Amr al-Hams, age 3, has shrapnel embedded in his brain from an Israeli airstrike, and he is immobile in his southern Gaza hospital bed.
His eyes dart around in search of his mother, according to Nour, his aunt. He is unable to speak or walk.
Inas, Amr’s mother, visited her parents in northern Gaza at nine months pregnant. Their tent was struck that night. His grandfather, two of his siblings, two of his parents, and his mother were all killed in the attack.
After being taken to intensive care with a breathing tube, Amr remained unharmed. His father, who has been grieving, is nearly speechless.
Amr has left intensive care and is now severely malnourished at Khan Younis’ Nasser Hospital. During Israel’s months-long blockade, the fortified milk he needed vanished.
Nour syringes him with mashed lentils. He is comforted by her while she sleeps next to him, changes his nappies, and sleeps next to him.
She says, “I tell him his mother will be back soon.” I occasionally give him a toy. He cries, though. He must miss her, in my opinion.
Amr must be immediately evacuated from the conflict zone, according to doctors. His brain injuries are likely to have long-term effects without medical treatment and therapy.
As a heatwave sweeps through Southern Europe and parts of the Middle East, causing evacuations and emergency alerts, countries across the Mediterranean are battling fast-spreading wildfires and soaring temperatures.
On Sunday, blazing blazes broke out in Greece, Turkiye, France, and Syria, and several other countries were also on high alert as weather forecasters warned that the scorching weather would get worse.
Authorities from Spain to Italy urged people to avoid unnecessary travel during the region’s first severe summer heatwave.
Meteorologists warned that extreme heat events, which are being exacerbated by climate change, are getting more frequent and intense, while emergency teams and ambulances were stationed close to well-known tourist destinations.
On July 3, 2025, a firefighter passes a burned-out house in Pikermi, east of Athens, Greece.
In western Turkiye, strong winds sparked wildfires that erupted on Sunday in the province of Izmir. The blaze was fought with aircraft-supported firefighters. Five neighborhoods in the Seferihisar district were reportedly vacated as a precaution, according to local authorities.
Over 600 fires have been fought over the past week in the drought-stricken nation, according to authorities.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya reported on Friday that Turkish authorities had detained 10 suspects in connection with wildfires that have erupted all over the nation over the past week.
In the western coastal province of Izmir, at least three people were killed by wildfires.
In Dortyol, a coastal area in Hatay province, firefighters were still attempting to contain a blaze.
In addition, in southern Evia, more than 160 firefighters, 46 fire trucks, and five aircraft were stationed in Greece to battle the blaze.
According to officials, the fire started late on Friday and sprang through two villages as forested areas burned. Near Athens, fires also broke out.
In the southwest of France, where the temperatures soared above 40C (104F), wildfires erupted. A historic abbey and a campsite were razed.
On Monday, Meteo France issued orange-level heat alerts for 84 of the country’s 101 departments.
During an attempt to contain a wildfire east of Athens, Greece, on July 3, 2025, a firefighting aircraft flies over a fire engine.
Temperatures in parts of Extremadura and Andalusia reportedly reached 44C (111F), according to the national weather agency AEMET in Spain.
Diego Radames, a 32-year-old photographer in Madrid, told the AFP news agency, “I feel that the heat we’re experiencing is not normal for this time of year.” “Madrid just keeps getting hotter.”
Rome, Milan, and Naples are among the 21 cities Italy placed in the red zone, along with other significant ones. According to Mario Guarino of the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine, heatstroke cases increased by 10%.
Portugal also experienced extreme weather, with a red warning for the city’s capital until Monday night. Extreme heat and wildfires were high on the national radar in the other third of the nation.
Firefighters alone on Sicily’s island island battled 15 fires on Saturday.
Scientists warn that the heat is getting worse due to climate change.
Berlin, Germany – In 1979, Kien Nghi Ha lived in Hanoi with his parents, who worked as electricians at a power plant, and his 12-year-old sister in a one-bedroom apartment.
They shared the toilet and an outdoor kitchen area along with their neighbours. One of them, an elderly woman, would sometimes look after Ha, then seven years old, and his sister.
He remembers the cool, smooth tiled floor offering comfort during the blistering summer heat. He would lie on it listening to the lively street noise and occasional sound of a tram beyond a green steel entrance door.
Four years earlier, in 1975, North Vietnamese communist forces had defeated United States-aligned fighters in South Vietnam to take the whole country under a one-party system that remains in power today.
Ha was part of an ethnically Chinese mixed Hoa Kieu minority. Communities like his, especially in the early post-war years, felt vulnerable.
He remembers how children turned away from him after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, then an ally of China at that time in 1978, because of his heritage.
