Driver in custody after striking pedestrians in France, interior minister says

(LONDON) — Ukrainian drones attacked the Russian Black Sea coast overnight into Tuesday morning, according to the Russian Defense Ministry and local officials, just hours after President Vladimir Putin took virtual meetings from his residence there in the coastal resort city of Sochi.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces shot down at least 31 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 15 over the Black Sea, two over Crimea and two over Krasnodar Krai, the Black Sea region in which Sochi is located.

Putin took part in a video meeting of BRICS nations from his Sochi residence on Monday afternoon, the Kremlin said in an official readout. It is not clear whether the president was still at his residence during the nighttime Ukrainian drone attack.

At least one person was killed in Sochi during the attack, local Gov. Veniamin Kondratiev said in a post to Telegram. The man was killed when fragments of a falling drone hit the car he was driving, Kondratiev said. Six houses were also damaged in the attack, Kondratiev said.

Sochi Mayor Andrey Proshunin posted photos of the damage to Telegram, saying a military monument was also struck by debris. Proshunin posted photos of damage in the Adlersky district of the city, just south of Sochi International Airport.

Russia’s federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsiya, also introduced temporary flight restrictions at the airport in the early hours of Tuesday.

Bocharov Ruchey, the Russian president’s summer residence, is located in the Tsentralny district in the northwest of Sochi, around 17 miles from the international airport.

The residence was in regular use by Putin before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin hosted former U.S. President George Bush there in 2008, and reportedly used the residence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russian media reports suggested that Putin stopped using the residence from 2024 amid intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks. Reports also suggested that parts of the residence may have been demolished in recent years.

Russia continued its own long-range strike campaign on Ukraine, with the air force in Kyiv reporting 84 drones launched into the country overnight into Tuesday. Sixty craft were shot down or suppressed, the air force said, with the impacts of 23 drones recorded across 10 locations.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that at least 21 people were killed in a “savage” Russian airstrike on the village of Yarova in eastern Donetsk Oblast on Tuesday. The strike hit as people there gathered to collect their pensions, Zelenskyy said.

One person was also killed and one person injured by Russian fire in the southern frontline Zaporizhzhia region, Gov. Ivan Federov said.

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(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.

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(NEW YORK) — Dr. Aqsa Durrani, an American physician who has been providing humanitarian work around the world for over 15 years, said amid the harrowing scenes of death and destruction in Gaza, one story especially sticks with her.

Found injured and alone after an Israeli airstrike, a 4-year-old girl was taken to a trauma field hospital in central Gaza, she told ABC News.

“She was completely in shock. She was not talking and [a colleague] decided, ‘I have to take this little girl home and I have try to see if I can help her find her family,'” said Durrani, a pediatric ICU doctor and an epidemiologist who worked with Doctors Without Borders in Gaza earlier this year.

Durrani, who said her colleagues are working in conditions that are “incomprehensible,” recently gained major attention for an interview on the digital platform “Humans of New York.”

“He has kids around her age. He tried to feed her, he tried have his kids play with her,” Durrani told ABC News. “She was completely non-emotive — for days. And for those days, he tried to find her family.”

He looked in the area where the airstrike hit — a location where displaced people were sheltering — but he wasn’t able to find her family there, according to Durrani.

“Finally, he said that he found a man who said that he had a niece that age and that they were staying in that area, so he brought him to her,” Durrani said.

“He said that when she saw him, she yelled out ‘ammo,’ which means uncle in Arabic, and she ran to him and hugged him. And it was the first time [my colleague] had heard her speak,” Durrani said.

But this was only one child and it took days to find her family because they had been displaced multiple times, Durrani told ABC News.

“I said, ‘It’s so beautiful that you took her and you were able to reunite her with her uncle.’ And he said, ‘I have to do that. I have do that because I have to believe that someone will do that for me when this happens to me, or someone will do that for my children,'” Durrani said.

“I think the story exemplifies every aspect of the horror that everyone is experiencing,” Durrani said.

