Category: Nation World News Wires

FONTAINEBLEAU, France — A fire raging in the historic and much-visited Fontainebleau forest south of Paris on Monday prompted evacuations of some residential neighborhoods and disrupted train and highway traffic.

It was among several wildfires in western Europe as the region bakes under its third red-alert heat wave this year.

In Spain, 10 people were still unaccounted for Monday from a fire that ripped through a remote southern expatriate community last week, killing 13 people in one of the country’s deadliest blazes.

The Fontainebleau forest fire is unusual for its proximity to the French capital — about 42 miles away. The region hosts the Fontainebleau Chateau favored by Napoleon and is popular with visitors from Paris and beyond.

French President Emmanuel Macron said all necessary means were being deployed to fight the fire of ″exceptional scale.”

Two water-dumping planes were deployed over the area along with hundreds of firefighters, regional fire service spokesperson Paul Laurain told public broadcaster France-Info.

The head of the regional administration, Pierre Ory, told French media that an investigation is underway and that arson was being considered a possibility.

A new fire has broken out in another section of the forest, Ory said. The initial fire is still not contained and was continuing to spread at a moderate rate.

“Winds are turning, which is significantly complicating the work of the firefighters,” he said.

Trains to and from the bustling Gare de Lyon train station were disrupted late Sunday but were returning to normal Monday morning. A section of the busy A6 highway leading southeast of Paris was shut down because of fire risk.

Large fires in southern France have already scorched thousands of acres since last week, disrupting the Tour de France cycling race and stretching firefighting resources.

France is experiencing the peak of its third heat wave of the summer, with temperatures surpassing 104 degrees Fahrenheit across western and central areas and around 98 F in Paris.

Spain reeling from deadly wildfire

A 93-year-old British national died Sunday in a hospital from injuries sustained in the Los Gallardos wildfire, elevating the death toll to 13.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was expected to visit the site of the fire on Monday. Regional authorities said the blaze was contained Sunday after affecting some 27 square miles of forest and farmland — larger than the size of Manhattan.

Spain is experiencing extreme heat, which combined with wind and little rainfall is creating the ideal conditions for small wildfires to grow unchecked.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Homes evacuated in U.K. due to fires

In the U.K., people were evacuated from several dozen rural homes in north Wales after a wildfire broke out across a mountainside on Sunday, British media reported.

Wildfires also burned in several locations across England as another heat wave — the third this year — brought hot, sunny and dry conditions.

The Met Office said record heat waves since May have led to 2026 becoming the first year to record temperatures of 95 F or higher on six separate days. That broke the previous record set in 1976 and 2020, when five days were recorded with such temperatures.

Natural England’s fire severity index has put much of England at “very high” risk of wildfires, with some areas in southern England and the Midlands at “exceptional” risk.

Minnesota prosecutors announced Monday that they have obtained key evidence in their ongoing investigations into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during pitched protests against a federal immigration enforcement crackdown in the state earlier this year.

“Through the cooperation of our federal partners we have obtained the hard drives of previously withheld evidence in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said. “We have also obtained some of the physical evidence that was previously withheld, including Renee Good’s car.”

Statements, police body camera video, and other evidence had previously been withheld by federal officials in the killings.

She said state and local investigators now also have in their possession Good’s damaged car.

Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed in her car while leaving an anti-immigration enforcement protest in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surged through the region.

Her death and that of Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse shot and killed by federal officers just weeks later during a Jan. 24 protest, sparked outrage across the country and calls to rein in immigration enforcement.

“The wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence,” Moriarty said.

Investigators are going through all the evidence, including hard drives with statements, hours of video recorded by body-worn cameras, and the car Good was driving, Moriarty said.

“We need transparency. We need cooperation. Our community needs it,” she said. “Our democracy requires it.”

At the end of June, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Moriarty asked a federal judge to push out the deadlines in their lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice because they said they were in the midst of recently reinitiated “ongoing discussions” with the FBI about information sharing.

Those ongoing discussions with the FBI about information sharing are likely to affect Minnesota’s request for summary judgment in the case, Ellison and Moriarty wrote in their motion to the court.

The attorneys representing the federal government signed onto the motion.

Ellison said he remains “deeply troubled that the federal government spent more than half a year attempting to conceal this evidence from state investigators.”