“Some even threw stones at me. This was very shocking, and I didn’t understand at that time what was going on,” he said.
Ha, then seven, pictured on the day he arrived with his family to West Berlin in 1979 after a trip via boat and plane [Courtesy: Kien Nghi Ha]
The family decided to leave. His parents sold their valuables and embarked on a dangerous and costly trip by boat to Hong Kong. Despite no guarantees of safety, an estimated two million people would ultimately leave this way.
At that time, those who feared for their future under the new Communist authorities could choose to resettle in one of three countries – West Germany, Australia or the United States.
The choice was not available for long. When his uncle left Vietnam just three months later, people were only allowed to migrate to the US.
Ha’s parents opted for West Germany as they believed it offered a better work-life balance than the US.
The fractures in Vietnam mirrored divisions in Germany, with North Vietnam backed by the USSR-aligned East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the capitalist West Germany supporting South Vietnam.
After arriving in Hong Kong, the family travelled by plane to Frankfurt and then on to Tegel airport in West Berlin, where journalists were waiting, eager to document the country welcoming so-called “boat people”.
“I don’t recall much from the arrival, but I do remember many journalists there wanting to take pictures of us,” Ha said.
The family were provided an apartment within a social housing complex where thousands of people lived near the Berlin Wall on the west side. His father became a transport worker, while his mother was a cleaner in a children’s nursery.
Compared with other social housing at the time, Ha says, the flat was in good condition, with central heating and individual toilets.
But the transition was not easy. Ha felt isolated as one of the only children from a minority background in his primary school.
A different path
Within months of the war’s end, Vietnam signed diplomatic relations with the GDR, paving a different kind of path for Huong Mai* to fly overseas a few years later.
At 21, she left Hanoi for Moscow and then travelled to Schonefeld airport in East Berlin. She was among the first groups of contract workers and was soon employed at a factory that made drinking glasses.
Now aged 64, Mai has a 27-year-old son and runs a textile shop in the town where she has lived since she arrived in the GDR. Mai requested Al Jazeera uses a pseudonym to tell her story, for personal privacy reasons.
On April 30, Vietnam marked 50 years since the end of the war. For the large Vietnamese-German diaspora, who arrived as refugees and contract workers, this year’s milestones have stirred a sense of reflection.
Mai said she felt joy on the anniversary.
“My father resisted against the French colonialists, and then my older brother fought against the Americans. So, for me, the end of this war is very meaningful because of the blood that was shed by my family in all of these wars,” she said.
Her brother followed in her footsteps, arriving in Germany in the 1990s alone. His family joined him two decades later, in 2009.
His daughter, 26-year-old Dieu Ly Hoang, now lives in Prenzlauer Berg, which is coincidentally the same neighbourhood as Ha. It is a sought-after area of the German capital, formerly in the GDR, now home to cosy cafes, posh restaurants, yoga studios and affluent expatriate families where English is heard on the streets more often than German.
“It’s been a very important aspect for me to see what my family went through, and how resilient they have been. I know I’m very lucky not to have experienced an evacuation and I can’t imagine what it was like for my grandparents,” Ly said, as she recalled hearing stories about the wartime rations of rice.
“I acknowledge the sacrifices they made to migrate for a better life so that I could be born and live in peace,” said Ly, an art historian.
Ha, now 53 and a father to two sons, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Asian German diaspora at the University of Tubingen and holds a PhD in cultural studies. Friendly, open and knowledgeable of the complex history he is a part of, Ha also said the commemorative events have felt significant.
“There’s an intellectual and cultural discussion going on through which we are trying to make sense of this history and what this history means for us living in the German-Vietnamese diaspora,” he said.
“Questions pop up in private and public conversations, articles, books, and artworks. And knowing more about this history will improve our sense of self in German society, because we are able to discover more about a past that we, the younger generations, didn’t experience on a personal level. This allows us to connect the past with the present.”
An estimated 35,000 refugees arrived in West Germany in 1979, while 70,000 contract workers began to arrive in the GDR in 1980.
When Germany unified in 1990, it brought together, at least physically, two communities.
“In the GDR, people were proud to show international solidarity, and this went hand in hand with hatred of the capitalist West, while the West German government saw the Vietnam War as part of the global struggle against communism,” explained German historian Andreas Margara.
Ly said some of her relatives still mention it when they hear a southern Vietnamese accent.
“They do not become stressed nor do they act differently, but they notice the accent verbally, like ‘Oh, this person is from the south’. They do not go further into details, but I can feel a certain differentiation there because there is this history there. My parents’ generation, including people like war veterans, don’t have the spaces in the diaspora to meet, share their experiences and understand each other more,” she said. “Unified Germany, though, can be a space for more reconciliation.”
