Music: Anomalie — ‘Parc’
Leaders of Jordan, France and Egypt: Cease fire now in Gaza
King Abdullah II, Emmanuel Macron and Abdel Fatah El-Sisi writes: The war in Gaza and the catastrophic humanitarian suffering it is causing must end now. Violence, terror and war cannot bring peace to the Middle East. The two-state solution will. It is the only credible path to guaranteeing peace and security for all, and ensuring that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis ever have to relive the horrors that have befallen them since the Oct. 7 attack. On March 25,…
Germany is accused of complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza
Germany has been accused of aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza, in a case before the UN’s top court. It was brought by Nicaragua and calls for emergency measures to stop Germany from selling weapons to Israel. It also wants Berlin to restore funding to the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. Nicaragua’s lawyer had harsh words for the dual role Germany’s playing in what the ICJ’s already ruled to be a plausible case of genocide. Al Jazeera’s senior…
Elizabeth Warren says she believes Israel’s war in Gaza will legally be considered a genocide
Politico reports: Sen. Elizabeth Warren believes international officials could find that Israel’s assault on Gaza legally constitutes a genocide, she said during an event at a local mosque last week. “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Warren (D-Mass.) said Friday while taking audience questions during an event at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts. A video…
IRC President on delivering aid to Gaza: ‘We need a paradigm shift’
This week Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the Israeli attack on a World Central Kitchen envoy an ‘inflection point’. President of the International Rescue Committee David Miliband tells Ali Velshi that what is really needed is a ‘paradigm shift’ to get more aid into Gaza. ‘Aid workers have a legal right to go about their business without being killed. This couldn’t be more serious.’
The disappeared of Gaza: tens of thousands missing in territory since start of war
The Guardian reports: Late one night in March, Ahmed Abu Jalala rose quietly, trying hard not to wake his family, sleeping around him on the floor of a UN-run school in northern Gaza. The 54-year-old father knew his six children needed food, but after months of war there was none. Little aid reached Jabaliya, where they had been staying since fleeing their small home in the early weeks of the conflict, and his children had been reduced to eating wild…
Trump’s RNC takeover triggers strife and staff exits as purge partly backfires
The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s allies installed to run the Republican National Committee have faced a tumultuous first month in charge, buffeted by staffing problems and operational headaches as they attempt to bring the party apparatus under the control of the Trump campaign before the 2024 election. The internal strife at the RNC has prompted the Trump campaign to privately admonish its new leaders in recent weeks. And the move to orchestrate a purge may have partly backfired with far-reaching…
The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change
Donna Ferguson writes: Shortly after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, in 1859 he started reading a little-known 100-year-old work by a wealthy French aristocrat. Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages [of his book] are laughably like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words.” In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,…
Music: Anomalie & Rob Araujo — ‘Hang Glide’
‘The war in Gaza is over, but the state of war is not,’ says retired general Israel Ziv
David Horovitz writes: Is this how the war ends? Not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with the IDF pulling its ground forces out of Khan Younis, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant asserting, in defiance of reality, that Hamas has “stopped functioning as a military organization throughout the Gaza Strip,” contradicting himself in the next breath, and clarifying a few hours later? As Israel on Sunday marked six months since the October 7 massacre, the two prime declared…
‘Unprecedented in modern history’: U.S. aid experts warn Gaza likely already experiencing famine
HuffPost reports: A group of U.S. government humanitarian experts on Tuesday privately warned fellow officials that the spread of hunger and malnutrition in Gaza amid the U.S.-backed Israeli offensive is “unprecedented in modern history,” famine is likely already occurring in parts of the Gaza Strip and the pace of hunger-releated deaths will “accelerate in the weeks ahead.” The striking assessment was shared in a cable drafted by officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development and sent to the White…
José Andrés frustrated it took foreign aid workers’ deaths to spark international outrage over Gaza
HuffPost reports: “There’s way too many cases now of humanitarians dying ― many civilians, women, children that the only thing they did was trying to get close by, to somewhere that they were giving them flour or bread,” Andrés told Martha Raddatz on Sunday during ABC’s “This Week.” "This doesn't seem a war against terror. This doesn't seem anymore a war about defending Israel. This really, at this point, seems it's a war against humanity itself," José Andrés tells @MarthaRaddatz…
Miriam Margolyes: Israel has become a ‘vicious, genocidal, nationalist nation’
The indomitable Miriam Margolyes OBE has a message in support of the Jewish Council! She calls for all of us Jews to “shout, beg, scream for a ceasefire” pic.twitter.com/UgwRSusq84 — Jewish Council of Australia (@jewishcouncilAU) April 5, 2024
Gaza’s carnage through the eyes of Palestinian photojournalists
Rolling Stone reports: On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Israel began its siege on Gaza that same day. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently asked photojournalists to share images, taken in Gaza during the war, that they want the world to never forget. Each image is accompanied by a personal text from the photographer, explaining the context and their emotions as they took these photographs….
Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine
The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump has privately said he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory, according to people familiar with the plan. Some foreign policy experts said Trump’s idea would reward Russian President Vladimir Putin and condone the violation of internationally recognized borders by force. Trump’s proposal consists of pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia, according to people who discussed it with Trump…
Hundreds of new species discovered on Africa’s isolated sky islands
GrrlScientist writes: Located in southeastern portion of Africa in the nations of Malawi and Mozambique, there lies a chain of mountains, or granitic inselbergs, that tower above the surrounding landscape. They were formed millions of years ago when the Earth’s crust pushed upward and torrential rainfall cut through and washed away the soil, leaving patches of forest perched atop granite mountain peaks, separated from lower elevations. These inselbergs comprise an “inland archipelago” or “sky islands”, if you prefer, that are…