Four people were killed by an airstrike on a alleged drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, according to the US military. US War Secretary Pete Hegseth is under investigation for a previous attack that resulted in the death of survivors in a follow-up strike. He ordered the attack.
Published On 5 Dec 2025
Daniel Wiffen of Ireland has qualified for the 25-meter freestyle 800-meter final of the European Short Course Swimming Championships in Lublin.
In qualifying for Saturday’s final, the Olympic 800-meter freestyle champion ran a time of 7:34.60, placing him fourth overall.
He finished in second place, trailing Zalan Sarkany from Hungary, who ran a 7:33.85.
Wiffen continued to win the 1500m freestyle title on Thursday after posting a late surge and bronze medalist performance on Tuesday.
The Magheralin man won his first gold medal since having surgery on his appendix in August by 1.55 seconds over Hungarian Sarkany.
Jack McMillan, a British individual who won gold in the 400-meter freestyle in Poland, was unable to reach the 100-meter freestyle semi-finals.
McMillan, a Belfast native and Olympic and world champion in the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay, topped his heat with a time of 47.02, but he was 18th overall and is second reserve for Friday night’s semifinals.
Published On 5 Dec 2025
Second Ashes Test, the Gabba, Brisbane (day-night, day two of five)
England 334: Root 138, Crawley 76; Starc 6-75
Australia 378-6: Weatherald 72, Labuschagne 65, Smith 61; Carse 3-113
Australia are 44 runs ahead
England produced a floodlit fightback late on day two of the second Test against Australia, but still face a huge battle to stay alive in the Ashes after missing five chances at the Gabba.
Australia were on course for a substantial first-innings lead until Brydon Carse summoned the energy for a hostile spell in the Brisbane night.
In the same over, Carse bowled Cameron Green for 45 and then ended Steve Smith’s march to yet another Ashes century on 61 thanks to a wonder catch from Will Jacks.
When captain Ben Stokes bowled Josh Inglis, Australia had lost three wickets for 38 runs and eventually closed on 378-6 – a lead of 44.
England are still in the match despite being woeful for much of Friday. It was a performance that had all the characteristics of their 16-Test winless run in this country and 39-year winless run on this ground.
The tourists added only nine to their overnight 325-9 to be all out for 334, then allowed Australia to get away with some scattergun bowling before the first interval.
Wicketkeeper Jamie Smith’s drop of Travis Head was the first of the quintet of chances England missed.
Jake Weatherald slashed 72 and Marnus Labuschagne made 65 before Smith and Green added 95 for the fourth wicket.
The came the Carse-inspired revival. Whether it was too late to keep Australia to a lead England can manage will be revealed on Saturday.
If the first three days of this series – the two days of the first Test and the opening day here – were packed with action, this had a more familiar and foreboding feel of Australia slowly turning the screw.
No team has made as many as England’s 334 in the first innings of a day-night Test and lost, yet Australia put the tourists’ effort into context. This might have been the best day for batting and, when the pink ball went soft, England lacked inspiration.
On day one, England’s batting seemed fraught with danger, never far from the threat of implosion. A second-string Australia attack always found a way of conjuring – or being gifted – a wicket.
On day two, the Australians simply played orthodox Test cricket. It just so happened England’s best pace bowlers offered plenty of chances to score.
Off-spinner Jacks bowled only one over, and his selection would have looked an error had it not been for his incredible catch.
Still, day-night Tests can change rapidly under the lights and England deserve praise for hanging in and eventually using the conditions to their advantage. Their short-ball plan had Australia hopping around, though also allowed more rapid scoring.
Carse, usually so reliable, had been as guilty as anyone of spraying the ball around Brisbane – he conceded 113 runs from his 17 overs.
And it was indicative of England’s situation that the Durham man was asked to bowl a spell of bouncers in the night session, when usually the floodlights would offer the kind of movement to encourage orthodox seam bowling.
With Green stepping back to flay an expected short ball, he was bluffed by a Carse yorker that splattered the stumps. From the next ball, Carey gloved a venomous lifter, only for Ben Duckett to grass the vital catch moving forward from gully.
Still, in the same over, Carse got the crucial wicket of Smith thanks to Jacks’ moment of magic. Smith tried to drag a pull around the corner only for Jacks, at backward square leg, to fling himself to his right and cling on with his right hand.
Inglis and Carey countered, boundaries continued to flow and Duckett put down another chance – this time Inglis at gully off the bowling off Stokes. Three balls later, Stokes removed Inglis’ middle stump.
There was still time for England to create two more chances, and for Carey and Neser to add 49 from only 55 balls.
It may seem churlish to criticise Archer for his dismissal 14 balls into the day – 38 was his highest Test score, 70 was England’s highest last-wicket stand in this country for 74 years and Labuschagne took a stunning catch – but it was the beginning of Australia snatching the momentum. It left Root out of partners on 138 not out.
Still, the error of Archer’s needless pull at Brendan Doggett was dwarfed by the drop of Smith. When Archer took the edge of Head on three, England’s keeper failed to cling on to the rising ball and Australia surged into life.
Head added another 30 to his score, and along with Weatherald’s maiden Test half-century, the hosts punished some woeful England bowling. Australia took 112 runs in the 14 overs up to the first interval, with Labuschagne attacking when he replaced Head.
England rarely had control for the remainder of the day. Australia rocketed along at more than five an over, yet their batting was risk-free thanks to the wayward bowling. Time and again the home side were able to cut and pull because England missed their lengths.
