Pistorius’ parole will come with other conditions, Department of Corrections spokesman Singabakho Nxumalo said outside of the prison where Pistorius has been incarcerated in the South African capital, Pretoria.

Pistorius will not be allowed to leave the area of Pretoria where he is set to live without permission from authorities. He will also attend a program to deal with anger issues and another program on violence against women. He will have to perform community service.

“Parole does not mean the end of the sentence. It is still part of the sentence. It only means the inmate will complete the sentence outside a correctional facility,” Nxumalo said. “What will happen is that Mr. Pistorius will be allocated a monitoring official. This official will work with him until his sentence expires.”

Nxumalo said the monitoring official would need to be notified of any major events in Pistorius’ life, including if he wants to move house or get a job.

“We have to be informed of each and every activity,” Nxumalo said.

Pistorius will not wear a monitoring bracelet as that is not part of South African parole procedure, Nxumalo said. Pistorius’ sentence will expire on Dec. 5, 2029.

The decision to grant parole was made at a hearing at the prison earlier Friday.

Pistorius, who turned 37 this week, has been in jail since late 2014 for the Valentine’s Day 2013 killing of model Reeva Steenkamp, although he was released for a period of house arrest in 2015 while one of the numerous appeals in his case was heard. He was ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to 13 years and five months in prison.

Serious offenders in South Africa must serve at least half of their sentence to be eligible for parole, which Pistorius has done.

Pistorius was at the height of his fame and one of the world’s most admired athletes when he killed Steenkamp. He shot her multiple times in the bathroom of his Pretoria villa in the predawn hours with his licensed 9mm pistol.

Pistorius’ parole hearing was his second in the space of eight months. He was wrongly ruled ineligible for early release at a first hearing in March. That was due to an error made by an appeals court over when the sentence officially started.

Pistorius was initially convicted of culpable homicide — a charge comparable to manslaughter — for killing Steenkamp. That conviction was overturned and he was convicted of murder after an appeal by prosecutors. They also appealed against an initial sentence of six years for murder, and Pistorius was ultimately sentenced to 13 years and five months in prison.

Pistorius testified at his murder trial that he killed Steenkamp by mistake when he fired four times through the door thinking she was a dangerous intruder hiding in his bathroom in the middle of the night. Prosecutors argued that Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and reality TV star, had fled to the toilet cubicle during a late-night argument and Pistorius killed her in a rage.

Pistorius was eventually convicted of murder on a legal principle known as dolus eventualis, which means he acted with extreme recklessness and should have known that whoever was behind the door would likely be killed. It’s comparable to third-degree murder.

Steenkamp’s father, Barry Steenkamp, died in September. Her mother, June Steenkamp, did not oppose Pistorius’ parole, but said in a statement before the hearing that she did not believe Pistorius had been fully rehabilitated and was still lying about the killing.

Rob Matthews, a South African man whose 21-year-old daughter was murdered in 2004 and who became a Steenkamp family friend, read out June Steenkamp’s statement. She said she was not opposing Pistorius’ parole and didn’t attend the hearing because “I simply cannot muster the energy to face him again at this stage.”

Nevertheless, “I do not believe Oscar’s version that he thought the person in the toilet was a burglar,” June Steenkamp said in the statement. “In fact, I do not know anybody who does. My dearest child screamed for her life. … I believe he knew it was Reeva.”

While out on parole, Pistorius is expected to live at his uncle’s luxurious mansion in a wealthy Pretoria suburb, where he stayed during his murder trial.

Pistorius was first sent to Pretoria’s central prison, a notorious apartheid-era jail. He was moved to the city’s Atteridgeville Correctional Centre in 2016 and is set to be released from there in a little over a month, when the world will get its first public sight of him in nearly a decade.

There have been only occasional glimpses of Pistorius’ life behind bars. His father has said he has been holding bible classes for fellow prisoners, while a criminologist who worked with him said he had been driving a tractor at a part of the prison where vegetables are grown.

Pistorius’ lawyers have said he has been a “model prisoner.” There have been flashes of trouble, though, including an altercation Pistorius had with another inmate over a prison telephone that left him requiring medical treatment.

Pistorius killed Steenkamp just months after he had become the first double-amputee to compete at the Olympics. He was also a multiple Paralympic sprinting champion and one of sport’s most marketable figures, having overcome the amputation of both his legs below the knee as a baby to run on specially designed carbon-fiber blades. He was known as the “Blade Runner.”

At his sensational trial, prosecutors argued there was another side to Pistorius’ life that involved guns and angry confrontations with others. Pistorius was also found guilty of a second charge of recklessly firing a gun in a restaurant.

Researchers in Sweden followed the medical records of thousands of individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder — known as ADHD — for an average of four years, and up to 14 years, between 2007 and 2020. The patients, ages 6 to 64, were monitored for a range of cardiovascular disease diagnoses. The researchers found that people taking ADHD medications had a higher risk of hypertension and arterial disease, and the risk increased over time.

Each additional year of ADHD medication use elevated the risk of heart disease by an average of 4%, stabilizing after more substantial increases in the first three years of treatment. Overall, the results suggest that heart disease risk was 23% higher for people who have used ADHD medication for more than five years compared with those who did not take medication — but that’s lower than previously reported findings.

Careful attention to the heart health of patients with ADHD is not new, experts say. Earlier research has found that adults with ADHD have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease overall. And stimulants, which are commonly prescribed to treat ADHD, are known to elevate blood pressure as arousal to the nervous system makes the heart work harder.

Heart disease is so rare in children that pediatricians can often manage younger ADHD patients without the involvement of a cardiologist, said Dr. Mitch Elkind, chief clinical science officer for the American Heart Association. Children with specific concerns based on their medical history and adults with underlying risk factors may benefit a more cautious approach to use of ADHD medication, but there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

“It’s really a balancing act,” he said.

About 1 in 10 children ages 3 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And diagnoses are becoming more common among adults.

Patients should be aware of the risks associated with ADHD medications, but not alarmed, experts say.

“When we get into clinical practice, these changes are relatively insignificant in ordinarily healthy adults,” said Dr. David Goodman, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “You need to measure the benefit of the treatment against the relatively small risks, and patients will say benefits are tremendous and I wouldn’t want to give this up.”

Goodman, who is also on the executive board of the American Professional Society for ADHD and Related Disorders, is part of a steering committee that is developing the first published guidelines for the diagnosis and management of ADHD in adults, and the group plans to address the best practices for assessing and monitoring cardiovascular risk in that documentation.

“I don’t want to minimize this,” he said, highlighting the importance of screening for heart health in ADHD patients before starting treatment and checking in regularly.

“But if an adult comes in with hypertension and they’re on medication for that, I would still treat them with stimulant medication and just be more mindful to monitor the blood pressure and pulse,” he said. “I have patients in their early 80s on stimulant medications who would tell you, ‘I would not like you to stop prescribing medication because you’re concerned about my high blood pressure.’”

ADHD patients can monitor and care for their own heart health using the American Heart Association’s “Life’s Essential 8,” a set of key health behaviors and factors that can affect an individual’s risk for heart disease.

“I would say that keeping blood pressure under control is the most important one for somebody on a stimulant,” Elkind said. “Also keeping track of blood sugar and cholesterol levels, eating a healthy diet, exercising, not smoking, getting enough sleep.”

The risk for cardiovascular disease may be underestimated in the new study, the researchers wrote, as some heart disease that does not yet require medical care may not be diagnosed. And some patients who did not take their medication as prescribed could skew results.

While the study was not able to prove that ADHD medications caused heart disease, the findings “highlight the importance of carefully weighing potential benefits and risks when making treatment decisions on long-term ADHD medication use.”

“Clinicians should be vigilant in monitoring patients, particularly among those receiving higher doses, and consistently assess signs and symptoms of (cardiovascular disease) throughout the course of treatment,” the researchers wrote.

Video from the scene in the town of Reading in southern England showed a man being rescued by a crane cage from the roof of a building under construction as thick plumes of dark smoke and flames billowed around him.

A crowd that had gathered near the building broke out in applause as the man was lifted in the air and then lowered to the ground.

Crane operator Glen Edwards, 65, described the situation as a “close call” because of windy conditions.

“I was no more than 20 meters up in the air and I looked out my left-hand window and saw a guy standing on the corner of the building,” said Edwards, who had been working at the site before the blaze broke out.

“I’d only just seen him and someone said ‘can you get the cage on,’ so that was it, I got the cage on and got it over to him the best I could,” he added.

He said he tried to position the cage between the man and the flames but he was “hampered by the wind swirling around there.”

“But I got the cage down and I managed to get him in there,” he said.

More than 50 firefighters arrived at the scene to tackle the blaze, officials said, and another man was also lifted from the building by crane. Both men were taken to a hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation. The fire was extinguished later Thursday.

CSX spokesperson Bryan Tucker said in an email Thursday afternoon that “the fire is completely out.” He said that authorities and CSX officials reviewed air monitoring data and decided it was safe to let displaced return home.

The CSX train derailed around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday near Livingston, a remote town with about 200 people in Rockcastle County. Residents were encouraged to evacuate.

Two of the 16 cars that derailed carried molten sulfur, which caught fire after the cars were breached, CSX said in a statement.

It’s believed that the fire released the potentially harmful gas sulfur dioxide, but officials have not released results of measurements taken from air monitoring equipment that was being deployed Wednesday night.

The derailment meant some Livingston residents woke up on Thanksgiving in a middle school shelter.

Cindy Bradley had just finished cooking for the big meal Wednesday when an official knocking loudly urged her to leave her small Kentucky home as soon as possible because a train had derailed.

She ended up at Rockcastle County Middle School in Livingston — unsure what was to come next.

“It’s just really scary. We don’t know how long this is,” Bradley told WTVQ-TV on Wednesday night, surrounded by dozens of cots.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency website, sulfur dioxide can cause respiratory problems, depending on the concentration and length of exposure. The gas is commonly produced by burning fossil fuels at power plants and other industrial processes, the EPA says.

Evelyn Gray noticed a problem when her back door was opened by someone telling her to evacuate.

“As soon as he opened the back door to come in the chemical hit me, and I had a real bad asthma attack,” Gray told the TV station.

The danger from sulfur dioxide tends to be direct and quick, irritating the lungs and skin, said Neil Donahue, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“It is just nasty, caustic, and acidic stuff that hurts. It’s unpleasant to be in,” Donahue said.

Once the fire was put out, the threat from the chemicals was expected to diminish quickly, Donahue said.

CSX is now working to clean up an additional spilled chemical and restore the area.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency in the county, assuring crews all the help from the state they need. He asked the public to keep in mind the emergency workers and people forced to spend Thanksgiving away from home.

“Please think about them and pray for a resolution that gets them back in their homes. Thank you to all the first responders spending this day protecting our people,” the governor said in a statement Thursday.

CSX promised to pay the costs of anyone asked to evacuate, including a Thanksgiving dinner.

The head of the Irish police, Commissioner Drew Harris, said one officer was seriously injured in the violence that began after news spread that a 5-year-old girl was receiving emergency medical treatment at a Dublin hospital following the attack outside a school. At least 100 people took to the streets, some armed with metal bars and covering their faces.

Harris described the protesters as a “complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology.”

Police said over 400 officers, including many in riot gear, were deployed throughout the city center to contain the unrest, which they said was “caused by a small group of thugs.” A cordon was set up around the Irish Parliament building, Leinster House, and mounted officers were dispatched to nearby Grafton Street.

“These (riots) are scenes that we have not seen in decades, but what is clear is that people have been radicalized through social media and the internet,’’ Harris told reporters on Friday.

“But I don’t want to lose focus on the terrible event in terms of the dreadful assault on schoolchildren and their teacher. There’s a full investigation ongoing. There’s also a full investigation in respect on the disorder.”

Israel — wrenched by the abduction of nearly 240 people in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war — cheered as 13 Israeli women and children emerged free from Gaza. Most were in their 70s or 80s, and the youngest was a 2-year-old. Also released were 10 people from Thailand and one from the Philippines.

In Gaza, the truce’s start Friday morning brought the first quiet for 2.3 million Palestinians reeling and desperate from relentless Israeli bombardment that has killed thousands, driven three-quarters of the population from their homes and leveled residential areas. Rocket fire from Gaza militants into Israel went silent as well.

Increased supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel promised under the deal began to roll into Gaza, where U.N. officials had warned that Israel’s seal on the territory threatened to push it to starvation.

But relief has been tempered — among Israelis by the fact that not all hostages will be freed and among Palestinians by the briefness of the pause. The short truce leaves Gaza mired in humanitarian crisis and under the threat that fighting could soon resume.

Israel says the cease-fire could be extended if more hostages are released, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said it had received a new list of hostages to be released by Hamas on Saturday.

But Israel has vowed to resume its massive offensive once the truce ends. That has clouded hopes that the deal could eventually help wind down the conflict, which has fueled a surge of violence in the occupied West Bank and stirred fears of a wider conflagration across the Middle East.

FIRST HOSTAGES FREED
Under the deal, Hamas is to release at least 50 hostages, and Israel 150 Palestinian prisoners over the four days. Both sides were starting with women and children. Israel said the four-day truce can be extended an extra day for every additional 10 hostages freed.

After nightfall Friday, a line of ambulances emerged from Gaza through the Rafah Crossing into Egypt carrying the freed hostages, as seen live on Egypt’s state-run Al-Qahera TV. The freed Israelis included nine women and four children 9 and under.

The released hostages were taken to three Israeli hospitals for observation. The Schneider Children’s Medical Center said it was treating eight Israelis — four children and four women — and that all appeared to be in good physical condition. The center said they were also receiving psychological treatment, adding that “these are sensitive moments” for the families.

At a plaza dubbed “Hostages Square” in Tel Aviv, a crowd of Israelis celebrated at the news.

Yael Adar spotted her mother, 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, in a TV newscast of the release and was cheered to see her walking. “That was a huge concern, what would happen to her health during these almost two months,” she told Israel’s Channel 12.

But Yael’s 38-year-old son, Tamir Adar, remained in captivity. Both were kidnapped on Oct. 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz. “Everyone needs to come back. It’s happiness locked up in grief.”

The hostages included multiple generations. Nine-year-old Ohad Munder-Zichri was freed along with his mother, Keren Munder, and grandmother Ruti Munder. The fourth-grader was abducted during a holiday visit to his grandparents at the kibbutz where about 80 people — nearly a quarter of all residents of the small community — are believed to have been taken hostage.

The plight of the hostages has raised anger among some families that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not doing enough to bring them home.

Hours later, 24 Palestinian women and 15 teenagers held in Israeli prisons in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem were freed. In the West Bank town of Beituna, hundreds of Palestinians poured out of their homes to celebrate, honking horns and setting off fireworks that lite up the nights sky.

The teenagers had been jailed for minor offenses like throwing stones. The women included several convicted of trying to stab Israeli soldiers, and others who had been arrested at checkpoints in the West Bank.

“As a Palestinian, my heart is broken for my brothers in Gaza, so I can’t really celebrate,” said Abdulqader Khatib, a U.N. worker whose 17-year-old son, Iyas, was freed. “But I am a father. And deep inside, I am very happy.”

Iyas had been taken last year into “administrative detention,” without charges or trial and based on secret evidence. Israel often holds detainees for months without charges. Most of those who are tried are put before military courts that almost never acquit defendants and often don’t follow due process, human rights groups say.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, an advocacy group, Israel is currently holding 7,200 Palestinians, including about 2,000 arrested since the start of the war.

CEASE-FIRE TAKES HOLD
Friday’s halt in fighting brought Gaza’s uprooted population a moment to catch their breath after weeks of fleeing for shelter, searching for food and fearing for family.

After the truce began Friday morning, four trucks of fuel and four trucks of cooking gas entered from Egypt, as well as 200 trucks of relief supplies, Israel said.

Israel has barred all imports into Gaza throughout the war, except for a trickle of supplies from Egypt.

Its ban on fuel, which it said could be diverted to Hamas, caused a territory-wide blackout. Hospitals, water systems, bakeries and shelters have struggled to keep generators running.

During the truce, Israel agreed to allow the delivery of 130,000 liters (34,340 gallons) of fuel per day — still only a small portion of Gaza’s estimated daily needs of more than 1 million liters.

Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are crowded into the southern portion of the territory, with more than 1 million living in U.N. schools-turned-shelters. The calm brought a chance for displaced residents of the south to visit homes and retrieve some belongings.

But the hundreds of thousands who evacuated from northern Gaza to the south were warned not to return in leaflets dropped by Israel. Israeli troops hold much of the north, including Gaza City.

Still, hundreds of Palestinians tried walking north Friday. Two were shot and killed by Israeli troops and another 11 were wounded.

Sofian Abu Amer decided to risk checking his home in Gaza City.

“We don’t have enough clothes, food and drinks,” he said. “The situation is disastrous. It’s better for a person to die.”

Israel’s northern border with Lebanon was also quiet on Friday, a day after the militant Hezbollah group, an ally of Hamas, carried out the highest number of attacks in one day since fighting there began Oct. 8.

Hezbollah is not a party to the cease-fire agreement but was widely expected to halt its attacks.

A LONGER PEACE?
The war erupted when several thousand Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking scores of hostages, including babies, women and older adults, as well as soldiers.

The hope is that “momentum” from the deal will lead to an “end to this violence,” said Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, which served as a mediator along with the United States and Egypt.

But hours before it came into effect, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told troops that their respite would be short and that the war would resume with intensity for at least two more months.

Netanyahu has also vowed to continue the war to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities, end its 16-year rule in Gaza and return all the hostages.

The Israeli offensive has killed more than 13,300 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza government. Women and minors have consistently made up around two-thirds of the dead, though the latest number was not broken down. The figure does not include updated numbers from hospitals in the north, where communications have broken down.

The ministry says some 6,000 people have been reported missing, feared buried under rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants in its death tolls.

Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas fighters, without presenting evidence for its count.

At that time, police seized an assault-style rifle and 9 mm handgun from John Madore, 33. Madore, who was arrested in Strafford on assault and reckless conduct charges, was later involuntarily admitted at New Hampshire Hospital in Concord, according to records. The charges were dismissed in 2017 following a competency evaluation that remains sealed.

