Category World News

Nine of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar’s ten children were killed in Khan Younis by an Israeli airstrike while she was employed at Nasser Hospital in Gaza. The only other child left in the care of her is her husband.

The film It Was Just an Accident, a film from Iran, won the Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival. For his filmmaking, which served as inspiration for his award-winning work, the dissident has endured years of travel bans and prison sentences in Iran.

My brother-in-law, Samer, was killed in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on April 27, when his vegetable stall was bombed. He lacked weapons. He lacked political charisma. In a place where food has become more expensive than gold, he was a quiet man who was trying to make a living feeding his children.

By profession, Samer wasn’t a vendor. He was an advocate for the oppressed’s rights. However, he was forced to make a change of course by the war.

He was able to purchase vegetables from neighborhood wholesalers during the ceasefire. Supply levels dramatically decreased after the war resumed and the crossings into Gaza abruptly stopped, but he still maintained a small vegetable stock. Even as buyers became scarce as a result of the high prices, he kept selling day and night. He frequently made a generous effort to give us free vegetables, but I never did.

I froze when I learned about Samer’s murder. My husband and I tried to keep the news from them, but I was able to tell the truth through tears. Although he appeared to want to scream, his scream continued to linger inside his throat. Perhaps his burdened soul couldn’t bear the expression of grief because of something.

Samer left a devastated family and three young children behind. No one anticipated his demise. It shocked me. Even in the most difficult circumstances, he was a good and sincere young man who was always upbeat, loving, and full of laughter.

In front of his vegetable market, he still has a loving voice in my memory.

Samer is one of the many food sellers who have died as a result of this genocide. Anyone who works in the food industry has been targeted. As if they were selling food, they were bombed, as if fruit and vegetable vendors, grocers, bakers, shop owners, and community kitchen workers. As if the food they were supplying was a threat, bunkeries, stores, farms, and warehouses have been destroyed.

One of the busiest streets in Gaza City’s Remal neighborhood, al-Wahda Street, was bombed ten days after Samer’s death. At least 33 people have died.

The Jabaliya bakery’s immediate vicinity was bombed two weeks prior to Samer’s martyrdom. A food distribution center in Khan Younis was targeted days earlier. Since the start of the war, more than 39 food and distribution centers and 29 community kitchens have been targeted, according to the Gaza-based government media office.

By now, it is obvious that Israel is not only preventing food from entering Gaza through its deliberate starvation campaign. Every component of the food supply chain is being destroyed as well.

All that is currently available to purchase are scraps because of the frequent targeting of vendors and markets for those whose incomes allow for food purchases. In Gaza, death has become more simple than life.

The worst victims of starvation are babies and young children. At least 26 Palestinians, including nine children, died in Gaza in less than a 24-hour period as a result of starvation and lack of medical care, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on May 21.

Since the aid embargo started in early March, the Gaza-based Ministry of Health announced on May 5 that at least 57 children had died as a result of malnutrition.

I frequently skip days without eating to give my kids whatever little food they have leftovers. My husband usually returns with nothing but scraps after spending the entire day looking for something to quench our hunger. If we’re lucky, we divide our children’s leftovers between two pieces of bread.

Even more intolerable is the hardship that Samer’s wife must endure. She tries to keep her tears a secret from her children, who keep asking when their father will leave the market. She had to become a father overnight as a result of her long lines in front of neighborhood restaurants in search of some food.

She frequently returns empty-handed, yelling, “When Dad comes back, he’ll bring us food,” to comfort her children. Her children sleep hungry and dreaming of a meal to fill their stomachs, which their late father never will provide.

Hamas claims that Israel is preventing Gaza from receiving aid, but Israel has made that claim. The claim has been refuted by the Western media, who are blatantly involved in the distortion of the truth.

Yet it is obvious that Israel is also pursuing Gaza’s entire population. In accordance with international law, it deliberately obstructs the flow of humanitarian aid by using starvation as a weapon of war against civilians.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently demanded that all Palestinians be barred from Gaza in exchange for a truce in order to put an end to the conflict.

His choice to pass food through the crossings is nothing more than a PR stunt. To reassure the world that we are not starving, enough flour was brought in to allow the media to distribute images of bread at a bakery.

