Category World News

Houston, Texas – Oscar Gato Sanchez had donned his attire for the immigration court appearance. The 25-year-old wore a red button-down dress, black slacks, and dress shoes with the aim of making a positive impression. His dark hair was cut short.

Gato Sanchez, a Cuban immigrant, was presenting himself to a judge in the US immigration case on a Monday afternoon.

He had no cause to doubt that the court would decide his case at some point while he was seated inside the Texas courtroom.

Gato Sanchez sought asylum because he believed his life would be in danger if he came back to Cuba. Gato Sanchez feared repercussions from his participation in recent anti-government demonstrations on the island because of the allegations made by human rights organizations there.

His aunt sat in the room outside the judge’s hearing room for the fear of retaliation while he waited for him to appear in court. She was concerned. The clock appeared to be ticking more slowly than usual.

What’s putting off so long, exactly? His aunt, a native of Houston, emailed a friend to ask her out.

However, there were more women waiting outside the courtroom than just two. Four men sat next to their phones while wearing typical street clothing and staring intently at the elevators.

Gato Sanchez emerged from the courtroom at around 3:15 p.m. with a folder of documents in his hands. The four men immediately surrounded him. They appeared to have known the outcome of Gato Sanchez’s case from the beginning.

As soon as Gato Sanchez’ case was dropped, federal agents arrived in the courthouse and seized him.

His terrified aunt. She made an effort to obtain details. However, the men only informed her that her nephew would be transported to Conroe, Texas, the site of Houston’s largest detention facility.

The men refused to even disclose to her whether they were from ICE or another federal law enforcement agency.

Why did they do this, God? His aunt cried out indignantly. His aunt’s friend yelled out to him as the agents removed Gato Sanchez.

She cried out, “You’re not a bad person.”

One of the many people who have recently left their immigration hearings is Gato Sanchez, one of the others. Advocates worry that the courthouse arrests will deter foreigners from seeking legal refuge in the US.

The executive director of Houston’s nonprofit for immigrant rights, Cesar Espinosa, referred to these individuals as “people who are doing the right thing.”

After the Supreme Court found that lower court judges had overstepped their authority to enact Trump’s executive orders, US President Donald Trump is vying to continue with his campaign to end birthright citizenship.

Ukraine’s European allies pledged increased levels of military aid to Ukraine this year, making up for a United States aid freeze, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his ambition to absorb all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

“At this moment, the Europeans and the Canadians have pledged, for this year, $35bn in military support to Ukraine,” said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte ahead of the alliance’s annual summit, which took place in The Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24-25.

“Last year, it was just over $50bn for the full year. Now, before we reach half year, it is already at $35bn. And there are even others saying it’s already close to $40bn,” he added.

The increase in European aid partly made up for the absence of any military aid offers so far from the Trump administration.

In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to buy the US Patriot air defence systems Ukraine needs to fend off daily missile and drone attacks.

The Trump administration made its first sale of weapons to Ukraine the following month, but only of F-16 aircraft parts.

At The Hague this week, Zelenskyy said he discussed those Patriot systems with Trump. At a news conference on Wednesday, Trump said: “We’re going to see if we can make some available,” referring to interceptors for existing Patriot systems in Ukraine. “They’re very hard to get. We need them too, and we’ve been supplying them to Israel,” he said.

Russia has made a ceasefire conditional on Ukraine’s allies stopping the flow of weapons to it and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated that condition on Saturday.

On June 20, Vladimir Putin revealed that his ambition to annex all of Ukraine had not abated.

“I have said many times that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” he declared at a media conference to mark the opening of the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum on Friday, June 20.

“But you know we have an old parable, an old rule: wherever a Russian soldier steps, it is ours.”

“Wherever a Russian soldier steps, he brings only death, destruction, and devastation,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the next day.

In a post on the Telegram messaging platform on June 21, Zelenskyy wrote that Putin had “spoken completely openly”.

“Yes, he wants all of Ukraine,” he said. “He is also speaking about Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, the Caucasus, countries like Kazakhstan.”

German army planners agreed about Putin’s expansionism, deeming Russia an “existential threat” in a new strategy paper 18 months in the making, leaked to Der Spiegel news magazine last week.

Moscow was preparing its military leadership and defence industries “specifically to meet the requirements for a large-scale conflict against NATO by the end of this decade”, the paper said.

“We in Germany ignored the warnings of our Baltic neighbours about Russia for too long. We have recognised this mistake,” said German chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday, highlighting the reason for an about-turn from his two predecessors’ refusal to spend more on defence.

“There is no going back from this realisation. We cannot expect the world around us to return to calmer times in the near future,” he added.

Germany, along with other European NATO allies, agreed on Wednesday to raise defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035.

It was a sign of the increasingly common threat perception from Russia, but also a big win for Trump, who had demanded that level of spending shortly after winning re-election as US president last year.

