World News

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/36992556

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem appeared in commercials aired on Mexican TV warning that anyone crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted and deported.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.semafor.com/article/04/22/2025/sheinbaum-bans-us-propaganda

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28999448

By WAFAA SHURAFA and SAMY MAGDY Updated 11:37 AM EDT, April 22, 2025

"DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed at least 17 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and destroyed bulldozers and other heavy equipment that had been supplied by mediators to clear rubble. Separate strikes killed two people in Lebanon."

Why Israel Fears the Faces of Dead Palestinian Children on Its Streets (David Issacharoff | Haaretz, 2025-04-21)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000

archived:
https://archive.is/2025.04.21-202552/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000
———

“Ahead of an anti-war demonstration scheduled for Thursday in Tel Aviv – organized by the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together – the Israeli police said they would not allow the protest to take place unless organizers agreed to a ban on signs displaying images of ‘kids or babies from Gaza’ or bearing references to ‘genocide and ethnic cleansing.’

“The document outlining these conditions was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, perfectly reflecting the heavy-handed police, who are acting without any clear guidelines or legal basis.

“Even in death, Palestinian children killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are treated as a threat in Israel…”

#StandingTogether #IsraeliOpposition
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

Sharon Osbourne has urged US authorities to revoke work visas for Kneecap after the Irish language rap group used a performance at Coachella to denounce Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The TV presenter accused the band of hate speech and supporting terrorist organisations and said it should not be allowed to perform in the US. “I urge you to join me in advocating for the revocation of Kneecap’s work visa,” she exhorted followers on X on Tuesday.

Fox News commentators also condemned the band and accused it of bringing “Nazi Germany” sentiments to America.

Kneecap scorned the Fox News comments and posted supportive messages from fans, saying it had received thousands of such endorsements as well as “hundreds of violent Zionist threats”. Almost all the concerts of a US tour scheduled for October have sold out, it added.

The trio, Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara from Belfast and DJ Próvaí from Derry, have built a following in the US with a mix of Irish republican totems, punk spirit and a film that stormed last year’s Utah film festival.

During their set last weekend at Coachella, the California desert music festival, Mo Chara said Britain had persecuted Irish people but not bombed them from the skies. “The Palestinians have nowhere to go.”

The performers led the audience in chants of “free, free Palestine” and screened pro-Palestinian messages on to screens. “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” said one. “It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes,” said another. The last used an expletive against Israel.

Osbourne, a judge on the TV show America’s Got Talent, said the festival had “compromised its moral and spiritual integrity” by allowing Kneecap and Green Day to denounce Israel over the 18-month war.

“Music’s primary purpose is to unite people. It should not be a venue for promoting terrorist organisations or spreading hate”, she said, singling out Kneecap’s “aggressive” political statements.

“This band openly support terrorist organisations. This behaviour raises concerns about the appropriateness of their participation in such a festival and further shows they are booked to play in the USA.”

Fox News commentators compared the band’s comments to Nazi Germany, with one saying the band should be removed from “authority positions” and that the “values of education” should be re-instilled.

Kneecap posted a clip of the segment and said the commentator’s admission that she had not previously heard of the band was the “only part of this shite that made any sense”.

The group said they had planned to denounce “US-backed genocide in Gaza” at an earlier performance in Coachella, on 11 April, but that the comments did not appear on the screen. The band also complained that the festival’s livestream did not carry a chant celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher.

Every accusation is a confession.

An unprecedented coral bleaching episode has spread to 84% of the world's reefs in an unfolding human-caused crisis that could kill off swathes of the essential ecosystems, scientists warned Wednesday.

Abby Wu was just 14 when she had cosmetic surgery for the first time.

After receiving hormone treatment for an illness, Abby's weight increased from 42kg (6 stone 8lbs) to 62kg (9 stone 11lbs) in two months.

The change hadn't gone unnoticed by her drama teacher.

"My teacher said, 'You were our star but now you're too fat. Either give up or lose weight fast,'" recalls Abby, who was preparing for her drama exams at the time.

Abby's mother stepped in, taking her to get liposuction to remove fat from her belly and legs.

Abby remembers her mother's words as she waited in the clinic in a hospital gown, nervous about the impending operation.

"Just be brave and walk in. You'll become pretty once you're out."

The surgery was traumatic. Abby was only given partial anaesthesia and remained conscious throughout.

"I could see how much fat was extracted from my body and how much blood I was losing," she says.

An ashen pallor and an eerie stillness all that remains where there should fluttering fish and vibrant colours in the reefscape, one conservationist says

The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into “uncharted territory” by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.

Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.

