geneva_convenience

Pro-Palestine protesters entered a BBC building in Belfast and the RTÉ campus in Dublin on Tuesday. Both protests voiced their criticism of the coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The BBC building in the city centre was put into lockdown for a short period when protesters made their way on to the premises.

“Officers attended the scene and spoke with the crowd who then left the building and moved their protest outside. “No damage was caused and the protesters have since moved on from this area.”

Donald Trump’s tariffs have unleashed a “major negative shock” into the world economy, the International Monetary Fund has said, as it cut its forecasts for US, UK and global growth.

In a stark assessment of the impact of the US president’s policies, as global finance ministers prepare to meet in Washington, the IMF said: “We expect that the sharp increase on 2 April in both tariffs and uncertainty will lead to a significant slowdown in global growth in the near term.”

The 36 deputies who signed a letter in the Financial Times condemning the actions of Israel in Gaza are now facing an investigation by the Board of Deputies.

A statement from the Board this morning announced that all of the signatories are now “subject to a complaints procedure”, while some senior members of the organisation have been suspended.

They include the vice-chair of the Board’s International Division, who has been suspended pending the investigation into complaints regarding the letter, which was published last Wednesday and has sparked a communal row.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who has been in immigration detention in Louisiana for more than a month, was barred from attending the birth of his firstborn child Monday, after immigration officials denied him permission to attend the birth in person, according to emails reviewed by CNN.

On Sunday morning, attorneys for Khalil wrote to Melissa Harper, director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in New Orleans, requesting that Khalil be released from detention for two weeks so he could travel to New York and be with his wife when she delivered their son.

The IDF special forces unit killed eight Palestinian Red Crescent personnel, six emergency rescue workers and a United Nations employee in three separate predawn attacks at the same location south of Rafah, then buried the 15 aid workers in a mass grave along with their crushed emergency vehicles.

Firing on the first medical team and then the ambulance crews that came to find them an hour later "resulted from an operational misunderstanding by the troops," the report said, while killing the U.N. worker was "a breach of orders."

Israel's military advocate general was investigating the incident and could pursue criminal charges, but "there are no outside investigations of the killings underway," the AP said. The IDF has "killed more than 150 emergency responders" and "well over 1,000 health workers," according to the U.N., and it "rarely investigates such incidents."

Since the fall of the USSR, a large part of developing world elites, middle classes, and intellectuals have been effectively transformed into ideological parrots of US liberal propaganda through USAID-funded NGOs, educational and media projects.

In the absence of any competing political or intellectual framework, support for US economic doctrine and political liberalism has remained unchallenged.

Yet USAID's emphasis over the last three decades on white American liberal ideas about multiculturalism, gender and sexual rights is now anathema to American conservatives.

This, more than anything, has prompted the administration to discard the agency altogether.

For Trump, there is no need to continue indoctrinating developing world elites and middle classes in capitalism and anti-welfare policies - they already believe in them, especially if objectionable liberal American ideas must accompany such indoctrination.

The US, he realises, can now solely rely on hard power to impose its will, sparing itself the cost of investing in "soft power".

Israel Police conditioned approval for an anti-war protest this coming Thursday in Tel Aviv on the requirement that "no images of children or babies from Gaza" be displayed.

According to a document sent on Sunday by the police to the Arab-Jewish movement Standing Together, which is organizing the protest, demonstrators are prohibited from displaying signs, posters, or flags that "incite to violent or illegal activity."

The document, obtained by Haaretz, also states that participants are forbidden from displaying "hostage signs" (apparently referring to posters with images of hostages) or signs bearing the phrase "genocide."

Berlin has reported a marked increase in attacks on asylum seekers and refugee shelters, amid a sharp rise in far-right crime and a hardening of German migration policy.

Official figures provided at the request of two local Green party lawmakers showed there were 77 assaults on asylum seekers and refugees in 2024 and eight instances of deliberate damage to residences housing them.

This compares with 32 targeted attacks on people and none on residences in 2023, one of the deputies, Ario Ebrahimpour Mirzaie, told the news agency dpa.

