A new German citizenship law has been enacted, requiring those seeking citizenship to acknowledge that Israel has a “Right to Exist.”
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Wednesday, “Anyone who shares our values and makes an effort can now get a German passport more quickly and no longer has to give up part of their identity by giving up their old nationality. But we have also made it just as clear: anyone who does not share our values cannot get a German passport.”
She confirmed that new questions on the topics of anti-Semitism, the right to the existence of an Israeli state and Jewish life in Germany have been added to the citizenship test.
German Chancellor Olaf Schulz made dual citizenship a key point of his election campaign and promised to reduce the time it takes for new citizens to obtain a German passport to five years in his election campaign of 2021.
The first generation of immigrants was not allowed to have dual citizenship. However, rising anti-Semitism, increasingly divisive debates about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the popularity of anti-immigrant, far-right politics led to a revision of the citizenship law.
In December last year, the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt made it mandatory for those who want to become German citizens to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
Bolivia’s army chief was arrested on Wednesday after sending soldiers and tanks to take up position in front of government buildings in what President Luis Arce called an attempted coup.
The troops and tanks entered Plaza Murillo, a historic square where the presidency and Congress are situated, in the afternoon, prompting global condemnation of an attack on democracy.
One of the tanks tried to break down a metal door of the presidential palace.
Surrounded by soldiers and eight tanks, the now-dismissed army chief General Juan Jose Zuniga said the “armed forces intend to restructure democracy, to make it a true democracy and not one run by the same few people for 30, 40 years”.
AFP reporters soon saw soldiers and tanks pulling back from the square. The uprising lasted about five hours.
Later Wednesday, Zuniga was captured and forced into a police car as he addressed reporters outside a military barracks, footage on state television showed.
“General, you are under arrest,” Deputy Interior Minister Jhonny Aguilera told Zuniga.
“No one can take away the democracy we have won,” Arce said from a balcony of the government palace in front of hundreds of supporters.
Military troops are deployed at the Plaza de Armas in La Paz on June 26, 2024. — AFP
Earlier he had urged “the Bolivian people to organise and mobilise against the coup d’etat in favour of democracy”, in a televised message to the country alongside his ministers inside the presidential palace.
He also swore in new military leaders, firing Zuniga.
Right before he was arrested, Zuniga told reporters that the president had told him to stage an uprising, thus triggering a crackdown that would make him look strong and boost his sagging approval rating.
At a meeting Sunday, the general said, Zuniga asked Arce “So we bring out armored vehicles?” He said the president answered, “Bring them out.”
Arce’s instructions were to “stage something to raise his popularity”, the general said.
Former president Evo Morales wrote on X that “a coup d’etat is brewing” and also urged a “national mobilisation to defend democracy”.
Zuniga’s anti-democratic remarks
Bolivia is deeply polarised after years of political instability and the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) is riven by internal conflict between supporters of Arce and his former mentor Morales.
A supporter of Bolivian President Luis Arce fires a bengal outside Quemado Palace at Plaza Murillo in La Paz on June 26. — AFP
Morales, who was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, was extremely popular until he tried to bypass the constitution and seek a fourth term in office in 2019.
The leftist and former coca union leader won that vote but was forced to resign amid deadly protests over alleged election fraud, and fled the country. He returned after Arce won the presidency in October 2020.
Since then a power struggle has grown between the two men, and Morales has increasingly criticised the government and accused it of corruption, tolerating drug trafficking, and sidelining him politically.
Six months ago, the Constitutional Court disqualified Morales from the 2025 elections, however, he is still seeking nomination as the MAS candidate. Arce has not said whether he will seek re-election.
Zuniga appeared on television on Monday and said he would arrest Morales if he insisted on running for office again in 2025. “Legally he is disqualified, that man cannot be president of this country again,” he said.
Since that interview, rumours have swirled that Zuniga was on the verge of being dismissed.
Calls for calm
In this handout picture released by Bolivian Presidency, Bolivian President Luis Arce (2nd R) attends a military event next to Gen. Juan Jose Zuniga (R) in La Paz on April 18, 2024. — AFP
The US administration of Joe Biden said it was keeping a close eye on events in Bolivia and “calls for calm”, according to a spokesperson for the National Security Council.
Condemnations of the troop movements also poured in from across Latin America, with leaders of Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela calling for democracy to be respected.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on X: “I am a lover of democracy and I want it to prevail throughout Latin America. We condemn any form of coup d’etat in Bolivia.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Wednesday called for “respect for democracy and the rule of law,” in a message on X.