The weapons ban against Madore was part of bail orders unsealed by a judge Wednesday following a request by the New Hampshire Bulletin.

On Nov. 17, Madore had a 9 mm pistol and ammunition when he shot and killed Bradley Haas, a state Department of Safety security officer who was working at the hospital’s front lobby entrance, the state attorney general’s office said. Madore was fatally shot by a state trooper shortly afterward.

In addition to the pistol, police found an AR-style rifle, a tactical vest and several ammunition magazines in a U-Haul truck in the hospital’s parking lot that Madore had rented.

Those firearms were not the same ones seized in 2016, Michael Garrity, a spokesperson for the New Hampshire attorney general’s office, confirmed in a statement late Wednesday. The guns used in 2016 remain in the custody of the Strafford Police Department, he said.

It remains unclear how Madore, who had most recently lived in a hotel in New Hampshire’s Seacoast area, acquired the guns found Nov. 17. If he had tried to buy them, he would have been required to note his hospitalization at a mental health institution when filling out a federal firearms application.

Madore was accused in 2016 of choking his sister and grabbing his mother around the neck and knocking her to the floor because he was upset that they had put the family dog down, according to an affidavit.

When police arrived at their Strafford home, Madore was barricaded in an upstairs bedroom and said he had firearms and that it wasn’t going to end well, the police affidavit states. He eventually surrendered peacefully, police said.

A celebration of life has been scheduled on Nov. 27 for for Haas, 63, a former police chief from Franklin, New Hampshire.

The beer is safe to drink, thanks to a series of treatments that include microfiltration and ultraviolet light, and it is meant to bring attention to the issue of water scarcity and reuse.

“Buildings globally use 14% of all potable water,” says Aaron Tartakovsky, CEO and co-founder of Epic Cleantec, the San Francisco-based water treatment company that made the beer in collaboration with a local brewery. “Almost no buildings reuse that water — that’s what we’re trying to change.”

The beer is a Kölsch-style ale — a crisp, light-bodied drink originating from Germany — and was made with recycled graywater from Fifteen Fifty, a 40-story luxury apartment building in San Francisco. But it’s not for sale, as regulations prohibit the use of recycled wastewater in commercial beverages. At least for now.

A ‘solar’ moment

Epic Cleantec equips buildings with its water recycling system, eliminating the need to discharge wastewater into a sewer to transport it to a remote treatment facility. The system recycles up to 95% of wastewater, according to the company — either what is known as blackwater, which comes from toilets, or graywater, which comes from sinks, washing machines, bathtubs and showers.

It does so by first using biological treatment to remove organic matter, then microfiltration via membranes just 0.04 microns thick (about 0.05% of the thickness of a human hair), and finally disinfection by ultraviolet light and chlorine, which makes the water safe for reuse in non-potable applications like toilet and urinal flushing, irrigation and laundry. The system installed in Fifteen Fifty is designed to recycle 7,500 gallons of water per day, or up to 2.75 million gallons per year.

“What we’ve done is just take a lot of existing principles in the wastewater world and design it for single buildings instead,” Tartakovsky said. “We do for water what solar did for energy, which is moving away from a sole reliance on large, centralized infrastructure.”

Epic Cleantec says the system has other benefits: recovered heat from the wastewater can be used to pre-heat domestic hot water, cutting heating costs, and the organic matter in the wastewater can be used to produce natural soil products, usable in landscaping, gardens or parks.

An installation takes the space of a few parking spots, on average, but it’s expensive — from a few hundred thousand dollars into the millions, depending on the size of the building. However, Tartakovsky says that it pays for itself in just a few years, by lowering utility bills.

In San Francisco, since 2015, all new buildings of more than 100,000 square feet are required to have an on-site water recycling system; out of the few dozen currently installed, Epic Cleantec is responsible for five.

“It’s very common sense. Why are we still using pristine drinking water from our national parks to flush the toilets of our tech employees in downtown San Francisco?” Tartakovsky asks. “Scientifically, this water often meets or even exceeds drinking water standards.”

Cutting water usage

Epic Cleantec started its beer project in late 2022, for attendees of a conference on sustainable building technologies. “We ended up producing just over 7,000 cans, not as a commercial product, but as an educational effort,” Tartakovsky says, using 2,000 gallons of recycled water. “It was meant to tell the water reuse story in a new way. But frankly, we did not anticipate the tremendous response that we saw.”

While Epic Cleantec’s system isn’t intended to produce water for drinking, regulations currently allow potable reuse of wastewater in many US states, including California and Texas. More states, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Washington, are in the process of updating their water reuse regulations.

“Recycled water is already being used as a source of drinking water in places like Southern California, Singapore and Australia,” says David Sedlak, director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “All of those operations rely upon recycling plants that are associated with sewage treatment plants. Building-scale water recycling systems offer an opportunity for cities to reduce their reliance on water from rivers, lakes and reservoirs — sources that are vulnerable to climate change. It also offers opportunities to save energy and reduce the amount of pollutants that cities release to the environment.”

Sedlak, who is not involved in Epic Cleantec, says the water recycling system developed by the company has proven its technology to be a viable means of recycling water within buildings. “It is clean enough to use to produce a tasty beer and it is certainly clean enough to use for toilet flushing and landscape irrigation,” he adds.

In 2017, two California-based brewers produced limited-edition beers made from recycled water, to serve at local events. Daniel McCurry, an assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California, tried one. “I drank it with no reservations, but it was brewed with water from a municipal potable reuse project in San Diego,” he says.

He explains that municipal systems for potable reuse typically include two more steps than Epic Cleantec’s – reverse-osmosis and UV/advanced oxidation processes – which McCurry says can remove chemical contaminants such as industrial solvents and pharmaceuticals “to a much greater extent than by ultrafiltration, UV, and chlorine alone.”

Being able to sell beer or other drinks made with such water would require another regulatory step, but it isn’t out of the question, according to Tartakovsky. “When I got into the water industry, there was a lot of often-repeated tropes that the general public was just not ready for recycled water,” he says.

“In the industry, we call it the ‘yuck’ factor. There’s a mental perception that recycled water is not as clean as other sources of water. But what I often remind people of is that all water on this planet is recycled. The water we are drinking today is the same water that was consumed by the dinosaurs millions of years ago.”

He adds that, despite not being its focus, Epic Cleantec is now having conversations with some of the largest brewers in the world. “We have a lot of people who are asking for more of it, just because beyond being an interesting environmental story, the beer actually just tastes really good,” he says.

“You’re going to start hearing a lot more about a lot of different industries using recycled water for their products. I think the sky’s the limit for what we can do.”

The Transportation Security Administration is reporting that more than 2.7 million travelers have passed through security on Wednesday, and that won’t even be the busiest expected day.

Travel experts said that nearly 3 million passengers are expected to pass through TSA on Sunday, which would break travel records.

The world’s busiest airport, Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport, marked its busiest morning ever on Wednesday with a record breaking 32,00 thousand passengers by 8 a.m.

According to officials, they are urging people to avoid rinsing or washing a turkey before cooking it because that can spread germs.

The CDC also recommends not leaving the turkey on the counter because certain temperatures can cause bacteria to grow and to make sure to wash all dishes and utensils the raw turkey has touched.

Finally, the CDC said that the stuffing’s center must reach 165 degrees fahrenheit for it to be safe to eat.

Johnny Hollman Sr. became unresponsive during his arrest late on the night of Aug. 10 and later died. An autopsy determined the 62-year-old’s death was a homicide, with heart disease also a contributing factor, and his family has called on prosecutors to charge Officer Kiran Kimbrough with murder. An attorney for Kimbrough, who was fired, says the officer acted lawfully.

The roughly hour-long video shows Kimbrough arriving at the scene of the crash and gathering information from Hollman, the other driver and a passenger before the confrontation.

Relatives have said Hollman was driving home from Bible study at his daughter’s house and bringing dinner to his wife when he collided with another vehicle while turning across a busy street just west of downtown Atlanta.

In the video, Hollman repeatedly insists the other driver hit him, but otherwise follows Kimbrough’s orders to move his car and stay by it. The encounter escalates after Kimbrough tells Hollman he failed to turn his white Chevrolet Silverado pickup correctly and was at fault for the crash.

Hollman immediately begins protesting, saying repeatedly, “I didn’t do nothing.” Kimbrough tells Hollman he can contest the finding in court, but he needs to sign the citation. He also accuses Hollman of screaming and repeatedly warns him that he will be jailed if he doesn’t sign.

Kimbrough’s attorney Lance LoRusso said in an emailed statement Wednesday that before the officer arrived, the other parties in the collision called 911 to report Hollman was disorderly and they were concerned for their safety.

“Mr. Hollman violently and unlawfully resisted Officer Kimbrough’s lawful efforts to arrest him,” LoRusso said. “The Atlanta Police investigation confirmed Officer Kimbrough deployed his city-issued TASER and used force in a manner consistent with his training and Georgia law.”

In the video, Hollman says he will sign the ticket after Kimbrough steps closer to him. Kimbrough’s body camera gets blocked, obscuring exactly what happens next, but the two men begin to struggle.

Kimbrough demands Hollman’s arm, but Hollman says his right arm hurts. Within seconds, Hollman is on the ground, saying he didn’t do anything and asking the officer why he’s doing this.

“I’m an old man. I’m an old man,” Hollman says.

Kimbrough yells at him to sign the ticket and says he is going to use his Taser on him.

“Put your hands behind your back now. Put your arms behind your back,” Kimbrough shouts before engaging his Taser in what police have said was a “warning arc.”

The tussling continues, with Kimbrough continuing to tell Hollman to put his hands behind his back and Hollman repeating over and over, “I can’t breathe.”

The officer then uses his Taser to shock Hollman — a maneuver police have called a “drive stun.”

The video also shows the aftermath of the struggle. Another first responder arrives and helps Kimbrough get handcuffs on Hollman, who is lying face down and is no longer fighting. Kimbrough rolls Hollman over, checks his pulse and tells him to sit up. But Hollman is unresponsive, lying on the ground with a bloody face.

When other officers arrive a couple of minutes later, Kimbrough explains Hollman protested when instructed to sign a ticket, resisted when told to put his hands behind his back and looked like he was going to hit the officer. Kimbrough said he punched Hollman a couple of times, stunned him and put him in handcuffs.

“I don’t know what’s going on with him now,” Kimbrough says. “He’s still breathing, though.”

The video’s release came after Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum fired Kimbrough on Oct. 10. Schierbaum said Kimbrough, who like Hollman is Black, violated department policy when he didn’t wait until a supervisor arrived to arrest Hollman.

LoRusso said Georgia law doesn’t require an officer to seek approval from a supervisor before making an arrest and said Kimbrough has appealed his firing.

Mawuli Davis, a lawyer for the family, said at a news conference Wednesday that Hollman was doing nothing wrong.

“What he was doing was he was making his case, like so many of us do when someone is going to issue us a ticket,” Davis said. He later added, “Instead of listening and being patient and using his training of de-escalation, instead this officer treated him as if he were not an elder.”

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has completed its inquiry into Hollman’s death and handed over its investigative file to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who will decide whether to seek charges. The district attorney’s office investigation is ongoing, and it’s not clear when that decision will be made, a spokesman said Wednesday.

Hollman’s daughter, Arnitra Hollman, said she’s grateful to Willis for releasing the video, but that’s only the first step.

“Now moving forward, we need him jailed,” she said of Kimbrough. “We need him prosecuted to the fullest extent because our father’s life means so much, not just to us but to people in the community.”

Hollman’s death has contributed to discontent with police among some Atlantans that centers on a proposal to build a large police and firefighter training facility that opponents call “Cop City.”

It also prompted Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to instruct the police department to do a “top-to-bottom review” of its standard operating procedures and training curriculum. That review led to some changes, notably a rule change that says officers should write “refusal to sign” on a traffic ticket instead of arresting someone who won’t sign.

In a statement Wednesday, Dickens said many people, especially Hollman’s family, will find the video difficult to watch.

“I continue to extend my deepest sympathy to them and hold them close in my thoughts and prayers,” he said.

The Great Dane’s owner Courtney Tucker, who lives near Tulsa, reached out to Chewy in hopes of giving 11-year-old Riley one last Christmas. Riley was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, and has outlived the breed’s life expectancy of 8-10 years.

With Riley not expected to make it to Christmas Day, Tucker wrote a letter to the company’s Chewy Claus program, which its website says helps make pets’ “holiday wishes come true one letter at a time.”

“While he may not make it to Christmas, it would mean the world to us if Chewy Claus was able to give us one last holiday celebration with everyone who loves Riley,” Tucker wrote in the letter.

Chewy Claus made Christmas come early for Riley and Tucker, giving the Great Dane a slew of toys, treats, a steak dinner and, most importantly, a Christmas celebration with his favorite people.

“Riley is so special to everyone. He has a relationship with almost everyone in my family, and giving him this experience just means so much not (just) to me but every single family as well,” Tucker said in a Chewy video of the Christmas celebration.

The parade started on Manhattan’s Upper West Side making its way alongside Central Park in front of big crowds and a national television audience before ending in front of Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street.

Among the big names performing is Cher, who just released her first Christmas album. The Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy Award-winner has a prime spot — performing just before the arrival of Santa Claus, which marks the end of the parade.

Other celebrities and musical groups taking part include Jon Batiste, Bell Biv DeVoe, Brandy, Jessie James Decker, Pentatonix and Miss America 2023 Grace Stanke. The parade also includes performances from the casts of some Broadway shows.

New balloons debuting this year include Leo the lizard, a character from a Netflix film, who is more than 40 feet (12.5 meters) tall, as well as ones that have been there before — like SpongeBob, coming in at 44 feet (13.4 meters).

Some characters, like Snoopy, have been in the parade for many years, but this year’s balloon is a new Beagle Scout Snoopy version — celebrating the 50th anniversary of his first appearance in the Peanuts comics.

The parade isn’t just about what’s going on in the skies, though. At street level, the procession includes more than two dozen floats, interspersed with marching bands from around the country and a number of clown crews among the 8,000 people participating, organizers said.

Thousands lined the streets in coats on a sunny morning. Children were on the shoulders of their parents, shouting as Snoopy and SpongeBob and Leo the Lizard went by.

Terri Brown, her husband and their children, ages 3, 5 and 8, were groggy after the 30-mile (50-kilometer) drive from Westfield, New Jersey. But their faces lit up as the parade started.

“I’ve always wanted to bring them here since I used to come as a kid,” Brown said. “I’m happy it’s good weather.”

Ross Greenstein drove 10 hours from Michigan to catch the parade with his daughter, who is studying law in New York, as well as his wife and two other children. Before Thursday, he had only seen the parade on TV.

“I grew up every Thanksgiving, waking up and jumping on the couch and watching the parade,” Greenstein said. “We came to see the parade for the first time in my life and it feels very surreal.”

This is the 97th time the parade has been held since 1924.

The broadcast is hosted by Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb and Al Roker from “Today” and airs on NBC.

President Joe Biden and his wife Jill called NBC during the parade. The president told Al Roker that people should take a moment to be thankful to live in a country with so much.

“We’re the greatest nation in the world. We should focus on that. We should focus on dealing with our problems and stop the rancor,” Biden said.

The waves of rockets sent over the border represented one of the most intense bombardments since Hezbollah started attacking Israeli posts in the country’s north at the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.

Hezbollah has said that by heating up its actions on the Israel-Lebanon border, it is easing pressure on the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s crushing aerial, ground and naval offensive has left more than 13,300 Palestinians dead and caused wide destruction in the sealed-off enclave.

The war was triggered by an Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that left about 1,200 people dead, most of them civilians, and resulted in about 240 hostages getting taken to Gaza.

An agreement for a four-day cease-fire in Gaza and the release of dozens of hostages held by the militants and Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, was set to take place Thursday but appeared to have hit a last-minute snag.

Hezbollah said in a series of statements released Thursday that the volleys it fired toward Israeli posts included 48 Katyusha rockets that were directed at an Israeli army base in Beit Zeitem, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) south of the border.

The group said its fighters also struck tanks and locations where Israeli troops were taking positions.

The intense fire followed an Israeli airstrike on a house in Beit Yahoun, a village in southern Lebanon, that killed the five senior fighters, including Abbas Raad, the son of the head of Hezbollah’s 13-member parliamentary bloc in Lebanon, Mohammed Raad.

The deaths bring the number of Hezbollah fighters who have been killed in seven weeks of fighting to at least 83.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met in Beirut in Thursday with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian. They discussed the ongoing war in Gaza and efforts to “stop the Israeli aggression,” as well as the situation at the tense Lebanon-Israel border, according to a statement released by Hezbollah.

Amirabdollahian warned in comments to journalists upon his arrival in Lebanon Wednesday that the ongoing Israel-Hamas war could “spiral out of control” if a truce does not last.

Iran-backed factions in Iraq, including the militant group Kataib Hezbollah, have carried out more than 60 and rocket or suicide drone attacks at bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. Kataib Hezbollah is allied with Lebanon’s Hezbollah but the groups have different leaders.

The U.S. military said Thursday that one of its warships in the Red Sea shot down bomb-carrying drones launched from territory controlled by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The American military’s Central Command said the USS Thomas Hudner, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, shot down the drones early Thursday morning. “The ship and crew sustained no damage or injury,” Central Command said.

The diplomatic breakthrough promised some relief for the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza who have endured weeks of Israeli bombardment, as well as families in Israel fearful for the fate of their loved ones taken captive during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.

The deal appeared to hit a last-minute snag when Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, announced a one-day delay late Wednesday, without providing a reason. The cease-fire was originally set to begin Thursday morning.

On Thursday, Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, which played a key role in mediating with Hamas, announced the cease-fire will start at 7 a.m. local time Friday (5 a.m. GMT.)

He said the two sides had exchanged lists of those to be released, and the first group of hostages held by Hamas — including 13 women and children — would be freed Friday afternoon. Increased aid for Palestinians will start to enter “as soon as possible,” al-Ansari said.

RISING TOLL IN GAZA

The Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza, meanwhile, resumed its detailed count of Palestinian casualties from the war, saying over 13,300 have been killed. The new numbers were not fully broken down, but in past tallies, women and minors have consistently made up around two-thirds of the dead.