Archer was excellent at the beginning of the second session to have Weatherald lbw, yet a seven-over spell meant he could not come back in the twilight. Stokes induced a poor slash from Labuschagne.
In Hama, tens of thousands of Syrians have gathered to remember Bashar al-Assad’s assassination. In 2024, an opposition-led lightning offensive led to the Assad regime’s sacking.
Published On 5 Dec 2025
The tragedy has rekindled some of the mistrust and divisions in Hong Kong that erupted as a result of the devastating housing estate fire that claimed the lives of at least 159 people.
On November 26, the city watched horrifiedly as the fire started at Wang Fuk Court and quickly spread to seven of the complex’s eight towers. According to official reports, many residents were trapped inside because the alarms were malfunctioning.
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After burning for more than 40 hours, Wang Fuk Court is on track to be one of the worst fires ever to occur, with 176 people killed in the blaze that started in 1948. However, the casualties rate have kept rising since the fire was extinguished on November 28.
Many Hong Kongers have never considered the scale.
This is a downtown area, not a small village in the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’t have anticipated that this would have happened, Issie, an educator who works in Wang Fuk Court’s Tai Po district, told Al Jazeera.
“This is a completely unthinkable situation. We anticipated that the government would have “put out the fire.”
Hong Kongers quickly mobilized following the fire’s eruption, when they distributed food, water, and shelter to young protesters despite not always agreeing with them. This is unlike the protests of 2019, which have taken place since.
As other residents of the housing estate’s 4, 000-plus residents were quickly gathered online assistance databases, including clothing, food, and other supplies, in Tai Po.
A petition was then released calling for “four demands” of government accountability in response to the protest’s “five demands, not one less” slogan. More than 10,000 people signed the petition, according to local media, before it was eventually removed.
In a striking visual similarity to the 2019 protest artwork “Lennon Walls,” handwritten notes adorned the fire’s victims.
A Hong Kong professor with experience with the city’s governance structure told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity because of concerns for the impact on their careers, that “mobilization is in Hong Kong’s “DNA.”
Because it was meant to be a significant renovation project, “people couldn’t explain why that happened.” He claimed that the renovation project, which was carried out to make the building structure and the residents safer, ended in tragedy.
Athena Tong, a visiting research fellow from Hong Kong and a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, shared the sentiment that the government was slow to act.
According to Tong, “the fact that society, the regular citizens, needed to mobilize at that scale to help with relief demonstrates that there is no trust in the government’s competence,”
Hong Kongers began to question the government’s prompt response online, including a suggestion from early experts and officials that Wang Fuk Court’s bamboo scaffolding, a custom in Hong Kong construction, should be replaced with metal.
Later, fire investigators determined that Styrofoam blocks and subpar mesh netting were the main culprits.
However, some of the discontent stems from the deep existential questions that the protests in 2019 raised about Hong Kong’s future, according to observers.
As a number of grievances began to surface, some of which date back to the city’s 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty, the protests erupted into a widespread antigovernment movement in 2019.
The issue ranged from whether Beijing was backing off with its commitments to the former British colony’s “high degree of autonomy” until 2047 under the “one country, two systems” agreement with China to how the local leader of Hong Kong would be chosen. Some people were concerned about the future of Hong Kong’s distinctive identity and culture.
By contrast, pro-government Hong Kongers and Chinese officials perceived the protests as a city ebbing into pieces, possibly with the support of the US government, who wanted to destabilize Hong Kong for their own reasons.
Hong Kong was temporarily at a standstill for months as a result of the protests, but as a result, COVID-19 containment laws started to become in effect in 2020. Beijing passed legislation that made it next to impossible for large-scale protests in the middle of 2020.
The government’s response in 2019 and 2025, according to Issie, the resident of Hong Kong.
These things wouldn’t have happened before, she said, “especially when it comes to people being critical of their policies, and even this time when people were trying to help.”
A Hong Kong government spokesman earlier this week claimed that “foreign forces, anti-China, and destabilizing forces” were using “seditious pamphlets” to “maliciously smear the rescue work, instigate social division and conflict to undermine the society’s unity” in a language that was strikingly reminiscent of its 2019 remarks.
According to China’s state-run Global Times newspaper, a “small number of external hostile forces” were attempting to “reverse the tragedy and “replica tactics from the anti-extradition bill unrest” in 2019 to obstruct rescue and recovery efforts.
According to local media reports, Hong Kong police have detained at least 15 people on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with the fire, and have also detained at least three others on suspicion of sedition and “attempting to incite discord” in response to the arrests.
According to local media, Miles Kwan, a university student, and former district councillor Kenneth Cheung, who was detained for leafleting, are among them.
The local government’s Executive Council member Ronny Tong claimed that there isn’t much information available about the sedition-related arrests, and that more evidence than criticism of the government would have helped to support the national security charges brought against them.
The law is the law, in our opinion, with a capital W. The police might err on the side of caution if someone violates the law at a sensitive time. The courts will be there to protect them if they overreacted, Ronny Tong said.
He claimed for Al Jazeera that it made sense for the government to reroute volunteers’ efforts to streamlined their work. The government provided a 100, 000 Hong Kong dollar ($12, 847) subsidy over the course of the past week, promising Wang Fuk Court residents would receive free housing until their homes were rebuilt.
Although only a small number of details have been made public, Hong Kong leader John Lee has also demanded an independent committee to look into the fire and review the building-work system in Hong Kong.
No government official had resigned as of Friday due to the deadly fire.