World News

The UN received reports that Myanmar's military had conducted attacks, while the military accused rebels of the same.

Fighting has been reported in Myanmar despite the military junta and a rebel group alliance announcing temporary ceasefires to support earthquake relief.

As of Friday, the military had carried out at least 14 attacks since the ceasefire, according to reports received by the UN Human Rights office.

The military accused two rebel groups in the alliance that declared a ceasefire of carrying out attacks. One group said fighting broke out in response to "offensives" by the military.

Thousands of Palestinians chanted against Hamas during anti-war protests last week in the Gaza Strip, the biggest show of anger at the militant group since its attack on Israel ignited the war.

Protesters said they were venting anger and desperation as they endure a new round of war and displacement after Israel ended a ceasefire. They leveled unusually direct criticism at Hamas even while remaining furious at Israel, the United States and others for their plight.

Public expressions of dissent have been extremely rare since Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007. The militant group has violently dispersed occasional protests and jailed, tortured or killed those who challenged its rule. Hamas has faced no significant internal challenge since the start of the war and still controls Gaza, despite losing most of its top leaders and thousands of fighters.

Despite the WHO's polio campaign reaching a high number of children in Gaza, hundreds of thousands remain at risk of paralysis amid Israel's blocking of aid

Obviously, things can quickly devolve on any story about Israel. Let's stick to Netanyahu's political situation.

On Monday, while Netanyahu was attending a hearing in his corruption case at the Tel Aviv district court, the prime minister was forced to interrupt his own testimony to respond to an urgent police summons after the arrest of two of his aides.

Jonatan Urich, one of Netanyahu’s most trusted advisers, and Eli Feldstein, hired as a spokesperson by the prime minister’s office shortly after the war broke out, are suspected of taking money from Qatar, funnelled via a US lobby group, in order to promote a positive image of the Gulf state in their briefings to journalists. Lawyers for both men have declined to comment on the allegations.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.06-034333/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/in-southern-syria-israel-is-the-power-that-matters-1d2d95f6

There is a new boss in this front-line village. It isn’t the group of former rebels who overthrew a half-century of Assad family rule four months ago, and installed themselves as Syria’s government. Nor is it any of the armed militias south of the capital, Damascus, about 45 miles to the northeast.

It’s Israel, which, aiming to insulate itself from attacks across the border, took over the former United Nations buffer zone in Syrian territory that includes Al-Hamidiyah along with the strategic high ground nearby.

A newly built Israeli military outpost keeps watch over the village, its lights blazing even during the day, as does a Merkava tank positioned behind a berm. Teenage soldiers staff checkpoints and fan out every day on patrols, checking IDs and limiting the villagers’ movements at night. 

At the village’s western edge, about a mile outside Israel’s border fence, bulldozers are carving out a tall barrier of compacted soil. Some of it crosses property that belongs to Eid al-Ali, who watched warily as his goats grazed around the earthworks, an area Israeli soldiers have made off-limits. 

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.05-130219/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2025/04/05/after-myanmar-earthquake-citizens-step-in-amid-army-s-absence_6739866_114.html

As the death toll from the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar on March 28 surpassed 3,000, under the condition of anonymity, a foreign expert from a major international agency who visited Mandalay on Sunday and Monday described to Le Monde a very contrasting situation. While the eastern part of the city of 1.6 million residents was barely affected, in the Northwest of Mandalay, between the royal palace and the Irrawaddy River, the damage was much more significant – eight-story buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble.

The city has not been paralyzed: "In the entire eastern part of the city, restaurants, shops, even beauty salons are reopening. People have to work. The large covered markets are closed for inspection, but you can see food, clothing and flower stalls on the streets. It is not a city on its knees," he said.

Thousands of displaced people have settled along the moats of the royal palace, where volunteer teams continuously distributed water and meals in containers. The citizen response to the earthquake was significant. "You come across dozens of convoys coming from Yangon with banners indicating donations – from banks, companies, monasteries," the foreign expert said. "In front of the hospital are dozens of different ambulances because they belong to various NGOs."

Archive: https://archive.is/20250405124954/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/phone-call-led-aid-groups-to-paramedics-buried-in-a-gaza-grave-5df07dca

A United Nations team had spent several fruitless days waiting for Israeli forces to permit them to look for a group of Palestinian emergency workers who disappeared after being fired on by Israeli soldiers. Then, a call came in from Israel’s military that would end their wait.

