Can international justice stop Israel?
There is growing pressure to hold Israel to account for its war on Gaza. It has been more than three months since Israel launched its devastating war on Gaza. Nearly 25,000 Palestinians have now been killed, and tens of thousands more injured. Many countries have rejected Israel’s actions – and South Africa has taken it to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of committing genocide. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, even became the subject of criminal complaints in Switzerland. Meanwhile, Mexico and Chile have referred Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC). But will any of this make a difference? Presenter: Elizabeth Puranam Guests: Lara Elborno – International lawyer and human rights advocate who co-hosts the weekly podcast, The Palestine Pod William Schabas – Professor of international law at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom Jennifer Cassidy – Lecturer in diplomacy and international law at the University of Oxford and a former UN and EU diplomat Adblock test (Why?)
At least 13 students killed in China school fire: State media
The victims were identified as third-grade students from an elementary school in Henan province, according to reports. A fire has ripped through a dormitory in a boarding school in central China, killing 13 students, state media reported. One student was injured in the blaze at Yingcai School in Henan province’s Yanshanpu village, the Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday. The victims were identified as third-grade elementary school students. A teacher told the state-run Hebei Daily that all of them were from the same class of nine and 10 year olds. Firefighters managed to swiftly extinguish the blaze, which was reported at 11pm (15:00 GMT) on Friday and the head of the school was taken into custody while the authorities were investigating the cause. The injured survivor was being treated in hospital and reported to be “in stable condition”, according to Xinhua. China National Radio reported that some windows on the school’s dormitory building were smashed and published photos showing police cordoning off a nearby area. Yanshanpu village lies on the outskirts of Nanyang, a city of nearly 10 million. Little information about the boarding school is publicly available, though social media videos published earlier showed young children including kindergarteners wearing smocks with the school’s logo as well as older children learning calligraphy. The private boarding institution with a kindergarten and an elementary school gives students a break every two weeks, but not this weekend, reported The Paper, a news outlet supported by the Shanghai government. Many of Yingcai’s students are from rural areas, it said. ‘Too scary’ On Saturday, Chinese social media users expressed outrage about the fire and called for any safety lapses to be punished. “It’s too scary, 13 children from 13 families, all gone in an instant … if there is no severe punishment their souls will not rest in peace,” one commenter on the Weibo social media site wrote. China frequently experiences fires and other fatal accidents, largely attributed to lenient safety standards and inadequate enforcement. In November, 26 people died and dozens were sent to hospital after a fire at a coal company office in northern China’s Shanxi province. Eleven people died in July after the roof of a school gym collapsed in the country’s northeast. In April, a hospital fire in Beijing killed 29 people and forced desperate survivors to jump out of windows to escape. After the coal company fire in November, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the country to “conduct in-depth investigations of hidden risks in key industries, improve emergency plans and prevention measures”. Adblock test (Why?)
