World News

Israel’s parliament on Monday passed a law approving the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis, a measure that has been harshly condemned by the international community and rights groups as discriminatory and inhumane.

The passage of the bill marked the culmination of a yearslong drive by the far-right to escalate punishment for Palestinians convicted of nationalistic offenses against Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the Knesset to vote for the bill in person.

The law makes the death penalty — by hanging — the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of nationalistic killings.

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Experts say the legislation has two key elements that will effectively limit the death penalty to Palestinians.

First, the bill makes the death penalty a default punishment for nationalistic killings in military courts, which try only West Bank Palestinians and not Israeli citizens. It says that only in special circumstances can military judges change the sentence to life imprisonment.

It gives Israeli civilian courts a greater degree of leniency in sentencing, with judges having the option to choose between the death penalty and life imprisonment.

The second element is how the bill defines the offense punishable by death: killing that rejects the existence of the state of Israel.

“It will apply in Israeli courts, but only to terrorist activities that are motivated by the wish to undermine the existence of Israel. That means Jews will not be indicted under this law,” Cohen said.

In case it is not clear, Nationalistic killing of Palestinians is not covered by this law at all, only Nationalistic killing of Israelis.

Literally creating a legal rule in which murdering an Israeli is worse, even if done with the same exact motivation, than murdering a Palestinian.

The BBC has a new head honcho in waiting, the Director-General designate Matt Brittin. His job: helming one of the world's most famous and oldest international media brands, one with a vast and sensitive domestic position. His last job: President of EMEA Business and Operations at Google. You can imagine a greater culture clash, but you'll have to work at it.

It is far too early to predict how Brittin will steer the largely unsteerable BBC, an organization in perpetual crisis in a rapidly mutating media, political, and economic hellscape. Some say his decades of experience in Google and impeccable institutional background make him the ideal guide and defender for the Corporation, which until very recently didn't even have a YouTube policy. Others point out his complete lack of broadcast, editorial, or media managerial experience, his lack of presence in the Google C-suite, and Google's role as a predatory destroyer of journalism.

So, Bari Weiss, just across the pond.

The head of Canada’s largest airline is stepping down after his video tribute to pilots killed in a fatal collision became a public relations nightmare for Air Canada, prompting a wave of mockery and indignation at him from both the public and politicians for not speaking French.

Air Canada’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, will retire by the end of the third quarter of 2026, the company said on Monday. He will continue to lead the company and serve on the board of directors until that time, the carrier said.

Last week, an Air Canada Jazz flight landed at LaGuardia airport in New York and then collided with a fire truck on the runway, killing its two pilots, Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther. The pair were praised by aviation experts for taking actions that saved passengers’ lives.

In response to the tragedy, the company posted a four-minute condolence video in which Rousseau spoke only two French words – bonjour and merci.

Canada’s largest airline is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, where French is both widely spoken and the official language. Forest, the 30-year-old pilot, was francophone, as were a number of passengers onboard the flight.

The Brent crude oil price is on track for its biggest monthly gain on record in March after the Iran war caused mayhem in the markets.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed by 51% since the start of March, LSEG data shows, beating the previous monthly record of 46% in September 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf war.

Brent closed at $112.57 a barrel on Friday, up from $72.48 a barrel on 27 February, the day before the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Brent traded as high as $119.50 a barrel during March, its highest level since June 2022, after Iran all but closed the strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil and gas would normally pass.

US crude prices also rose during March; West Texas Intermediate has gained 48%, on track for its strongest month since May 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was disrupting the world economy.

Oil prices climbed through the month despite the coordinated release of 400m barrels of oil from emergency reserves announced on 11 March. Analysts at BloombergNEF estimate that 9m barrels of oil per day have been knocked off global oil supply by the Middle East conflict.

Donald Trump appeared to lose his ability to talk down the oil price as the war continued. Earlier in the month, the president’s claims of progress in negotiations pushed down crude prices, but by late March his declaration of a 10-day extension for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz was followed by a rising oil price and falling stock markets.

no to farage in sunderland
reform are coming to the north east again to spread their hate, lies & division. come show them they aren't welcome.
thursday 26th of march 2026
sunderland live arena, raignton meadows, DH4 5PH
meet at 6pm at the entrance to the carpark.

