World News

By Sabine Siebold

BERLIN, July 1 (Reuters) – NATO is set to announce at next week’s Ankara summit that its European members have filled almost all the gaps left by the United States in the alliance’s defence plans, a NATO source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The main gap NATO is still struggling to plug is in strategic bombers, where the U.S. has said it will make only one aircraft available instead of two, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. told its allies in May that it had decided to shrink the pool of military capabilities committed to the transatlantic alliance in a crisis, raising urgent questions as leaders prepare for a NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 to 8.

The move is meant to gradually end an “unhealthy co-dependence” on U.S. forces as Washington faces the potential of simultaneous conflicts in multiple theatres, according to NATO’s top commander, U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich.

In mid-June, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said other allies were increasing their contributions and would fill “a lot” of the gaps but did not give any details. 

Asked for comment, a NATO spokesperson referred to these remarks by Rutte.    

The U.S. did not publicly disclose details of its reductions, but they range from refuelling aircraft to fighter jets, drones and ships, according to figures provided to Reuters by a military source.

The number of U.S. F-15 and F-15E fighter jets available to NATO will fall by a third to 99 and the number of MQ-4 and MQ-9 Reaper drones by half to 12, according to the source.

The number of KC-135 and KC-46 refuelling aircraft falls to 63 from 79, while only one strategic bomber and aircraft carrier would be allocated, rather than two.

The number of maritime patrol aircraft goes down to 15 from 26, the number of destroyers falls to nine from 17, and the only submarine carrying cruise missiles is also cut from the commitments.

The NATO alliance is under unprecedented strain, with some European countries concerned that Washington may fulfil repeated threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw.

(Reporting by Sabine Siebold, editing by Bart Meijer)

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MONACO (AP) — Monaco authorities said a person was arrested but later released Wednesday as they “very actively” pursue their probe of an explosion that reportedly wounded a Ukrainian tycoon with ties to Russia and two other people.

A statement from the Mediterranean principality’s prosecutor general said the person is a foreign national and was detained in Monaco in the morning.

They were held in police custody “as further checks were deemed necessary” before being released in the afternoon, it said, giving no further information about the person or why they aroused suspicion.

The explosion at an apartment building entrance in Monaco occurred late Monday. Monaco authorities haven’t identified any of the injured but said they were a family and that they appeared to have been specifically targeted.

Media reports identified Ukrainian construction tycoon Vadym Yermolaiev as being among the injured. He has said he renounced his Ukrainian citizenship nearly a decade ago, and he was targeted by Ukrainian sanctions in 2023 for ties to Russia. A woman and a child were also hurt.

The prosecutor’s statement said the child has been interviewed in neighboring France but that the other two victims are still not in a condition to be questioned. One of them is critically injured and their life remains in danger, it said.

It described the blast as an attempted assassination and said French authorities are assisting the investigation. Analysis of the explosive device and work to identify the bomber is ongoing, it said.

It was not clear why the family was targeted or by whom.

Russia has a long history of targeting its enemies abroad, and Western intelligence officials have recently said that a campaign of targeted killings has ramped up since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine is also believed to have carried out attacks and targeted killings of Russian figures in the course of the war, although those attacks have largely been confined to Ukrainian or Russian territory.

The attack shocked the country on the Mediterranean coast, one of the world’s smallest sovereign states known for its high concentration of wealthy residents. Monaco’s Prince Albert II described it as “an odious act” and said all public services were mobilized to ensure security.

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JERUSALEM (AP) — It was the deadliest reported strike in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Most of the victims were children.

In almost any other conflict, these haunting truths would be seared into national memory. Yet more than 120 days since at least one U.S. missile struck an Iranian primary school, there remains no final accounting of what happened.

The Trump administration has yet to directly accept the blame or formally release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the bombing, even though the military possessed evidence almost immediately that the site of the school had been struck, a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss an ongoing investigation, told The Associated Press.

The AP has reconstructed the story of the attack, beginning in the schoolyard on the morning of Feb. 28, drawing from open-source information, video footage, human rights reports and interviews with researchers and civilians inside and outside Iran to reveal previously unreported details about the bombing in Minab, including the diversity of children killed.