The US plan to revamp the Palestinian Authority is doomed to fail
For two months now, the United States and other Western countries, backing Israel, have been talking about “the day after” in Gaza. They have rejected Israeli assertions that the Israeli army will remain in control of the Strip and pointed to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as their preferred political actor to take over governance once the war is over. In so doing, the US and its allies have paid little regard to what the Palestinian people want. The current leadership of the PA lost the last democratic elections held in the occupied Palestinian territory in 2006 to Hamas and since then, it has steadily lost popularity. In a recent public opinion poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), some 90 percent of respondents were in favour of the resignation of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and 60 percent called for the dismantling of the PA itself. Washington is undoubtedly aware of the low public trust in the PA, but there is a reason why it insists on supporting its takeover of Gaza: its leadership has been a reliable partner for decades in maintaining a status quo in the interests of Israel. The US would like that arrangement to continue, so its backing for the PA may be accompanied by an attempt to revamp it in order to solve its legitimacy problem. But even if this effort succeeds, it is unlikely the new iteration of the PA would be sustainable. A reliable partner Perhaps one of the main factors that has convinced the US that the PA is a “good choice” for post-war governance in Gaza is its anti-Hamas stance and willingness to conduct security coordination with Israel. Since the commencement of the conflict between Israel and Gaza on October 7, the PA and its leadership have not issued an official statement offering explicit political support for the Palestinian resistance. Their rhetoric has predominantly focused on condemning and disapproving of attacks on civilians on both sides, while also rejecting the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. In a political address on the ninth day of the war, Abbas criticised Hamas, asserting that their actions did not represent the Palestinian people. He emphasised that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and underscored the importance of peaceful resistance as the only legitimate means to oppose Israeli occupation. This statement was later retracted by his office. In December, Hussein al-Sheikh, a PA official and secretary-general of the executive committee of the PLO, also criticised Hamas in an interview with Reuters. He suggested its armed resistance “method and approach” has failed and led to many casualties among the civilian population. The stance of the PA is consistent with its own narrow political and economic interests which have come at the expense of the Palestinian national cause. It has systematically and brutally stamped out any opposition and any support for other factions, including Hamas, in order to maintain its rule over West Bank cities while Israel continues with its brutal occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people. In Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008–2009, the PA leadership hoped to regain administrative control of Gaza with assistance from Israel. During that conflict, the PA prohibited any activities in the West Bank in support of Gaza and threatened to arrest participants. I, myself, faced harassment and the threat of arrest for attempting to join a demonstration against the war. Similar positions were adopted by the PA, albeit with less aggressive measures, in subsequent Israeli assaults on Gaza, as its leadership came to recognise that Hamas was unlikely to relinquish its control over the Strip. Since October 7, the PA has taken a bolder stance, marked by more aggressive actions. Its security forces have suppressed demonstrations and marches held in support of Gaza, resorting to shooting live ammunition at participants. Additionally, the PA has recently detained individuals expressing support for the Palestinian resistance. While cracking down on Palestinian protests, the PA has done nothing to protect its people from attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian communities, which have resulted in deaths, injuries and the displacement of hundreds of people in the occupied West Bank. Additionally, the Israeli army has intensified its raids in the PA-administered areas, leading to the arrest of thousands and the killing of hundreds of Palestinians, with no reaction from the PA. The PA’s inability to offer basic protection has added to the deterioration of its legitimacy among Palestinians. Furthermore, by taking a stance against the Palestinian resistance and aligning itself with Israel and the US, the PA is only further undermining its own legitimacy. PA 1.0 and PA 2.0 Washington is aware of the growing unpopularity of the PA and its leadership among Palestinians but it is not giving up on it because it seems to believe that that can be fixed. That is because the US has tried to revamp the authority before as it has always faced problems with legitimacy due to the way it was set up. As a governing institution, the PA was established to bring an end to the first Intifada. Conceived under the interim peace agreements in Oslo, it was envisioned as an administrative body to oversee civil affairs for Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and certain parts of the West Bank, excluding occupied East Jerusalem. It effectively took on a role as an Israeli security contractor in exchange for certain benefits related to administering Palestinian population centres. The PA faithfully fulfilled its mandate, carrying out routine arrests and surveillance of Palestinian individuals, whether they were involved in actions against Israel or were activists opposing its corrupt practices. Thus, Israel strategically benefitted from the establishment of the PA, but the same cannot be said for the Palestinian people, as they continued to experience the ravages of a military occupation. Despite this, the PA under Yasser Arafat – or what we can call PA 1.0 – leveraged patronage and corruption to maintain some level of support. Notably,
Dominican Republic to trial four-day work week: Can it work globally?
