Category World News

In the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless after the two-week-old ceasefire, violent winds have blown down tents.

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023, Palestinians in the area are currently dealing with their second cold, wet winter.

Strong winds and rain are adding to people’s suffering, with thousands of families living in worn-out tents after their homes were destroyed in the bombardment.

Since the ceasefire’s implementation last month, which halted Israel’s 15-month offensive, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have since returned to northern Gaza. However, the majority of people discovered severely damaged or destroyed homes.

Families have since found it difficult to find shelter amid the besieged enclave’s mounds of destruction.

Authorities are urging people to enter temporary shelters because they believe this is the most urgent humanitarian need.

“Despite the tragedy we are living, despite the rain and the very bad weather, people are staying under no roof”, Qassem Abu Hassoun told Al Jazeera.

“Which means that people are hanging on to their country, their land. Even a grain of sand is anchored by people.

Anwar Hellis called the struggle “more difficult for us than displacement”.

He claimed that when we awoke at night, we discovered that our tents had been destroyed by the wind and that our food and clothing had been sand-filled.

Hani Mahmoud, a journalist from Gaza City, claimed many Palestinians had been forced to leave a temporary camp in the city’s western area due to the bad weather.

There aren’t as many basic items as warm clothing, either.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has praised a deal that would allow Russia to pay for its massive invasion of its neighbor by granting Ukraine access to the country’s rare earth minerals.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he wanted “equalisation” from Ukraine for Washington’s “close to” $375.8bn in support.

“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths”, Trump said.

He continued, “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to get what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things.”

According to the German Kiel Institute, which tracks the world economy, the US has allocated 88.33 billion euros ($92bn) to Ukraine from January 2022 to October 31, 2024.

Germany, Ukraine’s second biggest supporter, gave $16.3bn, followed by the UK at $15.3bn.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz criticised Trump’s suggestion as “very egotistic” and “very self-centred”, arguing that Kyiv will need its natural resources to finance rebuilding after the war ends.

Here’s what we know about Ukraine’s rare earth minerals:

What are they?

Rare earth minerals are a group of 17 heavy metals – the 15 lanthanides on the periodic table, scandium and yttrium – that are found on the Earth’s crust worldwide.

Because the minerals are used to produce electric cars, phones, and other high-tech products, demand has increased in recent years.

There were 110 million deposits of rare earth materials in the world in 2023, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).

The largest producer of the minerals is China, which extracts at least 60 percent of the world’s supply. China also processes at least 90 percent of the world’s rare earths, giving it a “near monopoly”, the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported in 2024.

Additionally, China has filed countless processing technology patents.

The US imports how many rare earth minerals?

The USGS estimated that the US imported 190 million pounds of rare earth compounds and metals in 2023, a 7% decrease from the previous year.

It added that in 2024, the US was reliant on China, Malaysia, Japan and Estonia for 80 percent of its rare earth needs.

Besides those 17 heavy metals, the US is also seeking other critical minerals, including tungsten, tellurium, lithium, titanium and indium.

Ukraine claimed that six locations in the nation house its rare earth materials and other crucial minerals.

In 2023, Forbes business magazine estimated that Ukraine’s mineral resources amounted to 111 billion tonnes, mainly coal and iron ore, worth $14.8 trillion.

However, more than 70 percent of the resources are in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, which Russia partly controls.

Minerals are also found in Dnipropetrovsk, which borders the Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions, which Russia illegally annexed in 2022. Russian troops are currently moving there.

Although the Crimean Peninsula is a mineral-rich place, Russia annexed it in 2014.

In 2022, Ukraine said it was one of the world’s top 10 countries for proven reserves of titanium, making up 7 percent of global production.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, stated to reporters at a press briefing in Kyiv on Tuesday that he had first proposed granting the US access to its rare earth minerals in September.

Zelenskyy claimed that allies who supported Ukraine during the war were willing to invest in it.

We are aware that all of this can be improved with the assistance of our partners, who are assisting us in defending our land and bringing down the enemy with their weapons, presence, and sanctions packages. And this is absolutely just”, he added.

Zelenskyy’s “victory plan,” which was announced last year as a means of ending the nearly three-year-long war, also described the concept as an “important economic point.”

What has Russia said?

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Trump’s comments suggested Ukraine should “purchase assistance”.

