WORLD

Europe's largest nuclear plant was knocked off Ukraine's electricity grid Monday after its last transmission line was disconnected as a result of a fire caused by Russian shelling, the facility's operator said. Russian forces have kept up "intensive shelling" of the area around Zaporizhzhia in recent days, Energoatom said in a statement. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN watchdog, said last Saturday that the plant had lost its last main line to the grid, but was still sending power to the grid through a reserve line. Officials at the IAEA, which still has two experts at the plant, and Energoatom weren't immediately available to explain the consequences of the line being cut.

The developments came a day before U.N. Inspectors were due to report on their efforts to avert a potential disaster at the Ukrainian site that has been engulfed by Russia's war. The Russian military had earlier Monday accused Ukrainian forces of staging "provocations" at the plant, which lies within a Russian-installed administrative area.

Support for Liz Truss is dwindling among British voters even before her anticipated appointment as the prime minister of Britain.

Opinions vary among Britons on whether she’ll be a better leader than her predecessor, Boris Johnson. Most believe she would be worse than other leaders dating back to Margaret Thatcher.

When the citizens were asked if the current foreign secretary was competent, the fall was largely comparable.

More than a third of Pakistan is now underwater due to what the United Nations chief called “monsoon on steroids”. The flood-ravaged country has received ten times heavier rainfall than usual since mid-June. The satellite images shared by the European Space Agency show the extent of the flood that has claimed more than 1,100 lives and affected over 33 million people in Pakistan. Houses, agricultural lands, and infrastructure have been washed away in one of the worst floods in the country’s history.

An overflowing Indus River has effectively created a long lake, tens of kilometres wide, according to satellite images. The blue to black colours in the image shared by ESA after mapping the data captured from space by Copernicus Sentinel-1 show where the land is submerged.

The Suez Canal was once again in the news on Wednesday as a 250-meter-long tank called Affinity V got stuck in the narrow southern section. It was around the same place where the container ship called Ever Given was stuck in 2021 causing massive problems for the supply chain moving through the region. 

Affinity V, a crude oil tanker which was bound for Saudi Arabia from Portugal, was stuck for around 4-5 hours before it was finally able to move forward. According to the Suez Canal Authority, the vessel was refloated with the help of tugboats and the busy route was back to normal in the next couple of hours. 

“Affinity ran aground at around 7.15 pm local time on Wednesday, and was refloated five hours later,”, George Safwat, a spokesman for Suez Canal Authority, told Egyptian government-affiliated Extra News.

China's discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in the western region of Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity, the UN human rights office has said in a long-awaited report. The report released Wednesday calls for an urgent international response over allegations of torture and other rights violations in Beijing's campaign to root out terrorism. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet brushed aside China's calls for the office to withhold the report, which follows her own trip to Xinjiang in May and which Beijing's contends is part of a Western campaign to smear China's reputation.

The report has fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region's native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups. The report, which Western diplomats and UN officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet's four-year term. It was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years.