The global energy crisis caused by the war in Iran is equivalent to the combined force of the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the head of the International Energy Agency has warned.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said the growing fallout could be seriously compounded through [interruptions] to the “vital arteries of the global economy”, including petrochemicals, fertilisers, sulphur and helium.

Speaking at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on Monday, Birol said the depth of the problems in energy markets caused by American and Israeli bombings in Iran, and the closure of the [strategic] strait of Hormuz, had not [initially] been properly understood by world leaders.

That situation prompted his intervention last week, when the IEA pushed for demand-side measures such as increases in the number of employees working from home, a temporary lowering of speed limits on highways and reduced air travel.

Edits mine.

Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan is on a mission. The new housing minister of the Netherlands is charged with building 100,000 homes a year and breaking through a planning deadlock to combat one of Europe’s worst housing crises.

The Irish-born 50-year-old is new to politics. Until a fortnight ago she was the country’s top female military officer, famous for getting flak jackets redesigned for women’s bodies and holding her own in a male-dominated sphere.

Now she is clear. With a shortage of 400,000 homes, average house prices of almost €500,000 and a growing population, the country must build like it did after the second world war – and be prepared to make some compromises along the way.

“What I take from working in defence is that you keep your eye on the ball,” Boekholt-O’Sullivan, from the liberal-progressive D66 party that now leads the coalition government, said.

“The homes have to be built: that is the primary need right now. Luxury takes time, and we do not have time.”

It's so weird to have a politician sound competent.

This month I will conclude my tenure as the commissioner-general of Unrwa – the United Nations agency that has provided essential, public-like services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East for more than 75 years. As the world struggles to emerge from the quagmire of Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran threatens to engulf the entire region, I am profoundly concerned about the future of Palestinian refugees and the multilateral system at large.

Having endured more than two years of relentless physical, political and legal attacks, most fiercely in Palestine, Unrwa has reached breaking point. The risks to Palestinians’ rights and the stability of the region are immense.

In December 2023, amid the escalating brutality of the war in Gaza, I wrote to the president of the UN general assembly that in my 35 years of working in complex emergencies, I had never had cause to report the killing of 130 personnel, nor to predict the killing of many more. I did not imagine then that the number of colleagues killed would triple – the death toll is now more than 390 – or that so many others would sustain life-changing injuries, or be arbitrarily detained and tortured.

Hundreds of Unrwa premises in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The parliament of Israel adopted legislation to end the agency’s presence in occupied East Jerusalem, including by forcibly shutting schools and health clinics, and cutting off the supply of water and electricity to our premises. The Unrwa headquarters in East Jerusalem was seized, looted and set on fire, with senior Israeli officials celebrating the destruction on site and online. A deputy mayor of Jerusalem even threatened to “annihilate and kill all members of Unrwa”.

I'll just leave this here.

Sohrab Faqiri spent Eid, the Muslim festival to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, looking for the grave of his brother, killed in a massive Pakistan airstrike on Kabul this week.

Pakistan’s bombardment campaign, on what it says is terrorist and military infrastructure in neighbouring Afghanistan, appeared to have gone catastrophically wrong. A rehabilitation centre for drug addicts was hit on Monday night, according to the United Nations and the Afghan authorities. The UN’s preliminary death toll is 143 people, while the Taliban administration puts the figure at more than 400 dead.

Faqiri’s brother, Qais, a tailor and father of a 10-year-old boy, was being treated for the last three months at the facility, called Omid or “Hope”. Faqiri rushed there after the airstrike, but could not find him among the survivors. He spent the next two days visiting hospitals in Kabul, but there was no sign of Qais. Then, by chance, he saw a video of a mass burial by the authorities of the airstrike victims and spotted his brother.

On Thursday – marked as Eid in Afghanistan – he went to the hillside graveyard on the edge of Kabul, where the burial took place. There, he found rows of stones planted along lines of upturned earth. But there were no names to identify any of the bodies.

“Worst of all is that his grave is not known to us,” Faqiri said, speaking at the cemetery, bursting into tears. “This is the saddest moment, for a person on Eid day to search for the body of his brother.” He has not had the heart yet to tell their mother.

Donald Trump has branded the UK and other Nato allies “cowards” but anger is growing among cabinet ministers that his war in Iran could jeopardise Britain’s fragile finances.

Senior members of the government are in despair about the potential effects on the economy, with experts warning of higher energy prices and mortgage and borrowing costs.

They have already begun contingency planning in case the conflict is protracted, including considering lowering speed limits to minimise fuel consumption.

