Qatar’s prime minister pledged to continue its efforts to stop Israel’s war on Gaza, ahead of an emergency international summit to discuss a joint response after the Israeli attack in the Qatari capital Doha.
Alphonce Felix Simbu snatched gold in the first photo finish at a major championship marathon on Monday, edging out German Amanal Petros in a dramatic race to the line to give Tanzania its maiden world title.
The photo finish showed the 42.195km race was decided by three hundredths of a second as Simbu surged past the diving Petros at the line, closer than the 0.05-second gap between the gold and silver medallists in the men’s 100m final on Sunday.
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Simbu and Petros were given the same time of two hours, nine minutes and 48 seconds, the German taking the silver despite heading the field as the leaders entered Tokyo’s National Stadium. Italian Iliass Aouani took the bronze in 2:09.53.
“When we entered the stadium, I was not sure if I would win,” the 33-year-old Simbu said. “I did not know if I had won. But when I saw the video screens and me on the top of the results, I felt relieved.
“I made history today – the first Tanzanian gold medal at a world championships.”
The finish was closer than at the 2001 championships in Edmonton, when Ethiopian Gezahegne Abera edged Kenyan Simon Biwott by a single second.
South African Josia Thugwane won the closest Olympic men’s marathon by three seconds from South Korean Lee Bong-ju at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
It was a first global title for Simbu, who won bronze in the marathon at the London world championships in 2017 and finished second in the Boston marathon in April.
Simbu struck back for East African distance running the morning after Frenchman Jimmy Gressier became the first man born outside the region to win the 10,000km title for more than 40 years.
The early morning event opened with another incident more reminiscent of sprints than endurance races when Vincent Kipkemoi Ngetich of Kenya jumped the gun, forcing a restart.
More shocks followed as two of the fastest runners in the field, Ethiopia’s Tadese Takele and Deresa Geleta, who took gold and silver at the Tokyo city marathon in March, dropped off with less than 10km to go.
The race was wide open for much of the distance, with a couple of dozen runners in the leading cluster some 90 minutes in.
The pack then gradually thinned out as some faded in the morning heat, leaving Simbu, Petros and Aouani clear of the field coming into the stadium.
Eritrean-born Petros looked set to take the title back to Europe until Simbu found a late kick and ran him down at the line.
“It’s like the 100 metres,” said Petros. “Coming into the finish I was thinking about winning so a bit of me is feeling very sad.
“But I have to accept it. As an athlete you have to learn for tomorrow, train hard, keep going and be thankful for the silver.”
The United States, South Korea and Japan have started joint air and naval drills that North Korea has condemned as a “dangerous idea”.
The manoeuvres, known as “Freedom Edge”, began off South Korea’s Jeju Island on Monday and will last until Friday.
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The US Indo-Pacific Command said the exercises, which will involve enhanced ballistic-missile and air-defence scenarios, would be “the most advanced demonstration of trilateral defence cooperation to date”.
Meanwhile, the South Korean Defence Ministry said it would improve the allies’ ability to counter growing nuclear and missile threats from North Korea, according to The Associated Press news agency.
There have been protests in Seoul on Monday against the military exercises.
In comments published by North Korean state media on Sunday, leader Kim Jong Un’s influential sister hit out at what she called South Korea, Japan and the US’s “reckless show of strength” in “the wrong places”.
Kim Yo Jong, who is vice department director of the North Korean governing party’s central committee, threatened that their joint military drills would “undoubtedly bring about negative consequences for themselves”.
Last week, her brother visited weapon research facilities, with Pyongyang saying it would accelerate the building of its conventional army as well as its nuclear programme.
The message was reiterated on Monday, when the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations declared that its position as a nuclear-weapons state was irreversible.
Pyongyang has repeatedly indicated that it is not interested in resuming nuclear negotiations with Seoul and Washington, after talks broke down during US President Donald Trump’s first term.
It has deepened its alliance with Moscow in recent years, sending thousands of troops to the Russian region of Kursk, where Ukraine seized territory in a surprise offensive in August 2024.
The isolated country also maintains ties with China, its largest trading partner. Earlier this month, the North Korean leader travelled to China, where he appeared beside Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an enormous military parade.
The governor of New York state, Kathy Hochul, has endorsed Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, a staunch pro-Palestinian advocate who has campaigned for a more equitable allocation of the city’s resources, for mayor ahead of a closely watched November election in the financial capital of the United States.
Writing in The New York Times, the state leader said on Sunday she made her decision after “frank conversations” with her fellow Democrat, who resoundingly won the support of the party’s voters in a primary election in May.
