03 World
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Excerpt from www.express.co.uk
One of the most important cities in Spain is already facing scorching temperatures, weeks before the official beginning of summer.
People in Seville, the largest city in the southern region of Andalusia, baked under a 30C heat on Wednesday – and have been told to prepare for even more blistering conditions in days to come.
The Spanish weather forecasters believe temperatures in the southern region will continue to rise over the next few days, with Meteored saying: “Saturday will be sunny and warm.
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Excerpt from www.mirror.co.uk
The Singapore Airlines flight plummeted some 6,000ft injuring many passengers including Linda Kitchen, whose husband Geoff is believed to have suffered a fatal heart attack
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Excerpt from www.bbc.com
The mother of the Ghanaian toddler officially recognised as the world’s youngest male painter has told the BBC of her pride in her son’s artistic ability, and hopes he can take the art world by storm.
Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah achieved the incredible feat aged one year and 152 days.
“He already knows what colours complement each other,” said his mother Chantelle Kuukua Eghan, who has been an artist herself for eight years.
Ms Eghan said she first realised his talent when he was only six months old.
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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com
Whenever the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an investigation into an ongoing war, versions of the following question will inevitably be asked: Does the pursuit of accountability risk leaving the warring parties with no incentive but to continue the fight?
The same question is again being asked now that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan has made the landmark decision to request arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders.
For years, I have tried to get to the bottom of what is often called the “peace versus justice” debate. I wrote a book about how that debate played out with the ICC interventions in Libya and Uganda. I have also published findings on the peace-justice relationship in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere. While responses to the debate are often driven more by assumptions and hypotheticals than incontrovertible facts, the reality is that there is no special key that helps unlock the relationship between resolving wars and achieving accountability for wartime atrocities.
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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com
US slaps tariffs on Chinese goods, and Beijing launches an anti-dumping inquiry in response.
Chinese imports have helped push down the cost of products like video games, T-shirts and home appliances in the United States. But many American factories say these imports have driven them out of business and cost more than a million people their jobs.
President Joe Biden says he will not allow China to “unfairly control the market”.
In the run-up to November’s elections, he has sharply raised tariffs on Chinese imports ranging from electric vehicles to solar cells to protect American industries and workers.
Beijing has launched an anti-dumping investigation in response.
Russia’s Proposal to Redraw Baltic Sea Borders Sparks Concern From Neighbors– www.themoscowtimes.com
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Excerpt from www.themoscowtimes.com
A Russian Defense Ministry proposal to redraw Russia’s maritime borders in the Baltic Sea has sparked concern from Moscow’s neighbors in the region, with officials from Finland to Lithuania decrying what they describe as an attempt to sow confusion and destabilize regional security.
While the Kremlin insisted Wednesday that the government draft resolution was not politically motivated, experts told The Moscow Times that the proposed changes could be used to put pressure on Russia’s western neighbors — all of whom are EU and NATO members.
“This is an issue that shows Russia can and is going to create problems and disputes where the situation was already unproblematic,” said Arkady Moshes, who heads the Russia program at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA).
“So it’s a part of this hybrid pressure,” he told The Moscow Times.
According to the Defense Ministry’s draft resolution — which has since disappeared from the government’s website after it was published Tuesday — Russia’s maritime borders around the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad and the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland would be changed in order to “correspond to the modern geographical situation.”
While the proposal did not provide details on how the borders might change, it nevertheless prompted condemnation from Russia’s neighbors in the Baltic Sea region that would be impacted by any territorial revisions.
“This is an obvious escalation against NATO and the EU, and must be met with an appropriately firm response,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said Wednesday.
Finland’s Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement, calling the Russian Defense Ministry’s draft resolution a distraction and “a form of hybrid influencing.” Authorities in Sweden, meanwhile, claimed Moscow might be seeking to take control over the Baltic Sea.
“If Russia has clear geographical and technical reasons [for the proposal] … then it will become a technical issue, and the border might be corrected,” analyst Moshes told The Moscow Times.
“But [these technical arguments] will have to be presented, and the process will then be dealt with in accordance with [international] rules,” he added.
Later on Wednesday, Russian state media, citing an anonymous military-diplomatic source, reported that Moscow “does not have any intentions to revise” its territorial boundaries in the Baltic Sea despite the proposed changes.
In either case, it remains unclear what any revisions might look like given a lack of concrete information provided in the Defense Ministry’s draft resolution, according to Ryhor Nizhnikau, a senior research fellow at FIIA.
“However, if the draft is approved, it might create a sort of gray zone on the borders,” he told The Moscow Times.
“We might expect a scenario in which a commercial vessel enters what Russia claims to be its waters and is then intercepted by the Russian military, accusing it of violating Russia’s borders,” Nizhnikau said.