In February, the Dominican Republic will become the first Caribbean nation to test a four-day work week, following similar trials in countries such as the United Kingdom. The six-month pilot will be voluntary for companies and will not involve a pay cut for participating employees. Growing calls for a shorter work week have stemmed from COVID-19-era discussions and anecdotes that long and in-person work hours do not necessarily guarantee higher productivity. So what is the four-day work week trial in the Dominican Republic, and has it had success elsewhere? What is the Dominican Republic’s four-day work week trial? Beginning in February, organisations in the Caribbean nation can choose whether to implement a six-month-long trial of a four-day work week. The standard week will drop to 36 hours from 44 hours, typically running from Monday through to Thursday. Employees will continue to earn the same salaries. Some of the companies expected to participate in the trial run include the government’s national health insurance agency; power company EGE Haina; Claro, a Latin American telecommunications company; and IMCA, a heavy equipment business. A local university has been tasked with analysing the results, including any health changes in workers and the relationship between work and their personal lives. How does a four-day work week actually … work? In a four-day work week, the workload typically remains the same. But companies, managers and their teams are forced to prioritise even more than they otherwise have to, cutting out, perhaps, some meetings. But there’s something else too that a four-day week model must emphasise, according to the Dominican Republic’s Labour Minister Luis Miguel de Camps. “It prioritises people, improving health and wellbeing, and promoting a sustainable and environmentally friendly productivity,” said de Camps. Where has a four-day work week been trialled — and what happened? Several countries around the world have tested or legislated a four-day work week, particularly since COVID-19, which reignited conversations around workplace flexibility, productivity, and work-life balance. In 2023, the UK launched what is considered the largest trial of a four-day work week and found positive results. A total of 61 companies joined the trial, and 56 extended it, with 18 making the switch permanent. About 2,900 employees were part of the pilot in the UK. Surveys taken before and after the trial found reduced stress levels within staff. More than half of the surveyed employees said it was easier to balance work and home responsibilities, while 40 percent also said they were sleeping better. Some of the other benefits that emerged from the UK trial included: Employees ended up taking less sick leave since they had more time to physically and mentally recuperate from work and associated stress. Gender parity improved. Men contributed more to household and family tasks when they had three-day weekends. In Japan, where death by overwork killed close to 3,000 people in 2022, larger companies such as Microsoft have tested the four-day work week and found positive results. Are there other success stories? Iceland trialled a shorter work week between 2015 and 2019. Approximately 2,500 public sector employees participated in it. The results: Workers were less stressed, and productivity did not suffer. The trial, that Iceland’s labour unions renegotiated contracts for more than 85 percent of the country’s workforce to reduce work hours. But are all four-day work weeks the same? In February 2022, Belgium became the first European country to legislate a shorter work week. Employees can choose to work four days a week instead of five, without losing their salary. But there’s a catch: They must still work 40 hours. In other words, those who choose the four-day work week must work 10 hours a day. In 2021, the United Arab Emirates government announced that all public sector organisations would operate for four and a half days per week. However, employees in the country still spend some of the highest hours at work, at an average of 52.6 hours per week per employed person. How about going longer rather than shorter? In India, recent calls for a 70-hour week have sparked heated debate. In 2023, Narayana Murthy, the iconic co-founder of Indian multinational technology company Infosys, made the recommendation saying it could boost productivity and the country’s economy. India’s economy is already the fastest-growing among G20 nations. And Indians already work an average of 47.7 hours a week, which is higher than the 36.4 average in the United States or 36.6 in Japan, according to the International Labour Organisation. In China, some firms practice a “996” work culture, in which employees work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The average work week, however, is 46.1 hours. Still, Murthy suggested that the younger generation is not hardworking enough. “India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. Our youngsters must say: This is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week,” he said during a podcast. India’s labour unions have hit back at Murthy’s comments. Adblock test (Why?)