Still, many details about the blast remain elusive, as a lack of information from the Pentagon and politicization of the attack by Iran’s theocracy have complicated independent reporting efforts. That has created an accountability vacuum, leaving the families of the victims without resolution. Among the mysteries remaining are the number of munitions that hit the school and a complete list of the dead.

When asked last week about the incident, President Donald Trump said he hadn’t read the Pentagon’s report and had seen nothing to make him believe the U.S. had carried out the attack.

“I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it, because there were missiles flying all over the place,” he said. “I don’t think it was us.”

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment from the AP.

The reconstruction draws from interviews with U.S. officials, Iranian human rights workers, a resident of Minab, an international representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Union and researchers from major international rights groups.

Several people who spoke to the AP were in direct contact with the families of victims and rescuers who rushed to the scene. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution against them and those with whom they spoke.

Skies over the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran about 16 miles (25 km) from the Strait of Hormuz, were clear and bright on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 28, a school day in Iran. It was Ramadan.

Students of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school, Farsi for “Good Tree,” jostled past the colorful murals lining the schoolyard and into the building. Boys and girls filtered into separate spaces with brightly painted desks.

The school they entered was one of over 30 with the same name established to serve children from families closely tied to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard or other state institutions, said Shiva Amelirad, the international union representative who also worked as a teacher in Iran for 18 years and has been in contact with people in Minab.

Though most schools in Iran operate within guidelines proscribed by the Islamic Republic, the Shejareh Tayyebeh schools were more explicitly oriented toward reproducing and reinforcing the Guard’s worldview, she said, adding that children are civilians regardless of their family backgrounds, and “any attack targeting a school is unequivocally condemnable.”

The school lay within the same walled compound as a Guard base, according to an AP assessment of satellite imagery and open-source mapping. It was once part of that neighboring base, before it was fenced off and converted over a decade ago.

Though some of its pupils were the children of Guard officers working on the nearby base, others were local children from Minab, which is populated predominantly by people of the majority-Sunni Baluch ethnic minority who often face repression from the Iranian government, said the Balochistan Human Rights Group.

Hundreds of students are believed to have been inside the building by the time teachers and administrators received the news that bombs had begun falling on Tehran around 9:40 a.m.

Teachers and administrators thought it prudent to send the children home. They called parents on landline phones, summoning them for an early pickup, two people told the AP. A recently released report by Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts, also found that parents were called to pick up their children.

At 10:15 a.m., Iran’s state media sent out an advisory, closing schools across the country.

One father, who lived a short distance away, went immediately to pick up his 10-year-old son, said a resident of Minab, who relayed the stories of several families to the AP. The AP verified details of the residents’ stories against available lists of the dead and rights groups’ chronologies of the day’s events.

The father noticed his 6- and 7-year-old relatives among the students waiting for their parents, said the resident. He asked them if they’d like a ride home and they said no, that their own father was on the way.

He left with his child and headed to the supermarket. Ten minutes later, he heard the explosions.

Multiple munitions pummeled the compound, striking at least five buildings, according to an AP analysis of satellite imagery. Hundreds of pounds of explosives collapsed the school.

The father raced back to a scene of chaos, where onlookers gathered, screaming, as men pawed through smoking rubble to dig out bodies, according to video of the aftermath circulated by Iranian state media.

Eventually, the father made out two burned figures he believes were those of his relatives, but he couldn’t be sure.

People kept coming. One man from a nearby Sunni village arrived to search for his nephew after receiving a panicked call from the boy’s mother. In the rubble, he found her dead son.

Rescuers found small backpacks and children’s drawings, colored pencils and worksheets. Gently suspended, a tiny arm lay in the wreckage.

Men carried disfigured limbs and torsos to the local hospital, said the Balochistan Human Rights Group, whose staff spoke with two families of those killed. The AP has not been able to verify how many munitions specifically hit the school, but the attack had left flesh so mutilated that many body parts were unrecognizable.

