Six In The Morning Friday 4 October 2024

 

More blasts reported in Beirut after key route out of Lebanon hit by Israeli strike

Israel evacuation order tells people to head north of Awali river

The Israeli military has issued further evacuation orders today for people in southern Lebanon to move north of the Awali river, which can be seen in the map below.

The Israel Defense Fores (IDF) says anyone near "Hezbollah elements, installations, and combat equipment is putting his life at risk," adding that travelling south may put civilians in further danger.

Summary

• More air strikes have been reported in southern Beirut and Lebanon, as Israel tells more than 30 villages in the south to evacuate

• A major road out of Lebanon was hit overnight - pictures show a large crater near the border crossing into Syria, where thousands of people have been fleeing. Israel says the route was being used to transport weapons

• Rockets continue to be fired into Israel from Lebanon - watch the moment our correspondent runs for cover after hearing gunfire and explosions

Argentina’s Javier Milei accused of plagiarising UN speech from West Wing

Populist leader alleged to have ‘copied word for word’ a monologue by TV show’s fictional president Jed Bartlet

Tom Phillips Latin America correspondent

Fri 4 Oct 2024 15.04 BST

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

Pakistan locks down capital ahead of pro-Khan rally

Supporters of ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan have vowed to march on Islamabad, Pakistan's capital city, with some of them threatening to fire at the police if denied entry.

The Pakistani capital Islamabad was put on lockdown on Friday in preparation for a demonstration by supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Roads leading into the city were blocked with shipping containers, extra police and paramilitary troops were deployed and internet and mobile services were shut down.

Khan's party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaaf (PTI), appeared to ignore a demand from Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi to call off the rally.

October 7 attacks: Israel's intelligence failures

A year after Palestinian armed groups breached Gaza's security fence and led a simultaneous wave of assaults on Israeli communities and outposts, FRANCE 24 looks at the intelligence failures that led to the October 7 attacks. There was plenty of warning that Hamas was planning a large-scale assault: suspicious movements along the border with Gaza, as well as a huge military parade taking place inside the enclave. But Israeli authorities ignored them. FRANCE 24's Claire Duhamel examines how the threat from Hamas was underestimated at the highest echelons of the Israeli army and state. 

On October 4, 2023, the Palestinian armed faction Islamic Jihad organised a huge military parade in Gaza. It proudly displayed its new weapons: drones and long-range rockets capable of reaching the heart of Israel.  A few women, who had been authorised to attend the parade by the local authorities, shouted slogans encouraging the fighters. Militants had been planning for months to stage the attack on Israel for Shabbat, three days later. 

Sudan's war to intensify as rainy season draws to a close

By Khalid Abdelaziz and Aidan Lewis

October 4, 20243:32 AM PDT

After almost 18 months of war, fighting in Sudan is escalating as seasonal rains end with the army using intensified airstrikes and allied fighters to shore up its position ahead of a likely surge by the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

An uptick in fighting will aggravate an already dire humanitarian crisis in which famine has been confirmed and over 10 million people - one fifth of the population - are displaced, more than anywhere else in the world. U.N. agencies have often been unable to deliver aid.

"There won't be a decisive breakthrough," a senior Western diplomat in the region, speaking on condition of anonymity due to political sensitivities, told Reuters.

Scientists looked at images from space to see how fast Antarctica is turning green. Here’s what they found

Parts of icy Antarctica are turning green with plant life at an alarming rate as the region is gripped by extreme heat events, according to new research, sparking concerns about the changing landscape on this vast continent.

Scientists used satellite imagery and data to analyze vegetation levels on the Antarctic Peninsula, a long mountain chain that points north to the tip of South America, and which has been warming much faster than the global average

They found plant life — mostly mosses — had increased in this harsh environment more than 10-fold over the past four decades, according to the study by scientists at the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire in England, and the British Antarctic Survey, published Friday in the journal Nature Geoscience.