Israeli aircraft bombed several militants' sites in Gaza early Sunday, hours after three rockets were fired from the Palestinian enclave toward southern Israel.
The military said in a statement the airstrikes targeted military camps and a naval base for Hamas, the Islamic militant group controlling Gaza. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
On Saturday evening, Israel announced that its air defenses, known as "Iron Dome," intercepted two of three missiles coming from Gaza. Later, it said all three rockets had been shot down.
No Palestinian group claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. The Israeli army said Hamas was responsible for any attack transpiring in Gaza.
Cross-border violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has ebbed and flowed in recent years. Last month, the two sides fought their worst round of violence in months.
Leaders from Hamas and the smaller but more radical Islamic Jihad are in Cairo, talking with Egyptian officials about cementing a cease-fire that would see some economic incentives and easing of restrictions on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned at his weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday that no steps would be made toward any form of cease-fire as long as rocket fire continued. He said last month's onslaught, in which 34 Palestinians were killed, including a top militant commander, would be just a "promo" to what came next if aggression from Gaza continued.
Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since seizing Gaza in 2007 and dozens of shorter skirmishes.
France's prime minister is holding special meetings Sunday about the government's divisive redesign of the national retirement system, amid warnings that strike-related transport troubles will get even worse in the coming days.
Travel tangles continued Sunday as the strikes entered their fourth day, with most French trains at a standstill. Fourteen of Paris' subway lines were closed, with only two lines — using automated trains with no drivers — functioning. International routes also suffered disruptions.
Monday will be a bigger test of the strike movement's strength, and of travelers' patience. Unions are calling for even more people to walk off the job Monday, when commuters go back to work. Many people worked from home or took a day off when the strike began last week, but that's not sustainable if the strikes drag on.
Warning of safety risks, the SNCF national train network and Paris transit authority RATP warned travelers to stay away Monday instead of packing platforms for the few functioning trains. "On December 9, stay home or find another means of locomotion," SNCF said in a message to travelers.
Looking ahead to a challenging week, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is holding meetings Sunday afternoon and evening with government ministers involved in the reform — and with President Emmanuel Macron, according to government officials.
Macron, a centrist former investment banker, argues that the retirement overhaul will make a convoluted, out-dated system more fair and financially sustainable. Unions however see the reform as an attack on fundamental worker rights, and fear people will have to work longer for smaller pensions.
The government says it won't change the official retirement age of 62, but the plan is expected to include financial conditions to encourage people to work longer, as life spans lengthen.
New nationwide protests are scheduled Tuesday, and the prime minister is scheduled to release details of the plan Wednesday.
Yellow vest activists joined in the anger Saturday, as they added the retirement reform to their list of economic grievances in protests around the country. Police fired tear gas on rowdy protesters at largely peaceful marches through Paris and the western city of Nantes.
The Justice Department's internal watchdog will release a highly anticipated report Monday that is expected to reject President Donald Trump's claims that the Russia investigation was illegitimate and tainted by political bias from FBI leaders. But it is also expected to document errors during the investigation that may animate Trump supporters.
The report, as described by people familiar with its findings, is expected to conclude there was an adequate basis for opening one of the most politically sensitive investigations in FBI history and one that Trump has denounced as a witch hunt. It began in secret during Trump's 2016 presidential run and was ultimately taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The report comes as Trump faces an impeachment inquiry in Congress centered on his efforts to press Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Democrat Joe Biden. Trump also claims the impeachment investigation is politically biased.
The release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz's review is unlikely to quell the partisan battles that have surrounded the Russia investigation. It's also not the last word on that investigation. A separate internal investigation continues, overseen by Trump's attorney general, William Barr and led a U.S. attorney, John Durham.
Trump told reporters Saturday that he was waiting for the chance to see Horowitz's report and that he looked forward ``very much to seeing what happens with the Durham report, maybe even more importantly, because it's a horrible thing that took place and it should never happen to another president.''