By the end of the day, doctors at the hospital estimated they had at least 108 bodies, but cautioned that it was likely an undercount, said the resident of Minab.

By the next day, state media was saying around 150 had been killed. Soon, it was reporting a death toll of 168.

Three days after the bombing, state TV showed thousands of Iranians packing a Minab roundabout, where the crowds faced a podium and a large portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late founder of the Islamic Republic.

The gathering might have been mistaken for a demonstration, if it were not a funeral. All the parents of victims, regardless of ethnicity or religion, had to participate, said the Minab resident. Most women in the crowd donned the black chador garment customary to the Islamic Republic, even though it’s not typically worn by Baluch people at funerals.

Parents were told they’d be permitted to take their children’s bodies back to their villages and conduct their own observances, said the resident. In the end, though, many decided to bury their children together.

In footage captured by drone cameras and circulated by state media, workers broke ground on an earthen lot, creating a grid of tiny, identical, unmarked graves.

“The state media advocated a narrative based on IRGC interest,” said Amelirad. “You can tell because they called the kids martyrs.”

Strikes continued to ravage Iran, targeting more sites in its opening days than the start of recent U.S. or Israeli military campaigns, including in Gaza, an Airwars analysis found.

Racing to document the ongoing bombardment, journalists and rights groups struggled to verify details from Minab. They had no access to the target site. Government restrictions in Iran prevented most foreign journalists from entering the country. The opening day of the war, Iran shut down the internet, making it nearly impossible to hear from ordinary civilians.

As the war progressed and the Strait of Hormuz became a major battlefield, the situation in the province grew more tense, said the resident. All branches of the military were deployed heavily in the area. Families of the victims feared retribution for speaking out. People were reportedly being detained for trying to communicate with foreign media.

That left Iran’s government in control of the messaging around the strike.

Iran’s soccer team wore golden “#168” pins on their jackets upon their arrival at the FIFA World Cup.

The Iranian team negotiating for a pause to the war with the U.S. named itself “Minab 168.”

The children were depicted as animated Lego figures in viral videos made by pro-Iran groups trolling the U.S.

“In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian authorities … exploited the suffering of victims’ families and surviving children for propaganda purposes,” wrote Amnesty International in a March report investigating the deaths.

Through it all, there remained no public list of the names of the dead.

Locked out of Iran, researchers focused on the question of responsibility.

Iran blamed the U.S. Trump cast doubt on American culpability and pointed the finger at Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said only that the Pentagon was investigating.

Internally, the U.S. military knew more than it initially let on. The clues were buried in their archives.

When the news first surfaced, the U.S. military knew they had conducted strikes in the vicinity — though it took the military time to verify the Iranian claims that a school was struck and begin a formal investigation, said a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing inquiry.

It appears that while the building housing the school was identified as such by one analyst as early as seven years ago, that discovery was not sufficiently made known across different intelligence and military staffs and agencies, the U.S. official said.

Ultimately, the building was not known among target developers as a school, revealing potential systematic shortfalls in the target analysis and review process, they said.

One former Pentagon official, similarly speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bombing came as a natural result of changes made by the Trump administration to reduce staff to mitigate civilian harm and Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality.

When Hegseth took charge, he slashed the size of an office called the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created at the direction of Congress in late 2022. That stopped the office’s work on updating “no-strike lists,” which are lists of protected sites such as hospitals, schools, churches and mosques, that the Pentagon keeps, said Wes Bryant, who began working at the office in 2024 as the Branch Chief of Civil Harm Assessments.

When he was working at the Pentagon, it was well known that the list was out-of-date, he said.

In the last weeks, researchers have made some progress. Airwars, the conflict research group, spent months combing through open-source information to verify the identity of victims. The group determined the names and identities of 157 of the dead, including 123 children, all 13 or younger, and 34 adults. Among the adults are 26 school staff members (one of whom was pregnant) and five parents — each of whom lost at least one child.

The group puts the death toll between 157 and 168 and says between 95 and 111 people were injured.

It’s unclear if the formal results of the military’s Minab investigation will be published. Much of the investigative work has been completed, but the U.S. military’s Central Command, which commissioned the investigation, is currently reviewing the findings.

