👋 नमस्कार*
Welcome to Tuesday, where Israeli forces vow a response to Iran’s attack despite calls for restraint, the Paris Olympic flame is lit in Greece and the design of a train station in China gets some online mocking. Meanwhile, Ishak Ibrahim in Egypt-based news website Al-Manassa questions the support of Egyptian Islamic and Christian religious institutions to the government's failed economic policies amid increasingly dire social and humanitarian conditions.
[*Namaskār - Marathi, India]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
La Vanguardia’s Tuesday edition features the start of Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial in New York and the risk of wider Middle East war as Israel and Iran face off. But the Barcelona-based daily also reserves part of its front page for Rafael Nadal, who is making a comeback at the Barcelona Open after a year of injuries, though the Spanish tennis great has confirmed that 2024 will be his last year on tour.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israel will respond to Iran’s attack, Israel army chief says. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned his war cabinet for the second time in less than 24 hours after Tehran launched an unprecedented attack on Israel over the weekend. For more, read this article from Kayhan-London, translated from Persian by Worldcrunch: Iran's Retaliation Against Israel Is An Internal Struggle With Its Own Rhetoric.
• Australian police declared the knife attack at a Sydney church a terrorist act. A 16-year-old teenager was arrested after an Assyrian church bishop and three followers were stabbed on Monday. Captured on a church livestream, it is the second stabbing in three days in Australia, after an unrelated attack left seven people dead in a popular Sydney shopping center. Those injured in the church attack are expected to recover.
• Jury selection for Trump’s historic criminal trial continues after dozens ruled out. Sixty of 96 potential jurors were sent home after they said they couldn’t be impartial in the trial of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is facing hush-money charges in New York. The process to select 12 impartial jurors could take up to two weeks.
• The Olympic flame for the Paris 2024 Games was lit in Greece's ancient Olympia. The lightning will kick off an international torch relay stretching from the Acropolis to the South Pacific across 64 French territories and ending in Paris for the start of the Games on July 26. For more on the Olympics, check this article translated from French to English: What Olympic Role For The River Seine? A Deeper Look.
• Denmark’s old stock exchange in the center of Copenhagen was engulfed in a massive fire. The spire of the 17th-century building, one of the Danish capital’s most famous landmarks, which was undergoing renovation, collapsed on Tuesday morning. Deputy prime minister Troels Lund Poulsen described the blaze as “our own Notre-Dame moment,” referring to the fire that damaged the Paris cathedral in April 2019, five years ago almost to the day.
• At least 100 killed as lightning and heavy rains lash Pakistan and Afghanistan. Both countries have reported a death toll of about 50 people, urging emergency services to remain on high alert as more severe weather is expected in the coming days.
• Chinese building mocked on social media for resembling a sanitary pad. Authorities say the proposed design of the North Nanjing train station takes inspiration from plum blossoms, which the eastern Chinese city is known for, but internet users don’t agree: “Why can we all tell it is a sanitary pad immediately, but the architects can't?”
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
200 million
Baidu's AI chatbot “Ernie Bot” has amassed over 200 million users and its application programming interface (API) is used 200 million times daily. The number of users doubled since December, with 85,000 enterprise clients. Despite this, Chinese generative AI services still trail behind Western counterparts like OpenAI's ChatGPT, which remains the most popular globally. Follow Worldcrunch’s international coverage of all things chatbot here.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Muslim and Christian alike, Egypt's religious institutions make the economic crisis worse
Amid increasingly dire economic, social and humanitarian conditions in Egypt, the charitable work of Islamic and Christian religious institutions is important. Yet these institutions also support the government's failed economic policies, writes Ishak Ibrahim in Egypt-based news website Al-Manassa.
🕌⛪ Waves of soaring prices have crushed Egyptians, pushing many of them into poverty. In this context, charitable work is important. Islamic and Christian religious institutions lead this type of charitable work directly or through their affiliated bodies and associations. They help poor families meet their needs through providing cash or in-kind assistance. Even in secular countries, the role of religious institutions is no longer limited to matters of faith, theology and religious services.
🇪🇬 But such institutions often find themselves the crosshairs of secular and civil movements that view their growing charitable role as evidence of the decline of civil state institutions or that fear the spread of radical religious movements and their associated conservative cultural and social pattern. A further dilemma in Egypt is that charitable religious institutions support the government's economic policies and its repercussions through their activities and their leaders’ statements.
🗯️ Today, this trend is strongly evident with economic issues, some of which are a matter of controversy and disagreement. Religious institutions are usually supportive of government policies and hold the weaker party and the people responsible for these crises. They completely ignore those who have actually caused such crises.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED
📣 VERBATIM
“This is not novelistic. I mean, somebody sticks a knife in you, that’s pretty personal. Pretty first person.”
— Salman Rushdie's memoir Knife is out today. It explores the knife attack the Indian-British novelist survived on Aug. 12, 2022, revealing his shock and disbelief at the event. He sustained severe injuries, including blindness in one eye. Rushdie sees writing about the incident as a necessary step in confronting the truth and reclaiming his narrative, as a “knife that cuts through the truth.” “It became clear to me that I couldn’t write anything else, I had to write this first,” he said. The attacker, Hadi Matar, awaits trial. Check out this article from the Worldcrunch vault, published in the wake of the 2022 attack on Rushdie.
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Did Israel Set A Trap For Iran — Or For Itself? — FRANCE INTER
• Memories For Food: Gaza Mothers Sell Family Heirlooms To Feed Their Children — DARAJ
• Shish Kebab: Back To The Source Of Turkey's Best-Known Culinary Export — OKSIJEN
✍️ Newsletter by Anne-Sophie Goninet and Cory Agathe
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