Of that, 1.5 percent is for military-related spending like dual-purpose infrastructure, emergency healthcare, cybersecurity and civic resilience.

Even Trump, who has previously expressed admiration for Putin, seemed to be souring on him.

“I consider him a person that’s, I think, been misguided,” he said after a moment’s thought at his NATO news conference. “I’m very surprised actually. I thought we would have had that settled easy,” referring to the conflict in Ukraine. “Vladimir Putin really has to end that war,” he said.

In the early weeks of his administration, Trump appeared to think it was up to Ukraine to end the war.

Putin continued his ground war during the week of the NATO summit, launching approximately 200 assaults each day, according to Ukraine’s General Staff – a high average.

Ukraine, itself, was fighting 695,000 Russian troops on its territory, said Zelenskyy on Saturday, with another 52,000 attempting to create a new front in Sumy, northeast Ukraine.

“This week they advanced 200 metres towards Sumy, and we pushed them back 200–400 metres,” he said, a battle description typical of the stagnation Russian troops face along the thousand-kilometre front.

Terror from the air

Russia continued its campaign of demoralisation among Ukrainian civilians, sending drones and missiles into Ukraine’s cities.

Russian drones and missiles killed 30 civilians and injured 172 in Kyiv on June 19.

“This morning I was at the scene of a Russian missile hitting a house in Kyiv,” said Zelenskyy. “An ordinary apartment building. The missile went through all the floors to the basement. Twenty-three people were killed by just one Russian strike.”

“There was no military sense in this strike, it added absolutely nothing to Russia militarily,” he said.

Overnight, Russia attacked Odesa, Kharkiv and their suburbs with more than 20 strike drones. At least 10 of the drones struck Odesa. A four-storey building engulfed in flames partly collapsed on top of rescue workers, injuring three firefighters.

A drone attack on Kyiv killed at least seven people on Monday this week. “There were 352 drones in total, and 16 missiles,” said Zelenskyy, including “ballistics from North Korea”.

A Russian drone strike on the Dnipropetrovsk region on Tuesday killed 20 people and injured nearly 300, according to the regional military administration.

Ukraine focused on drone production

Ukraine, too, is focused on long-range weapons production. Five of its drones attacked the Shipunov Instrument Design Bureau in Tula on June 18 and 20. Shipunov is a key developer of high-precision weapons for the Russian armed forces, said Ukraine, and the strikes damaged the plant’s warehouses and administration building, causing it to halt production.

“Thousands of drones have been launched toward Moscow in recent months,” revealed Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin last week, adding that air defences had shot almost all of them down.

But Ukraine is constantly improving designs and increasing production.

On Monday, the United Kingdom announced that Ukraine would be providing its drone manufacturers with “technology datasets from Ukraine’s front line” to improve the design of British-made drones that would be shipped to Ukraine.

“Ukraine is the world leader in drone design and execution, with drone technology evolving, on average, every six weeks,” the announcement from Downing Street said.

On the same day, Norway said it would invert that relationship, to produce surface drones in Ukraine using Norwegian technology.

Zelenskyy said this Build with Ukraine programme, in which Ukraine and its allies share financing, technology and production capacity, would ultimately work for missile production in Ukraine as well.

His goal is ambitious. “We want 0.25 percent of the GDP of a particular partner state to be allocated for our defence industry for domestic production next year,” he said.

Among Ukraine’s projects is a domestically produced ballistic missile, the Sapsan, which can carry a 480kg warhead for a distance of 500km – enough to reach halfway to Moscow from Ukraine’s front line.

Asked whether the Sapsan could reach Moscow, Zelenskyy’s office director, Andriy Yermak, told the UK’s Times newspaper: “Things are moving very well. I think we will be able to surprise our enemies on many occasions.”

Trouble with club membership

Ukraine’s ambition to join NATO and the European Union, leaving Russian orbit, is what triggered this war, and Russia has said that giving up both those clubs is a condition of peace.

NATO first invited Ukraine to its 2008 Summit in Bucharest. But in February, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said NATO membership for Ukraine was not a “realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement”, and a “final” ceasefire offer from the White House on April 17 included a ban on NATO membership for Ukraine.

Despite this, on Wednesday, Rutte told Reuters: “The whole of NATO, including the United States, is totally committed to keep Ukraine in the fight.”

Earlier this month, Rutte told a discussion at the Chatham House think tank in London that a political commitment to Ukraine’s future membership of NATO remained unchanged, even if it was not explicitly mentioned in the final communique of the NATO summit.

“The irreversible path of Ukraine into NATO is there, and it is my assumption that it is still there after the summit,” Rutte said.

If that gave Ukrainians renewed hope, this was perhaps dashed by the European Union’s inability last week to open new chapters in its own membership negotiations.