Coral reefs are known as the rainforests of the sea because of their high concentration of biodiversity that supports about a third of all marine species and a billion people.

But record high ocean temperatures have spread like an underwater wildfire over corals across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, damaging and killing countless corals.

At a secret workshop in Ukraine’s north-east, where about 20 people assemble hundreds of FPV (first person view) drones, there is a new design. Under the frame of the familiar quadcopter is a cylinder, the size of a forearm. Coiled up inside is fibre optic cable, 10km (6 miles) or even 20km long, to create a wired kamikaze drone.

Capt Yuriy Fedorenko, the commander of a specialist drone unit, the Achilles regiment, says fibre optic drones were an experimental response to battlefield jamming and rapidly took off late last year. With no radio connection, they cannot be jammed, are difficult to detect and able to fly in ways conventional FPV drones cannot.

“If pilots are experienced, they can fly these drones very low and between the trees in a forest or tree line. If you are flying with a regular drone, the trees block the signal unless you have a re-transmitter close,” he observes. Where tree lined supply roads were thought safer, fibre optic drones have been able to get through.

The European Commission has fined US companies Apple and Meta millions for violations of the Digital Markets Act.

The European Commission on Wednesday found tech giants Apple and Meta in breach of obligations under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), fining the two US companies €500 million ($572 million) and €200 million respectively.

Apple was found to have breached its "anti-steering" obligation under the DMA, while Meta was considered not to have given consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data, another stipulation of the DMA.

However, the EU also closed an investigation of Apple over its user choice obligations after the tech giant complied with the DMA by making it easy to select a default browser and for users to remove pre-installed apps such as Safari.

The U.S. expects Ukraine's response Wednesday to a peace framework that includes U.S. recognition of Crimea as part of Russia and unofficial recognition of Russian control of nearly all areas occupied since the 2022 invasion, sources with direct knowledge of the proposal tell Axios.

Why it matters: The one-page document the U.S. presented Ukrainian officials in Paris last week describes this as Trump's "final offer." The White House insists it's ready to walk away if the parties don't make a deal soon.

Summary

London talks aimed at securing a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia have been downgraded and will no longer include US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff.

The US state department blamed logistical reasons, but it was clear the decision was last-minute and left the Foreign Office wrongfooted.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has ruled out recognising occupied Crimea as Russian territory, after reports suggested this was being considered by the US and the Kremlin. "Ukraine does not legally recognise the occupation of Crimea. There's nothing to talk about," said Zelensky.

Ukraine's ministry of strategic industries said it was "naïve" to expect Ukraine to change its position on "non-negotiable" issues such as Crimea.

Levels of a little-known forever chemical known as TFA in European wines have risen “alarmingly” in recent decades, according to analysis, prompting fears that contamination will breach a planetary boundary.

Researchers from Pesticide Action Network Europe tested 49 bottles of commercial wine to see how TFA contamination in food and drink had progressed. They found levels of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a breakdown product of long-lasting Pfas chemicals that carries possible fertility risks, far above those previously measured in water.

Wines produced before 1988 showed no trace of TFA, the researchers found, but those after 2010 showed a steep rise in contamination. Organic and conventional wines showed a rise in TFA contamination, but levels in organic varieties tended to be lower.

The U.S. should stop making threats and resorting to coercion if it wants to make a deal, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant legally residing in the United States, has apparently been disappeared to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) after mistakenly turning onto the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, Michigan.

The bridge, one of North America’s busiest international crossings, links Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. Due to the complexity of nearby highways, even local residents occasionally take the wrong ramp. For Prada, this innocent mistake led to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation—culminating in his disappearance into a foreign prison.

https://archive.is/bUoPa

It’s the fourth global bleaching event since 1998, and has now surpassed bleaching from 2014-17 that hit some two-thirds of reefs, said the ICRI, a mix of more than 100 governments, non-governmental organizations and others. And it’s not clear when the current crisis, which began in 2023 and is blamed on warming oceans, will end.

“We may never see the heat stress that causes bleaching dropping below the threshold that triggers a global event,” said Mark Eakin, executive secretary for the International Coral Reef Society and retired coral monitoring chief for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“We’re looking at something that’s completely changing the face of our planet and the ability of our oceans to sustain lives and livelihoods,” Eakin said.

The European Union will never recognize the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula as legally Russian, the bloc's top diplomat Kaja Kallas told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on April 22.

Kallas' comments come in response to reports that the recognition of Crimea as Russian territory is being considered as part of a U.S.-backed proposal to end the war in Ukraine.

"Crimea is Ukraine," Kallas told the AFP.