border checks have detained 708 smugglers since October and prevented 17,600 unauthorized entries," Faeser said in an interview with the Funke media group.
The minister also noted that asylum applications are "currently a fifth lower than in the same period last year."
India’s mammoth elections: Nearly a billion voters, 44 polling days
The 2024 Indian general election is a massive democratic exercise unmatched in scale globally and historically. Spanning more than six weeks, with an electorate of more than 970 million registered voters, elections in the country dubbed “the world’s largest democracy” are a logistical challenge involving colossal figures.
With nearly 970 million people eligible to vote in the 2024 elections, India has once again broken its own record. The 2019 elections had 900 million registered voters, with a turnout of 67% – which means 615 million people cast their ballots in a single election.
With a population of nearly 1.4 billion people living in a country spanning more than 3 million square kilometres – around six times the size of France – holding nationwide elections on a single day is not possible due to staffing and security reasons.
Seniors 75 and older top 20 million in Japan for the first time
By TAKURO CHIBA/ Staff Writer
April 13, 2024 at 17:54 JST
For the first time in Japan’s history, the number of seniors aged 75 and older topped 20 million.
On April 12, the internal affairs ministry released population estimates as of Oct. 1, 2023.
It said the total population came to 124,352,000, a decrease of 595,000 over the previous year. The figure marked the 13th straight year of population decrease. It was also the second largest drop behind that for 2021.
Eastern Europeans buy up property in the West as Putin steps up ‘war on nerves’
Agnes Marciniak-Kostrzewa’s phone won’t stop ringing. She’s been in the property business for 25 years, helping Poles to buy homes on Spain’s southern shores, but the past few months have been “really crazy.”
There are lots of reasons why people might trade the Baltic coast for the Mediterranean. More than three decades after the collapse of communism, Poles are richer than ever before. Many who started businesses in the early 1990s are now looking to retire. And remote work, ushered in by the pandemic, has allowed many to live more rootlessly and opt for warmer climates.
But several realtors told CNN that their clients are now citing another reason: Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the fear that the conflict could spread.
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