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At least 40 were killed after missiles struck a tent camp in Khan Younis, Gaza Civil Defense officials said. The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas operatives.

(Washington Post gift article, no paywall)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13189597

Hypocrisy, thy name is liberal democracy?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20134225

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20134224

by Mariam Barghouti

Sep 09, 2024

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent encampment designated as a humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, Gaza officials said early on Tuesday, in what the Israeli military said was an attack on a Hamas command centre.

A Gaza civil defence official told Agence France-Presse that 40 people were killed in the attack inside the Al-Mawasi camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Earlier, the civil emergency service said airstrikes on a tent camp for displaced Palestinians killed and wounded 65 people in the southern part of the strip, but did not break down the number of dead and injured.

Residents and medics said the tent encampment in the al-Mawasi area was struck by at least four missiles. The camp is crowded with displaced Palestinians who have fled from elsewhere in the enclave.

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Thailand will distribute 145 billion baht (US$4.2 billion) of its "digital wallet" handout programme earlier than scheduled to support vulnerable groups, a deputy finance minister said on Monday (Sep 9), stressing the need for short-term economic stimulus.

In remarks during a budget debate in the Senate, Julapun Amornvivat said the government has prepared 450 billion baht (US$13.29 billion) in total for its signature handout programme, which seeks to stimulate economic activity by transferring 10,000 baht to 50 million Thais to spend in their localities.

The measure, which was scheduled for rollout in the last quarter of this year, is the cornerstone of Thailand's plans to jumpstart Southeast Asia's second-largest economy, which grew 2.3 per cent in the second quarter.

The handout scheme has been criticised by economists including two former central bank governors as fiscally irresponsible. The government rejects that, but has struggled to find sources of funding.

It insists the policy is necessary to energise the economy, which the central bank expects to grow just 2.6 per cent this year, up from 1.9 per cent in 2023 and far adrift of most regional peers.

Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa want international criminal court to class environmental destruction as crime alongside genocide

Three developing countries have taken the first steps towards transforming the world’s response to climate breakdown and environmental destruction by making ecocide a punishable criminal offence.

In a submission to the international criminal court on Monday, they propose a change in the rules to recognise “ecocide” as a crime alongside genocide and war crimes.

If successful, the change could allow for the prosecution of individuals who have brought about environmental destruction, such as the heads of large polluting companies, or heads of state.

A bridge collapsed and a bus was swept away by flooding in Vietnam on Monday, raising the death toll in the Southeast Asian country to at least 64 from a typhoon and subsequent heavy rains that also damaged factories in export-focused northern industrial hubs, state media reported.

Nine people died on Saturday after Typhoon Yagi made landfall in Vietnam before weakening into a tropical depression. The rest died in the floods and landslides that followed on Sunday and Monday, state media VN Express reported.

The water levels of several rivers in northern Vietnam were dangerously high.

A bus carrying 20 people was swept into a flooded stream by a landslide in mountainous Cao Bang province on Monday morning. State media said four bodies were recovered from the bus and one person was rescued alive. The others were still missing.

Former Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Monday after being convicted of four counts of sexual assault in attacks on women in his Toronto office building that in some cases date back for decades.

The 11-year sentence is reduced to take into account time he has already spent behind bars. Nygard has about 6.7 years left to serve and will be eligible for full parole after one-third of that.

Nygard, 83, was found guilty by a Toronto jury on four counts of sexual assault last November. He was acquitted of a fifth count of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement.

Toronto police laid their own charges against him about a year later. Nygard also faces charges of sexual assault and forcible confinement in Manitoba and Quebec.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado tried to reassure supporters Monday that her coalition still hopes to gain control of the presidency despite the departure into exile of their candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.

Machado’s group maintains that it has evidence that González won the July 28 presidential election by a wide margin against Venezuela’s authoritarian incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, despite his claim to have won.

Machado told an online meeting Monday of opposition leaders, reporters and others that her group still hopes to see Maduro leave office in January, even if for voters those hopes seem increasingly tenuous since González’s decision to flee into exile to Spain over the weekend.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri has said that the spread of disease and Israel’s “starvation campaign” in Gaza is “killing more people than bombs and bullets”.

He added that the damage inflicted by famine “is going to be carried by Palestinians for several generations in the future”.

His comments follow his new report to the UN General Assembly last week, in which he detailed how Israel has used starvation in Gaza “with the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinian people”.

It explained that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s food system, including the poisoning and destruction of agricultural land, and the destruction of ports and fishing vessels served to make the entire population dependent on humanitarian aid.

Israeli diplomats are being instructed to lobby members of the US Congress to pressure South Africa into dropping its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Pretoria is calling on the world court to label Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.

"We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price," read a cable from Israel's foreign ministry to its embassy and all consulates in the US.

According to Axios, the Israeli diplomats were also told to push for legislation against South Africa at the state and federal levels in the US, with the foreign ministry stating that "even if they won't materialize, presenting them and talking about them will be important" in influencing the African nation's policy.

After three years extracting plastic waste from the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an environmental nonprofit says it can finish the job within a decade, with a price tag of several billion dollars.

Twice the size of Texas, the mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii is growing at an exponential pace, according to researchers.

Ukraine’s low-budget tech wizardry has stunned Western audiences since the war’s outset. Soldiers operating out of front-line garages have modified donated artillery, rehabbed captured weapons, amped up off-the-shelf drones, and coded software to streamline it all.

. . .

As Russia’s war carries on into its third year, the Ukrainian government has tried to promote investment both from abroad and domestically into the defense tech startups for its current wartime arsenal and a prospective peacetime cash cow — particularly as global venture capital has gone gung-ho on weapons.

But money has been painfully slow to come in from abroad. The average weapons firm in Ukraine faces stout financial barriers from all sides — reactionary policy at home where the central bank has put measures in place to prevent capital flight, and abroad, where major insurers and investors won’t touch either Ukraine or defense.

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Israeli jets have launched a substantial strike on targets in Syria, killing at least 25 people, according to an opposition war monitor that said it was one of the most violent such attacks in years.

The main target appeared to be a military research centre in Masyaf associated with Syria’s chemical and ballistic missiles programme, but explosions were also heard in Damascus, Homs and Tartus. Syrian state media had put the death toll at 16 with 40 wounded.

The attack on Sunday night struck targets associated with pro-Iranian militias as well as the “scientific research facility” near Hama, reportedly run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

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Australian police are working with their international counterparts to locate a man they believe fled the country after pouring boiling coffee on a baby in Brisbane.

The random attack - which occurred last month and has shocked the nation - left the nine-month-old boy with “serious burns” to his face and limbs.

Queensland Police have issued an arrest warrant for a 33-year-old wanted over acts intending to cause grievous bodily harm, a charge which carries a possible life sentence.