A spokesperson for UN peacekeepers in Lebanon on Saturday said that Israel had requested it leave its positions in south Lebanon where Israel is clashing with Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, but they had refused.

They asked us to withdraw “from the positions along the blue line … or up to five kilometers (three miles) from the blue line,” UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) spokesperson Andrea Tenenti told Agence France-Presse (AFP), using the term for the demarcation line between both countries. “But there was a unanimous decision to stay,” he said.

A British Columbia First Nation says at least 55 children died or disappeared while attending a residential school near Williams Lake, more than triple the number recorded for the institution in the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation memorial register.

The higher figure is contained in an interim report into the St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School by the Williams Lake First Nation.

The report says the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation memorial register lists 16 children by name as having died while under the school's care.

It says the additional 39 deaths or disappearances were verified "through archival documentation."

An Australian state police chief apologized to the Jewish community on Saturday after a sergeant allegedly performed an outlawed Nazi salute.

The 65-year-old instructor on domestic violence policy and law at the Victoria state police academy in Melbourne is facing charges for the gesture and for praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler with the words, “Heil Hitler” on Tuesday and Wednesday in front of academy staff and recruits, Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said.

“I want to express just here at the outset my disappointment, my disgust, my anger at this appalling conduct,” Patton told a press conference.

“There is simply no place for this type of conduct in our society, let alone in this police force. For that reason, I want to profoundly apologize to the Jewish community but also to the community as whole,” Patton added.

A series of U.S. airstrikes targeted several camps run by the Islamic State group in Syria in an operation the U.S. military said will disrupt the extremists from conducting attacks in the region and beyond.

The U.S. Central Command said the airstrikes were conducted Friday, without specifying in which parts of Syria. About 900 U.S. troops have been deployed in eastern Syria alongside the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that were instrumental in the fight against IS militants.

Despite their defeat, attacks by IS sleeper cells in Iraq and Syria have been on the rise over the past years, with scores of people killed or wounded.

A Massachusetts pharmacist was sentenced Friday in Michigan to 7 1/2 to 15 years prison for his role in a 2012 national meningitis outbreak that killed dozens of people.

Neither Glenn Chin nor relatives of the Michigan victims made statements at his sentencing in Livingston County Circuit Court in Howell, northwest of Detroit.

Chin supervised production at New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, which shipped steroids for pain relief to clinics across the country. Investigators said the lab was rife with mold and insects.

More than 700 people in 20 states were sickened with fungal meningitis or other debilitating illnesses, and dozens died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ukrainian military recruitment officers raided restaurants, bars and a concert hall in Kyiv, checking military registration documents and detaining men who were not in compliance, media and witnesses reported Saturday.

Officers descended on Kyiv’s Palace of Sports venue after a concert Friday night by Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy. Video footage aired by local media outlets appears to show officers stationed outside the doors of the concert hall intercepting men as they exit. In the footage, officers appear to be forcibly detaining some men.

Checks were also conducted at Goodwine, an upscale shopping center, and Avalon, a popular restaurant.

It is unusual for such raids to take place in the capital, and reflects Ukraine’s dire need for fresh recruits. All Ukrainian men aged 25-60 are eligible for conscription, and men aged 18-60 are not allowed to leave the country.

Palestinians in northern Gaza described heavy Israeli bombardment Saturday in the hours after airstrikes killed at least 22 people, as Israel continued to tell people there and in southern Lebanon to get out of the way of its offensives against the Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups.

In Lebanon, the United Nations peacekeeping force said its headquarters in Naqoura had again been hit, with a peacekeeper struck by gunfire late Friday and in stable condition. It wasn’t clear who fired. The shooting occurred a day after Israel’s military fired on the headquarters for the second straight day. Israel, which has warned the peacekeepers to leave their positions, didn’t immediately respond to questions.

Hunger warnings emerged again as residents in northern Gaza said they hadn’t received aid since the beginning of the month. The U.N. World Food Program said no food aid had entered the north since Oct. 1. An estimated 400,000 people remain there.

The artificial intelligence maker OpenAI may face a costly and inconvenient reckoning with its nonprofit origins even as its valuation recently exploded to $157 billion.

Nonprofit tax experts have been closely watching OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, since last November when its board ousted and rehired CEO Sam Altman. Now, some believe the company may have reached — or exceeded — the limits of its corporate structure, under which it is organized as a nonprofit whose mission is to develop artificial intelligence to benefit “all of humanity” but with for-profit subsidiaries under its control.

Jill Horwitz, a professor in law and medicine at UCLA School of Law who has studied OpenAI, said that when two sides of a joint venture between a nonprofit and a for-profit come into conflict, the charitable purpose must always win out.

“It’s the job of the board first, and then the regulators and the court, to ensure that the promise that was made to the public to pursue the charitable interest is kept,” she said.

Canada's parliament has passed a bill that that will cover the full cost of contraception and diabetes drugs for Canadians.

The Liberal government said it is the initial phase of a plan that would expand to become a publicly funded national pharmacare programme.

But two provinces - Alberta and Quebec - have indicated they may opt-out of the programme, accusing Ottawa of interfering in provincial matters.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party is ahead in national polls by a wide margin, does not support the legislation.

A group of leading legal figures say Fifa has ignored their report into human rights concerns over the 2034 World Cup, warning that the governing body is “dealing with the devil” in planning to take the tournament to Saudi Arabia.

A decision on the Saudi bid to host the World Cup is to be made in December, although it appears to be a foregone conclusion given there are no other bidders. The lawyers – Prof Mark Pieth, Stefan Wehrenberg and Rodney Dixon KC – submitted a report to Fifa in May pointing out areas in which the Saudi state breached the human rights policies of world football’s governing body.

Pieth said that going to Saudi Arabia was a “big risk” for Fifa. “My understanding is that Saudi Arabia is quite a bit nervous [about public criticism] and they are dangerous,” he said. “That’s my take. I’m not shy to say it in public. People are really dealing with the devil here. So there is a big risk.”

A US-made munition was used in a strike on central Beirut that killed 22 people and wounded 117, according to an analysis of shrapnel found by the Guardian at the scene of the attack.

The strike on Thursday night hit an apartment complex in the densely populated neighbourhood of Basta, levelling the apartment building and destroying cars and the interiors of nearby residences.

It was the deadliest strike on Lebanon’s capital city since fighting between Hezbollah and Israel started a year ago.

A first responder on the scene said rescue crews had worked overnight to find survivors and recover the dead from under rubble. They said the building had more people living there than usual as residents had recently welcomed people displaced from Israeli bombing in south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut. That elevated the number of people wounded and killed in the airstrike.

Abortion has passed inflation to become the top issue in the presidential election for women younger than 30 since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, according to results released Friday of a survey of female voters by KFF.

About 2 in 5 in the group of young voters said abortion was their top concern in the recent survey, compared with 1 in 5 who ranked it most important in the same survey in the spring.

In the earlier edition, inflation was the top concern for younger voters, as it was for women voters of all ages. Inflation remained the top concern for women in each age group over 30 and women overall. Women overall ranked abortion as their No. 3 concern, after inflation and threats to democracy, but ahead of immigration.