AFP Video

Inle Lake (Myanmar) (AFP) – Thousands of Buddhists take to boats on Myanmar’s famed Inle Lake for the seventeen-day Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda festival as it returns after a three-year absence. The event sees four Buddha statues loaded onto a golden barge before being rowed through villages in the country’s eastern Shan state. This year, the festival is tinged with sadness as Myanmar continues to grapple with violence following a coup in 2021. According to a local monitoring group, the military’s crackdown on anti-coup fighters has resulted in more than 4,100 deaths and tens of thousands of arrests.

Jerusalem (AFP) – Speaking to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says “we will stand with you in solidarity with your people”. Sunak is the latest western leader to meet with Israeli leaders after more than 1,400 people — mostly civilians — were killed in a bloody Hamas attack on October 7. In response, the Israeli forces have conducted a sustained campaign of air raids on Gaza, with the enclave’s Hamas-controlled health ministry reporting around 3,500 casualties as a result.

Strasbourg (France) (AFP) – The European Parliament awards the EU’s top human rights prize, the Sakharov Prize, to Mahsa Amini, the Iranian Kurdish woman whose killing in Iranian custody sparked the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. “The 16th September 2022 is a date which will live in infamy, and the brutal murder of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini marked a turning point,” says European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.

Berlin (AFP) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz describes as “cynical” the warnings made by Russian President Vladimir Putin about civilian deaths in the Israel-Hamas conflict. Speaking to the Bundestag, Scholz says he is “more than outraged” by Putin’s public remarks, as the war in Ukraine grinds on 18 months after Russia’s invasion.

Majdal Shams (AFP) – In Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, people are stocking up on water and food as concerns grow that the Israel-Hamas war will spill over into border areas with Syria and Lebanon. Since Hamas militants stormed over the Gaza border into Israel on 7 October, exchanges of fire have intensified on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon and the Syrian-controlled parts of the Golan Heights.

Gardanne (France) (AFP) – Two French video-game fans are leading the “Odyssey Project”, which aims to open a museum dedicated to video games near Paris in 2026. They have already raised over one million euros for the project via an online crowdfunding campaign.

Taipei (AFP) – Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn and US hardware leader Nvidia say they will team up to create ‘AI Factories’, powerful data processing centres that would drive the manufacturing of next-generation products such as electric cars.

Barcelona (AFP) – Spanish police said Wednesday they had rescued over 400 animals, mostly dogs and cats, as part of an operation that smashed an international pet trafficking ring and led to the arrest of 13 people.

Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – More than 470 people have been killed by a strike on the Ahli Arab hospital in the besieged Gaza Strip, says the Hamas-controlled health ministry. Israel and Palestinian militants have traded blame for the attack. The Israeli army says it has evidence the hospital was hit by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired. The strike has unleashed a torrent of condemnation from across the Arab world. Rallies erupted on the night across the Middle East and are continuing after calls for a “day of rage”.

Donetsk (Ukraine) (AFP) – Undertaker Zenyk and his dog, Nyk, are inseparable. Every day, the pair make the journey between Ukraine’s Donbas region and the city of Dnipro, bringing the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers to a military morgue. Neither Moscow or Kyiv publicly comment on how many of their own soldiers have been killed since the start of the war.