The Organisation of American States (OAS) said the international community would “not tolerate any form of breach of the legitimate constitutional order in Bolivia”.
Once dismissed as an “empty suit”, perennial Indian premier-in-waiting Rahul Gandhi emerged from his third consecutive election defeat with his reputation enhanced and his party back from the political wilderness.
But analysts are divided on whether the 54-year-old — a scion of a dynasty that has already given India three prime ministers — is ready for the next battle he faces.
Already the leader of the opposition to Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi in all but name, Gandhi now takes on the formal position in India’s parliament.
Congress party general secretary K. C. Venugopal said Gandhi would be “a bold voice for the common people” and ensure the government “is held firmly accountable at all times”, he told reporters in a statement late Tuesday.
Gandhi’s ascension is significant because, for the previous decade, his once-mighty Congress party did not have enough seats in the legislature to qualify him for the post.
“It’s a huge thing what he has achieved in this election — he’s been able to get the masses to take him seriously,” Sugata Srinivasaraju, an author of a book on Gandhi, told AFP.
“But is that sufficient to be a good leader of the opposition inside the parliament? That is a big question.”
Coalition politics
Modi’s first two terms in office saw landslide wins for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), allowing his government to steamroll laws through parliament with only cursory debate.
Dozens of bills were pushed through the legislature hours after they were introduced, including a contentious and far-reaching overhaul of India’s criminal justice code last year.
Unable to stymie the government’s legislative programme, Gandhi and Congress were reduced to staging regular symbolic walkouts of the chamber and demonstrations outside parliament.
With the BJP now reliant on coalition allies to govern, and Congress nearly doubling its seats in parliament, the dynamics of Gandhi’s role will necessarily change.
His new post entitles him to take a role in the composition of parliamentary committees and sit on selection panels for appointing some of India’s most powerful civil servants.
But Srinivasraju said it remained to be seen if Gandhi could evolve from Modi’s chief gadfly outside parliament to an effective opponent within its walls.
“He has not been a great speaker inside parliament. He has not been able to sway the crowds,” he said.
“From that perspective, we don’t know if Rahul is really ready.”
‘Missed several opportunities’
Gandhi is the son, grandson and great-grandson of former prime ministers, beginning with Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru.
For that reason, he was seen as India’s leader-in-waiting when he first entered parliamentary politics in 2004, but he struggled for years to shed his image as an insubstantial and entitled princeling.
Leaked US embassy cables disparagingly referred to him as an “empty suit”, and Modi dismissed him as a dynast more interested in luxury and self-indulgence than fighting to helm the world’s biggest democracy.
For much of the past decade, many voters agreed with that sentiment.
His stewardship of Congress — once India’s dominant party with a proud role in ending British colonial rule — looked hapless against Modi’s seemingly unassailable rule.
“Gandhi missed several opportunities to shape up as an effective parliamentarian and politician,” political commentator Rasheed Kidwai told AFP.
‘Judging him with interest’
The seeds of his turnaround were sown in 2022 when he embarked on a cross-country walking tour inspired by his unrelated namesake, independence hero Mahatma Gandhi, to hear the concerns of ordinary people.
His journey gave him a gravitas that had previously eluded him, and his colleagues credited it with helping reinvigorate the party, delivering an election result that defied exit poll forecasts of another landslide BJP win.
Gandhi also stayed unruffled through the several ongoing criminal cases arrayed against him, which he and supporters accuse the government of orchestrating to eliminate him as a rival to Modi.
Last year, he was briefly disqualified from parliament after a conviction for criminal libel in a case brought by a BJP member, and weeks before this year’s election, Congress had its bank accounts frozen as part of a running income tax probe.
Having pierced Modi’s aura of invulnerability and shrugged off adversity, Kidwai said Gandhi’s new post would give him the opportunity to capitalise on his newfound public esteem and establish himself as an alternative prime minister.
“Taking up this position is going to do a lot of good for him,” he said.
“People who didn’t take him seriously will now start judging him with interest.”
A 42-year-old Texas woman has been charged with attempted murder after she tried to drown a three-year-old Palestinian girl, as per CNN.
The horrific incident took place on May 19 in Texas when the accused, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, attacked the girl playing in the swimming pool at her family’s apartment complex. The child’s mother and six-year-old brother were also present there.
“Mrs H, the mother, who wears hijab and modest swimwear, was watching her children in the shallow end of the pool when a white American woman entered the swimming pool area,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a press release on Friday.
