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Authorities in the Mexican state of Sinaloa have ordered residents not to don masks or costumes for Halloween to avoid being confused with criminals amid a worsening cycle of cartel violence.

Home to the powerful Sinaloa cartel, the north-western state has been wracked by deadly infighting between factions of the group following the arrest of one of its leaders, drug trafficker Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, in the United States in late July.

The intra-cartel warfare has left hundreds of people dead or missing since September, and the federal government has deployed hundreds of soldiers to the region.

“Do not wear a costume or a mask, carry plastic guns, or dress up as anyone,” the state’s security secretary, Gerardo Mérida, instructed residents, also warning people not to be on the streets late at night.

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About 8,000 North Korean soldiers are stationed in Russia on the border with Ukraine, the US secretary of state has said, warning that Moscow is preparing to deploy those troops into combat “in the coming days”.

Antony Blinken said the US believed that North Korea had sent 10,000 troops to Russia in total, deploying them first to training bases in the far east before sending the vast majority to the Kursk region on the border with Ukraine.

Blinken told a press conference that the North Korean troops had received Russian training in “artillery, UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], basic infantry operations, including trench clearing, indicating that they fully intend to use these forces in frontline operations”.

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Tankers bearing sanctioned Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) have clustered together off Russia's eastern coast, indicating that Moscow is struggling to sell the product amid Western restrictions, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 30.

Days before, commerical liquefication at Russia's Arctic LNG 2 came to a halt due to shipping difficulties imposed by Western sanctions.

Three of the tankers now anchored near Russia previously loaded cargo from the Arctic LNG 2 facility. The vessels — Nova Energy, Pioneer, and Asya Energy — are docked near the port of Nakhodka, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

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At least 1,085 buildings have been destroyed or badly damaged since Israel’s invasion targeting the Hezbollah militia, including many in controlled demolitions, a New York Times analysis shows.

Satellite imagery and videos show widespread destruction in six villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, revealing 1,085 buildings that have been leveled or badly damaged since its Oct. 1 invasion aimed at crippling the militant group Hezbollah.

Earlier this month, The New York Times, using satellite imagery, verified the destruction of scores of buildings in two other villages.

The images offer only a glimpse at the situation in southern Lebanon. There has been little access to the area since the invasion began and the extent of the damage is unclear.

. . .

According to The Times’s latest analysis, one village, Mhaibib, appears to have been virtually flattened, with only a handful of buildings still standing. In five other villages and towns, entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble.

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North Korean troops wearing Russian uniforms and carrying Russian equipment are moving to the Russian region of Kursk, near Ukraine, according to the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, who described the deployment as a dangerous and destabilising development.

Austin was speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon with the South Korean defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, as concerns grow about Pyongyang’s deployment of as many as 11,000 troops to Russia. The US and South Korea said some of the North Korean troops are heading to Kursk, on the border with Ukraine, where the Kremlin’s forces have struggled to push back a Ukrainian incursion.

Austin said “the likelihood is pretty high” that Russia will use the North Korean troops in combat. He added that officials were discussing what to do about the deployment, which he said had the potential to broaden or lengthen the conflict in Ukraine. Asked if it could prompt other nations to get more directly involved in the conflict, he acknowledged that it could “encourage others to take action”.

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Ukrainian American Sophika Lashchyk-Tytla says she can’t understand why her brother plans to vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump given his open hostility to continuing U.S. support for Ukraine.

Hours after unconvincing arguments with her brother, the Philadelphia native carried a kit of campaign information as she canvassed in the city’s suburbs with fellow Ukrainians who’ve rallied around Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Just ten days before the election, nearly a dozen went door-knocking in Montgomery County, where one of the country’s largest Ukrainian populations now has voter material available in Ukrainian for the first time. The county includes non-voting recent emigres from President Joe Biden’s post-full-scale invasion Uniting for Ukraine parole program and thousands more with U.S. citizenship who arrived in the 1990s.

. . .

“I feel like I’m trying to save Ukraine and our country and I can’t listen to your (Trump) stuff,” Lashchyk-Tytla told her brother as she departed for a weekend of rallying Ukrainian support for Harris.

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US state department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel’s military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, according to three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter.

The incidents – some of which may have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources – have been recorded since 7 October 2023, when the Gaza war started. They are being collected by the state department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance (CHIRG), a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.

. . .

The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment and coordinated department action.

None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter.

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A journalist was shot dead Tuesday night in western Mexico, a local prosecutor's office said, in a part of the country hit hard by drug cartel violence.

Mauricio Cruz Solis, a host on local radio station La Poderosa Uruapan who also published news on the Minuto x Minuto outlet, was killed in the city of Uruapan in the western state of Michoacán.

One other person was wounded in the attack, the prosecutor's office said.

The radio station where Cruz Solis worked mourned his killing in a statement published on social media.

"Mauricio was more than a colleague, he was an unconditional friend, a source of inspiration and a tireless voice in the service of our community," the station said. "We will always remember you Mauricio. Thank you for all that you shared with us."

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A UN committee has urged Peru to compensate women who were forcibly sterilised in the 1990s, ruling that the state policy could constitute a “crime against humanity”.

Forced sterilisation was part of a programme implemented by Peru’s then president Alberto Fujimori during the final four years before he left office in 2000 after a decade in power.

The United Nations committee on the elimination of discrimination against women said hundreds of thousands of people had been affected. The 23-member committee issued its finding after reviewing a joint complaint filed by five victims who were forcibly sterilised between 1996 and 1997. “The victims claimed that the forced sterilisations they underwent had severe and permanent consequences for their physical and mental health,” it said in a statement.

The experts denounced Peru’s failure to properly investigate the violations and compensate the victims, urging the country to put in place a “comprehensive reparation programme for victims”.

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Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.

The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.

A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.

The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.

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The brainy birds carry big chips on their shoulders, scientists say. And some people who become subjects of their ire may be victims of mistaken identity.

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”

. . .

How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.

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Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”

. . .

How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.

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