Findings from similar past investigations have been more timely. When a Hellfire missile killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 29, 2021, the Defense Department claimed responsibility and gave details on its operations in less than a month.

When asked about the Minab investigation last week, Trump said, “I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem.” Hegseth said the report would be divulged “when the appropriate time is right.”

Some members of Congress still push for transparency.

In a recent interview, Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota and a member of the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said Congress has not gotten enough information on the bombing and expected a full report.

The issue “has not gone away,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin, Mary Clare Jalonick and Lisa Mascaro in Washington, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Amir Hussein Rajdy in Cairo and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

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By Jonathan Spicer

ANKARA, July 1 (Reuters) – Five years ago, the West risked a full-blown diplomatic crisis with NATO ally Turkey when 10 ambassadors called for the release of a man they saw as a political prisoner, prompting an angry President Tayyip Erdogan to order their expulsion.

After two frantic days in 2021, the sides stepped back from the brink with the U.S., French, German, Canadian and other envoys issuing conciliatory statements and Erdogan saying they would be more careful in the future.

And so they have been.

Since then — and especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year later left Europe feeling exposed — the West has mostly avoided publicly raising concerns about Turkey’s record on rights and freedoms, instead focusing on boosting security ties with the regional military power and big arms exporter. 

The West’s diplomatic pivot will be on display when the leaders of NATO’s 32 member states meet in Ankara on July 7 to 8.

They are not expected to criticise an unprecedented legal crackdown on Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), including the jailing of its presidential candidate, Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s main rival, according to Western and Turkish diplomats involved in summit planning. 

WESTERN SILENCE

Some critics of Erdogan’s government believe the relative Western silence encourages its authoritarian slide, isolates Turkey’s opposition and ignores NATO’s founding principles of democracy and rule of law.

“It remains important for the West to continue to comment on the degradation of democratic institutions in Turkey because the course is not irrevocably set, Turkey is not beyond the pale,” said David Satterfield, a former U.S. ambassador to Ankara.

“It’s important that Turks hear others talking about their system in this way,” Satterfield, now director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy, told Reuters. 

Erdogan’s office did not respond to a request for comment on such views.

Satterfield denied that his advocacy for human rights in Turkey had harmed core transactional U.S.-Turkish ties, and added that the decision during President Donald Trump’s second term to avoid discussing democratic values had not advanced relations.

Erdogan briefly ordered that Satterfield should be declared “persona non grata” in 2021, along with nine other Western ambassadors, after they jointly called for the release of jailed philanthropist Osman Kavala, saying the case was damaging for Turkish democracy. 

Kavala, jailed for nearly nine years, faces a life sentence for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government, which he denies. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that he and others in the case should be released given insufficient evidence, and that his detention was intended to silence him. 

Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, in power for 23 years, rejects criticism of its democratic credentials and any suggestions that courts are politicised, saying the judiciary is independent.

Hundreds of elected opposition CHP officials and members have been jailed over the past two years and its leader has been ousted, in what the party calls a judicial coup. 

DETENTIONS, RESTRICTIONS AHEAD OF SUMMIT

To the alarm of rights groups ahead of the NATO summit, dozens of Turkish journalists from independent media outlets have been denied access to cover the event, while authorities have detained more than 200 people, citing security concerns.

Erdogan’s office did not comment on the denied media accreditations, while NATO says it relies on the host country for guidance on such matters.

Asked whether the alliance plans to raise rights concerns at the summit, a NATO official referred to an earlier statement regarding the accreditation issue, saying it was very important for reporters to attend in person. 

The U.S. embassy in Ankara did not immediately comment on any shift in policy toward Turkey.

Few foreign capitals have commented on the crackdown on the CHP. Some Western diplomats say overt criticism of Ankara’s policies does little to mitigate any democratic backsliding, so they prefer to raise concerns privately with Turkish officials. 

TRUMP SEES ERDOGAN AS A FRIEND

The NATO summit marks Trump’s first visit as U.S. president to Turkey. He is also expected to hold a bilateral meeting with Erdogan, whom he regularly calls a friend, underscoring the warmest U.S.-Turkish ties in years.  

