ECU-Temple Gameday: Pirates face Temple in final game of regular season

Authorities in China’s western Xinjiang region have opened up some neighborhoods in the capital of Urumqi after residents held extraordinary late-night demonstrations against the city’s draconian “zero-COVID” lockdown that had lasted more than three months. The displays of public defiance were fanned by anger over a fire in an apartment compound that had killed 10, according to the official death toll. Emergency workers took three hours to extinguish the blaze in a delay many attributed to obstacles caused by anti-virus measures. Some Urumqi residents had their doors chained physically shut. Many in the city believe such brute-force tactics may have prevented residents from escaping in Friday’s fire and that the official death toll is an undercount.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has resigned as head of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party following local election losses suffered by her party. Tsai offered her resignation on Saturday evening, a tradition after a major loss, in a short speech in which she also thanked supporters. She said she will shoulder the responsibility as she had hand-picked candidates in Saturday’s elections. Voters in Taiwan overwhelmingly chose the opposition Nationalist party in several major races across the self-ruled island. Chiang Wan-an, the Nationalist party’s mayoral candidate, won the closely watched seat in capital Taipei. Lingering concerns about threats from rival China, which claims Taiwan as its territory, took a backseat to more local issues.

Far from Doha’s luxury hotels and sprawling new World Cup stadiums, scores of South Asian workers poured into a cricket ground in the city’s sandy outskirts to enjoy the tournament they helped create. Their treatment has been the controversial backstory of the 2022 World Cup, ever since Qatar won the bid to host the soccer championship. Headlines have been filled with reports of their low wages, inhospitable conditions and long hours, often in the scorching heat. But on Friday night as the Netherlands played Ecuador, the bleachers of the cricket stadium heaved with workers reveling on their one day off of the week.

Heavy rainfall triggered landslides early Saturday on the southern Italian island of Ischia that collapsed buildings and left as many as 12 missing. The mayor of Naples was quoted by the news agency ANSA as saying one body had been recovered on the island. He was speaking on the margins of a city event. There was earlier confusion over the death toll after Italian Vice Premier Matteo Salvini said in Milan that eight had been confirmed dead. The interior minister later said that no deaths had yet been confirmed, while 10-12 were missing. The minister, Matteo Piantedosi, told RAI state TV that “probably some of those people are under the mud.”

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a televised address has praised paramilitary volunteers tasked with quashing dissent. Meanwhile, a pro-reform Iranian news site said Saturday that 140 ophthalmologists have expressed concern over a rising number of people blinded after being shot by security forces with metal pellets. Khamenei met with the paramilitary Basij group and reiterated unsupported claims that the mass anti-government protests are a foreign plot devised by the U.S. to destabilize Iran. He said the protesters were mercenaries. Khamenei's comments came a day after Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi met with the Basij and praised their efforts to maintain security.

Ukrainian authorities are endeavoring to restore electricity and water services after recent pummeling by Russian military strikes that vastly damaged infrastructure. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said millions have seen their power restored since blackouts swept across the war-battered country days ago. Skirmishes continued Saturday in the east and residents from the southern city of Kherson have headed north and west to flee after punishing, deadly bombardments by Russian forces in recent days. The strikes have been seen as attempts at Russian retribution against Ukraine’s beleaguered but defiant people after Ukrainian troops over two weeks ago liberated the city that had been in Russian hands for many months.

World Cup host Qatar sits in a region that is warming faster than anywhere else on earth besides the Arctic. The wealthy Gulf Arab nation has been able to pay for extreme adaptive measures so far like outdoor air-conditioning to mitigate the effects of rising temperatures in some areas. Qatar has inched forward in recent years with climate pledges. But the transition away from hydrocarbons will not be simple for one of the world's largest producers and exporters of natural gas.