cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41296397

Schooled by Trump, Americans are learning to dislike their allies

https://archive.is/2025.04.01-221630/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/03/31/schooled-by-trump-americans-are-learning-to-dislike-their-allies

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60113523

GERMANY IS REPORTEDLY seeking to deport two Irish citizens for taking part in pro-Palestine protests in Berlin.

Four foreign residents are reported to have been hit with deportation orders, including two Irish citizens – Roberta Murray (31) and Shane O’Brien (29).

Solidarity demonstrations will take place tomorrow in Berlin and Munich in response to the deportation orders.

MBFC

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4484610

A French court found Marine Le Pen guilty Monday in an embezzlement case and followed up the verdict with a sentence barring her immediately from running for office for five years. Le Pen abruptly left the Paris courtroom before hearing how long she will be banned from running for public office.

Le Pen and 24 other officials from her National Rally were accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations. Le Pen and her co-defendants deny wrongdoing.

The biggest concern for Le Pen was that the court may declare her ineligible to run for office preventing her from running for president in 2027 -- a scenario she had described as a “political death.”

The Constitutional Council ruled Friday, in a separate case, that imposing the punishment immediately was constitutional.

Full article

In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.

I served in Gaza for nine months, and first came across these procedures, called "mosquito protocol" in December 2023. It was only two months into the ground offensive, long before there was a shortage of dogs from the IDF's canine unit, Oketz, who were used for this purpose. This became the insane, unofficial excuse for this insane, unofficial procedure. I didn't realize then how ubiquitous using human shields, whom we referred to as a "shawish," would become.

Today, almost every platoon keeps a "shawish," and no infantry force enters a house before a "shawish" clears it. This means there are four "shawishes" in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.

I recently saw that the IDF's Military Police Criminal Investigation Division opened six investigations into the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, and my jaw dropped. I've seen cover-ups before, but this is a new low.

If the MPCID wanted to do its job seriously, it would have to open far more than even a thousand investigations. But all the MPCID wants is for us to be able to tell ourselves and the world that we're investigating ourselves, so they've found six scapegoats and are pinning it all on them.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27991220

Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem, Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger
Tue 1 Apr 2025 14.17 EDT

"Dr Ahmed al-Farra, a senior doctor at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, witnessed the arrival of some of the remains.

“I was able to see three bodies when they were transferred to the Nasser hospital. They had bullets in their chest and head. They were executed. They had their hands tied,’’ Farra said. “They tied them so they were unable to move and then they killed them.”"

March 31 (Reuters) - Iran complained to the United Nations Security Council on Monday about "reckless and belligerent" remarks by U.S. President Donald Trump, describing them as "a flagrant violation of international law" and the founding United Nations Charter.

Excerpts:

When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.

Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

So far this term, Trump has acted as if climate change does not matter: He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, announced plans to reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and paused new offshore-wind development and Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding. But if the president’s bid for Greenland—or the U.S. military’s quiet cooperation with Canada to boost Arctic defenses—is any indication, the U.S. is weighing its options for a warmer future. “We live in the real world,” Evan Bloom, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and former State Department official, told me. “The military and other agencies will continue to take climate change into account, because they have to.” When he hears Trump talk about Greenland, he hears the president speaking about the geopolitics of climate change—“whether he’s willing to call it that or not.”

Israeli forces have been accused of executing handcuffed Palestinian medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza's Rafah.

Fifteen humanitarian workers went missing last week after responding to a distress call from civilians being attacked by Israeli forces.

The workers include eight paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six members of the Palestinian Civil Defence search-and-rescue teams, and one UN staff member.

They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with at least around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them, according to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza.

At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless, he added.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27962568

Ryan Grim and Sarah Hay Mar 20, 2025

[a very chilling article on how Trump and his underlings are trampling on any semblance of legality]

"The family only discovered that their loved one, Jerce Reyes Barrios, had been renditioned to #ElSalvador when they saw him in viral videos posted by the #Trump administration, in which it celebrated what it said was the mass deportation of violent members of the #Venezuelan gang #TrenDeAragua. "

https://archive.ph/YN2qW

Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem, Malak A Tantesh in Gaza, and Julian Borger
Mon 31 Mar 2025 10.24 EDT

"Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one” and buried in a mass grave eight days ago in southern Gaza, the UN has said.

According to the UN humanitarian affairs office (Ocha), the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) and civil defence workers were on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been shot at earlier in the day, when their clearly marked vehicles came under heavy Israeli fire in Rafah city’s Tel al-Sultan district. A Red Crescent official in Gaza said that there was evidence of at least one person being detained and killed, as the body of one of the dead had been found with his hands tied."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27946021

from Drop Site News [you may get a request to sign up for free subscription]

Sharif Abdel Kouddous Mar 31, 2025

"The day after the assassination of Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat, the Israeli military openly celebrated his killing. A correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher and a contributor to Drop Site News, Shabat was killed on March 24 when the Israeli military targeted him as he was driving in his car in Beit Lahia. He was 23 years old. Earlier that day, journalist Mohamed Mansour of Palestine Today was killed, along with his wife and son, in an Israeli airstrike on his home in Khan Younis.

On its official X account the following day, the Israeli military confirmed it had “eliminated” Shabat, claiming they had “exposed” his role within Hamas six months earlier, and the statement concluded with the haunting words: “Don’t let the press vest confuse you, Hossam was a terrorist.”"

https://archive.ph/jTAcu

Jeremy Scahill Mar 31, 2025

[article contains some details on recent negotiations]

"Hamas’s chief negotiator, Dr. Khalil al-Hayya, announced that Hamas had accepted a deal on Saturday put forward by Qatar and Egypt, the two main regional mediators. “We do not want anything new. We want to respect what was signed, what the guarantors guaranteed, and what the international community approved,” al-Hayya said. “Out of our concern for our people and our families, we dealt with all offers responsibly and positively, with the aim of achieving our goals of stopping the war.” "