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“In our conversations, I heard a leader who shares my commitment to a New York where children can grow up safe in their neighbourhoods and where opportunity is within reach for every family,” Hochul wrote in the city-based newspaper.
“I heard a leader who is focused on making New York City affordable — a goal I enthusiastically support,” Hochul added.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old left-wing politician who has promised to make buses free and freeze rents for subsidised tenants, won 56.4 percent of votes among registered Democrats in the primary race, easily beating former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Yet Cuomo, a pro-Israel candidate who joined a team of lawyers defending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against war crimes allegations in Gaza, has taken the unusual move of choosing to stay in the race, reflecting a continued divide within the Democratic Party.
While recent polls suggest Mamdani has a 22-point lead among New York voters, some prominent New York Democrats have appeared hesitant to back him, including US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres, and, until recently, Hochul — though the governor had been more positive in comments about Mamdani than the others.
Speaking in Iowa on Saturday, Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen criticised his Democratic colleagues for failing to endorse Mamdani, accusing them of the “kind of spineless politics” that “people are sick of”.
“They need to get behind him, and get behind him now,” Van Hollen said.
Mamdani, who has campaigned alongside independent Senator Bernie Sanders and progressive Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal in recent days, has received fewer endorsements from centrist Democrats like Hochul, less than two months out from the November 4 general election.
Thanking the governor for her announcement on Sunday, Mamdani acknowledged Hochul’s “support in unifying our party” as well as her “focus on making New York affordable”.
He also praised “her resolve in standing up to Trump”.
Trump has also weighed in on the race, saying Mamdani being “up by 20” in a recent poll shows there is a “rebellion against bad candidates … they’re tired of it”.
“I’m not looking at the polls too carefully, but it would look like he is going to win, and that is a rebellion,” Trump told “Fox and Friends” on Fox News on Friday, describing Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as “my little communist mayor”.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Mamdani with 45 percent support among likely voters, and a comfortable 22-point lead over his closest rival, Cuomo, with 23 percent.
Repeat Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, who cofounded the Guardian Angels to combat “violence and crime” on the New York subway in the 1970s, is polling at 15 percent, according to the Quinnipiac poll, while embattled incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent candidate, has just 12 percent support.
Trump has dismissed Sliwa as a candidate, describing the Republican candidate known for his trademark red beret as “not exactly prime time”.
The Pitt, a television series centred on the trials and tribulations of American healthcare workers, has been awarded the prize for best drama at the Emmy Awards.
The HBO Max drama, set in a fictional emergency room in Pittsburgh, also took home the prizes for best leading actor and best supporting actress, for Noah Wyle and Katherine LaNasa, at the 77th edition of the awards show in Los Angeles on Sunday.
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Wyle, who portrays the grizzled and overworked emergency physician Michael Robinavitch in the series, paid tribute to healthcare workers in his acceptance speech.
“To anybody who is going on shift tonight, or coming off shift tonight, thank you for being in that job, this is for you,” Wyle said.
The Studio, a comedy about the head of a Hollywood studio trying to balance his artistic dreams with commercial realities, won 13 awards, the most on the night, including lead actor in a comedy for co-creator Seth Rogen.
“I so could not wrap my head around this happening that I literally prepared nothing,” Rogen said in his acceptance speech.
“I’ve never won anything in my life. When I was a kid, I bought a used bowling trophy at an estate sale. And my parents were like, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, you should probably buy that.’”
Adolescence, the Netflix hit about a 13-year-old boy radicalised by online misogyny, won eight awards, including best limited series.
Severance, the Apple TV+ sci-fi series about employees who have undergone a procedure to separate their work memories from their personal lives, took home the best actress in a drama series award for Britt Lower and the best supporting actor in a drama series award for Tramell Tillman, respectively.
The HBO Max dark comedy Hacks, about the fraught relationship between a legendary stand-up comedian and a younger comedy writer, won best actress in a comedy series for Jean Smart and best supporting actress in a comedy series for Hannah Einbinder.
In her acceptance speech, Einbinder called attention to Israel’s war in Gaza, declaring “free Palestine”.
Elaborating on her remarks backstage, Einbinder, who earlier this month signed a pledge not to work for Israeli companies implicated in the war, said the issue was close to her heart for many reasons.
“I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel, because our religion and our culture is such an important and longstanding … institution that is really separate to this sort of ethnonationalist state,” she said.
Earlier, Spanish actor Javier Bardem said in a red carpet interview with Variety that he could not work with any film studio that “justifies or supports the genocide” in Gaza.