“So, this [draft resolution] creates extra pressure on the governments of neighboring countries, military, and also commercial entities,” he added.
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Excerpt from readsludge.com
A new FEC disclosure shows the president’s main super PAC continues to rely on dark money for the majority of its funding.
The primary pro-President Biden super PAC took in more than $12 million in April from “dark money” groups—organizations that funnel money into politics while masking the funding’s true source.
According to a Federal Election Commission filing posted last night, Future Forward PAC transferred $10.2 million in April from its affiliate Future Forward USA Action and received a $2.2 million contribution from Bright Future Fund, a mysterious organization whose address is listed as a D.C. registered agent service. These dark money donors provided the majority of the $16.2 million that Future Forward reported raising in April.
It appears that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was not able to prevent the state of Iran from being able to develop weapons-grade uranium. Recent public statements that have emerged after the death of President Raisi seem to confirm what previous public comments only suggested, Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
Internal debate within Iran itself claiming the Supreme Leader will now be able to push forward with his long-wanted plans to complete the easily completable task of finally building a nuclear bomb.
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Excerpt from www.americanthinker.com
So Iran’s nuclear chicanery has few surprises for me. For the past twenty years, the Iranian regime has played a nuclear cat and mouse game with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, the UN’s so-called nuclear “watchdog.”
But all that changed recently.
In February, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, told a domestic television interviewer that the regime has now “crossed all the scientific and technological thresholds necessary” for producing nuclear weapons.
Three European nations, Ireland, Norway, and Spain, have chosen to recognize the “state of Palestine,” a move that has led to Israel recalling all of its ambassadors from these nations and accusing the nations of attempting to undermine Israeli sovereignty.
Other moves from Israel include an expected total boycott of the three nations, in addition to any ambassadors still in Israel from these countries being compelled to watch video from the October 7 Massacre Israel claims this move by these three nations is giving legitimacy to.
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Excerpt from www.irishtimes.com
Key Points
- Taoiseach announces Ireland will formally recognise the state of Palestine
- Recognition is “the right thing to do”, says Simon Harris
- Norway says it will recognise a Palestinian state, with Spain set to follow
- Israel recalls ambassadors to Ireland and Norway after move
- Israeli embassy in Ireland says decision undermines Israel’s sovereignty
- Recognition by all three will formally take effect from May 28th
- Move comes amid Gaza conflict and ICC seeking Netanyahu arrest warrant
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Excerpt from www.reuters.com
BRUSSELS, May 21 (Reuters) – Europe’s landmark rules on artificial intelligence will enter into force next month after EU countries endorsed on Tuesday a political deal reached in December, setting a potential global benchmark for a technology used in business and everyday life.The European Union’s AI Act is more comprehensive than the United States’ light-touch voluntary compliance approach while China’s approach aims to maintain social stability and state control.
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Excerpt from medicalxpress.com
Researchers have successfully developed the technology that can accurately segment different body organs by effectively learning medical image data used for different purposes in different hospitals, which is expected to greatly contribute to the development of large-scale medical AI models in the future.
The study, published in the journal Medical Image Analysis, was led by Professors Kilian Pohl and Ehsan Adeli at Stanford University and Professor Sanghyun Park at the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology.
Hospitals and other health care institutions have organ image data for various parts of the body for different purposes. To facilitate and provide health care more accurately, however, it is necessary to develop an AI model for multi-organ segmentation based on the medical data that individual institutions do not have.
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Excerpt from en.wenews.pk
DAKAR, Senegal: Police took into custody an activist and a preacher in Dakar after they filmed videos criticising Senegal’s prime minister for perceived tolerance towards gay people, media reported on Tuesday.
Quoting a source close to the case, the media said that the two men are being investigated for “spreading false news” and “offending” the head of government.
Activist Bah Diakhate was arrested by Judicial police on Monday after he recorded a video attacking Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko for an earlier statement on LGBTQ rights.
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Excerpt from www.gmanetwork.com
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – The Netherlands will no longer permit its citizens to adopt children from foreign countries, a Dutch government minister said on Tuesday.
Minister for Legal Protection Franc Weerwind added that intercountry procedures that already started will continue for the time being.
Dutch parents adopted around 40,000 children from 80 countries in the previous half-century. The practice has declined in recent years, with just 145 children adopted in 2019, dropping to 70 in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to most recent numbers of the independent Dutch Youth Institute think tank.
Between February 2021 and November 2022, the Dutch government had already implemented a freeze of almost two years on intercountry adoptions.
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Excerpt from www.aei.org
In the wake of the recent campus occupations, there seems to be an emerging public consensus that the root of university administrators’ difficulties lies in the inherent challenge of maintaining campus safety while simultaneously preserving students’ rights to free speech. Although this struggle may feel real for many campus leaders, it need not be so difficult: Indeed, some university presidents have found it relatively easy to support both civil and constitutional rights. With students’ futures, institutional reputations, and the careers of university leaders at stake, it is both the wise and moral choice to follow these examples.