According to Peskov, according to the Russian news agency TASS, “It means that there will no longer be any free or other kind of assistance,” but it will be provided on a commercial basis.

Transgender girls and women are prohibited from playing women’s sports in schools and other educational settings by President Donald Trump’s executive order.

The latest in a line of new executive actions that has put a spotlight on gender debates in the US is the directive, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”

After signing the order in the White House’s East Room on Wednesday, Trump declared that “the war on women’s sports is over”.

What does Trump’s order say?

The Department of Justice is given the task of overseeing a ban on transgender athletes from attending female-designated schools or using women’s locker rooms. If schools fail to adhere to the policy, they could lose federal funding.

The directive depends on how to interpret Title IX, a US statute that forbids sex discrimination in education, interprets the definition of “sex” as the gender that a person “was given at birth.”

Defending the policy, a White House official told CNN: “If you’re going to have women’s sports, if you’re going to provide opportunities for women, then they have to be equally safe, equally fair, and equally private opportunities, and so that means that you’re going to preserve women’s sports for women”.

The directive also has an impact on professional sports. It calls on the State Department to press the International Olympic Committee to stop allowing transgender athletes to compete in the US and for government officials to appoint a ban on transgender women from entering the country for competitions.

When the Olympics comes to Los Angeles in 2028, the US will use “all of our authority and our ability” to enforce Trump’s order, a White House official said.

Why has Trump done this?

Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has brought up the topic of transgender athletes, promising to address it on his first day in office.

Trump remarked a day before taking the oath of office in Washington that “we will get critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.” “We will keep men out of women’s sports. It’s over”.

In the run-up to the US presidential election last year, the debate over allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports turned into a slug in the US culture war.

Nearly 70% of Americans who responded to a Gallup survey in May 2023 said trans athletes should only be permitted to compete in their own sex categories. In other words, trans women should compete on men’s teams only. This increased from 62 percent in 2021 to 62 percent.

What does the law say?

It’s complicated. Prior to Trump’s executive order, transgender women had no specific national restrictions on participating in women’s sports, but 27 states already have laws, regulations, or policies governing the participation of transgender students in sports that match their gender identities rather than their biological sex, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.

However, these laws have frequently been challenged in federal courts, with mixed outcomes. Generally, the courts have ruled that transgender athletes should be allowed to compete, with judgements in their favour in Idaho, West Virgina and Arizona.

The main governing body for college sports in the US, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), applauded the clarity of Trump’s executive order, which “set up a unified national framework” amid “a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions.”

What did Biden do regarding trans women in women’s sports?

Former US President Joe Biden fought fervently for transgender rights from the beginning of his 2021-2025 term, overriding a law that barred transgender people from serving in the military (which Trump has since reinstated).

Then, in 2023, Biden’s administration attempted to amend Title IX to provide some protections to transgender athletes. Schools would be unable to impose blanket bans on transgender athletes under its proposal, which was seen as a middle-ground approach to the contentious issue. However, they would still be able to impose restrictions on their participation if it was determined that it would compromise fair competition or safety.

However, as the former president’s term drew to a close, his administration withdrew the proposal, saying it did not have enough time to “regulate on this issue” due to conflicting feedback and drawn-out court cases.

Do trans women compete in sports more than women?

For years, there have been heated debates surrounding the subject. Even after receiving hormone treatment, transgender women still have a strength and speed advantage over women, according to research. This is because men may not be able to make up for the inherent athletic advantage men have over women after menstrual age, which also includes having more bone density, lung capacity, and muscle mass.

However, a 2024 study from the International Olympic Committee discovered that transgender women may perform worse in jumping, lunging, and general cardiovascular fitness than men.

The benefits of being bigger, according to Joanna Harper, a sports scientist who is transgender, are not as clear as the benefits of being bigger, but they do have drawbacks because their larger frames are now being powered by less muscle mass and less aerobic capacity.

“The question isn’t ‘ Do trans women have advantages? ‘ – but instead, ‘ Can trans women and women compete against one another in meaningful competition? ‘ Truthfully, the answer isn’t definitive yet”, she said.

Which trans women’s sports participation cases have sparked a row?

Although there aren’t many transgender women competing in elite women’s sports, there are still a lot of public debate about these issues. Swimming legend Lia Thomas, who spent three years on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swimming team before switching to the women’s team, broke numerous records.