With the conflict continuing to escalate, the UK confirmed it was authorising the use of British military bases to strike Iranian missile launchers that are targeting commercial ships in the strait of Hormuz. Previously, UK bases were only being used to strike Iranian sites targeting British allies and interests in Gulf states.

For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – was closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they could to the sealed site.

On Friday morning, hundreds of worshippers were forced to pray outside the Old City, as Israeli police barricaded the entrances to the site.

Because of security concerns related to the US-Israeli war on Iran, on 28 February Israeli authorities had in effect sealed off the mosque complex in Jerusalem to most Muslim worshippers during Ramadan. Officials framed the move as a security measure linked to the escalating confrontation with Iran, leaving thousands of Palestinians to gather and pray outside the gates of the Old City instead.

However, Palestinians say the move is part of a wider Israeli strategy to leverage security tensions to tighten restrictions and entrench control over the al-Aqsa mosque complex, known as al-Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, which also encompasses the seventh-century Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine. To Jews it is the Temple Mount, the site of the 10th-century BC first temple and second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in AD70.

It was over beers on an autumn evening in Zurich in 2024 that a group of journalists with an independent Swiss research collective began to discuss investigating Palantir, one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Three years earlier, Palantir had advertised that it was setting up a “European hub” in the Swiss municipality of Altendorf, a sleepy town of roughly 7,000 people on the shores of Lake Zurich.

Press coverage of the move was positive: a Swiss national newspaper said the canton of Schwyz had “pulled off a coup” by landing a US tech company. But the journalists in the collective, WAV, were not so sure. They wondered what Swiss authorities were doing with Palantir.

WAV approached a small Swiss reader-funded magazine, Republik, to collaborate on a story. One year and 59 freedom of information requests later, their investigation, which alleged that Palantir had persistently courted Switzerland but had been rejected, made waves across Europe – prompting debate in Germany and comment from UK politicians.

Palantir was not happy. The journalists say they had interviewed company executives and sent a full list of questions before publication, but that the company demanded they print a detailed rebuttal, with a list of points that the journalists say went well beyond the scope of their investigation. When the magazine refused, Palantir filed a lawsuit in a Swiss commercial court demanding that it do so.

A video shared by Tehran Times claims to show the moment a US F-35 fighter jet was hit during a combat mission over Iranian airspace. The clip shows the aircraft appearing to take damage, with explosions, smoke trails, and the jet veering off course mid-air.

A US F-35 fighter jet was attacked during an Iranian strike and forced to make an emergency landing at a military base in the Middle East, according to CNN. The claim, first made by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), would mark the first known instance of Iran hitting one of the US military’s most advanced and expensive aircraft in the ongoing conflict in Middle East.

According to the IRGC, the stealth jet was struck by air defence systems over central Iran in the early hours of Thursday. A video shared by Tehran Times claims to show the moment a US F-35 fighter jet was hit during a combat mission over Iranian airspace. The clip shows the aircraft appearing to take damage, with explosions, smoke trails, and the jet veering off course midair.

In a statement, the IRGC said it had "struck and seriously damaged" the aircraft at around 2.50 am (local time), adding that the jet’s fate remains unclear and that there is a "high possibility" it may have crashed. The group also said the operation followed the interception of more than 125 US-Israeli drones, calling it evidence of improvements in Iran’s air defence systems.

If confirmed, the incident would mark the first time Iran has successfully targeted an F-35, a fifth-generation fighter jet that costs more than $100 million and is considered a cornerstone of US air power. Both the US and Israel have been deploying F-35s extensively since the conflict escalated on February 28.

US CONFIRMS EMERGENCY LANDING, PLAYS DOWN DAMAGE

According to CNN, US Central Command said the aircraft was "flying a combat mission over Iran" when it was forced to make an emergency landing. "The aircraft landed safely, and the pilot is in stable condition," spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins told CNN. "This incident is under investigation."

However, Washington has not issued any official statement. The Pentagon said its operations are going as planned, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth saying the US is "winning decisively" and that Iran’s air defences have been "flattened".

Amid escalating conflict, at least 16 US aircraft have reportedly been destroyed since the start of the war, including 10 Reaper drones, while several others have been damaged in combat or accidents.

[ADDENDUM]

The actual video of the event, plus more, from The Hindustan Times:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YZZAGO0rkLk