At least 169 people were killed after Colombia was hit by one of its largest earthquakes in years. The magnitude 7.4 quake struck at a depth of 103km (64 miles) in Chocó province, the country's geological service said. It was felt across an enormous area, stretching for hundreds of miles across western Colombia. Many of the deaths have been concentrated in Cali, Colombia's third most populous city.
At least 900 people were injured in the quakes, Colombia's Association of Capital Cities (Asocapitales) wrote in an update on Tuesday. The epicentre of the quake was near the village of San José del Palmar, in Chocó province, but local mayor León Fabio Marín Moncada said that there had miraculously been no deaths or injuries - despite the roads in and out being damaged. According to Asocapitales, most of the fatalities were in cities. Cali, located about 200km from the epicentre, was the worst affected with 85 dead.
More than 70,000 Canadians have signed a petition calling for the US ambassador in Ottawa to be expelled for undermining diplomatic relations between the two neighbours. The online petition accuses Pete Hoekstra of "making repeated interventions in Canadian political discourse" and of having "normalised the Trump administration's threats to annex Canada as the '51st state'" of the US. In a statement to the BBC, the US embassy said it was aware of the petition but declined to comment further.
Canada and the US are currently engaged in an intense period of trade talks, aiming to reach an agreement before new US tariffs take effect next Wednesday. The petition, launched by a woman in Calgary, also raises concerns about meetings in Washington between the US state department officials and some Albertans who want the province to separate from Canada. It requests Ambassador Hoekstra be formally removed from his role, and a parliamentary committee review "US diplomatic interference in Canadian domestic affairs".
Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi criticised Vladimir Putin's first-ever visit to the disputed Kuril islands on Thursday as "absolutely unacceptable". Russian state media reported that Putin visited Iturup, known in Japan as Etorofu, one of four islands in the Kuril chain that are claimed by Russia and Japan. Putin's trip "has worsened Japanese sentiment towards Russia," Takaichi told reporters, maintaining the island chain was "a unique territory of [Japan] historically and under international law".
The countries have been locked in a dispute over the Kurils for decades, and it is the main reason Moscow and Tokyo did not sign a peace treaty after World War Two. The Kuril islands sit between Hokkaido in northern Japan and Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Four of the southernmost islands are claimed by Japan, which calls them the Northern Territories.
They are administered by Russia. At the end of World War Two, the Soviet Union annexed the island chain and deported around 17,000 Japanese residents.
The current outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo is on track to surpass the deadliest outbreak of the disease ever, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that the 2026 outbreak, "at its current pace", would "eclipse" that of the 2014-2016 occurrence, which killed at least 11,000 people. The outbreak this year, declared on 15 May, has seen at least 4,300 cases and caused more than 2,000 deaths.
The WHO said on Wednesday it hoped to reverse the spread of the disease within three months but warned that this meant bringing transmission under control - not ending the outbreak entirely. The epidemic was only officially declared in May, but it is believed the outbreak began at least three months before then, health officials said this week. "We are chasing the virus, the virus is ahead of us," WHO Africa director Dr Mohamed Janabi said at a news conference in the city of Bunia, near the centre of the outbreak.