“The alleged attacker reportedly approached the mother with racist interrogations then jumped into the swimming pool and grabbed the children to the deep end of the pool to allegedly drown them,” the statement added, after which the mother jumped in to rescue her children, with Wolf responding by ripping off her headscarf.
Local police arrived at the scene and arrested Wolf for public intoxication.
“We are American citizens, originally from Palestine, and I don’t know where to go to feel safe with my kids. My country is facing a war, and we are facing that hate here,” CAIR quoted the child’s mother as saying.
“My daughter is traumatised; whenever I open the apartment door, she runs away and hides, telling me she is afraid the lady will come and immerse her head in the water again.”
Texas House of Representatives member Salman Bhojani, from Euless, said he was “appalled” by the incident.
US President Joe Biden said he was “deeply hurt” by the incident.
The attack comes in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which at least 37,598 Palestinians have been killed.
In late November, three Palestinian men in their early 20s were shot near a university campus in Vermont in the US, injuring all three of them.
One month earlier, police in the US state of Illinois charged a 71-year-old man with murder and a hate crime for stabbing a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy to death and seriously injuring his mother.
According to the police, he targeted the victims as a response to the war in Gaza and their religion.
In its press release, CAIR said it had received 3,578 complaints of bias and discrimination in the last three months of last year.
A man named Guru from Jaipur, India, has sparked online outrage by posting a video of himself assigning rates to foreign women tourists visiting the state.
Unaware of Guru’s intentions, women tourists reacted normally and smiled in the reels. However, his derogatory tone in the name of generating content offended many people online.
He was detained on June 23 by the local police for harassing women tourists and posting their videos online.
Shared on the Instagram account @guru__brand0000, Guru can be seen saying in the videos, “Guys, you will get these women for Rs 150.” Pointing out to individual women, Guru assigns different rates and says, “She is available for Rs 150, she is for Rs 200, you can get her for Rs 500 and this one is for Rs 300.”
Since Guru was speaking in Hindi, none of the women tourists could decipher the offensive content of his video.
In another video, Guru went beyond limits by approaching a couple and saying that the woman tourist was his wife. He said, “Guys, she is my wife. He is my brother-in-law. How do you guys like him? My brother-in-law.”
Police have also found that the man forcibly made foreign tourists buy products from his shop in the Amer Market of Jaipur.
This is not the first time foreign tourists have been harassed in India. Recently, a Spanish woman who was out on a bike tour with her partner was gang-raped during her stay in Jharkhand state.
The world is unprepared for the increasing ferocity of wildfires turbocharged by climate change, scientists say, as blazes from North America to Europe greet the northern hemisphere summer in the hottest year on record.
Wildfires have already burned swathes through Turkey, Canada, Greece and the United States early this season as extreme heatwaves push temperatures to scorching highs.
While extra resources have been poured into improving firefighting in recent years, experts said the same was not true for planning and preparing for such disasters.
“We are still actually catching up with the situation,” said Stefan Doerr, director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at the UK’s Swansea University.
Predicting how bad any one blaze will be — or where and when it will strike — can be challenging, with many factors including local weather conditions playing into calculations.
But overall, wildfires are getting larger and burning more severely, said Doerr, who co-authored a recent paper examining the frequency and intensity of such extreme events.
A separate study published in June found the frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires appeared to have doubled over the past 20 years.
By the end of the century, the number of extreme wildfires around the globe is tipped to rise 50 percent, according to a 2022 report by the UN Environment Programme.
Doerr said humanity had not yet faced up to this reality.
“We’re clearly not well enough prepared for the situation that we’re facing now,” he said.
Climate change is a major driver, though other factors such as land use and the location of housing developments play a big part.
Fires do not respect borders so responses have evolved between governments to jointly confront these disasters, said Jesus San-Miguel, an expert for the European Commission Joint Research Centre.
The EU has a strong model of resource sharing, and even countries outside the bloc along the Mediterranean have benefited from firefighting equipment or financial help in times of need, San-Miguel said.
But as wildfires become increasingly extreme, firefighting simply won’t be a fix.
“We get feedback from our colleagues in civil protection who say, ‘We cannot fight the fires. The water evaporates before it reaches the ground,’” San-Miguel said.
Wildfires have already burned swathes through Turkey as extreme heatwaves push temperatures to scorching highsMahmut BOZARSLAN
“Prevention is something we need to work on more,” he added.
Controlled burns, grazing livestock, or mechanised vegetation removal are all effective ways to limit the amount of burnable fuel covering the forest floor, said Rory Hadden from the University of Edinburgh.
