WASHINGTON — The U.S. military-built pier designed to carry badly needed aid into Gaza by boat has been reconnected to the beach in the besieged territory, and food and other supplies will begin to flow soon, U.S. Central Command announced Friday.

The section that connects to the beach in Gaza, the causeway, was rebuilt nearly two weeks after heavy storms damaged it and abruptly halted what had already been a troubled delivery route.

Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters by phone that operations at the reconnected pier will be ramped up soon with a goal to get 1 million pounds of food and other supplies moving through the pier into Gaza every two days.

The pier was operational for a week before a storm broke it apart May 25 and had initially struggled to reach delivery goals. Weather was a factor, and early efforts to get aid from the pier into Gaza were disrupted as civilians desperate for food stormed the trucks that aid agencies were using to transport the food to the warehouses for distribution.

However, before it broke apart, the pier had been gradually increasing aid movement each day. Cooper said the lessons learned from that initial week of operations made him confident that higher levels of aid throughout could be attained.

The maritime route for a limited time had been an additional way to help get more aid into Gaza because the Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah has made it difficult, if not impossible at times, to get anything through land routes that are far more productive. Israel’s military operations in Rafah and military strikes in northern Gaza also temporarily halted U.S. airdrops of food.

Cooper said the U.S. expects to resume those airdrops in the coming days.

PM in India: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was formally elected Friday as the leader of the National Democratic Alliance coalition, which won the most number of seats in the country’s national election after his political party failed to win a majority on its own.

The 73-year-old, who will be sworn in as prime minister Sunday for a rare third term, will now form a coalition government.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP has governed India as part of the NDA coalition over the past decade, but this is the first time under his leadership that the party has needed support from its regional allies to form a government.

“This alliance of ours reflects India’s spirit in its true sense,” Modi said after the BJP and coalition members backed him as their prime ministerial candidate. “We were neither defeated nor are we defeated ... it was an NDA government in the past, still is and will be.”

Full results from India’s six-week election, which began in mid-April, were released Wednesday. The BJP won 240 seats; 272 are needed for a majority. Together, the parties in the NDA coalition bagged 293 seats in the 543-member lower house of parliament.

Meanwhile Modi’s political challenger, the INDIA alliance led by the Congress party, won 232 seats.

Fuhrman badge stripped: Former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, who was convicted of lying on the witness stand in the O.J. Simpson trial three decades ago, is now barred from law enforcement, under a California police reform law that took effect in 2023 meant to strip the badges of police officers who act criminally or with bias.

Fuhrman, who is white, was one of the first two detectives sent to investigate the 1994 killings of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. The slayings and Simpson’s trial exposed divisions on race and policing in America.

Fuhrman reported finding a bloody glove at Simpson’s home, but his credibility came under withering attack during the trial as the defense raised the prospect of racial bias.

Fuhrman retired from the LAPD after Simpson’s 1995 acquittal, and at age 72, his return was doubtful. The decertification was likely meant to make clear that California will not tolerate such officers.

D-Day apology: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak apologized Friday for leaving D-Day commemorations in France early to return to the election campaign trail.

Sunak, who is fighting to keep his job in the July 4 election, was not alongside world leaders for the major memorial event Thursday at Omaha Beach in Normandy. Former Prime Minister David Cameron, who is now foreign minister, represented the United Kingdom.

Sunak had attended a ceremony at the British memorial in Normandy alongside King Charles III and surviving World War II veterans, and a commemoration in Portsmouth, England, the day before.

Sunak wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion that helped free Europe from the Nazis “should be about those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. The last thing I want is for the commemorations to be overshadowed by politics.”

“On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay in France longer — and I apologise.”

Sunak insisted he “stuck to the itinerary” that had been laid out for him for D-Day weeks before he called the election.

Pandemic-aid convictions: A jury convicted five Minnesota residents and acquitted two others Friday for their roles in a scheme to steal more than $40 million that was supposed to feed children during the coronavirus pandemic. The case received widespread attention after someone tried to bribe a juror with a bag of $120,000 in cash.

That juror was dismissed before deliberations began, and a second juror who was told about it also was dismissed. An FBI investigation of the attempted bribe continues, with no arrests announced.

The seven people are the first of 70 to stand trial in what federal prosecutors have called one of the nation’s largest COVID-19-related frauds, exploiting rules that were kept lax so that the economy wouldn’t crash during the pandemic.

Record fish consumption: The total global volume of fish, shrimp, clams and other aquatic animals that are harvested by farming has topped the amount fished in the wild from the world’s waters for the first time, the United Nations reported Friday.

The Food and Agriculture Organization, in its latest report on fisheries and aquaculture — or farming in water — says the global catch and harvest brought in more than 185 million tons of aquatic animals in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Experts say the milestone had been expected, as the hauls from fisheries have largely stagnated over the past three decades — largely because of limits in nature.