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What South Africa really won at the ICJ

What South Africa really won at the ICJ

Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes: For those with long memories, the seed of South Africa’s case against Israel—accusing it of genocidal acts in the Gaza Strip—might be traced to a spring day nearly 50 years ago. On Apr. 9, 1976, South Africa’s white supremacist prime minister, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, was welcomed with full red-carpet treatment to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The moment, for those who knew the prime minister’s past, was incongruous. A former Nazi sympathizer who had proudly…

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No justification or excuse could ever cover up this horror of 11,500 children killed in Gaza

No justification or excuse could ever cover up this horror of 11,500 children killed in Gaza

Gideon Levy writes: Two hundred and sixty names of babies whose age was 0; names of babies who didn’t get to celebrate their first birthday, nor will they ever celebrate anything else. Here are some of their names: Abdul Jawad Hussu, Abdul Khaleq Baba, Abdul Rahim Awad, Abdul Rauf al-Fara, Murad Abu Saifan, Nabil al-Eidi, Najwa Radwan, Nisreen al-Najar, Oday al-Sultan, Zayd al-Bahbani, Zeyn al-Jarusha, Zayne Shatat. What dreams did their parents have for them? Then there are hundreds of…

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CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’

CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’

The Guardian reports: CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinians perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza. Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on…

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Hamas returns to reestablish order in parts of northern Gaza

Hamas returns to reestablish order in parts of northern Gaza

The Associated Press reports: In a sign of Hamas’ resilience despite Israel’s deadly air and ground campaign in the past four months, four residents and a senior official in the militant group said it has begun to resurface in areas where Israel withdrew the bulk of its forces a month ago, deploying police officers and making salary payments to some of its civil servants in Gaza City. Four Gaza City residents told The Associated Press that in recent days, police…

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Biden needs to stand up to Netanyahu

Biden needs to stand up to Netanyahu

Jonathan Martin writes: Biden aides have clearly absorbed the blowback they got from even friendly Democratic lawmakers for making no mention of Palestinian suffering in official statements they issued marking 100 days since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Indeed, it’s hard to overstate how contemptuous even staunchly pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers have become of Netanyahu. One House Democrat told me of a dinner last month with about eight other colleagues, a cross-section of the caucus ideologically and generationally. “It…

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Police in Dearborn, Michigan, put on alert after WSJ opinion piece

Police in Dearborn, Michigan, put on alert after WSJ opinion piece

Reuters reports: President Joe Biden on Sunday denounced anti-Arab rhetoric in response to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece targeting Dearborn, Michigan, that the mayor called “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.” The WSJ published the piece on Friday headlined as “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,”, suggesting the city’s residents, including religious leaders and politicians, supported Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and extremism. The column drew outrage from Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, as well as several U.S. lawmakers and rights advocates from the…

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What has happened to the rule of law in India?

What has happened to the rule of law in India?

Vaibhav Vats writes: On December 11, India’s supreme court upheld ending the constitutional privileges of the Indian-controlled province of Kashmir, a disputed region claimed by both India and Pakistan. The decision was a sobering example of the Indian judiciary’s creeping servility in the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Just as India’s vibrant, secular democracy is transforming into an authoritarian, ethnonationalist state, the supreme court, once vaunted for its fierce independence, is failing to stand up for the rule of…

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‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza

‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza

CNN reports: Hanadi Gamal Saed El Jamara, 38, says sleep is all that can distract her children from the aching hunger gnawing at their bellies. These days, the mother-of-seven finds herself begging for food on the mud-caked streets of Rafah, in southern Gaza. She tries to feed her kids at least once a day, she says, while tending to her husband, a cancer and diabetes patient. “They are weak now, they always have diarrhea, their faces are yellow,” El Jamara,…

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Over 800 officials in U.S. and Europe sign letter protesting Israel policies

Over 800 officials in U.S. and Europe sign letter protesting Israel policies

The New York Times reports: More than 800 officials in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza. The letter is the first instance of officials in allied nations across the Atlantic coming together to openly criticize their governments over the war, say current and former officials who are organizing or supporting the effort. The officials say that it…

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Domicide, the mass destruction of homes, should be identified as a crime against humanity

Domicide, the mass destruction of homes, should be identified as a crime against humanity

Balakrishnan Rajagopal writes: We all understand that killing can be a murder, a war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide, depending on the gravity and intention of the act. The same should apply for the destruction of homes. In Gaza, we are witnessing destruction that is overwhelming in terms of its scale and impact, and far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in…

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How Broadway helped Irgun’s Zionist terrorists in their war against British rule

How Broadway helped Irgun’s Zionist terrorists in their war against British rule

In a letter to the New York Times published on December 2, 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and 26 other leading American Jews wrote: Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the…

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The polling ‘disaster’ that’s starting to terrify Team Trump

The polling ‘disaster’ that’s starting to terrify Team Trump

Rolling Stone reports: In the middle of last year, several of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, including some of his 2024 campaign’s senior staff, started noticing an ominous trend in independent polling and in internal Republican survey data: A significant share of swing voters in key states — even some Republicans — say they would not want to vote for a freshly-convicted criminal. The trend spooked them enough that, in recent months, some of these officials and political allies have directly…

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‘I will be a first minister for all’: Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill marks historic moment for north of Ireland

‘I will be a first minister for all’: Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill marks historic moment for north of Ireland

The Observer reports: The chamber’s ornate ceiling remained blue, red and gold, and Portland stone still held up the Stormont edifice, but the beaming Sinn Féin faces declared this was a historic moment for Irish nationalism. Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister in a day of symbolism and pomp that restored devolved government and etched an epitaph on the tomb of what was once a unionist state. The union endured – Northern Ireland remains part of the…

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Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Any oscillator — a pendulum, a spring, a firefly, a human heart cell — wants to match up with its neighbors. Mathematicians recently showed that synchronization is inevitable in expander graphs, a type of network found in many areas of science. https://t.co/SM4cUWupJf pic.twitter.com/rINEz3lTuf — Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) February 3, 2024 Leila Sloman writes: Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled…

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