“It should never have taken this long for Minnesota law enforcement to gain access to the federal government’s evidence,” he said in a statement. “I hope that this is the beginning of a major course correction on the part of the federal government.”

There have been at least eight deaths since the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign began last year, but nobody has been charged in connection with them.

A Minneapolis resident, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, was also shot and injured in his home while ICE agents were in pursuit of another man.

In May, Christian Castro, an ICE agent, was arrested and charged with assault as well as falsely reporting a crime in connection with that Jan. 14 nonfatal shooting.

Prosecutors say Castro, 52, fired through a home’s front door and shot Sosa-Celis in the thigh.

In April, Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., another ICE agent, was charged with pointing his gun at a motorist and passenger on a Minneapolis highway.

Prosecutors said at the time it was the first criminal case against a federal officer involved in the Minnesota immigration crackdown.

On Monday, ICE was involved in a fatal shooting in Maine, according to state House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat.

Details of what transpired in Biddeford, a coastal city of about 23,000 people roughly 15 miles southwest of Portland, remained unclear.

Last week, an ICE agent in Houston fatally shot a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for decades as the homebuilder drove his construction crew to a job site.

The federal Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has acknowledged officers were looking for someone else when they attempted to stop Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s vehicle. The agency maintains Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle, prompting an officer to open fire in self-defense.

BIDDEFORD, Maine — The motorist killed by ICE officers in a Maine shooting Monday was not the target of the warrant the officers were executing, Sen. Angus King said Homeland Security Secretary Mullin told him.

It’s the second time in a week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have used deadly force and at least the ninth since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown.

Immigrant rights groups identified the man who was killed as a 26-year-old native of Colombia.

King, an independent senator from Maine, said Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against officers in Biddeford, a coastal city roughly 15 miles southwest of Portland.

“He was in a vehicle — pulled out in the vehicle, and the term the secretary used was ‘weaponized’ the vehicle and was shot by an ICE agent,” King said.

King had initially said Mullin told him the man was the target of a deportation effort. Mullin later called King with new information he had received, a spokesperson for the senator said.

The Maine attorney general’s office, which is investigating along with the FBI and other agencies, said initial statements suggest the motorist was trying to flee in the direction of the agent. The man was the target of an enforcement operation related to a final order of removal, the office said, and the agent who killed him has been placed on leave.

Messages seeking comment were left for ICE and the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Man was authorized to work in U.S., advocates say

The advocacy groups Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! said the man who was killed was authorized to work in the U.S. and had a Social Security number. After the shooting, his family contacted the Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, executive director Mufalo Chitam said.

“It’s a young family and he was leaving to go to work,” Chitam told the Associated Press. The family, she said, isn’t ready to speak publicly about the shooting.

Mary Hayes, who lives close to where the shooting happened, said the man lived nearby with his wife and daughter.

“I watched a wife fall to her knees looking at her husband’s dead body on the ground,” Hayes told the AP as she held a piece of cardboard with “No ICE Stop ICE” written on it. “I watched a little girl crying with a little pink backpack on because she’s never going to see her father again.”

The Colombian Embassy told the AP in an emailed statement that it is in contact with U.S. authorities and “working to formally confirm the individual’s identity and nationality.”

Security video but no body-worn camera footage

Cory Poulin, whose family runs a laundromat near the scene, told the AP that security cameras at the business captured footage of the man’s car rolling into the intersection after shots were fired. Other images from the scene showed the car going in circles and bullet holes in its windshield.

“Two ICE members ran to the intersection and another ICE member in a Ford SUV went into the intersection to stop the car from rolling,” he said. “I don’t know for a fact, but I don’t believe he was alive when the car started rolling.”

He said Maine State Police asked that he not release the footage publicly.

The agents involved in the shooting didn’t have body-worn cameras, King said.

“The question is, what did he do with his vehicle,” King said. “Were officers threatened? Were the threats rising to the level that justified deadly force?

“That’s what this investigation is all about and I certainly intend to stay after it to do everything I can to be sure the investigation is as transparent and thorough as possible.”

Anti-ICE protesters gather near scene

Dozens of demonstrators critical of ICE and President Donald Trump’s ongoing immigration crackdown gathered in Biddeford within hours of the shooting.

Amy Goodman, who is from nearby Wells, arrived with a sign that said “Stop Killing Us” and directed it toward police working at the scene.