As a result of the assaults, 34 people needed treatment in hospital, according to the official data. These included 16 women, 14 men, two girls and two males whose age was not reported.

Not long before what would turn out to be his final public appearance, a blessing of the crowds who had gathered for Easter Sunday mass in St Peter’s Square and an unexpected popemobile tour of the piazza, Pope Francis received a devout if perhaps unlikely visitor.

Among the last people to see and speak to the pontiff in the hours before his death early on Monday morning was the US vice-president, JD Vance, a zealous, albeit comparatively recent, convert to Roman Catholicism.

The pair met on Sunday morning at the Domus Santa Marta guest house, the down-to-earth lodgings where Francis lived during his 12-year papacy. According to statements from the Vatican and Vance’s office, the two men spoke for a few minutes to exchange Easter greetings, and the 88-year-old pope gave the vice-president rosaries, a Vatican tie and three big chocolate Easter eggs, one for each of his children.

There are two parallel image channels that dominate our daily visual consumption. In one, there are real pictures and footage of the world as it is: politics, sport, news and entertainment. In the other is AI slop, low-quality content with minimal human input. Some of it is banal and pointless – cartoonish images of celebrities, fantasy landscapes, anthropomorphised animals. And some is a sort of pornified display of women just simply … being, like a virtual girlfriend you cannot truly interact with. The range and scale of the content is staggering, and infiltrates everything from social media timelines to messages circulated on WhatsApp. The result is not just a blurring of reality, but a distortion of it.

A new genre of AI slop is rightwing political fantasy. There are entire YouTube videos of made-up scenarios in which Trump officials prevail against liberal forces. The White House account on X jumped on a trend of creating images in Studio Ghibli style and posted an image of a Dominican woman in tears as she is arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). AI political memefare has, in fact, gone global. Chinese AI videos mocking overweight US workers on assembly lines after the tariff announcement raised a question for, and response from, the White House spokesperson last week. The videos, she said, were made by those who “do not see the potential of the American worker”. And to prove how pervasive AI slop is, I had to triple-check that even that response was not itself quickly cobbled-together AI content fabricating another dunk on Trump’s enemies.

The impulse behind this politicisation of AI is not new; it is simply an extension of traditional propaganda. What is new is how democratised and ubiquitous it has become, and how it involves no real people or the physical constraints of real life, therefore providing an infinite number of fictional scenarios.

What would the world look like if Kevin McCloud had his way? What if each of us had the chance to build our very own Grand Design, letting our streets be lined with personal visions, liberated from the identikit brick boxes offered by the usual big housebuilders?

A glimpse of this world exists, sort of, on the outskirts of Bicester in Oxfordshire, where the country’s biggest self-build experiment has been under way for 10 years. Graven Hill is a place where rooftops tilt, zigzag and bulge, where windows come in circles, squares and triangles, or poke out from unexpected places. There are balconies fashioned from glass, steel and rustic timber clinging to facades of stone, brick, wood and render, along with every type of fibre-cement board available. Wandering the freshly tarmacked streets feels like walking through a building supplies catalogue. Panels of fake wood are proudly fixed next to rusted cor-ten steel and bits of slate, as if residents were fed fizzy drinks and let loose in a cladding warehouse.

The UN’s humanitarian agency, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and Gaza’s civil defence service have rejected the findings of an Israeli military investigation that concluded the killings of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers in Rafah last month were caused by “professional failures”.

“The video filmed by one of the paramedics proves that the Israeli occupation’s narrative is false and demonstrates that it carried out summary executions,” Mohammed al-Mughair, a civil defence official, told Agence-France Presse on Monday, accusing Israel of seeking to “circumvent” its obligations under international law.

Jonathan Whittall, the UN’s humanitarian chief for Gaza, said the investigation did not go far enough. “A lack of real accountability undermines international law and makes the world a more dangerous place,” he said.

“Without accountability, we risk continuing to watch atrocities unfolding, and the norms designed to protect us all eroding.”