Horowitz's report is expected to identify errors and misjudgments by some law enforcement officials, including by an FBI lawyer suspected of altering a document related to the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide. Those findings probably will fuel arguments by Trump and his supporters that the investigation was flawed from the start.
But the report will not endorse some of the president's theories on the investigation, including that it was a baseless "witch hunt" or that he was targeted by an Obama administration Justice Department desperate to see Republican Trump lose to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
It also is not expected to undo Mueller's findings or call into question his conclusion that Russia interfered in that election in order to benefit the Trump campaign and that Russians had repeated contacts with Trump associates.
Some of the findings were described to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity by people who were not authorized to discuss a draft of the report before its release. The AP has not viewed a copy of the document.
Trump said last week that he expected Horowitz's report to be "devastating," but said the "big report" would come from John Durham, the U.S. attorney appointed by Barr to examine how intelligence was gathered in the early days of the Russia investigation. Durham's investigation is criminal in nature, and Republicans may look to it to uncover wrongdoing that the inspector general wasn't examining.
It is unclear how Barr, a strong defender of Trump, will respond to Horowitz's findings. He has told Congress that he believed "spying" on the Trump campaign did occur and has raised public questions about whether the counterintelligence investigation was done correctly.
The FBI opened its investigation in July 2016 after receiving information from an Australian diplomat that a former Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had been told before it was publicly known that Russia had dirt on the Clinton campaign in the form of thousands of stolen emails.
By that point, the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, an act that a private security firm — and ultimately U.S. intelligence agencies — attributed to Russia. Prosecutors allege that Papadopoulos learned about the stolen emails during a conversation in London with a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud. Papadopoulous pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about that interaction.
The investigation was taken over in May 2017 by Mueller, who charged six Trump associates with various crimes as well as 25 Russians accused of interfering in the election either through hacking or a social media disinformation campaign. Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
He examined multiple episodes in which Trump sought to seize control of the investigation, including by firing James Comey as FBI director, but declined to decide on whether Trump had illegally obstructed justice.
The inspector general's investigation began in early 2018. It focuses in part on the FBI's surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The FBI applied in the fall of 2016 for a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page's communications, with officials expressing concern that he may have been targeted for recruitment by the Russian government.
Page was never charged and has denied any wrongdoing.
The warrant was renewed several times, including during the Trump administration. Republicans have attacked the procedures because the application relied in part on information gathered by an ex-British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, whose opposition research into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia was funded by Democrats and the Clinton campaign.
In pursuing the warrant, the Justice Department referred to Steele as "reliable" from previous dealings with him. Though officials told the court that they suspected the research was aimed at discrediting the Trump campaign, they did not reveal that the work had been paid for by Democrats, according to documents released last year.
Steele's research was compiled into a dossier that was provided to the FBI after it had opened its investigation.
The report also examined the interactions that senior Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr had with Steele, whom he had met years earlier through a shared professional interest in countering Russian organized crime. Ohr passed along to the FBI information that he had received from Steele but did not alert his Justice Department bosses to those conversations.
Ohr has since been a regular target of Trump's ire, in part because his wife worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the political research firm that hired Steele for the investigation.
This is the latest in a series of reports that Horowitz, a former federal prosecutor and an Obama appointee to the watchdog role, has released on FBI actions in politically charged investigations.
Last year, he criticized Comey for a news conference announcing the conclusion of the Clinton email investigation, and for then alerting Congress months later that it had been effectively reopened. In that report, too, Horowitz did not find that Comey's actions had been guided by partisan bias.
The inspector general also referred former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for potential criminal prosecution after concluding that McCabe had misled his office about his involvement in a news media disclosure. No charges have been brought and McCabe has adamantly denied any wrongdoing.
Kenyan rescuers digging through the rubble of a six-story building found two survivors alive Sunday, two days after it collapsed in Nairobi and killed at least five people and injured 31 others.
Authorities said 24 people were still missing. When the two survivors were found Sunday morning, a crowd of onlookers burst into cheers and clapping.
Rescuers including the military had said they were communicating with people believed to be trapped in pockets of debris.
