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Lower-income American households are running out of money at the end of every month, the discount retailer Dollar General said as it released dismal results that drove its shares down more than 30 per cent for their sharpest one-day drop on record.

The largest US dollar store chain, with more than 20,000 locations across 48 states, painted a bleak financial picture for many of its customers after years of inflation and the depletion of savings built up during the pandemic. Shrink, an industry byword for inventory losses that includes shoplifting, was also on the rise, it added.

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In a move celebrated by pro-Palestinian activists as a win for the divestment movement and a “major victory” for Palestinian rights advocacy in the US, the San Francisco State University (SFSU) has pulled investments from four weapons companies involved in Israel’s war on Gaza.

Students for Gaza SFSU said the university will sell its corporate bond position in American aerospace and arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corporation, Italian defense company Leonardo, US-based data analysis enterprise Palantir Technologies, as well as construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar.

Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.

Now, leaked private messages purportedly sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to Salazar’s purported messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was apparently in close contact with the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state’s staggering descent.

Now, the tranche of hundreds of private messages show Salazar may have revealed sensitive information from the investigations, lending credence to allegations by Correistas that she engaged in a pattern of politically motivated actions, including aggressively pursuing cases against left-wing politicians while simultaneously delaying cases against more pro-U.S. right-wingers.

KIGALI/FUZHOU, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- It was pleasantly warm and dry in Rwanda in early August, and young farmers in Southern Province were celebrating a bountiful harvest. Their hands were not bunched with corn or rice but with mushrooms, cultivated with the help of a technology transferred from a country far away to this "land of a thousand hills" in Africa. (...) After decades of work, Lin and his team succeeded in selecting and breeding a type of high-yield, drought and salinity-resistant herbaceous plant that can be used as a substitute for wood to grow edible and medicinal mushrooms.

Throughout these years, Lin has faced gunpoint robberies, malaria, altitude sickness and long periods in remote outposts without electricity or water. Witnessing extreme poverty in developing countries further strengthened Lin's commitment to Juncao.

"We go to the poorest places with a genuine intent to help the people," Lin stated.

Lin noted that around 4,000 Rwandan households have benefited from the technology, with some experiencing their incomes double or even triple over the years.

The President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas, has accepted an invitation from Russian President Vladimir Putin to participate in the upcoming summit of the BRICS group. The information was confirmed by the Palestinian ambassador to Moscow, Abdel Hafiz Nofal, who stressed that PA President Mahmoud Abbas accepted the invitation to participate in the BRICS summit to be held in the Russian city of Kazan.

Nofal pointed out that it has not yet been defined whether the Palestinian representation will be occupied by Abbas himself or whether Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa will participate in his place. But he stressed the importance of Palestinian representation at the event, regardless of who ultimately attends on behalf of the PNA.

The invitation to Abbas to participate in the BRICS summit and the group's endorsement of Palestinian membership in the UN highlight the growing interest and support of these countries for the Palestinian cause in a context of rising tensions in the Middle East.

Israel has banned coverage of the damage inflicted by Hezbollah strikes deep inside the occupied territories early August 25, Western media say.

The Telegraph, quoting sources, reported that the Benjamin Netanyahu regime issued a censorship decree, requiring reporters to obtain permission before publishing “damage caused by rocket attacks to strategic infrastructure or to military bases” to avoid “harm to Israeli forces on the ground.“

According to a report by the state-run British media outlet BBC, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah, is expected to produce evidence that rockets hit targets in Israel.