She added that her generation has “more chances and spaces for dialogue” as she recalled recently meeting a Vietnamese German art history student and having plenty about which to talk.
Mai agreed that there are not many opportunities in her life to meet southerners, yet she feels no animosity.
Kenya is marking its anniversary of pro-democracy rallies, with police blocking main roads in the capital, Nairobi, anticipating protests, after last month’s demonstrations descended into violent clashes.
People rally each year on July 7 to mark the date in 1990 when Kenyans demanded a return to multiparty democracy after years of autocratic rule by then-President Daniel arap Moi.
The protest is called “Saba Saba”, meaning “seven seven” in Kiswahili, because of the date.
Kenya antiriot police guard parliament buildings in Nairobi, Kenya, July 7, 2025]Brian Inganga/AP Photo]
Monday’s event comes as young Kenyans – angry over economic stagnation, corruption and repeated acts of police brutality – are once again engaging in protests that also saw looting and violence, leaving dozens dead and thousands of businesses destroyed.
Protesters accuse the authorities of paying armed vandals to discredit their movement, while the government has compared the demonstrations with an “attempted coup”.
On Monday, the streets of Nairobi were eerily quiet after police mounted roadblocks on the main roads, preventing most people from entering the centre, with many businesses closed for the day.
The government is committed to protecting life and property during protests, Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen said on his X account on Sunday.
“Our security agencies are on high alert to deal decisively with criminals and other elements of ill intent who may seek to infiltrate peaceful processions to cause havoc, mayhem, or destruction of property”, he said.
Leading activist Hanifa Aden wrote on X: “The police getting rained on as they block every road while we stay at home warming our beds”.
“Total shutdown and forced holiday executed by the state”, she added.
On Sunday afternoon, a news conference by the Kenyan Human Rights Commission calling for an end to “enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings” was broken up when men, some armed with sticks, forced their way into the compound.
Social media and rising economic expectations have created anger at inequalities in a country where about 80 percent are trapped in informal, poorly paid jobs.
The death of Albert Ojwang, a teacher and blogger, in police custody in June gave impetus to protests, with the government-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights reporting 19 deaths across the country during demonstrations last month.
Prosecutors approved murder charges against six people, including three police officers, over Ojwang’s death. All six pleaded not guilty.
At least 80 people have died in protests since June 2024 and dozens detained illegally.
A groundbreaking coronial inquiry has revealed that an Australian police officer shot an Indigenous teenager dead because they were drawn to “high adrenaline policing.”
The 682-page findings were made at a ceremony in the remote outback town , of Yuendumu in central Australia on Monday. Racist behavior was also “normalized” in Zachary Rolfe’s Alice Springs police station.
Five years after Kumanjayi Walker was shot, which caused protests all over the country. However, Rolfe was found not guilty of murder in a 2022 trial in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory.
One of 598 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died in custody since 1991 when detailed records began, Walker was shot three times during the attempted arrest in Yuendumu.
After conducting a nearly three-year investigation, Northern Territory coroner Elisabeth Armitage said, “I found that Mr. Rolfe was racist.”
Elisabeth Armitage, the coroner for the Northern Territory, has published her findings into Kumanjayi Walker’s death. twitter.com/hNb6UPnDUT
Rolfe worked for an organization with the hallmarks of “institutional racism,” she claimed, after being fired from the police force in 2023 for reasons unrelated to the shooting.
Rolfe’s racism and other attitudes “in a way that increased the likelihood of a fatal outcome” were a “significant risk,” she claimed.
According to the coroner, Walker’s family and community will always accept that racism played an “integral part” in his death. The taint could stain the [Northern Territory] police, the police said.
The coroner cited offensive language and described the territory’s tactical police as “grotesque examples of racism” during a so-called awards ceremony.
No complaints about the awards have ever been made over the course of ten years,” she said.
The policeman’s text messages also revealed his interest in “high adrenaline policing” and “contempt” for some more senior officers as well as “remote policing.” According to her, these behaviors “had the potential to lead to a fatal encounter with Kumanjayi.”
Walker’s family claimed that the inquest had exposed “deep systemic racism within the NT police” in a statement shared before the coroner’s release of her findings.
In a statement posted on social media, the family stated that “the hearing testimony confirmed our family’s belief that Rolfe is not a “bad egg” in the NT Police force but a symptom of a system that disregards and brutalizes our people.
The inquest concluded that there is evidence supporting a return to full community control, citing Yapa culture, stronger people, better outcomes, and self-governance, as stated in the statement, which mentions the Warlpiri people, also known as Yapa.
Kumanjayi White, 24, a Yuendumu native and a member of the Warlpiri community, passed away in a supermarket in Alice Springs last month, forcing Armitage to postpone their presentation.