The figures do not include updated numbers from hospitals in the north, where services and communication largely broke down earlier this month. The ministry says some 6,000 people have been reported missing and are feared to be buried under rubble.

The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants in its death tolls. Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas fighters, without presenting evidence for its count.

The ministry stopped publishing casualty counts as of Nov. 11, saying it had lost the ability to do so because of the collapse of the health sector in the north.

NETANYAHU SAYS TRUCE WON’T END WAR

The truce agreement had raised hopes of eventually winding down the war, which has leveled vast swaths of Gaza, fueled a surge of violence in the occupied West Bank, and stirred fears of a wider conflagration across the Middle East.

Air raid sirens sounded across northern Israel on Thursday as Hezbollah said it fired 48 Katyusha rockets from southern Lebanon. The barrage came after an Israeli strike killed five Hezbollah fighters, including the son of the head of the group’s parliamentary bloc.

The Israeli military said it was striking the sources of the launches. Israel and Hezbollah, which fought a monthlong war in 2006, have repeatedly traded fire across the border since the war in Gaza broke out.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the war after the truce expires, with the goal of destroying Hamas’ military capabilities, ending its 16-year rule in Gaza and returning all of the estimated 240 captives held in Gaza by Hamas and other groups.

“We will continue it until we achieve all our goals,” Netanyahu said, adding that he had delivered the same message in a phone call to U.S. President Joe Biden. Washington has provided extensive military and diplomatic support to Israel since the start of the war.

The delay in implementing the cease-fire dismayed uprooted Palestinians in Gaza, who hope to use the few days of quiet to visit homes they fled – or at least the wreckage of them — and to reconnect with families after the massive dispersal caused by the Israeli assault.

“We’d been waiting and hoping since yesterday,” said Aya Hamad, who is sheltering at a hospital in the central city of Deir al Balah. “We wanted to go home to get a change of clothes for our children, even though we know our homes have been bombed and are gone. … But no, it’s all for nothing.”

Many talked of trying to make short visits to homes in Gaza City in the north of the territory, though it was unlikely Israeli troops controlling the area would have allowed it.

Israeli troops hold much of northern Gaza and say they have dismantled tunnels and much of Hamas’ infrastructure there. Israeli forces on Wednesday revealed what they said was a major Hamas hideout in a tunnel beneath Shifa Hospital.

The territory’s largest medical center has been at the heart of a fierce battle of narratives over both sides’ allegedly reckless endangerment of civilians. Hamas and hospital staff deny Israeli allegations that Shifa was used as a militant command center.

The military said Thursday it detained Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Shifa, for questioning over his involvement in what it said were “extensive” Hamas activities in the hospital. Gaza’s Health Ministry called on international bodies to intervene and said it would no longer cooperate with the World Health Organization in evacuating hospitals.

Earlier Thursday, Israel ordered the full evacuation of the Indonesian Hospital in the north, Dr. Munir al-Boursh, a Health Ministry official inside the facility, told Al-Jazeera.

Fighting has raged outside the hospital for days, and hundreds of people have already been evacuated to the south. It was unclear if the arrest of Abu Selmia would affect those efforts.

Israel has threatened to launch wider operations in southern Gaza, where most of the territory’s population is now located. More than 1 million people, including hundreds of thousands who fled the north, have crammed into overflowing U.N.-run shelters with dwindling food, water and basic supplies.

For Hamas, the cease-fire would provide an opportunity to regroup after weeks of apparently heavy losses. Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar, who is believed to be alive and in hiding in Gaza, is likely to claim the release of Palestinian prisoners as a major achievement and declare victory if the war ends.

HOSTAGES TO BE FREED IN STAGES

Under the truce deal, 50 hostages are supposed to be freed in stages, in exchange for the release of what Hamas said would be 150 Palestinian prisoners. Women and children would be released first, and Israel said the truce would be extended an extra day for every additional 10 hostages freed.

The return of hostages could lift spirits in Israel, where their plight has gripped the country. Families of the hostages have staged mass demonstrations to pressure the government to bring them home.

Qatar said the cease-fire would allow a “larger number of humanitarian convoys and relief aid” to enter Gaza, including fuel, but it gave no details on quantities.

Israel cut off all imports at the start of the war, except for a trickle of food, water and medical supplies allowed in from Egypt. The lack of fuel has caused a territory-wide blackout, leaving homes and hospitals reliant on generators, which have also steadily been forced to shut down.

Israel’s Justice Ministry published a list of 300 prisoners eligible to be released, mainly teenagers detained over the past year for rock-throwing and other minor offenses.

The war erupted when several thousand Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking scores of hostages, including babies, women and older adults, as well as soldiers, for whom Hamas is expected to demand a large number of high-profile prisoners.

More than 1.7 million people, three-fourths of Gaza’s population, have been displaced in the war. Many, if not most, will be unable to return home because of the vast damage and the presence of Israeli troops in the north.

Israel has barred imports to Gaza since the start of the war, except for a trickle of aid. Humanitarian aid groups operating in Gaza said the truce will prove too short and the Rafah crossing’s capacity insufficient to meet urgent needs.

The truce raised hopes of eventually winding down the war, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 deadly rampage into Israel. Now in its seventh week, the war has leveled vast swaths of Gaza, fueled a surge of violence in the occupied West Bank, and stirred fears of a wider conflagration across the Middle East.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a nationally televised news conference that the war would resume after the truce expires. Israel’s goals are to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and return all 240 hostages held captive in Gaza.

“I want to be clear. The war is continuing. The war is continuing. We will continue it until we achieve all our goals,” Netanyahu said, adding he had delivered the same message in a phone call to U.S. President Joe Biden. He also said he had instructed the Mossad spy agency to hunt down Hamas’ exiled leadership “wherever they are.”

The cease-fire efforts hit another hurdle when Israel’s national security adviser said in a late-night announcement that the deal would not take effect before Friday, a day later than originally expected. Tzachi Hanegbi gave no reason for the delay, but Channel 13 TV said there were still some last-minute details being ironed out.

If implemented, the deal temporarily freezes both sides at a tenuous moment.

Israeli troops hold much of northern Gaza and say they have dismantled tunnels and much of Hamas’ infrastructure there. But Israeli officials acknowledge the group’s infrastructure remains intact elsewhere. Netanyahu’s announcement Wednesday appeared to be aimed at public concerns that a truce will lead Israel to halt its offensive before achieving its goals.

Israel has said it is determined to take its ground offensive into the south. That could be potentially devastating for Gaza’s uprooted population, most of which is squeezed into the south with nowhere to go to avoid the assault.

Residents in Gaza City said the fighting intensified overnight into Wednesday, with gunfire, heavy artillery and airstrikes. Palestinian militants continued firing rockets at Israel throughout the day, without causing casualties.

A DIPLOMATIC BREAKTHROUGH
The announcement of the truce capped weeks of indirect, stop-and-go negotiations to free some of the hostages taken by Hamas and other militants during their Oct. 7 raid. Egypt and Qatar, along with the United States, helped mediate the deal.

Fifty hostages will be freed in stages, in exchange for the release of what Hamas said would be 150 Palestinian prisoners. Both sides will let go women and children first.

Israel said the truce would be extended an extra day for every additional 10 hostages freed by Hamas. Hamas said hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian aid — including fuel — would be allowed to enter Gaza.

Netanyahu said the deal also included a provision for the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit the hostages in captivity.

The cease-fire is to take effect at 10 a.m. local time (0800 GMT) Thursday, according to Egypt’s state-run Qahera TV channel.

Biden welcomed the deal, saying Netanyahu committed to supporting an “extended pause.” Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said he hoped it would eventually lead to a permanent cease-fire and “serious talks” on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel’s Justice Ministry published a list of 300 prisoners eligible to be released, mainly teenagers detained over the past year for rock-throwing and other minor offenses.

WILL THE WAR RESUME?
The war erupted when several thousand Hamas militants broke into southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking hostages.

Weeks of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, followed by a ground invasion, have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. It does not differentiate between civilians and militants, though some two-thirds of the dead have been identified as women and minors.

The ministry said that as of Nov. 11 it had lost the ability to count the dead because of the collapse of large parts of the health system, but says the number has risen sharply since then. Some 2,700 people are missing and believed buried under rubble.

Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas fighters, though it has presented no evidence for its count.

Hamas, meanwhile, will have a chance to regroup. Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar will likely present the release of the prisoners — seen by most Palestinians as heroes resisting occupation — as a major achievement, and declare victory if the war ends.

STRIKES CONTINUE
An airstrike overnight hit a residential building in the southern town of Khan Younis, killing 17 people, including children, said Ahmad Balouny, a relative of the deceased. An Associated Press reporter saw the bodies of two children pulled from the rubble.

Outside Khan Younis, workers dug a mass grave for 111 bodies that Israeli authorities handed over after troops took them from Shifa Hospital and other parts of northern Gaza. Israeli troops had taken the bodies apparently for DNA analysis amid the search for hostages in the north.

Strikes also leveled buildings in the Nusseirat refugee camp and the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The city’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said 128 bodies were brought in overnight after strikes.

In northern Gaza, about 60 bodies and 200 people wounded by heavy fighting were brought into the Kamal Adwan Hospital overnight, hospital director Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout told Al-Jazeera television Wednesday.

Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced in the war. Many, if not most, will be unable to return home because of the vast damage and the continued presence of Israeli troops in the north. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said that more than 1 million Palestinians were seeking shelter in 156 of its facilities in Gaza.

The cease-fire deal promises an increase of aid to the south, bringing some relief to hundreds of thousands who have struggled to find food and water. Israel has barred imports to Gaza since the start of the war, except for a trickle of aid entering through Egypt’s Rafah crossing.

A Qatari statement said the cease-fire would allow a “larger number of humanitarian convoys and relief aid,” including fuel. But it gave no details on actual quantities.

Humanitarian aid groups operating in Gaza criticized the cease-fire, saying the truce was too short and the Rafah crossing’s capacity was insufficient to deliver enough aid to meet the urgent demand.

The Palestine Red Crescent aid group and U.N. teams evacuated 190 wounded and sick people, their companions and some medical teams from Shifa Hospital to hospitals in southern Gaza, Wednesday, a Red Crescent spokesperson said.

DEAL COULD DIVIDE ISRAELIS
The return of hostages could lift spirits in Israel, where their plight has gripped the country. Families of the hostages have staged mass demonstrations to pressure the government to bring them home.

But they could also find themselves divided as some hostages are freed and others not.

Ofri Bibas Levy, whose brother, sister-in-law and two nephews — aged 4 and 10 months — are among the captives, said the deal puts the families in an “inhumane” situation.

“Who will be released, who won’t?” she asked. “No matter which way it happens, there will still be families that will remain worried and sad and angry.”

As part of what the company described as a routine review of customer information, Stellantis determined that eight of the hybrid Wranglers had caught fire while they were turned off and parked. Six of the vehicles were being charged when the fires started. The company said it doesn’t believe anyone was hurt in the fires.

The recall covers 2021-2024 models of the Jeep Wrangler 4xe SUVs. All other Wrangler models have been deemed safe by Stellantis, which maintains its U.S. headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

The SUVs affected by the recall can still be driven until they are fixed, but Stellantis is recommending they be parked away from buildings and not be charged until they can be repaired. The fixes involve either resetting or updating the software, or replacing the vehicle’s battery pack.

Stellantis plans to contact the owners of the SUVs that need to be fixed.

The FBI’s Buffalo office said late Wednesday that it had concluded its investigation: “A search of the scene revealed no explosive materials, and no terrorism nexus was identified,” it said in a statement. “The matter has been turned over to the Niagara Falls Police Department as a traffic investigation.”

Much remained unclear about the incident at the Rainbow Bridge, which prompted concerns on both sides of the border as the U.S. headed into the Thanksgiving holiday. Both U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were briefed soon afterward, and Trudeau excused himself from Question Period in the House of Commons to get further information, saying officials were “taking this extraordinarily seriously.”

A few hours later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and western New York’s U.S. attorney, Trini Ross, both sought to ease fears.

“Based on what we know at this moment,” Hochul said at a news conference, “there is no sign of terrorist activity in this crash.”

At a separate news conference with Ross nearby in Buffalo, Erie Country Sheriff John Garcia said, “We can go on with our lives.”

Security camera video released by the U.S. government showed the car race through an intersection on a wet road, hit a low median and vault high into the air in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection area just east of the main vehicle checkpoint. The car flew for yards (meters), twisting, and then crashed into a line of booths out of the camera’s view.

Rickie Wilson, a Niagara Falls tour guide, was by his parked car nearby and turned around when he saw something in the air.

“I first thought it was an airplane. It looked like slow motion,” he said. “I said, ‘My God, it’s a car. It’s a vehicle, and it’s flying through the air.’”

The identities of those in the car weren’t released. Hochul said it wasn’t clear whether the driver — a western New York resident — was intentionally heading for the bridge, which crosses the Niagara River.

The two people who died were a husband and wife, according to a person briefed on the investigation who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information about the people who were killed.

Matthew Miraglia, the FBI special agent in charge in Buffalo, said investigators so far had found no “derogatory” information on the driver.

“We’re scanning his social media. There’s nothing there,” Miraglia said.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Wednesday night that he had been in contact with both the FBI and the White House and investigators had found “no connection to any terrorist or criminal group.” Investigators swabbed the scene and found no evidence of chemicals or substances used for explosives, he added.

Officials said the car was traveling at tremendous speed as it approached the bridge at around 11:30 a.m. in downtown Niagara Falls in an area that includes several hotels and a casino.

Hochul said the car ended up “basically incinerated,” with nothing left but the engine. Debris was scattered across a dozen checkpoint booths. The governor, a Democrat, called video of the airborne car “absolutely surreal.”

Photos and video taken by bystanders and posted on social media showed thick smoke, flames on the pavement and a singed security booth. A Customs and Border Protection worker in a checkpoint booth was treated at a hospital for minor injuries and released, Hochul said.

From inside Niagara Falls State Park, Melissa Raffalow said she saw “a huge plume of black smoke” rise up over the border crossing, roughly 50 yards (45 meters) away from the popular tourist destination. Raffalow told AP in a message that police arrived soon after, urging visitors to disperse as they began cordoning off the street.

Raghu Bhattarai said by phone that he was inside his restaurant, the Niagara Tandoori Hut, near the bridge when he heard a sound he described as a “boom.” A few minutes later, he saw black smoke rising.

The Rainbow Bridge — a short span that offers striking views of the falls — and three others between western New York and Ontario were quickly closed as a precaution, though the other three later reopened. The Buffalo-Niagara International Airport began security checks on all cars and told passengers to expect additional screenings.

The safety measures tied up traffic at the airport and elsewhere on one of the busiest U.S. travel days of the year, ahead of the American Thanksgiving holiday.

Sanchit Chatha, his wife Reyshu and their 13-year-old daughter, Trisha, had stopped in Niagara Falls for lunch en route home to Toronto from Buffalo when they started getting news notifications about the explosion. Worried friends called, knowing the family was in the area.

Trisha was concerned at seeing the bridges to Canada shut down, her mother said.

“She has a math test tomorrow,” the mother explained as the family waited to find out when the crossings would open.

In Toronto, about 100 miles (about 160 kilometers) away, police said they were increasing patrols as a precaution. New York City police were monitoring the news from Buffalo but already had boosted security at various spots because of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday.

About 6,000 vehicles cross the Rainbow Bridge each day, according to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory. About 5% is truck traffic, according to the federal data.

The bridge, constructed in 1941, is just over 1,440 feet (439 meters) long and has a main span constructed of steel, according to the data.

The mysterious illness is described as an “atypical canine infectious respiratory disease,” the Oregon Department of Agriculture said in a November 9 news release. Symptoms include coughing, sneezing, eye or nose discharge and lethargy.

Veterinarians in Oregon have reported more than 200 cases of the disease since mid-August. Other cases have been reported in Colorado, Illinois and New Hampshire.

“Based on the epidemiology of the cases reported at this point, the cases appear to share a viral etiology, but common respiratory diagnostic testing has been largely negative,” Oregon State Veterinarian Dr. Ryan Scholz told the American Veterinary Medical Association.

In other words, dogs with the unidentified illness show similar signs of an upper respiratory disease but generally don’t test positive for common respiratory diseases. And the disease is generally resistant to standard treatments, said Dr. David B. Needle, a pathologist at the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and clinical associate professor at the University of New Hampshire.

“Fatalities do not seem to be a large part of the syndrome we are investigating, with rare animals developing an acute and sometimes fatal pneumonia after the longer chronic disease,” Needle said. “We think these may represent secondary infections.”

Where did the disease come from?

Needle said he’s part of a team trying to identify the disease and find common DNA segments by collecting samples from local veterinary clinics and comparing the results.

“If what we have identified is a pathogen, it is likely that the bacteria is host-adapted bacteria with long histories of colonizing dogs,” Needle said. An “evolutionary event” like spontaneous mutation or getting a gene from a different source could then have led the bacteria to become virulent, he said.

He said researchers have received samples from Oregon and expect to receive samples from Colorado, Illinois and other states for testing.

The Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory has also reported cases of a mysterious canine disease, the lab’s director told CNN in an email.

“There has been an uptick in the numbers of dogs with respiratory disease, (coughing, lethargy, fever) and the signs have been persisting longer than a few days,” said Kevin Snekvik, the laboratory’s executive director and a professor at the Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

Snekvik said his Washington lab has not reported any canine deaths from the mystifying disease, but said labs in other states have reported a few deaths.

What can dog owners do?

While the news may be concerning, “We suggest caution rather than worry,” the Oregon Veterinary Medical Association’s website says.

While this particular disease is unusual, “Periodic outbreaks of Canine Infectious Respiratory Disease Complex (CIRDC) can occur in a dog population. At least nine different bacteria and viruses have been linked as causes of CIRDC, which is transmitted by respiratory droplets,” the association said.

“Infection with more than one bacterial or viral agent is common. Symptoms include coughing, sneezing, nasal and/or eye discharge, and lethargy. If your dog shows these symptoms, please contact your veterinarian.”

