👋 Daag!*
Welcome to Friday, where Israel breaches the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, investigators find the black box from the Washington, D.C. plane crash, and the benefit concert for the L.A. fires included a surprise musical group reunion. Meanwhile, Die Zeit’s Paul Hildebrandt looks at the novel approach the Swiss city of Zurich has taken to tackle drug addiction.
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[*Limburgish – Netherlands, Belgium and Germany]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
“Grandma vs. the Right,” headlines German daily Die Tageszeitung with a cover photo of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a rare political statement from the former leader, she said that Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU and the likely next Chancellor, broke his promise not to vote with the far right AfD party to impose stricter immigration rules. Merz said after the vote that a policy is not wrong just because the “wrong people back it.”
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israel launches attack on Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, violating ceasefire deal again. The Israeli army said on Friday it struck “multiple” Hezbollah targets in the area near the border with Syria in the east, as tensions escalated following its extension of a recent deadline for removing its troops from the country. Meanwhile, three hostages are set to be freed on Saturday in the next hostage-prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. Follow Worldcrunch’s international coverage of the Middle East here.
• Ahmed al-Sharaa vows to preserve "civil peace" in first address as interim president. In Friday’s speech, Sharaa, who has just been appointed interim president for an unspecified transitional period, also promised to preserve Syria's territorial unity. Meanwhile, Syria's new Islamist leaders are undertaking a radical overhaul of the country's broken economy, including plans to fire a third of all public sector workers and privatizing state-run companies dominant during half a century of Assad family rule.
• Russian forces slowly closing in on key Ukrainian city. If Ukraine fails to hold on to Pokrovsk, Russia would be in a strong position to mount attacks in several directions in the east and increase pressure on Kyiv at a critical juncture in the war. Read more about how negotiations to end the war in Ukraine could play out in this piece from German daily Die Zeit, in English via Worldcrunch.
• D.C. crash black boxes found. Investigators have recovered the flight data recorders from the American Airlines plane that crashed into the Potomac River after colliding with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on Wednesday and killed 67 people. U.S. President Donald Trump used a press conference to blame diversity rules under his predecessors, even if he offered no information that connected the crash to those hired for air traffic control roles.
• Myanmar’s military extends its state of emergency for another six months. This comes as the generals struggle to maintain their increasingly fragile grip on power, with fighting happening on multiple fronts across the country. The military-controlled National Defence and Security Council renewed the emergency rule in a meeting in the capital Naypyidaw on Friday, a day before the four-year anniversary of a coup that threw the country into chaos after a decade of tentative democracy.
• Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull has died at the age of 78. Born in Hampstead in December 1946, she was known for hits like As Tears Go By, which reached the UK top 10 in 1964, and for starring roles in films including 1968's The Girl On A Motorcycle. She was also famously the girlfriend of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.
• News Quiz! The surviving members of which seminal band reunited at FireAid, the LA fires benefit concert?
A. Fleetwood Mac
B. Grateful Dead
C. A Tribe Called Quest
D. Nirvana
[Answer below]
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💬 LEXICON
Terra dei Fuochi
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy has violated the rights of nearly three million residents in Italy who live in what is known as the “Land of Fires.” The Terra dei Fuochi is an area around Naples in which garbage is disposed of and burned by a mafia group that does it for a fraction of the price of the regular trash pickup. But the court ruled that adverse health effects to the people in the area, including higher rates of cancer and groundwater pollution, mean that the Italian government’s laxity on the issue is a violation of residents’ basic rights to live in good health.
📹 ON THIS DAY VIDEO — 4 HISTORY-MAKING EVENTS, IN 57 SECONDS
➡️ Watch the video: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
📰 IN OTHER NEWS
🔍 The year started without the tyrant of Damascus. Lebanon elected a president. Gaza has a ceasefire. Some of this progress is due to external geopolitical forces, yet there are signs that the region could be turning around from within.
— DARAJ
🇱🇾 A recent video of a woman being tortured in Libyan refugee camps is further proof that agreements signed by the EU and Italy with Libyan and Tunisian authorities are doing more harm than good. But the work of associations like Refugees in Libya shows that there is still some hope for the future.
— LA STAMPA
💉 Cheap cocaine is flooding the European drug market, escalating conflicts in open drug scenes, everywhere except the historically drug-tolerant Zurich. A visit to this Swiss city with a different approach for taking on drug addiction.
— DIE ZEIT
📣 VERBATIM
“It is very simple: If he taxes Brazilian products, there will be reciprocity.”
— Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responded to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats against the South American country by promising to take similar actions against the U.S. Brazil buys more products from the U.S. than it sells to it, and Brazilian diplomats have said they hope this beneficial arrangement for the U.S. would help them avoid tariffs that Trump has pledged. But Lula, a left-wing candidate in Brazil, is not as close to Trump as his far right rival Jair Bolsonaro is.
✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright & Jake Shropshire
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Quiz Answer: D. The surviving members of Nirvana reunited at the FireAid LA fires benefit concert. Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl and Pat Smear made a surprise appearance at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, performing “Breed” with St. Vincent on vocals, “School” with Kim Gordon and “Territorial Pissings” with Joan Jett. Other performances at the relief concert included Billie Eilish, Pink, Katy Perry and Dr Dre.