Sufyan Jaber Abed Jawwad, a sanitation worker with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, was the first Unrwa employee killed in the West Bank in more than a decade.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20310478

By Dania Akkad

Published date: 13 September 2024 19:12 BST

[...] BBC World Service has seen documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13315099

On the streets of Iranian cities, it’s becoming more common to see a woman passing by without a mandatory headscarf, or hijab, as the second anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini and the mass protests it sparked approaches. 

There’s no government official or study acknowledging the phenomenon, which began as Iran entered its hot summer months and power cuts in its overburdened electrical system became common. But across social media, videos of people filming neighborhood streets or just talking about a normal day in their life, women and girls can be seen walking past with their long hair out over their shoulders, particularly after sunset.

It’s almost as if the threat of long range missiles is scaring the shit out of Russia.

I hope NATO reply that if Russia turns Kiev into a melted spot, Moscow will follow. But to be fair it’s all ego saber rattling.

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday seized about $3 million from bank accounts belonging to social media platform X and satellite-based internet service provider Starlink, both companies controlled by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

The move by Justice Alexandre de Moraes was aimed at collecting funds that are equivalent to the amount that X owes to the country in fines. The bank accounts of the two companies have since been unfrozen.

Legal analysts have questioned de Moraes’ prior decision to freeze Starlink’s bank account to pay for cases related to X. While Musk owns both X and SpaceX, which operates Starlink, the two companies are separate entities.

When school started this year for Mikalay in Belarus, the 15-year-old discovered that his teachers and administrators no longer called him by that name. Instead, they referred to him as Nikolai, its Russian equivalent.

What’s more, classes at his school — one of the country’s best — are now taught in Russian, not Belarusian, which he has spoken for most of his life.

Belarusians like Mikalay are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow expands its economic, political and cultural dominance to overtake the identity of its neighbor.

It’s not the first time. Russia under the czars and in the era of the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus. But with the demise of the USSR in 1991, the country began to assert its identity, and Belarusian briefly became the official language, with the white-red-white national flag replacing a version of the red hammer and sickle.

Britain and the US have raised fears that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine.

During their summit in Washington DC on Friday, Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden acknowledged that the two countries were tightening military cooperation at a time when Iran is in the process of enriching enough uranium to complete its long-held goal to build a nuclear bomb.

British sources indicated that concerns were aired about Iran’s trade for nuclear technology, part of a deepening alliance between Tehran and Moscow.

The United States on September 13 said the Russian news outlet RT is taking orders directly from the Kremlin and working with Russian military intelligence to spread disinformation around the world to undermine democracies.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has gathered new evidence that exposes cooperation between RT and four other subsidiaries of the Rossia Segodnya media group, and it intends to warn other countries of the threat of the disinformation.

In addition to RT, Rossia Segodnya operates RIA Novosti, TV-Novosti, Ruptly, and Sputnik, but the announcement on September 13 focused largely on RT. The outlet, formerly known as Russia Today, has previously been sanctioned for its work to allegedly spread Kremlin propaganda and disinformation.

Russian officials have threatened that a possible decision by the West to allow Kyiv to use donated weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory would result in a major escalation of its war against Ukraine that could include the use of nuclear weapons.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, warned on September 14 that Kyiv could be turned into a "gray melted spot" if restrictions against Ukraine's use of Western weapons were loosened.

• Brazil’s supreme court said Friday that it ordered funds to be moved from Starlink and X bank accounts to pay fines levied against Elon Musk’s social media venture.
• Following the transfers, the court ordered that the seized bank accounts and assets of X and Starlink be unfrozen, saying there was no longer any need to keep them. 
• The use of X has been suspended in Brazil since late August.

Shukran Karisa Mangi always showed up drunk at work, where he dug up the bodies of doomsday cult members buried in shallow graves. But the alcohol couldn’t numb his shock the morning he found the body of a close friend, whose neck had been twisted so severely that his head and torso faced opposite directions.

This violent death upset Mangi, who had already unearthed children’s bodies. The number of bodies kept rising in this community off Kenya’s coastline where extremist evangelical leader Paul Mackenzie is accused of instructing his followers to starve to death for the opportunity to meet Jesus.

In one of the deadliest cult-related massacres ever, at least 436 bodies have been recovered since police raided Good News International Church in a forest some 70 kilometers (40 miles) inland from the coastal town of Malindi. Seventeen months later, many in the area are still shaken by what happened despite repeated warnings about the church’s leader.

What was once a gathering to commemorate the Ashaninka has evolved into a showcase of what they have done: the village’s self-sufficiency, which comes from growing crops and protecting its forest, is now a model for an ambitious project to help 12 Indigenous territories in western Amazon, amounting to 640,000 hectares (1.6 million acres), about the size of the U.S. state of Delaware.

In November, the Organization of Indigenous People of the Jurua River, known by the Portuguese acronym OPIRJ, secured $6.8 million in support from the Amazon Fund, the world’s largest initiative to combat rainforest deforestation. With Apiwtxa as the model, the grant is geared toward improving Indigenous land management with an emphasis on food production, cultural strengthening and forest surveillance.

More than 100 Ukrainian prisoners of war will be able to return to their families after an exchange of captured members of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces.

The prisoner swap on Saturday, mediated by the United Arab Emirates, involved 206 military personnel from both countries.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that of the 103 Ukrainian “warriors” who were released, 82 were soldiers and privates and 21 were officers, including police officers and border guards.

Photographers captured the moment that the smiling and emotional Ukrainians, wrapped in their country’s flag, embraced their fellow soldiers after being swapped at an unknown location in Ukraine.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20297056

Patrick Wintour

Diplomatic editor

Fri 13 Sep 2024 11.38 EDT

The “inhumane” treatment of migrants rounded up in a “futile” operation for the now scrapped Rwanda scheme, has been laid bare in testimonies from Home Office staff that reveal force was used against distressed detainees.

Dozens of migrants facing removal to Rwanda under the previous Conservative government were detained as part of a surprise initiative, Operation Vector, launched days before the 2 May local elections in England and Wales in what critics say was an “act of political theatre”.

Home Office accounts show the department paid out £56.8m in compensation for more than 2,700 wrongful detentions in the five years before the Rwanda raids.

(Fran Heathcote, general secretary for the Public and Commercial Services union) added: “What also concerns us is the likelihood Rishi Sunak knew full well the Rwanda scheme was futile and causing distress to individuals but continued to push it ahead of the general election to make a political point.”

China's new home prices fell at the fastest pace in more than nine years in August, official data showed on Saturday, as supportive measures failed to spur a meaningful recovery in the property sector.

Germany has agreed to open the doors to 250,000 skilled and semi-skilled Kenyan workers in a controlled and targeted labour migration deal. 

Kenya is struggling with increasing difficulties in providing work and sufficient income for its young professionals, while Germany is facing a shortage of skilled labour. 

Five Kenyan bus drivers have already been welcomed to Flensburg, in the north of Germany, in a pilot project. 

Migration agreements are a central pillar in the German government's efforts to curb immigration.