It pointed them to a mass grave marked by a white electricity pole in the Gaza border town of Rafah, said Jonathan Whittall, the head of the United Nations’ humanitarian office in Gaza and the West Bank who received the call. 

The U.N. team found 14 bodies in the grave, including eight paramedics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society and six members of the Palestinian Civil Defense, which includes firefighters and emergency responders. The body of a U.N. worker was found in a different location. Another paramedic is missing. One survived. 

“I was hearing gunfire, but had no idea where it was coming from,” the surviving paramedic, Monzer Jehad Abed, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32113472

Archived

As a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand last Friday, the temblor rattled buildings across the sprawling Thai capital of Bangkok, home to an incredible 142 skyscrapers. When the shaking ceased all were standing strong — with one very notable exception. The State Audit Office (SAO) building in Chatuchak district, a 30-story skyscraper still under construction by a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, collapsed into a heap of rubble, trapping nearly 100 people inside.

As of this week, 15 have been confirmed dead in the collapse, and a further 72 remain missing. Thailand announced over the weekend that it was launching an investigation to determine the cause of the collapse, and the prime minister said the tragedy had seriously damaged the country’s image.

As emergency teams sifted through the wreckage in the immediate aftermath, the building’s primary contractor, China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group, came under intense public anger and scrutiny. Anger was further fueled by clear efforts by the company, and by Chinese authorities, to sweep the project and the tragedy under the rug.

Shortly after the collapse, the China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group removed a post from its WeChat account that had celebrated the recent capping of the building, praising the project as the company’s first “super high-rise building overseas,” and “a calling card for CR No. 10’s development in Thailand.” Archived versions of this and other posts were shared by Thais on social media, including one academic who re-posted a deleted promo video to his Facebook account — noting with bitter irony that it boasted of the building’s tensile strength and earthquake resistance.

Trying to access news of the building collapse inside China [...] queries on domestic search engines returned only deleted articles from Shanghai-based outlets such as The Paper (澎湃新闻) and Guancha (观察网). In a post to Weibo, former Global Times editor Hu Xijin (胡锡进) confessed that the building “probably had quality issues.” Even this post was rapidly deleted, making clear that the authorities were coming down hard on the story.

Meanwhile, the machinery of propaganda continued to turn out feel-good news on China’s response to the quake. The Global Times reported that emergency assistance for Myanmar embodied Xi Jinping’s foreign policy vision of a “community of shared future for mankind.” In Hong Kong, the Ta Kung Pao (大公報) newspaper, run by the Liaison Office of China’s central government, twisted the knife into the United States as it reported on the earthquake response, noting the absence of USAID, recently dismantled by the Trump administration. Behind the news, the paper declared, “China’s selfless response demonstrates the responsibility of a great power.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32116772

Archived

The tragic collapse of a skyscraper in Bangkok [which was the only building that collapsed during the recent earthquake in Thailand], behind the same Chinese contractors associated with the works on Novi Sad railway station, has opened new questions about the security of Chinese projects around the world. While CNN and the Telegraph are investigating the responsibility of Chinese companies in detail, Serbia has reason to follow the developments related to this case with special attention.

While the safety of the Novi Sad railway station and the responsibility of the Chinese contractors from the CRIC-CCCC consortium, led by the China Railway International Company, are still being investigated in Serbia, the new tragedy has once again raised an avalanche of questions about the safety and reliability of projects implemented by Chinese construction companies around the world. In question is the collapse of a skyscraper in Bangkok, the construction of which, according to international media, was entrusted to the company China Railway Number 10 Engineering Group - a related entity of the state corporation that also operates in Serbia.

[...]

The project worth more than two billion Thai baht (about 45 million pounds), built for three years, was led by a company whose actors are known to the public in Serbia - the Italian-Thai corporation Italian-Thai Development Plc and the company China Railway Number 10 (Thailand) Ltd. The latter is the local branch of the Chinese giant China Railway Number 10 Engineering Group, with a share of 49 percent, which is the maximum share of foreign companies in Thai companies, according to the Telegraph, referring to local source The Nation.

[...]

The investigation by the Thai Ministry of Industry is focused on the possible reasons for this disaster, among which are issues of the quality of the steel used, a poor construction project, as well as the possible inadequacy of the specific construction method - the so-called "flat slab" slabs, i.e. flat slabs that lie directly on the pillars, without classic supporting beams. In addition, experts point out the problem of the ground on which Bangkok rests: the soft and unstable ground could significantly increase the effects of the earthquake.

