A draft law that would have criminalized France’s colonial rule from 1830 to 1962 has been in the hands of the country’s parliament. What we know about the bill, according to Nada Qaddourah of Al Jazeera.
Published On 24 Dec 2025
This past week, Israel’s horrific Australian attack was combined with the horrific Bondi Beach attack.
Israeli state policy and Jewish identity were blurred in media narratives, which raises serious questions about who is at risk when Israel’s anti-Palestinian messaging travels outside its borders.
Contributors:
Naama Blatman, executive director of the Jewish Council of Australia
Ori Goldberg, a professor and political analyst,
Author of The Palestine Laboratory is Antony Loewenstein.
Lawyer for Australia, Ramia Sultan, is a Palestinian.
Jimmy Lai, a polarizing and dishonest Hong Kong media mogul, was found guilty this week of conspiring with foreign forces.
The Chinese Communist Party is gaining more and more control over Hong Kong, according to Tariq Nafi’s report.
Hindutva pop’s pervasiveness
Hindu nationalism, or “Hindutva,” has become a mainstream media craze in India. Meenakshi Ravi speaks to one of its biggest names as he explores its musical subgenre, Hindutva pop.
Published On 24 Dec 2025
“It’s not just Venezuela,” he said. Samuel Moncada, the UN’s ambassador to Venezuela, stated at a UNSC meeting on Tuesday.
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According to Moncada, the US government has stated this in its National Security Strategy, which states that they are responsible for shaping the continent’s future.
“We want to make Venezuela known to the world so that it doesn’t become just the first target of a larger plan. He claimed that the US government wants to divide us so that it can take us out on our own.
Venezuela requested a UNSC meeting earlier this month to address the “ongoing US aggression” that had started in September when the White House launched airstrikes against ships in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. The vessels were allegedly supplying US drugs, according to the White House, without providing any supporting evidence.
At least 105 people have been killed in the US forces’ attacks thus far, according to Washington, who insists they are necessary to stop the flow of drugs to US shores. Legal experts and Latin American leaders have referred to these killings as “extrajudicial killings.”
Since the White House has been acting without the consent of the US Congress, whose authority is required to formally declare war on another country, Moncada also alleged at the UNSC meeting that the administration of US President Donald Trump has violated both international and US domestic law.
Moncada claimed that Trump’s “military act aimed at laying siege on the Venezuelan nation” stemmed from his last week’s imposition of a naval blockade on all US-sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers.
The masks have been removed, according to Moncada. It is not freedom, security, or anything else, but it is. It is land, mined, and is oil.
According to Moncada, US forces have seize at least two Venezuelan oil tankers and seize at least 4 million barrels of the country’s oil in a “robbery carried out by military force.”
The US coastguard, which has the authority to board ships under US sanctions, has defended its naval blockade of Venezuela as a “law enforcement” action. A naval blockade, on the other hand, would be regarded as a war crime by international law.
Latin American drug cartels are still the “single most serious threat,” according to Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, and Trump will continue to use US power to oust them. Additionally, Walletz claimed that Venezuelan oil plays a significant role in funding the cartels there.
According to him, “Sanctioned oil tankers serve as Maduro’s primary economic lifeline and his illegitimate regime’s primary economic lifeline.”
Several international drug cartels, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, were earlier this year designated terrorist organizations by the White House. In November, Washington also included the “Cartel de los Soles,” which it claims is led by Maduro.
The Venezuelan leader has refuted US allegations and accused the Trump administration of using the allegations as a pretext for “regime change” in his nation.
Separately, Russia’s UN ambassador warned that the US’s “intervention” in Venezuela might serve as a template for upcoming violent attacks on Latin American states.
Five Europeans have been subject to visa bans by the US, including a former European Union commissioner, for allegedly pressuring tech companies to censor and suppress “American viewpoints” they oppose.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to the individuals as “radical activists” who engaged in “advanced censorship crackdowns” against “American speakers and businesses” in a statement released on Tuesday.
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Ideologues in Europe have been spearheading coordinated efforts for far too long to impose American views on platforms they oppose, he said on X.