“Sadly, it’s something we’re seeing a whole lot more often lately, and I’m mad about it,” said Goodman, who was wearing a shirt that said “ICE is best when crushed.”

“It’s heartbreaking and I wanted to show up,” Goodman’s friend, Molly Zucker of Cape Neddick, said as she held a sign reading, “No human being is illegal.”

Police blocked access to the shooting scene, which is in a neighborhood of mostly multifamily homes, churches, and businesses near downtown. Several protesters stood nearby, with some holding signs condemning ICE’s presence in the community and state.

“We are grieving, we are furious, and we will not allow his death to be treated as routine or inevitable,” Chitam said. “How much more harm must our communities endure before those with the power to act acknowledge that this has gone too far?”

A recent uptick in Trump’s immigration crackdown

The fatal shooting in Maine was at least the ninth death from an encounter with federal immigration officials since the start of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the second in a week, following the killing of a Houston man.

The reported shooting comes amid a newly intensified push by the Trump administration to carry out its mass deportations agenda. During the five-day period at the end of June, ICE arrested more than 10,000 people. The figures indicate that while the administration is no longer cracking down on individual cities, the arrests continue and are surging.

“More than anything else, I want to know, ‘Why are you in Maine?’” Rep. Chellie Pingree (D., Maine) said in a video posted on social media.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat running for Senate, wrote on X: “It’s time to get ICE off our streets.”

Hundreds of Maine ICE arrests since Trump’s return

ICE had a significant presence in Maine earlier this year, which prompted several protests.

The Homeland Security Department named the operation “Catch of the Day,” an apparent play on Maine’s seafood industry, just as it has done for other enforcement surges, like “Metro Surge” in Minnesota and “Midway Blitz” in Chicago.

Immigration officials said in late January that they had ceased “enhanced operations” in Maine after hundreds of arrests.

A Homeland Security spokesperson said at the time that some Maine arrests were of people “convicted of horrific crimes” including aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child.

Court records show that while some had felony convictions, others had unresolved immigration proceedings or had been arrested but never convicted of a crime.

ICE arrested 546 people in Maine between the start of Trump’s second term and March 11, 2026, the most recent data available, according to ICE arrest data provided to the University of California, Berkeley Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the AP. About 45% of those arrested had criminal backgrounds. During the equivalent 416-day period before Trump took office, roughly 69% of those arrested had criminal backgrounds, the data show.

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.

Last week, an ICE officer fatally shot 52-year-old Salgado Araujo, of Houston, after he was pursued by federal agents driving unmarked vehicles while he was taking his construction crew to their latest job site.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitch McConnell on Sunday revealed for the first time that a fall led to his hospitalization, breaking the silence about his condition after weeks of mounting speculation about the Kentucky Republican’s health.

McConnell, 84, said in a statement that he has undergone a battery of tests as doctors try to determine what led to his fall. He explained the long silence about his condition by saying that “folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.”

“Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it,” he said.

McConnell said he is now in a rehabilitation center and will not be returning to the Senate “quite yet.” He said he continues to work with his staff on Senate business in the meantime.

The statement included a smiling picture of the senator with his wife, Elaine Chao, a tacit response to speculation online that McConnell had died or was incapacitated.

It comes following his hospitalization on June 14. McConnell’s office for weeks provided little information, insisting only that he was “receiving excellent care” and recovering. As his hospital stay grew longer, speculation mounted about his condition. It grew so intense that Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear took the extraordinary step of asking that McConnell update the public about his health in a “transparent manner.”

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko stepped down on Sunday as President Volodymyr Zelensky announced fresh changes to Ukraine’s government, saying he had offered a new and important position to the former premier.

Zelensky, who has remained in office under martial law because wartime elections are prohibited, has periodically reshuffled his government in an effort to bring fresh momentum to his administration.

Svyrydenko, who has served as Ukraine’s economy minister, was named prime minister in July 2025 at the age of 39 after playing a lead role in securing a mineral agreement between Ukraine and the United States, seen as an important way of tying U.S. interests to Ukraine’s security.

In a statement on social media, Svyrydenko said she was “proud to have had the honor of leading the government during one of the most difficult periods in Ukraine’s modern history.” She also said she had discussed “next steps” with Zelensky, but did not provide further details.

“I remain ready to serve the Ukrainian state and carry out every task aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s position, defending our national interests and bringing a just peace closer,” she said.