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Excerpt from www.oann.com
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has stressed the need for the United States and Europe to respond to China’s industrial strategy to keep competition alive.
Yellen hosted a roundtable with financial executives at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management on Tuesday. During it, she addressed global macro-economic trends and financial sector risks.
She sounded the alarm about competition from China. Yellen warned that if countries do not respond to China’s industrial policy, businesses in countries around the world could be at risk.
“And industrial overcapacity not only poses a threat to firms in the U.S. and Europe, it could also prevent countries around the world, including emerging markets, from building the industries that could power their growth,” she stated.
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Excerpt from www.france24.com
After approximately five weeks, 19 witnesses, reams of documents and a dash of salacious testimony, the prosecution against Donald Trump rested its case Monday, handing over to the defense before closing arguments expected next week.
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Excerpt from abcnews.go.com
TAIPEI, Taiwan — China is accelerating the forced urbanization of Tibetan villagers and herders, Human Rights Watch said, in an extensive report that adds to state government and independent reports of efforts to assimilate rural Tibetans through control over their language and traditional Buddhist culture.
The international rights organization cited a trove of Chinese internal reports contradicting official pronouncements that all Tibetans who have been forced to move, with their past homes destroyed on departure, did so voluntary.
The relocations fit a pattern of often-violent demands that ethnic minorities adopt the state language of Mandarin and pledge their fealty to the ruling Communist Party in western and northern territories that include millions of people from Tibetan, Xinjiang Uyghur, Mongolian and other minority groups.
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Excerpt from www.nysun.com
As of now there are about a thousand American soldiers deployed in Niger as part of the fight against jihadist forces in the region, but by the middle of September they will likely all be gone. The ruling junta has given Washington four months to vacate everyone from Niger Air Base 201, a $100 million drone air base that is near the remote town Agadez. It is owned by Niger but financed, and was built, by America.
The announcement came on May 19 at the capital, Niamey, after days of talks between the junta and a delegation from the Department of State. The approximately 1,000 soldiers deployed as part of the anti-jihadist fight have until September 15 at the latest to leave the base, which is used for intelligence and anti-terrorism operations in the Sahel and the Sahara.
Since a July 2023 coup d’état against the elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, things have gone south for relations between Niger and both the former colonial power, France, and America. While the split between Niamey and Washington is on the surface amicable, there is no getting around the idea that Secretary Blinken’s team at Foggy Bottom could have done better. There are uncomfortable echoes of President Biden’s hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 as well as of President Obama’s decision to shutter the American Embassy in Yemen in 2015.
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Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Supporters of Taiwan’s new president are protesting an attempt by the China-leaning opposition to curtail his powers.
On Tuesday, lawmakers from the Kuomintang kicked off the final steps toward passing a law that would require President Lai Ching-te to deliver an address to them every year, appear separately to answer questions and provide a range of documents when asked.
The law would also allow officials to be jailed if they are found lying to the legislature — a change that has the potential to bog Lai’s officials down in court proceedings.
The proposed legislation could be passed in the coming days and make it difficult for Lai to govern the chip hub at the epicenter of US-China tensions. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party says the bill is being rushed through the legislature without enough consultation, while the KMT insists all the proper procedures have been followed.
“It appears to be an attempt to weaken the government’s ability to govern effectively,” said Wen-ti Sung, a Taipei-based nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
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Excerpt from wtvbam.com
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Excerpt from townhall.com
Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder faced questions about the usefulness of the U.S.-built temporary humanitarian pier — with a $300+ million price tag for American taxpayers — and struggled to explain what has been accomplished in the days since the pier’s construction was completed. Notably, the Pentagon does “not believe” any of the hundreds of tons of aid delivered so far has made it to those for whom it’s intended.
Wow: Ryder says “I do not believe” any of the aid that’s been delivered through the pier has actually gotten to the people of Gaza
— Lara Seligman (@laraseligman) May 21, 2024
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Excerpt from uk.news.yahoo.com
President Emmanuel Macron flew to France’s Pacific territory of New Caledonia on Wednesday, where nine days of riots have killed six, injured hundreds and incinerated cars, shops and public buildings.
Macron’s plane was en route from France to the troubled islands, a holiday destination now strewn with hundreds of charred vehicles and scarred by burned-out stores, businesses and schools.
The deadliest unrest in four decades has been blamed on French plans to give voting rights to thousands of non-indigenous residents, which Indigenous Kanaks say will dilute their votes.
French authorities said the violence, which erupted May 13, had eased since 1,050 troops, tactical police and national security reinforcements from Paris were deployed, including to “highly sensitive” areas.