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Red ribbons and Palestinian flags were seen in London at a vigil calling for the release of thousands of Palestinians being held without charge in Israeli prisons. The vigil focused on Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who’s been held for nearly one year. Al Jazeera’s Milena Veselinovic was there.

Meanwhile, Caf has increased the prize money for the winners of Afcon from $7m (£5.2m) to $10m (£7.5m).

The surprise announcement about the future of Afcon was made by Motsepe after a meeting of Caf’s executive committee in Morocco before the start of the 2025 finals in Rabat on Sunday.

The biennial hosting of Afcon has long caused issues with the football calendar, with the vast majority of recent tournaments held midway through the European club season.

However, Caf remained committed to scheduling the tournament every two years – not least as it needs the revenue raised from the finals to reinvest in the game on the continent.

Caf had made a resolution for Afcon to be held in a June-July slot from 2019 onwards and began its new plan in Egypt that year.

But the Covid-19 pandemic and weather conditions in host nations in Central and West Africa meant the 2021 and 2023 editions in Cameroon and Ivory Coast respectively were staged in January and February instead.

Fifa’s expanded 32-team Club World Cup was held in June and July this year, forcing Caf to opt for mid-season dates once again.

As a result this year’s Afcon in Morocco will take place over Christmas and the New Year for the first time, with the final on 18 January.

The dates for the finals in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in 2027 are yet to be announced, and that will be swiftly followed by another Afcon in 2028 – with the hosts of that edition yet to be decided.

After that, the continent’s biggest tournament will become a quadrennial tournament taking place in the same year as the European Championships.

Motsepe said the decision had been made in conjunction with Fifa president Gianni Infantino and the world governing body’s general secretary Mattias Grafstrom – and that Caf “have to compromise”.

Emma Groves, 35, from Belfast, was refused entry to Switzerland and detained at Zurich airport after making an easy mistake when packing

A woman was turned away from her holiday destination and held in custody after making one crucial error while travelling. Emma Groves, 35, from Belfast, made her way to Dublin Airport for a four-night break in Zurich, Switzerland on December 1 this year.

The pair dropped off their luggage and completed check-in before passing through security without any problems. Emma had reserved the Aer Lingus flight approximately three weeks earlier after spotting a hotel she fancied visiting on TikTok.

However, it wasn’t until the duo reached border control in Zurich that they discovered Emma had made a grave blunder which left her devastated. Following the loss of her passport several weeks beforehand, Emma had requested a replacement document, which arrived at her home.

Yet after discovering her original passport, she failed to destroy it and stored it in a drawer alongside her moisturisers and fake tan products.

Emma explained: “I had grabbed it [passport] the night before and give my passport to my boyfriend, he minds them because I do lose everything. Only the night before I thought ‘my goodness am I going to be able to travel, the gold has completely faded off’ this which is strange for it being a new passport. It was in a drawer with all my moisturisers and fake tans. So I did think it’s probably just rubbed off.”

Upon reaching the Swiss border, Emma discovered her passport had been flagged as cancelled. She recalled: “He just said ‘do you have another one’ and then it kind of clicked. The border police came and got me and my boyfriend.

“We went into this room and said we realised what had happened. I said I’ve got a new one but I’ve grabbed the old one so he said because it had been cancelled it was an invalid document.”

Emma was informed she would need to be flown back to Dublin before she could re-enter the country using her valid passport. Her boyfriend chose to remain in the country and await Emma’s return.

Emma found herself placed in a “weird” airport hotel, which she likened to a “mini prison”, containing roughly 20 beds separated by curtains.

She explained: “They put me in an airport hotel and I was in there for about three or four hours, but it was just like a room with a lot of beds in it separated by curtains. I just sat and watched Stranger Things get me through.

“It was scary enough in the hotel because there were a lot of people in there, and there kind of wasn’t really any security or even a locked door. It was a weird room.

“[In Dublin] we used a machine to drop off the luggage, but then we did have to go over to a desk to leave them, and she checked the passport and stuff. The passports were scanned so you’d think they would pick up if it was cancelled.

“Border security in Switzerland said I shouldn’t have been able to get that far. It wasn’t until like 6pm that they told me I’d be getting on the flight at 8pm.”

It’s understood that Aer Lingus verifies that a presented passport corresponds to the passenger’s identity and remains valid. In instances where a passport has been cancelled but remains in date, the discrepancy would be spotted upon entry to another country.

Emma was then accompanied around the airport by a chaperone before being boarded onto the aircraft first, as her passport had been seized. She was given a set of documents which stated she was denied entry and had her passport confiscated.

