US President Joe Biden will pay a solidarity visit to Israel on Wednesday following the Hamas attacks, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who also announced that Israel had agreed to work on civilian aid for Gaza.

Blinken spoke after meeting for nearly eight hours at the defence ministry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the top US diplomat’s second visit since the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

“The president will reaffirm United States solidarity with Israel and our ironclad commitment to its security,” Blinken said early Tuesday in Tel Aviv.

“Israel has the right and indeed the duty to defend its people from Hamas and other terrorists and to prevent future attacks,” Blinken said.

Biden “will hear from Israel what it needs to defend his people as we continue to work with Congress to meet those needs,” he said.

Biden will visit Tel Aviv, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in Washington. He also announced that Biden would travel to Jordan where he would meet Jordanian King Abdullah II, Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Blinken said that the United States also secured assurances from Israel on working to bring foreign assistance into the impoverished and blockaded Gaza Strip as Israel prepares a ground offensive against the Hamas-ruled territory.

US officials said that a new US coordinator on humanitarian aid, David Satterfield, would work with Israel to develop more concrete plans.

Biden hopes to “hear from Israel how it will conduct its operations in a way that minimises civilian casualties and enables humanitarian assistance to flow to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not benefit Hama,” Blinken said.

“At our request, the United States and Israel have agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza,” Blinken said.

He said the two sides were discussing the “possibility of creating areas to help keep civilians out of harm’s way.”

“We welcome the government of Israel’s commitment to work on this plan. The president very much looks forward to discussing it further when he’s here on Wednesday,” he said.

Biden has vowed unwavering solidarity with Israel after suffering the worst attack in its 75-year history. But he also has voiced concern about more severe proposals that could impact civilians in Gaza and earlier pressed Israel to reverse a decision to shut off water supply.

“We share Israel’s concern that Hamas may seize or destroy aid going entering Gaza or otherwise preventing it from reaching the people who need it,” Blinken said.

“If Hamas in any way blocks humanitarian aid from reaching civilians, including by seizing the aid itself, we’ll be the first to condemn it and we will work to prevent it from happening again.”

Source: AFP

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said every Hamas member was “a dead man” after the first meeting of his country’s emergency government.

Alongside him, opposition figure Benny Gantz said it was “a time for war”.

But US President Joe Biden said he had spoken to Mr Netanyahu and made it clear that Israel must “operate by the rules of war”.

The death toll in Israel has reached 1,200. More than 1,100 people have been killed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza.

Mr Biden said he understood the anger and frustration of the Israeli people but urged Israel to adhere to the principles of the Geneva conventions. He also warned Iran – which has welcomed the Hamas attack – to “be careful”.

Earlier on Wednesday Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gantz agreed to put aside a bitter political rivalry that had escalated into widespread protests.

Mr Gantz told Israeli citizens that the newly-formed government was “united” and ready to “wipe this thing called Hamas off the face of the Earth”.

Alongside Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gantz, the centrist National Unity Party leader and a former defence minister, the new temporary cabinet would also include Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

The country’s main opposition leader, Yair Lapid, has not joined the alliance. However, Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gantz said in a joint statement that a seat would be reserved for him in the war cabinet.

“During the war period, no bills or government decisions will be promoted that do not concern the conduct of the war,” said a statement.

“All senior appointments will be automatically extended during the war period.”

The emergency government will give broader national consensus to military action. It also brings to the war cabinet two voices who are experts in military strategy. Both Mr Gantz and also Gadi Eisenkot, who joins as an observer, are former Israeli military chiefs of staff.

The announcement of the new cabinet came in the wake of savage attacks by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip.

Source: BBC

The Israeli military says the surprise co-ordinated assault launched by Hamas on Saturday feels like the September 2001 attack on the US

“This is our 9/11 – they got us,” says a spokesman, while another compares it to the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack

Israel is still fighting Palestinian militants in multiple places near the Gaza border, two days after the attack began

And it says fighters may be still be getting into Israel from the enclave

More than 700 people have been killed in Israel since Hamas launched its attacks on Saturday morning, including 260 at a music festival

And almost 500 have died in Gaza, after Israel launched massive retaliatory air strikes.