Sudan suspends membership in IGAD regional bloc
DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY, Announcement by army-aligned foreign ministry comes after it accused bloc of ‘violating’ country’s sovereignty by inviting RSF chief to a summit. The government of war-ravaged Sudan says it has suspended its membership in the East African regional bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The announcement on Saturday was made by the foreign ministry, which is loyal to army chief and Sudan’s de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group have been fighting for nine months in a vicious war that has killed thousands of people and displaced more than seven million. The government had already announced this week that it was freezing its relations with IGAD ahead of a meeting of the bloc in Uganda on Thursday after it had invited RSF head Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo to the gathering. It accused the bloc of “violating Sudan’s sovereignty” and setting a “dangerous precedent”. IGAD, in parallel with the United States and Saudi Arabia, had repeatedly attempted to mediate between the two warring parties, but to no avail. This is a developing story. More to come… Adblock test (Why?)
‘I don’t want him to die this way’: Uganda’s hidden disabled children
Namazala, Jinja District, Uganda – The home of Joy Nangobi sits on the edge of Namazala village. Its front is open to the main road and thoroughfare that carries trucks loaded with sugar cane harvested from the fields surrounding it. Its back yard is small and fenced by the tall, dense cane. Two goats sit idle in the yard as three neighbourhood children play around them. Laundry hangs neatly drying over a wood stack beneath an overcast mid-morning sky. From a small outside kitchen, Joy slowly tugs her 20-year-old daughter Katherine “Kat” Muwunguzi by the wrist across the hard clay, Kat’s knees grinding the sharp rocky earth to the storeroom she now sleeps in. The walls are covered in a thin layer of red dust, the floor scattered with wood chips beneath a steel bed rusted and lacking a mattress. A filthy, tattered blanket is the only barrier between Kat’s lithe body, the cold night air and malaria. Joy wrenches Kat up to the bed’s edge, her arms and head flailing. Kat’s legs are twisted unnaturally beneath her as she sits on its edge, her smile childlike as she puts her hand inside her mouth. She is instructed not to move and Joy leaves the room and shuts the door behind her, to resume cooking the midday meal. The sleeping quarters of 20-year-old Katherine Muwunguzi who lives with an undiagnosed intellectual disability and is frequently violent towards her mother, Joy Nangobi [Christopher Hopkins/Al Jazeera] Kat lives with an intellectual disability and what is assumed by her mother to be epilepsy. Her intellectual disability has never formally been diagnosed, she can’t talk and is prone to acts of violence. “When we went to a government facility [hospital], that was when they told us she has mental issues and to go away.” Joy’s despair is clear as she explains through an interpreter: “At one point when in the process of taking her to the hospital she would bite my husband seriously. At one point, he was even forced to throw her after a strong bite.” The stigma of people with intellectual disabilities is fuelled by a cultural belief that they are ‘cursed’ Kat has a four-year-old son, Edwin, though she isn’t aware that she is the boy’s mother. When Kat began to show at seven months and she was confirmed to be carrying Edwin, their next-door neighbour disappeared. Joy and her husband Robert Balina, workers on the sugar cane plantations, suspect their next-door neighbour raped Kat in the sooty outdoor kitchen while they slept inside. He has never been charged. This family dynamic means that Joy raises Edwin, but not as her own. She is determined to teach Edwin that Kat is his mother. Joy Nangobi, the mother of Katherine Muwunguzi, becomes emotional as she recounts her daughter’s story [Christopher Hopkins/Al Jazeera] “We are trying our level best to try and create a relationship between the child and his mother, but she doesn’t have anything that she cares about given her mental situation. “We always tell this child [Edwin] that no matter the condition of your mother, she is your mother. Every time we try to ask him, just to find out, if he remembers who his mother is, and if you ask him, he says – ‘the one who is mentally disturbed is my mother’.” Kat is among an estimated one in four adults with a psychosocial or intellectual disability in Uganda to have been the victim of sexual assault. But rape is only one of a raft of human rights abuses this minority face due to their vulnerability. The stigma of people with intellectual disabilities is fuelled by a cultural belief that they are “cursed”. Restrictive practices such as restraint, tethering and forced seclusion are common. In Uganda, people living with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities are often considered a burden on society. While NGOs and local experts in the field of intellectual disability cite a lack of education and awareness as being the major hurdles to overcoming the cultural taboo around such disabilities within communities, they also say the government has failed to prioritise funding. But a small corner of society has taken up the challenge and is providing a sliver of hope to those like Joy and Kat. Adblock test (Why?)
