The 6-meter-high “unsurvivable” wall of water Hurricane Laura was forecast to send onto the Louisiana coast showed up despite widespread reports of a lower peak, authorities said on Friday, rejecting criticism that they had raised too much alarm.
The highest surge hit about 24 kilometers east of where Laura was forecast to make landfall but it [...]

Chadwick Boseman, the star of the ground-breaking superhero movie “Black Panther,” has died from colon cancer, his publicist told AFP on Friday.
Boseman, who was in his 40s, had not publicly discussed his condition — which was first diagnosed in 2016 — and continued to work on major Hollywood films.
“It was the honor of his career [...]

Evacuation orders have been lifted for tens of thousands of people in the Western U.S. state of California as firefighters continue to make progress in bringing wildfires across the state under control.
Officials with the state fire agency, Cal Fire, said Friday that in the past two days at least 50,000 people were allowed return home [...]

College athletes across the country added their voices to those calling for an end to racial injustice Friday with football players and others marching on campus or stepping away from practices to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin.
In Oklahoma, the Sooners football team walked in rows of three to the Unity Garden, [...]

As Afghanistan’s warring sides prepare to hold long-awaited negotiations next week to establish peace, Pakistan is trying to push the Taliban to come to the table in a move that experts say is an attempt by Islamabad to increase its influence in postwar Afghanistan and counter its rival India.
Pakistan, however, claims that it is only [...]

Supporters of new Kassala state Governor Saleh Ammar allegedly shot and killed four protesters and injured six others Thursday in eastern Sudan’s Kassala town, according to eyewitnesses. One of the six injured succumbed to his injuries at a nearby hospital Friday, witnesses said.
The protesters say Ammar is unqualified for the job and are calling on [...]

The U.N. Security Council on Friday unanimously renewed its peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon for another year, as tensions rise between Lebanon and Israel.
“This renewal of UNIFIL was absolutely indispensable and essential for the security of Lebanon, Israel and the whole region,” said France’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Anne Gueguen, using an acronym for the U.N. [...]

A Twitter hashtag that surfaced in April as a clapback against Chinese nationalist attacks on a Thai celebrity for a perceived insult to Beijing is growing into a pan-Asian political movement.
Named after drinks associated with places struggling against increasingly authoritarian impulses — Hong Kong’s milky black tea, Taiwan’s bubble tea and Thailand’s iced tea — [...]

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is still in an induced coma from a suspected poisoning but his condition is stable and his symptoms are improving, the German doctors treating him said Friday. 
Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator  who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow [...]

Irina Tsukerman The Israel-UAE peace deal was an unpleasant surprise to the Moroccan diplomatic and intelligence community as it foiled
The post Morocco’s diplomatic eclipse and UAE-Israel peace deal appeared first on Blitz.
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Source: Weekly Blitz :: Writings