Canadian cyclist Veronica Ivy, who became the first transgender woman to win a world championship in track cycling, is another. Ivy criticised the sport’s governing authority for later imposing a ban on transgender women who transitioned after puberty from participating in women’s events, calling the policy “inhumane” and “disgusting”.

Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer who did not identify as transgender, was at the center of a gender row during the most recent Olympic games. Khelif, who was recorded as female at birth faced a flurry of online backlash, egged on by Trump and several right-wing French politicians, due to previously failing a “gender eligibility test” by a boxing federation. After being declared fully eligible for the Olympics and earning a gold medal last year, Khalif later sued social media platform X for harassment.

What are the most notable sports organizations’ opinions on this subject?

Last year, the International Olympic Committee made changes to its policies to give individual sports the authority to define participation standards. At least 10 Olympic sports, including swimming, cycling and boxing, introduced restrictions for transgender athletes for the 2024 games.

The US’s NCAA, for its part, has sport-specific testosterone limits for transgender women. The association has now said it will take steps to align its policy with Trump’s new directive, “subject to further guidance from the administration”.

What do women’s sports figures say?

Their views are divided. Some argue that a ban on women’s sports is necessary to ensure equality, while others argue that it unfairly discriminates against a minority group.

Former British Olympian Sharron Davies, a swimmer who campaigns for women’s sports, claimed that “second-rate male athletes are self-identifying their way onto women’s podiums” and ruining grassroots sport in a foreword to a report by Policy Exchange, a UK conservative think tank, in 2024. Davis also wants to see a ban on biological males from both professional and amateur female competitors.

One of the attendees to Trump’s signing ceremony on Wednesday, former college swimmer Riley Gaines, who said she applauded the ban. She wrote on X: “Things could’ve been so different. The final straw, according to many moderates, was gender mania.

Things could’ve been so different. The final blow for many moderates was gender insanity, which fueled the shift toward common sense. Specifically, I believe it was the issue of men in women’s sports.

Since November 5th, I’ve been living in a state of gratitude every day. Praise God. pic. twitter.com/3ByM1n8TUf

Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, however, spoke out against the ban, saying it only served to alienate transgender women.

“Contrary to what the president wants you to believe, trans students do not pose threats to sports, schools or this country, and they deserve the same opportunities as their peers to learn, play and grow up in safe environments”, she said.

What are the opinions of LGBTQ and other civil rights advocates?

The ban has been largely denounced by them.

The administration of Trump allegedly used the protection of women as a pretext to erode transgender rights, according to GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy group.

In any discussion about protecting women and girls, anti-LGBTQ politicians with a history of abusing, bullying, and denying their health care have no credibility, the organization claimed in a statement.

Another pro-LGBTQ organization, Athlete Ally, expressed sadness over the “no longer be able to experience the joy of playing sports as their full and authentic selves.”

Kulvinder Kaur, a resident of New Delhi, India, had tried to call her husband in the US several times before. After two weeks of the connection not going through, she was consumed by anxiety, she said from her home in Hoshiarpur, in the northern Indian state of Punjab.

“I was really concerned about what might have happened to him if he had been murdered or robbed there. I was concerned if I ever saw him again because he is the father of my children, Kaur said.

Then, she saw a news telecast: President Donald Trump’s administration was deporting batches of illegal Indian immigrants.

Harvinder Singh, 40, was one of the 104 Indians who had entered the country without authorization over the past few years. On Wednesday, as Trump rebuffed a crucial election promise that brought him back to power in January, her husband was deported.

In search of a better life for his family back in Punjab, Singh had made a desperate journey to the US, through jungles, rivers, and seas, crossing rivers and rivers. This week, like many other detainees, including women, Singh had his hands and legs cuffed during the 40-hour journey to Amritsar, a city in northern India.

The visuals of Indian citizens – shackled in chains – parading towards a US military aircraft, for its farthest-ever journey as a deportation flight, have prompted anger in India. On Thursday, hours after the deportees landed, opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party, staged a protest wearing handcuffs outside the parliament in New Delhi.

The outcry over Indian nationals’ treatment by US authorities comes days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled White House visit on February 13 and raises questions about Modi’s relationship with Trump. If Trump is indeed Modi’s friend, as both leaders claim, why isn’t New Delhi able to stop him from steps that could complicate ties?