[...]

What further strengthened the suspicion of omissions in the construction process was the deletion of all posts by China Railway Number 10 Group on Chinese social networks related to this project.

[...]

The lack of responses to media inquiries also points to possible attempts to cover up responsibility, which is of particular concern in partner countries around the world, including Serbia, where Chinese contractors have already faced safety issues in the tragic collapse of the canopy at the Novi Sad railway station.

[...]

"About 72 per cent of fatalities aged 13-55 are men, which is the rough age range of Hamas combatants, Mr Fox said. “We know that Hamas uses child soldiers, and these statistics show clearly that Israel is targeting fighting-aged men.”

According to the Henry Jackson Society who's entry in Wikipedia says: While describing itself as non-partisan, its outlook has been described variously as right-wing, neoliberal, and neo-conservative

South Korea's Constitutional Court on Friday, April 3, upheld President Yoon Suk Yeol's impeachment over his disastrous martial law declaration, voting unanimously to strip him of office for violating the constitution. Yoon, 64, was suspended by lawmakers over his December 3 attempt to subvert civilian rule, which saw armed soldiers deployed to parliament. He was also arrested on insurrection charges as part of a separate criminal case. His removal triggers fresh presidential elections, which must be held within 60 days.

Occasionally, an image from a conflict zone makes the world stop and take notice.

Like in September 2024, when a heart-breaking picture went viral online of 10-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa’s pink rollerblades protruding from her cloth-shrouded body.

Her parents in Gaza City said she had been killed by an Israeli airstrike as she went outside her home to skate.

But what about the huge quantity of online material from conflict zones that most of us don’t see?

Unless it's archived, it's at risk of being lost forever.

Archivists such as Dr Jamila Ghaddar seek to capture and preserve as much online material as they can, from videos shared on Telegram to viral posts on Instagram.

Australia has just sweltered through its hottest 12 months on record, a weather official said Thursday, a period of drenching floods, tropical cyclones and mass coral bleaching.

Senior government climatologist Simon Grainger said the rolling 12-month period between April 2024 and March 2025 was 1.61 degrees Celsius (34.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average -- the hottest since records began more than a century ago.

"This is certainly part of a sustained global pattern," he told AFP.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-142440/https://www.ft.com/content/58169216-3853-496d-9c54-3fc56ad2e7a6

Oil prices tumbled on Thursday as Opec+ unexpectedly announced plans to boost production just as sweeping US tariffs stoked fears of a global economic slowdown.

Eight Opec+ members, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, said they would triple a planned increase in oilproduction in May, accelerating a commitment to reverse production cuts over the next 18 months.

The move came hours after US President Donald Trump set out a new tariff regime that investors said was more severe than expected.

Hundreds of men and women stand in rows, divided by nationality, in the courtyard of a white-walled compound, flanked by armed guards in fatigues.

“Do you want to go home?” a voice shouts in the video obtained by CNN. They raise their hands. “Yes,” they reply in chorus.

The group were among around 7,000 people recently released from scam centers run by criminal gangs and warlords operating along Myanmar’s border with Thailand, where many are held against their will and forced to work conning ordinary people, including American citizens, out of their life savings.

Some volunteer to work in the compounds. But many others are lured by promises of well-paying jobs or other enticing opportunities, before being trafficked across the border into Myanmar to carry out fraudulent investment schemes and romance scams.

For years, the scam centers and cyber fraud compounds - many run by Chinese crime syndicates – have proliferated along the mountainous frontier, raking in billions of dollars from scams, money laundering and other illicit activities. The Chinese and Thai governments finally launched a highly publicized crackdown in February.

Those included in the releases are a fraction of an estimated 100,000 people trapped along the border.

The United States is increasing the number of aircraft carriers deployed in the Middle East to two, keeping one that is already there and sending another from the Indo-Pacific, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, April 1. The Carl Vinson will join the Harry S. Truman in the Middle East "to continue promoting regional stability, deter aggression, and protect the free flow of commerce in the region," Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.

"To complement the CENTCOM maritime posture, the secretary also ordered the deployment of additional squadrons and other air assets that will further reinforce our defensive air-support capabilities," Parnell said, referring to the US military command responsible for the region. "The United States and its partners remain committed to regional security in the CENTCOM (area of responsibility) and are prepared to respond to any state or non-state actor seeking to broaden or escalate conflict in the region," he added.