Ankara wants the summit to highlight alliance unity and help expand defence-industry partnerships. NATO chief Mark Rutte said tens of billions of dollars worth of deals would be announced.

Allies increasingly see Turkey, which has NATO’s second-largest military and is a leading exporter of armed drones, as a bulwark against Russian aggression on the southeast flank.

Its rising value within NATO comes after some past strains including over Turkey’s delay of Sweden and Finland’s membership bids in 2022 to 2023, and despite its relatively cordial relationship with Moscow. 

Western allies are now signalling they have “given up on values to an extent and prefer a transactional relationship … knowing that Turkey is indispensable for the defence of Europe,” said Karol Wasilewski, head of Turkey, Caucasus and Central Asia at the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies.

Ankara knows that any Western criticism, including over the crackdown on the opposition CHP, will be muted and “won’t translate into actions”, Wasilewski said.

(Reporting by Jonathan SpicerEditing by Gareth Jones)

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VATICAN CITY (AP) — The ultratraditionalist Society of St. Pius X is planning to defy Pope Leo XIV by consecrating four bishops without his consent. The move incurs an automatic excommunication for the bishops involved, and amounts to a “schismatic act” — or a willful rupture of unity in the Catholic Church.

The ceremony marks the first major crisis for Leo, who has prioritized church unity and healing tensions with traditionalists that worsened during the Pope Francis pontificate.

The society, known by its acronym SSPX, was founded in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the 1960s church meetings revolutionized the Catholic Church’s relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths, and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.

In 1975, the SSPX founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was suspended and the society was suppressed by the Vatican.

In 1988, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four other bishops, and the group today still has no legal status in the church.

Despite that original schismatic act, the group has continued to grow and today poses a threat to the Holy See since it represents a parallel, ultra-Catholic, pre-Vatican II church. The SSPX counts two bishops, 751 priests, 264 seminarians training in five seminaries, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics.

Under the church’s in-house canon law, consecrating a bishop without papal consent incurs an automatic excommunication for both the people administering the consecration and the bishops receiving it.

The Vatican doesn’t have to declare the excommunications or issue a decree: It happens automatically. But some experts believe the Holy See will want to respond publicly in some form since the SSPX is making such a public show of the consecrations.

Excommunication is the harshest penalty under canon law. It is considered “medicinal” in nature, meant to teach those who incur it that “what you did was wrong and you must repent for what you have done,” said the Rev. Robert Gahl of the Catholic University of America.

“The medicine may be bitter tasting, meaning that there’s a harsh feature of it because it’s a penalty, but it’s meant to bring about a change in the one who receives it,” he said.

The excommunication, however, doesn’t affect the validity of the consecration itself: SSPX bishops, like their priests, are validly but illicitly ordained.

Leo could extend the excommunications to others attending the event, including rank and file Catholics, but few expect he will.

Despite his general distrust of traditionalists and a broader crackdown on the old Latin Mass, Pope Francis actually went out of his way to offer concessions to the SSPX.

In 2015, he decreed that Catholics could validly go to confession with SSPX priests, essentially recognizing as legitimate the absolutions granted to Catholics who confessed their sins to SSPX priests.

Francis had made the concession as a one-year gesture during his Jubilee of Mercy, but he then extended it indefinitely. He also made a provision to allow SSPX priests to celebrate marriages legitimately.

Experts say Leo could revoke some of the concessions that Francis granted the SSPX as part of the Holy See’s response to the new consecrations.

First as cardinal and then as pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI worked to heal the SSPX schism and bring the group back under Rome’s wing.

He made two major concessions as part of his outreach. In 2007, he relaxed restrictions on celebrating the traditional Latin Mass throughout the Catholic Church. And in 2009, he removed the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops.

The gesture, however, became an acute embarrassment for him and sparked a crisis with Jewish leaders because one of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, was a known Holocaust-denier.