The answer, say experts, is a difficult balancing act that the Modi government believes it must manage.

“The issue with the Trump administration is there are a number of issues on the table, including tariffs”, said Harsh Pant, a geopolitics analyst at New Delhi-based think tank, Observer Research Foundation, referring to Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Indian imports. “So, where do you give in and where do you negotiate?

” In order to make Trump happy, who is transactional by nature, India does not want to raise the stakes too much]on the immigration issue] and is absorbing the costs, “Pant told Al Jazeera”. There are also a lot of difficulties.

The “Crashess side of America”

His administration began military detention flights to deport undocumented immigrants after Trump declared a national emergency regarding immigration. At least six planeloads of immigrants have been flown to Latin America, causing unrest in Colombia and Brazil. After it became clear that Brazilian nationals were chained and handcuffed while being deported, the government of Brazil protested against the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight.”

India though, has not said it has protested similar treatment meted out to its nationals. Of the 104 Indians on the plane that landed on Wednesday, several were children – they, however, are not known to have been shackled.

As of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, among countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants – 725, 000 – living in the US.

US Border Patrol chief, Michael Banks, wrote on X that the authorities” successfully returned illegal aliens to India”, captioning a video showing shackled men being led into the military plane:” If you cross illegally, you will be removed. “

Anil Trigunayat, a former Indian diplomat who has served in the US, told Al Jazeera that the” treatment with Indian nationals, dragging them like criminals like this is unprecedented “in his experience.

” Handcuffing and those kinds of things are inhuman essentially. They have shown a very crass side of the American establishment, “said Trigunayat”. This is crass language. And absolutely unjustified and unnecessary. “

She was chained in chains, the claim read.

Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told parliament that the government was working with the Trump administration to prevent Indian citizens from being deported after there was a furor among opposition members in both houses of parliament on Thursday.

Jaishankar added that there hasn’t changed from the previous procedure and that the US’s operating procedure has allowed the “use of restraints” while deporting since 2012.

He also shared government data from 2009 on the deportees, touching a high of 2042 in 2019, before falling marginally again. Last year, 1368 undocumented Indian immigrants were deported by the US authorities.

He added that the US instructed New Delhi to follow up on their requests for food, medical attention, and toilet breaks while traveling, as well as that they were not restrained.

That wasn’t the experience of Khusboo Patel, a 35-year-old from Modi’s home state in Gujarat, on the 40-hour journey back home, her family said.

” She was shackled in chains her whole journey, strictly restricted to her seat, “her elder brother, Varun Patel, told Al Jazeera from his home in Vadodara, a city in eastern Gujarat.

When Khusboo was detained by the authorities, she had only been there for a month. We were not aware of her whereabouts and it made us anxious, “Patel, the brother, said. When local media inquired about Khusboo’s return, the family was informed.

” She told us that they were brought in like prisoners and criminals, “he said”. Nobody harmed her but it was a horrifying experience. “

Patel said he was disappointed in the Modi government’s failure to” secure a dignified return of our citizens”.

What are their current options for us? That time is gone. Our government enabled this mistreatment. “

Shattered dreams

In an effort to lure Singh into the US, Singh and Kaur are now concerned about recovering the more than $55,000 in debt owed to friends, a neighborhood bank, and small-time lenders. The couple, parents to two children, sold their farmland – but it wasn’t enough. Not by a distance.

” We were cheated by our agent who left my husband going from one place to another, “Kaur, 35, told Al Jazeera.

Kaur said she was horrified when she saw the immigrants being held in cuffs because she spoke in a muffled voice. I’m satisfied that my husband is at home with me now, “she said”. However, we are now concerned about our enormous debt. How will we ever recover that money? “

Vinod Kumar, head of the sociology department at Panjab University, Chandigarh, said thousands of youth continue to sell their belongings and take up risky, so-called dunki routes in search of a better life”. With deportation, they have finished their career at both, home and abroad, “he said, adding that a majority of deportees come from lower-income families.

” Earlier, this trend was limited to Punjab, Gujarat, or to some states in]southern India], “said Kumar, who specialises in diaspora politics. Now it’s expanding to other parts of India.

Singh and the passengers on the same plane with him have returned.