Durrani was based in central Gaza — working at a trauma field hospital there — from Feb. 24 to April 24, witnessing the end of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Hamas and the weekslong blockade on all humanitarian aid.

Field hospitals — which are tents and semi-permanent structures — were meant to offload existing hospitals. At the field hospital where Durrani worked, they were only able to provide care to injured or burn patients, she said.

“We could not possibly provide other services with the circumstances that we were in,” Durrani said. “We really had to keep it to lifesaving trauma service.”

“Now, most of the patients that they’re receiving are injured at these supposed aid-distribution sites. They are receiving now more patients with gunshot wounds, including children with gunshot wounds. Each day continues to get worse and we have just been witnessing this genocidal violence now for months and months and it’s beyond anything that even our most experienced humanitarian colleagues can imagine,” Durrani said.

The Israel Defense Forces have previously said shooting incidents at aid sites were under review, but has also said in few instances that it fired “warning shots” toward people who were allegedly “advancing while posing a threat to the troops.”

At least 2,018 have died trying to get humanitarian aid in Gaza and another 15,000 have been injured since May 28, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health.

Durrani said her colleagues, despite experiencing constant horror were “committed to doing everything in the best way possible and despite their own personal trauma” and continue to come in every day.

“We’ve had physicians who receive their own family members in the ER during during mass casualty incidents. They’re enduring these horrors and also working to provide care in those circumstances,” she said.

“What I cannot stress enough is that they — even in those circumstances, and even despite relentless trauma — were providing beautiful, compassionate, evidence-based care,” Durrani said.

Durrani recalled one day when they “called a child psychiatrist, who was one of the only child psychiatrists in the whole Gaza Strip, he was so apologetic that he could not come to see the children that day and told us that it was because he was actually himself displaced that day, and that he had lost some of his family members.”

The majority of their patients were women and children “even though our hospital was for everyone,” she said.

“We would round on all of the injured patients with the surgeons and go patient by patient. And often there were airstrikes nearby, and the Palestinian doctors and nurses would just speak louder over the bombs. And just continue providing compassionate care to the patients as we continued down the line,” Durrani said.

Food was becoming more scarce toward the end of Durrani’s time in Gaza, she said.

“Much of our days were actually spent trying to work with other organizations to see if we could find any food to give anyone. At the end, I was only able to provide patients with one meal per day, and mothers and children were sharing one portion of one meal,” she said.

“I even had one mother say, ‘Is there anything you can give my child to distract him from the hunger?’ And this was a child who had been burned by a fire that resulted from an airstrike,” she said.

Durrani said she believes the conditions in Gaza are a “deliberate choice” made by Israeli leadership, and called on the U.S. government to withdraw its support for what she called “complete indiscriminate” violence.

The Israeli government has denied that it is limiting the amount of aid entering Gaza and has claimed Hamas steals aid meant for civilians. Hamas has denied those claims.

Israel’s cabinet has approved plans to expand its military campaign in Gaza, drawing widespread criticism from the United Nations and key allies including Germany. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said on Aug. 8 the escalation “will result in more killing, more unbearable suffering, [and] senseless destruction.”

More than 100 aid groups have warned of “mass starvation” in Gaza, describing a dire food shortage due to the Israeli government’s siege.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer pushed back, saying “there is no famine” in Gaza. He blamed Hamas and called the food crisis in Gaza “a man-made shortage engineered by Hamas.”

A USAID analysis appeared to undercut Israeli assertions about the extent to which Hamas has allegedly stolen humanitarian aid. A presentation reviewed by ABC News, examining more than 150 reported incidents involving the theft or loss of U.S.-funded humanitarian aid in Gaza, showed that the group failed to find any evidence that Hamas engaged in widespread diversion of aid to cause the amount of hunger seen in the strip.

Durrani said providing medical aid in the Gaza Strip was an experience unlike any other.

“It’s dystopian, but it elicits a very visceral response. It’s just completely unfathomable that it’s actually, real, everything around you. I entered through the Karam Shalom crossing and we drove through Rafah and Rafah was at that point, even in late February, almost completely destroyed. It just looked like a dystopian reality,” Durrani said.

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