DANY BLOG

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Spanish police are searching the headquarters of the ruling Socialist Party as part of an ongoing investigation into possible financial wrongdoing, the Civil Guard said Wednesday.

The raid on the office in central Madrid is another blow to the party ofPrime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose Socialists have been hammered by aseries of corruption scandals.

The Civil Guard told The Associated Press that the police were under judicial orders to find material relevant to a National Court probe into accusations of corruption against a former party member involved in a state-run company.

The police said the search is strictly limited to a probe led by National Court judge Santiago Pedraz into the possible wrongdoing of Socialist party member Leire Díaz.

The alleged case against Díaz started in 2025 when audio recordings appeared in Spanish media of her apparently being involved in attempts to discredit a member of the Civil Guard’s anti-corruption unit. Further reports linked her to alleged attempts to influence the work of state prosecutors.

The Socialist party said she was acting on her own.

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Diaz, who has left the party, has denied wrongdoing.

Last week a separate court said it was investigating former Prime Minister José LuisRodríguez Zapateroin connection with a government airline bailout. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Sánchez's wife and brother are being probed over allegations of influence peddling, which both have denied.

And, most damning for the Socialists, a former minister under Sánchez and a senior party official are both being investigated on allegations they played a part in a kickback ring that started during the COVID-19 pandemic, which they have denied.

Sánchez, who has been prime minister since 2018, has called the cases against his family a “smear campaign.” But the corruption case against his former cohorts led him toask the nation for “forgiveness”in 2025.

His minority government depends on the support of a junior coalition partner, which for now has stuck with it despite the judicial actions.

Sánchez, who has stood out on the international stage for hisprogressive stancesthat have earned the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump, has not been directly linked to any of the scandals.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A group led by a Roman Catholic bishop in the Philippines launched a fact-finding body Wednesday to document accounts of witnesses and other details of ex-President Rodrigo Duterte’sbloody anti-drugs crackdownthat the government can use to prosecute law enforcers.

Duterte, who ended his stormy six-year presidency in 2022, wasarrested last yearand taken to the Netherlands, where he is facing trial before theInternational Criminal Courtin The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity over the killings.

Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, Duterte’s loyal ally and his former national police chief, who first enforced the bloody crackdown, is wanted by the ICC as a co-perpetrator for some of the thousands of killings, which alarmed Western governments and human rights groups.

Dela Rosa has gone into hiding and is being hunted by Philippine authorities, who have vowed to enforce an ICC warrant for his arrest and turn him over to the global court.

Dela Rosa and the brash-speaking Duterte have denied authorizing extrajudicial killings, but the then president had repeatedly threatened suspects with death.

Many of the thousands of police officers directly involved in the brutal crackdown that leftthousands of mostly poor suspectsdead have not been thoroughly investigated, and very few have been convicted, according to human rights groups.

“This is long overdue,” Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David said in a news conference. The nongovernment “EJK Truth Commission” he helped organize will focus on helping victims, their families and even repentant law enforcers to finally find closure, David said.

“This is an opportunity for a catharsis … so we can recover our dignity as a country,” David said. “Ultimately, what we aspire for is healing not only for the victims but also our institutions.”

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Raul Pangalangan, a respected Philippine lawyer, who has served for years as an ICC judge, said the commission he will head “was created to ensure that the stories of victims, survivors and families are heard, verified and preserved.”

The commission plans to hold public hearings.

“These things happened because everybody looked the other way,” Pangalangan said. “It is almost a conspiracy of silence.”

Members of the commission said they will allow the government to use their findings to help authorities investigate, prosecute and seek accountability. Their periodic reports may be submitted to justice and human rights officials, they said.

David called on civil society, academic, religious and other groups to help the commission and said a large charity group in Germany has offered funding support.

Commission member Raquel Fortun, a forensic pathologist with the state-run University of the Philippines, told The Associated Press that the task of establishing facts years after the killings would be difficult. There were efforts by some law enforcers involved in the killings to evade accountability.

Death certificates of 13 drug suspects, whose remains were exhumed after Duterte stepped down from office, stated they died of natural causes, like heart attack and pneumonia, she said.

“When I examined the remains, I found that they were hit by gunfire,” Fortun said.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia fired more than 100 drones and two ballistic missiles at Ukraine overnight, the Ukrainian air force said Tuesday, as the country’s foreign ministry noted that Moscow’s recentthreat to hit Kyiv especially hard from the airbrought nothing new.

Russia Ukraine War

Russia on Monday urged foreign citizens, including members of diplomatic missions, to leave the Ukrainian capital as quickly as possible and told residents to steer clear of military and government facilities. It said that “systemic strikes” on Kyiv were being prepared.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio by phone Monday that the U.S. should evacuate its diplomatic staff from Kyiv, a foreign ministry statement said. Rubio didn’t say whether the State Department would take that step, but expressed concern during a trip to India that the “terrible” war in Ukraine could escalate further.

