👋 নমস্কাৰ*
Welcome to Friday, where Antony Blinken is in Israel as the UN is set to vote on a U.S. draft resolution for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, new Russian-led strikes overnight kill three and cause blackouts across Ukraine, and Germany’s soccer team bids “auf wiedersehen” to Adidas after 70 years. Meanwhile, Italian daily La Stampa’s Stefano Liberti boards the Aegean Explorer, the Greek ship that set sail toward protecting and conserving the Mediterranean Sea.
[*Nomoskar - Assamese, India]
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German daily Neue Württembergische Zeitung lends its front page to the end of Germany’s Football Association (DFB) relationship with German sports brand Adidas, with the headline “DFB era ends for Adidas.” DFB announced on Thursday the end to its seven-decade relationship with Adidas as it signs a deal with Nike to provide all apparel and equipment from 2027 to 2034. German teams wore Adidas for all four men’s World Cup titles, three European titles, the women’s two World Cup titles and eight European titles. *For more, we offer this recent article in French daily Les Echos: Gerard Piqué's Kings League Wants To Reinvent Soccer For Gen-Z.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Blinken meets with Netanyahu as UN votes on U.S. draft resolution for Gaza: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has arrived in Tel Aviv to meet with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the United Nations Security Council is expected to vote on a Washington-drafted resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
• Russian missile strikes on energy hubs cause blackouts in Ukraine: A barrage of missiles and drones targeted electrical power facilities in several parts of Ukraine overnight, killing three people and leaving several cities without electricity. The strikes, described by Kyiv’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko as “the largest attack on the Ukrainian energy sector in recent times,” damaged the Dnipro hydropower plant, the country’s biggest dam. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview that while the conflict in Ukraine “started as a special military operation,” Russia is currently “in a state of war,” escalating the official language the country had used so far.
• Delhi chief minister and opposition members arrested ahead of India elections: Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s fiercest critics, was arrested by authorities on Thursday over an alleged corruption case. The arrest sparked protests in New Delhi and across India, with dozens of members of the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) detained, as the opposition denounced a politically motivated arrest, just weeks before the country’s general elections.
• Haiti gang leader shot dead transition council nears finalization: A police operation in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince killed a prominent gang leader, Ernst Julme, known as Ti Greg, who had escaped prison earlier this month, as political groups appear to be getting closer to finalizing a transition council in the country. Read this analysis translated from French to English by Worldcrunch: “Hell Or Paradise: What If Haiti Can't Be Saved?”
• EU to open membership negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina: European Leaders have agreed to open talks with Bosnia and Herzegovina on joining the bloc. European Council President Charles Michel said the Balkan country’s “place is in our European family,” but warned that improvements must be made in combating corruption and money laundering.
• Uganda president Museveni appoints son as army chief: Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has promoted his son Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba to head the military, amid a major cabinet reshuffle in which five ministers were sacked. In power since 1986, Museveni has denied speculation that he is grooming his 48-year-old son, his eldest child, for the presidency.
• Two Canadians switched at birth get official apology: Richard Beauvais and Eddy Ambrose, two Canadians who learned they had been mistakenly switched at birth in the small town of Arborg, Manitoba, in 1955, received an official apology from the recently elected premier of Manitoba, reversing a decision by the previous government to deny responsibility for the mix-up. The mistake was discovered last year after a simple at-home DNA testing kit, with the two men meeting face-to-face for the first time this week.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
0.3 inches
The global average sea level rose by about 0.3 inches (0.76 centimeters) from 2022 to 2023, nearly four times the increase of the previous year, according to a NASA-led study. The jump can be attributed to a warming climate and a strong El Nino, which involves warmer ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific than normal and means that rain that normally falls on land ends up in the ocean, temporarily raising sea levels. Human activity is also responsible for this acceleration. If the current rate of increase continues, “we are on track to add another 20 centimeters (7.87 inches) of global mean sea level by 2050,” says Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, director for the NASA sea level change team.
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📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Guardians of the Aegean: aboard the Greek ship working to save the Mediterranean
For more than 20 years, the Greek NGO Archipelagos has been monitoring the unique ecosystems and desertified areas of the Aegean Sea, the arm of the Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey. For Italian daily La Stampa, Stefano Liberti goes on a ride along on the association's main ship, the Aegean Explorer, revealing the effects of climate change, plastic pollution and industrial fishing.
⛵ Thodoris Tsimpidis is the director of Archipelagos, a nongovernmental organization with the mission to protect and conserve the Mediterranean. He founded it in 1998, imparting a real turn in his life. Until then he had been a captain of quite different hulls: he had steered merchant ships, from container ships to oil tankers, crossing all the oceans. "And it was precisely what I saw at sea that prompted me to set up this project." So, at 36, he decided to drop everything overnight and use his severance pay to buy a ship to do ecosystem monitoring and safeguarding in the Aegean, the sea of his childhood.
🔍 The Aegean Explorer is the main ship: 21 meters long by six meters wide, six tons in weight, and the ability to accommodate up to 25 people, a water quality analysis laboratory, a data collection laboratory that uses sonar and a remotely operated vehicle (RoV). With these instruments they photograph the state of the seabed, observe the movements of cetaceans, record the impacts of fishing and other anthropogenic activities, and study changes in ecosystems as an effect of climate change.
🌊 "The Aegean Sea contains the last remaining large marine forests, as well as large and significant coral red algae and impressively beautiful ecosystems that are about 8,000 years old. All these things we are destroying with our unwise actions," Tsimpidis says a bit disheartened. In the nearly 50 years he has been sailing, Tsimpidis has seen the Mediterranean turn more and more into a dumping ground, poisoned by the residues of industrial and agricultural production, choked by plastic, red-hot because of climate change.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED
📣 VERBATIM
“We are in a state of war.”
— The Kremlin says in an interview to pro-Russia newspaper Arguments and Facts, scaling up the conflict in Ukraine from what they previously described as a “special military operation.” Media outlets have previously been banned from using the word “war” and campaigners have been prosecuted for describing Russia’s military actions as a war. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says that as soon as the West became involved in Ukraine, it became a war. This comes as Russia strikes energy hubs in Ukraine, causing blackouts.
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• The "Humanitarian" Pier Is Really About Biden's Election — And Colonizing Gaza — AL MANASSA
• Billionaires, Jingoists And The Paradox Of China's Economic Slowdown — FRANCE INTER
• Mars And Back: Is NASA’s Groundbreaking Research Mission Really About Money And Politics? — UNDARK
✍️ Newsletter by Anne-Sophie Goninet and Ione Gildroy
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