Zelensky announced her resignation in a post saying that Ukraine was “changing its political strategy.” He also said he had offered Svyrydenko the opportunity to lead “a new, important area” in Ukraine’s relations with a key international partner.

“Each priority area of foreign policy will be assigned to a specific person with substantial experience who is capable of implementing what we agree on at the leaders’ level and what the Ukrainian people expect,” Zelensky said, describing the impending reshuffle.

The Ukrainian leader also said there would be changes among the top ranks of Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies.

Zelensky met with a series of senior officials following the announcement, including Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, and Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

The overhaul, which Zelensky has yet to explain in detail, would be the fourth major reorganization of his government since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Ukraine continues strikes against Russian oil sites

Elsewhere, a Ukrainian attack in southwest Russia killed one person and wounded three more, local officials said Sunday, as Kyiv’s forces continued to bombard Russia’s oil facilities.

The head of Russia’s Samara region, Gov. Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, said that a child was among the injured. He also said that residential homes and apartment buildings were damaged in the strike, as well as an unspecified “industrial site.”

Russian media outlets reported that the attack’s target was the region’s Syzran Oil Refinery, with many sharing images that appeared to show plumes of black smoke rising over the site. The refinery, which is owned by oil and gas giant Rosneft and sits some 500 miles east of the border, has been a repeated target for Kyiv’s forces.

Meanwhile the governor of Russia’s Rostov region, Yuri Slyusar, said that a tanker had been damaged in a drone attack in the Azov-Black Sea maritime canal. The tanker was empty and there is no threat of an oil spill, Slyusar said.

Ukraine’s drone strikes on oil refineries and other infrastructure across Russia have triggered a widespread fuel crisis with gasoline shortages and rationing in multiple regions and motorists waiting for hours to fill their tanks. Moscow has responded by intensifying its bombardment on Kyiv and other cities, exposing Ukraine’s vulnerability to ballistic missile strikes.

Zelensky has described the strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure as part of Kyiv’s campaign of “long-range sanctions” carried out in response to Moscow’s refusal to halt its four-year invasion of its neighbor.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday that it had attacked the ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk in Ukraine’s Odesa region. Ukrainian officials have not yet commented on the claims.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna said Saturday that he was detained by settlers and the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank and released only after calls to the American Embassy in Jerusalem. The Israeli Defense Forces denied detaining any visitors in the incident, the latest example of escalating political tensions involving Israel and its ally’s Democratic Party.

A representative for Khanna, a California Democrat who is an outspoken progressive, said the confrontation occurred Wednesday in the middle of a three-day tour of the West Bank. As the congressman visited a Palestinian village that had been abandoned after settler attacks, masked men with guns stopped his group and refused to let them leave.

The New York Times said the incident was witnessed by one of its photographers. Khanna’s office said it occurred in the town of Khirbet Zanuta.

Khanna said that when Israeli soldiers arrived he was dispirited to see them interact in a friendly manner with their captors and also block the exit for the congressman’s party. Not until the U.S. Embassy and Israeli police were called was Khanna’s group allowed to proceed.

“If this can happen to an American member of Congress, imagine what life is like for Palestinians who have no smartphones, no security, and no national platform,” Khanna, who is exploring a presidential bid in 2028, said in a fundraising email he sent out shortly after his post Saturday about the incident.

In a statement, the IDF said it received a report of Israeli citizens blocking foreign nationals and media in Khirbet Zanuta.

“Upon receiving the report, IDF troops were dispatched to the scene, quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians, and reopened the blocked road,” the military said in a statement. “The IDF soldiers operating in the area did not take part in blocking the road.”

Democratic politicians from the United States have stepped up their criticism of Israel amid a sharp turn against the country by the party’s voters. This week, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose father was born in Jerusalem and fought in Israel’s war of independence, gave a blistering speech in Tel Aviv in which he said Israel has become a “territorial pariah.” Emanuel also is a potential White House contender.

In a recent survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about 58% of Democrats said the U.S. is “too supportive” of Israelis.

Also Saturday, the Israeli military said it detained four suspects who were attacking foreign journalists traveling to Sinjil, another West Bank community. The assailants blocked the journalists’ vehicle and damaged it and were armed with clubs and knives, according to the military’s statement.

CNN reported that it had a team among the journalists who were attacked. The network said the journalists were there to cover the one-year anniversary of the killing of a Palestinian-American man who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers.