https://archive.is/OwZbW

Israeli strikes in Jabalia, northern Gaza, killed over 50 children in just 48 hours, the UN’s child relief agency, UNICEF, said in a statement on Saturday.

“This has already been a deadly weekend of attacks in North Gaza. In the past 48 hours alone, over 50 children have reportedly been killed in Jabalia, where strikes leveled two residential buildings sheltering hundreds of people,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.

Retired Jewish professor Haim Bresheeth, a child of Holocaust survivors and founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine, was arrested under a UK anti-terrorism law after speaking at a recent pro-Palestinian protest in London.

A report by Brown University’s Watson Institute reveals that since the beginning of the war, the US has spent more than $22 billion on military aid to Israel - from weapons and equipment to the deployment of aircraft carriers. Israel receives more U.S. military aid than any other country and is uniquely able to use that funding to spend on domestic goods.

The total amount of American aid since the start of the war is about NIS 85 billion ($22 billion) based on an average exchange rate by the Bank of Israel over the past year. Most has been delivered but about $5.2 billion will only arrive next year. According to official estimates from the Bank of Israel, the total cost of the war is estimated to be about NIS 250 billion ($65 billion), including around NIS 118 billion ($31 billion) for military costs including army operational costs, replenishment of military equipment, ammunition, and logistical support. Therefore, by a simple calculation, the U.S. has been funding about 70% of the war effort.

Indonesia and Russia have begun their first joint naval exercises, as Jakarta’s new leader Prabowo Subianto seeks a bigger role for the south-east Asian country on the global stage.

The exercises off the eastern coast of Java island, come just two weeks after Prabowo, a former general and defence minister, took over Indonesia’s presidency.

Prabowo has vowed to maintain Indonesia’s long-standing neutral foreign policy, but he is also seeking a more influential role for the world’s fourth-most populous country, whose natural resources have put it at the centre of global clean energy supply chains.

The five-day joint exercise will be conducted in Surabaya, a port in the east of Java, and its surrounding waters, the Indonesian navy said on Monday. Russia has brought four warships, one helicopter and one tug salvage ship for the exercise, it added.

Indonesia has held joint exercises with Russia in the past as part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but this week’s drills are the first bilateral effort between the two countries. Jakarta also holds annual joint exercises with the US and its allies.

As president-elect, Prabowo travelled to more than a dozen countries and met leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Last week, his administration announced its intention of joining the Brics grouping of major emerging economies that includes China and Russia.

“We consider Russia as a great friend,” Prabowo said in a statement after meeting Putin in July, calling to deepen ties with Moscow.

But Julia Lau, senior fellow and co-co-ordinator of the Indonesia studies programme at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, warned against interpreting the naval drills and overtures to the Brics bloc of emerging economies as evidence of a tilt towards China and Russia. As president-elect, Prabowo also met Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and France’s Emmanuel Macron.

Prabowo “is trying a balancing act vis-à-vis the US, China and Russia,” she said. The military drills with Russia are “part of the new administration’s strategy to show that they are not aligned with any great power”.

Archive link

Israel has officially notified the United Nations of its decision to cut ties with its agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) as another UN agency warns of an impending famine in genocide-ravaged Gaza.

In a statement on Monday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it cancelled a cooperation agreement from 1967 which provided the legal basis of the country’s relations with UNRWA.

UNRWA on Monday said Israel’s ban on its operations would lead to the “collapse” of humanitarian work in the war-torn Gaza Strip.

Aid groups have warned that Israel’s ban on UNRWA could create further obstacles to addressing a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel has said other UN agencies and aid groups can fill the gap, but those organisations insist UNRWA is essential.

Sounds like what every venue should be like to me! Can we just make every venue this? We can do it.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in war-torn Sudan have unleashed yet another depopulation campaign in the towns and villages of Gezira state, killing hundreds, looting, raping, and burning crops in the country’s breadbasket amid a famine that has engulfed over half the population.

“Never in modern history have so many people faced starvation and famine as in Sudan today,” according to UN experts. “Severe levels of hunger” affect more than 25 million people, including 97% of the over 11 million internally displaced people (IDPs). Along with the over three million others who have fled to neighboring countries, 30% of Sudan’s population has been displaced.

Adding to the largest displacement crisis in the world, the wave of attacks since October 20 has forced another 135,000 people to flee from the eastern region of the state, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on November 1.

The RSF, a paramilitary organization that has been at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for over a year and a half, invaded Gezira in December 2023. Attacking more than 2,000 villages this February, it had brought agriculture to a near halt in this state whose Nile-watered fields were producing over half of all Sudan’s wheat.

Most of these villages in the western vicinity of the Hasahisa, one of the main towns in the central part of Gezira, remain deserted, said Jamal (name changed) spokesperson of Hasahisa’s Resistance Committee (RC).

A network of RCs across Sudan was spearheading the mass protests against the military junta jointly led by the SAF and the RSF, before the allies turned on each other, hurling the country rocked by revolutionary turmoil into a civil war in April 2023. Since then, the RCs have been organizing and coordinating relief and rescue efforts for civilians caught in the war which has claimed well over 62,000 lives, according to a conservative estimate.

Gezira was a safe haven for those fleeing the fighting in the capital region of Khartoum, until the RSF’s invasion late last year. Following the attacks in February, the eastern area was the only safe region, Jamal said. Its market towns of Rufaa and Tamboul were “serving as the main suppliers of food for the entire state.”

The areas under attack in Gezira are expanding. On October 31, the RSF invaded homes, seized vehicles, looted gold and money, and gave residents a 24-hour ultimatum to desert the village of Mustafa Al-Qureshi in Al-Halawin.

The UN’s Secretary-General “is appalled by reports of large numbers of civilians being killed, detained and displaced, acts of sexual violence against women and girls, the looting of homes and markets and the burning of farms,” his spokesperson said on November 1.

That day, RSF depopulated another village in Al-Halawin, before launching attacks on other localities including Al-Kamlin and Hasahisa to the west and northwest of Tambul. Across Gezira, a total of 120 villages have been affected by RSF attacks since October 20, according to a joint statement by the RCs of Hasahisa and Rufaa on November 1.

Archive link

At least six people died after Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki in eastern Indonesia erupted late on Sunday, spewing explosive plumes of lava and forcing authorities to evacuate several nearby villages, officials said on Monday.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, located on Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province, erupted on Sunday at 11.57pm local time, belching a fiery-red column of lava, volcanic ash and incandescent rocks, Hadi Wijaya, a spokesman for The Centre of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, said on Monday.

“After the eruption, there was power outage and then it was raining and big lightning which caused panic among residents,” he said, adding that the authority had raised the status of the volcano to level IV or the highest.

The agency has recommended a 7km (4.35 miles) radius must be cleared.

The Disaster Management Agency lowered the known death toll from an earlier report of nine, saying it had received updated information from local authorities. Heronimus Lamawuran, a local official at East Flores area, said the eruption had affected seven villages.

The authorities are still gathering data on the number of evacuees and damaged buildings.

Indonesia sits on the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, an area of high seismic activity atop multiple tectonic plates.

This eruption follows a series of eruptions of different volcanoes in Indonesia. In May, a volcano on the remote island of Halmahera, Mount Ibu, caused the evacuation of people from seven villages.

Archive link

The EU gives one-third of its entire budget to farmers through its common agricultural policy (Cap), which hands out money based on the area of land a farmer owns rather than whether they need the support.

But strict privacy rules, weak transparency requirements and complex chains of company ownership mean little scrutiny has been possible of who gets the money. In a study commissioned by the European parliament’s budgetary control committee in 2021, researchers from the Centre for European Policy Studies (Ceps) found that it is “currently de facto impossible” to identify the largest ultimate beneficiaries of EU funding with full confidence.

Scientists have criticised "perverse incentives" in the Cap that push farmers to destroy nature. They estimate that 50%-80% of EU farming subsidies go toward animal agriculture rather than foods that would be better for the health of people and the planet.

"We need a rapid food transition for a healthier future and subsidies are the biggest economic lever for change," said Paul Behrens, a global change researcher at Leiden University, who was not involved in the study.

He said: "The inequality in the Cap is extreme and this work highlights again just how much the richest land-owners continue to get richer from subsidies. Although transparency in the Cap has improved over time, the amount of detective work needed to uncover how the public's tax money is spent is astonishing."

Archive link

Terrorism is a term that has found permanent usage in everyday life around the globe. Legal and political fields both use the word at leisure; counter terrorism is a rapidly growing field of work. It is therefore concerning that terrorism does not have a single universal definition under international law. Important terms used across international law usually are defined so that a threshold is set for their application. Leaving terrorism undefined means that there is no uniformity in national approaches to issues related to it. The United Nations currently has 19 instruments on ‘unlawful’ acts (rather than acts of terrorism). These are referred to as the anti terrorism conventions or protocols. In 1996, there was an attempt by the United Nations to unify international rules related to terrorism into one single instrument. The process did not lead to a satisfactory conclusion, leaving the attempt incomplete. However, it is high time that there is a set definition as the international community needs to be unified in the fight against terrorism as a global phenomenon. Countries of the Global South, such as Pakistan, need to be heavily consulted during the process as they have had extensive experience in the field that has led to some solid national definitions which the international community would greatly benefit from.

[...]

It's interesting how different countries are dealing and are effected by the declining worldwide birth rates. The most astounding statistic to me is that wildlife populations have dropped +70% over the past 50 years. Frankly, if humans think that we are in the right to drop wildlife populations by such a staggering amount, a slight drop in human populations only seems like a fair way to balance the scales.

Wang pointed out that in contrast to the EU's abrupt launch of an anti-subsidy investigation (into Chinese EVs) without any industry request, China's trade remedy probe into European brandy, pork, and dairy products were all initiated in response to applications from China's domestic industries in full compliance with WTO rules and Chinese laws.

Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24), and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.

Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.

Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.

Callum Parslow was convicted on 25 October of attempted murder after stabbing an asylum seeker at a hotel in April. It can now be revealed he was jailed in 2018 for targeting 10 women and girls with messages describing sexually motivated murder, torture and rape, and then changed his name after his release.

At the time, the 32-year-old was on bail and awaiting trial for his most recent offences against women, which followed a similar pattern to the abuse he was jailed for in 2018.

Parslow was targeting Mercy Muroki, a policy researcher and former GB News presenter, from multiple accounts under fake names on Facebook, Instagram and X.

Among the messages sent in July and August 2023 were videos of himself performing sexual acts and footage of a black woman being flogged. “The message he sent was about him fantasising that this would ­happen to me,” said Muroki, who has chosen to waive her anonymity.

Speaking to the Observer, Muroki said: “I said to the police: ‘This is clearly a very deranged person who is fixated on the far-right stuff and on me – do I need to be worried that he might escalate it to something in person?’

“They were kind of like: ‘Oh no, don’t worry.’ They said he seems like a bit of a loner, a bit of a saddo. That’s how they characterised him – just a sad person on a computer – whereas actually I feel that the content he had posted demonstrated it was way past some keyboard warrior stuff.”