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👋 السلام عليكم*
Welcome to Thursday, where Hamas hands over the remains of four Israeli captives, impeached Yoon Suk Yeol becomes the first sitting South Korean president to go on criminal trial, and today’s quiz question comes from the UK’s art scene. Meanwhile, Clarissa Levy in Agência Pública reports on how the Indigenous people of Guyana have chosen to spend their first “carbon credit dollars.”
[*Ssalamū ‘lekum - Darija, Morocco]
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German daily Die Tageszeitung writes today about the fiery exchange between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, headlining with “Trump: Ukraine Started the War [nobody believes that].” The world leaders got into a back-and-forth on Wednesday when, following Trump’s comments suggesting Ukraine had started the war in the region, Zelensky said that Trump was “caught in a web of disinformation,” to which Trump said that Zelensky was a “dictator without elections,” echoing a common Kremlin talking point.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israel receives bodies of four hostages held in Gaza. As part of the ongoing ceasefire agreement, Israel has for the first time received the bodies of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The four dead are said to include three members of the Bibas family, mother Shiri and her two children who have long been feared dead, as well as Oded Lifshitz, a veteran peace activist who was 83 when he was abducted. The militant group claims all four were killed in an Israeli strike more than a year ago. Read more in this analysis translated from Arabic by Worldcrunch: The People Of Gaza Are Trapped By Madness And Delusion — Of Trump And Hamas.
• EU leaders back Zelensky after Trump calls him “dictator.” European leaders, including the UK’s Keir Starmer and Germany’s Olaf Scholz defended Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday after U.S. President Donald Trump called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator” and warned he had to move quickly to secure peace or risk losing his country. French President Emmanuel Macron posted on X that “Ukraine must always be included and its rights respected.” Both Macron and Starmer are expected to travel to the White House early next week to discuss the war in Ukraine. For more, check this Les Echos article translated from French by Worldcrunch: What Putin Wants From Trump: Ukraine On Its Knees, The Baltics Out Of NATO.
• G20 foreign ministers gather in South Africa amid tensions with U.S. Foreign ministers from the G20 top economies are set to meet on Thursday and Friday in Johannesburg amid tensions between members over the Ukraine war, trade disputes. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he wouldn’t attend the summit due to diplomatic tensions between South Africa and the U.S. sparked by President Trump’s executive order to stop foreign aid to the country.
• South Korea’s president attends first criminal trial hearing. Impeached leader Yoon Suk Yeol has become the country’s first sitting head of state to stand trial in a criminal case as hearings opened Thursday on his bid to impose martial law in December. Police arrested the 64-year-old former prosecutor last month after a weeklong standoff at his residential compound, on charges of insurrection. If convicted, Yoon could be sentenced to life in prison or face the death penalty.
• Iran executed 975 people in 2024 in “horrifying escalation.” Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) both reported on Thursday that Iran carried out at least 975 executions last year, the highest number since IHR began recording executions in the country in 2008. “Five people were executed on average every single day in the last three months of the year as the threat of war between Iran and Israel escalated,” IHR Director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said.
• Six elephants killed in Sri Lanka after being hit by train. Sri Lanka reported its worst wildlife accident after a passenger train hit a herd of elephants in the early hours of Thursday near a wildlife reserve in Habarana, east of the capital Colombo, killing six. The train derailed but no injuries among passengers were reported. Last year, more than 170 people and nearly 500 elephants were killed in human-elephant encounters overall in the country.
• News Quiz! An artist from Bournemouth in the UK has set a world record for what kind of sculpture?
A. The tallest tower of baked beans
B. The smallest LEGO brick
C. The biggest teacup
D. The longest London bus
[Answer below]
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
36%
The world’s glaciers are melting faster than previously expected, with a new study published in the journal Nature showing that global ice loss happened at a rate 36% higher over the past 10 years than over the 10 years before that. Since the turn of the century, researchers say that glaciers around the world have lost 5% of their volume, with 273 billion tons of ice melting each year.
📹 ON THIS DAY VIDEO — 4 HISTORY-MAKING EVENTS, IN 57 SECONDS
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➡️ Watch the video: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
📰 IN OTHER NEWS
💬 Trump's vile proposal to take over Gaza has led to a shift in discourse in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. This moment could mark a new beginning, with Arab regimes aligning their politics with those of their peoples.
— AL-MANASSA
🗳️ Ahead of Germany's crucial national elections Sunday, Russia is actively working to destabilize the country through cyberattacks, agents, and disinformation campaigns. Can anything be done to stop or at least counter these attacks?
— DIE ZEIT
🌳 Andy's Mall is the result of the first payment made by Guyana's government to the Indigenous people of the Kako area, who are proud to say that they were the last to give in and sign the contract with the government that determined the conversion of their forests into carbon credits.
— AGÊNCIA PÚBLICA
📣 VERBATIM
“The playbook is well-known.”
— Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro posted a public rebuttal to charges being brought against him over an alleged coup attempt, saying that the legal case was brought by the government which needed to “manufacture internal enemies.” He compared himself to indictments brought in other South American countries with leftist governments on charges of coup attempts. The playbook, he said, is that the government will, “fabricate vague accusations, claim to be concerned about democracy or sovereignty, and persecute opponents, silence dissenting voices and concentrate power.”
✍️ Newsletter by Anne-Sophie Goninet & Jake Shropshire
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Quiz Answer: B. David Lindon, a micro artist from Bournemouth, has set a new Guinness World Record for creating the smallest handmade sculpture with a red LEGO piece measuring only 0.02517mm by 0.02184mm. The engineer by trade, who has become known for his work creating miniature pieces of art, says the sculpture is about the same size as a human white blood cell.