That was because Slovakia decided to veto the move to do so in the European Council, the EU’s governing body. Slovakia also blocked an 18th sanctions package the EU was set to approve this week, because it would completely cut the EU off from Russian oil and gas imports.

Slovakia and Hungary have argued they need Russian energy because they are landlocked. Their leaders, Robert Fico and Viktor Orban, have been the only EU leaders to visit Moscow during the war in Ukraine. Zelenskyy has openly accused Fico of benefiting personally from energy imports from Russia.

In a week of disruptive politics from Bratislava, Slovakia also intimated it could leave NATO.

“In these nonsensical times of arms buildup, when arms companies are rubbing their hands … neutrality would benefit Slovakia very much,” Fico told a media conference shown online on June 17. He pointed out that this would require parliamentary approval.

Three days later, the independent Slovak newspaper Dennik N published an interview with Austria’s former defence minister, Werner Fasslabend, in which he said Slovakia’s departure from NATO might trigger Austria’s entry into the alliance.

Kipchumba Murkomen, the interior minister of Kenya, was caught on video posing as authorizing police to shoot protesters. At least 16 people were killed on Wednesday during protests involving police brutality, according to Murkomen.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli soldiers intentionally shot at Palestinians who were being “ordered” to aid in Gaza.

According to Haaretz, Israel reportedly ordered an investigation into possible war crimes based on the allegations made by some soldiers on Friday.

The Gaza Government Media Office reported on Thursday that at least 549 Palestinians had been killed and 4, 066 were hurt while waiting for food to be distributed at locations supported by Israel and the United States, according to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Since its establishment in May, the GHF has received a lot of negative feedback.

Unnamed Israeli soldiers were cited in the Haaretz report as saying that Israeli troops were instructed to fire at Palestinians’ crowds and use unnecessary force against those who appeared to be ineffective.

One soldier told Haaretz, “We threw grenades and fired machineguns from tanks.” A group of civilians were hit while moving under the cover of fog once, according to one incident.

Another soldier claimed that between “one and five people were killed every day” while stationed in Gaza.

That soldier said, “It’s a killing field.”

Method of “control”

According to a military statement made available on Telegram, the Israeli army “strongly rejected” the claims in the report. Any claim of a deviation from the law or [military] directives will be thoroughly examined, and appropriate action will be taken. The article’s claims of deliberate fire directed at civilians are not acknowledged in practice, it said.

However, the report was denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz, who called it “blood libel” against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), according to a statement released by The Times of Israel news outlet.

They claimed that “the IDF operates under difficult circumstances against a terrorist enemy that targets civilians.” “IDF soldiers follow through on their orders to avoid harming innocent civilians,” they say.

The Military Advocate General has instructed the army’s General Staff’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism to look into alleged war crimes at these aid sites, according to Haaretz.

Nir Hasson, one of the report’s authors, claimed that the Israeli directive to fire on civilians was intended to “control” the aid seekers.

From West Jerusalem, he said, “You use fire to move people from one point to another, like if you wanted the crowd to run away [from] a place, you shoot them at them,” he said.

Hasson said he would likely hold a position in the army, even though the journalist and his colleagues are unaware of the name of the commander who might have issued a directive.

Despite this practice at these locations, the majority of Israeli soldiers and soldiers still hold the same conviction that the conflict in Gaza is legitimate, according to the journalist.

More and more people are asking themselves whether this war is necessary, as well as what the Gazan population is [paying] for this war, he said.

“A death trap,” that is.

According to the government media office of the enclave, “war crimes” are occurring at Gaza’s GHF aid distribution sites, referring to “the shocking confessions” published by Haaretz.

The statement added that the Israeli occupation army is using heavy machine guns, artillery, and shells against peaceful gatherings waiting for food as additional evidence that it is using a systematic policy of genocide under the false pretense of “relief.”

Hamdah Salhut, a journalist from Amman, Jordan, called the Haaretz report “shocking.”

Salhut claimed that Palestinians have now died at these distribution centers because of “people in Gaza.” Palestinians are left with no choice, according to aid organizations, who have stated that they must either starve themselves or go hungry in the GHF’s distribution centers.

Attacks on aid seekers have only increased since an Israeli blockade was lifted, and the GHF started distributing food at the end of May, and there are four locations where the GHF operates in Gaza, one in the center and three in the south.

In southern Gaza, doctors claimed on Friday that six people had been shot while trying to get food.

Aid organizations, including the UN, have condemned the GHF vehemently for its “weaponization” of crucial items.

In response to a question from Al Jazeera about the Haaretz report, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “We don’t need a report of that nature to acknowledge that there have been massive violations of international law in Gaza.” At a press conference in New York, he continued, “There must be accountability when there is a violation of international law.”

The GHF’s aid distribution sites were described as “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid,” according to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, which is known by its French initials as MSF.