The Houthis began targeting shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden after the start of the Gaza war in 2023, claiming solidarity with Palestinians. Houthi attacks have prevented ships from passing through the Suez Canal, a vital route that normally carries about 12% of world shipping traffic. Ongoing attacks are forcing many companies into a costly detour around the tip of southern Africa.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on Wednesday, April 2, a major expansion of a military operation in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, saying the army would seize "large areas" of the Palestinian territory.

The defense chief said in a statement that Israel would expand its presence in Gaza to "destroy and clear the area of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure." The expanded operation would "seize large areas that will be incorporated into Israeli security zones," he said, without saying how much territory Israel would take. The announcement comes after he warned last week the military would soon "operate with full force" in additional parts of Hamas-run Gaza.

In February, Katz announced plans to set up an agency for the "voluntary departure" of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. That came after Israel expressed a commitment to a proposal from US President Donald Trump to take over the territory after relocating its 2.4 million Palestinian inhabitants.

China announced Monday the discovery of a crude oil reserve estimated at 100 million tons in the northeastern part of the South China Sea, according to a statement from the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

The reserve was located at the "Huicou 19-6" oil field, situated approximately 170 kilometers off the coast of Guangdong province in southern China. The field lies in waters averaging 100 meters in depth.

CNOOC said test drilling at the site yielded 413 barrels of oil and 68,000 cubic meters of natural gas per day.

As US President Donald Trump prepares to announce reciprocal tariffs on April 2, which he calls “Liberation Day,” attention is turning to the potential impact on global trade.

Trump’s tariff plans remain a major source of global uncertainty, with fears that countermeasures from other countries could deepen trade tensions.

His announcement that the US would impose 25% tariffs on car imports has brought renewed attention to Türkiye’s automotive exports to the American market.

According to data from the Turkish Exporters Assembly (TIM), the US remains a key destination for Türkiye’s automotive sector.

Now, thousands of protesters have been detained and government-owned media appears to be running a blackout on any coverage of the protests. A number of journalists have been arrested and a BBC reporter has even been deported after his reporting of demonstrations.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters have gathered across Turkey in what was initially to express opposition to Imamoglu’s arrest, but have quickly bloomed into wider anti-government gatherings. However, Turkish state media has been accused of censoring any coverage of the protests. The Guardian reported that government owned channels broadcast interviews with ministers unrelated to the protests and that:

Substantive coverage of the protests has instead been the preserve of the small slice of newspapers and cable channels that exist outside the well funded and slick pro-government broadcasting networks.

Meanwhile, in 2023, there was a massive jump in arms exports to Europe. Overall, the value of UK companies’ arms export contracts to Europe more than quadrupled between 2013–17 and 2019–23, reaching £16.15 billion in the latter period. This reflects a trend towards European rearmament that has been going on for many years, but which greatly accelerated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Then, despite not being as high as in previous years, sales to human rights abusing regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar remain high. In 2023, the UK issued single licenses worth £515m (10.4% of the total) to Saudi Arabia, and £351m (7.1% of the total) to Qatar.

Hegseth’s visit to the Philippines comes in the midst of a critical mid-term election, scheduled to be held on May 12, that is functioning for the elite as a referendum on the geopolitical allegiance of the Philippines. The tariffs, spending freezes, and volatility of the Trump administration have thrown into sharp relief the question of Manila’s loyalty to its former colonial ruler. The Marcos administration, functioning as a proxy of US imperialism, has brought the Philippines to the brink of war with China.

The opposition to Marcos is headed by the Duterte family, which has sought to improve relations with China by distancing Manila from Washington. Over the past month, the Marcos government has overseen the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte and the arrest and extradition to The Hague of her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, on charges of crimes against humanity. The current political situation in the Philippines is deeply unstable.

Hegseth announced that the Trump White House was lifting its funding freeze on $500 million in military funding to the Philippines committed in the final year of the Biden administration. However, hundreds of millions of dollars in USAID grants, for malaria eradication, educational improvement, and HIV/AIDS prevention, remain frozen and are likely to be scrapped. The release of military funding is seen as shoring up the political prospects of the Marcos administration slate.

Clearly supportive of the Marcos administration, Hegseth declared, “There is a very real reason why our first trip and our first visit is here to your great country,” to which Marcos responded, “Your visit to the region, and especially the fact that you have come to the Philippines as your first stop, is a very strong indication and sends a very strong message.”