These images, however, do not accurately represent what we encounter on the ground. The majority of my family’s bread has not been delivered to me, just like my family has. Where available, flouri continues to cost $450 per bag.

Aid organizations claim 119 aid trucks have entered since Monday, compared to 388 that Israel has claimed. Because the Israeli army continues to target anyone attempting to secure the distribution of aid, an undetermined number of these have been looted.

When compared to the needs of the world’s starving population, this minuscule amount of aid Israel is providing is insignificant. Every day, at least 500 trucks are needed to carry the bare minimum.

Meanwhile, some Western governments have threatened sanctions and used symbolic measures to allegedly compel Israel to stop starving us. Why was it necessary to wait until our children were starving before doing this? Why do they only threaten, disregarding the law, and act accordingly?

Our top wish for today is to discover a loaf of bread. In this devastating famine, which has destroyed our lives and destroyed our planet, our only concern is how to continue to survive. No one in our lives is now in good health. We’ve turned into corpses. Even though our bodies are dead, our hearts still tingle with hope as we yearn for the miraculous day that this nightmare ends.

Who will, however, support us? Who has our hearts broken yet, and how is that?

And the most crucial question of all is: When will the world stop blinding us to our slow, brutal hunger?

Five years ago on May 25, 2020, a white police officer in the United States killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, during an arrest.

A bystander’s video showed officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. The footage sparked weeks of global protests against police brutality and racism. It contributed to a jury’s murder conviction against Chauvin and a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department.

Although ample evidence showed that Chauvin and police misconduct were to blame for Floyd’s death, another narrative quickly emerged – that Floyd died because of a drug overdose.

Five years later, that falsehood is central to calls for President Donald Trump to pardon Chauvin.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a member of Trump’s Republican Party from Georgia, for example, recently revived her longstanding and long-debunked take that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death.

“I strongly support Derek Chauvin being pardoned and released from prison,” Greene wrote in a May 14 X post. “George Floyd died of a drug overdose.”

In 2021, a Minnesota jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Chauvin also pleaded guilty to twice violating a federal criminal civil rights statute – once against Floyd and once against a 14-year-old in 2017. The state and federal sentences that Chauvin is serving concurrently each exceeded 20 years.

In 2023 after a two-year investigation sparked by Floyd’s death, the US Department of Justice found that the city of Minneapolis and its police department engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations, including use of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people.

The narrative that Floyd died of an overdose persisted through the involved police officers’ criminal trials and beyond their convictions, in part because powerful political critics of the racial justice movement sought to rewrite history with false claims. It was one of many false statements about Floyd’s actions, his criminal history and the protests that followed his murder.

Experts said systemic racism contributes also to the proliferation of the inaccurate narratives and their staying power.

“The core through-line that emerges is the kind of longstanding, deep racist narratives around Black criminality and also the ways people try to justify who is or isn’t an ‘innocent victim’,” Rachel Kuo, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies race, social movements and technology, said of the falsehoods.

The summer 2020 protests built on 2014 and 2016 protests against police brutality, but with Floyd’s case as a catalyst, racial justice advocates achieved global visibility and corporate attention, Kuo said.

That visibility came with a price.

When people of colour achieve visibility for their social movements or political demands, an effort to delegitimise those demands quickly follows, Kuo said. Misinformation plays a part by trying to “chip away” at the belief that what happened to Floyd was unjust or to undermine the protest movement overall, she said.

How conservative influencers distort an autopsy report to push overdose claim

Chauvin killed Floyd after police were called to a corner grocery store where Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill. News reports about Floyd’s criminal record – which included three drug charges, two theft cases, aggravated robbery and trespassing – fuelled false claims about his background.

Two autopsy reports – one performed by Hennepin County’s medical examiner and one commissioned by Floyd’s family – concluded Floyd’s death was a homicide. Although they pointed to different causes of death, neither report said he died because of an overdose.

The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office reported “fentanyl intoxication” and “recent methamphetamine use” among “other significant conditions” related to his death, but it did not say drugs killed him. It said Floyd “experienced a cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by law enforcement officer”. The private autopsy concluded Floyd died of suffocation.