Source: BBC

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman will share the prize.

The technology was experimental before the pandemic, but has now been given to millions of people around the world to protect them against serious Covid-19.

The same mRNA technology is now being researched for other diseases, including cancer.

The Nobel Prize committee said: “The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

Both were told they had won by telephone this morning and were said to be “overwhelmed”.

Vaccines train the immune system to recognise and fight threats such as viruses or bacteria.

Traditional vaccine technology has been based on dead or weakened versions of the original virus or bacterium – or by using fragments of the infectious agent.

In contrast, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines use a completely differently approach.

During the Covid pandemic, the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were both based on mRNA technology.

Professor Kariko and Professor Weissman met in the early 1990s when they were working at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, when their interest in mRNA was seen as a scientific backwater.

Source: BBC

Americans have commemorated the 60th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” a pivotal event held in the US capital in the 1960s US civil rights movement, amid spreading social injustice in an increasingly polarized US society.

Tens of thousands of Americans, who gathered on Saturday in Washington, DC, to show their devotion to the ideas of late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., called for an end to White supremacy and racial discrimination in the United States.

Rights activists from all over the US and from all walks of society gathered at the iconic Lincoln Memorial to promote racial equality in US society and beyond.

Speakers at the rally, who see Black America’s rights are on the line, addressed discriminatory issues in US society including Supreme Court decisions on Affirmative Action to states who are attempting to rewrite the history.

“No Justice, No Peace,” the demonstrators chanted, while speakers reminded that “Black lives matter”, condemning gun violence against Black individuals.

They stressed that racism is becoming more prevalent in American society and highlighted the need for more efforts to eliminate racial discrimination.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “I have a dream” speech which would become one of the most influential speeches in world modern history.”

That march brought more than 250,000 people to the US capital to push for an end to continuous discrimination against colored people in the US.

In his memorable speech, King urged the righteous people from all walks of US society to imagine a day when “all of God’s children, Black men and white men, [are] …  ‘Free at last! Free at last!”

The “March on Washington” King’s enlightening speech helped change the segregated system prevalent in US society in the 60s and bring an end to Jim Crow laws, pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and open the modern civil rights era which was slowly making progress before former US President Donald Trump launched his regressive rightist campaign, driving a wedge in US society.

Source: Presstv

Gun deaths related to children in the United States have reached a new high, a recent study revealed on Monday, signaling the surging gun violence across the country.

The report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) found that more children had died from gun-related injuries in 2021, in contrast to previous years.

By using the stats provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mortality database, the study found that gun deaths of American children rose from 3,390 in 2019 to 4,368 in 2020 and to 4,752 in 2021, the latest year for which data was available.

According to the study published in the AAP’s journal, gun violence has been the number one cause of death for children in the United States since 2020.

Noticeably, among Black kids guns were mostly used for homicide while the majority of White children used them for suicide.

Source: Presstv

A man who posted violent threats against President Joe Biden and other officials online was shot dead during an FBI raid on Wednesday.

Agents were attempting to serve an arrest warrant on Craig Robertson at his home in Utah, just hours ahead of a planned visit to the state by Mr Biden.

A criminal complaint said Robertson posted threats on Facebook against Mr Biden and a prosecutor pursuing criminal charges against Donald Trump.

The FBI declined to give more details.

The raid happened at about 06:15 local time in Provo, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Salt Lake City.

A criminal complaint outlined messages that Robertson made on Facebook including pictures of guns and threats to kill Mr Biden and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney leading an investigation into a hush-money payment by Mr Trump to an adult film star.

According to the complaint, other messages targeted US Attorney General Merrick Garland and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Robertson posted on Facebook: “I hear Biden is coming to Utah. Digging out my old ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle.”

It was just one of dozens of violent messages and photos of weapons posted on two of Robertson’s Facebook accounts.

The complaint said Robertson came to the attention of federal agents in March after he posted a threat against Mr Bragg on Truth Social, the social network owned by Mr Trump. The company alerted the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center.

