Author: ALJAZEERA

Representatives of governments and international organisations, billionaires, entrepreneurs, experts, academics, NGOs and press corps are once again descending on the Graubunden winter sports resort in Davos, Switzerland. Under the motto “Rebuilding Trust”, the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) will start on January 15, aiming to discuss “the basic principles of trust” – transparency, coherence and responsibility. But the ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as from new conflicts around the globe may make it difficult to rebuild trust in institutions. And these days, the relevance of the WEF itself is often up for debate.…

Gaza is under a weeklong sustained telecoms outage, the longest since the onset of the war with Israel.A weeklong telecommunications blackout in the Gaza Strip has become a “matter of life and death” and should end immediately, digital civil rights group Access Now says during the longest continuous outage since Israel’s war began. “It is unconscionable to toy with connectivity amidst unprecedented violence and unfathomable human suffering,” Marwa Fatafta, the group’s policy and advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement on Thursday. “Internet shutdowns must not be used as weapons of war. Access Now continues…

Official data shows GDP was 5.2 percent in 2023, hitting a government target, but recovery looks uneven.China’s economy grew by 5.2 percent in 2023, hitting the government’s official target, but concerns about growth momentum remain amid a protracted property crisis, sluggish consumer and business confidence, and weak global growth. China’s National Bureau of Statistics said gross domestic product (GDP) in the world’s second-biggest economy also rose by 5.2 percent in the final three months of 2023, compared with the same period last year. Kang Yi, the bureau’s head, said the expansion had been “hard won” and cautioned that the economy…

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…