Search and rescue operations were continuing in the Moroccan town of Safi after flash floods killed at least 37 people.
Drought-hit Morocco often experiences severe weather, but Sunday’s flooding in the coastal town is the deadliest such disaster in at least a decade.
A muddy torrent swept cars and bins from the streets of Safi, which lies roughly 300km (190 miles) south of the capital, Rabat.
The General Directorate of Meteorology (DGM), Morocco’s national weather forecaster, has warned that further thunderstorms are likely over the next three days in several regions, including Safi.
Survivors are still receiving treatment at the town’s Mohammed V Hospital, with two remaining in intensive care, according to local officials.
Schools have been closed as mud and debris continue to clog the streets.
Safi is known as a centre for arts and crafts, particularly terracotta pottery, and its streets were left strewn with shattered bowls and tajines.
The Moroccan prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to determine whether anyone bears responsibility for the scale of the damage, according to the official news agency MAP.
Addressing parliament, Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch said: “Thirty-seven millimetres (1.5 inches) of rain fell in a short period, hitting the historic Bab Chabaa district of Safi, which is crossed by a river, and causing the deaths of numerous merchants and workers.”
As the waters receded, a landscape of mud and overturned cars was revealed. Civil Protection units and residents soon started clearing the debris.
Morocco is enduring its seventh consecutive year of severe drought, and last year was the North African kingdom’s hottest on record.
The Australian police say the two men accused of carrying out a deadly shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach that killed 15 people were “inspired” by the ISIL (ISIS) group.
Police also confirmed on Tuesday that they were investigating a trip the two suspects undertook to the Philippines last month.
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“Early indications point to a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State, allegedly committed by a father and son,” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said at a news conference.
“These are the alleged actions of those who have aligned themselves with a terrorist organisation, not a religion,” Barrett said, referring to ISIL.
One of the alleged attackers, identified by police as 50-year-old Sajid Akram, was shot dead by police officers. His 24-year-old son, believed to have acted alongside him and named by local media as Naveed Akram, was also shot and remains in critical condition in hospital.
Investigators say the father-son duo opened fire on hundreds of people gathered at the beachside festival, carrying out the attack that lasted about 10 minutes at one of Australia’s most popular tourist locations.
Wayne Hay, reporting for Al Jazeera from Bondi Beach, said police confirmed that “two Islamic State flags – homemade flags – were found in the gunmen’s vehicle along with an improvised explosive device”.
“They also spoke about this trip that the pair had taken to the Philippines. A lot of speculation about that over the past 24 hours or so. They confirmed that they did go to the Philippines recently, but they are not clear yet as to the motive for that trip,” Hay said.
“That will, of course, form part of any ongoing investigation as to why they made that trip,” he said.
Mourners gather at the Bondi Pavilion in memory of the victims of the shooting at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, December 15, 2025 [Saeed Khan/AFP]
New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters that the reason for the visit and where they visited in the Philippines “is under investigation at the moment”.
The Philippine police said they are also investigating the matter.
ISIL-linked armed groups are known to operate in parts of the Philippines, particularly in the country’s south. While those groups have been significantly weakened in recent years, they continue to exist as smaller cells on the southern island of Mindanao.
Their strength is far removed from the influence they once exerted, particularly during the 2017 siege of Marawi, when ISIL fighters laid siege to the city, prompting months of heavy combat with government forces that killed more than 1,000 people.
The United States has said it killed eight people in new attacks on vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean, days after the US military seized a Venezuelan oil tanker amid Washington’s continuing military buildup in Latin America.
In a post on social media, the US Military Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said that “lethal kinetic strikes” targeted three vessels in international waters on Monday, at the direction of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
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Eight people were killed in total, SOUTHCOM said in a statement.
“Three in the first vessel, two in the second and three in the third,” it said, while claiming without providing any evidence that those killed were linked to drug trafficking.
At least 90 people have been killed in similar US attacks on dozens of vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela since September, in what international law experts have criticised as extrajudicial killings by the US military.
On Dec. 15, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters. Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/IQfCVvUpau
US lawmakers have questioned Hegseth over his role in the attacks, including whether he personally ordered a second strike on a boat targeting two people who had survived a first attack and were left clinging to the debris in September.
The Pentagon has also deployed warships, a submarine, drones and fighter jets to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, in what it claims are efforts to tackle drug smuggling in the region.
Venezuela said the attacks and US military buildup were aimed at allowing “external powers to rob Venezuela’s immeasurable oil and gas wealth“, even before US forces seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, with US President Donald Trump telling reporters, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”
US military to use Trinidad airports, on Venezuela’s doorstep
The latest attacks on vessels in Latin American waters come as the US continues to build up its considerable military presence in the region surrounding Venezuela, with Trinidad and Tobago saying on Monday that it had authorised US military aircraft to use its airports.
