👋 Салом*
Welcome to Friday, where the first aid trucks arrive in Gaza through the newly built U.S. floating pier, French police forces arrive in New Caledonia after days of rioting, and two cryptothieves get arrested for stealing $25 million in 12 seconds back in 2023. Meanwhile, in Ukrainian news website Livy Bereg, Sonya Koshkina looks at how Protestants in Ukraine have helped fortify the Kyiv-Washington alliance.
[*Salom - Uzbek]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
“Why is the women’s vote so important?,” Noida-based weekly news magazine India Today asks on its cover, reporting on the high numbers of women casting their votes in the country’s general election, which will end on June 1. According to the magazine, women will “prove decisive” in the seven-phase ballot that will decide the 543 members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, as current leader Narendra Modi seeks a third term as prime minister.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• First U.S. aid trucks arrive via Gaza pier as Israel accuses South Africa of false claims at ICJ. Israel has accused South Africa of “biased and false claims” at the UN’s top court in an attempt to force Israel to stop its military campaign in Rafah. South Africa told the court that Israel intended to “wipe [the Palestinians] off the face of the Earth.” Lawyers for Israel will present their response today. Meanwhile, the U.S. said that its first aid shipment via a temporary pier off Gaza has made it ashore. Around 500 tons of aid is expected to enter the strip in the coming days.
• Russia increases drone use in Kharkiv as Ukrainian drones intercepted. Overnight, Russia intercepted more than 100 Ukrainian drones in the south of the country, over Crimea and the Black Sea, in one of the largest overnight drone attacks by Ukraine. This comes as Russian forces advance along the front line, making the biggest gains in 18 months. The Ukrainian artillery on the Kharkiv frontline said they had never seen anything close to the number of drones being used. Read about Ukraine’s fight against Russia in the Black Sea with this piece translated by Worldcrunch.
• French forces arrive to regain control of New Caledonia after rioting began on Monday. The number of police and gendarmes on the French Pacific territory will rise from 1,700 to 2,700 by the end of Friday. The rioting, which has so far resulted in four deaths, hundreds of arrests and fires and looting, started because of anger towards electoral reform. France has declared a state of emergency on the archipelago. Read about why Paris suspects foreign influence in New Caledonia.
• Taiwanese lawmakers exchange physical blows in dispute over parliament reforms. Even before votes were cast on Friday, lawmakers screamed at, pushed and hit each other outside the legislative chamber, before the chaotic scenes moved to the floor of the parliament. This comes just days before President-elect Lai Ching-te takes office without a legislative majority. Read more about Lai’s victory, translated by Worldcrunch.
• Police kill man who set fire to a synagogue in Rouen, northern France. The man was reportedly armed with a knife and iron bar, and was shot when he approached police. Police were called to the synagogue in the Normandy city after smoke was seen rising from it early Friday morning. The fire was brought under control, however “significant” damage was caused. Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol said there were no victims other than the armed man, and that the entire city was “in shock.”
• Texas governor pardons man who killed Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Governor Greg Abbott granted a full pardon on Thursday to former U.S. Army sergeant and Uber driver Daniel Perry, who was jailed for 25 years after fatally shooting a 28-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran at a Black Lives Matter rally. Abbott cited Texas’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, one of the strongest such measures in the U.S., as Perry insisted he was acting in self-defense.
• Australia’s richest person seeks removal of her portrait from exhibition. The caricature-style portrait of mining magnate Gina Rinehart is one of 21 individual works that make up a single piece in the indigenous artist Vincent Namatjira’s “Australia in Colour” exhibition. Upset at how she is depicted, Rinehart is asking the National Gallery of Australia to remove her portrait.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
12 seconds
Anton Peraire-Bueno, 24, and James Peraire-Bueno, 28, were arrested on Wednesday in the U.S. for stealing $25 million worth of cryptocurrency in April 2023. In an elaborate heist, which federal prosecutors in Manhattan called “novel,” the two brothers, who had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were able to exploit the Ethereum blockchain’s integrity and steal the money from traders in just 12 seconds. Prosecutors said the brothers had found a vulnerability in the code of software that is used by the majority of the network’s “validators,” who are responsible for checking that new transactions are valid before they are added to the blockchain.
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📰 STORY OF THE DAY
A holy war? How Ukrainian Evangelicals try to “convert” U.S. Christians to back Kyiv
In Ukrainian news website Livy Bereg, Sonya Koshkina reports on the activism of a prominent Ukrainian Protestant trying to show Republicans in the U.S. that Kyiv is the real defender of Christian values.
🤝 For more than six months, Ukraine was waiting for the U.S. to commit to more financial support for its military. To convince the local establishment, to gain support from completely different groups of influence and ordinary voters, they resorted to active advocacy and lobbying. Ukrainian government officials and Ukraine's friends from other countries have built communication networks to make their case. And yet for many years, there has been one line of advocacy that has produced consistent results, even if it is not very publicly visible: Ukrainian Protestant groups.
⛪ We turned to Pavlo Unguryan, the leader of the National Prayer Breakfast in Ukraine and coordinator of the Christian Platform of the Ukrainian-American Partnership, to help understand how Protestants in Ukraine have helped fortify the Kyiv-Washington alliance. Unguryan is a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament; at the time of his first election in 2007, he was the head of the youth movement of the Baptists of Ukraine. He is a fourth-generation evangelical Christian.
🇺🇦 The history of Ukrainian Protestants goes back hundreds of years. The first evangelicals appeared on our lands at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. Back then, Ukrainian territory was part of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the ideas of the Reformation, especially popular among the nobility, were actively spread.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
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💬 LEXICON
共同親権
Japan’s parliament enacted a bill on Friday to allow divorced parents to choose joint custody of their children (共同親権, pronounced “Kyōdō shinken”) from 2026, changing a decades-old law. Japan was the only G7 country that didn’t recognize the legal concept of shared custody, with the former system only allowing custody by one parent, usually the mother. This was criticized by divorced parents, who say they have been estranged from their children as a result, and by foreign citizens, who said it complicated maintaining ties if their former partners chose to return to Japan with their children.
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✍️ Newsletter by Ione Gildroy and Anne-Sophie Goninet
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