👋 Esama!*
Welcome to Tuesday, where WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange leaves the UK after striking a plea deal with the U.S. justice department, Israeli airstrikes kill at least 24 in Gaza City, and hundreds of Filipino devotees celebrate their patron saint with mud and banana leaves. Meanwhile, Basel Ramsis in Egypt-based news website Al-Manassa pens a thought-provoking piece on what Zionism shares with Nazism, in light of the movie The Zone of Interest.
[*Mandika, Senegal, Gambia]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Seoul-based newspaper Chosun Ilbo dedicates its front page to the lithium battery plant fire in Hwaseong, south of the capital, which broke out on Monday after a series of explosions. The fire, which firefighters struggled for 5 hours to extinguish with water, killed 22 people in the factory run by battery manufacturer Aricell. One person is still missing and 8 others have been wounded. On Tuesday morning, police and fire authorities began a joint investigation to determine the exact cause of what is considered one of the worst accidents to occur at a chemical factory in South Korea.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Julian Assange is released from prison after U.S. plea deal. The WikiLeaks founder has been freed from prison in the United Kingdom and is traveling home to Australia, after he agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of breaching the espionage law in the United States. For more, read this piece The Persecution Of Julian Assange Leaves Lasting Damage To Press Freedom, now on Worldcrunch.
• Israeli airstrikes kill at least 24 in Gaza City. Israeli forces killed at least 24 Palestinians in three separate airstrikes early on Tuesday on Gaza City and the dead included a sister of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. Israeli tanks also pressed deeper into western areas of Rafah in the south of the enclave overnight.
• Trump has plan to halt U.S. military aid to Kyiv unless it talks peace with Moscow. Two key advisers to Donald Trump have presented him with a plan to end Russia's war in Ukraine, if he wins the presidential election, that involves telling Ukraine it will only get more U.S. weapons if it enters into peace talks. The U.S. would at the same time warn Moscow that any refusal to negotiate would result in increased U.S. support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, at least five people were killed and 41 injured, including four children, after Russia launched two missiles on the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. For more about what Trump’s return would mean for the war in Ukraine, read this piece translated from Russian to English.
• EU launches membership talks with Moldova and Ukraine. The start of negotiations will be marked by a ceremony in Luxembourg on Tuesday. While the process is likely to take years, the opening of the talks will give the pair, war-torn Ukraine in particular, encouragement to continue on their path to leaving their Soviet past behind them.
• Thousands protest in Kenya against tax hikes. Police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse demonstrators in the Kenyan capital Nairobi and other cities on Tuesday as thousands took to the streets across the country to protest against proposed tax hikes. Protesters also called for President William Ruto to quit.
• China’s lunar probe returns with rare Moon rocks. The Chang'e-6 l has returned to Earth with the first ever samples from the Moon's unexplored far side, landing in the Inner Mongolia desert on Tuesday after an almost two-month long mission. Scientists say the samples could answer key questions about how planets are formed.
• Rare Beatles record with “McArtney” typo sold. The 1962 demonstration record, which features the band's songs Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You, is one of only 250 copies in the world. It is considered to be unique because Paul McCartney's surname is incorrectly spelt in the credits as “McArtney.”
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
2.99 million
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said it had screened a total of 2.99 million airline passengers in a single day last Sunday. Although that breaks the previous record set in May, the agency said the number would probably increase by the end of the week, when up to 3 million Americans are expected to travel for the long July 4th holiday weekend. The TSA expects to screen more than 32 million people from Thursday through Monday (up 5% compared to last year). In 2024 so far, TSA recorded seven of the 10 busiest days in its history.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
When Zionism resembles Nazism — and neo-fascists side with Netanyahu
Zionism shares with Nazism the claims of building what they call National Socialism, though nationalism always takes over. There are lessons in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, and the current politics of the far right in Europe, writes Basel Ramsis in Egypt-based news website Al-Manassa.
🔍 While watching the 2023 Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, I noticed that Zionism not only shares with Nazism the discourses of national socialism, but also inherited its aesthetic. The film presents aspects of the life of the family of the head of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The filmmakers often do not realize the similarity in details between the lives of Nazi settlers and Zionist settlers. However, viewers of the film, who have watched Israeli films or filmed investigations in its settlements, and who have intellectual integrity, will notice this similarity.
↔️ The meeting of Nazism with Zionism and extreme Judaism in the aesthetic may seem like a funny paradox, but, in addition to the ideas of socialist nationalism that unite them, it expresses the current reality in a direct and blunt way that is fit for the 21st century. For this emerges in the growing ties between Israel and the European and American extreme and racist right-wing movements, including the Nazi and Neo-fascist movements that are historically anti-Semitic at their core.
🇮🇱 This shift of the traditional European powers moving away from unconditional support for Israel could have a new impact on Israel in the medium-term, just as the intensification of right-wing and extremist tendencies that have reached the point of criminality within Israeli society. It suggests “substitution,” that is the rejection of Netanyahu, his government, and his Likud being replaced by a rejection of the practices of Israel as a state.
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📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
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📣 VERBATIM
“If we get this right, they’ll probably give me the Nobel Prize in Economics.”
— During a visit to the Czech Republic on Monday, Argentina's President Javier Milei claimed that his “rewriting (of) a large part of economic theory,” together with his senior advisor Demian Reidel, was worth the Nobel Prize. Elected last November in a context of severe economic crisis, the libertarian politician promised a radical plan to deregulate the economy. He undertook drastic budget cuts in the public and social sector. Although inflation has fallen, so has the economic performance of the country, where almost 56% of Argentinians live below the poverty line.
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Mecca Burning: Pilgrims Dying In The Heat Is A Climate Alarm For Us All — FRANCE INTER
• As Gaza Burns Next Door, IEDs Remind Egypt That Another War Is Not Quite Over — MADA MASR
• How The Paris Paralympics Are Driving Engineering And Accessibility Innovation — LES ECHOS✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright and Laure Gautherin
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