Nevertheless, the Hennepin County autopsy report’s fentanyl detail provided kindling for the drug overdose narrative to catch fire. PolitiFact first fact-checked this narrative when it was published on a conservative blog in August 2020.

As Chauvin’s trial approached in early 2021, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson wrongly told his millions of viewers that Floyd’s autopsy showed he “almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl.”

Conservative influencer Candace Owens amplified the false narrative in March 2021. Lawyers defending Chauvin argued drug use was a more primary cause of death than the police restraint, but jurors were unconvinced.

Chauvin’s 2021 conviction didn’t spell the end of misinformation about Floyd’s death. The drug overdose narrative emerged again in late 2022 as the trial neared for two other police officers charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death.

Misinformation experts said it’s not surprising that Floyd and the 2020 protests remain a target of false portrayals years later because of the widespread attention Floyd’s death drew at a time when online platforms incentivise inflammatory commentary.

“Marginalised groups have been prime targets of misinformation going back hundreds, even thousands of years” because falsehoods can be weaponised to demonise, harm and further oppress and discriminate, said Deen Freelon, a University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication professor who studies digital politics with a focus on race, gender, ideology and other identity dimensions in social media.

He said Floyd’s murder was a magnet for mis- and disinformation because it “fits the mould of a prominent event that ties into controversial, long-running political issues,” similar to events such as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conservative activists and politicians with large followings have continued to target Floyd and the 2020 protests.

The drug overdose narrative proliferated in conjunction with the October 2022 release of Owens’s film about Floyd and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, titled The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM. Rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, parroted the false narrative in an October 2022 podcast interview, citing Owens’s film.

In October 2023, Carlson repeated the false drug overdose narrative. That X video has since received more than 23.5 million views. In December 2023, Greene reshared a different Carlson video with the caption, “George Floyd died from a drug overdose.”

Ramesh Srinivasan, an information studies professor at the University of California-Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, said social media algorithms don’t allow for nuanced conversations that require detail and context, which are important for productive discussion about what happened in the summer of 2020.

A person’s online visibility and virality, which can directly correlate to their revenues in some cases, improves when a person takes extreme, antagonistic, partisan or hardened positions, he said.

“Those conditions have propped up certain people who specialise in the peddling of troll-type content, of caricatured content, of deliberately false content,” Srinivasan said.

Freelon said the internet has “added fuel to the fire” and broadened misinformation’s reach.

“So it’s important to remain vigilant against misinformation,” he said, “not only because lies are inherently bad but also because the people who bear the harm have often historically suffered disproportionately from prejudice and mistreatment.”

In a rural Pakistanean field where thick wooden frames are pressed together, bushes are yoked together. A man perched on a plank is a man perched behind them, only to have ropes and his pride.

As the animals roar down a track, causing a ton of dust and a real sense of danger, hundreds of spectators scream and cheer.

This is Punjabi bull racing.

The traditional sport contrasts starkly with Pakistan’s city’s floodlit cricket and hockey stadiums, which capture the raw vibrancy of rural life.

Bull fighting is common in Punjab’s Attock district. More than just a pastime, it is here. It is a component of the area’s living heritage.

Crowds converge on the village of Malal each year to see the spectacle, which is a significant source of revenue for the sport. Jockeys rely on instinct and experience to win, crouching low behind the bulls on their wooden planks.

However, chaos never permeates the landscape. Bulls frequently unseat jockeys and send them stumbling through the dust.

“This is not just for entertainment,” he said. Sardar Haseeb, whose family has organized races for generations, described it as “tradition”. We are proud of our animals. For this reason, farmers and landowners raise their bulls year-round. People are willing to pay a bull’s success at a high price. It embodies pride in itself.

Dances and banknote showers are performed during the celebration, which is more typically associated with weddings.

Sizzling pans’ aroma draws crowds, enticing the smell of freshly fried sweets. Roasted chickpeas and other delectables are served at tallholders. Local vendors profit from the celebration of culture because of the bustling scene’s income.

More than 100 bulls competed at the most recent Haseeb event, which attracted participants from all over Pakistan.

Farmer Muhammad Ramzan was one of the competitors.