DUBAI, May 19 (Reuters) - A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister crashed on Sunday as it was crossing mountain terrain in heavy fog, an Iranian official told Reuters, and rescuers were struggling to reach the site of the incident.

The official said the lives of Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian were "at risk following the helicopter crash", which happened on the way back from a visit to the border with Azerbaijan in Iran's northwest.

These numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living.

Between May 6 and May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appeared to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 “identified” dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead.

OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand, by Israelis. On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision. Israel’s military did not make a big deal about it either, probably because there is no way to sound good when celebrating a reduction in the number of children you have killed.

Many noticed anyway. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave the most detailed account of what had happened. For about two months, OCHA had been repeating numbers from Hamas’s Government Media Office, and on May 8 it switched back to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, its source at the beginning of the war. The Ministry of Health is acknowledged to be the more reliable of the two, and it is unclear why OCHA switched to the worse of the two sources, or switched back. A UN spokesperson, Farhan Haq, later explained that the Ministry of Health was “for whatever reason, given the conditions on the ground, unresponsive.” But the Ministry of Health kept publishing statistics in the interim. OCHA didn’t use them.

KHARKIV REGION, Ukraine, May 16 (Reuters) - Peeking out from under a hat and with his face covered, the Russian fighting for Kyiv described unrelenting battles in the northeastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv where Moscow's forces opened a new front last week.

"The situation is difficult, the intensity is very high, there is fighting almost every ten minutes," said the mortarman, who identified himself only by his callsign, Winnie.

The soldier is part of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a group of Russians opposed to President Vladimir Putin who are fighting for Ukraine.

JERUSALEM, May 16 (Reuters) - Israeli government splits over the war in Gaza broke open this week, after the Defence Minister publicly demanded a clear strategy from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as troops returned to battle Hamas fighters in areas thought to have been cleared months ago.

The comments from Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who said he would not agree to setting up a military government in the enclave, reflect growing unease in the security establishment at the lack of direction from Netanyahu over who will be left to run Gaza when the fighting stops.

They also brought out the sharp split between the two centrist former army generals in the cabinet, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, who both backed Gallant's call, and the hard right nationalist religious parties led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who condemned the comments.

SYDNEY, May 16 (Reuters) - Armed forces were protecting New Caledonia's two airports and port after a third night of violent riots that have killed four people, the Pacific Island's top French official said on Thursday morning, adding at least four alleged instigators were under house arrest.

In three municipalities on the French-ruled island, gendarmes faced about 5,000 rioters, including between 3,000 and 4,000 in the capital Noumea, France's High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said in a televised press conference.

Two hundred people have been arrested, and 64 gendarmes and police injured, while road barricades put up by the protesters were causing a "dire situation" for medicine and food for the population, he added.

The White House has condemned an attack on an aid convoy heading to Gaza by Israeli settlers who threw packages of food into the road and set fire to the vehicles.

Video of the incident on Monday at Tarqumiya checkpoint, west of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, showed settlers blocking the trucks and throwing boxes of much-needed supplies on the ground. Photographs from the scene showed piles of damaged aid packages and drifts of rice and flour across the road.

Late on Monday, photos began circulating on social media showing the trucks on fire.

The UN has denied that the estimated death toll of women and children in the war in Gaza has been revised downward, pointing towards a confusion between the total numbers of dead bodies recorded, and the number of those who have so far been fully identified.

After the Gaza health ministry’s revised totals of those killed first appeared on the website of the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (Ocha), they were quickly seized on as proof by pro-Israel media and commentators that the UN had previously been exaggerating the toll.

They showed 24,686 dead which appeared to be a downward revision from the figure of about 35,000 which had been reported earlier in May, with 7,797 children and 4,959 women confirmed dead, about half the toll cited in previous reports. But the UN said on Monday that estimated overall death toll remained about 35,000.

Hackers and fraudsters are gaining access to sensitive drug ordering tools and then advertising some of the most tightly controlled drugs in the country, including fentanyl.

“Tap the fuck in,” a message posted to a large crime-focused Telegram group chat in October read. The user included a photo of a Macbook Pro in a darkened room with a hand hovering above the keyboard. On the screen were blue and white boxes; a dashboard used by doctors and other medical industry professionals to order prescriptions. The panel displayed various pieces of information, such as the prescribing physician, the patient’s required dose, and the patient’s name.

In the middle of the screen read the text “oxyCODONE (oxyCODONE 5 mg oral tablet).”

404 Media has uncovered a wide-spanning scheme in which criminals break into various panels used by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and even wholesale narcotics providers, and then leverage that access to order controlled substances like oxycodone. Some of the hackers then appear to sell these substances for profit online. Because the hackers are using legitimate ordering tools designed for industry professionals, when a prescription request lands at a pharmacy, it can look as legitimate as any other.

A team of United Nations experts tasked with gathering information on sexual violence linked to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that some victims were sexually assaulted, including rape and gang rape, according to a U.N. report released Monday.

“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed,” a press release announcing the report’s findings said. “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”

The 23-page report said the team also found “clear and convincing information” that some of the women and children taken back to Gaza that day by Hamas as hostages were subjected to “rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” There were “reasonable grounds to believe,” it said, “that this violence may be ongoing.”

TEL AVIV, Israel - The U.S. military on Saturday said it began dropping food over the Gaza Strip, a war-torn enclave desperate for humanitarian aid.

A "a combined humanitarian assistance airdrop into Gaza" of over 38,000 meals along the coastline using C-130 aircraft was conducted by U.S. and Jordanian air forces, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

In the wave of AI controversies and lawsuits, CNET has been publicly admonished since it first started posting thinly-veiled AI-generated content on its site in late 2022— a scandal that has culminated in the site being demoted from Trusted to Untrusted Sources on Wikipedia.

Considering that CNET has been in the business since 1994 and maintained a top-tier reputation on Wikipedia up until late 2020, this change came after lots of debate between Wikipedia's editors and has drawn the attention of many in the media, including some CNET staff members.

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