Category World News

Following Germany, France makes new military plans.

A human rights organization warns that the Israeli military is continuing to carry out extensive, deadly raids on the territory, forcing entire Palestinian communities into lockdown in some areas of the occupied West Bank.

Due to the Israeli military’s fear of violence, which the organization, which launched an intensified operation earlier this week, led to the release of a report from Save the Children on Friday.

The child rights organization claimed that the lockdowns “keep kids out of school, put families at risk, and increase the risk of physical violence and child detention from the Israeli military.”

Beginning on Wednesday, Israeli troops began a series of significant raids in other cities and towns in the occupied West Bank, including Jenin, and placed a large portion of the northeastern Tubas governorate under Israeli control.

Since the raids began, Israeli forces have inflicted dozens of injuries in the Tubas area, according to a report released Friday by the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Residents claim that the military has launched arbitrary attacks against civilians, blocked journalists and ambulances, and damaged infrastructure as a result of Israel’s claim that the operation is aimed at eradicating Palestinian armed groups.

A video of two unarmed Palestinian men being killed by Israeli forces in Jenin on Thursday, which was filmed, has also received widespread condemnation.

“Systematic assault”

In the wake of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the nearby Gaza Strip, which has claimed the lives of nearly 70, 000 Palestinians since October 2023, there has been a rise in Israeli military and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

Since Israel’s occupation of Gaza began, more than 1, 000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli army and settler attacks in the West Bank, according to the UN.

Since January, about 32, 000 residents of several refugee camps have been forced out of their homes and prevented by Israel from returning, making the northern West Bank particularly hit.

In what rights organizations and UN officials have described as a campaign to forcefully relocate Palestinians, the Israeli military has also engaged in extensive home demolitions.

The raids in the Tubas governorate, according to Ameer, who works for a West Bank-based Save the Children organization, are “a systematic assault by Israeli forces and a continuation of the Israeli government’s collective punishment policy.”

“The operation is preventing children from receiving essential services and supplies, including education and health care,” the operation claims. Every child in these regions is denied access to education, according to Ameer in a statement.

Gaza attacks

Despite a US-brokered ceasefire with Hamas that was signed last month, Israel has continued to attack Gaza.

A Palestinian was killed in Bani Suheila, a town east of Khan Younis, in an Israeli drone attack that was reported on Friday, along with several other Israeli attacks in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis and Rafah, according to a local medical report.

According to the most recent information from the enclave’s Ministry of Health, at least 347 Palestinians have been killed since the truce started on October 10.

The director of the government media office in Gaza, Ismail al-Thawabta, also reported on Friday that 535 Israeli violations had been documented since the ceasefire began.

Al-Thawabta claimed in a statement posted on Telegram that aid flow into the war-torn region is still significantly below what was agreed upon during the truce.

Only 35 percent of the nearly 28, 000 requested have been allowed by the Israeli occupation, making aid a tool of war instead of a legal or humanitarian obligation, he claimed.

President Trump has stated that he will reject all executive orders signed by former US president Joe Biden, citing the debunking of a dissenting theory about the legitimacy of Democratic policies.

Trump, a Republican, estimated that autopen, a machine that mimics a given signature, was used to execute most of Biden’s orders in a social media Trump/posts/115629010097815862″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>post on Friday.

Trump wrote that any agreement Sleepy Joe Biden and the Autopen, which were roughly 92% of them, is “hereby terminated and without any further force or effect.”

Biden, who resigned from office in January at age 82, has long been alleged to be in charge of the executive branch due to his advanced mental state and advanced age.

In Friday’s post, the Republican leader, who is 79 years old, threatened to prosecute Biden if the Democrat denied it.

Because the people who ran the Autopen did it illegally, Trump said, “I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and any other items that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden.”

“Joe Biden was not a part of the Autopen process, and if he claims to be, he will face perjury charges” is the statement.

A frequent critic

The autopen and other mechanical signature devices were first used in the White House in the early 19th century by Thomas Jefferson, the third US president. Trump has already used the device, particularly during his first term.

However, Trump and his Democratic predecessors, including Biden and Obama, have had bitter relationships.

He has criticized Biden in particular for his ilk and his use of the autopen while in office. Trump replaced Biden’s portrait with a picture of the mechanical device after staging a “presidential walk of fame” near the White House Rose Garden earlier this year.

Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, recently visited him and showed off the picture.

In presidential elections, Biden and Trump faced off twice: once against each other in 2020 and once against each other in 2024. Trump came out on top in the end.

He has also consistently refuted accusations of widespread voter fraud and said he lost the 2020 election.

Trump has said something deceptive and untrue about Biden, including that White House officials cheated on the Democrat into signing policy documents without his consent.

However, it is impossible to establish definitively whether Biden used the autopen without his permission. In a statement from June, Biden himself refuted the claim.

He wrote, “Let me be clear: I made the decisions while I was president.” I chose the laws, executive orders, laws, and proclamations that I made. It’s absurd and false to make any suggestion I didn’t make.

Trump did make that claim again on Friday in his platform Truth Social.

The Republican leader wrote that Biden was taken from him by the Radical Left Lunatics who were circling him around the stunning Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Trump’s claim is undermined by legal arguments.

Trump’s latest attempt to label the actions of his political rivals as illegitimate is the announcement made on Friday.

For instance, in a Truth Social message posted in March, Trump attempted to overturn the pardons Biden had obtained prior to his White House exit.

