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We lack water, electricity, fuel, and our besieged services are staggering under the massive numbers of injured. No one is safe ... The bombardment of Gaza is now constant. My nine-year-old asked me if he would go to heaven or hell Mahmoud Shalabi We lack water, electricity, fuel, and our besieged services are staggering under the massive numbers of injured. No one is safe Here in Gaza, what is happening under Israeli military bombardment has never been seen before. Homes are being destroyed without residents being warned. Israeli missiles are hitting high-rise buildings, mosques, streets – and we are asking...

The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians. On 7October, the National SecurityCouncil spokesperson Adrienne Watson stated that the US “unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians”. Every one of us must stand up and denounce the killing of every civilian, Israeli or Palestinian or otherwise. But Watson’s use of the word “unprovoked” is doing a lot of work here.... What exactly counts as a provocation? Not, apparently, the large number of settlers, more than 800 by one media...

It’s happened. The eco-crazies in the liberal media are trying to mesh climate change and the pandemic into one big fear porn monstrosity. The Guardian released a nutty story Oct. 18 propagandizing how “[t]he next pandemic may come not from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice, according to new data.” The liberal outlet tried to frighten readers into believing in the imaginary specter of climate COVID: “The findings imply that as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, it becomes more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local...

Andrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine. On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead. “We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.” That place was Lysychansk, one of the most...

At least 11 people were killed and 15 more wounded at a military training ground in the Belgorod region in south-western Russia on Saturday when two volunteers opened fire on other troops, the Russian defence ministry has said. .. According to Baza, a Russian news site with close ties to the police, the shooting took place at 10am local time during shooting practice. Saturday’s mass shooting points to growing tensions among Russia’s troops, issues that have plagued its army since the start of the war. The incident also comes as tens of thousands of newly drafted Russian men are sent...

Western officials are engaged in “prudent planning” behind the scenes to prevent chaos and panic in their home countries in the event Russia was to detonate a nuclear bomb in or near Ukraine. Although a nuclear crisis is considered highly unlikely, the insider said officials internationally were re-examining plans to provide emergency support and reassurance to populations fearful of nuclear escalation. Hints of the thinking emerged in a briefing by an official on Friday, who was asked if there would be measures in place to prevent panic buying or people fleeing cities en masse in fear of escalation after a...

Key figures including Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin are using military defeats to undermine defence chief Sergei Shoigu. Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine. The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats...

The Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea, a hated symbol of the Kremlin’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian peninsular, has been hit by a massive explosion on the span that carries railway traffic. Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke. The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place around 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge, although it was not immediately clear what caused it. Some images appeared to show a...

After Russia’s chaotic retreats in Kherson – less than a week after Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Ukrainian province alongside three others – the region’s Moscow-appointed governor, Kirill Stremousov, sought to calm the mood. Far from a rout, the withdrawal was a tactical “regrouping” to “deliver a retaliatory blow”, Stremousov said on Wednesday. His comments – among the first public admissions of Russia’s retreats in Kherson – attempted to mask what even many vocal supporters of the war now say: the situation is the most dire the Russian army has found itself in since the start of the invasion seven...

Two women in Russia-annexed Crimea, including Miss Crimea, have been found guilty of discrediting the Russian army by singing a patriotic Ukrainian song in a video posted on social media, local authorities have said. Olga Valeyeva, who won the Miss Crimea 2022 beauty pageant, and an unnamed friend sang the popular Ukrainian Chervona Kalyna song on a balcony. A video of the women singing was posted on Instagram ...."A video was published on the internet in which two girls performed a song that is the fighting anthem of an extremist organisation,” Crimea’s interior ministry said on Telegram on Monday. It...

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has appeared to concede the severity of the Kremlin’s recent military reversals in Ukraine, insisting Russia would “stabilise” the situation in four Ukrainian regions it illegally claimed as its own territory last week. Russia has suffered significant losses in two of the four regions since Friday, when Putin signed treaties to incorporate them into Russia by force, with Russian officials saying their forces were “regrouping”. “We are working on the assumption that the situation in the new territories will stabilise,” Putin told Russian teachers during a televised video call. With Ukraine pushing its advance in...

The Guardian is upset that Giorgia Meloni, very likely set to become Italy’s first woman prime minister, is opposed to gender quotas and “sexualised” herself during the election. In an article harping on the fact that the national conservative leader “posted [a] sexualised clip of herself during [the] election campaign, favours curbs on abortion and is against ‘pink quotas’” by Rome correspondent Angela Giuffrida, the British newspaper appeared irate that she believed “roles should be achieved through merit, not gender”. The “sexualised” video — a joke social media post uploaded after electioneering was officially closed of a fully-clothed Meloni holding...

A neo-Nazi pro-Kremlin group active in Ukraine is inciting atrocities against prisoners of war and explicitly advocates the torture of captives including “removing body parts”. The self-styled “Task Force Rusich” is fighting in Ukraine on behalf of the Kremlin and is linked to the notorious Wagner Group mercenaries. A message on Rusich’s Telegram channel sent on 22 September advocates the “destruction of prisoners on the spot”. Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a London-based initiative supported by the United Nations, said: “Rusich, an openly neo-Nazi group highly likely operating on behalf of the Kremlin, has promoted the commission...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.” That disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens,...

A Florida prosecutor suspended by Ron DeSantis for defying a new 15-week abortion law says a federal judge’s decision to send his reinstatement appeal to trial means a reckoning is coming for the state’s Republican governor. Andrew Warren, a Democrat, was removed as Hillsborough county state attorney on 4 August after saying he would not enforce the abortion ban or prosecute providers of gender transition treatment for young people. DeSantis cited Warren’s alleged “woke agenda” in reasons for his decision. At a hearing in Tallahassee on Monday, Judge Robert Hinkle denied motions from DeSantis to dismiss Warren’s lawsuit, and another...

Summons delivered to eligible men at midnight. Schoolteachers pressed into handing out draft notices. Men given an hour to pack their things and appear at draft centres. Women sobbing as they sent their husbands and sons off to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The first full day of Russia’s first mobilisation since the second world war produced emotional showdowns at draft centres and even signs of protest, while it appears Russia could be considering far more than the 300,000 new conscripts claimed by the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. One woman in a small village in the Zakamensky region of...

Russian leader seems keen to curry favour with Chinese president as battlefield setbacks and sanctions bite Vladimir Putin has told Xi Jinping that he understands China’s “questions and concerns” about the war in Ukraine, in a rare nod to tensions between the two states caused by the Russian invasion. The remarks came as Xi and Putin met on Thursday for the first time since the war began, at a summit in Uzbekistan where the Russian president was expected to court the Chinese leader personally as an ally in his conflict with the west. invasion that drew the most attention. In...

The New York Times reporter Fady Hanona is just one of hundreds of Jew-haters associated with the American media. The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was one of the bitterest critics of Jews and Israel and a defender of Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda. Still, in the eyes of Wash Post and majority of the US media – he is a “hero”. Similarly, NYT found a perfect reporter as Fady Hanona to fill pages of this newspaper with Jew hatred. And most painful fact is – Fady Hanona would continue working for The New York Times unless his nefarious writings...

When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in the early hours of 24 February, with mass missile strikes and the advance of a land force from several directions, many key Ukrainian officials were apparently caught by surprise. Some were fast asleep. There had been rumours of a Russian invasion for weeks, and the previous evening US and Ukrainian intelligence received information that pointed to an invasion that night with almost certainty. Yet there was little in the way of last-minute efforts to fortify towns close to the border, or to warn citizens to brace for the inevitable. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was...