Dog owners should help keep their pets healthy by making sure they’re up-to-date on all vaccines, such as those for canine influenza, Bordetella and parainfluenza, the association said. Other tips include:

• Reducing contact with large numbers of unknown dogs. Just like with other respiratory pathogens, the more contacts your dog has, the greater the risk of encountering a dog that’s infectious.
• Reducing contact with sick dogs. This can be harder to determine but if a dog looks sick (coughing, runny nose, runny eyes), keep your dog away from it.
• Keep sick dogs at home and seek veterinary care.
• Avoid communal water bowls shared by multiple dogs.

The animatronic model from “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” is part of a sale organized by Julien’s Auctions and Turner Classic Movies, which, like CNN, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. More than 1,000 props and memorabilia from some of the best-known sci-fi, fantasy, action and superhero movies and TV series will be available at the auction.

Designed by the late Carlo Rambaldi, the model has some incredibly expressive moves. Its nostrils open and close, and its veins pulsate, while cables also allow for the movement of its eyes, lips, eyebrows, forehead and tongue.

This model comes from Rambaldi’s own collection, as did the animatronic figure of E.T. sold by Julien’s Auctions last November for $2.56 million.

His daughter, Daniela Rambaldi, recalls her father finding inspiration for E.T.’s expressive blue eyes from their family cat “Kikka,” the auction house said.

The story of the homesick E.T. and his bond with Elliott, the boy who finds him, Spielberg’s 1982 movie won near-universal acclaim and was nominated for nine Oscars, of which it won four.

Other artifacts from movie history are also up for sale, including a full Batman costume worn by Michael Keaton in “Batman Returns,” which has an estimate of up to $70,000, and a model of The Robot from the 1960s sci-fi series “Lost in Space.”

This model is “one of the rarest artifacts from the era ever offered at auction which also is still functional,” the auction house said, since only two full-scale models of The Robot were made during the show’s run. It is expected to be sold for up to $500,000.

Several items of Harry Potter memorabilia are for sale, too, including robes and the half-moon glasses worn by Richard Harris playing Albus Dumbledore in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.” The robes – screen-matched for authenticity – and glasses are anticipated to reach up to $70,000 and $20,000, respectively.

And for Marvel fans, props such as Captain America’s shield, complete with battle scars, from “Captain America: The First Avenger,” and a helmet worn by Robert Downey Jr. playing Iron Man in “Captain America: Civil War” are expected to sell for up to $70,000 and up to $40,000, respectively.

The pilot was the only person onboard the small Mooney M20, which crashed north of the Air Park-Dallas Airport in Plano, Texas, around 6 p.m. CT, according to a Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson. The aircraft landed in a parking lot less than a mile from the airport, according to Daly.

The plane “did not land on or collide with anything,” Daly said.

Authorities have not identified the pilot and it’s unclear what led to the crash.

The aircraft became engulfed in flames, which Daly said eventually spread to an unoccupied vehicle nearby. Video taken by witness Corban Garcia shows first responders battling fire around the plane’s smoke-blackened frame, which is crumpled just feet from a row of shops.

Garcia said he first heard an explosion Tuesday night as he was leaving his workplace across the street from the shopping center.

“I looked up to the left and saw a huge plume of smoke,” he said.

“Honestly, at first I thought it was a car fire until I saw the tail of the airplane,” Garcia said. “Then I was shocked.”

Another witness who was driving by, Shawn Anderson, said he saw the plane in flight before it crashed and noticed it was moving unusually.

“The plane made a turn like he was going up but didn’t look right,” Anderson said. When he looked back, he said he saw a billowing cloud of black smoke and the plane had smashed into a parking lot in front of a diner.

The National Transportation Safety Board will lead an investigation into the cause of the crash, according to the FAA, which is also participating in the inquiry.

The slide — estimated to be 450 feet (137 meters) wide — occurred at about 9 p.m. Monday during a significant rain and windstorm near Wrangell, an island community of 2,000 people some 155 miles (250 kilometers) south of the state capital of Juneau.

Rescue crews found the body of a girl in an initial search and late Tuesday the bodies of two adults were found by a drone operator. Searchers used a cadaver-sniffing dog and heat-sensing drones to search for two children and one adult unaccounted for after the disaster, while the Coast Guard and other vessels looked along a waterfront littered with rocks, trees and mud.

Alaska State Troopers spokesperson Austin McDaniel said a woman who had been on the upper floor of a home was rescued. She was in good condition and receiving medical care. One of the three homes that was struck was unoccupied, McDaniel said.

“Our community is resilient,” Wrangell interim borough manager Mason Villarma told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “And it always comes together for tragedies like this. We’re broken, but resilient and determined to find everybody that’s missing.”

Gov. Mike Dunleavy issued a disaster declaration for Wrangell, saying he and his wife were heartbroken and praying for all those affected.

The landslide left a scar of barren earth from near the top of the mountain down to the ocean. A wide swath of evergreen trees were ripped out of the ground and a highway was buried by debris, cutting off access and power to approximately 75 homes.

Troopers said a large-scale search and rescue mission wasn’t initially possible because the site was unstable and hazardous. A geologist from the state transportation department was flown in from Juneau and conducted a preliminary assessment, clearing some areas of the debris field for ground searches.

Troopers warned of the threat of additional landslides. They urged people caught on the other side of the slide, away from Wrangell, to evacuate by water taxi.

Wrangell received about 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain between 1 a.m. and 8 p.m. Monday, with wind gusts up to 60 mph (96 kph) at higher elevations, said Aaron Jacobs, a hydrologist and meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau.

It was part of a strong storm system that moved through southeast Alaska, bringing heavy snow in places and blizzard-like conditions to Juneau and rainfall with minor flooding to areas farther south. Landslides also were reported in the Ketchikan area and on Prince of Wales Island, he said.

Rainfall amounts like what Wrangell received Monday are not unusual, Jacobs said, but strong winds could have helped trigger the slide. Saturated soil can give way when gusts blow trees on a slope, said Barrett Salisbury, a geologist with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

Another storm system is expected in the Wrangell area late Wednesday into Thursday.

Wrangell is one of the oldest non-Alaska Native settlements in the state, founded in 1811 when Russians began trading with Tlingits, according to a state database of Alaska communities. Tlingits, Russians, the British and Americans all accounted for historical influences on Wrangell. Timber once was a major economic driver, but that has shifted to commercial fishing.

In December 2020, torrential rains prompted a landslide in another southeast Alaska city, claiming two lives. The 200-yard-wide (183-meter-wide) slide slammed into a neighborhood in the community of Haines, leaving about 9 feet (2.7 meters) of mud and trees covering city streets.

The term “Black Friday” in relation to shopping the day after Thanksgiving is most often traced to Philadelphia where police had to deal with large crowds who thronged the streets of the city before the annual Army-Navy game and to take advantage of sales. According to the Dec. 18, 1961, issue of Public Relations News, a newsletter, it became customary for police to refer to post-Thanksgiving shopping as Black Friday and Black Saturday because of the headaches they created.

Retailers began taking ownership of the term in the late 1980s as the opening bell for the holidays. Of course Black Friday has morphed more accurately into a month of offers that begin in October, when Halloween jack-o’-lanterns are still flickering.

A number of stores that were closed on Thanksgiving, including Walmart and Target, reopen early Friday as the holiday shopping season begins in earnest.

Here are the store hours on Black Friday for some prominent national chains.Walmart Black Friday hours

Walmart stores will open at 6 a.m.Target Black Friday hours

Most Target stores will open at 6 a.m.Best Buy Black Friday hours

Best Buy stores will be open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.Macy’s Black Friday hours

Macy’s stores will be open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.Dick’s Sporting Goods Black Friday hours

Dick’s Sporting Goods stores will be open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.Kohl’s Black Friday hours

Kohls stores will open at 5 a.m.Home Depot Black Friday hours

Home Depot stores will be open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.Lowe’s Black Friday hours

Lowe’s will open at 6 a.m.

Airline officials say they are confident they can avoid the kind of massive disruptions that have marred past holiday seasons, such as the meltdown at Southwest Airlines over last Christmas. As of Wednesday evening that appeared to be the case.

U.S. airports reported 59 flight cancellations into, out of or within the U.S. Wednesday and 2,750 flight delays, according to FlightAware, a tracking service. FlightAware said anything less than 300 cancellations and 4,000 delays per day is considered very good.

Buffalo Niagara International Airport in New York said it was checking all vehicles arriving at the airport and performing additional security screenings after a car crashed and exploded at a nearby checkpoint on the U.S.-Canada border. But the airport said it remained open and fully operational. All four border crossings in the area were closed, the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission said.

Snow showers could snarl traffic in other parts of the country. The National Weather Service was predicting accumulating snow in northern New England Wednesday, including up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of snowfall in northern Maine. Snow was also expected to hit the northern Rocky Mountains on Thanksgiving Day, bringing up to 1 foot of snow to parts of Wyoming by Friday.

Security lines at airports could be long. Delta Air Lines is telling passengers to arrive at the airport at least two hours before their flight if they are traveling within the United States, three hours early if they’re flying overseas — and maybe earlier on Sunday and Monday.

Jordan Sessions heeded that advice and got to the airport early Wednesday for a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Oakland, California. But the Portland airport wasn’t crowded and the check-in lines were short, so he wound up waiting a bit for his flight.

That wasn’t the case for Brittany Dandridge, who found lines out the door when she arrived for her flight from Dallas to Oakland.

“Luckily I was traveling with my dog and they allowed me to skip the line,” she said.

The Transportation Security Administration said it screened more than 2.6 million passengers Tuesday and it expected another 2.7 million passengers to come through airport security on Wednesday. On Sunday, it expects to screen 2.9 million passengers, which would surpass a previous record set on June 30.

Lines ebbed and flowed all morning Wednesday at Moynihan Train Hall in New York. Some travelers said they opted to travel by train for convenience or lower prices. Others said they just wanted to avoid any chaos at the airport.

Matthew Hudnall and Abby Greenbaum were traveling from Atlanta to New York to Boston to visit family with their 5-year-old daughter. By the time they reach Boston, they will have taken a total of nine trains, they said.

“I think we thought it would be calmer and less stressful than flying. So, far that’s true,” Greenbaum said.

Amtrak said it was expecting 750,000 passengers between Nov. 19 and Nov. 26. The company said travelers could see some boarding delays this weekend because of high passenger volumes.

The holiday will also test the Federal Aviation Administration, which faces shortages of air traffic controllers at key facilities that caused reductions in flights to the New York City area this summer and fall.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during a news conference Monday that the government prepared for holiday travel by hiring more air traffic controllers, opening new air routes along the East Coast and providing grants to airports for snowplows and deicing equipment.

Airlines have also added tens of thousands of employees in the last couple of years, and Southwest says it bought more winter equipment to keep planes moving even during sub-freezing temperatures.

AAA predicts that 55.4 million people will travel at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) from home between Wednesday and Sunday, the third-highest forecast ever by the auto club. AAA says most of them — 49.1 million — will drive.

Drivers will get a break from last year on gasoline prices. AAA says the nationwide average for gas was down to $3.28 a gallon on Wednesday, compared with $3.63 a year ago.

Charging stations — not gas prices — were on the mind of Guy Maughan as he set out last week in his Tesla on a 13-day Thanksgiving road trip that will take him from his home near Seattle to his brother’s home in Los Angeles and then to his parents in Phoenix.

Maughan said he and his travel companion — a 7-month-old golden doodle named Nala — expect to spend only about $150 to charge the car along the 3,000-mile (4,800-kilometer) route.

“I love driving, I love road trips, and the car takes care of all the heavy lifting,” said Maughan, who is a real estate agent. “I just put in the destinations and it tells me where we’re going to stop. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.”

Air travelers will enjoy lower prices too. Airfares in October were down 13% from last year, according to government figures, and fares around Thanksgiving have been about 14% lower than a year ago, according to the travel site Hopper.

Even so, the high cost of rent, food, health care and other expenses were weighing on people’s travel plans.

Jason McQueary, a 25-year-old social worker and graduate student, said rent and other essentials eat up most of his paycheck and he was grateful for his credit card points, which brought down the cost of his roundtrip flight from Denver to Chicago from $450 to $150.

“I was just like, ‘Man, I’m glad I only come home once a year,’” said McQueary, who was waiting to get picked up Tuesday after arriving to Chicago O’Hare International Airport to spend Thanksgiving with family in his hometown of Byron, Illinois.

Starting Wednesday, customers will be able to get Honey BBQ wings, Roasted Garlic Parmesan wings and Signature Hot wings at Popeyes locations across the country, along with the Ghost Pepper and Sweet N’Spicy wings that Popeyes says proved popular when they were sold earlier this year. They go for $5.99 for a pack of six.

Back in 2019, Popeyes’ chicken sandwich created a frenzy in the fast food industry, prompting a wave of copycats and became a barometer for success.

With wings, Popeyes thinks it can rekindle that enthusiasm, at least in part. And, chicken sandwich aside, it’s a good time to get into the wings game, with cheap eats gaining ground as some customers rein in spending.

Wings are here to stay

Over the past few years, Popeyes has brought wings to the menu on a limited-time basis. But customer interest has earned the items a lasting place on the menu, Sami Siddiqui, president of Popeyes North America, told CNN.

“In January, when we were running our Ghost Pepper wing [promotion], we saw incredible demand,” he said. “The offer was supposed to last for about six weeks. And we sold out of wings in two weeks.” This summer, Popeyes rolled out another version of the wings, this time with a sweet and spicy sauce. That one did even better, Siddiqui said. “It was actually the most successful product and results we’ve seen since the infamous chicken sandwich.”

When it debuted in 2019, the chicken sandwich prompted throngs of hungry people to mob Popeyes locations in search of the item, which sold out in just about two weeks. Popeyes ultimately brought the sandwich back, permanently, and saw its overall sales skyrocket.

With wings, Siddiqui said, Popeyes once again saw long lines and a sales lift. In the third quarter, sales at Popeyes locations open at least 17 months jumped 5.6% in the United States year-over-year, thanks in part to chicken wings. The customer reaction “reinforced and solidified our view that we need to have five permanent flavors of wings on the menu,” he said.

Siddiqui doesn’t expect enthusiasm over Popeyes wings to reach the same kind of fervor inspired by the chicken sandwich. “It’s really hard to replicate what was sort of [like] lightning in a bottle,” he said. But he does see some similarities, including a relatively low price.

A good time to sell cheap chicken

Other chains have seen success with chicken wings in recent months, as people cut back on spending by buying cheaper food.

Wingstop’s domestic same-restaurant sales, which include sales at restaurants open at least a year, jumped 15.3% in the third quarter. When customers ditch pricier options, “Wingstop is uniquely positioned to gain more new guests,” CEO Michael Skipworth said during a November analyst call discussing quarterly results.

Some customers aren’t necessarily switching from other food to wings, but see wings as a reasonably priced addition, Siddiqui said.

“If you’re coming for a sandwich, or you’re coming for tenders, for $5.99 you’ll add on six wings,” said Siddiqui. Plus, wings can attract a younger demographic to Popeyes than usual or new customers altogether, he added.

With the new items, Popeyes also seems to be trying to goad its competitors into another marketing war.

To promote the wings, Popeyes is putting up billboards next to competitors. It’s also encouraging people to try the wings with promotional deals that use codes that insult competitors, like “OPENSUNDAY” to mock Chick-fil-A, which is famously not.

In a statement released late Wednesday, Tzachi Hanegbi said that contacts on the deal were continuing. “The release will begin according to the original agreement between the parties, and not before Friday,” he said.

The swap was to take place as part of a four-day truce in the war in Gaza expected to begin on Thursday.

Hanegbi gave no explanation for the delay, and it was not immediately clear when the cease-fire might begin.

The surprise announcement came after Israel and Hamas earlier Wednesday agreed to a four-day cease-fire — a diplomatic breakthrough that would free dozens of hostages held by militants as well as Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and bring a large influx of aid to the besieged territory.

The truce raised hopes of eventually winding down the war, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 deadly rampage into Israel. Now in its seventh week, the war has leveled vast swaths of Gaza, fueled a surge of violence in the occupied West Bank, and stirred fears of a wider conflagration across the Middle East.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, joined by the two other members of his special war cabinet, told a nationally televised news conference that the war would resume after the truce expires. Israel’s goals are to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and return all 240 hostages held captive in Gaza.

“I want to be clear. The war is continuing. The war is continuing. We will continue it until we achieve all our goals,” Netanyahu said, adding he had delivered the same message in a phone call to U.S. President Joe Biden. He also said he had instructed the Mossad spy agency to hunt down Hamas’ exiled leadership “wherever they are.”

Israeli troops hold much of northern Gaza and say they have dismantled tunnels and much of Hamas’ infrastructure there. But Israeli officials acknowledge the group’s infrastructure remains intact elsewhere. Netanyahu’s announcement Wednesday appeared to be aimed at public concerns that a truce will lead Israel to halt its offensive before achieving its goals.

Just days before the truce, Israel said it was determined to take its ground offensive into the south. That could be potentially devastating for Gaza’s uprooted population, most of which is squeezed into the south with nowhere to go to avoid the assault.

Residents in Gaza City said the fighting intensified overnight into Wednesday, with gunfire, heavy artillery and airstrikes. “Apparently they want to advance before the truce,” said Nasser al-Sheikh, who is sheltering with relatives in the city.

Palestinian militants continued firing rockets at Israel throughout the day, without causing casualties.

A DIPLOMATIC BREAKTHROUGH
The announcement of the truce capped weeks of indirect, stop-and-go negotiations to free some of the roughly 240 hostages taken by Hamas and other militants during their Oct. 7 raid. Egypt and Qatar, along with the United States, helped mediate the deal.

Fifty hostages will be freed in stages, in exchange for the release of what Hamas said would be 150 Palestinian prisoners. Both sides will let go women and children first.

Israel said the truce would be extended an extra day for every additional 10 hostages freed by Hamas. Hamas said hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian aid — including fuel — would be allowed to enter Gaza.

Netanyahu said the deal also included a provision for the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit the hostages in captivity. Earlier, the ICRC said it was unaware of any agreement to do so.

