Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi has been killed during clashes between armed groups in Gaza City, just days after a Hamas-Israel ceasefire took hold. Here are key moments from his life covering the war.
The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded for work on technology’s impact on sustained economic growth.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 would be shared among American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France’s Philippe Aghion and Canada’s Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth”.
The award was based on the idea that vast numbers of people have been lifted out of poverty over the past two centuries as the world has seen sustained economic growth with technology the underlying cause. Previously, stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history, the jury said in a statement.
Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States, won half of the prize for using historical records to identify what changed during the Industrial Revolution.
His research showed lasting growth depends on grasping why technologies function, not merely observing that they do. Before that understanding developed during the Industrial Revolution, it was difficult to build upon new discoveries and inventions.
Aghion, from College de France and The London School of Economics, and Howitt, from Brown University in the US, share the other half of the prize “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction,” the jury said.
In an article published in 1992, they developed a mathematical framework for “creative destruction,” a concept popularised by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in the early 1900s, describing how new products replace old ones in the marketplace.
The award has a total cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2m), which Mokyr will split with Aghion and Howitt.
The economics prize wraps up this year’s Nobel season, which honoured research into the human immune system, practical applications of quantum mechanics and the development of new forms of molecular architecture.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was awarded the highly watched Nobel Peace Prize.
She surprised many when she dedicated it to US President Donald Trump, who had made no secret of the fact that he thought he deserved it.
The economics prize is the only Nobel not among the original five created in the will of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to lose his place during his speech to parliament, telling US President Donald Trump that the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear site at Fordow was one of the ‘miracles’ of the Bible.
Dressed in winter coats, scarves and hats to guard against freezing temperatures, Grassy Narrows residents spent weeks at the blockade site to stop logging trucks from getting to the Whiskey Jack Forest to pick up wood.
Schoolchildren were bussed in to take part in the fight. Archival footage from Canada’s public broadcaster CBC shows a line of determined young people blocking a truck on a dirt road. “We believe in traditional land … not clearcutting,” read one sign held up by a land defender.
“There must have been about 50 to 75 kids stopping trucks. Trucks just stopped, and they didn’t want to move,” recalls JB, who took part in the direct action.
Residents set up a makeshift encampment, where they cooked over woodfires and held ceremonies. With locked arms, they stood or lay down in front of the trucks.
And when some of the loggers tried to reach the forest via alternative access routes, those were quickly blocked too. “They’d come at 3 o’clock in the morning to get our wood. So we started getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning to go and blockade,” JB explains.
The community’s sustained fight – the blockade still stands today – led to results: In 2008, the logging company gave up its clear-cutting in the area, citing the uncertainty, delays and added costs caused by the land defenders.
“At first, a lot of people were scared. That was a very confrontational [approach], but [the fear] didn’t last long,” says Williamson, who took part in the blockade himself.
“Physically stopping the cutting of trees … seemed more real than sitting down at the table with people that are not listening,” he adds. “The more we saw the results of physically blocking and occupying the land, we saw that was the only way that anyone would listen.”
A documentary shot by local journalists from the early days of the blockade shows community members confronting a forestry industry contractor after he is told he won’t be able to truck away the logs.
“The beef isn’t here,” the contractor says, telling the land defenders to go to company and industry offices with their grievances instead. “We’ve done that,” a community member responds. Eventually, the truck turns back down the road.
Isaacs says what she remembers most about that time was the sense of community that grew out of Grassy Narrows’s stand.
“We were all doing something,” Isaacs says while sitting in front of a fire at a clearing in the forest where the blockade started more than 20 years ago.
“We were all busy chopping [firewood], keeping the fire cooking. For the first time, I was like, ‘This is how our people felt when they were working together in a village, in a community. This is what it felt like.’”
LISTEN: Judy Da Silva, Chrissy Isaacs and Indigenous elder Chickadee Richard sing by a campfire at the site where the community first resisted logging.
Today, a wooden cabin, wigwam and other structures sit at the blockade site, just off a dirt road. Community members use the area for ceremonies and other gatherings. The wooden gate that was used to block logging trucks still stands.
“Our people, our community, we’re really resilient,” says Isaacs, whose front-line activism continues.
She recently set up a tent outside Queen’s Park, the Ontario legislature in Toronto, to protest against a new law known as Bill 5, which allows the province to bypass environmental regulations and Indigenous rights to build major resource projects.
When she got home, community members told her they, too, were ready to protect the land and the water against Bill 5. “’If we go back out there, I’ll be there,’” she says people told her.
US President Donald Trump told members of Israel’s Knesset that the ‘age of terror and death’ was over following the Gaza ceasefire deal, marking the beginning of what he called ‘the historic dawn of a new Middle East’.
Families of many of the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel under an exchange deal say their long-awaited freedom is bittersweet after they learned their loved ones would be deported to third countries.
At least 154 Palestinian prisoners being freed on Monday as part of the swap for Israeli captives held in Gaza will be forced into exile by Israel, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Media Office said.
Those to be deported are among a larger group of Palestinians being released by Israel – 250 people held in Israeli prisons along with about 1,700 Palestinians seized from the Gaza Strip during two years of Israel’s war, many of whom were “forcibly disappeared”, according to the United Nations. For its part, Hamas and other Palestinian groups released 20 Israeli captives under a Gaza ceasefire agreement.
There are no details yet about where the freed Palestinians will be sent, but in a previous prisoner release in January, dozens of detainees were deported to countries in the region, including Tunisia, Algeria and Turkiye.
Observers said the forced exile illegally breaches the citizenship rights of the released prisoners and is a demonstration of the double standards surrounding the exchange deals.
“It goes without saying it’s illegal,” Tamer Qarmout, associate professor in public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera.
“It is illegal because these are citizens of Palestine. They have no other citizenships. They’re out of a small prison, but they’re sent to a bigger prison, away from their society, to new countries in which they will face major restrictions. It’s inhumane.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, relatives of Palestinian prisoner Muhammad Imran said they were shocked to learn he was among those Israel had decided to force into exile.
Raed Imran said the family had previously received a call from an Israeli intelligence officer, confirming that his brother, 43, would be released home and asking where he would stay on his release.
But on Monday, the family was dismayed to learn that Muhammad, who was arrested in December 2022 and sentenced to 13 life terms, would be deported.
“Today’s news was a shock, but we are still waiting. Maybe we’ll get to see him somehow,” Imran said. “What matters is that he is released, here or abroad.”
The exile means his family might be unable to travel overseas to meet him due to Israel’s control of the borders.
“We might be looking at families who will be seeing their loved ones deported and exiled out of Palestine but have no way of seeing them,” said Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, who has reported extensively from the occupied West Bank.
According to Qarmout, the deportations are intended to deprive Hamas and other Palestinian groups of being able to claim any symbolic win from the exchange and to remove the deported prisoners from any involvement in political or other activities.
“Exile means the end of their political future,” he said. “In the countries they go to, they will face extreme constraints, so they will not be able to be active in any front related to the conflict.”
He said the deportations amounted to forcible displacement of the released prisoners and collective punishment for their families, who would either be separated from their exiled loved ones or forced to leave their homeland if they were permitted by Israel to travel to join them.
“It’s a win-win for Israel,” he said, contrasting their experiences to those of the released Israeli captives, who will be able to resume their lives in Israel.
“It’s more double standards and hypocrisy,” he said.