authorities

Authorities board vessel off Swedish coast after it suffered an engine failure.

Sweden’s customs service has said that authorities boarded a Russian freighter that anchored in Swedish waters on Friday after developing engine problems, and were conducting an inspection of the cargo.

The owners of the vessel, the Adler, are on the European Union’s sanctions list, Martin Hoglund, spokesman at the customs authority, said on Sunday.

“Shortly after 0100 (00:00 GMT) last night we boarded the ship with support from the Swedish Coast Guard and the police service in order to make a customs inspection,” Hoglund said. “The inspection is still ongoing.”

Hoglund declined to say what the customs service had found on board the ship.

According to ship-tracking service Marine Traffic, the Adler is a 126-metre-long, roll-on, roll-off container carrier. It is anchored off Hoganas in southwest Sweden.

EU and US sanctions

In addition to the Adler being on an EU sanctions list, the vessel and its owners, M Leasing LLC, are also both subject to US sanctions, suspected of involvement in weapons transport, according to OpenSanctions, a database of sanctioned companies and individuals, persons of interest and government watchlists.

Hoglund said the ship had left the Russian port of St Petersburg on December 15, but he said customs did not have any information about its destination.

The night-time operation was led by the Swedish Customs Administration along with the coastguard, National Task Force, Swedish Security Service and prosecutors.

In a previous incident, the Adler was boarded by Greek forces in the Mediterranean in January 2021. The operation was carried out under the auspices of the EU’s Operation Irini, which monitors the United Nations arms embargo on Libya.

Authorities in Gaza have warned that stormy weather could spur more war-damaged buildings to collapse and heavy rains are making it more difficult to recover bodies still under the rubble.

Authorities sounded the alarm on Monday, three days after two buildings collapsed in Gaza, killing at least 12 people, during winter rains that have also washed away and flooded the tents of displaced Palestinians and led to deaths from exposure.

A ceasefire has been in effect since October 10 after two years of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, but humanitarian agencies said Israel is letting very little aid into the enclave, where nearly the entire population has been displaced.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abou Azzoum said despite a shortage of equipment and fuel and the weather conditions in the enclave, Palestinian Civil Defence teams retrieved the bodies of 20 people on Monday.

The bodies were recovered from a multistorey building bombed in December 2023 where about 60 people, including 30 children, were believed to be sheltering.

Gaza Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal called on the international community to provide mobile homes and caravans for displaced Palestinians rather than tents.

“If people are not protected today, we will witness more victims, more killing of people, children, women, entire families inside these buildings,” he said.

Father mourns children killed in building collapse

Mohammad Nassar and his family were living in a six-storey building that was badly damaged by Israeli strikes earlier in the war and collapsed in heavy rain on Friday.

His family had struggled to find alternative accommodation and had been flooded out while living in a tent during a previous bout of bad weather. Nassar went out to buy some necessities on Friday and returned to a scene of carnage as rescue workers struggled to pull bodies from the rubble.

“I saw my son’s hand sticking out from under the ground. It was the scene that affected me the most. My son under the ground and we are unable to get him out,” Nassar said. His son, 15, died as did a daughter, aged 18.

Exposure warning

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Monday that more aid must be allowed into Gaza without delay to prevent putting more displaced families at serious risk.

“With heavy rain and cold brought in by Storm Byron [late last week], people in the Gaza Strip are freezing to death,” UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.

“The waterlogged ruins where they are sheltering are collapsing, causing even more exposure to cold,” he added.

Lazzarini said UNRWA has supplies that have waited for months to enter Gaza that he said would cover the needs of hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s more than two million people.

UN and Palestinian officials said at least 300,000 new tents are urgently needed for the roughly 1.5 million people still displaced. Most existing shelters are worn out or made of thin plastic and cloth sheeting.

Gaza authorities, meanwhile, were still digging to recover about 9,000 bodies they estimated remain buried in rubble from Israeli bombing during the war, but the lack of machinery is slowing down the process, spokesman Ismail al-Thawabta said.

Azzoum reported that Civil Defence teams said they require a surge in heavy machinery to expedite the work.

“They are saying that they are still in need, initially, for 40 excavators and bulldozers in order to achieve some slight progress in the whole process on the ground,” Azzoum said, reporting from Gaza City.

Israel’s continuing ban on the entry of heavy machinery into the Gaza Strip is a violation of the ceasefire, he added.

Earlier on Sunday, Hamas said Israel’s continuing violations of the ceasefire risk jeopardising the agreement and progress towards the next stage of United States President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war.

Since the ceasefire began, Israel has continued to strike Gaza on a daily basis, carrying out nearly 800 attacks and killing nearly 400 people, according to authorities in Gaza, while blocking the free flow of humanitarian aid.

“There is no real sense of safety nor protection for families,” Azzoum said of the ongoing violations.

Central American nation on edge after voting plagued by fraud claims and a recent history of contested elections.

Election officials in Honduras have released updated voting results from the country’s November 30 election, following a three-day pause in tallies amid allegations of fraud and inconsistencies.

With 89 percent of ballots tallied on Monday, the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura held a slim lead of 40.21 percent over centrist contender Salvador Nasralla, who has 39.5 percent.

Rixi Moncada, a leftist candidate with the governing LIBRE party, is trailing in third place, with 19.28 percent.

“After carrying out the necessary technical actions (with external auditing), the data is now being updated in the results,” Ana Paola Hall, president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), said in a social media post.

Allegations of fraud had dominated the lead-up to the election, and statements from United States President Donald Trump-backed have likewise stirred controversy.

In the final days before the election, Trump indicated that he may not be able to work with anyone but Asfura. That, in turn, led to an outcry from other candidates who accused the US leader of election meddling.

The electoral body stated that about 14 percent of the tally sheets showed inconsistencies and would be reviewed. Hall added in her post that candidates must “stay alert and, where applicable, file the corresponding challenges in accordance with the law”.

Following a coup in 2009, Honduras experienced a period of repression and disputed elections that left many sceptical about the legitimacy of the electoral process. Security forces killed at least 16 people when they opened fire on protesters following a contested vote in 2017, with about 30 killed in protests across the country.

The prolonged vote-counting has fuelled concerns that similar clashes might erupt.

The opposition has also criticised Trump’s stated preference for Asfura as a form of interference, given his threat that US support could be withdrawn if he did not win.

Trump has previously written, “If he [Asfura] doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.”

Moncada, the Libre candidate, has said she will not recognise the results that took place under “interference and coercion”. Nasralla has also said that Trump’s interference may have cost him votes.

Accusations of impropriety are widespread, with a conservative member of the CNE panel accusing a LIBRE member of “intimidation”, and Nasralla saying that “the corrupt ones are the ones holding up the counting process”.

Rights groups and civil society organisations have called for patience and transparency.