👋 Haaahe!*
Welcome to Friday, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Japanese anti-nuclear group Nihon Hidankyo, UN peacekeepers report Israeli fire at their position for the third consecutive day, and the night sky lights up in the UK and the U.S. Meanwhile, for Germany daily Die Zeit, Volker Weidermann wonders why artists like to depict solitude so much.
[*Cheyenne]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Spanish daily sports newspaper Mundo Deportivo dedicates its front page to Spanish tennis champion Rafael Nadal following his announcement to retire from the sport. The 38-year-old, who has won 22 Grand Slam titles, will represent Spain in his final appearance at next month's Davis Cup Finals in Malaga.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israeli attack wounds UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, kills 22 in Beirut strike. Lebanon’s foreign ministry condemned an Israeli attack on a watchtower used by UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon on Friday, the third consecutive day peacekeepers have reported Israeli fire at their positions. At least 22 were killed and 117 wounded in an Israeli strike late on Thursday in the heart of Beirut that targeted senior Hezbollah official Wafiq Safa, who survived, according to security sources.
• At least 16 dead, millions without power after Hurricane Milton. Search and rescue and recovery operations are ongoing in Florida after the storm passed through the southern U.S. state overnight, leaving at least 16 dead and about 3.1 million homes and businesses without power. While the damage is “not the worst-case scenario” that was expected, Governor Ron DeSantis said, the clean-up operation could take many weeks or even months. Milton has now weakened and is no longer officially a hurricane. The storm is expected to continue to move away from the east coast of Florida.
• Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo. The organization of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (who are also known as Hibakusha) has received the prize “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Friday. Nihon Hidankyo’s main activities include the prevention of nuclear war and the elimination of nuclear weapons, as well as state compensation for the A-bomb damages.
• Zelensky meets Pope Francis at Vatican. After meeting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for dinner late Thursday, the Ukrainian president headed on Friday morning to the Vatican for his second face-to-face encounter in four months with Pope Francis, as part of a whirlwind tour of European capitals to drum up support from allies for Ukraine. Read more in this analysis translated from French by Worldcrunch: Zelensky Wants More Weapons — But Is Ready For A Softer Definition Of “Victory.”
• Gunmen kill 20 miners in attack in Pakistan. Seven others were wounded when attackers stormed the workers’ accommodation at the Junaid Coal Company mines in Balochistan province in southwest Pakistan in the early hours of Friday morning. No group has claimed immediate responsibility for the killings but suspicion is likely to fall on the separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), which has carried out several deadly attacks in the province in the past.
• Tesla unveils “Cybercab” self-driving taxi. CEO Elon Musk promised that the firm’s long-awaited robotaxi, unveiled on Thursday evening at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California, will cost less than $30,000 and said that the futuristic-looking vehicle’s autonomous driving feature will be brought to Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y cars in California and Texas by next year. Production of the Cybercab, which has no pedals or steering wheel, is expected to begin some time “before 2027.” From the Worldcrunch vault, we offer this piece translated from German on the limits of self-driving cars.
• Remains of British explorer found after 100 years on Everest. A documentary team discovered a boot and a sock with “a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it,” National Geographic magazine reported Friday, on the peak’s Central Rongbuk Glacier. The items could belong to Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared on the world’s highest mountain in 1924 alongside climbing partner George Mallory as the pair attempted to be the first to reach its summit. The discovery could help resolve the enduring mystery of whether Irvine and Mallory ever managed to reach the summit, nearly three decades before the first currently recognized ascent in 1953.
📣 VERBATIM
“This was not a mistake and not an accident.”
— Italian Minister of Defence Guido Crosetto called Thursday’s attack by Israeli forces on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) headquarters in southern Lebanon “totally unacceptable” and said that “this was not a mistake and not an accident.” Crosetto said he had summoned the Israeli ambassador to demand an explanation for the attack, which injured two Indonesian peacekeepers.
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📰 IN OTHER NEWS
✍️ “How can the world see this fire and smoke covering the beauty of Beirut without saying a word?” asks Baghdad native poet Aya Mansour, for whom the Lebanese coastal metropolis has long been a source of inspiration and freedom.
— DARAJ
🌐 The end of a bipolar world and of Western supremacy has created a more fluid, and threatening, geopolitical map. For smaller powers, now is the time to “get the best deal” for themselves with the superpowers.
— CLARÍN
📖 Writers and artists have always dreamt of loneliness. For centuries, this celebration of proud or penitent solitude was an artistic luxury, but it has also inspired a powerful political concept.
— DIE ZEIT
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED
💬 LEXICON
被爆者
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo. The grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who are also known as Hibakusha (被爆者, meaning “survivor of the bomb”), received the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.
✍️ Newsletter by Anne-Sophie Goninet & Emma Albright
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