Protesting War in Ukraine
Abel Tomlinson speaks against war
Abel Tomlinson speaks against war
The vast majority of pro-Trump online groups seemed to shrug off the former President's rallying cry
Protesters busted windows after protest took violent turn
An Israeli missile strike destroyed a suspected arms depot used by Iran-backed militias at Syria's Aleppo airport Wednesday, a war monitor said, with authorities saying the strike put the airport out of service.The Britain-based war monitor said the arms depot was "completely destroyed".
"If time was rewound I would do it all over again," says Muntazer al-Zaidi, whose protest brought him prison time but also hero status in his country.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -An Israeli minister with responsibility for administrating the occupied West Bank drew condemnation on Monday after he said there was no Palestinian history or culture and no such thing as a Palestinian people. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also angered neighbouring Jordan for speaking at a podium covered in what appeared to be a variation of the Israeli flag that showed an Israeli state with expanded boundaries that included the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and Jordan.
Indian police have launched a hunt for a Sikh preacher who has revived talk of an independent Sikh homeland and stoked fears of a return to violence that killed tens of thousands of people in 1980s and early 1990s. Police in the northwestern state of Punjab, where Sikhs are in the majority, said they had arrested 114 supporters of the preacher, Amritpal Singh, 29, and seized 10 guns and 430 rounds of ammunition and other equipment. Police have accused Singh and his supporters of attempted murder, obstruction of law enforcement and creating disharmony and said he had been on the run since Saturday when officers tried to block his motorcade and arrest him.
A U.S. Marine veteran is severely wounded after a Palestinian gunman opened fire on him and his wife as they drove in the West Bank on Monday. The attacker is in custody.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered U.S. support in helping Armenia toward having peace discussions with Azerbaijan, the U.S. State Department said on Monday. Blinken and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a phone call on Monday, which was about two weeks after Azerbaijani troops and ethnic Armenians exchanged gunfire in Azerbaijan's contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, killing at least five people.
Police crack down on the biggest opposition-led protest since President Ruto took office last year.
Philadelphia will pay $9.25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by racial justice protesters who accused police of abusing them at a 2020 rally following the killing of George Floyd, the city said on Monday. The Philadelphia city government said in a written statement the payment would be distributed among 343 plaintiffs who alleged physical and emotional injuries in the police response to protests ignited by the killing of Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. The city will also provide a grant of at least $500,000 to the Bread & Roses Community Fund for free mental health counseling for residents of West Philadelphia, a predominantly Black neighborhood, who have been victims of police violence, lawyers for plaintiffs said.
The Russian occupiers used trucks to deliver their wounded soldiers to a school in the village of Vysoke, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where they set up a hospital, and about fifty injured occupiers were taken to another village.
Provides an overview of Sri Lanka, including key facts about this south Asian island state.
Crisis in Israel deepens over the new government's radical plans, which have alienated and dismayed Israelis and Jewish Americans alike.
Provides an overview of Afghanistan, including key events and facts about this war-torn country in south Asia.
STORY: "Especially Americans and those who supported the war should think, when in history, did missiles and bombings bring democracy?”Twenty years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqi writer and associate professor of Arabic literature at New York University Sinan Antoon thumbs through the headlines from his home in New Jersey.“Most people don't have hope. The situation in Iraq now is really terrible, and the Iraqis who live in Iraq will live with the consequences of the invasion, sadly. The people who decided to go to war... They don't have to live with the consequences of war."For Antoon, what’s left of his home country is hopelessness and anarchy.“All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours…”The invasion was meant to topple a dictator and usher in a thriving democracy.Instead, Iraqis faced years of upheaval and chaos…A devastating insurgency – first by Hussein loyalists, then by al Qaeda – was followed by a sectarian civil war and later, the rise of the Islamic State, which occupied a third of the country and slaughtered thousands."As much as I wanted to see the end of Saddam Hussein and his regime, I wanted that to be by the Iraqi people, not by military occupation. If you go now and ask Iraqis, 'Do we have a democracy in Iraq?' No, we have an oligarchy. We have one of the most corrupt systems in the world. Iraqis have lost $1.3 trillion, 1 million people have died, these are some of the estimates, very conservative estimates put it at 300,000, and that's already a huge number, 1.2 million people are internally displaced. This is not democracy."U.S. credibility also suffered from Bush's decision to invade based on bogus, exaggerated and ultimately erroneous intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.Brown University’s “Costs of War” project puts U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Syria over the past 20 years at 4,599.It estimates total deaths – including Iraqi and Syrian civilians, military, police, opposition fighters, media and others – between 550,000 to 584,000.This only includes those killed as a direct result of war, but not estimated indirect deaths from displacement, disease or starvation.The project also estimates the U.S. price tag to date for the wars in Iraq and Syria comes to $1.79 trillion. If you add projected veterans' care through 2050, it rises to $2.89 trillion.“Although the American media keeps saying about the cost of the war, the cost, yes, the cost of the war and billions of dollars to taxpayers, but the people who planned the war and who supported it, their portfolios tripled. Weapons companies and weapons manufacturers made a lot of money. But definitely, the war was unnecessary, ask the mothers, ask the 4 million orphans in Iraq, ask the 1 million widows, ask the people who are born in Falluja with birth defects every day because of the depleted uranium and the phosphorus that was used there by the U.S. So saying one is against the war doesn't mean that one is for dictatorship. It's not that simple.”In his 2019 work “The Book of Collateral Damage,” Antoon sought to chronicle what has haunted him since 2003, the stories of civilian lives destroyed by war.