Argentina arrests, deports family of Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive
Drug boss Jose Adolfo Macias is at large after escaping from an Ecuadorean prison, triggering wave of gang violence. The wife and children of Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive, drug kingpin Jose Adolfo Macias, were arrested in Argentina and have been deported to Ecuador. The Los Choneros gang leader, known as “Fito”, escaped from a prison in the port city of Guayaquil this month, leading to a surge in gang violence across Ecuador that prompted President Daniel Noboa to declare a 60-day state of emergency in the country, which is home to 17.8 million people. Argentina’s security minister Patricia Bullrich said: “We are proud that Argentina was a hostile territory for a group of drug dealers who could’ve come to settle here. Mr Fito had a sentence of 38 years and he escaped, leaving a trail of blood and death in Ecuador.” Fito’s wife Mariela Macias, her three children, a nephew, a family friend and a nanny were deported, Bullrich told a news conference on Friday. Mariela arrived in Argentina two weeks ago just before her husband escaped. In December, they bought a house in an exclusive neighbourhood of Cordoba, in central Argentina, in cash. The authorities were still investigating whether Fito only sent his family to Argentina or if he was or is in the country, Al Jazeera’s Latin America editor Lucia Newman reported from Buenos Aires. Soldiers stand guard outside Simon Bolivar airbase in Guayaquil after the wife and children of fugitive drug trafficker Jose Adolfo Macias were deported to Ecuador from Argentina [Vicente Gaibor del Pino/Reuters] Cordoba official Juan Pablo Quinteros said the family’s temporary residence permit had been cancelled, allowing the authorities “to detain them and expel them from the country”. Interior minister Guillermo Francos said: “Argentina will not be a den for criminals.” Fito escaped on January 7 from a prison in Guayaquil where he was serving time for various crimes, including drug trafficking and murder. Authorities have tied Los Choneros to extortion, murder and drug trafficking and accuse the group of controlling Ecuador’s crime-plagued and overcrowded prisons. Under the state of emergency declared after Fito disappeared, the military was deployed onto the streets and a nationwide nightly curfew was mandated. Incidents in January alone have included an on-air attack by armed men on a TV station, the taking of more than 200 prison officials hostage and the kidnapping of police officers, as well as the murder of a prosecutor pursuing organised crime. Adblock test (Why?)
Israeli strike hits residential building in Damascus: Syrian state media
BREAKINGBREAKING, Deaths reported as attack targets the Mazzeh neighbourhood, several where diplomatic missions are located. Syrian state media says a suspected Israeli strike has hit a residential building in Damascus, without giving additional details. The attack took place in the Mazzeh neighbourhood in the west of the Syrian capital on Saturday, it added. The neighborhood is home to several diplomatic missions, including the Lebanese and Iranian embassies. According to a well-informed source, the target was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence unit, adding that a senior IRGC intelligence official in Syria and his assistants were in the building. The source, speaking to Al Jazeera, added that this attack could be in retaliation for the IRGC attack on a Mossad safe house in Erbil. The attack killed five people in a building where “Iran-aligned leaders” were meeting, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based organisation that relies on a network of sources on the ground. “An Israeli missile strike targeted a four-storey building, killing five people… and destroying the whole building where Iran-aligned leaders were meeting,” said the group. Syrian State-TV reported that the “Israeli aggression” targeted the building. Widening tensions The strike comes amid widening tensions in the region and the Israeli offensive on Gaza that has killed thousands. Last month, an Israeli air strike on a suburb of Damascus killed Iranian general Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria. Israel has also targeted Palestinian and Lebanese operatives in Syria over the past years. Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years. Israel rarely acknowledges its actions in Syria, but it has said that it targets bases of Iran-allied groups, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has sent thousands of fighters to support Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces. Earlier this month, a strike said to be carried out by Israel killed top Hamas commander Saleh Arouri in Beirut. Over the past weeks, rockets have been fired from Syria into northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, adding to tensions along the Lebanon-Israel border and attacks on ships in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Adblock test (Why?)
