Gambian lawmakers have blocked an attempt to re-legalize female genital cutting after months of debate. The practice remains common in the West African country, despite the upheld ban.

Gambian lawmakers on Monday upheld a 2015 ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), despite pressure from religious traditionalists in the West African country.

Lawmakers rejected a controversial bill, introduced earlier in 2024, that sought to enshrine "female circumcision" as a religious and cultural practice.

Following months of heated debate, legislators ended the bill's chances by rejecting all its clauses and blocking any further vote.

Projected results from the election commission after polls closed in Rwanda put incumbent Paul Kagame on 99.15%. Turnout was said to be 98%. Only two opposition candidates with no real profile were allowed to run.

More than 9 million Rwandans were called to vote for a new president on Monday, and according to official results, more than 99% of them supported the incumbent Paul Kagame for a fourth term.

Soon after polls closed on Monday evening, the election commission said that Kagame had won 99.15% of the votes. 

It also put turnout at a staggeringly high 98%. By comparison, even in those few countries where citizens are legally obliged to vote or face a fine, such as Australia, turnout only ever tends to be between 90 and 95%.

Republicans are seeking to capitalize on Trump’s assassination attempt — using it to demand everyone stop talking about his threats to democracy

As Donald Trump recovers from an assassination attempt and Republicans head to Milwaukee for his coronation this week, the GOP elite has rallied around a new messaging strategy: emotionally blackmailing Democratic politicians, journalists, Hollywood celebs, and numerous other Trump critics into shutting up about the former president’s openly authoritarian vows and his extreme policy agenda.

Since the deadly shooting at a Pennsylvania rally Saturday, prominent conservatives have been working to blame the incident on Trump’s enemies for labeling him a “fascist” and for fanning heated “rhetoric” that, in their telling, caused the would-be assassin to shoot at the former and perhaps future American president. “When the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the Republic would end, it heats up the environment,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) saidSunday, adding: “It’s simply not true. Everyone needs to turn the rhetoric down.”

Two sources told NBC News that the Secret Service flagged a building near the rally site as a security concern. Investigators will be scrutinizing how a gunman was allowed to scale it.

The rooftop where a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally was identified by the Secret Service as a potential vulnerability in the days before the event, two sources familiar with the agency’s operations told NBC News.

The building, owned by a glass research company, is adjacent to the Butler Farm Show, an outdoor venue in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service was aware of the risks associated with it, the sources said.

“Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,” said one of the sources, a former senior Secret Service agent who was familiar with the planning.

A city in northern Germany has become the first to issue an all-out ban on the use of a hand gesture used to encourage silence in the classroom because of its close resemblance to a far-right Turkish gesture.

The “silent fox” gesture – where the hand is posed to resemble an animal with upright ears (the little and forefinger) and a closed mouth (the middle fingers pressed against the thumb) – has long been seen as a useful teaching tool by educators in Germany and elsewhere. It signals to children that they should stop talking and listen to their teacher.

But authorities in the port city of Bremen say the symbol is “in danger of being mistaken” for the right-wing extremist “wolf salute”, from which it is indistinguishable.

Bankir and his men have been trying to fight off Russian attacks along the Ukrainian front lines for more than two years. But it’s only now that they are finally able to strike where it hurts: Inside Russia’s own territory.

The newly granted permission by the United States and other allies to use Western weapons to strike inside Russia has had a huge impact, Bankir said. “We have destroyed targets inside Russia, which allowed for several successful counteroffensives. The Russian military can no longer feel impunity and security,” the senior officer in Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) told CNN. For security reasons, he asked to be identified by his call sign only.

A subclass of PFAS has been found near manufacturing plants and landfills, and in remote regions of the world

Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” used in lithium ion batteries essential to the clean energy transition present a dangerous source of chemical pollution that new research finds threatens the environment and human health as the nascent industry scales up.

The multipronged, peer-reviewed study zeroed in on a little-researched and unregulated subclass of PFAS called bis-FASI that are used in lithium ion batteries.

Researchers found alarming levels of the chemicals in the environment near manufacturing plants, noted their presence in remote areas around the world, found they appear to be toxic to living organisms, and discovered that waste from batteries disposed of in landfills was a major pollution source.

Over 245 million Americans are expected to experience 90F temperatures early this week, with some as high as 105F

A heatwave that impacted the US west coast over the past week is now moving east into the midwest and south-east, as millions of Americans have been under a heat alert at some point in the past week.

“Numerous near record-tying/breaking high temperatures are possible over the central High Plains and Southeast Sunday, and along much of the East Coast by Monday,” reported the National Weather Service.

Cities on the east coast such as Baltimore and Washington DC will experience temperatures up to 100F (38C) this Tuesday. Temperatures in the west are expected to fall to typical summer averages.

Hope for new treatments after researchers find spread of disease is aided by shutting down of molecules in key genes

Scientists have made a crucial DNA discovery that could help cure one of the deadliest cancers.

A team of researchers from the UK and US have found that pancreatic cancer is able to shut down molecules in one of the body’s most important genes, helping the disease to grow and spread rapidly.

Pancreatic cancer is the 12th most common cancer worldwide, with more than half a million people diagnosed every year. It has the worst survival rates of all the most common forms of the disease.

When two young Brazilian women were reported missing in September 2022, their families and the FBI launched a desperate search across the US to find them. All they knew was that they were living with wellness influencer Kat Torres.

Torres has now been sentenced to eight years in prison for the human trafficking and slavery of one of those women. The BBC has also been told that charges have been filed against her in relation to a second woman.

Mutilated and dismembered bodies were found in plastic bags at a dump site in the Mukuru slums of southern Nairobi. Preliminary investigations revealed that all the bodies were female.

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Mutilated and dismembered bodies were founded in plastic bags at a garbage dump in the Mukuru slums of southern Nairobi.

Six bodies were found on Friday and additional body parts were found on Saturday, acting national police chief Douglas Kanja said at a press conference. Eight bodies were found in total.

Preliminary investigations revealed that all the bodies were female.

Increasingly exasperated by Viktor Orbán’s obstruction of EU foreign policy, Brussels is contemplating an unprecedented step to boycott Hungary’s foreign affairs summit next month.

European Union foreign affairs ministers are set to snub Hungary by organizing their own foreign affairs summit in August instead of traveling to Budapest for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s event.

Hungary, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, plans to host a foreign affairs summit in Budapest on August 28-29 — a prime opportunity for Orbán to try to shape the bloc’s foreign policy agenda and for his Foreign Affairs Minister Péter Szijjártó to stand in the limelight.

But after Orbán obstructed aid for Ukraine and his self-styled peace visits to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, which he didn’t coordinate with the EU’s 26 other national leaders, many foreign ministers have been hunting for a way to avoid becoming props in what they believe would be another Orbán propaganda show.