DolphinMath

Security services say spate of fires and infrastructure attacks could be part of systemic attempt by Russia to destabilise continent

Security services around Europe are on alert to a potential new weapon of Russia’s war – arson and sabotage – after a spate of mystery fires and attacks on infrastructure in the Baltics, Germany and the UK.

When a fire broke out in Ikea in Vilnius in Lithuania this month, few passed any remarks until the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, suggested it could have been the work of a foreign saboteur.

No true ~~Scotsman~~ vegan

The White House on Tuesday provided the most complete definition yet of what it considers a "major ground operation" in Rafah that could trigger a change in United States policy toward Israel, and said Israel's actions there have not yet reached that level.

"We have not seen them smash into Rafah - we have not seen them go in with large units, large numbers of troops in columns and formations in some sort of coordinated maneuver against multiple targets on the ground. That is a major ground operation. We have not seen that," White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at a briefing.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 28 (Reuters) - Haiti's transition council on Tuesday tapped former Prime Minister Garry Conille, who briefly led the country over a decade ago, to return to the role as the Caribbean nation works to restore stability and take back control from violent gangs.

The transition council voted 6-1 to install Conille as interim prime minister, a member told Reuters.

Conille's extensive resume in development, working largely with the United Nations, is considered key to shoring up international support as Haiti prepares to launch a U.N.-backed security mission led by Kenya, though its deployment has faced hurdles.

LAGOS — Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu vowed to usher in an era of renewed hope when he was inaugurated into office a year ago. Twelve months later, the prices of food and fuel have doubled, driving increasingly loud discontent.

Tinubu’s first anniversary, on May 29, comes as the country is set to slip two places to fourth on the ranking of Africa’s largest economies, according to the IMF.

The president had promised to deliver higher economic growth, a million new jobs and security reforms. On his first day, he removed a decades-long subsidy on petrol that had made it relatively affordable for consumers. He charged the central bank’s new leadership to pursue a market-driven exchange rate. The bank has hiked the benchmark lending rate by 7.5 percentage points since February to tame inflation.

Aid workers fear a new disaster as militia forces close in on a major Darfur city.

On a sunny April afternoon in 2006, thousands of people flocked to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a rally with celebrities, Olympic athletes, and rising political stars. Their cause: garner international support to halt a genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow,” Barack Obama, then the junior Illinois senator, told the crowd, speaking alongside future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That same week, then-Sen. Joe Biden introduced a bill in Congress calling on NATO to intervene to halt the genocide in Sudan. “We need to take action on both a military and diplomatic front to end the conflict,” he said.

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Protesters demanding the resignation of Armenia’s prime minister on Monday blocked main streets in the capital city and other parts of the country, sporadically clashing with police. 

Police said 196 people have been detained in Yerevan. Protests have roiled the country for weeks, sparked by the government’s return of four border villages to Azerbaijan.

Even in an urbanized economy, many Black voters care deeply about the government’s unfulfilled promises when it comes to land redistribution.

For the first time since the end of apartheid in South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party is poised to lose its governing majority. While corruption and poverty are often cited for the setback the ANC is expected to face in elections later this month, its electoral fate is also closely tied to its performance on land issues.

Despite the fact that the country has urbanized and its economy no longer revolves around land, delivering land to Black South Africans remains a yardstick against which ANC performance is measured. Land has deep symbolic meaning as an acute material loss before and during the apartheid era and as hope for a more inclusive and just future. As Nelson Mandela put it in 1995, “With freedom and democracy, came restoration of the right to land. And with it the opportunity to address the effects of centuries of dispossession and denial.”

Traditional food is painted as backward and dirty—except for tourists.

Instruction began early on a November 2018 morning. This lesson was not taught in a classroom, but in a makeshift kitchen as part of Xinjiang’s “household school” program. There, a teacher stood before her class of adult women and asked: “What do you like to eat for breakfast?”

The students responded in unison, “nan and milk” or “nan and tea.”

“You don’t eat a bowl of hot congee?” the teacher interjected. This question sparked additional discussion and “even more curiosity” among the women in attendance.

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.” Almost immediately, others disputed the translation and said sabaya referred merely to “female captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a post on X, taking exception to a Washington Post article that said that it did. She said the Israeli translation was “playing on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it does seem excessively lurid to suggest, without direct evidence, that they have been raped in captivity for the past several months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, allowing readers to do the gestational math. “Think of what that means for these young women.”) But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it.

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