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BBC News with Sue Montgomery.
Turkey's president has sought to downplay public demonstrations taking place following the detention of the mayor of Istanbul. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the main rival to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was arrested days before he was expected to be named as a candidate for the 2028 presidential election. Police have reportedly fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the mayor's supporters outside the city hall as Emily Wither explains. We are seeing the protests, some of them being violently broken up by the police. We expect that to continue in the coming days. And it was interesting, we've heard from Erdoğan for the first time on all of this. He said that the opposition were just seeking to cover up internal mistakes. This is much softer language compared to what we heard from Ekrem İmamoğlu earlier. He appeared to share a message aimed directly at President Erdoğan. He accused him of corruption and he called on members of the judiciary to oppose any injustice. President Trump has signed an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, vowing to return the money it controls to individual states. Many Republicans blame it for what they say is poor performance in schools. But Democrats have called the planned closure reckless. Our correspondent in Washington, Merlyn Thomas, says Mr. Trump's order may not succeed. On his own, President Trump cannot scrap the entire department. It was set up with congressional approval, and so it will need congressional approval to dismantle it as well. And that is not something that is likely to happen because Republicans would need 60 votes in the Senate. It would need a super majority. And that's not something that is likely to happen. It's a political long shot. And even in the House of Representatives, President Trump would likely struggle to gain the necessary support as well. Israel is expanding its military operation on the ground in Gaza. As Hamas militants said, they fired rockets towards Tel Aviv. Jon Donnison is in Jerusalem. It was another day of mass casualties in Gaza, bringing the total number to almost 600 since Tuesday, according to the Ministry of Health, which operates under Hamas. Israel's military issued a fresh evacuation order across much of the strip as it expanded its offensive. It dropped leaflets in residential areas, telling people to move to so-called safe areas or even to leave Gaza. How, or where to, nobody knows. Up until now, Hamas has not responded militarily to Israel breaking the cease-fire. That changed this afternoon when it sent three rockets into Israel. President Zelenskyy has asked EU leaders for $5.5 billion for artillery shells to use in Ukraine's fight against Russia. Addressing a security meeting in Brussels, he said the support was needed as soon as possible. World News from the BBC. A judge in the U.S. has ordered President Trump's administration not to deport an Indian postgraduate academic at Washington's Georgetown University. The Department of Homeland Security has accused Badar Khan Suri of spreading Hamas propaganda and anti-Semitism on social media, but didn't cite specific evidence. The leader of the M23 rebels has said the group isn't bound by cease-fire, agreed by the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda in Qatar earlier this week. Corneille Nangaa told the Reuters news agency, "as long as it doesn't solve our problems," "what happened in Doha" "doesn't concern us." Organizers of Canada's Vancouver International Auto Show have barred the American carmaker Tesla. The security concerns follow protests at Tesla dealerships in both Canada and the U.S. over its boss, Elon Musk. Many Canadians see him as intrinsically linked to President Trump and his tariff war against Canada. The U.N. has named 2025 as the year of the glacier in an attempt to bring attention to the importance of the world's ice fields and the threat posed to them by climate change. Imogen Foulkes sent this report from the Swiss Alps. Glaciers are a crucial part of our global ecosystem. The ice stores the winter snow and releases it gradually in spring and summer. That snow melt waters crops, fills rivers and provides millions of people with drinking water. But now as our planet warms, the ice itself is melting. Two hundred seventy-three billion tons of ice are disappearing each year. It's contributing to rising sea levels and with less ice to store the snow, disrupted water supplies, flooding, drought and landslides. BBC News. |