The cease-fire is to take effect at 10 a.m. local time (0800 GMT) Thursday, according to Egypt’s state-run Qahera TV channel.

Biden welcomed the deal, saying Netanyahu committed to supporting an “extended pause.” Several nations, including Britain, France, China and Russia, also welcomed the agreement.

Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said he hoped the deal would eventually lead to a permanent cease-fire and “serious talks” on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel’s Justice Ministry published a list of 300 prisoners eligible to be released, mainly teenagers detained over the past year for rock-throwing and other minor offenses.

WILL THE WAR RESUME?
The war erupted when several thousand Hamas militants broke into southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking hostages.

Weeks of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, followed by a ground invasion, have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. It does not differentiate between civilians and militants, though some two-thirds of the dead have been identified as women and minors.

The ministry said that as of Nov. 11 it had lost the ability to count the dead because of the collapse of large parts of the health system, but says the number has risen sharply since then. Some 2,700 people are missing and believed buried under rubble.

Israeli troops and tanks are expected to remain in place around northern Gaza during the truce. Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas fighters, though it has presented no evidence for its count.

Hamas, meanwhile, will have a chance to regroup. Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar will likely present the release of the prisoners — seen by most Palestinians as heroes resisting occupation — as a major achievement, and declare victory if the war ends.

Israel faces pressure to extend the truce. The war’s devastation has galvanized international criticism of Israel, and even the U.S., its closest ally, has expressed concern about the heavy toll on Gaza’s civilians.

STRIKES CONTINUE
An airstrike overnight hit a residential building in the southern town of Khan Younis, killing 17 people, including children, said Ahmad Balouny, a relative of the deceased. An Associated Press reporter saw the bodies of two children pulled from the rubble.

Outside Khan Younis, workers dug a mass grave for 111 bodies that Israeli authorities handed over after troops took them from Shifa Hospital and other parts of northern Gaza. Israeli troops took the bodies apparently for DNA analysis amid the search for hostages in the north.

Strikes also leveled buildings in the Nusseirat refugee camp and the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The city’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said 128 bodies were brought in overnight after strikes.

“There’s no safe place,” said Umm Rami al-Jabali, who survived a strike in Deir al-Balah.

In northern Gaza, about 60 bodies and 200 people wounded by heavy fighting were brought into the Kamal Adwan Hospital overnight, hospital director Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout told Al-Jazeera television Wednesday.

Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced in the war. Many, if not most, will be unable to return home because of the vast damage and the continued presence of Israeli troops in the north.

The cease-fire deal promises an increase of aid to the south, bringing some relief to hundreds of thousands who have struggled to find food and water. Israel has barred imports to Gaza since the start of the war, except for a trickle of aid entering through Egypt’s Rafah crossing.

A Qatari statement said the cease-fire would allow a “larger number of humanitarian convoys and relief aid,” including fuel. But it gave no details on actual quantities.

Humanitarian aid groups operating in Gaza criticized the cease-fire, saying the truce was too short and the Rafah crossing’s capacity was insufficient to deliver enough aid to meet the urgent demand.

At a U.N. school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah — packed with families living in classrooms or ramshackle shelters set up in the yard — Amal Mahmoud said her family from northern Gaza was dispersed across the territory.

“We don’t like this truce. We want to return to our homes, to our lands,” she said.

DEAL COULD DIVIDE ISRAELIS
The return of hostages could lift spirits in Israel, where their plight has gripped the country. Families of the hostages — who include babies and older adults — have staged mass demonstrations to pressure the government to bring them home.

But they could also find themselves divided as some hostages are freed and others not.

Ofri Bibas Levy, whose brother, sister-in-law and two nephews — aged 4 and 10 months — are among the captives, said the deal puts the families in an “inhumane” situation.

“Who will be released, who won’t?” she asked. “No matter which way it happens, there will still be families that will remain worried and sad and angry.”

The fishing town of Grindavik was evacuated a week ago as magma – semi-molten rock – rumbled and snaked under the earth amid thousands of tremors. It has left a jagged crack running through the community, thrusting the ground upward by 1 meter (3 feet) or more in places.

The Icelandic Meteorological Office said there is a “significant likelihood” that an eruption will occur somewhere along the 15-kilometer (9-mile) magma tunnel, with the “prime location” an area north of Grindavik near the Hagafell mountain.

Grindavik, a town of 3,400, sits on the Reykjanes Peninsula, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the capital, Reykjavik and not far from Keflavik Airport, Iceland’s main facility for international flights. The nearby Blue Lagoon geothermal resort, one of Iceland’s top tourist attractions, has been shut at least until the end of November because of the volcano danger.

Grindavik residents are being allowed to return for five minutes each to rescue valuable possessions and pets.

A volcanic system on the Reykjanes Peninsula has erupted three times since 2021, after being dormant for 800 years. Previous eruptions occurred in remote valleys without causing damage.

Iceland sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic and averages an eruption every four to five years. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and grounded flights across Europe for days because of fears ash could damage airplane engines.

Scientists say a new eruption would likely produce lava but not an ash cloud.

The Custer County Sheriff’s Office announced Tuesday afternoon that they have the suspect, Hanme K. Clark, in custody. They did not immediately release additional details.

The shooting took place on the property line in a wooded area on Monday. The local sheriff had said that two men and a woman died at the scene of the shooting, in a rural area about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Colorado Springs.

Clark had eluded law enforcement since Monday. A local sheriff had said the shooting followed a contentious and year-long lawsuit over an easement on Clark’s property.

Gabriel Garcia was convicted of civil disorder and obstruction of an official government proceeding.

He’s a former member of the extremist group the Proud Boys and once sat on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee.

Garcia got into confrontations with police officers during the capitol riots back in 2021 and helped others storm into the building. He also posted a video where he was heard taunting then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

He’s expected to be sentenced in March and faces up to 25 years in prison and possible financial penalties.

Based on Disney’s wildly popular “Frozen” animation film, the new section of the park features landscapes and characters from the movie and two new rides, a roller coaster and a boat ride that takes visitors through different scenes featured in the film.

“Over the past decade, the film has grown into one of the most successful franchises in Disney history,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences. “World of Frozen represents Hong Kong Disneyland’s largest and boldest expansion since the park opened in 2005.”

The opening comes after Disney announced in September a $60 billion expansion of its parks and cruises over about a decade. Now that Chinese tourists are venturing abroad again after the pandemic, the new attraction is meant to be a game changer for a theme park that has run losses for years.

Some of the hundreds of Disney fans who lined up hours ahead of time were dressed like characters from “Frozen.”

Disney enthusiast Bryan Darmanic, who had travelled from California with his wife and daughter, were among the first visitors to the Frozen-themed roller coaster and received limited edition souvenirs to commemorate the experience.

“The World of Frozen is really well-designed and beautiful,” said Darmanic, whose family was making its first visit to the Hong Kong theme park.

Winnie Ip, a tourist from Macao, said she arrived at 9 a.m. in the morning ahead of the opening of the Frozen section.

The Frozen attractions were “magnificent,” Ip said.

Hong Kong has been beefing up the park to try and draw more visitors. In June 2022, it debuted its Momentous multimedia and fireworks show, which is staged at its castle on most nights.

Elsewhere, Disney plans to launch a Zootopia-themed area at its Shanghai Disneyland in December, a Fantasy Springs port at Tokyo DisneySea next spring and a Frozen-themed Kingdom of Arendelle at Disneyland Paris, slated to open in either 2024 or 2025.

White fog hung below the gray skies that day. He recalled looking down at the rough, green waters below moments before he did the unthinkable: He jumped.

“My hands left the rail and I had an instantaneous regret for my actions,” Hines told CNN.

Hines fell 220 feet at a speed of 75 miles per hour – “equivalent to a pedestrian being struck by a car that is traveling that fast,” according to the Bridge Rail Foundation, a nonprofit working to prevent suicides on the bridge.

During the 4-second fall, Hines said the feeling of depression left his mind, and was replaced by a survival urge he described as almost instinctual.

“And at that time, all I wanted to do was live.”

After he was rescued from the water, Hines needed three vertebrae replaced with a titanium metal plate and pins, ultimately undergoing four and half weeks of recovery. And in the years since, Hines has been traveling the world to share his rare testimony.

“I have met thousands of people who have survived mild, moderate to extreme suicide attempts who have all said they each had the same instant regret,” Hines said. “They recognized their thoughts didn’t have to become their actions.”

More than a confirmed 1,800 people have jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge since it was built in 1937, according to the Bridge Rail Foundation. The very first incident happened that same year.

Hines is one of 39 people known to survive the deadly leap. “Nineteen have come forward to say they all had the exact same instant regret that I had,” Hines said.

After years of debate over installing a suicide deterrent on the iconic bridge, a net is now nearing completion.

In 2018, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District began building a net along the perimeter of the 1.7 mile long bridge.

The $217 million project consists of the installation of a stainless steel net, 20 feet below the sidewalk on both sides of the bridge, according to Golden Gate Bridge spokesperson Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz.

“The amount of net that we’re installing is the equivalent of seven football fields,” Cosulich-Schwartz told CNN.

It’s a project proponents hope will offer many people a second chance at life.

While Hines noted not all those who jump may feel regretful, he said he can’t help but empathize with those who did experience the same feeling but never got another chance to choose life.

“Recognizing that all the people that passed away might have wished they were still here… it’s a very troubling thing to think about,” he said.

‘A symbol of hope and care’

Kevin Berthia attempted to jump off the Golden Gate on March 11, 2005. But after jumping, he ended up clinging to a railing for over an hour and a half.

“I swung myself around and smacked into the railing, and got on that 4-inch cord,” Berthia recalled.

And he held onto that cord as California Highway Patrol Officer Kevin Briggs talked to him about reasons to choose life. It was in this 92-minute conversation that Berthia began to experience regret.

While he credits Briggs for saving his life, Berthia also said he believes a safety net would have made a world of difference that day.

“I looked over that rail and all I saw was the water,” Berthia told CNN. “If I saw a deterrent, I would have probably been like, ‘OK, maybe this is not meant to be.’”

He desperately needed a sign that someone cared about him, Berthia added: “I needed something to say no.”

While the purpose of the net is “to reduce the number of injuries and deaths from jumping off the bridge,” bridge spokesperson Cosulich-Schwartz said it’s also meant to serve as that sign Berthia was looking for 18 years ago.

“The net is a symbol of hope and care for people who may be experiencing the worst day of their lives,” Cosulich-Schwartz said.

“It is a large, visible and permanent symbol that there are people in the community that care about you,” he continued. “And, if necessary, offer people a second chance.”

The net is currently 80% built, and is set to be completed in December, according to the bridge officials.

The construction of this deterrent won’t be a temporary solution in suicide prevention, according to researchers.

A 1978 study of Golden Gate Bridge suicide attempters found more than 90% of those who were stopped remained alive decades later, and didn’t go on to take their own lives.

The fight for the net

Since the Golden Gate’s opening, suicide prevention groups and nonprofits like the Bridge Rail Foundation have continuously pushed for a deterrent of some sort on the bridge.

“Originally, we wanted to raise the rail,” Hines said, which would be similar to the 11-foot steel fence that encloses the George Washington Bridge in New York City.

The transportation district invited public comment on the potential project, and the opinions of the board and local residents were deeply divided.

“We got shut down with that because it was obstructing the view and people didn’t want to ruin the aesthetics of the bridge,” Hines told CNN. “And I always say, what are the aesthetics of a bridge compared to one human life?”

In 2014, the bridge’s board of directors unanimously approved the funding for the safety net construction.

“Engineers designed the Net to minimize impacts to Bridge views and appearance,” according to a Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District release, which noted the addition would still “slightly diminish the integrity of the the historic features.”

Berthia acknowledged many people enjoy the beauty and history of the Golden Gate. “And I get that, but we don’t listen to enough people that have lost loved ones off that bridge,” he said.

Thirty people or more die by suicide at the bridge each year on average, according to the release, with hundreds more stopped by law enforcement or other citizens.

“Ultimately, a physical barrier is needed to stop this tragedy,” the release said. “The selected design allows open, scenic vistas to remain intact, while preventing anyone from easily jumping to the water below.”

“I’m so grateful that not one more beautiful person with loved ones, and family and friends who care for them is ever again, gonna die by their hands off of the Golden Gate Bridge,” Hines said. “I thank God every day I get to be alive to see it.”

Macky Kessa, mayor of the southern coastal city of Jacmel, was detained but has not been charged, his attorney, Jimmy Jean-Baptiste, told The Associated Press.

He said Kessa is being held in Haiti’s notorious National Penitentiary in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and that he plans to seek his release.

It wasn’t immediately clear why Kessa was detained. Jean-Baptiste declined further comment, noting that the investigation is ongoing.

The arrest occurred after Kessa met with Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire, who is investigating the case and has interviewed several other suspects who have been languishing in jail for more than two years. Voltaire is the fifth judge to be appointed to the case, with previous judges stepping down for various reasons, including fear of being killed.

Voltaire did not immediately return a message requesting comment. He has previously said he would not discuss the case publicly because it is still ongoing, with several hearings being held but no trial yet scheduled.

More than 40 suspects have been arrested in the case, most of them shortly after Moïse was fatally shot at his private residence in an attack that also injured his wife, Martine Moïse.

Among those detained are 18 former Colombian soldiers accused of taking part in the plot and several high-ranking Haitian police officers.

While the case drags on in Haiti, 11 suspects have been extradited to the U.S., with two of them already sentenced.

U.S. prosecutors have described a wide-ranging plot among suspects in Haiti and South Florida who aimed to benefit from lucrative contracts under a successor to Moïse, after he was either kidnapped or killed.

The busiest days to fly will be Tuesday and Wednesday as well as the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 2.6 million passengers on Tuesday and 2.7 million passengers on Wednesday. Sunday will draw the largest crowds with an estimated 2.9 million passengers, which would narrowly eclipse a record set on June 30.

Meanwhile, AAA forecasts that 55.4 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home between next Wednesday and the Sunday after Thanksgiving, with roads likely to be the most clogged on Wednesday.

The weather could snarl air and road traffic. A storm system was expected to move from the southern Plains to the Northeast on Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing possible thunderstorms, sleet and snow. Parts of Maine, Vermont and northern New Hampshire are expected to get 3 to 7 inches (7 to 17 centimeters) of snow between Tuesday night and Wednesday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during a news conference Monday that the government has tried to better prepare for holiday travel over the last year by hiring more air traffic controllers, opening new air routes along the East Coast and providing grants to airports for snowplows and deicing equipment. But he warned travelers to check road conditions and flight times before leaving home.

“Mother Nature, of course, is the X factor in all of this,” he said.

The good news for travelers by plane and car alike: Prices are coming down.

Airfares are averaging $268 per ticket, down 14% from a year ago, according to the travel site Hopper.

Gasoline prices are down about 45 cents a gallon from this time last year. The national average was $3.30 per gallon on Monday, according to AAA, down from $3.67 a year ago.

A survey of GasBuddy users found that despite cheaper pump prices, the number of people planning to take a long driving trip this Thanksgiving hasn’t changed much from last year. Patrick De Haan, an analyst for the price-tracking service, said inflation has cooled but some things like food are still getting more expensive. Consumers are also charging more on credit cards and saving less.

“Sure, they love the falling gas prices, but a lot of Americans spent in other ways this summer and they may not be ready to open their wallets for Thanksgiving travel just yet,” De Haan said.

Thanksgiving marks the start of the holiday travel season, and many still haven’t shaken last December’s nightmare before Christmas, when severe winter storms knocked out thousands of flights and left millions of passengers stranded.

Scott Keyes, founder of the travel site Going, is cautiously optimistic that holiday air travel won’t be the same mess. So far this year, he said, airlines have avoided massive disruptions.

“Everyone understands that airlines can’t control Mother Nature and it’s unsafe to take off or land in the middle of a thunderstorm or snowstorm,” Keyes said. “What really irks people are the controllable cancellations — those widespread disruptions because the airline couldn’t get their act together because their system melted down the way Southwest did over Christmas.”

Indeed, Southwest didn’t recover as quickly as other carriers from last year’s storm when its planes, pilots and flight attendants were trapped out of position and its crew-rescheduling system got bogged down. The airline canceled nearly 17,000 flights before fixing the operation. Federal regulators told Southwest recently that it could be fined for failing to help stranded travelers.

Southwest officials say they have since purchased additional deicing trucks and heating equipment and will add staff at cold-weather airports depending on the forecast. The company said it has also updated its crew-scheduling technology.

U.S. airlines as a whole have been better about stranding passengers. Through October, they canceled 38% fewer flights than during the same period in 2022. From June through August — when thunderstorms can snarl air traffic — the rate of cancellations fell 18% compared to 2022.

Even still, consumer complaints about airline service have soared, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. There have been so many complaints, the agency says, that it has only compiled figures through May.

The airlines, in turn, have heaped blame on the Federal Aviation Administration, which they say can’t keep up with the growing air traffic. In fact, the Transportation Department’s inspector general reported this summer that the FAA has made only “limited efforts” to fix a shortage of air traffic controllers, especially at key facilities in New York, Miami and Jacksonville, Florida.

Meanwhile, staffing levels in other parts of the airline industry have largely recovered since the pandemic. After shedding tens of thousands of workers early on, airlines have been on a hiring spree since late 2020. Passenger airlines have added more than 140,000 workers — an increase of nearly 40% — according to government figures updated last week. The number of people working in the business is the largest since 2001, when there were many more airlines.

Airlines are using their expanded work forces to operate more flights. Southwest is the most aggressive among the big carriers, planning to offer 13% more seats over Thanksgiving than it did during the comparable five-day stretch last year, according to travel data provider Cirium. United and Delta are growing 8% each. American will grow a more modest 5% but still have the largest number of seats.

But as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his Cabinet for a vote, he vowed to resume the Israeli offensive against Hamas as soon as the truce ends.

“We are at war, and we will continue the war,” he said. “We will continue until we achieve all our goals.”

The Israeli Cabinet was expected to vote on a plan that would halt Israel’s offensive in Gaza for several days in exchange for the release of about 50 of the 240 hostages held by Hamas. Israel has vowed to continue the war until it destroys Hamas’ military capabilities and returns all hostages.

