World News

At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip while waiting for UN and commercial trucks to enter the territory with desperately needed food, according to Gaza’s health ministry and a local hospital.

The circumstances of the killings were not immediately clear. It did not appear to be related to a new Israel- and US-supported aid delivery network that was rolled out last month and has been marred by controversy and violence.

Palestinians say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on crowds trying to reach food distribution points run by the US and Israel-backed aid group since the centres opened last month. Local health officials say scores have been killed and hundreds wounded.

From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark.

But these 10-meter (30-foot) -long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance.

Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as “Voyagers,” have been put into service by Denmark’s armed forces for a three-month operational trial.

Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Link to study

Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says.

In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021’s deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said.

Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It’s called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA.

Brett Wilkins Jun 16, 2025

Flight-tracking websites showed dozens of Air Force aerial refueling planes departing from military bases in the United States and heading to Europe on Sunday, fueling speculation of direct U.S. involvement in the widening Israeli-Iranian war.

Military-focused news sites reported that around 30 U.S. Air Force KC-135R and KC-46A tankers were identified by flight-tracking software in what The Times of Israelcalled an "unprecedented mass deployment" to Europe.

At least 37 Palestinians were killed on Monday in new shootings in Gaza near food distribution centres run by private US contractors guarded by Israeli troops, local authorities said.

Witnesses blamed the shootings on Israeli troops who opened fire early in the morning as crowds of hungry Palestinians converged on two hubs managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organisation that recently began operating in Gaza with Israeli and US support.

The death toll on Monday was the highest yet reported in the near-daily shootings since the GHF began operations three weeks ago.

Hundreds of thousands of people dressed in red marched through the streets of The Hague on Sunday to demand more action against the "genocide" in Gaza.

NGOs such as Amnesty International, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and Oxfam organized the demonstration, which ran through the city to the International Court of Justice. The protesters were all dressed in red, creating a "red line".

Organisers described it as the country's largest demonstration in two decades. Many waving Palestinian flags and some chanting "Stop the Genocide", the demonstrators turned a central park in the city into a sea of red on a sunny afternoon.

Video is linked. SFW, but keep your volume down.

Turki al-Jasser, a prominent Saudi journalist who highlighted corruption, women’s rights and the Palestinian cause in his writing, was executed in Saudi Arabia on Saturday after the kingdom’s top court upheld his death sentence, the Saudi Interior Ministry announced on X.

Saudi authorities raided Jasser’s home in March 2018, seizing his electronic devices and arresting him. He was later convicted of terrorism and treason.

But campaigners have long held that he was imprisoned because authorities believed he was running a Twitter account which reported on corruption and human rights violations by those in power, including the Saudi royal family.

Al-Jasser's supporters and advocates said his execution, committed while world attention was on Israel’s attacks on Iran, demonstrated once again that criticism of the authorities in Saudi Arabia would not be tolerated.

They also drew parallels between Jasser’s execution and the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, another prominent Saudi journalist, who was dismembered by a Saudi murder squad in the kingdom’s embassy in Istanbul.

The man accused of assassinating the top Democrat in the Minnesota House held deeply religious and politically conservative views, telling a congregation in Africa two years ago that the U.S. was in a “bad place” where most churches didn’t oppose abortion.

Alaa M accused of torturing detainees at military hospitals during Syrian civil war under former ruler Bashar al-Assad

A Syrian doctor has been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in his home country – including murder and torture – by a German court.

The 40-year-old man, whose identity was only disclosed as Alaa M, worked as a junior doctor in an army hospital and a military intelligence prison in Homs and Damascus in Syria, in 2011 and 2012, in the early phase of the civil war.

He abused prisoners accused of being members of the opposition and who were considered enemies of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad who had participated in the uprisings against the regime during the Arab spring. He was convicted by the court in Frankfurt am Main of two deaths and eight cases of severe torture.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/936863

[In Hague] the march estimated the peaceful crowd at more than 150,000 people. Local media put the numbers closer to 100,000. > > In neighboring Belgium, around 75,000 people, many of them also clad in red, hit the streets in the capital Brussels, police said. Several rallies have been held to draw attention to Israel’s actions in Gaza, but Sunday’s was the biggest rally so far. > > According to another source: > >

• In Brussels, where protesters were also calling for action from the EU, turnout was estimated at 110,000 by organisers and 75,000 by police.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/14275510

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/14275507

The black walls appeared overnight ahead of the show’s opening Monday, visually isolating Israeli booths from dozens of other international exhibitors. The Israeli Defense Ministry said the move followed a last-minute demand from organizers to remove offensive weapons systems from display — a request they rejected.

The [French] official said Israeli exhibitors were told weeks in advance that they couldn’t exhibit certain types of equipment, and that the walls were erected as a last resort when five of them didn’t comply. Four others did and are allowed to exhibit. The official did not elaborate on what kind of equipment was not allowed, or why.

The president and CEO of Israeli company IAI, Boaz Levy, said it has exhibited at the Paris Air Show for decades and had received authorizations to display its equipment.

‘’Last night, after our booth was set up and ready for the show, we were asked to remove some of our systems from the booth. We tried to negotiate with them, but it seems these orders came from the highest levels in Paris,’' he said in a statement. ‘’This morning, when we arrived at our booth, we were shocked to find out that we were blocked by black walls built overnight.’'

150.000 participants according to organizers

The Witkruis Monument — which means White Cross Monument in the language spoken by South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority — is a memorial only to white people who were killed on farms over the last three decades. It’s a visceral snapshot seized on by some South Africans to drive a discredited narrative that white farmers in the majority Black country are being targeted in a widespread, race-based system of persecution.

The killings of farmers and farmworkers, regardless of race, are a tiny percentage of the country’s high level of crime, and they typically occur during armed robberies, according to available statistics and two studies carried out over the last 25 years.

Yet because wealthier white people own 72% of South Africa’s privately owned farms, according to census data, they are disproportionately affected by these often brutal crimes. Black people own just 4% of the country’s privately owned farmland, and the rest is owned by people who are mixed race or of Indian heritage.

The UN disaster relief agency said it was having to dial back aid plans as the humanitarian sector faced "the deepest funding cuts ever." it comes after the Trump administration said it would reduce funding to the UN.

The United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Monday said it was forced to drastically scale back aid plans due to "brutal funding cuts."

OCHA is seeking $29 billion (€ 25.7 billion) in funding in a drastic budget revision.

That's in contrast to the amount sought in December when the UN had said it needed $44 billion to help in over 70 countries, providing assistance to "180 million people, including refugees" under the Global Humanitarian Overview 2025 (GHO).

Airbus bagged a $3.5 billion plane order from Saudi Arabia's AviLease on the opening day of the Paris Airshow on Monday, as a diplomatic dispute erupted over France's decision to shut down four Israeli stands for displaying deadly weapons.

Delegates expect this year's iteration of the world's biggest aviation trade show to see less business than usual, partly due to last week's deadly crash of an Air India Boeing 787 and also because Boeing racked up huge deals during U.S. President Donald Trump's recent tour of the Middle East.

Tensions between long-standing allies France and Israel flared up as the show was getting underway, when Paris ordered the main four Israeli company stands to be closed down when they refused to remove offensive weapons from display.

Israel's ministry of defence condemned the move as "outrageous and unprecedented" and accused France of trying to shield its companies from Israeli competition.