WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans are heading to the House Tuesday for the second time this Congress to try and elect a speaker, marking what they hope will be a unifying moment for a party that has been in turmoil for weeks.

GOP lawmakers are expected to rally their votes behind Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to be the next speaker despite reluctance from some who are wary of his hardline approach. Conservatives have been mounting an intense pressure campaign to persuade the final holdouts to support him.

17 October 2023; MEMO: On Saturday a popular shopping mall in Malaysia was evacuated in response to a bomb threat made by an anonymous caller, reportedly to sway the government’s longstanding stance on supporting Palestine.

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — The U.S. worked to break a deadlock over delivering aid to millions of increasingly desperate civilians in the Gaza Strip, which has been besieged and under assault by Israel since a brutal attack by Hamas militants, as U.S. President Joe Biden prepared to head to the region.

Israeli airstrikes continued to pound Gaza early Tuesday, killing dozens of people in the besieged enclave’s south, where Israel told civilians from the north to seek shelter ahead of an expected ground offensive.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Three opposition parties that vowed to restore democratic standards in Poland together won over 54% of the votes in the nation’s weekend parliamentary election, putting them in a position to take power, according to a complete ballot count reported Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is appealing the length of prison sentences for four Proud Boys leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy in the U.S. Capitol attack, challenging punishments that were significantly shorter than what prosecutors had recommended, according to court filings on Monday.

ROME, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Two people were arrested on terrorism charges in the northern Italian city of Milan on Tuesday. One of them is an Egyptian national and the other an Italian citizen of Egyptian origin, the Italian authorities said.

The two are charged with participating in a conspiracy to promote terrorism and with incitement to commit terrorism. Both were spotted for their activities on social media chat groups related to Islamic terrorism, the Interior Ministry said.

16 October 2023; MEMO: Turkiye stands with Egypt in rejecting the exile of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in the face of Israel’s war with the Hamas group, Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, said alongside his counterpart in Cairo on Saturday, Reuters report.

According to the report, Fidan said it is important to act to stop the conflict from spreading and to re-start peace talks centred on achieving a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.

16 October 2023; MEMO: Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons are being denied medical care, resulting in sick prisoners being left without access to clinics or hospitals.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Police in Belgium on Tuesday shot dead a suspected Tunisian extremist accused of killing two Swedish soccer fans in a brazen shooting on a Brussels street before disappearing into the night.

Hours after a manhunt began in the Belgian capital, Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “the perpetrator of the terrorist attack in Brussels has been identified and has died.”

DENVER (AP) — Colorado’s highest court on Monday upheld the search of Google users’ keyword history to identify suspects in a 2020 fatal arson fire, an approach that critics have called a digital dragnet that threatens to undermine people’s privacy and their constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

However the Colorado Supreme Court cautioned it was not making a “broad proclamation” on the constitutionality of such warrants and emphasized it was ruling on the facts of just this one case.

16 October 2023; MEMO: The Palestinian Ministry of Health in the besieged Gaza Strip has called for countries around the world to send volunteer medical teams to the Palestinian enclave as a matter of urgency to relieve its exhausted medical staff, Anadolu has reported. The appeal has been made nine days after Israel began its ruthless, non-stop bombardment of the territory.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s political fundraising machine is raking in donations at a prodigious pace, but he’s spending tens of millions of dollars he’s bringing in to pay attorneys to deal with the escalating costs of the various criminal cases he is contending with as he moves further into the 2024 presidential campaign.