He continued, “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious extraterritorial censorship.”
Thierry Breton, who served as the internal market’s European commissioner from 2019 to 2019, was the most notable target.
The French businessman is referred to as the “mastermind” behind the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law designed to combat hateful speech, misinformation, and disinformation on online platforms, by Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary for public diplomacy.
Prior to an interview Musk conducted with Trump during the last year’s presidential campaign, Rogers claimed Breton had threatened Elon Musk, the owner of X and close ally of US President Donald Trump.
In a post on X, Breton criticized the visa ban, calling it a “witch hunt” and drawing comparisons to the McCarthy era, in which officials were allegedly forced out of the government due to ties to communism.
Censorship, he said, “isn’t where you think it is,” to our American friends.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s CEO Imran Ahmed, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, German organization leaders, and Global Disinformation Index (GDI) director Clare Melford, are also named by Rogers.
Jean-Noel Barrot, the French minister for Europe and foreign affairs, “strongly” condemned the visa restrictions, claiming that the EU “cannot allow the rules governing their digital space to be imposed on them by others.” He emphasized that the DSA “has no extraterritorial reach and in any way affects the United States” and that it was “democratically adopted in Europe.”
The visa bans were cited by HateAid’s Ballon and von Holdenberg as an attempt to impede US companies operating in Europe from enforcing European law.
A government that uses censorship allegations to silence those who fight for human rights and freedom of expression, they said in a statement.
The GDI’s spokesperson added that the US action was “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship,” as well as “immoral, unlawful, and un-American.”
The Trump administration published a National Security Strategy that accused European leaders of censoring free speech and repressing opposition to immigration policies, accusing them of risking “civilizational erasure” for the continent.
The DSA has become a hot button in US-EU relations in particular, with US conservatives calling it a tool of censorship of right-wing ideas in Europe and elsewhere, a claim Brussels refutes.
Major platforms are required by the legislation to explain content-moderation decisions, provide transparency for users, and grant researchers access to study subjects like children’s exposure to dangerous content.
After the EU fined Musk’s X for breaking DSA guidelines for transparency in advertising and its methods to ensure users were verified and real people, tensions grew even more this month.
Washington last week made the case that important European companies, including Accenture, DHL, Mistral, Siemens, and Spotify, might be targeted in response.
The US has also criticised the UK’s Online Safety Act, which mandates similar content management standards for major social media platforms.
The UK’s tech cooperation agreement was terminated last week by the White House because it stifled its implementation.
After months of intense fighting with Russian forces, the Ukrainian military claims that its forces have withdrawn from Siversk, a battle-scarred town in eastern Donetsk.
Ukraine’s General Staff stated in a statement on Telegram on Tuesday that Russian troops had a “significant advantage” over Ukrainian troops in terms of manpower and equipment and that they were constantly putting pressure on the Ukrainian troops by conducting small-unit assaults in challenging weather conditions.
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The General Staff stated that Ukraine’s decision to withdraw its forces was based on “preserving the lives of our soldiers and the units’ combat capabilities.”
Before the retreating orders were issued, Russian forces suffered significant losses, Siversk is still “under the control of our troops,” and enemy units are being blocked, the General Staff continued.
Late on Tuesday, a site for Ukraine’s DeepState military monitoring revealed that Russian forces had taken control of Hrabovske, a village in the Sumy region of Ukraine, close to Russia’s border.
Russian President Vladimir Putin informed Russian President Sergei Medvedev on December 11 that troops had taken Siversk, a region where fighting has been frequent in recent months, but Ukrainian officials at the time denied the Russian reports.
Russian troops were “taking advantage of unfavourable weather conditions” to launch attacks, according to the Ukrainian military at the time, but were mostly being “destroyed on the approaches.”
Siversk was crucial to the defense of northern Donetsk, according to the Kyiv Independent news site, despite its small size and pre-war population of 10,000, of which only a few hundred civilians are still there.
The town, according to the Kyiv Independent, had provided protection for the larger Sloviansk and Kramatorsk regions, which Russia has been unable to conquer since the start of fighting.
