The United States has asked China to urge Tehran to rein in Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea but has seen little sign of help from Beijing, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing US officials.The US has repeatedly raised the matter with top Chinese officials in the past three months, the report said.

An UNRWA training center sheltering tens of thousands of displaced people has been hit on Wednesday with buildings ablaze and mass casualties, Thomas White, the Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza said on X."Safe access to/from the center has been denied for two days, people are trapped," he added.

Pope Francis has issued a new plea against all wars as he evoked the horror of the mass killing of Jews and other victims of the Nazis ahead of Saturday's Holocaust Memorial Day."The memory and condemnation of that horrible extermination of millions of people...may help everybody to not forget that the logic of hatred and violence can never be justified," he said during his Wednesday weekly audience."Let us not get tired of praying for peace, for conflicts to end, for weapons to stop, for relief for exhausted populations," Francis added.The leader of the world's more than 1.35 billion Roman Catholics mentioned the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the bombing of civilians in "martyred Ukraine."He repeated his assertion that "war is always a defeat" in which "the only winners, so to speak, are weapons manufacturers."