And in a television interview that aired on Swiss television just before the pope’s decree was made public, Williamson said he didn’t believe Jews were killed in gas chambers during World War II.

Benedict later acknowledged a simple internet search would have turned up Williamson’s views.

Williamson later ran afoul of the SSPX, which expelled him in 2012 for insubordination. He had ignored a deadline to “declare his submission” to its authority and had called for the society’s superior to resign, the group said at the time.

Williamson, who was ordained a priest by Lefebvre in 1976 and had taught in the society’s seminaries in Europe, the U.S. and Argentina, died in 2025.

Despite his concessions to the SSPX, Francis enraged many Catholic traditionalists by reversing Benedict’s relaxation on celebrating the old Latin Mass for the broader Catholic Church. Francis cracked down on its spread, arguing it had become a source of division in the church.

While the SSPX is one fringe group out of communion with Rome, plenty of other traditionalists are in full communion with the Holy See.

Leo, as part of his effort at promoting unity, allowed a prominent American cardinal to celebrate an old Latin Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica last year.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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June 30 (Reuters) – Democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term U.S. Representative Diana DeGette on Tuesday in the Democratic primary in a Denver-area district, according to U.S. media projections, the latest victory of an insurgent leftist over an establishment Democrat.

Kiros, a 29-year-old former attorney who was fired after refusing to remove a controversial post that criticized law firms for their stance on Israel and Palestine, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide.

The race was called by multiple media outlets with 78% of the vote counted, with Kiros carrying a nearly 7,000-vote lead over DeGette.

Kiros, who moved to the U.S. from Ethiopia as a baby, faced controversy over her criticism of Democrats who support Israel and her alliance with socialist political commentator Hasan Piker, whose rhetoric critics have described as offensive and crude. She is favored to win November’s election in the overwhelmingly Democratic district.

Kiros is the latest democratic socialist to oust an incumbent this summer. In New York City, three candidates with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America and endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries.

(Editing by Michael Learmonth and Cynthia Osterman)

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SEOUL, July 1 (Reuters) – South Korea’s Oceans Ministry said on Wednesday the cargo vessel Namu, operated by HMM, would exit the Strait of Hormuz in mid-July at the earliest once the damage sustained in an attack in May was repaired. 

The bulk carrier’s hull was hit near the stern in the attack, which Seoul said on May 27 probably involved an Iranian anti-ship missile, summoning the Iranian ambassador to share the results of its investigation and lodge a protest.

Saeed Koozechi, Iran’s ambassador to South Korea, denied Tehran’s involvement, the Yonhap news agency reported, and South Korea later said it could not conclusively determine who was responsible or whether the attack was intentional.

There are currently two vessels stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, including Namu, with 35 crew members on board, Nam Jae-heon, vice oceans minister, told a press briefing on Wednesday. Nam added that 21 South Korean-operated vessels had passed safely through the strait since Washington and Tehran signed a ceasefire two weeks ago.

HMM is paying for the repairs, a ministry official said at the briefing.

A spokesperson at the company confirmed to Reuters it was covering the cost, adding it would lodge a claim with its insurance company.

When asked by Reuters whether South Korea would ask Iran or the U.S. to pay for the repairs, Nam said South Korea may consider a review later. He did not elaborate.

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz after the U.S. and Israel launched their attacks on February 28, sending global oil prices sharply higher and raising concerns about the impact on the global economy.

(Reporting by Jack Kim and Heejin Kim; Editing by Tom Hogue and Kate Mayberry)

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CAIRO (AP) — A motorized tricycle plunged into a canal in southern Egypt on Tuesday, killing nine children and injuring two others, local officials said.

The tricycle fell into the water in the area of Abu Tig in the southern province of Assiut, according to a statement the governor’s office posted on Facebook. Assiut, located 320 kilometers (199 miles) south of the capital, Cairo, is a province in Upper Egypt known for historic landmarks.

Local media reported that a steering malfunction caused the tricycle to overturn as it carried children returning home from work on nearby farms. The conditions of those injured were unclear. The bodies were taken to Abu Tig Hospital, according to the governor’s office.

