Nigeria, West Bank, Brazil
Today's three stories you should know
Nigeria
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has postponed a trip to the G20 summit in South Africa after promising to step up the hunt for 24 girls kidnapped from a school by armed men earlier this week. The gunmen stormed a boarding school in a northwestern region, engaging police officers in a firefight, scaling a security fence and killing the school’s vice principal. Northwestern Nigeria has been plagued for years by criminal gangs, known locally as bandits, kidnapping people, often students, for ransom. Tinubu has faced significant pressure to address the situation but the government has so far failed to get it under control.
More from Al Jazeera here.
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West Bank
Israel’s expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from three refugee camps in the occupied West Bank in early 2025 was a war crime, rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, calling for the officials responsible to be prosecuted. HRW said in a new report that 32,000 residents of the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps were forcibly displaced and have not been allowed to return. The rights group added that hundreds of homes have been demolished, describing the expulsions as ethnic cleansing. The Israeli government told Reuters it had to demolish civilian infrastructure so that it could not be used by armed groups.
More from Reuters here.
Brazil
Criminal gangs are expanding their presence in the Brazilian Amazon and now operate in almost half of the region’s municipalities, according to a new report. The presence of the gangs—who engage in drug trafficking, illegal logging and mining, and extortion—has led to a massive uptick in violence and threatens efforts to preserve the world’s largest tropical rainforest and fight climate change, the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety said. The COP30 international climate conference is currently taking place in Brazil, next to the rainforest, and part of its focus has been on how to protect the Amazon and combat deforestation.
More from the Independent here.