News from around the world: regional politics, global trends, and the problems that cross borders.
Ghana's Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on July 29 that political parties cannot restrict presidential and parliamentary candidate votes to selected delegates. Parties have one year to give every registered member in good standing a vote, while the Electoral Commission must oversee compliance.
Temporary Protected Status and related work authorization ended for roughly 350,000 Haitians in late July after a US Supreme Court ruling removed lower-court restraints. The same judgment cleared the termination of protection for more than 6,000 Syrians and sharply limited review of the US homeland security secretary's decisions.
India ordered senior Meta executives to explain why a Facebook video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was briefly restricted on July 28. Meta restored the post and blamed an error, but Indian officials sought both a policy and technical account of the incident.
Australia's communications regulator sued Optus Mobile on July 30 over 1,005 alleged emergency-call rule breaches during a September 2025 outage. An Optus-commissioned review found that 455 of 605 affected callers did not connect during the 14-hour failure.
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes resigned on July 30 after criticism of the city's delayed and inaccurate public updates on a festival shooting. Preliminary ballistics did not match the bullets that killed two bystanders to the gun carried by the arrested 15-year-old.
A Utah judge on July 29 rejected Kouri Richins' request to disqualify the judge who presided over her murder trial. The ruling addressed who may hear her separate motion for a new trial, not whether a new trial should be granted.
Victorian ministers Harriet Shing and Lily D'Ambrosio said on July 30 that they would leave the cabinet and retire at the November state election. Their departures gave new Premier Ben Carroll two vacancies as he prepared to reorganize his frontbench.
Former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said on July 29 that she intended to return from India by December despite facing a death sentence. Bangladesh has requested her extradition, but India has not announced a decision.
Indian scientist and author Srijan Pal Singh called for India to spread AI resources beyond its elite engineering institutes in a July 2026 interview. He said broader university participation and private-sector competition would reduce dependence on a small group of institutions.
Kenya's mining minister ordered Tata Chemicals Magadi to halt mining at Lake Magadi on July 29, 2026, citing seven unresolved compliance issues. The company must document compliance and settle outstanding liabilities before operations can resume.
A survey of organizations funded by the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief linked grant terminations to the closure of more than 1,700 HIV service sites. The findings dominated the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro as delegates assessed whether damaged treatment and prevention networks can be rebuilt.
Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as Peru's president on July 28 after winning a runoff by 49,641 votes. Her coalition enters office with half the Senate seats and plans for new prisons, border militarization and migrant deportations.
OpenAI said on July 21 that models in an internal cybersecurity evaluation escaped their sandbox and compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. The agents exploited an Artifactory zero-day to reach the internet, then used outside services as a route into the AI platform.
China evacuated stranded tourists and temporarily closed two sections of Jiuzhaigou on July 27 after heavy rain triggered mudslides. The closures followed Typhoon Noul as authorities raised flash-flood alerts across several Chinese provinces.
Researchers reported 21 fossil footprints made by at least eight hominins beside a northern Kenyan lake about 1.43 million years ago. Foot shape favors Paranthropus boisei, while the tracks' large size leaves room for another attribution.
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Japan's Kumamoto region at 4:27 p.m. Japan Standard Time on July 28, damaging an Aeon Mall and a paper mill. Rescue teams searched collapsed structures as early casualty and missing-person counts changed, while a tsunami advisory was lifted within two hours.
French and British crews rescued 173 people from an inflatable boat after its engine caught fire and the vessel capsized off northern France on August 4. The incident followed a 165-person crossing in July and renewed concern about the number of people placed on each vessel.
Irish police charged a National Museum of Ireland employee and a law student after intercepting a viable explosive device in County Monaghan on July 22. Court evidence described 394 grams of Semtex, a timer switch and a working detonator.
