At least 4 dead as massive fire engulfs Hong Kong high-rise apartment buildings
Perry Gerenday/Getty Images
(LONDON) — At least four people were killed and three others were injured as a major fire engulfed a residential apartment complex in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district on Wednesday, with photos and video from the scene appearing to show serious damage to several buildings.
“A fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po at 2.51 p.m. today … The fire was upgraded to No. 3 alarm at 3.02 p.m., and to No. 4 alarm at 3.34 p.m.,” according to a statement from the Hong Kong government.
By 6:22 p.m. local time the fire had been upgraded again to a No. 5 alarm, city officials said.
Officials said nine people had been transfered to two local hospitals, including four people who were pronounced dead.
Three people were in critical condition, one was in serious position and another was listed as stable, officials said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
The logo of the United Nations at the General Debate of the UN General Assembly in New York. Over 140 heads of state and government are expected to attend the world’s largest diplomatic event over several days. Photo: Kay Nietfeld/dpa (Photo by Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — The United Nations said Friday that U.S. airstrikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean violate international human rights law and must stop.
In a statement to ABC News, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said that the attacks breach international law and called for an investigation into the strikes.
“These attacks – and their mounting human cost – are unacceptable. The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them,” Türk said.
“Under international human rights law, the intentional use of lethal force is only permissible as a last resort against individuals who pose an imminent threat to life,” he added. “Based on the very sparse information provided publicly by the U.S. authorities, none of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law.”
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told ABC News that President Donald Trump is working to eliminate threats to U.S. security.
“The UN has failed at everything from operating an escalator to ending wars — it’s ridiculous that they are now lecturing President Trump and running cover for evil narcoterrorists trying to murder Americans. The President acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring poison to our shores, and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from destroying lives,” Kelly said.
Since September, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have executed over a dozen military strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, arguing they are anti-drug and counter-terrorism measures.
Over 60 people have allegedly been killed in the strikes, according to U.S. officials.
In announcing the latest and most deadly strike Wednesday, Hegseth said the U.S. “carried out a lethal kinetic strike on yet another narco-trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization in the Eastern Pacific.”
“This vessel, like all the others, was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” he added.
This is the first time the U.N. has condemned the strikes.
“The United States should investigate and, if necessary, prosecute and punish individuals accused of serious crimes in accordance with the fundamental rule of law principles of due process and fair trial, for which the U.S. has long stood,” a statement from his office reads.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for Türk, mirrored this sentiment at a Friday U.N. briefing.
“These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable. The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats,” she said.
(LONDON and KYIV, Ukraine) — Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared last week to be cautiously optimistic on the U.S. 28-point peace plan to end his invasion of Ukraine, but statements made by his emissaries in the days since then have led some analysts to believe he thinks he can get a better deal.
“I believe that it could also form the basis for a final peace settlement, but this text has not been discussed with us in detail,” Putin told his Security Council on Friday.
Momentum has appeared to be building as U.S., European, Ukrainian and Russian representatives met first in Geneva, Switzerland, and then in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. U.S. President Donald Trump has now said a deal could be “very close” and has ordered his envoy Steve Witkoff to travel to Moscow next week to present the plan to Putin.
But despite the diplomatic flurry and public optimism, many close observers of Russia still doubt Putin is actually ready to take a deal now or sees much need to compromise.
“I see nothing at the moment that would force Putin to recalculate his goals or abandon his core demands,” Tatiana Stoyanova, founder of R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center wrote on X.
“He feels more confident than ever about the battlefield situation and is convinced that he can wait until Kyiv finally accepts that it cannot win and must negotiate on Russia’s well-known terms,” Stoyanova said. “If the Americans can help move things in that direction — fine. If not, he knows how to proceed anyway.”
Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit in protest after Russia’s 2022 invasion, also told ABC News he thought it “most likely” that this latest round of negotiations will fizzle out with the combatants still far apart on key issues, as has been the case with previous efforts.
The new 19-point plan negotiated with Ukraine this week is highly unlikely to align with Moscow’s goals, Bondarev said. Even the original 28-point plan that Russia helped draw up with Witkoff “wasn’t fully acceptable to Russia in the first place,” he said, pointing to the Kremlin’s apparent hesitance to commit to the initial blueprint.
“Now it’s even less acceptable,” he said. “So, of course, they would not accept it.”
But Bondarev didn’t rule out entirely that Putin might lunge for a deal that contains many of his demands.
“Of course, we can and we should be ready for any surprises from the Kremlin,” he said. “They can still surprise sometimes.”
The original 28-point U.S. proposal that heavily favored Russia was revised down to 19, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials, during the Geneva negotiations.
Some of the most unacceptable points to Kyiv have been removed, according to sources familiar with the discussions, including a cap on Ukraine’s army and a war crimes amnesty. But it is not entirely clear what the new plan includes and the most intractable issues, including Ukraine ceding more unoccupied territory remain.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday again downplayed hopes for a deal, saying it was “too early to say” whether the warring parties are close to an accord. Russia’s deputy foreign minister has since said Moscow will not make any major concessions.
