Author: ALJAZEERA

Mediterranean Sea – In the pitch-black hours of early Thursday morning, the Humanity 1 rescue ship approached a sky-blue wooden boat in distress in the central Mediterranean Sea. On board were at least 126 people who were suffering from hypothermia, dehydration and exhaustion from clinging to the boat for hours as it struggled to stay upright amid waves as high as two metres (six feet). Cries for help in Arabic echoed off the waves in the pre-sunrise. “‘We were ready for death, we were dying,’” a 30-year-old Syrian survivor told Al Jazeera as he clung to the orange rescue RIB…

New Delhi, India – Immediately after becoming the prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi held backdoor negotiations with the Finance Commission of India to significantly cut funds allocated to the country’s states. However, the head of the commission, an independent constitutional body deciding states’ shares from central taxes, resisted, and Modi had to back off, new revelations show. The Finance Commission’s firm stance forced the Modi government to hastily redo its maiden full budget in 48 hours and slash funding across welfare programmes since its assumption of retaining a greater portion of the central taxes did not pan out. At…

Central Gaza Strip – Palestinians in Gaza’s smallest refugee camp have once again found themselves digging the bodies of their relatives out from under rubble, hours after Israeli forces announced their withdrawal from the area. Witnesses in the Maghazi refugee camp say many of the residents were shot at close range by Israeli soldiers “in cold blood”. Piles of broken concrete and scenes of widespread destruction are evidence that homes were not spared in Israeli attacks, which included missile strikes and heavy artillery shelling. Israeli soldiers have been conducting ground operations in northern, central, and parts of southern Gaza, for…

Charity says billionaires $3.3 trillion richer than in 2020 as annual gathering of business elites take place.The world’s richest five men have more than doubled their fortunes since 2020, the charity Oxfam has said, sounding the alarm about unchecked corporate power as business elites hold their high-profile annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland. The five men are worth a combined $869bn after growing their fortunes at a rate of $14m per hour during the past four years, Oxfam said in its report “Inequality Inc.”, released on Monday. Despite the growth in the fortunes of the five – LVMH chief Bernard Arnault,…

Humanitarian aid for the besieged Gaza Strip has been shipped under a deal brokered between Israel and Hamas. The aid, which includes medicines for the Israeli captives that Hamas is still holding, was making its way from Egypt on Wednesday, after being flown from France to Qatar. Paris and Doha announced the previous day that they had brokered the first deal between Israel and the Palestinian group since a truce ended on December 1. More than 100 of the 240 or so captives taken by Hamas during its assault on Israel on October 7 were freed during that weeklong pause…

Tang Shuangning is latest in long line of high-profile figures to be ensnared in Xi Jinping’s anticorruption drive.The former head of China’s state-owned banking giant Everbright Group has been arrested for alleged corruption, prosecutors have said. Tang Shuangning, 69, was arrested on suspicion of taking bribes and embezzlement following the conclusion of an investigation by the anticorruption authority, China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate said on Monday. Tang was earlier this month expelled from the ruling Communist Party for alleged violations of party discipline, including bringing unauthorised books into the country and accepting illicit gifts. The former bank chairman is the latest…

Gaza City – I first met Dr Refaat in 2015 in Gaza City. He was a guest speaker at The English Club to discuss the book he edited, Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza. It was a collection of short stories by 15 young writers, and a couple by Dr Refaat, that delved into the experience of growing up in Gaza and the writers’ experiences during the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on the enclave. We were all aspiring writers of a sort, we ranged from 13 to 17 years old, and I think most of us underestimated…

The additional inspections come after the US Federal Aviation Administration said the 737 MAX should remain grounded.Boeing has said it will add further quality inspections for the 737 MAX planes after a mid-air blowout of a cabin panel in an Alaska Airlines MAX 9 earlier this month, the head of its commercial planes division said. In a letter to the global planemaker’s employees on Monday, Stan Deal, president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said the company will also deploy a team to supplier Spirit AeroSystems – which makes and installs the plug door involved in the incident – to check and…

Inevitably, contempt breeds disgust. Anyone with a scintilla of awareness and sympathy for the horrors that Palestinians have endured for generations knows the abiding ache that churns inside of us like a dormant volcano ready to blow up with righteous anger. So, we take to the streets, bridges and national malls in a necessary display of irenic solidarity and to point an accusatory finger at the hypocrites and their enablers who deny the inhumanity and injustices that we can all see being perpetrated in Gaza and the West Bank with deliberate, lethal efficiency by a fanatical regime seized with a…

Massive destruction, displacement, hunger and loss in Gaza are ‘staining our shared humanity’, the United Nations says.On day 100 of the war on Gaza, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip continues with no sign of easing, amid a growing humanitarian catastrophe and the looming threat of a regional spillover. At least 23,968 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, have been killed since the war began on October 7, after Hamas fighters carried out an assault on southern Israel that killed 1,139 there. Israel said about 240 people were also taken captive. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has…