FBI agents then visited the suspect, who told them that the post was a “dream” and ended the conversation by saying: “We’re done here! Don’t return without a warrant!”

Later posts by Robertson referenced his encounter with the agents, showed him in camouflage used by snipers, and repeatedly threatened public officials.

The messages continued as late as Tuesday, when he posted: “Perhaps Utah will become famous this week as the place a sniper took out Biden the Marxist.”

Mr Biden will make his first visit to Utah as president on Thursday, with a visit to a veterans’ hospital and a fundraising event in Park City.

Source: BBC

At least 17 people were killed and 22 injured Thursday when a bus carrying locals and migrants plummeted into a ravine in northwestern Mexico, authorities said.

Three minors were among those killed, the civil protection agency in Nayarit state reported.

The injured were taken to hospitals in the area, while one passenger escaped unharmed, it said.

The bus was travelling from Mexico City to northwestern Tijuana, which borders San Diego, from where numerous migrants attempt to seek refuge in the United States.

There was no immediate confirmation of the victims’ nationalities, though local media reported that citizens of India and Africa were believed to be among them.

Deadly road accidents are common in Mexico, usually due to high speeds, poor vehicle conditions or driver fatigue.

Such crashes are a leading cause of deaths among migrants making the dangerous journey overland to the United States.

In February, migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, and Central America were involved in a bus crash between the southern state of Oaxaca and central Puebla that left at least 17 dead.

In July, at least 29 people were killed when a passenger bus careened off a mountain road and fell into a ravine in Oaxaca.

Source: AFP

World hunger stopped rising in 2022 after growing for seven years but remains above pre-pandemic levels and far off track to be eradicated by 2030, UN agencies said Wednesday.

Between 691 million and 783 million people faced hunger last year, with a midrange of 735 million, the five agencies said in a report.

The proportion of people facing chronic hunger rose from 7.9 percent of the world population in 2019 — before the pandemic — to 9.2 percent in 2022.

The annual rise “has stalled”, however, with the total falling by about 3.8 million people between 2021 and 2022, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report.

“There is no room for complacency though, as hunger is still on the rise throughout Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean,” they warned.

The report is “a snapshot of the world still recovering from a global pandemic and now grappling with the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which has further rattled food and energy markets.”

Since 2019, those crises have plunged an additional 122 million people into hunger, according to the UN, with women and those living in rural areas hit particularly hard.

The post-pandemic economic recovery helped improve the situation, “but there is no doubt that the modest progress has been undermined by rising food and energy prices magnified by the war in Ukraine,” said the report.

The report was prepared by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.

The estimates indicate that hunger “is no longer on the rise at the global level” but it remains “far above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels and far off track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2” of a world free of hunger, the report said.

The UN agencies warned that if the world fails to redouble and better target its efforts, the “goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030 will remain out of reach.”

‘New normal’

“There are rays of hope, some regions are on track to achieve some 2030 nutrition targets,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

“But overall, we need an intense and immediate global effort to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Formulated in 2015 by the UN General Assembly, the Sustainable Development Goals include 17 interlinked objectives including ending hunger and poverty.

If the pace of progress does not pick up, nearly 600 million people could still suffer from hunger in 2030, mostly in Africa.

The UN agencies warned that the major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition — conflicts, economic shocks, natural catastrophes — as well as glaring inequality seem to become the “new normal”.

“What we are missing is the investments and political will to implement solutions at scale,” said Alvaro Lario, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The worst drought in four decades in the Horn of Africa region threatens to create a famine affecting more than 23 million people in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the World Food Programme warned in May.

Some 2.4 billion people — three out of 10 people on the planet — suffered from moderate or severe food insecurity in 2022.

The pandemic hit the incomes of many people and the Ukraine war sent prices rising, leaving “billions without access to an affordable healthy diet,” the UN agencies said.

More than 3.1 billion people did not have enough money for a healthy, balanced diet last year, according to UN figures.

“Hunger is rising while the resources we urgently need to protect the most vulnerable are running dangerously low,” the WFP’s executive director Cindy McCain warned on Wednesday.

“As humanitarians, we are facing the greatest challenge we’ve ever seen.”

Source: AFP