Hamas predicted a Qatari-mediated deal could be reached in “the coming hours.”

Netanyahu acknowledged that the Cabinet faced a tough decision, but supporting the cease-fire was the right thing to do. Netanyahu appeared to have enough support to pass the measure, despite opposition from some hard-line ministers.

Netanyahu said that during the lull, intelligence efforts will be maintained, allowing the army to prepare for the next stages of battle. He said the battle would continue until “Gaza will not threaten Israel.”

The announcement came as Israeli troops battled Palestinian militants in an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza and around hospitals overcrowded with patients and sheltering families.

Details of the expected cease-fire deal were not released. Israeli media reported that an agreement would include a five-day halt in Israel’s offensive in Gaza and the release of 50 hostages held by Hamas in exchange for some 150 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Israel’s Channel 12 TV said the first releases would take place Thursday or Friday and continue for several days.

Talks have repeatedly stalled. But even if a deal is reached, it would not mean an end to the war, which erupted on Oct. 7 after Hamas militants stormed across the border into southern Israel and killed at least 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and kidnapped some 240 others.

THE TOLL IN GAZA
In weeks of Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, and more than 2,700 others are missing and believed to be buried under rubble, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry says it has been unable to update its count since Nov. 11 because of the health sector’s collapse.

Gaza health officials say the toll has risen sharply since, and hospitals continue to report deaths from daily strikes, often dozens at a time.

The Health Ministry in the West Bank last reported a toll of 13,300 but stopped providing its own count Tuesday without giving a reason. Because of that, and because officials there declined to explain in detail how they tracked deaths after Nov. 11, the AP decided to stop reporting its count.

The Health Ministry toll does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants but has not provided evidence for its count.

In southern Lebanon, an Israeli strike killed two journalists with Al-Mayadeen TV, according to the Hezbollah-allied Pan-Arab network and Lebanese officials. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. A separate Israeli drone strike in Lebanon killed four Hamas members, a Palestinian official and a Lebanon security official said.

The Israeli military has been trading fire almost daily across the border with Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and Palestinian militants since the outbreak of the war.

TALKS ON HOSTAGES
Israel, the United States and Qatar, which mediates with Hamas, have negotiated for weeks over a hostage release that would be paired with a temporary cease-fire and the entry of more aid.

In Washington, President Joe Biden said Tuesday that a deal on releasing some hostages was “very close.”

“We could bring some of these hostages home very soon,” he said at the White House.

Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Majed al-Ansari expressed optimism, telling reporters that “we are at the closest point we ever had been in reaching an agreement.” He added that negotiations were at a “critical and final stage.”

Izzat Rishq, a senior Hamas official, said Tuesday that an agreement could be reached “in the coming hours,” in which Hamas would release captives and Israel would release Palestinian prisoners. Hamas’ leader-in-exile, Ismail Haniyeh, also said they were close to a deal.

Israel’s Channel 12 TV, citing anonymous Israeli officials, said a truce could be extended and additional Palestinian prisoners released if there were additional hostages freed.

FIGHTING IN JABALIYA AND AROUND HOSPITALS
Inside Gaza, the front line of the war shifted to the Jabaliya refugee camp, a densely built district of concrete buildings near Gaza City that houses families displaced in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israel has bombarded the area for weeks, and the military said Hamas fighters have regrouped there and in other eastern districts after being pushed out of much of Gaza City.

The fighting in Jabaliya also affected two nearby hospitals, trapping hundreds of patients and displaced people sheltering inside. A strike Tuesday hit inside one of the facilities, al-Awda, killing four people, including three doctors, the hospital director told Al-Jazeera TV. The director, Ahmed Mahna, blamed the strike on Israel, a claim that AP could not independently confirm.

Residents of Jabaliya said there was heavy fighting as Israeli forces tried to advance under the cover of airstrikes. “They are facing stiff resistance,” said Hamza Abu Mansour, a university student.

The Israeli military said strikes hit three tunnel shafts where fighters were hiding and destroyed rocket launchers. Footage released by the military showed Israeli soldiers patrolling on foot as gunfire echoed around them.

It was not possible to independently confirm details of the fighting.

It’s unclear how many Palestinian civilians remain in northern Gaza, but the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees estimates that some 160,000 people are still in its shelters there, though it can no longer provide services. Thousands more still shelter in several hospitals in the north even after many fled south in recent weeks.

Most hospitals are no longer operational. The hospital situation in Gaza is “catastrophic,” Michael Ryan, a senior World Health Organization official, said Monday.

With Israeli troops surrounding the Indonesia Hospital, also near Jabaliya, staff had to bury 50 dead in the facility’s courtyard, a senior Health Ministry official in the hospital, Munir al-Boursh, told Al-Jazeera TV.

Up to 600 wounded people and some 2,000 displaced Palestinians remain stranded at the hospital, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

A similar standoff played out in recent days at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, where over 250 patients and medical workers are stranded after the evacuation of 31 premature babies.

Israel has provided evidence in recent days of a militant presence at Shifa. But it has yet to substantiate its claims that Hamas had a major command center beneath the facility, allegations denied by Hamas and hospital staff.

DIRE CONDITIONS IN NORTH AND SOUTH
Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have crowded into the southern section of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli strikes have continued and where the military says it intends to extend its ground invasion. Many are packed into U.N.-run schools and other facilities across the territory’s south or sleeping on the streets outside, even as winter rains have pelted the coastal enclave in recent days.

There are shortages of food, water and fuel for generators across all of Gaza, which has had no central electricity for over a month.

Strikes overnight crushed residential buildings in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing at least 20 people, according to hospital officials. Footage from the scene showed the legs of five young boys sticking out from under a collapsed concrete slab of one home.

Israel continues to strike what it says are militant targets throughout Gaza, often killing women and children. Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

The attack was reported at around 8:30 p.m. at the Walmart in Beavercreek, a town of about 50,000 in the Dayton metropolitan area.

“The conditions of the victims right now is unknown” but all were taken to hospitals for treatment, police Capt. Scott Molnar said at a news conference.

Police also said the shooter died after apparently shooting himself. His name, a motive for the attack and other details weren’t immediately released.

Police earlier said on social media that the store had been cleared and secured and there wasn’t any “active threat.”

“We’re heartbroken by what’s happened at our Beavercreek, Ohio store. This remains a developing situation, and we’re working closely with investigators on the scene,” Walmart said in a statement.

The 45-year-old suspect was believed to be driving a white Ram 1500 pickup truck with a camper shell, according to a Facebook post from the Custer County Sheriff’s Office.

Residents of the wooded, rural area were told to shelter in place for five hours on Monday as authorities hunted for the man, but the order was listed Monday night while he remained at large.

At around 1 p.m. Monday, a report of shots being fired sent deputies to Rocky Ridge Road, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from the county seat of Westcliffe and about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Colorado Springs.

The shooting took place on the property line in a wooded area and began with “a suspected property dispute,” the Sheriff’s Office said.

Two men and a woman died at the scene and a fourth person was taken to a trauma center in critical condition but was expected to survive, the Sheriff’s Office said.

The victims’ names and other details weren’t immediately released.

It was one of several mass shootings that occurred in the past few days around the country.

Four people were wounded Monday night when a gunman opened fire in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, before apparently killing himself, police said.

On Sunday, a Tennessee man died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while on the run after a series of shootings that killed four of his female relatives.

Officers found the body of Mavis Christian Jr., 52, in his car during a search following shootings at three locations in Memphis that left three women and a teenage girl dead and a teenage girl critically wounded, the Memphis Police Department said.

Coast Guard spokesperson Petty Officer Ryan Fisher said the Coast Guard responded but that rescue operations were quickly called off.

“It sounds like all parties involved were rescued,” he said.

The P-8A aircraft overshot the runway at a Marine base on Kaneohe Bay, said U.S. Marine Corps spokesperson Gunnery Sgt. Orlando Perez. He did not have further information.

A photo taken by a witness showed the plane floating just offshore, a scene reminiscent of the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” when a commercial aircraft piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger made an emergency landing on the New York river. All 155 people aboard survived.

The P-8A and the Airbus A320 that Sullenberger piloted are roughly the same size.

Diane Dircks, 61, and her family had just returned to the dock after the rainy weather cut their pontoon boat trip short when her daughter noticed the plane in the water.

“We went running over to the end of the dock, and I took some pictures,” she said.

They then heard sirens coming from everywhere.

Dircks, who is visiting from Illinois, said her daughter keeps a pair of binoculars on her for birdwatching, so she was able to see the plane and the rescue boats arriving.

“It was unbelievable,” she said.

It was cloudy and rainy during the afternoon around the time of the crash. Visibility was about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers), said Thomas Vaughan, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Honolulu.

The P-8A is often used to hunt for submarines and reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. It is manufactured by Boeing and shares many parts with the 737 commercial jet.

The plane belongs to the Skinny Dragons of Patrol Squadron Four stationed at Whidbey Island in Washington state. Patrol squadrons were once based at Kaneohe Bay, but now they deploy to Hawaii on a rotational basis.

Marine Corps Base Hawaii is about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Honolulu on Oahu. The base houses about 9,300 military personnel and 5,100 family members and is one of several key military installations on Oahu.

The base sits on Kaneohe Bay, which is also home to coral reefs, a breeding ground for hammerhead sharks and a University of Hawaii marine biology research institute.

The auction house said Monday that it will put up for sale in New York six of the seven first-half shirts the Argentina captain wore in Qatar, including the one he donned in the dramatic win in the final against France.

Argentina won the final, and its third World Cup, in a penalty shootout after a 3-3 draw at the Lusail Stadium, in which Messi had scored two goals.

Sotheby’s, which was founded in London in 1744, will offer Messi’s shirts in New York between Nov. 30 and Dec. 14. The shirts will be on view at its New York headquarters in a free, public exhibition during the bidding dates.

It is working with U.S.-based tech startup AC Momento, which partners with high-profile athletes to help manage their match-worn memorabilia.

The current record for a game-worn item of sports memorabilia is Michael Jordan’s 1998 NBA Finals jersey, which sold for $10.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York in Sept. 2022.

The current record for a game-worn item of soccer memorabilia is a shirt Diego Maradona wore in Argentina’s infamous 1986 quarterfinal 2-1 victory over England, where he infamously scored one goal with his hand, a goal he said owed much to the “Hand of God.” That sold for $9.3 million at Sotheby’s in London in May 2022.

Winning, and lifting, the World Cup last year meant Messi emulated the feat of Maradona in 1986, the previous time Argentina won the trophy.

A portion of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to UNICAS Project, led by Sant Joan de Déu (SJD) Barcelona Children’s Hospital with the support of the Leo Messi Foundation, to meet the needs of children suffering from rare diseases.

The 36-year-old Messi, who currently plays for Inter Miami in the MLS, spent 17 years at Barcelona, winning Spain’s league on numerous occasions and the European Champions League on four occasions. He has won the Ballon d’Or, which is presented annually to the game’s top player, a record eight times.

But it was with his belated triumph in Qatar that cemented his place among the all-time greats Pele and Maradona.

That’s why his shirts are potentially so valuable.

The U.S. government is offering to send another round of four at-home virus tests ahead of the typical surge in cases during the winter holiday season.

Anyone who did not order a batch of four COVID-19 tests in September can secure up to eight of them this time around starting Monday at COVIDtests.gov. The U.S. Postal Service will deliver them for free.

The government is mailing out the coronavirus tests as the the flu season kicks off and a spike in RSV cases has been reported in some spots around the country. Hospitalizations for COVID-19, which has killed more than 1 million people in the United States, were on the rise this fall but have stayed steady in recent weeks. Immunity from previous vaccinations and infections has kept case counts lower compared with other years.

The new release of free COVID-19 nasal swab tests also comes ahead of the first winter since the pandemic started that insurers are no longer required to cover the cost of them. On average, at-home tests now cost $11 out of pocket, according to an analysis by the nonprofit health research firm KFF.

The Food and Drug Administration also approved updated COVID-19 vaccines in September in the hopes of revving up protection for Americans this winter. The shots target an omicron descendant named XBB.1.5, replacing older vaccines that targeted the original coronavirus strain and a much earlier omicron version. Shots are recommended for everyone age 6 months or older, but uptake has been slow.

U.S. taxpayers have spent tens of billions of dollars to develop COVID-19 tests, vaccines and treatments in the three years since the pandemic started.

The number of people traveling 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more from home for Thanksgiving is expected to reach 55.4 million this week, a slight increase over last year, according to AAA projections.

And while misery loves company, there are some steps travelers can take to improve the experience:

EARLY BIRDS GET THE OPEN ROADS
Most travelers — more than 49 million — are expected to drive to their Thanksgiving destinations. Traffic is anticipated to peak on Wednesday, the day before the holiday. The worst time to be on the road will be between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. that day, according to INRIX, a transportation data and insights provider.

Not only will traffic jams slow you down, they can result in crashes caused by distracted drivers, said Megan Jones, senior actuary at Arity, another company that analyzes mobility data.

“When traffic is moving at a more steady pace and you don’t have as much of that stop and go, folks are less inclined to pick up their phones,” she said.

However, speeding also increases around the holiday, she said, with the greatest rate of high-speed driving of more 80 mph (129 kph) on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Drivers should be thoughtful about their own behavior and alert to those around them, Jones said.

“It’s something to be cognizant of as you’re coming home. There are others on the road, and those high speeds do present a higher risk of accidents, and more costly accidents when they occur,” she said.

TAKE IT EASY, NOT QUEASY
Road trips with children pose additional challenges, including breaking up backseat fights and keeping carsickness at bay.

While those traveling on Thanksgiving Day might be tempted to hold off on meals or snacks given they are headed to a feast, that could be a bad move, said Dr. Mona Amin, a pediatrician and parenting coach.

“An empty stomach can make symptoms of nausea worse, so make sure anybody prone to carsickness has a satiated belly and is hydrated,” she said.

Additional tips include avoiding screen time, opening the windows for fresh air and having the child look at the horizon.

“Sometimes, messes may happen,” she said. “Stay calm in your voice and tone and reassure them.”

DEEP BREATHS, NOT BIG GULPS
About 4.7 million people are expected to fly during the Thanksgiving travel period, according to AAA. That’s an increase of 6.6% compared to 2022 and the highest number since 2005. When it comes to air travel, Sheryl Skaggs, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said a little empathy goes a long way.

“Go in with the mindset that the planes are likely to be incredibly crowded,” she said. “Seasoned fliers are more attuned to that and prepared for that, but you have so many other people that aren’t necessarily regular fliers that are going to be traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday.”

She urged travelers to be tolerant and understanding, rather than taking issue with crying babies or picking a fight over reclining seats.

“This isn’t particularly comfortable for anyone,” she said. “But if you show respect to other people, that can also have a chain reaction.”

Skaggs co-authored a study published earlier this year exploring nearly 1,000 incidents of passenger misconduct on airplanes over a 20-year period. Consumption of alcohol was a significant contributor to misconduct, which the study defined as behavior that was abusive or unruly, antagonized others or compromised the safety of flights.

Oftentimes, the drinking starts well before passengers board the plane, Skaggs said.

“Don’t be afraid to say something to flight attendants if you think that something’s not right or that you see something potentially escalating,” she said.

THE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
Thanksgiving travel also can be an emotional journey depending on where travelers are headed.

Holidays can be difficult for a variety of reasons, including complicated family dynamics, unrealistic expectations and disruption of routine, said Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth, chief medical officer at The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention.

“There can be a lot of anticipatory anxiety about the holidays, thinking about what’s happened in the previous years or wondering about how things are going to go,” she said.

To ease that anxiety, she recommended spending some travel time focused on mental health and preparing for what’s to come.

“If you’re going to be around family members you typically have conflicts with, my advice is to decide in advance how you want to interact with them. Things get a lot harder once you’re in the situation — old patterns can come out quickly,” she said. “So think ahead of time about what’s going to make you feel the best.”

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels said they hijacked the ship over its connection to Israel and would continue to target ships in international waters that were linked to or owned by Israelis until the end of Israel’s campaign against Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

“All ships belonging to the Israeli enemy or that deal with it will become legitimate targets,” the Houthis said.

Mohammed Abdul-Salam, the Houthis’ chief negotiator and spokesman, later added in an online statement that the Israelis only understand “the language of force.”

“The detention of the Israeli ship is a practical step that proves the seriousness of the Yemeni armed forces in waging the sea battle, regardless of its costs and costs,” he added. “This is the beginning.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office had blamed the Houthis for the attack on the Bahamas-flagged Galaxy Leader, a vehicle carrier affiliated with an Israeli billionaire. It said no Israelis were on board.

The ship’s Japanese operator, NYK Line, said the vessel had no cargo at the time of the hijacking. Its crewmembers are from the Philippines, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Mexico, NYK said.

Japan on Monday condemned the hijacking. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said the Japanese government was doing its utmost for an early release of the crew through negotiations with Houthi rebels, while also communicating with Israel and cooperating with the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Iran.

The Houthis said they were treating the crew members “in accordance with their Islamic values,” but did not elaborate on what that meant.

Netanyahu’s office condemned the seizure as an “Iranian act of terror.” The Israeli military called the hijacking a “very grave incident of global consequence.”

Israeli officials insisted the ship was British-owned and Japanese-operated. However, ownership details in public shipping databases associated the ship’s owners with Ray Car Carriers, founded by Abraham “Rami” Ungar, who is known as one of the richest men in Israel.

Ungar told The Associated Press he was aware of the incident but couldn’t comment as he awaited details. A ship linked to him experienced an explosion in 2021 in the Gulf of Oman. Israeli media blamed it on Iran at the time.

Authorities confirmed Monday that the captain and the first mate on the Galaxy Leader were Bulgarians.

Bulgaria’s top police officer, Zhivko Kotsev, told reporters that they were in touch with their families. “Nobody has sought contact with us up to this moment,” he said.

International shipping often involves a series of management companies, flags and owners stretching across the globe in a single vessel.

Two U.S. defense officials confirmed that Houthi rebels seized the Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea on Sunday afternoon local time. The rebels descended on the cargo ship by rappelling from a helicopter, the officials said, confirming details first reported by NBC News. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The ship’s seizure resembles others previously conducted by Iran, which has long armed the Houthis.