Trinidad and Tobago said it had given the green light for the US military to use its airports “in the coming weeks”, adding that Washington would use them for “logistical” operations, including “facilitating supply replenishment and routine personnel rotations”.
The Caribbean island nation, which is located only 12km (7.4 miles) from Venezuela at its closest point, has been supportive of the US military buildup in the region, in contrast to some other Central and South American leaders.
Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has said she would rather see drug traffickers “blown to pieces” than have them kill citizens of her nation.
In response, Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro again said that his country would stop supplying gas to Trinidad and Tobago on Monday, according to the Venezuelan state television channel Telesur.
New Delhi, India – A newly released Bollywood spy thriller is winning praise and raising eyebrows in equal measure in India and Pakistan, over its retelling of bitter tensions between the South Asian neighbours.
Sunk in a sepia tone, Dhurandhar, which was released in cinemas last week, is a 3.5-hour-long cross-border political spy drama that takes cinemagoers on a violent and bloody journey through a world of gangsters and intelligence agents set against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions. It comes just months after hostilities broke out between the two countries in May, following a rebel attack on a popular tourist spot in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which India blamed Pakistan for. Islamabad has denied role in the attack.
Since the partition of India to create Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought four wars, three of them over the disputed region of Kashmir.
The film stars the popular actor Ranveer Singh, who plays an Indian spy who infiltrates networks of “gangsters and terrorists” in Karachi, Pakistan. Critics of the film argue that its storyline is laced with ultra-nationalist political tropes and that it misrepresents history, an emerging trend in Bollywood, they say.
A still from the trailer of Dhurandhar [Jio Studios/Al Jazeera]
What is the latest Bollywood blockbuster about?
Directed by Aditya Dhar, the film dramatises a covert chapter from the annals of Indian intelligence. The narrative centres on a high-stakes, cross-border mission carried out by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and focuses on one operative who conducts operations on enemy soil to neutralise threats to Indian national security.
The film features a heavyweight ensemble cast led by Singh, who plays the gritty field agent tasked with dismantling a “terror” network from the inside. He is pitted against a formidable antagonist played by Sanjay Dutt, representing the Pakistani establishment, and gangsters such as one portrayed by Akshaye Khanna, while actors including R Madhavan portray key intelligence officers and strategists who orchestrate complex geopolitical manoeuvering from New Delhi.
Structurally, the screenplay follows a classic cat-and-mouse trajectory.
Beneath its high-octane set pieces, the film has sparked an angry debate among critics and audiences over the interpretation of historical events and some key figures.
A scene shown in the trailer of the new Bollywood film, Dhurandhar [Jio Studios/Al Jazeera]
Why is the film so controversial in Pakistan?
Despite the longstanding geopolitical tensions between the two countries, India’s Bollywood films remain popular in Pakistan.
Depicting Pakistan as the ultimate enemy of India has been a popular theme retold for years, in different ways, especially in Bollywood’s spy thrillers, however. In this case, the portrayal of Pakistan’s major coastal city, Karachi, and particularly one of its oldest and most densely populated neighbourhoods, Lyari, has drawn strong criticism.
“The representation in the film is completely based on fantasy. It doesn’t look like Karachi. It does not represent the city accurately at all,” Nida Kirmani, an associate professor of sociology at Lahore University of Management Sciences, told Al Jazeera.
Kirmani, who has produced a documentary on the impact of gang violence in Lyari of her own, said that like other megacities in the world, “Karachi had periods of violence that have been particularly intense.”
However, “reducing the city to violence is one of the major problems in the film, along with the fact the film gets everything about Karachi – from its infrastructure, culture, and language – wrong”, she added.
Meanwhile, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has taken legal action in a Karachi court alleging the unauthorised use of images of the late former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, and protesting against the film’s portrayal of the party’s leaders as supporters of “terrorists”.
Critics, including Kirmani, say the film also bizarrely casts gangs from Lyari into geopolitical tensions with India, when they have only ever operated locally.
Kirmani said the makers of the movie have cherry-picked historical figures and used them completely out of context, “trying to frame them within this very Indian nationalistic narrative”.
Mayank Shekhar, a film critic based in Mumbai, pointed out that the film “has been performed, written, directed by those who haven’t ever stepped foot in Karachi, and perhaps never will”.
“So, never mind this dust bowl for a city that, by and large, seems wholly bereft of a single modern building, and looks mostly bombed-out, between multiple ghettos,” Shekhar said.
He added that this is also in line with how Hollywood “shows the brown Third World in action with a certain sepia tone, like with Extraction, set in Dhaka, Bangladesh”.
Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh (centre) performs during the music launch of his upcoming Indian Hindi-language film Dhurandhar in Mumbai on December 1, 2025 [Sujit Jaiswal/AFP]
How has the film been received in India?
Dhurandhar has been a huge commercial success in India and among the Indian diaspora. However, it has not escaped criticism entirely.
The family of a decorated Indian Army officer, Major Mohit Sharma, filed a petition in Delhi High Court to stop the release of the film, which, they claim, has exploited his life and work without their consent.
The makers of the film deny this and claim it is entirely a work of fiction.
Nonetheless, the film’s storyline is accompanied by real-time intercepted audio recordings of attacks on Indian soil and news footage, film critics and analysts say.
People linger outside a movie theatre that is screening The Kashmir Files, in Kolkata, India, on March 17, 2022 [Debarchan Chatterjee/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
Is this an emerging pattern in Bollywood films?
Shekhar told Al Jazeera that focusing on a deliberately loud, seemingly over-the-top, hyper-masculine hero’s journey is not a new genre in Bollywood. “There’s a tendency to intellectualise the trend, as we did with the ‘angry young man’ movies of the 1970s,” he said, referring to the formative years of Bollywood.
In recent years, mainstream production houses in India have, however, favoured storylines that portray minorities in negative light and align with the policies of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kirmani told Al Jazeera that this frequently means “reducing Muslims across India’s borders and within as ‘terrorists’, which further marginalises Muslims in India culturally”.
“Unfortunately, people gravitate towards these kinds of hypernationalistic narratives, and the director is cashing in on this,” she told Al Jazeera.
Modi himself lavished praise on a recent film called Article 370, for what he said was its “correct information” about the removal of the constitutional provision that granted special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. Critics, however, called the film “propaganda” and said the film had distorted facts.
Another Bollywood film Kerala Story released in 2023 was accused of falsifying facts. Prime Minister Modi praised the film, but critics said it tried to vilify Muslims and demonise the southern Kerala state known for its progressive politics.
In the case of Dhurandhar, some critics have faced online harassment.
One review by The Hollywood Reporter’s India YouTube channel, by critic Anupama Chopra, was taken down after outrage from fans of the film.
Went looking for Anupama Chopra’s Dhurandhar review? It’s gone. The Hollywood Reporter India quietly made the video private.
For context, The Hollywood Reporter India was launched by RPSG Lifestyle Media, part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, which also owns Saregama –…
India’s Film Critics Guild has condemned “coordinated abuse, personal attacks on individual critics, and organised attempts to discredit their professional integrity”, in a statement.
United States President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit seeking at least $10bn from the BBC over a documentary that edited his speech to supporters before the US Capitol riot in 2021.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Miami on Monday, seeks “damages in an amount not less than $5,000,000,000” for each of two counts against the United Kingdom broadcaster for alleged defamation and violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
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Earlier in the day, Trump confirmed his plans to file the lawsuit.
“I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally… I guess they used AI or something,” he told reporters at the White House.
“That’s called fake news .”
President Trump: “I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally…I guess they used AI or something…they actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with January 6th that I didn’t say.” pic.twitter.com/cUwXqBq3Zd
Trump has accused the UK publicly-owned broadcaster of defaming him by splicing together parts of a January 6, 2021, speech, including one section where he told supporters to march on the Capitol, and another where he said, “Fight like hell”.
The edited sections of his speech omitted words in which Trump also called for peaceful protest.
Trump’s lawsuit alleges that the BBC defamed him, and his lawyers say the documentary caused him overwhelming reputational and financial harm.
The BBC has already apologised to Trump, admitted an error of judgement and acknowledged that the edit gave the mistaken impression that he had made a direct call for violent action.
The broadcaster also said that there was no legal basis for the lawsuit, and that to overcome the US Constitution’s strong legal protections for free speech and the press, Trump will need to prove in court not only that the edit was false and defamatory, but also that the BBC knowingly misled viewers or acted recklessly.
The broadcaster could argue that the documentary was substantially true and its editing decisions did not create a false impression, legal experts said. It could also claim the programme did not damage Trump’s reputation.
Rioters attack the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to disrupt the certification of Electoral College votes and the election victory of President Joe Biden [File: John Minchillo/AP Photo]
Trump, in his lawsuit, said that the BBC, despite its apology, “has made no showing of actual remorse for its wrongdoing nor meaningful institutional changes to prevent future journalistic abuses”.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the BBC had “a long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in service of its own leftist political agenda”.
The BBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the lawsuit was filed on Monday.
The dispute over the edited speech, featured on the BBC’s Panorama documentary show shortly before the 2024 presidential election, prompted a public relations crisis for the broadcaster, leading to the resignations of its two most senior officials.
Other media organisations have settled with Trump, including CBS and ABC, when Trump sued them following his comeback win in the November 2024 election.