Local news outlet Cairo 24 said the children’s ages ranged from 10 to 17.

Photos posted by the governor’s office showed dozens of people gathered at the canal as people in divers’ gear searched the water.

Assiut Gov. Mohamed Elwan ordered authorities to implement safety measures, including the installation of concrete barriers along the sides of the canal.

Deadly traffic accidents claim thousands of lives every year in Egypt, which has a poor transportation safety record. Speeding, bad roads and poor enforcement of traffic laws are the main reasons for crashes. Earlier this year, a truck and a pickup truck collided on a highway, killing 18 people, officials said.

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LA GUAIRA, Venezuela (AP) — Aid groups warned Tuesday that Venezuela’s fragile healthcare system is being pushed to its limits nearly a week after two powerful earthquakes, with damaged and understaffed hospitals overwhelmed by the injured and deteriorating conditions in the disaster zone causing infectious diseases to spread.

The scores of international and domestic teams across Venezuela remain focused on the search for survivors, with the government death toll surpassing 1,700 and new bodies still being hauled out from the rubble.

But a humanitarian crisis is already unfolding among the living. United Nations agencies expressed concern about the health effects of thousands of displaced people sleeping for days in the open or in crowded, unsanitary shelters.

Venezuelan officials say that more than 15,800 people have been affected by the earthquakes — a figure that reflects the official number of displaced people, U.N. refugee agency spokesperson Carlotta Wolf said on Tuesday. Suddenly homeless Venezuelans are sleeping in cars, parks and elsewhere without adequate emergency shelter available.

Wolf said that number would continue to rise. Many of those displaced in the hardest-hit state of La Guaira are suffering from widespread food shortages, she said.

At a media briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, World Health Organization spokesperson Christian Lindmeier warned that displaced Venezuelans without access to toilets, showers, soap or much nourishing food have become increasingly vulnerable to the outbreak of preventable diseases like measles, given the population’s low vaccination rates. Conditions are ripe for waterborne infections like dengue, yellow fever and malaria to spread.

The Venezuelan healthcare system, strained by decades of underinvestment and years of economic crisis is “under extreme pressure now, with facilities operating beyond the capacity of the surge of the trauma cases,” Lindmeier said.

According to the government, last week’s earthquakes damaged or otherwise compromised 38 hospitals nationwide. WHO said it so far has evaluated 21 of those facilities, three of which are no longer operating. Another six have sustained damage and the rest are now buckling under the influx of injuries.

Many specialist doctors are missing in the ruins, including officials in charge of maternity care in La Guaira, WHO said, compounding the challenges to health care in a country that 8 million people, including many doctors and nurses, have fled in recent years.

“Findings reveal chaotic service delivery and patient flow, marked by overcrowding, growing surgical backlogs … and a breakdown in biosafety measures,” Lindmeier said. He added that “the collapse of forensic and morgue services and inadequate casualty registration” has made it difficult to gauge the scope of the disaster.

Venezuela’s government, which has long retained control over access to information, offers daily casualty updates. Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly, announced Monday that the official toll stood at 1,719 people killed and 5,000 injured, and warned the public against sharing information that contradicted authorities.

Experts say the official toll is likely a significant undercount, as many more people remain missing and hopes for finding survivors diminish with each passing day.

NASA estimates that nearly 59,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed by the earthquakes, which would put the number of people affected by the quakes in the hundreds of thousands. The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, on Tuesday said 680,000 children are in need of humanitarian assistance nationwide.

Authorities have not offered an official count of missing people, leading many Venezuelans to turn to nongovernmental digital databases to report their loved ones as missing. One such registry listed at least 43,220 people as missing.

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DeBre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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BEIJING, June 30 (Reuters) – Li Changguan has been appointed party chief of China’s civil affairs ministry, the ministry’s website showed on Tuesday.

• The profile of Lu Zhiyuan, who had been the minister as well as the party chief of the ministry since late 2023, has been removed from its website.

• Lu’s removal from the posts have not been previously announced.

• The newly appointed party chief, Li, has been a vice minister at the ministry since 2024.

(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sharon Singleton)

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