Twice in the last month, U.S. warships have intercepted missiles or drones from Yemen that were believed to be headed toward Israel or posing a threat to American vessels. The USS Carney, a Navy destroyer, intercepted three land attack cruise missiles and several drones that were launched by Houthi forces toward the northern Red Sea last month.

On Nov. 15 the USS Thomas Hudner, another destroyer, was sailing toward the Bab-el-Mandeb strait when the crew saw a drone, reported to have originated in Yemen. The ship shot down the drone over the water. The officials said the crew took action to ensure the safety of U.S. personnel, and there were no casualties or damage to the ship.

Satellite tracking data from MarineTraffic.com analyzed by the AP showed the Galaxy Leader traveling in the Red Sea southwest of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, more than a day ago. The vessel had been in Korfez, Turkey, and was on its way to Pipavav, India, at the time of the seizure reported by Israel.

It had its Automatic Identification System tracker, or AIS, switched off, the data showed. Ships are supposed to keep their AIS active for safety reasons, but crews will turn them off if it appears they might be targeted or to smuggle contraband, which there was no immediate evidence to suggest was the case with the Galaxy Leader.

The British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which provides warnings to sailors in the Persian Gulf and the wider region, put the hijacking as having occurred some 150 kilometers (90 miles) off the coast of Yemen’s port city of Hodeida, near the coast of Eritrea. It later cited a security officer with the ship’s company saying the vessel had been taken to Hodeida.

The Red Sea, stretching from Egypt’s Suez Canal to the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait separating the Arabian Peninsula from Africa, remains a key trade route for global shipping and energy supplies. That’s why the U.S. Navy has stationed multiple ships in the sea since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7.

Since 2019, a series of ships have come under attack at sea as Iran began breaking all the limits of its tattered nuclear deal with world powers. As Israel expands its devastating campaign against Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip following the militant group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel, fears have grown that the military operations could escalate into a wider regional conflict.

The Houthis have repeatedly threatened to target Israeli ships in the waters off Yemen. Such attacks both back its Iranian benefactors, as well as bolster the Houthis’ position in Yemen as anger has grown against their rule in recent months as that country’s civil war grinds on without resolution, said Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arabian Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“The Houthis view the war between Israel and Hamas as an opportunity to mute some of this domestic criticism,” Johnsen wrote in an analysis earlier this month. “If they are attacking Israel, their local rivals will be less inclined to attack them.”

The plight of the babies, along with the Israeli claims against Shifa Hospital, have become potent symbols in the devastating war between Israel and Hamas. An Israeli offensive has taken a heavy toll on Palestinian civilians, while Israel has accused Hamas of using Shifa and other hospitals as headquarters for military operations.

The newborns from the hospital, where power was cut and supplies ran out while Israeli forces battled Palestinian militants outside, were receiving urgent care in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. They had dehydration, hypothermia and sepsis in some cases, said Mohamed Zaqout, director of Gaza hospitals. Four other babies died in the two days before the evacuation, he said.

A World Health Organization team that visited Shifa said most of the remaining patients had amputations, burns or other trauma. Plans were being made to evacuate them in the coming days.

Later Sunday, Israel’s army said it had strong evidence supporting its claims that Hamas maintains a sprawling command post inside and under Shifa. Israel has portrayed the hospital as a key target in its war to end Hamas’ rule in Gaza following the militant group’s into southern Israel six weeks ago.

The army said it found a 55-meter (60-yard) tunnel about 10 meters (33 feet) under the hospital’s 20-acre complex, which includes several buildings, garages and a plaza. It said the tunnel included a staircase and a firing hole that could be used by snipers, and ended at a blast-proof door that troops have not yet opened.

The Associated Press couldn’t independently verify Israel’s findings, which included security camera video showing what the military said were two foreign hostages, one Thai and one Nepalese, taken to the hospital following the Oct. 7 attack.

The army also said an independent medical report had determined that Israeli army Cpl. Noa Marciano, whose body was recovered in Gaza, had been killed by Hamas in the hospital. Marciano had been injured in an Israeli strike Nov. 9 that killed her captor, according to Israel’s intelligence assessment. The injuries were not life-threatening but she was then killed by a Hamas militant in Shifa, the army said.

Hamas and hospital staff have denied the allegations of a command post under Shifa. Critics describe the hospital as a symbol of what they call Israel’s reckless endangerment of civilians. Thousands have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza, which is severely short of food, water, medicine and fuel.

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan dismissed the Israeli military’s announcement and didn’t deny that Gaza has hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. However, he said, “the Israelis said there was a command and control center, which means that the matter is greater than just a tunnel.”

HOSTAGE NEGOTIATIONS

About 1,200 people have been killed on the Israeli side, mainly civilians during the Oct. 7 attack in which Hamas dragged some 240 captives back into Gaza and shattered Israel’s sense of security. The military says 63 Israeli soldiers have been killed, including 12 over the past 24 hours.

Hamas has released four hostages, Israel has rescued one, and the bodies of two were found near Shifa.

Israel, the United States and Qatar, which mediates with Hamas, have been negotiating a hostage release for weeks. “We are hopeful that we can get a significant number of hostages freed in the coming days,” Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, told ABC’s “This Week.”

Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said the sticking points were “more practical, logistical.”

Israel’s three-member war cabinet is to meet with representatives of the hostages’ families on Monday evening.

SHIP SEIZED

Yemen’s Houthi rebels seized a Israeli-linked cargo ship in the southern Red Sea and took its 25 crew members hostage Sunday, an action that raised fear that regional tensions heightened by the war were spilling onto the seas. The Iran-backed rebel group said it would continue to target ships connected to Israel.

No Israelis were aboard the Bahamas-flagged Galaxy Leader, which was operated by a Japanese company with crewmembers from the Philippines, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Mexico, officials said. Public shipping databases associated the ship’s owners with Ray Car Carriers, a company founded by Abraham “Rami” Ungar, who is known as one of the richest people in Israel.

Ungar told The Associated Press he was aware of the incident but couldn’t comment as he awaited details. A ship linked to him experienced an explosion in 2021 in the Gulf of Oman. Israeli media blamed it on Iran at the time.

The Galaxy Leader was taken to the port city of Hodeida, near the coast of Eritrea, according to the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, citing a security officer with the ship’s company.

Japanese officials were negotiating with Houthi rebels for the release of the ship and its crew, said Japan Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno.

HEAVY FIGHTING IN THE NORTH

Heavy clashes were reported in the built-up Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. “There was the constant sound of gunfire and tank shelling,” Yassin Sharif, who is sheltering in a U.N.-run hospital there, said by phone.

The commissioner-general of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, said 24 people were killed the day before in what witnesses described as an Israeli airstrike on a U.N.-run school in Jabaliya. The Israeli military, which has repeatedly called on Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, said only that its troops were active in the area “with the aim of hitting terrorists.”

“This war is having a staggering and unacceptable number of civilian casualties. … This must stop,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement on that strike and another on a U.N.-run school within 24 hours.

More than 11,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities. Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried in rubble. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants; Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.

Attacks by Israeli forces and settlers have killed 215 Palestinians in the West Bank since the war began, according to Palestinian health officials.

COLDER WEATHER ADDS TO MISERY

More than two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, is struggling to provide basic services to hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Seventeen of its facilities have been directly hit, the agency said.

Their misery has worsened in recent days because of cold winds and driving rain.

Over the weekend, Israel allowed UNRWA to import enough fuel to continue humanitarian operations for another couple of days, and to keep internet and telephone systems running. Israel cut off all fuel imports at the start of the war, causing Gaza’s sole power plant and most water treatment systems to shut down.

Israel has repeatedly struck what it says are militant targets across the south, often killing civilians.

The evacuation zone is already crowded with displaced civilians, and it was not clear where they would go if the offensive moved closer. Egypt has refused to accept any influx of Palestinian refugees, in part because of fears that Israel would not allow them to return.

But some patients and foreign nationals reportedly got through. Turkey’s Health Ministry said it evacuated 110 people — including patients and their relatives — from an unspecified part of Gaza to Egypt. Another 87 people who were from Turkey or breakaway northern Cyprus entered Egypt from Gaza late Sunday, Turkish officials said, with the groups to be flown Monday to Turkey.

Palestinian-Canadian Khalil Manaa, 71, left Gaza for Egypt on Sunday. After fleeing to southern Gaza, he said he and relatives shared a home crammed with 40 people. “And there, we also were subjected to intense strikes. … A rocket hit our house,” he said.

With 99.4% of votes tallied in the presidential runoff, Milei had 55.7% and Economy Minister Sergio Massa 44.3%, according to Argentina’s electoral authority. It is the widest victory margin in a presidential race since the South American country’s return to democracy in 1983.

In the streets of Buenos Aires, drivers honked their horns and many took to the streets to celebrate in several neighborhoods. Outside Milei’s party headquarters, a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires, a full-on party kicked off with supporters singing, buying beers from vendors and setting off colored smoke bombs. They waved Argentine flags and the yellow Gadsden flag, emblazoned with the words “Don’t Tread On Me,” which Milei’s movement has adopted.

Inside, the self-described anarcho-capitalist who has been compared to former U.S. President Donald Trump, delivered his victory speech, saying the “reconstruction of Argentina begins today.”

“Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures,” Milei told supporters, who chanted “Liberty, liberty!” and “Let them all leave” in a reference to the country’s political class.

Massa of the ruling Peronist party had already conceded defeat, saying Argentines “chose another path.”

“Starting tomorrow … guaranteeing the political, social and economic functions is the responsibility of the new president. I hope he does,” Massa said.

With a Milei victory, the country will take an abrupt shift rightward and a freshman lawmaker who got his start as a television talking head blasting what he called the “political caste” will assume the presidency.

Inflation has soared above 140% and poverty has worsened while Massa has held his post. Milei has said he would slash the size of the government, dollarize the economy and eliminate the Central Bank as a way to tackle galloping inflation that he blames on successive governments printing money indiscriminately in order to fund public spending. He also espouses several conservative social policies, including an opposition to sex education in schools and abortion, which Argentina’s Congress legalized in 2020.

“This is a triumph that is less due to Milei and his peculiarities and particularities and more to the demand for change,” said Lucas Romero, the head of Synopsis, a local political consulting firm. “What is being expressed at the polls is the weariness, the fatigue, the protest vote of the majority of Argentines.”

Massa’s campaign cautioned Argentines that his libertarian opponent’s plan to eliminate key ministries and otherwise sharply curtail the state would threaten public services, including health and education, and welfare programs many rely on. Massa also drew attention to his opponent’s often aggressive rhetoric and openly questioned his mental acuity; ahead of the first round, Milei sometimes carried a revving chainsaw at rallies.

“There were lot of voters that weren’t convinced to vote Milei, who would vote null or blank. But come the day of the vote, they voted for Milei because they’re all pissed off,” Andrei Roman, CEO of Brazil-based pollster Atlas Intel, said by phone. “Everyone talked about the fear of Milei winning. I think this was a fear of Massa winning and economy continuing the way it is, inflation and all that.”

Milei accused Massa and his allies of running a “campaign of fear” and he walked back some of his most controversial proposals, such as loosening gun control. In his final campaign ad, Milei looks at the camera and assures voters he has no plans to privatize education or health care.

Milei’s screeds resonated widely with Argentines angered by their struggle to make ends meet, particularly young men.

“Incredibly happy, ecstatic, it’s a global historical phenomenon!” Luca Rodríguez, a 20-year-old law student, said outside Milei’s headquarters after spraying a bottle of champagne into the air onto those around him, who squealed with glee. “I want to break free from this ridiculous elite that takes away all our rights, all the tax money that pressures us and doesn’t let us live in peace.”

Two Milei supporters in the raucous crowd were 32-year-old identical twins, both dressed in matching grey tank tops with Argentine flags draped over their shoulders.

“We want a change, we want everything to improve,” Amilcar Rollo said beside his brother, Gabriel. “It’s the hope for something new from someone who hasn’t been there and has different ideas. Otherwise, it’s just the same as always.”

Most pre-election polls, which have been notoriously wrong at every step of this year’s campaign, showed a statistical tie between the two candidates or Milei slightly ahead.

Underscoring the bitter division this campaign has brought to the fore, Milei received both jeers and cheers on Friday night at the legendary Colón Theater in Buenos Aires.

The acrimony was also evident Sunday when Milei’s running mate, Victoria Villaruel, went to vote and was met by protesters angry at her claims that the number of victims from Argentina’s bloody 1976-1983 military dictatorship is far below what human rights organizations have long claimed, among other controversial positions.

The vote took place amid Milei’s allegations of possible electoral fraud, reminiscent of those from Trump and former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Without providing evidence, Milei claimed that the first round of the presidential election was plagued by irregularities that affected the result. Experts say such irregularities cannot swing an election, and that his assertions were partly aimed at firing up his base and motivating his supporters to become monitors of voting stations. Many have expressed concerns they undermine democratic norms.

Both Bolsonaro and Trump congratulated Milei on social media.

“The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you,” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “You will turn your Country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again!”

And posting on X, formerly Twitter, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also commended Milei.

“We look forward to continuing bilateral cooperation based on shared values and interests,” Blinken wrote.

Two separate systems will impact holiday travelers Saturday – one in New England and the other along the West Coast – both bringing rain and snow and the possibility of travel delays.

The system in the East will push rain and gusty winds into coastal New England and some snow showers across the White and Green Mountains.

If you have travel flexibility, and are driving instead of flying, it may be best to wait until Sunday for most of New England. Travelers in and out of Boston will likely encounter rain showers, patchy fog and wind gusts up to 30 mph Saturday. By Sunday, the sunshine will return and winds will decrease to 10 to 20 mph.

The West Coast system will begin Saturday in the Portland, Oregon, area and will stretch down through San Diego.

Rain will also spread into desert cities, including Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque – and will continue Sunday from Seattle down through Eureka, California.

More than 6 million people from Southern California to southern Idaho are under wind advisories through Sunday. Winds could reach 40 to 50 mph with gusts as high as 60 mph in the mountains.

“Winds this strong can make driving difficult, especially for high-profile vehicles and motorcycles,” the National Weather Service in Las Vegas said. “Gusty winds will blow around unsecured objects. Tree limbs could be blown down and a few power outages may result.”

Sunday also will see a shift eastward for this system into the Mountain West and Central Plains.

Rain, and snow for higher elevations, will stretch from Washington to Colorado. Salt Lake City will see rain showers to start, but as temperatures drop Sunday evening, it will gradually change over to a mix of rain and snow.

The focus across the Central Plains will be rain and thunderstorms from Nebraska down through Texas.

By Monday, a new threat begins across the Gulf Coast with the possibility for tornadoes, hail, and damaging winds.

As this low pressure system deepens and advances eastward, it will also spread rain from Minnesota through Louisiana.

Rain chances increase through the day Monday in Shreveport, with thunderstorms developing in the late afternoon and continuing through the evening.

The day with the most weather-related headaches for travelers is likely to be Tuesday, with the low pressure system bringing rain and thunderstorms to the majority of the eastern half of the country.

The area looking at possible rain includes major airport cities – New York, Washington, Chicago, and Atlanta. All could see delays and frustrations from the wet forecast.

Atlanta could see over an inch of rain in less than 24 hours Tuesday, and winds could gust up to or over 30 mph all day, even though the thunderstorms will be mostly confined to the afternoon.

The rocketship reached space following liftoff from South Texas before communication suddenly was lost. SpaceX officials said it appears the ship’s self-destruct system blew it up over the Gulf of Mexico.

Minutes earlier, the separated booster had exploded over the gulf. By then, though, its job was done.

Saturday’s demo lasted eight or so minutes, about twice as long as the first test in April, which also ended in an explosion. The latest flight came to an end as the ship’s six engines were almost done firing to put it on an around-the-world path.

At nearly 400 feet (121 meters), Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, with the goal of ferrying people to the moon and Mars.

“The real topping on the cake today, that successful liftoff,” said SpaceX commentator John Insprucker, noting that all 33 booster engines fired as designed, unlike last time. The booster also separated seamlessly from the spaceship, which reached an altitude of 92 miles (148 kilometers).

Added commentator Kate Tice: “We got so much data, and that will all help us to improve for our next flight.”

SpaceX founder Elon Musk watched from behind launch controllers at the southern tip of Texas near the Mexico border, near Boca Chica Beach. At company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, employees cheered as Starship soared at daybreak. The room grew quiet once it was clear that the spaceship had been destroyed.

SpaceX had been aiming for an altitude of 150 miles (240 kilometers), just high enough to send the bullet-shaped spacecraft around the globe before ditching into the Pacific near Hawaii about 1 1/2 hours after liftoff, short of a full orbit.

Following April’s flight demo, SpaceX made dozens of improvements to the rocket as well as the launch pad. The Federal Aviation Administration cleared the rocket for flight on Wednesday, after confirming that all safety and environmental concerns had been met.

After Saturday’s launch, the FAA said no injuries or public damage had been reported and that an investigation was underway to determine what went wrong. SpaceX cannot launch another Starship until the review is complete and corrections made, the FAA added.

NASA is counting on Starship to land astronauts on the moon by the end of 2025 or shortly thereafter. The space agency awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract to make it happen, by transferring astronauts from its Orion capsule to Starship in lunar orbit before heading down to the surface.

“Today’s test is an opportunity to learn — then fly again,” noted NASA Administrator Bill Nelson via X, formerly known as Twitter.

Starship is 34 feet (10 meters) taller than NASA’s Saturn V rocket which carried men to the moon more than a half-century ago, and 75 feet (23 meters) taller than NASA’s Space Launch System rocket that flew around the moon and back, without a crew, last year. And it’s got approximately double the liftoff thrust.

Like before, nothing of value was aboard Starship for the trial run.

Once Starship is proven, Musk plans to use the fully reusable mega rockets to launch satellites into orbit around Earth and equipment and people to the moon, and eventually, to Mars.

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said 33-year-old John Madore entered New Hampshire Hospital on Friday afternoon and killed Bradley Haas, a state Department of Safety security officer who was working at the front lobby entrance of the facility. There were several people in the lobby at the time of the shooting, he said.