Biden had incontrovertibly granted “preemptive” pardons to politicians who had been members of a House Select Committee looking into Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the US Capitol.

Because of the fact that they were carried out by Autopen, Trump reaffirmed familiar assertions in a letter to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs in which case he declared “the “Pardons” that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, VOID, VACANT, and OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.

Joe Biden, according to the statement, “did not sign them, but he did not know anything about them”!

Due to US law, which doesn’t mandate presidential pardons be signed in any particular way or even that they be written down, lawyers largely dismissed the president’s position as being unconstitutional at the time.

The President must not physically affix his signature to a bill he approves and chooses to sign, according to a 2005 memo from the US Office of Legal Counsel.

It further states that it is acceptable to “assign the President’s signature” to legislation or to “direct a subordinate” to do so is by design.

Aging while serving as president

However, Biden did have a lot of public concern about whether his age had prevented him from fulfilling his duties, particularly in his final years of a four-year term.

Biden’s performance in the presidential debate in June of 2024 heightened those concerns, making his appearance stiff and unable to carry on his train of thought.

Afterward, Biden was under pressure from the Democratic Party to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, which he eventually did in July that year.

Some critics speculated as to whether senior staff members’ increased influence over policymaking may have diminished as a result of Biden’s age.

Biden revealed this year that he has advanced prostate cancer and is currently receiving radiation therapy.

Trump will be 82 years old when he finishes his second term, which is a few months older than Biden when he won the presidency. Trump’s tenure in the White House was also affected by concerns about his age and mental health.

The New York Times published an article titled “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office” just this week. It went into detail about how Trump has limited his public appearances since taking office and described instances where he appeared to fall asleep in front of people.

Europe’s Airbus is ordering an immediate software change on a “significant number” of its best-selling A320 family of jets, in a move that industry sources said would bring disruption to half the global fleet, or thousands of jets.

The move to a different software, announced on Friday, which will affect 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets, must be carried out before the next routine flight, threatening cancellations or delays during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in the United States and beyond.

Airbus said in a statement that a recent incident involving an A320-family aircraft had revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls.

“Airbus acknowledges these recommendations will lead to operational disruptions to passengers and customers,” it said.

Industry sources said the incident that triggered the unexpected repair action involved a JetBlue flight from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, on October 30, in which several passengers were hurt following a sharp loss of altitude.

Flight 1230 made an emergency landing at Tampa, Florida, after a flight control problem and a sudden uncommanded drop in altitude, prompting an investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

JetBlue and the FAA had no immediate comment.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency is due to issue an emergency directive mandating the fix, Airbus said.

Two-hour repair

For about two-thirds of the affected jets, the recall will result in a relatively brief grounding as airlines revert to a previous software version, industry sources said.

Still, that comes at a time of intense demands on airline repair shops, already plagued by shortages of maintenance capacity and the grounding of hundreds of Airbus jets due to long waiting times for separate engine repairs or inspections.

Hundreds of the affected jets may also need hardware changed, threatening much longer waits, the sources said.

Some 3,000 A320-family jets were in the air worldwide shortly after the Airbus announcement.

American Airlines and Hungary’s Wizz Air said they had already identified which of their aircraft would need the software fix. United Airlines said it was not affected.

The world’s largest A320 operator, American, in a statement, said that about 340 of its 480 A320 aircraft require the software replacement, and it expects the majority of those fixes to be “complete today and tomorrow”, with about two hours required for each plane.

Other airlines said they would take planes briefly out of service to do the repairs, including Germany’s Lufthansa, India’s IndiGo and United Kingdom-based easyJet.

Colombian carrier Avianca said the recall affected more than 70 percent of its fleet, about 100 jets, causing significant disruption over the next 10 days and prompting the airline to close ticket sales for travel dates through December 8.

An Airbus spokesperson estimated the repairs would affect some 6,000 jets in total, mixed between several variants, confirming an earlier report by the Reuters news agency.

The temporary groundings for repairs for some airlines could be much longer, since more than 1,000 of the affected jets may also have to have hardware changed, the sources said.

The abrupt recall sent ripples around the world. In northern Europe, a Finnair flight was delayed almost an hour as pilots established which software version they had, a passenger said.

In Paris, Air France-KLM said it was cancelling 38 flights, 5 percent of the airline’s daily total. Mexico’s Volaris said it would be hit by delays or cancellations for up to 72 hours.

Largest mass recall

There are about 11,300 A320-family aircraft in operation, including 6,440 of the core A320 model, which first flew in 1987.

The setback appears to be among the largest mass recalls affecting Airbus in its 55-year history and comes weeks after the A320 overtook the Boeing 737 as the most-delivered model.

The A320 was the first mainstream airliner to introduce fly-by-wire computer controls.

The bulletin, seen by Reuters, traced the problem to a flight system called ELAC (elevator and aileron computer), which sends commands from the pilot’s side-stick to elevators at the rear. These, in turn, control the aircraft’s pitch or nose angle.

The computer’s manufacturer, France’s Thales, said in response to a Reuters query that the computer complies with Airbus specifications, and the functionality in question is supported by software that is not under Thales’s responsibility.

Launched in 1984, the A320 was the first mainstream plane to introduce fly-by-wire computer controls.

It competes with the Boeing 737 MAX, which suffered a lengthy worldwide grounding after fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, blamed on poorly designed flight-control software.

Demand for the two main brands of workhorse jets has surged in recent years as economic growth led by Asia brought tens of millions of new travellers into the skies.