TOKYO (AP) — An 18-year-old army trainee shot three fellow soldiers at a firing range on a Japanese army base Wednesday, killing two of them, officials said.

The suspect was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder at the scene in Gifu prefecture in central Japan, police said.

The suspect fired a rifle at the soldiers during a shooting exercise at the Hino Kihon firing range, police said.

The Ground Self Defense Force, Japan’s army, confirmed that two of those wounded were later pronounced dead at a hospital.

CAIRO, Jun 14 (NNN-MENA) – Arab League Secretary-General, Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, warned yesterday, against the implementation of Israeli plans to build thousands of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

He stressed, such plans undermine the two-state solution by grabbing the lands of the future Palestinian state, according to a statement published on the website of the Arab League.

MOSCOW, June 14 (Reuters) - A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday there was no reason for Moscow not to destroy its enemies' undersea communication cables given what he said was Western complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline blasts.

A sharp drop in pressure on both gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea was registered on Sept. 26 last year and seismologists detected explosions, triggering a wave of speculation about sabotage to one of Russia's most important energy corridors.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 14 (APP): Urgent action is needed to end gender-based bias in public and political life against women which remain deeply entrenched around the world, Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on Wednesday.

“Patriarchy must be a thing of the past. Our future depends on women and girls being at the table everywhere when decisions are made,” he said.

MOSCOW, June 14. /TASS/: The extension of the grain deal is out of the question unless the package of agreements is enforced, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the 46th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), according to a statement released on the ministry’s website.

"I have to state again that any further extension is out of the question unless the Istanbul package [of agreements] is enforced as it was initiated by UN Secretary-General [Antonio Guterres], by July 17," he said.

13 June 2023; MEMO: Israel exported a record $12.556 billion in defence products last year, with new Arab partners under the US-sponsored 2020 Abraham Accords accounting for almost a quarter of the business, the Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.

BAGHDAD, Jun 14 (NNN-NINA) – Iraqi security forces have confiscated 155,000 narcotic pills, in Iraq’s western province of Anbar, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said, yesterday.

The ministry’s General Directorate of Narcotics Affairs, said in a statement that, the Iraqi security forces seized the Captagon pills, when they raided a farm of a drug dealer in Anbar province, who managed to flee the scene.

The statement did not give further details about the fugitive drug dealer, and when exactly the raid took place.

ISTANBUL (AP) — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in comments published Wednesday he remains firm on his unconventional approach to Turkey’s economy, but suggested his recently appointed finance minister will have leeway to move away from policies many have blamed for a worsening cost-of-living crisis.

14 June 2023; MEMO: Israeli occupation forces carried out "disproportionate air strikes," killing and injuring Palestinian civilians in Gaza last month, Amnesty concluded in a report published yesterday

SANAA, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Houthi militia in Yemen launched a drone attack on government forces in the southern province of Shabwa on Wednesday, wounding at least four soldiers, a local military source said.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Houthis used a bomb-laden drone to attack a military checkpoint near the complex of the 1st Brigade in the Al-Musina'a area in the southern part of Shabwa.

There were no immediate comments from the Houthi group, which rarely discloses its operations.

(AP) --- Some 110 million people have had to flee their homes because of conflict, persecution, or human rights violations, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says. The war in Sudan, which has displaced nearly 2 million people since April, is but the latest in a long list of crises that has led to the record-breaking figure.

“It’s quite an indictment on the state of our world,” Filippo Grandi, who leads the U.N. refugee agency, told reporters in Geneva ahead of the publication Wednesday of UNHCR’s Global Trends Report for 2022.

RIYADH, Jun 14 (NNN-SPA) – Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry, announced yesterday that, it would co-chair a high-level international conference on humanitarian response to the conflict in Sudan.

The conference will be held on Jun 19, jointly with Qatar, Egypt, Germany, the European Union, and the United Nations agencies.

The ministry reiterated Saudi Arabia’s unwavering support for the Sudanese people, said the report.