Armed clashes erupted Thursday in Beirut during a protest organized by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and its allies against the lead judge probing last year’s blast in the city’s port. At least six people were killed and dozens were wounded in the most protracted and violent street fighting in the city in years, authorities said.

The exchanges of fire along a former front line from the 1975-90 civil war involved pistols, automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and were reminiscent of that conflict. Gunfire echoed in the capital for several hours and ambulances, sirens wailing, rushed to pick up casualties. Snipers shot from buildings. Bullets penetrated apartment windows in the area.

It was not immediately clear what triggered Thursday’s violence.

The World Bank on Monday warned of a significant 12 percent rise in the debt burden of the world’s low-income countries to a record $860 billion in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and called for urgent efforts to reduce debt levels.

World Bank President David Malpass told reporters the bank’s International Debt Statistics 2022 report showed a dramatic increase in the debt vulnerabilities facing low- and middle-income countries; he also urged for comprehensive efforts to help countries reach more sustainable debt levels.

“We need a comprehensive approach to the debt problem, including debt reduction, swifter restructuring and improved transparency,” Mr. Malpass said in a statement accompanying the new report.

Noelle Martine, an Australian Indian-Catholic woman, discovered at age 18 that her face had been photoshopped onto pornographic images.

The number of U.S. children orphaned during the COVID-19 pandemic may be larger than previously estimated, and the toll has been far greater among black and Hispanic Americans, a new study suggests.

More than half the children who lost a primary caregiver during the pandemic belonged to those two racial groups, which make up about 40 percent of the U.S. population, according to the study published Thursday by the medical journal Pediatrics.

“These findings really highlight those children who have been left most vulnerable by the pandemic, and where additional resources should be directed,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Alexandra Blenkinsop of Imperial College London, said in a statement.

A six-hour outage of Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms that plunged the services and the businesses and people who rely on them into chaos seemed to come at the worst time for the social media giant.

Though the global outage was a headache for many casual users, it was far more serious for the millions of people worldwide who rely on the social media sites to run their businesses or communicate with relatives, fellow parents, teachers or neighbors.

Yet the outage also came amid a separate crisis at Facebook, accused by a whistleblower of profiting from hate and division and suppressing research showing that Instagram contributes to body-image problems, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts in young women.

An energy crisis is looming over India as coal supplies grow perilously low, adding to challenges for a recovery in Asia’s third largest economy after it was wracked by the pandemic.

Supplies across the majority of coal-fired power plants in India have dwindled to just days’ worth of stock.

Federal Power Minister R.K. Singh told the Indian Express newspaper this week that he was bracing for a “trying five to six months.”

In the book of Proverbs, God commands parents to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (22:6).

A blast went off Friday at a mosque packed with Shiite Muslim worshippers in northern Afghanistan, killing or wounding at least 100 people, a Taliban police official said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which took place in Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz province, but militants from the Islamic State group have a long history of attacking Afghanistan’s Shiite minority.

Dost Mohammad Obaida, the deputy police chief for Kunduz province, said that the “majority of them have been killed,” in reference to the victims. He said the attack may have been carried out by a suicide bomber who had mingled among the worshippers inside the mosque.

Western powers have been trying for weeks to get Tehran’s answer to one question—when will the Islamic Republic return to nuclear talks that have been on hold since June? Iran’s response has been vague and simple: “soon.”

Behind Tehran’s stalling is an attempt to gain leverage to extract more concessions when negotiations do eventually resume, officials and analysts said, including by advancing its uranium enrichment program, a possible pathway to a nuclear bomb.

Iran has long denied seeking to weaponize nuclear energy.

“All patriots were brothers once.” Those are the words Zhou Enlai, China’s premier under Mao Zedong, proclaimed at an official dinner hosting U.S. President Richard Nixon.

Kilauea, one of the most active volcanos on Earth, began erupting on Hawaii’s Big Island Wednesday. The eruption is not in an area with homes and is entirely contained within Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Officials said increased earthquake activity and ground swelling before the eruption put them on high alert. Fissures then opened in the summit area and sent lava fountaining into the sky. Now the area has filled with molten rock, creating a lake of lava in the volcano’s crater.

The new lava is an expected evolution of a volcano that is recharging after a huge eruption in 2018 drained much of its magma.

Trevor wakes early Sunday morning and his phone tells him it will be sunny—the perfect day for fishing at his favorite spot. His aim is to catch enough to feed his family for a few meals, yet he will also be feeding something else in the process…

For the scientific community, there is only one explanation. A giant explosion occurred nearly 14 billion years ago, eventually leading to all the galaxies, stars and planets in the known universe. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and for millions of years life steadily evolved into larger and more complex forms.

ORLANDO, Florida (AP) – Jessica Kaschube has relied on the economic advantages of being married to pursue her career.

Death has come knocking a last time for the splendid ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 more birds, fish and other species: The U.S. government on Wednesday declared them extinct.

It is a rare move for wildlife officials to give up hope on a plant or animal, but government scientists say they have exhausted to find these 23.

The ivory-billed woodpecker was perhaps the best-known species the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared extinct. The woodpecker went out stubbornly and with fanfare, making unconfirmed appearances in recent decades that ignited a frenzy of ultimately fruitless searches in the swamps of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.

“Will Coronavirus Infect Your Marriage?”—“11 Ways to Stay Married Amid Coronavirus Concerns”—“How to End Pandemic Fights with Your Partner.” These and similar articles flooded newspapers and magazines almost immediately as the historic COVID-19 crisis began to take root. Shelter-in-place orders pushed relationships to their breaking points.