Previous rounds of talks have resoundingly failed. And, while the U.S. has been projecting hope, it’s unclear how serious Russia — which has been eking out battlefield gains — is about making peace.
“Putin does not want an agreement,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said at an Atlantic Council event on Tuesday. “The only agreement he wants is diktat — a Ukrainian surrender. Otherwise, he wants to continue fighting.”
“I suspect if Ukraine had accepted those dreadful 28 points, Putin would come back for more,” Herbst said. “He realizes those 28 points reflected great flexibility moving his direction on the part of the United States, and he would say, ‘See what else we can get’.”
Putin’s long march The Kremlin has indicated that the new peace plan was discussed at the summit between Putin and Trump in Alaska in August.
Putin left Alaska with Trump’s endorsement of the “fantastic relationship” between the two presidents, having successfully neutralized Trump’s previous demand he agree an immediate ceasefire and pushing off the threat of more American sanctions, while gaining the prospect of potentially lucrative bilateral economic cooperation.
Despite a nominal commitment to peace talks, as summer turned to fall, Russia only intensified its frontline offensives and expanded its long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, according to information released by Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Russian forces have captured some 350 square miles of Ukrainian territory — roughly the same area as the German capital of Berlin — since Trump and Putin sat down together in Alaska, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War think tank.
Putin has for years said that any peace deal in Ukraine must reflect the “new territorial realities” of Russian occupation of large chunks of the country. As Russian troops edge forward, Putin appears to be trying to entrench those territorial realities.
That new territory is a tiny sliver of the roughly 44,600 square miles — nearly 20% — of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces. But despite the slow rate and reportedly high human cost of Russia’s advance, independent military analysts worry it reflects a growing momentum for Moscow.
A high-profile advance around the destroyed Donetsk city of Pokrovsk and an unexpected local breakthrough on Ukraine southern Zaporizhzhia front have further burnished the Kremlin’s propaganda campaign promoting what they claim as an inevitable Russian victory.
Relentless Russian drone and missile strikes continue to kill civilians and wreak havoc on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, particularly the energy grid. Concentrated strikes on power stations and natural gas infrastructure have precipitated rolling blackouts in many parts of the country — including in Kyiv — as winter bites.
Zelenskyy’s government has also been rocked by a corruption scandal that has seen two cabinet ministers removed from their posts and figures close to the president investigated.
Bondarev said he believes Russia is repeating its strategy of delay and obfuscation. Putin is “playing for time,” he said, and “outsmarting” his Western adversaries.
“Putin says we need to remove the root causes of the war,” Bondarev said. “You cannot remove these root causes of the war just by signing some memorandum. You need to work it through. It takes a lot of experts, meetings, coordination — so it may take months. And at the same time, he will be fighting.”
“With each new tiny victory — every new village occupied, every square kilometer occupied — the Russian position will be more and more robust, less and less flexible,” Bondarev said.
Red lines “People’s expectations for how long a process like this will take are wildly exaggerated,” Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told ABC News this week.
“I think even in the best case we are talking about months not weeks,” Charap added.
Still, Charap said, the new push by the Trump administration was positive, noting it had jumpstarted negotiations and for the first time produced a framework document that at least included almost all the core issues of the conflict.
“You have to give them credit, they have certainly shaken up the stasis which had set in,” he said. “There are conversations happening that weren’t happening a week ago.”
Ukrainian lawmakers and analysts told ABC News there remains little hope in Ukraine that Putin can be trusted to abide by the terms of any peace deal. That is why Kyiv’s demands for Western security guarantees, NATO membership and more military aid have been so central to the Ukrainian negotiating position.
Still, Yehor Cherniev — a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News that the framework established with the U.S. “is a good signal and it’s good progress in our peace negotiations, because before we were stuck.”
But some “red lines” remain, Cherniev said, “as before, about the concession of our territories or of or our sovereignty.” Ukrainian officials have said they want to leave such thorny topics to a meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House.
“I have doubts that Russia will agree with this,” Cherniev added.
Oleksandr Merezhko, another member of parliament and the chair of its foreign affairs committee, told ABC News he believes “Putin will reject this peace plan and will reiterate his maximalist demands.”
“He is not interested in peace or ceasefire — he is only interested in our surrender,” Merezhko said. “We should insist not on a ‘peace treaty’ but on a ceasefire agreement.”
Zelenskyy has consistently urged more pressure on Russia twinned with more muscular Western military aid for Kyiv. Trump has often threatened a tougher line on Moscow, but — according to Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland — it is unclear if he is willing to deliver.
“In the end, Trump is going to have to stare down Putin to get his deal in any kind of decent form,” Fried said at an event Tuesday.
But Bondarev said he sees little hope of an imminent change in U.S. strategy, suggesting that any disunity within the administration will only further strengthen Moscow’s hand.