The Trump administration hastried for more than a yearto stop the fighting that broke out after Russia’s February 2022invasion. But its efforts yielded no significant breakthrough and are now on ice as Washington focuses on theIran war.

No diplomats say they are leaving Kyiv

There were no announcements of diplomatic departures from Kyiv. The European Union, French and Polish delegations publicly said that they would not leave.

The level of security threats posed by Russia to Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities “remains the same as in previous years and months,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement late Monday.

Russia has continuously launched missile and drone attacks on the capital for more than four years, it pointed out, adding that Ukraine was prepared to assist diplomatic missions seeking additional security measures.

Russia said itsbiggest missile attack of the yearlast weekend was a response to Friday’s deadly Ukrainian drone strike on what Moscow said was acollege dormitoryin Starobilsk, a city in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied Luhansk region.

But the Ukrainian General Staff said that its strike in Starobilsk hit the local headquarters of the Russian military’s special drone unit.

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Ukraine remains short of air defense missiles

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that sophisticated American-made air defense systems that Ukraine needs to stop Russian ballistic missiles are in short supply due to the Iran war.

“Unfortunately, there has been no progress for a long time with America on expanding the production of anti-ballistic capabilities,” Zelenskyy said on social media late Monday, adding that Kyiv is working with Europe to improve its own anti-ballistic capabilities in sufficient quantities.

He noted that Ukrainian battlefield gains in recent months have enabled it to “stabilize” the 1,250-kilometer (780-mile) front line in eastern and southern Ukraine, suggesting that Kyiv's forces are holding their own against Russia's bigger army.

Russia’s spring offensive is floundering as Ukraine’s midrange drone strikes disrupt its rear supply lines, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Moscow’s warning of major strikes aims to distract public attention from its “poor battlefield performance” and an economic pinch caused by war costs and international sanctions, the Washington-based think tank said late Monday.

Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal. Elise Morton in London contributed.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine athttps://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Brussels — A train crashed into a school minibus in Belgium on Tuesday, leaving at least several "victims" in an unconfirmed condition, the country's interior minister said. Two sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the French news agency AFP that several people on the bus were killed in the collision.

The Reuters news agency also quoted a local source as saying several people were killed, but there was no immediate confirmation from police or other authorities.

"With great dismay, I learnt of the tragic accident in Buggenhout, where a school bus was struck by a train. My thoughts go out to the victims and their loved ones. I wish the injured much strength," minister Bernard Quintin wrote on X.

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Photos from the scene showed the minibus laying on its side near the railway road crossing, with serious damage seen to its front end.

"The impact was extremely violent," said Frederic Sacre, a spokesman for the Belgian rail network operator, describing the toll as "dramatic."

"It happened at around 8:08 am when a minibus was struck by a train that was due to stop at the next station, which was about a kilometer away," he said.

KAMPALA, May 25 (Reuters) - Uganda has detected two more confirmed cases of Ebola, ‌its health ministry said on Monday, ‌bringing the total number of cases reported in the ​country to seven.

The two new cases are health workers in a private health facility in the capital Kampala and both are Ugandans, ‌the ministry said ⁠in a statement.

"Both patients have been admitted to the designated treatment ⁠unit and are now receiving care," the ministry said, adding that response teams were ​tracing all ​those who had ​been in contact with ‌the two people.

Ugandan authorities confirmed three new Ebola cases on Saturday.

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The epicentre of the outbreak is in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo's Ituri province, which borders Uganda.

The World ‌Health Organization has declared the ​outbreak of the rare ​Bundibugyo strain ​of Ebola a public health emergency ‌of international concern.

WHO chief ​Tedros Adhanom ​Ghebreyesus said on Sunday that there had been more than 900 suspected cases in ​the outbreak ‌so far, including 101 confirmed cases.

(Reporting ​by Elias Biryabarema; Writing by George ​Obulutsa;Editing by Alexander Winning)

BEIJING, May 25 (Reuters) - The death toll from flooding ‌in southwestern China's Chongqing has ‌risen to nine and 11 people ​are missing following torrential rain in the municipality, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Monday.

Flooding in Chongqing

A ‌number of ⁠neighbourhoods and villages in the district of Yongchuan ⁠were severely hit by sudden, extreme rainfall overnight on Saturday, ​state media ​reported ​earlier. Three deaths ‌were confirmed on Sunday.

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The rainfall caused flash floods and landslides in the area and more than 2,000 residents have been ‌relocated, the state-run ​Xinhua news agency ​said.

Dozens ​of people were killed ‌earlier last week ​when a ​belt of intense rainfall swept across large areas of ​central ‌and southwestern China.

(Reporting by Xiuhao ​Chen and Ryan Woo;Editing ​by Helen Popper)

ARACHOVA, Greece (AP) — As a child, Giannis Stathas remembers being snowed in for days at a time in Arachova, a village famous for its ski resort and long known as a winter playground for Greeks.

