Bangladesh celebrates Durga Puja with a record 33,851 mandaps

Israeli settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats visiting Palestinian olive harvesters near the town of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, according to witnesses and European officials.

The settlers surrounded the diplomats' vehicles, threw stones and smashed a window, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Ramallah reported. Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said the attackers targeted Belgium's consul general, French and Polish diplomats and Catholic representatives, that a French mayor was assaulted and that a Belgian vehicle was damaged. He linked the violence to Israel's settlement policy and said he would push for further European Union sanctions.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, said Bernard Baudoux, the mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries in northern France, was "violently assaulted by extremist settlers" and called on Israel to end what he described as criminal violence. Baudoux told AFP the episode suggested a tolerance within the Israeli government towards settler violence.

Suleiman Khourieh, the mayor of Taybeh, a Christian town north of Jerusalem, said the attackers beat a Palestinian teenager, pushed an older woman and scuffled with the visiting French mayor. "This violence shows nobody is protected - not Palestinians, not journalists and not diplomats," he said.

The assault came a day after settlers beat a group of Palestinians and Heidi Levine, a longtime photographer for The Washington Post, with bats and sticks north of Ramallah. The 63-year-old was in moderate condition after surgery, Beilinson Hospital in central Israel said, with a broken rib, lacerations and a serious cut on one hand.

The attacks have spread across the West Bank during the olive harvest. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said four women and a child were among six people injured when settlers attacked residents of Ma'in village in the Masafer Yatta area, south of Hebron. In Deir Ammar, west of Ramallah, Israeli forces opened fire on farmers picking olives; in the same area settlers shot and wounded two Palestinians. In Kafr Malek, northeast of Ramallah, the mayor said settlers raided a farm at dawn and killed about 20 sheep. Near Nablus, settlers were reported to have destroyed olive trees on the Beit Furik plain.

Al Jazeera's Nour Odeh reported that settlers have advertised attack campaigns on social media and that about 300 attacks have been documented since the start of October, a heavy blow in a key season for Palestinian farmers. She said danger came from both soldiers and settlers, with troops routinely intervening to protect settlers.

The violence followed a religious edict by Rabbi Dov Lior, a prominent figure in National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power party, who wrote that Jews are permitted to harvest olives even far from Jewish communities to publicly assert ownership of the land.

Israeli police opened an investigation into Saturday's attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disputed accounts of the settler assault on the diplomats and alleged a smear campaign, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. Israel holds elections on 27 October.

Researchers at Dhaka University have built an internet-connected trap that uses artificial intelligence to identify and count Aedes mosquitoes, the species that spreads dengue, in an effort to spot rising populations before outbreaks take hold.

The device, called MAST-CloudNet, was developed jointly by the university's Microsystems and Nanoengineering Lab in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Mueed Research Group in the Department of Zoology. The university's Public Relations Office announced it in a statement, and the work was published on 8 October in the journal IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

The trap copies the wingbeat sound of a female mosquito, playing frequencies of 350 to 500 hertz to draw in males. A small fan pulls the approaching insects onto yellow adhesive paper, where a built-in camera photographs them. Those images are sent to a cloud server, and an AI model identifies the species and counts the catch in real time, with results shown on a web dashboard.

Because male mosquitoes mature earlier and stay close to breeding sites, a rise in trapped males can act as an early warning that dengue risk is building, the researchers say. The conventional approach requires staff to empty traps and separate Aedes specimens in a laboratory, which is slow and labour-intensive.

In laboratory tests, the sound-based trap caught nearly five times as many Aedes mosquitoes as a similar trap without sound. During a three-day trial on the Dhaka University campus it caught 49 Aedes mosquitoes, or 83.1 per cent of everything it trapped, while a silent control trap caught just one. The device kept working through heavy rain, strong winds and ordinary campus noise.

The AI still made mistakes outdoors: it correctly identified 35 of the 49 Aedes, a rate of just over 71 per cent. Each unit costs about Tk 12,000 to build and can run on battery for roughly four and a half hours during a power cut.

The research was led by Md Ahsan Habib, an associate professor of electrical and electronic engineering; Professor Saeed Mahmud Ullah of the same department; and Khandaker Ashfaqul Muid, an associate professor of zoology. A master's student, Atique B Zakir, spearheaded the project.

Habib told New Age the system would give the authorities timely information on where Aedes mosquitoes are present and how their numbers are changing, helping them prioritise the removal of breeding sites and check whether interventions are working. He said the outdoor trial showed the idea was feasible but that larger studies were needed.

Asked why the trap targets males when only females transmit dengue, Habib acknowledged that catching males does not stop already-mated females from reproducing or spreading the virus. The trap is meant for surveillance, he said, and male counts alone cannot predict an outbreak.

The team plans to install 10 to 15 devices in residential areas of Dhaka South City Corporation in June and July 2027, aiming to improve the AI's outdoor accuracy, weather protection and long-term reliability. They will also explore solar power and more reliable internet connections.

The work comes during a severe dengue season in Bangladesh, with the health directorate reporting 90 deaths in the first 16 days of October alone.