Upon her return to Dublin, her mother met her with her replacement passport, allowing her to purchase fresh flights to Zurich, which she described as an “expense she didn’t need”.

Emma explained: “When I flew over, I actually initially wasn’t going to bring the forms back, but my mum was like ‘just take them’, so I flew out fine but when I got to the Swiss border again the border control lady was like ‘oh this doesn’t make sense it says you’ve already been here but you haven’t left’.’I give her the forms and she was like ‘oh okay that kind of explains it’ and I got through.”

Emma was informed by border officials that she would face no future travel difficulties due to it being an honest mistake. A representative from Aer Lingus stated: “Passengers travelling with Aer Lingus are responsible for ensuring they have all relevant travel documentation and compliance with relevant laws and regulations of the countries they are flying to, from, or transiting through. Passports used for travel must be valid and in date. If a travel document is not valid for travel, passengers may be refused entry when they reach their planned destination, as was the case in this instance.”

Police are not looking for anyone else over the shooting that wounded nine people at the Ivy League school in the northeastern US.

Police in Providence, Rhode Island, have detained a “person of interest” after a manhunt for a gunman who killed two people at Brown University, officials say.

At a news conference on Sunday, Police Colonel Oscar Perez said the individual had been detained that morning and officers were not currently looking for anyone else in relation to the shooting at the Ivy League university in the northeastern United States.

Officials have not released the identity of the person of interest.

Nine people were wounded on Saturday, seven of them critically, when a suspect with a firearm entered a building where students were taking exams and opened fire.

The shooting sparked a manhunt involving more than 400 law enforcement personnel, including agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, while the campus was placed under lockdown as the search took place.

Students hid under desks for hours after warnings of an active shooter were released.

Brown said in an advisory on Sunday that police had lifted a shelter-in-place order for the campus although police remained at the location and still considered it an active crime scene.

Access to parts of the campus remained restricted on Sunday as police maintained a security perimeter around Minden Hall and nearby apartment buildings, the university said.

Officials had earlier released a video of the suspect, a male, possibly in his 30s, who was dressed in black.

Providence Deputy Police Chief Timothy O’Hara said on Saturday that the gunman may have worn a mask and investigators had retrieved shell casings from the scene.

Detectives were looking into why the location was targeted, Perez told reporters. The incident was the second deadly gun attack at a US university in recent days after a shooting at Kentucky State University on Tuesday.

The Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people are shot, has documented 389 such incidents in the US so far this year, including at least six at schools.

Last year, more than 500 mass shootings were recorded in the US.

Dec. 10 (UPI) — The United States seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela amid ongoing tensions between President Donald Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

The tanker was seized during a “judicial enforcement action on a stateless vessel” that had docked in Venezuela, Bloomberg reported.

“Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a late-afternoon post on X.

U.S. officials sanctioned the oil tanker several years ago due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” Bondi explained.

“This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely — and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.”

U.S. military personnel seized the tanker by fast-roping from a helicopter to board it, Bloomberg reported.

Trump earlier confirmed the tanker’s seizure at the start of a 2 p.m. EST roundtable at the White House.

“We’ve just seized a tanker off the coast of Venezuela — the largest tanker ever seized,” Trump said at the start of the roundtable meeting.

He said “it was seized for a very good reason” and the “appropriate people” would address the matter when asked for more information by a reporter.

The vessel’s seizure occurred as the Trump administration has been applying pressure on Maduro, whom Trump has accused of being a narco-trafficker and of stealing the country’s 2024 presidential election by declaring himself the winner.

The Trump administration has designated Cartel de los Soles aka Cartel of the Sun a foreign terrorist organization that includes many Venezuelan military and government officials among its leadership.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a carrier strike group to join other U.S. Navy vessels in the Caribbean Sea amid ongoing strikes against small craft departing Venezuela and other nations that are alleged tobe carrying illicit drugs.

The oil tanker’s seizure and the presence of the U.S. military in international waters near Venezuela are likely to discourage oil companies from transporting Venezuelan crude oil.

“Shippers will likely be much more cautious and hesitant about loading Venezuelan crude going forward,” Kpler oil analyst Matt Smith told CNBC.

Rystad Energy’s Jorge Leon, who is in charge of the firm’s geopolitical analysis, told Bloomberg the U.S. seizure of a “Venezuelan tanker” is a “clear escalation from financial sanctions to physical interdiction.”

The seizure “raises the stakes for Caracas and anyone facilitating its exports,” Leon said.

The Trump administration also has advised international airlines to be cautious when approaching Venezuela, which has caused many to suspend operations there.