BRUSSELS: The European Union on Thursday urged Israel to reconsider its decision to demolish a Palestinian Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank, saying it undermines “prospects for a lasting peace.”

Amnesty International’s latest briefing report on the Rohingya crisis has managed to create a stir in an already riotous social media scene around Myanmar.

While the US officially transferred its embassy to Jerusalem, Israeli forces killed scores of demonstrators in Gaza

Jerusalemite activists have launched a hashtag on Twitter – #wearenothungry – as a rejection of Ramadan meals provided by the UAE for visitors to Al-Aqsa Mosque. They argue that the Gulf State is consorting with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, having sent a team to cyclists to participate in the international Giro d’Italia cycle race which passed through occupied Jerusalem on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba.

The Senate confirmed Gina Haspel on Thursday to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, elevating a woman to the directorship for the first time despite bipartisan misgivings about her role in the agency’s brutal detention and interrogation programs in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Ms. Haspel, the current deputy director and a career clandestine officer, takes the helm at a time of shifting alliances and intelligence threats from Iran to North Korea to Russia, and after President Trump tried to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s judgment as part of his broader attack on the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

But it was Ms. Haspel’s past that transfixed senators — if only for a few weeks — as they grappled anew with the aggressive interrogation policies of the George W. Bush administration in the years after the terrorist attacks. Ms. Haspel supervised a secret prison in Thailand in 2002 when a Qaeda suspect was waterboarded there, and senators raised fresh questions about her role in the agency’s destruction of videotapes of interrogation sessions in 2005.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans pressed Ms. Haspel to repudiate the program and sought assurances that torture would not be revisited under her watch. Ms. Haspel told senators during her confirmation hearing that her moral compass was strong and that she would not revisit such a program. And on Tuesday, under intense pressure, she went further, writing that the program “did damage to our officers and our standing in the world.”

Several Latin American and African nations abstain from vote after America threatened to cut aid programmes