“Western diplomacy has never tried to get the initiative, to first elaborate its own agenda and impose it on Russia,” the former diplomat said. “They only follow what Russia is doing. You can never prevail if you just follow your adversary and let him lead.”
“Trump mentioned that ‘it takes two to tango,'” he added. “But there is someone in every couple who leads and someone who follows.”
Jane Goodall and her son Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick appearing on the ABC TV special ‘Jane Goodall and the World of Animal Behavior: The Lions of the Serengeti’ in Africa, 1976. Walt Disney Television Photo Archive/ABC via Getty Images
(CALIFORNIA) — Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, anthropologist and conservationist, has died, according to the institute she founded. She was 91 years old.
Goodall died of natural causes while in California on a speaking tour of the United States, the institute said in a statement on social media on Wednesday.
The British primatologist’s “discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” according to the institute.
Goodall was only 26 years old when she first traveled to Tanzania and began her important research on chimpanzees in the wild. Throughout her study of the species, Goodall proved that primates display an array of similar behaviors to humans, such as the ability to develop individual personalities and make and use their own tools.
Among the most surprising discoveries Goodall made was “how like us” the chimpanzees are, she told ABC News in 2020.
“Their behavior, with their gestures, kissing, embracing, holding hands and patting on the back,” she said. “… The fact that they can actually be violent and brutal and have a kind of war, but also loving an altruistic.”
That discovery is considered one of the great achievements of 20th-century scholarship, according to the Jane Goodall Institute.
Goodall’s love of animals began practically at birth, she told ABC News. As a child growing up in London and Bournemouth, she dreamed of traveling to Africa and living among the wildlife. When she was 10, she read the books “Doctor Dolittle” and “Tarzan,” and the inspiration changed the trajectory of her life.
The initial arrival into Tanzania’s Gombe National Park proved to be challenging. The terrain was steep and mountainous, the forests were thick, and threats from buffalo and leopards lurked in the wilderness. But her lifelong ambition had finally been realized, and Goodall knew she was where she was meant to be.
“It was what I always dreamed of,” she told ABC News.
Goodall later earned a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behavior, from the University of Cambridge. Her thesis detailed the first five years of study at the Gombe reserve.
In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute with Genevieve di San Faustino. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. with offices in 25 cities around the world, the organization aims to improve the treatment and understanding of primates through public education and legal representation.
Goodall’s research garnered both scientific honors and mainstream fame, and she was credited with paving the way for a rise in women pursuing careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) over the years. The number of women in STEM has increased from 7% to 26% in the six last decades, according to The Jane Goodall Institute, which cited census information from 1970 to 2011.
In 1991, she also founded Roots & Shoots, a global humanitarian and environmental program for young people.
She was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in April 2002. The anthropologist continued to lend her voice to environmental causes well into her 80s and 90s.
In 2019, Goodall acknowledged the climate crisis and the importance of mitigating further warming, telling ABC News that the planet is “imperiled.”
“We are definitely at a point where we need to make something happen,” she said. “We are imperiled. We have a window of time. I’m fairly sure we do. But, we’ve got to take action.”
Goodall even partnered with Apple in 2022 to encourage customers to recycle their devices to reduce individual carbon footprint and cut down on unnecessary mineral mining around the world.
“Yes, people need to make money, but it is possible to make money without destroying the planet,” Goodall told ABC News at the time. “We’ve gone so far in destroying the planet that it’s shocking.”
Goodall emphasized in 2020 that there is still much to learn from “our closest-living relatives.”
“They’re still teaching us,” she said during the diamond jubilee anniversary of studying the species.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Goodall hypothesized that humans brought outbreak upon themselves, given that bats were the suspected driver of cross-species contraction of the virus.
“We have disrespected the natural world. We’ve disrespected animals, and we’ve been cutting down forests. Animals have been driven into closer contact with people. Animals have been hunted, killed and eaten. They’ve been trafficked,” she told ABC News in 2020. “So, animals of different species have been crowded together in the wild animal meat markets in Asia, bush meat markets in Africa, and this creates a fantastic environment for a virus or bacteria, virus in this case, to jump from an animal to a person.”
Goodall’s place in pop culture history was further cemented in 2022 when toymaker Mattel announced a special edition Barbie doll modeled after Goodall in honor of the 62nd anniversary of her first visit to Tanzania’s Gombe National Park.
“My entire career, I’ve wanted to help inspire kids to be curious and explore the world around them,” Goodall said in a statement at the time.
The doll is dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, and holds a pair of binoculars and a notebook. The doll itself is also sustainable, made from ocean-bound plastic.
Goodall was the recipient of several honors throughout her life. In 1995, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for “services to zoology” and promoted to Dame Commander in 2003. Goodall’s other honors included the French Legion of Honor, Japan’s Kyoto Prize and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
She is survived by a son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, from her first marriage to Dutch nobleman and wild photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick, as well as three grandchildren. Her second husband, former Tanzanian parliament member Derek Bryceson, died of cancer in 1980.
