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World in brief: December 22, 2024

MIDDLE EAST: Two US navy pilots were shot down today over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said.

Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their aircraft, with one suffering minor injuries.

“The guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, which is part of the USS Harry S Truman carrier strike group, mistakenly fired on and hit the F/A-18,” the US military said.

On Saturday night and early today, US warplanes conducted air strikes on Yemen’s capital Sana’a.

SPACE: On Tuesday, a Nasa spacecraft will fly closer to the sun than any man-made object sent before.

The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is set to hurtle through the sizzling solar atmosphere and pass within a record-breaking 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface.

Mission managers won’t know how Parker fared until days after the flyby since the spacecraft will be out of communication range.

Scientists hope to better understand why the sun’s corona is hundreds of times hotter than the its surface and what drives the solar wind.

 

MAYOTTE: Crowds vented their frustration at French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday as he toured the destruction wrought by the strongest cyclone to hit the French territory in nearly a century.

Mr Macron visited Tsingoni on Mayotte’s main island, where people remain without access to drinking water or phone service nearly a week after the storm.

As he walked through the area, some shouted: “We want water, we want water.” And the night before, he was met with boos from dozens of residents in Pamandzi on another nearby island.

 

ALBANIA: The government plans to shut down TikTok for one year, following the stabbing of a teenager in mid-November by another teen after a quarrel that started on the app.

Prime Minister Edi Rama said TikTok “would be fully closed for all” sometime next year.

TikTok said it has “found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have in fact confirmed videos leading up to this incident were being posted on another platform, not TikTok.”

 

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