Member of local guard at US Embassy in Sudan killed in paramilitary RSF’s custody

(LONDON) — South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday that Seoul may respond militarily to any casualties caused by North Korea’s launching of so-called “trash balloons” across the shared border, the state media Yonhap News Agency reported.

“North Korea’s gray zone provocations are continuing and are causing inconvenience and anxiety to the public, so we have summarized the military’s position to date and delivered a message,” Lee Sung-joon, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, as quoted by Yonhap.

“This is an internationally shameful and petty act that creates discomfort and anxiety among our people and is a low-level act intended to incite conflict.”

Though there were “no issues” so far that warranted a military response, Seoul would consider a military response if there were direct casualties caused by the North Korean balloons, Lee added.

“If North Korea’s continued trash balloons are judged to pose a serious threat to the safety of our citizens or to have crossed the line, the military will take stern military action,” he continued.

North Korea launched a total of 5,500 trash balloons at South Korea on 22 occasions from May 28 to Sept. 23, Lee said.

Approximately 120 of these were launched on Sunday and Monday, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

“Some are demanding physical responses from the military, such as shooting them down in the air,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff continued, according to Yonhap. “However, if unexpected hazardous materials are dispersed due to shooting them down in the air, it could pose a bigger problem to the safety of our citizens.”

Takeoffs and landings at Incheon International Airport — the main airport in the capital Seoul — were suspended twice during the early morning hours of Monday due to North Korean balloons, Yonhap reported.

Several fires have also been reported in metropolitan areas believed caused by “heat timers” attached to the balloons.

Household waste items like paper, vinyl and plastic bottles are among the confirmed contents, the South Korean military said. So far, no hazardous materials were identified. Some trash balloons carried manure.

Seoul estimated that North Korea spent 550 million won — around $411,600 — to produce the balloons to date, Yonhap reported.

South Korean civic groups also send balloons into North Korean territory, often carrying rice, essential medicine and leaflets critical of the regime in Pyongyang. North Korea has repeatedly protested such action and threatened a response.

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(LONDON) — Wildfires in the Amazon are choking swaths of Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador with smoke, leading to evacuations, school closures, canceled flights and a dire threat to plant and animal life in the region in what officials say is thought to be the worst fires in 20 years.

An estimated 20% of the Brasilia National Forest burned just last week and officials have launched a probe into suspected arson as residents of the nearby Brazilian capital city of Brasilia reported coughs, stinging eyes and scratchy throats, according to park officials.

In Bolivia’s capital city of La Paz, many schools held virtual classes and flights to and from the region were delayed and canceled. Elsewhere, in the provinces of Beni, Santa Cruz and Pando, many farmers and indigenous Bolivians have evacuated their land as fires continued. More than 3 million hectares of land have already burned in Bolivia this year.

In Ecuador, the government deployed an anti-fire helicopter and specialized brigades to contain a wildfire that has lasted almost two weeks.

The wildfire season in the Amazon region used to last three months from August to October. Now, it stretches on for six months, said Efrain Tinta Guachalla, a socio-territorial investigator at Fundación Tierra, a Bolivian NGO dedicated to sustainable rural development.

Guachalla attributes the fires to a growing amount of farmland, often for soy and cattle, and the deforestation that occurs because of this expansion. Deforestation causes the land to dry out due to a rise in temperatures and decreasing rainfall, causing a greater risk of fires in the surrounding forests.

“The fires are out of control,” he said. “The land is full of scars from the burning.”

While occasional wildfires in Europe and the American West are normal considering the climate, he continued, the humid Amazon is never meant to burn. He says that rainforest flora and fauna are being wiped out at unprecedented rates.

“The fires in California or the fires in Europe, those aren’t the same as the fires in South America. There’s an enormous difference — the loss of biodiversity,” said Guillermo Villalobos, a political scientist focusing on climate science at Bolivian nonprofit Fundación Solon. “Forests like the Amazon are historically tropical forests, meaning they’ve never burned, they’ve never coexisted with the fire. This is terribly tragic for the ecosystem and the world. The Amazon is in its worst state of the last 50 years.”

Over ten thousand species are at high risk of extinction, researchers say, in large part due to deforestation, according to a report by the Science Panel of the Amazon.

