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As Donald Trump’s onetime campaign manager and a New Hampshire resident, Corey Lewandowski has been by the former president’s side for many of his trips to the Granite State. But when Trump traveled to the state in late January, Lewandowski declined an invitation to appear at the event, a source with direct knowledge told CNN. Lewandowski’s absence is seen as a sign of how the longtime ally has drifted away from Trump since the 2020 election, according to multiple sources familiar with their relationship. In total, CNN spoke with more than a dozen of people in Trump’s orbit who noted the change. “I was over 1,500 miles away, and Mr. Trump was well aware of that,” Lewandowski told CNN when asked about his reason for missing the New Hampshire event, adding that his relationship with the former president has “never changed for the last eight years.” But in recent months, Lewandowski has privately started pitching potential 2024 GOP hopefuls and surveying their campaign operations, includi...

Progress toward gender equality is “vanishing before our eyes,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres told the Commission on the Status of Women on Monday. Speaking to the key UN women’s rights group ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, Guterres said gender equality is “300 years away” according to the latest estimates from UN Women, the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. Guterres cited high rates of maternal mortality, girls being forced into early marriage, and girls being kidnapped and assaulted for attending school as evidence that hope of achieving gender equality “is growing more distant.” In his speech, Guterres did not mention Iran, which was expelled from the 45-member commission in December over protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s so-called “morality police.” “Women’s rights are being abused, threatened, and violated around the world,” Guterres said, naming a few countries in...

Damning new evidence has been published as part of the inquiry that will determine whether or not former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson misled Parliament over his conduct during the so-called Partygate scandal. The new information suggests that people advising Johnson were aware that the gatherings taking place in Downing Street during Covid lockdowns were breaching the UK government’s own guidelines, and points to a culture of drinking inside Downing Street at the time. Last year, the Metropolitan Police issued Johnson with a fine for attending one of the gatherings, making him the first sitting UK prime minister to be found guilty of breaking the law. The new details came in a report from the House of Commons Committee of Privileges, which published the evidence on which Johnson will be questioned when he appears before the panel later this year. The report says there was evidence indicating that Johnson may have misled Parliament about what he knew of the events in Downing Str...

The number of births registered in Japan plummeted to another record low last year – the latest worrying statistic in a decades-long decline that the country’s authorities have failed to reverse despite their extensive efforts. The country saw 799,728 births in 2022, the lowest number on record and the first ever dip below 800,000, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health on Tuesday. That number has nearly halved in the past 40 years; by contrast, Japan recorded more than 1.5 million births in 1982. Japan also reported a record high for post-war deaths last year, at more than 1.58 million. Deaths have outpaced births in Japan for more than a decade, posing a growing problem for leaders of the world’s third-largest economy. They now face a ballooning elderly population, along with a shrinking workforce to fund pensions and health care as demand from the aging population surges. Japan’s population has been in steady decline since its economic boom of the 1980s and stood...

Four members of the same family charged in connection with the gruesome killing of Hong Kong model Abby Choi appeared in court Monday, after police said they found what are believed to be parts of her dismembered body, public broadcaster RTHK reported. Choi’s ex-husband Alex Kwong, 28, his brother Anthony, 31, and their father, Kwong Kau, 65, are charged with her murder. Alex Kwong’s mother Jenny Li, 63, is charged with perverting the course of justice, RTHK reported. All four were denied bail, the Kowloon City Magistrates’ Court ruled Monday, according to RTHK. They are yet to enter a plea. On Sunday, investigators identified a skull, several ribs and hair, believed to be Choi’s remains, in a large stainless steel soup pot, police said. Other body parts, including Choi’s torso and hands, remain missing. It follows a police investigation that began Wednesday after Choi, 28, was reported missing. Two days later, parts of her body were found at a house in the city’s Tai Po district, poli...

Mexico is rethinking its approach toward asylum seekers after the Biden administration unveiled a controversial new proposal to limit asylum eligibility in the United States. Mexico’s refugee assistance agency, known as COMAR, launched a pilot program in southern Mexico on Monday to explore expediting asylum denials to those it deems likely to travel onward to the US. The aim is to deter those migrants from accessing temporary documents issued by COMAR while their cases are being evaluated, which they might use to travel north – a common phenomenon, according to COMAR’s head Andrés Ramírez. But after the Biden administration announced its proposed new asylum rules on Tuesday, COMAR plans to abandon the strategy and use what it learned from the pilot program to come up with a different solution, Ramírez said. The US proposal – which has been panned by human rights advocates and immigration experts – largely bars migrants who have not taken a legal pathway and instead traveled through ot...

Israel launched airstrikes targeting alleged weapons manufacturing and storage sites in Gaza on Thursday, following a rocket attack from the coastal enclave, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said. In a statement, the IDF said “fighter jets struck a weapons manufacturing site” in central Gaza owned by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza. “In parallel, a military compound belonging to the Hamas Terrorist Organization in the northern Gaza Strip which also was used as a naval weapons storage warehouse was struck,” the statement said. Earlier Thursday, the IDF said five rockets fired from Gaza toward Israeli territory, including the cities of Ashkelon and Sderot, were intercepted and another rocket fell in an open area. The airstrikes come after the deaths of at least 11 Palestinians in Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, which occurred during a raid by the Israeli military that also left at least 500 injured, Palestinian officials said Thursday. One of the dead t...