One of three Ukrainian regions that faces Russian territorial demands is Donetsk, which serves as the stumbling blocks to a ceasefire agreement. The leaders of Ukraine have declared that they will not concede the territory that Moscow invaded.
According to the Reuters news agency, Russian forces had already seized more than 80% of Donetsk, Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, and the entire Luhansk region, by early December.
According to Reuters, Russian forces also control the regions of Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk, or about 75% of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions.
A negotiated settlement, according to a 28-point peace plan put forth by US President Donald Trump’s administration last month, would result in the designation of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk as “de facto Russians, including by the US.”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, recently stated that the United States is urging Ukraine to leave its forces in the Donetsk region in order to create a “free economic zone,” which he claimed the Russian side refers to as a “demilitarized zone.”
At least three people were killed on Monday night when Russian forces launched another “massive attack” on Kyiv on the battlefield, according to Zelenskyy, who said it on Tuesday.
In the Belgorod region of Russia, four people were killed by Ukrainian drone attacks in the past two days, according to local authorities.
Pope Leo expressed disappointment on Tuesday over Russia’s apparent refusal to agree to a ceasefire on December 25, which is the holiday of many Christians.
Speaking to reporters outside his Castel Gandolfo, Italy, he said, “I will make an appeal one more time to people of goodwill to respect at least Christmas Day as a day of peace.”
There will be at least 24 hours of peace, he said, and they might listen to us.
Many Orthodox people in Ukraine and Russia observe Christmas on January 7, which means the majority of them are Christians.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syria’s foreign and defense ministers met in Moscow to discuss expanding “strategic cooperation in the military industries sector,” according to Syrian state media.
According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), Putin’s meeting with the minister of defense and the minister of foreign affairs of Syria, Asaad Hassan Al-Shaibani, on Tuesday focused on “mutual interest” political, economic, and military issues, with “particular emphasis” on defense.
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Putin and the Syrian ministers discussed a number of issues relating to the defense, including expanding military cooperation, modernizing the Syrian army’s equipment, and transferring expertise and cooperation in research and development, according to SANA.
According to SANA, “both sides discussed ways to advance military and technical partnership in a way that strengthens the Syrian Arab Army’s defensive capabilities and keeps up with modern developments in military industries.”
According to the news agency, the two sides also discussed political and economic issues, including the “importance of continued political and diplomatic coordination between Damascus and Moscow in international forums.”
On the economic front, the discussions focused on boosting Russian-Syrian cooperation, including in terms of reconstruction initiatives, infrastructure development, and investment.
Putin reiterated “Moscow’s condemnation of repeated Israeli violations of Syrian territory, which he described as a direct threat to regional security and stability,” while also reaffirming Russia’s “steady support” for Syria and its territorial integrity.
The ministers’ recent visit to Moscow comes as a result of Syria’s new administration’s removal from power of Bashar al-Assad, its longtime leader and Moscow’s ex-alleyer, in December.
Russia’s key supporter of al-Assad during Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war included Russian air support that rained air strikes on rebel-held areas, which provided essential military support for the Assad regime.
Moscow is eager to establish positive relations with the new government in Damascus despite al-Assad and his family escaping to Russia after the regime was overthrown.
Moscow is particularly interested in obtaining agreements to keep operating the Tartous naval base and Khmeimim airbase on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, where Russian forces are still stationed.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new president, traveled to Russia in October, where he stated that his country would honor all previous agreements reached between Moscow and Damascus, which suggested that the two Russian military installations were secure during the post-Assad regime.
Putin stated during al-Sharaa’s visit that Moscow was prepared to take all necessary steps in response to what he termed the “many interesting and useful beginnings” discussed by the two sides regarding resuming relations.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed that during the Syrian delegation’s visit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov would also speak with his Syrian counterpart, Al-Shaibani.
Al-Shaibani claimed that his country wanted Russia “by our side” during a July visit to Moscow.
“The present period presents numerous challenges and threats, but it also offers a chance to build a strong, united Syria,” he said. And of course, we’re interested in Russia supporting us along this path,” Al-Shaibani said at the time to Lavrov.