Hijacking truth: How OSINT in Gaza fell prey to groupthink
Ten days into Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, a few seconds of footage showing a projectile exploding in the night sky became the centre of a furious debate. Israel claimed that the clip, captured by an Al Jazeera livestream at 18:59:50 on October 17, showed that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible for the deadly blast at al-Ahli Arab Hospital that occurred five seconds later. Investigations by Al Jazeera and the New York Times showed that the projectile in question had nothing to do with the hospital tragedy. But, by then, the theory that the blast had been caused by a Palestinian rocket had taken on a life of its own, endorsed by open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers and commentators lured by groupthink and confirmation bias. This matters. Before the conflict, OSINT journalism was already well established, bringing new rigour to reporting of events in places like Cameroon, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. Organisations like Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture won plaudits for restoring the primacy of fact over opinion, helping to expose war crimes. In Gaza, the trend has peaked. International media, locked out of the conflict zone, have been increasingly dependent on open source materials, including footage from Al Jazeera, the only global media organisation with a consistent presence in Gaza throughout the war. There have been notable OSINT breakthroughs – including by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit Sanad, which disproved Israel’s claim of a Hamas tunnel under al-Shifa Hospital, and showed how Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza on Israel’s instructions were killed while on the very “safe routes” that Israeli forces had told them to take. But, as the al-Ahli hospital episode illustrates, the war has also presented new challenges for the rapidly expanding field. To understand how OSINT practitioners have stumbled in this war, Al Jazeera spoke to Idrees Ahmad, associate editor at New Lines Magazine and director of journalism at the University of Essex. (Al Jazeera) Al Jazeera: You’ve written about how open source research has reinvigorated war reporting. It seems to have occupied an especially important place in Gaza, with open source pundits attracting huge mainstream attention online. Your thoughts? Idrees Ahmad: The OSINT landscape has changed quite a bit over the years. In the case of Syria, the OSINT community was doing very rigorous work, associated with unlocking war crimes investigations. But in Gaza, something opposite is happening. We’ve seen anonymous accounts posting speculative information, giving it the form and aesthetics of OSINT, but without the rigour. This information spreads fast, becoming a kind of groupthink, which makes it very difficult for anybody to swim against. Al Jazeera: Let’s unpack what happened with al-Ahli. Why is it noteworthy? Idrees Ahmad: Al-Ahli was significant. The important thing was that it happened in the context of many similar attacks on hospitals. The justification was that the hospitals were either being used to launch attacks or being used as headquarters by Hamas. Interestingly, the immediate assumption among media was that Israel did it. Al Jazeera: Yes. Can you describe how the tide then turned? Idrees Ahmad: It started with a couple of anonymous OSINT accounts, which had the appearance of precision and rigour associated with OSINT. So one analysed the Al Jazeera livestream of the projectile exploding midair, suggesting that the coordinates of that rocket were right over the hospital, which clearly supported the theory that a Palestinian rocket had exploded in the air and then caused the explosion on the ground. Another took separate footage, reaching the same conclusion. Al Jazeera: Wasn’t there also lots of focus on the OSINT visuals of the hospital car park, with the crater that appeared too small for an air strike? Idrees Ahmad: Yes, after the initial anonymous accounts put out their theory, suddenly everyone started jumping in to speculate that Israel’s version of events was correct. It triggered a kind of groupthink where everyone was engaging in speculation and deductive logic to substantiate that theory without any physical proof. Al Jazeera: Can you be more specific? How did the groupthink develop? Idrees Ahmad: Yes, obviously none of us witnessed the strike directly. But we do know that the perceived rigour of the OSINT people became the basis for a theory based on error. One of the things that happens when so-called experts get quoted is that their reputation gets tied to a theory, which is then endorsed by other