Campfire bans and establishing roads as firebreaks can all be effective in reducing starts and minimising spread, said Hadden, an expert on fire safety and engineering.
But such efforts require funding and planning from governments that may have other priorities and cash-strapped budgets, and the return is not always immediately evident.
“Whatever method or technique you’re using to manage a landscape… the result of that investment is nothing happens, so it’s a very weird psychological thing. The success is: well, nothing happened,” said Hadden.
Local organisations and residents often take the lead in removing vegetation in the area immediately around their homes and communities.
But not everyone is prepared to accept their neighbourhood might be at risk.
‘People don’t think that it will happen to them, but it eventually will,’ fire expert Jesus San-Miguel saidETIENNE TORBEY
“People don’t think that it will happen to them, but it eventually will,” San-Miguel said, pointing to historically cold or wet climates like the US Pacific Northwest that have witnessed major fires in recent years.
Canada has adapted to a new normal of high latitude wildfires, while some countries in Scandinavia are preparing for ever-greater fire risk.
But how best to address the threat remains an open question, said Guillermo Rein from Imperial College London, even in places where fire has long been part of the landscape.
Even in locations freshly scarred by fire, the clearest lessons are sometimes not carried forward.
“People have very short memories for wildfires,” said Rein, a fire science expert.
In July 2022, London witnessed its worst single day of wildfires since the bombings of World War II, yet by year’s end only academics were still talking about how to best prepare for the future.
“While the wildfires are happening, everybody’s asking questions… When they disappear, within a year, people forget about it,” he said.
Julian Assange’s wife Stella on Tuesday thanked campaigners for their support as the WikiLeaks founder was released after five years in British custody.
“Julian is free!!!!” she wrote on the social media platform X following confirmation that he had left Belmarsh high-security prison in southeast London.
“Words cannot express our immense gratitude” to everyone who had backed the global push for his release, she added.
Stella Assange met the Australian publisher while he was holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges that were later dropped.
Assange, accused of divulging US military secrets related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had been due back in court in London next month after winning an appeal against extradition.
But WikiLeaks said in a statement: “Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24, after having spent 1,901 days there.
“He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”
The media freedom group said sustained campaigning, from grassroots supporters to political leaders and the United Nations, “created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice”, leading to a deal.
The organisation said the deal “has not yet been formally finalised”.
Assange was initially detained for skipping bail in relation to the Swedish case and held in custody while the US extradition request wound its way through court.
He will now be reunited with his wife, whom he married at a ceremony in the prison, and their two young children, it added.
“WikiLeaks published ground-breaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions,” the statement read.
“As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.
“As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom. Julian’s freedom is our freedom.”
Two officers currently serving in the United States Air Force are seeking to quit their military roles and declare themselves conscientious objectors in the light of their opposition to Washington’s backing of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The two people in question are Larry Hebert and Juan Bettancourt who are critical of the US-backed genocide in Gaza that has killed over 37,400 Palestinians, predominantly women and children.
They have formally requested to be recognized as conscientious objectors as per established military procedures — a status granted to individuals who object to engaging in military activities on moral or ethical grounds.
Al Jazeera spoke to Hebert who is presently serving as a senior airman in the US Air Force. He pointed out that conscientious objection in the US military has historically been seen during protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
He intends to raise awareness that active-duty soldiers have the option to choose conscientious objection.
In an earlier interview with NBC News, Hebert revealed the death of six-year-old Hind Rajab in February was a pivotal moment influencing his decision.
A Korean Air flight bound for Taiwan faced a malfunction with the pressurization system, leading to the hospitalization of 13 out of 125 passengers.
The plane descended from the height of 35,000 feet to 9,000 feet within the span of ten minutes due to sudden uncontrollable decompression just 50 minutes into the flight.
The pressurization system is responsible for regulating the internal pressure of an aircraft.
The plane was returned to the Incheon International Airport, where it departed from.
15 passengers suffered from eardrum pain and hyperventilation during the descent. Among them, 13 were taken to a hospital, reported Yohap News Agency.
As much as 21,000 children in Gaza are said to have gone missing since October 7, reports Save the Children, a leading humanitarian organisation for children.
Israel launched fierce military operations against Palestinians following October 7 attacks which have killed at least 37,598 people and injured 86,032 in Gaza, according to Al Jazeera.
More than 15,000 children have been killed by Israel in the genocide.
Additionally, at least 3,000 children are reportedly amputated – the largest population of child amputees in the world.