Building collapses are common in Nairobi, where housing is in high demand and unscrupulous developers often bypass regulations.
After eight buildings collapsed and killed 15 people in Kenya in 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered an audit of all the country's buildings to see if they were up to code. The National Construction Authority found that 58% of buildings in Nairobi were unfit for habitation.
On Friday, Nairobi authorities said more than 20 people had been rescued, with some searchers using their bare hands to pick through the debris. Eight people were taken to a hospital, officials said.
It was not immediately clear what caused the collapse. Officials said 57 rooms had been rented out in the building. The Red Cross said 22 families lived there.
Three friends were waiting at a bus stop on the University of Maryland's campus around 3 a.m. on a Saturday when a stranger approached them, screaming.
"Step left, step left if you know what's best for you," the 22-year-old white man told the friends, according to police.
"No," one of the friends, a black man, said before the white man plunged a knife into his chest.
Police arrested Sean Urbanski at the bus stop, 50 feet from where 23-year-old Richard Collins III, was dying. After fatally stabbing Collins, Urbanski folded the knife, slipped it into his pocket and sat down on a bench until police arrived, a prosecutor has said.
When Urbanski's murder trial starts this week, Prince George's County prosecutors will argue Collins' killing was a hate crime carried out by a man biased against black people. Urbanski liked a Facebook group called "Alt-Reich: Nation" and saved at least six photographs of racist memes on his phone, according to prosecutors.
Defense attorneys say there is no evidence of a racist motive for what occurred at the bus stop that night in May 2017. Witnesses told police that Urbanski was drunk and screaming incoherently when he approached the friends, one of his lawyers has said.
The killing coincided with a surge in hate on U.S. college campuses. Reports of white supremacists posting fliers and other propaganda on campuses more than tripled in 2017, according to a tally by the Anti-Defamation League. In August 2017, torch-toting white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia's campus on the eve of a rally that led to violent clashes and bloodshed.
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it's "unfortunate" that higher-education officials, including from the U.S. Department of Education, haven't done more to combat hate on campuses.
"Much work remains to be done," she said.
Urbanski is charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole if he is convicted. Jury selection is scheduled to start Monday.
Defense lawyers failed to persuade Circuit Court Judge Lawrence Hill Jr. to exclude the racist memes and Facebook group as trial evidence. One of the memes "advocates violence against blacks," while another has an image of a noose, a handgun and poison, a prosecutor has said.
During a hearing in June, defense attorney William Brennan cited a New York Times article in which an administrator of the Facebook group said it was satire.
Hunter College sociology professor Jessie Daniels, an expert in online racism, said pushing boundaries between parody and harmful hate is "baked into the far-right culture."
"Just saying something is playing with humor doesn't give it a free pass," said Daniels, who is writing a book entitled, "Tweet Storm: The Rise of the Far-Right."
Prosecutors wanted to call Daniels as an expert witness to testify about her research and the material from Urbanski's phone.
The judge, however, ruled out any testimony by Daniels at the trial. Urbanski's lawyers said prosecutors didn't give them adequate notice of her testimony and argued Daniels would mislead the jury.
Daniels said some of the memes on Urbanski's phone are somewhat hard to decipher because they contain "multiple layers of inside jokes." Others are overtly racist, she added.
"Online white supremacy has real consequences," Daniels said. "Words have power, and they can cause people real harm."
Collins was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army shortly before his death. He was days from graduating from Bowie State University, a historically black college. Collins was visiting friends at the University of Maryland on the night of his killing.
Prosecutors say Urbanski, a former University of Maryland student, stabbed Collins because he was the only black person at the bus stop that night. His friends were a white male and an Asian female. Brennan has said there's no evidence Collins was "selected" because he was black.
Dawn and Richard Collins Jr. created a foundation in their son's name. In a video posted on the foundation's website, Dawn Collins said they were proud to see their son receive his Army commission.
In one of their last conversations, her son said, "Mom, I made it, and the world is going to know my name,'" she recalled.