experts. So it got to the point where a respected figure in the OSINT community shared this Wall Street Journal video which claimed to have multiple angles on the rocket and very conclusively said that it caused the explosion. And as the NYT investigation proved, this was certainly not the case. Wounded Palestinians sit in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, after arriving from al-Ahli hospital following an explosion there, on Tuesday, October 17, 2023 [Abed Khaled/AP Photo] Al Jazeera: Yes, this was major, right? The NYT was saying the ‘rocket’ wasn’t Palestinian at all. It was an object launched from near an Iron Dome centre in Israel that exploded a couple of miles away from al-Ahli. Surely a reason for returning to the drawing board? Idrees Ahmad: The thing is, once the New York Times came out and debunked the Israeli assertion that the projectile in the Al Jazeera video had caused the explosion, people started looking for new rationalisations to hold onto their conclusion. That’s the essence of conspiracy theory. Al Jazeera: So what’s the upshot of all this? Idrees Ahmad: It raises serious questions about these very confident judgements. There was no rush to admit that they got it so royally wrong. Or to maybe suspend judgement until there was an investigation or something. AP, for example, had published its own open source investigation, basically regurgitating the extant theories, using the same group of eager experts. Once the story collapsed, it simply turned to a new group of experts – smaller and more obscure – willing to endorse the ‘failed rocket’ thesis. The thing is, it’s successfully
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 696
These are the main developments as the war enters its 696th day. Here is the situation on Saturday, January 20, 2024. Fighting Ukraine has attacked an oil depot in western Russia, where four oil reservoirs with a total capacity of 6,000 cubic metres (212,000 cubic feet) caught fire, a Ukrainian security services source told the AFP news agency. The attack targeted the facility in Klintsy, about 70km (45 miles) from the Ukrainian border. An official in Ukraine’s intelligence service claimed Ukrainian drones attacked a gunpowder mill in Russia’s Tambov, local media has reported. Russian shelling in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region has killed a 57-year-old woman and a man was killed by a land mine, the Ukrainian president’s office confirmed. The Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukrainian border cancelled its traditional Orthodox Epiphany festivities on Friday due to the threat of Ukrainian drone strikes. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said that landmines are once again surrounding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which is in Russian hands. Mines at Europe’s largest nuclear facility had been removed in November by the United Nations nuclear watchdog. Ukrainian rescuers work in a residential building damaged after an attack in Kupiansk, Kharkiv region [File: Ukrainian Emergency Service/AFP] Diplomacy and politics The European Union has said it will drastically increase ammunition production this year in response to Ukraine’s growing pleas for support in its war against Russia. The EU also aims to impose a new round of sanctions on Russia next month to mark the second anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the AFP news agency and Bloomberg News reported. The bloc has already hit Russia with 12 rounds of sanctions. Finland does not see any immediate military threat from Russia, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said at a news conference with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. “We in Finland sleep peacefully at night because we are well prepared,” Orpo said. Ukraine has called on Western nations to stop Russia from sourcing key parts for its own weapons production. The Kremlin has said there is no prospect of reviving the Black Sea grain deal – which was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey – and that alternative routes for shipping Ukrainian grain carried huge risks. The lower house of Russia’s parliament plans to formally ask France’s National Assembly if it is aware that French mercenaries have been fighting on Ukraine’s side. France has denied the allegations, calling them a “disinformation” plot. A court in Siberia sentenced a truck driver to 19 years in prison for shooting a military enlistment officer in 2022, while prosecutors in Saint Petersburg asked for a 28-year sentence for a woman charged in the bombing of a cafe last April that killed a prominent military blogger, with both cases underscoring the tensions in Russian society over the war. Adblock test (Why?)