As climate change and global demand for agricultural products increase, Villalobos thinks the fires are only going to get worse as more land is cleared for farming, raising the risk of wildfires.

“We’re in an interminable loop,” he said. “A point of no return.”

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(LONDON) — As a 4-year-old Palestinian child waited on Sunday to cross into Jordan for a chance at a life-saving medical procedure, a gunman was crossing from the other side to attack Israeli border guards.

Accompanied by his mother and fiercest advocate, Huda, Ahmed Hammad had left Gaza a few hours earlier for an emergency surgery to change his pacemaker, a necessary device he had since he was just a baby that has a battery that is now days away from completely depleting.

As doctors first warned about the situation in March, the family soon organized to request an emergency evacuation, according to the humanitarian agents helping them. But Hammad’s case was repeatedly rejected by Israeli officials who cited security concerns, they said.

Until Sunday, when he made it out of Gaza for the first time, traveling to the crossing in the West Bank, just to be returned to the war-torn Gaza Strip a few hours later. All crossings from Jordan were shut down after the gunman coming from Jordan killed three Israeli civilians at Allenby Bridge crossing, Israeli officials said.

It has been over 11 months since Hamas militants carried out a surprise attack that prompted a retaliatory war from Israel, which has left over 41,000 killed and 94,000 injured in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. The health care system in the Strip collapsed as a direct result, leaving cases like Hammad’s in a limbo of bureaucracy that quickly took most of the time he had left to save his life.

Humanitarian agencies, such as Save The Children and Doctors Without Borders, say there are thousands of other children like him waiting to evacuate for medical reasons.

Hammad, who is nonverbal, has people who raised their voice on his behalf, pleading his case to the relevant authorities more urgently as every day went by.

His mother, Huda, who said she already lost a daughter early in the war due to malnutrition and lack of health care, has been documenting Ahmed’s journey on Instagram.

In posts shared with a growing number of supporters from all around the world, Huda uploaded photos of her son resting in a tent, as well as videos of the frequent, painful seizure-like activity that came with his pacemaker’s battery dwindling.

Also fighting on behalf of Ahmed is Tareq Hailat, head of the Treatment Abroad Program at the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), which provides free medical care to Palestinian children who lack access to it.

“He needs to get out, or that battery runs out and he’s going to die,” Hailat told ABC News.

He added that surgeries like the one Hammad needs were ordinary in Gaza before Oct. 7 but are now impossible in what humanitarian agencies, such as Doctors Without Borders, call a destroyed health care system.

Hailat said that the situation with medical evacuations for children of Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military took over the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategic ribbon of land running 9 miles at the border with Egypt that includes the Rafah crossing, a main evacuation point.

“Since the Rafah border has been closed, there’s only been about maybe a hundred children that have been pulled out. Before, we would pull out almost 50 every single day,” Hailat said.

When asked about the system in place and why emergency cases like Hammad’s can wait for months without updates, Hailat said there is no system in place and the permission appears to be given arbitrarily.

“We ask the same question every single day: why is this particular child not being able to be pulled out? And it really has to do with the fact that it’s all in the hands of COGAT and no one else,” Hailat told ABC News, referring to the Israeli military’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. “So we have to wait and plead until they approve, and we have to exert as much pressure as possible.”

Hammad’s peacemaker will soon lose power, which would leave him to face likely cardiac arrest, according to his doctor and advocates.

ABC News has reached out to COGAT for comment.

Dr. Oday Sallout, a cardiac and pediatric surgeon at the European Hospital in Gaza who has been following Hammad’s case, said he has a “complete heart block” condition, with his heart’s upper and lower chambers disassociated and not working in combination.

“This creates a mess, with complications including sudden loss of consciousness and ultimately the risk of cardiac arrest,” Sallout said in an interview. “With a pacemaker he can sustain a good life, but it must be changed. I’ve learned he was first approved to evacuate without his mother, which is like a death sentence for someone like Ahmed.”

He’s dependent on his mother, so separating them could be catastrophic, Sallout said.

After the Palestinian Ministry of Health flagged the case, Hammad was approved through the World Health Organization to be welcomed for treatment in multiple countries, including Spain and the United Arab Emirates.

But he needs to leave Gaza first.

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