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Facebook Tweet Email Link A sea of birch trees and Baltic pines sways in the wind as the road goes deeper into the forest. Here in the peaceful depths of western Lithuania’s Žemaitija National Park, an area of idyllic lakes, wetlands, old villages and forests 30 miles inland from the Baltic Sea, Soviet missile operators once waited in secret, poised for the destruction of Western Europe. Today, the once-classified complex known as Plokštinė Missile Base is the park’s most-visited attraction, the Cold War Museum. In 2024, 35,000 people from all over the world came to explore this eerie underground world,…

Facebook Tweet Email Link A fast-moving wildfire in southern France has scorched more than 11,000 hectares across 15 municipalities, killing one person, local officials said Wednesday. “We mourn the death of an elderly woman in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, who apparently did not want to leave her home,” Rémy Recio, a regional official, told CNN affiliate BFMTV. The blaze, which broke out Tuesday afternoon near Ribaute in the Aude department, has also injured two civilians and seven firefighters, Recio added. About 1,500 firefighters battled the flames overnight, with 320 more reinforcements arriving Wednesday. Aerial operations had resumed Wednesday morning with four Canadair water…

Facebook Tweet Email Link Rwanda has reached a deal with the Trump administration to take in migrants deported from the United States, becoming the third African nation to do so, amid complaints that governments on the continent are being pressured by the White House to receive them. Foreign US deportees, originally from other nations, had earlier been sent to South Sudan and Eswatini; a US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson described both groups as “barbaric” criminals. Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that the East African nation had “agreed with the United States to accept up…

Facebook Tweet Email Link When visiting Chongqing for the first time last November, Joshua Guvi was worried that the city he’d seen on social media couldn’t possibly be as cool in real life. Located in a mountainous area of southwestern China, this sprawling metropolis is known for its complex, multilayered layout, prompting some to refer to it as China’s “8D city.” Including its rural outer regions, the whole area is the size of Austria. Due to the city’s unique landlocked geography and rapid growth, Chongqing has had nowhere to go but up, to the point where one building even has…

Facebook Tweet Email Link Taipei, Taiwan  —  Taiwanese authorities have detained three current and former employees of the world’s largest chip manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), for allegedly stealing trade secrets, prosecutors said Tuesday. Law enforcement officers questioned several suspects and witnesses late last month. They searched their homes and detained three of them over “serious suspicions of violating national security laws,” the intellectual property branch of the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office said on Tuesday. TSMC produces more than 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips that power everything from smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI) applications to weapons, with…

Facebook Tweet Email Link Sydney Reuters  —  New Zealand’s air force said on Wednesday it had evacuated three people from a United States research base in Antarctica, in what it said was a high-risk operation in freezing temperatures and perpetual darkness. One person requiring urgent medical care and two others needing medical attention were taken on the rescue flight from the McMurdo Station on Tuesday, the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) said in a statement. The aircraft landed in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Wednesday morning. The statement gave no details of the medical emergency or nationalities.…

Facebook Tweet Email Link EDITOR’S NOTE:  This story is part of As Equals, CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. For information about how the series is funded and more, check out our FAQs. The warnings were impossible to ignore. For over a year, armed groups in northern Colombia had posted flyers touting violent campaigns against members of the LGBTQ community. “All will be military targets. We will not respect ages. We have already made progress in intelligence work and many have been identified,” warned one flyer in the coastal region of Guajira, dated March 2024, that included a kill list…

Facebook Tweet Email Link Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been performing a tricky balancing act – maintaining close partnerships with US President Donald Trump and Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin while insisting his country is a neutral party in the Russia-Ukraine war, to the dismay of Western nations who have sanctioned Moscow. But now, it seems, Trump has lost his patience – demanding that Modi finally pick a side, and using India’s continued purchases of cheap Russian oil as leverage in his trade war. The conundrum pits Trump and Modi, two nationalist leaders who have often described their friendship in…

Facebook Tweet Email Link As the world marks the 80th anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima near the end of World War II, the planet is closer to seeing them used again than it has been in decades, experts and survivors are warning. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Wednesday morning, dignitaries and the dwindling number of survivors were set to commemorate the moment a US B-29 bomber dropped the atomic weapon known as “Little Boy” on August 6, 1945. Three days later, the nearby city of Nagasaki was destroyed…

Facebook Tweet Email Link “What I’m doing now is digging my own grave,” says Evyatar David, as his fragile figure, weak with hunger, scrapes at the dirt with a shovel in a cramped Gaza tunnel. “Every day, my body becomes weaker and weaker,” the 24-year-old hostage adds, “and time is running out.” This is just one of the horrifying scenes recorded in the latest hostage videos released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad at the weekend showing two of the surviving Israeli hostages, kidnapped on October 7, 2023, sharply deteriorating in captivity. Broadcast of the disturbing images across Israeli and…