Author: Zaizeraa

The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve the sale of 45,000 shells for Israel’s Merkava tanks for use in its offensive against Hamas in Gaza, according to a US official and a former US official. The request is being made even as concerns grow about the use of US weapons in a war that has killed thousands of civilians in the Palestinian enclave since Israel responded to an attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas militants. The potential sale, worth more than $500 million, is not part of President Joe Biden’s $110.5 billion supplemental request that includes funding for Ukraine and Israel.…

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned his Israeli counterpart Yaov Gallant about Israel’s role in escalating tensions along the border between Israel and Lebanon, Axios reported on Monday. “Austin’s message to Gallant reflected growing anxiety in the White House that Israeli military action in Lebanon is exacerbating tensions along the border, which could lead to a regional war,” Axios reported citing Israeli and US sources briefed on the call between the two. The report stated: “Some in the Biden administration are concerned Israel is trying to provoke Hezbollah and create a pretext for a wider war in Lebanon that could draw the US and other…

Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh on Monday called on the European Union and the United Nations to “parachute aid” into the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by fighting between Israel and Hamas. “I call on the United Nations and the European Union to parachute aid into the Gaza Strip, especially the north,” he said, referring to the area where fighting is most intense. Israeli forces reached the gates of Gaza City’s main hospital on Monday, the primary target in their battle to seize control of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, where medics said patients including newborn babies…

Rome (16/11 – 57) Sri Lanka is mired in a deep political and economic crisis and the country’s then President Rajapaksa has flown out of the country, days after a huge crowd of protesters stormed his residence in July 2022. Protesters for months have demanded the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whose government has been blamed for chronic mismanagement of the country’s finances. The island nation of 22 million people has suffered months of lengthy blackouts, acute food and fuel shortages, and galloping inflation in its most painful downturn on record. Here is how the crisis unfolded: April 1: State of emergency Rajapaksa declares a temporary state of emergency, giving security forces sweeping powers to arrest and…

The Jordanian royal called out the West’s double standards in condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians and blamed world leaders for failing to call for a ceasefire despite the mounting death toll in the besieged enclave. Queen Rania of Jordan has accused the world of a “glaring double standard” in failing to condemn the civilian casualties in Gaza as Israel continues to shell the enclave in the ongoing war with Hamas. “When October 7 happened, the world immediately and unequivocally stood by Israel and its right to defend itself and condemned the attacks that happened, but what we are seeing in the last couple of weeks,…

Brussel, Frankfurt (16/11 – 23) A levying of embargoes and export bans, the imposition of sanctions, erection of fearsome “license” (= restriction) protocol: there’s nothing new about this back-and-forth in world trade, in the eternal jousting for advantage among markets and nations. The clever Chinese imagined they had the world tea market all locked up until an earnest Scottish botanist carrying the telling name of “Robert Fortune” snuck into the Middle Kingdom to observe their agriculture, steal tea plants, and pick up tricks of tea processing. The Chinese global tea monopoly was busted wide open. The fortunate Mr. Fortune was…

Soldiers and volunteers on Thursday were battling a blaze on Lebanon’s southern border caused by Israeli bombing overnight, local officials said, as Israel and Hezbollah exchange near-daily cross-border fire.Since Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, Lebanon’s southern border has seen tit-for-tat exchanges between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.Mayor of the border village of Alma al-Shaab, Jean Ghafari, said fire broke out after Israeli bombing late Wednesday.“The blaze reached the edges of the village after midnight” and is still burning, he told AFP, adding that it…

As a historian of the Ottoman Empire, I believe it is criminal to keep millions of people disconnected from their own recent past. Imperialism is a difficult subject to tackle in the Arab world. The word conjures up associations with the days of French and British colonialism and the present-day settler colony of Israel. Yet the more indigenous and long-lasting form of imperial rule, Ottoman imperialism, is often left out of contemporary historical debates. Some of the states that succeeded the Ottoman Empire have chosen to sum up Ottoman rule in local curricula as simply Ottoman or Turkish “occupation”, while…

Paris (08/11 – 75) Sri Lanka’s economic and political crisis of 2022 left the country bankrupt. Ranil Wickremesinghe took over as President of Sri Lanka in July 2022 when the country was in the middle of its worst economic and political crisis since independence in 1948. His predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, had been forced out of power after facing mass protests prompted by 12-hour power cuts and persistent fuel and food shortages. The nation was bankrupt.Wickremesinghe brought in the International Monetary Fund and has focused on reaching macroeconomic stability and driving tough but much-needed structural reforms. Today, as Sri Lanka embarks…

Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih Berri met Tuesday with French special envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian, in Beirut to help resolve divisions that have left the presidency vacant for nearly nine months. A statement from Berri’s office said the meeting was “good” and that “an opening has pierced through” Lebanon’s power vacuum, without elaborating. Mired in a grueling economic crisis since 2019, Lebanon has been governed by a caretaker cabinet for more than a year and without a president since late October. Le Drian, on his second mission to Lebanon, gave no public statement after the meeting with Berri. The French envoy is…