South Africa's opposition held rallies under tight security on Monday in a bid to force out President Cyril Ramaphosa over his handling of the country's sickly economy and crippling energy crisis.Today, his popularity ranking has slumped, battered by his handling of the economy, chronic electricity shortages and joblessness.
STORY: Thousands of protesters denouncing the French government's proposal to raise the retirement age by two years gathered in the Place de la Republique on the eve of a crucial televised interview by French President Emmanuel Macron.Protesters have been playing cat-and-mouse with police in cities across France since last week, setting bins and barricades on fire while police responded with tear gas and charged at protesters.French President Emmanuel Macron aims to use a TV interview on Wednesday (March 22) to "calm things down" and will plan reforms for the rest of his mandate, a source who took part in meetings between Macron and key allies told Reuters.
French President Emmanuel Macron is to make Wednesday his first public comments on the crisis sparked by his government forcing through a pensions overhaul, which has sparked violent protests and questions over his ability to bring about further change.Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, acting on the president's instructions, last Thursday invoked an article in the constitution that adopted the contentious reform without a parliamentary vote.The government Monday narrowly survived a no-confidence motion but the uproar has descended into the biggest domestic crisis of the second term for Macron, first elected in 2017 with pledges to radically reform France.Another day of national strikes and protests against the pension changes, in particular pushing back the minimum retirement age to 64 from 62, is planned for Thursday and garbage continues to pile up in the streets of Paris due to stoppages by refuse collectors.The tensions have also raised questions over the ability of France to host King Charles III of the UK when he arrives Sunday for the first foreign state visit of his reign.There were new clashes between protesters and security forces in central Paris late on Tuesday, in a repeat of scenes over the last days that have seen hundreds arrested and accusations of heavy-handed tactics by security forces.Blockades at oil refineries continue, potentially creating severe fuel shortages. There were clashes Tuesday at Fos-sur-Mer outside Marseille as authorities sought to force refinery workers back to work.- 'The crowd has no legitimacy' -Macron, who made raising the retirement age a cornerstone of his re-election campaign last year, has so far refused publicly to enter the fray and made no comment on the uproar other than in closed-door meetings.That will change later Wednesday when the president gives a live television interview to TF1 and France 2 television channels on the lunchtime news at 1200 GMT. Before breaking his silence, Macron spent most of Tuesday talking to ministers, advisors and other political heavyweights about the way forward but ruled out any radical concession.There will be no new prime minister to replace Borne, no dissolution of the lower-house National Assembly and no referendum on the pensions reform, people involved in the discussions told AFP.Borne invoked article 49.3 after failing to muster a parliamentary majority for the reform in the Assembly, a consequence of Macron's ruling party losing its overall majority in the 2022 legislative elections.Macron also called on his troops to provide ideas in the "next two to three weeks" aimed at "a change in method and a new reform agenda", one participant said, requesting anonymity.But in a warning to protesters, he added: "The crowd, whatever form it takes, has no legitimacy in the face of the people who express themselves through their elected representatives" in parliament.Spontaneous protests by young people -- coordinated in encrypted messaging services -- have seen nightly clashes with police since last week.Some protesters burned trash bins, bikes and other objects, while others blocked traffic in parts of the country.Forty-six people were arrested overnight in the latest clashes around Place de la Republique in Paris, while police used tear gas to disperse protests in other cities including Rennes and Nantes."Consciously, the government is creating all the conditions for a social explosion, and it was foreseeable for months, as if they were looking for that," the leader of the far-right MPs in parliament, Marine Le Pen, told AFP in an interview Tuesday.- Excessive force? -Lawyers, magistrates and some politicians accused police officers of having made arbitrary arrests in an attempt to stifle the anti-government protests.They cited as proof the fact that most of the detained demonstrators were released after a few hours, without any charges.Paris police chief Laurent Nunez rejected the allegations, telling BFM television: "There are no unjustified arrests."A survey on Sunday showed Macron's personal approval rating at just 28 percent, its lowest level since the height of the anti-government "Yellow Vest" protest movement in 2018-2019. Prominent Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said the coming visit by King Charles should be cancelled, telling BFM it was "unbelievable" that the president would dine with the monarch at the Versailles Palace outside Paris "while the people are protesting in the streets".In an interview with Le Figaro, Macron's influential former prime minister Edouard Philippe advised the president to "broaden" his political base with "a coalition" that includes representatives of the opposition on the traditional right and left.bur-sjw/js
The Biden administration announced Monday that it has determined all sides in the brutal conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the determination less than a week after he returned from a visit to Ethiopia during which he met with Ethiopian government and Tigrayan officials as well as victims of the conflict, but said little about the U.S. view of prospects for accountability.
Following a call from Joe Biden on Sunday, Netanyahu's government announced delays to some of its controversial plans.