Climate Greece Snow Melt

“We couldn’t go to school because of the snow,” said Stathas, now mayor of Arachova and the surrounding area. “We might have been stuck at home for two days without being able to go out because of the snow.”

“Now we don’t see that here anymore.”

Stathas says snowfall onMount Parnassosat an altitude of 2,400 meters (7,874 feet) is what once fell at 300 meters (984 feet).

New findings from the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute confirm the mayor’s observations.

“What we found across 10 mountains of Greece, across the mainland, is that snow cover is rapidly declining,” said Konstantis Alexopoulos, a snow hydrologist at the University of Cambridge and the National Observatory of Athens, and co-founder of the Hellenic Mountain Observatory. “We’ve lost more than half of the snow cover ... since the mid-1980s.”

Using 40 years of NASA and European Space Agency satellite imagery, researchers reconstructed gaps left by cloud coverage and infrequent satellite passes by using machine learning to estimate missing snow cover data.

Snow as a water reservoir

Alexopoulos said the decline matters because snow acts like a natural water reservoir.

“Snowpack is really like a savings account,” he said. “You can deposit an amount today and the longer you keep it in this savings account without spending it, the interest value is going to increase. And snow works in the exact same way.”

Unlike rain, which runs off quickly into rivers and the sea, snow remains stored in the mountains “ultimately melting at the time that we need it the most,” Alexopoulos said.

This helps sustain water supplies during the dry season, which is especially important in the Mediterranean climate where summer rainfall is limited.

Climate change in the Mediterranean

He added that the loss of snow is driven primarily by rising temperatures linked to greenhouse gas emissions, which reduce both snowfall and the duration of snow cover on the ground.

“The snow cover decline that we’re observing on the Greek mountains is not connected to the natural climate variability that does exist,” he said. “The current rate of climate change globally and specifically in hotspots like the Mediterranean is much faster than what the earth has experienced previously. “

Alexopoulos said the team expected a decline, but was surprised by its magnitude. “Other mountainous regions of the world, such as the Andes or the Himalayas, ... have all experienced a steep decline in snow cover but not at the rate that we saw in the Greek mountains.”

The study was one of the first long-term analyses of Greek mountains.

“Studying mountainous environments is inherently difficult due to remote access,” Alexopoulos said, adding that it’s difficult to install weather stations to take measurements and maintain a consistent record of observations.

“In Greece we haven’t focused so much on it because we never really understood the importance of snow’s contribution to our water resources,” he said. “But as this shifts and as this starts to decline, we are seeing thosedroughts, and we are trying to explain them.”

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While Mount Parnassos wasn’t part of the study, Alexopoulos said it is still representative of theconditions seen across Greece.

Snow shortage impact already visible

Back in Arachova, in the shadow of Mount Parnassos, the consequences are already visible.

“One hundred percent of Arachova’s water is supplied by snowmelt,” said local restaurant owner Aktida Koritou.

She said locals have become increasingly conscious of water scarcity and are extra careful not to be wasteful, especially during summer when shortages are most severe.

There is great concern because the springs in Arachova are drying up and reservoirs are not refilling, according to the mayor.

“The biggest problem begins in late August and early September and lasts until late September or early October,” Stathas said.

An unexpected snowfall in April caught locals off-guard and was welcomed as a top-up, but “will hardly help the reservoirs fill up,” according to Stathas.

Adapting to less snow

Authorities are trying to adapt. The municipality is exploring the construction of small dams so that no water is lost, while the ski center is also implementing snow retention measures to help preserve it longer.

Less snow also means drier vegetation and increasedfire risk. Stathas said fires weren’t really an issue in northern Greece in the past, but this has changed.

“You could set fire among the fir trees 30 years, 40 years ago and there was never a chance that the mountain would burn,” he said. “But now there is a great danger because of the severe drought.”

Arachova’s ski-based economy is also shifting.

Koritou, who worked at the ski center when it opened in the early 1980s, said the ski season now starts in January instead of December.

“No one will come to the mountain for Christmas. They will go to Switzerland. They will go wherever they find snow,” she said. “So they leave and (business) decreases. This Christmas, there was a 30% reduction, for me at least.”

In response, the municipality is trying to diversify beyond winter tourism, promoting the mountain town of Arachova as a summer destination.

“Someone can swim and in 20 minutes come to stay here where it’s cool,” Stathas said. “But to be able to hold on to tourism in the summer, we have to have water.”

Remembering winters past

Locals still remember how winters once were. Koritou recalls farmers rushing to harvest grapes in late October before the first snowfall. People kept shovels behind their doors, and neighbors cleared roads together. She also remembers sections of the mountain where snow never fully melted before the following winter came.

“There are some years when despair grips you,” Koritou said. “For those of us who know winter well, it’s disappointing not to see snow. You want it in the winter. The change is enormous.”