Formella said Madore was most recently living in a hotel in the Seacoast region and also had lived in Concord. He was wielding a 9mm pistol and had additional ammunition on him when he shot Haas, who was unarmed.

Police also found an AR-style rifle, a tactical vest and several ammunition magazines in a U-Haul truck in the hospital’s parking lot and were investigating possible connections between the truck and Madore.

“The actions of the trooper and Bradley Haas saved a lot of lives,” Formella said.

The shooting happened around 3:30 p.m. at New Hampshire Hospital and was contained to the front lobby of the 185-bed facility, State Police Col. Mark Hall said late Friday. He said CPR was performed on Haas, who later died at Concord Hospital.

Police are still trying to determine a possible motive.

“We have a lot of work to do to really figure out who this man was, why he might have done what he did, what led up to this incident,” said Formella, who said the Haas family has requested privacy.

Haas lived in Franklin, a small city about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Concord. He worked as a police officer for 28 years and rose to become police chief, according to a statement from the state attorney general’s office.

The Franklin Police Department mourned the death of the former chief, saying he dedicated decades to the city and police department before retiring in 2008.

“He continued to dedicate his time to the NH community by serving as a security officer helping and protecting those at the NH State Hospital,” the police department said on their Facebook page. “The FPD will honor his memory by flying our flags at half staff and wearing mourning bands in our badges.”

Gov. Chris Sununu also credited first responders for helping the state avoid a larger tragedy.

“If not for the heroics and sacrifice of Bradley Haas, the bravery of the New Hampshire Hospital staff, the unflinching response of New Hampshire State Police this tragedy could have been much, much worse,” Gov. Chris Sununu said Saturday.

Friday’s shooting was the latest act of violence at a U.S. hospital. Medical centers nationwide have struggled to adapt to the growing threats, which have helped make health care one of the nation’s most violent fields.

It came weeks after 18 people were killed and 13 others injured in a mass shooting in neighboring Maine.

The hospital remained in operation but was closed to visitors Friday evening.

The facility is the only state-run psychiatric hospital for adults in New Hampshire. Located in the capital city, it is part of a large state office park that includes multiple state agencies and is near the city’s high school and district courthouse. The Department of Safety provides security for the hospital.

Steve Ahnen, president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association, said in a statement that the hospital staff serves “patients with respect, compassion and with the utmost care and that extends to all who work there.”

“We extend our gratitude to New Hampshire’s first responders and all those who swiftly acted to minimize further harm and provide care to those in need,” he said.

Israel’s military has been searching Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital for a Hamas command center that it alleges is located under the facility — a claim Hamas and hospital staff deny. The evacuation, which Israel says was voluntary, left behind only Israeli troops and a small number of health workers to care for those too sick to move.

“We left at gunpoint,” Mahmoud Abu Auf told The Associated Press by phone after he and his family left the crowded hospital. “Tanks and snipers were everywhere inside and outside.” He said he saw Israeli troops detain three men.

Elsewhere in northern Gaza, dozens of people were killed in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp when what witnesses described as an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded U.N. shelter in the main combat zone. It caused massive destruction in the camp’s Fakhoura school, said wounded survivors Ahmed Radwan and Yassin Sharif.

“The scenes were horrifying. Corpses of women and children were on the ground. Others were screaming for help,” Radwan said by phone. AP photos from a local hospital showed more than 20 bodies wrapped in bloodstained sheets.

The Israeli military, which had warned Jabaliya residents and others in a social media post in Arabic to leave, said only that its troops were active in the area “with the aim of hitting terrorists.” It rarely comments on individual strikes, saying only that it targets Hamas while trying to minimize civilian harm.

“Receiving horrifying images & footage of scores of people killed and injured in another UNRWA school sheltering thousands of displaced,” Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said on X, formerly Twitter.

In southern Gaza, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building on the outskirts of the town of Khan Younis, killing at least 26 Palestinians, according to a doctor at the hospital where the bodies were taken.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel’s forces have begun operating in eastern Gaza City while continuing its mission in western areas. “With every passing day, there are fewer places where Hamas terrorists can operate,” he said, adding that the militants would learn that in southern Gaza “in the coming days.”

His comments were the clearest indication yet that the military plans to expand its offensive to southern Gaza, where Israel had told Palestinian civilians to flee early in the war. The evacuation zone is already crammed with displaced civilians, and it was not clear where they would go if the offensive moves closer.

What led to the Shifa Hospital evacuation wasn’t immediately known. Israel’s military said it was asked by the hospital’s director to help those who would like to leave to do so and that it did not order an evacuation. But Medhat Abbas, a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, said the military ordered the facility cleared and gave the hospital an hour to get people out.

A Shifa physician, Ahmed Mokhallalati, said on social media that about 120 patients remained, including some in intensive care and premature babies, and that he and five other doctors were staying.

Twenty-five of Gaza’s hospitals aren’t functioning due to a lack of fuel, damage and other problems, and the other 11 are only partially operational, according to the World Health Organization.

Israel has said hospitals in northern Gaza were a key target of its ground offensive, claiming they were used as militant command centers and weapons depots, which both Hamas and medical staff deny.

Internet and phone service were restored Saturday to Gaza, ending a telecommunications outage that had forced the United Nations to shut down critical aid deliveries.

The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted some 240 men, women and children. Fifty-two Israeli soldiers have been killed.

More than 11,500 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities. Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants; Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that the Israeli military would have “full freedom” to operate within the territory after the war. The comments again put him in conflict with U.S. visions for a post-war era in Gaza.

In an op-ed published Saturday in The Washington Post, President Joe Biden said Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited and governed under a “revitalized Palestinian Authority” while world leaders work toward a peaceful two-state solution. Netanyahu has long opposed a Palestinian state.

The U.S. is providing weapons and intelligence support to Israel in its offensive to root out Hamas.

GROWING FRUSTRATION

Gaza’s main power plant shut down early in the war, and Israel has cut off electricity. That makes fuel necessary to power generators needed to run water treatment plants, sanitation facilities, hospitals and other critical infrastructure for Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma said 120,000 liters (31,700 gallons) of fuel arrived, enough for two days, for the U.N.’s use after Israel agreed to the shipment. Israel also is allowing 10,000 liters (2,642 gallons) to keep internet and telephone systems running. It wasn’t immediately clear when UNRWA would resume aid that was put on hold Friday during the communications blackout.

Gaza has received only 10% of its required food supplies each day in shipments from Egypt, according to the U.N., and the water system shutdown has left most of the population drinking contaminated water. Dehydration and malnutrition are growing, according to the U.N.’s World Food Program.

In Jerusalem, thousands of marchers — including family members and supporters of about 240 hostages held in Gaza by Hamas — arrived on the last leg of a five-day trek from Tel Aviv to plead with the government to do more to bring their loved ones home.

The Israeli military said its aircraft struck what it described as a hideout for militants in the urban refugee camp of Balata in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said five Palestinians were killed. The deaths raised to 212 the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since the war began.

Israel announced that it will allow two tanker trucks of fuel into Gaza each day for the U.N. and communication systems. That amount is half of what the U.N. said it needs for lifesaving functions for hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza, including powering water systems, hospitals, bakeries and the trucks delivering aid.

Israel has barred entry of fuel since the start of the war, saying it would be diverted by Hamas for military means. It has also blocked food, water and other supplies except for a trickle of aid from Egypt that aid workers say falls far short of what’s needed.

The communications blackout largely cut off Gaza’s 2.3 million people from one another and the outside world.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, couldn’t bring in its aid convoy Friday because of the communications cutoff, spokesperson Juliette Touma said.

“An extended blackout means an extended suspension of our humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip,” Touma told The Associated Press.

Phone and internet services in parts of the Gaza Strip were partially restored Friday night after a limited quantity of fuel for generators was provided, according to NetBlocks, a group that tracks internet outages.

Israeli forces have signaled they could expand their offensive toward Gaza’s south while continuing operations in the north. Troops have been searching the territory’s biggest hospital, Shifa, for traces of a Hamas command center Israel alleges was located under the building — a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny.

On Friday, the military said it found the body of another hostage, Cpl. Noa Marciano, in a building adjacent to Shifa, like that of another hostage found Thursday, Yehudit Weiss. Hundreds of mourners, many carrying Israeli flags, attended Marciano’s funeral Friday in her hometown of Modi’in.

The war, now in its sixth week, was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, in which the militants killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted some 240 men, women and children.

More than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed in the war, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble. The count does not differentiate between civilians and militants, and Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.AID DRIES UP

After an American request, Israel agreed to let a “very minimal” amount of fuel into Gaza each day, national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said. COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for Palestinian affairs, said it would amount to 60,000 liters (15,850 gallons) a day for the U.N.

For the communications network, Israel also agreed on another 10,000 liters a day (2,640 gallons), a U.S. State Department official said.

UNRWA and other humanitarian groups need at least 120,000 liters (31,700 gallons) a day to run lifesaving functions, Touma said.

Gaza has received only 10% of its required food supplies each day in shipments from Egypt, according to the U.N., and the water system shutdown has left most of the population drinking contaminated water, causing an outbreak of disease.

Dehydration and malnutrition are growing, with nearly all residents in need of food, said Abeer Etefa, a Mideast regional spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Program.

“People are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” she said Thursday from Cairo.

MARCH FOR HOSTAGES

Israeli officials previously vowed fuel would not be let in until Gaza militants release the hostages. The government has been under heavy public pressure to show it is doing all it can to bring back people abducted in Hamas’ attack.

Thousands of marchers — including families of over 50 hostages — embarked Friday on the fourth leg of a five-day walk from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, chanting, “Bring them home!” They are marching to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, calling on his war Cabinet to do more to rescue their loved ones. They have urged the cabinet to consider a cease-fire or prisoner swap in return for the hostages.

Hamas has offered to exchange all hostages for some 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, which the Cabinet has rejected.

CONDITIONS AT SHIFA

With Israeli troops fanned out around the Shifa hospital complex, doctors spoke of horrifying conditions inside. Electricity has been out for nearly a week, leaving incubators for infants and ventilators for ICU patients defunct. Nearly 7,000 people are trapped there with little food, including patients, staff and civilian families.

Hospital Director Mohammed Abu Selmia told Al Jazeera television that 52 patients have died since fuel ran out — up from 40 reported before Israeli troops stormed in on Wednesday. He said staff were amputating limbs of some patients to avoid infection spreading because of shortages in medicines.

More were on the verge of death as their wounds are “open with maggots coming out of them,” another doctor, Faisal Siyam, told Al Jazeera.

Dr. Ahmad Mukhalalti said most of the 36 premature infants suffer from severe diarrhea because there is no clean water. He said Israeli troops had taken away all the bodies from the morgue and from a mass grave that staff dug days earlier in the courtyard. The Israeli military had no comment on the report. The doctors’ accounts could not be independently verified.

Abu Selmia said Israeli troops should either bring them fuel to power equipment or allow an evacuation.

“The hospital has become a giant prison,” he said. “We are surrounded by death.”

Israel’s military said it delivered 4,000 liters of water and 1,500 ready-made meals to Shifa, but staff said it was too little for the numbers of people there.

Israeli military spokesman Col. Richard Hecht acknowledged that the troops’ search for traces of Hamas was going slowly. “It’s going to take time,” he said.

Israel faces pressure to prove its claim that Hamas set up its main command center in and under the hospital. So far, Israel has shown photos and video of weapons caches that it says were found inside as well as what it said was a tunnel entrance. The AP could not independently verify the Israeli claims.

The allegations are part of Israel’s broader accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields across the Gaza Strip, contending that is the reason for the large numbers of civilian casualties during weeks of bombardment.

STRIKES IN THE SOUTH

Airstrikes continued to hammer the southern sector of Gaza, where most of the territory’s population is now sheltering. Among them are hundreds of thousands of people who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate Gaza City and the north to get out of the way of its ground offensive.

In the Nusseirat refugee camp, a strike crushed a building to rubble killing at least 41 people, staff at the nearby hospital said. Residents said dozens more were buried in the wreckage.

Early morning strikes outside the city of Khan Younis killed 11 members of a family that evacuated from Gaza City. Dozens of wounded, including babies and young children, streamed into the nearby hospital.

At the morgue, Alaa Abu Hasira wept over the bodies from the strike that were lined up side by side on the floor, including her son, daughter and several sisters. “All my loved ones are gone,” she sobbed.

So far, Israel’s ground assault has focused on northern Gaza as it vows to remove Hamas from power and crush its military capabilities. If the assault moves into the south, it is not clear where Palestinians can go. Egypt has refused to allow a mass transfer onto its soil.

As the war continues to inflame tensions elsewhere, Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian gunmen in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, killing at least three Palestinians. The fighting broke out late Thursday during an Israeli raid.

Israel’s military said five militants were killed. The Palestinian Health Ministry said three people died. The militant Islamic Jihad group claimed the three dead as members and identified one as a local commander.

IBM said this week that it stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis — a fresh setback as the platform formerly known as Twitter tries to win back big brands and their ad dollars, X’s main source of revenue.

The liberal advocacy group Media Matters said in a report Thursday that ads from Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal’s Bravo network and Comcast also were placed next to antisemitic material on X.

“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the company said in a statement.

Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal and Comcast didn’t respond immediately to requests seeking comment on their next steps.

The European Union’s executive branch said separately Friday it is pausing advertising on X and other social media platforms, in part because of a surge in hate speech. Later in the day, Disney, Lionsgate and Paramount Global also said they were suspending or pausing advertising on X.

Musk sparked outcry this week with his own tweets responding to a user who accused Jews of hating white people and professing indifference to antisemitism. “You have said the actual truth,” Musk tweeted in a reply Wednesday.

Musk has faced accusations of tolerating antisemitic messages on the platform since purchasing it last year, and the content on X has gained increased scrutiny since the war between Israel and Hamas began.

“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Friday in response to Musk’s tweet.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said X’s “point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board.”

“I think that’s something we can and should all agree on,” she tweeted Thursday.

Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal executive, was hired by Musk to rebuild ties with advertisers who fled after he took over, concerned that his easing of content restrictions was allowing hateful and toxic speech to flourish and that would harm their brands.

“When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop,” Yaccarino said.

The accounts that Media Matters found posting antisemitic material will no longer be monetizable and the specific posts will be labeled “sensitive media,” according to a statement from X. Still, Musk decried Media Matters as “an evil organization.”

The head of the Anti-Defamation League also hit back at Musk’s tweets this week, in the latest clash between the prominent Jewish civil-rights organization and the billionaire businessman.

“At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said on X.

Musk also tweeted this week that he was “deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind.”

The group has previously accused Musk of allowing antisemitism and hate speech to spread on the platform and amplifying the messages of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who want to ban the ADL.

The European Commission, meanwhile, said it’s putting all of its social media ad efforts on hold because of an “alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech” on platforms in recent weeks.

The commission, the 27-nation EU’s executive arm, said it is advising its services to “refrain from advertising at this stage on social media platforms where such content is present,” adding that the freeze doesn’t affect its official accounts on X.

The EU has taken a tough stance with new rules to clean up social media platforms, and last month it made a formal request to X for information about its handling of hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content related to the Israel-Hamas war.

X isn’t alone in dealing with problematic content since the conflict.

On Thursday, TikTok removed the hashtag #lettertoamerica after users on the app posted sympathetic videos about Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the terrorist attacks against Americans on 9/11 and criticizing U.S. support for Israel. The Guardian news outlet, which published the transcript of the letter that was being shared, took it down and replaced it with a statement that directed readers to a news article from 2002 that it said provided more context.

The videos garnered widespread attention among X users critical of TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. TikTok said the letter was not a trend on its platform and blamed an X post by journalist Yashar Ali and media coverage for drawing more engagement to the hashtag.

The short-form video app has faced criticism from Republicans and others who say the platform has been failing to protect Jewish users from harassment and pushing pro-Palestinian content to viewers.

TikTok has aggressively pushed back, saying it’s been taking down antisemitic content and doesn’t manipulate its algorithm to take sides.

The shooting happened around 3:30 p.m. at New Hampshire Hospital and was contained to the front lobby of the 185-bed facility, State Police Col. Mark Hall said at a news conference. He said CPR was performed on the victim, who later died at Concord Hospital.

Authorities identified the victim Friday night as Bradley Haas, 63, a state Department of Safety security officer who was working at the front lobby entrance.

Haas lived in Franklin, a small town about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Concord. He worked as a police officer for 28 years and rose to become police chief, according to a statement from the state attorney general’s office.

All patients at the psychiatric hospital were safe, and the state trooper who killed the shooter was not wounded, according to authorities.

“Investigators with the New Hampshire State Police have searched and cleared a suspicious box truck near the scene. They determined the truck poses no safety risk,” the statement from the attorney general’s office said.

No further information was released about the shooter, a possible motive or other details of the attack. But authorities planned to provide an update on the investigation Saturday morning.

Friday’s shooting was the latest act of violence at a U.S. hospital. Medical centers nationwide have struggled to adapt to the growing threats, which have helped make health care one of the nation’s most violent fields.

It came weeks after 18 people were killed and 13 others injured in a mass shooting in neighboring Maine.

The hospital remained in operation but was closed to visitors Friday evening, said Lori Weaver, commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services

“This is a difficult and unimaginable day for our employees and for our community,” she said. “We will continue to make resources available in the coming hours and days.”

“Our dedicated staff will continue to provide skilled, compassionate care as they do every day,” she said.

The facility is the only state-run psychiatric hospital for adults in New Hampshire. Located in the capital city, it is part of a large state office park that includes multiple state agencies and is near the city’s high school and district courthouse. The Department of Safety provides security for the hospital.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster called the shooting “horrifying” in a statement that asked the public to stay away from the hospital while police were still on the scene.

“Thank you to the State Police Officers who responded to the scene so quickly,” Kuster said in a statement. “My thoughts are with the victim, their family, and the Concord community.”

Other members of the state’s congressional delegation also released statements of support.

“The state immediately mobilized, and first responders and law enforcement are on the scene,” Gov. Chris Sununu said in a statement. “We will provide as many details as possible as this situation unfolds.”