Black people in the north African country suffer hardship and disadvantage, and many still carry the label of ‘liberated’ slaves
Many within Tunisia greeted the news that 81-year-old Hamden Dali had won his two decade-long campaign to have “atig” removed from his name with little more than bemusement.
But for Dali atig – meaning “liberated by” – in his name was a painful reminder of his family’s heritage as former slaves.
Continue reading...Trump administration moves against Gibran Bassil for alleged corruption
The Trump administration has imposed Treasury sanctions on one of Lebanon’s most influential politicians as it intensifies attempts to defang the militia and political powerhouse Hezbollah.
The move against Gibran Bassil for alleged corruption was announced on Friday as Trump’s chances of re-election continued to dip, and marks a sharp escalation of efforts to limit Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanese affairs. Crucially, it is a direct challenge to the country’s president and Bassil’s father in law, Michel Aoun, who Washington has considered an ally.
Continue reading...6 November 1995: prime minister shot at close range by 25-year-old Yigal Amir who told police ‘I acted alone on God’s orders and I have no regrets’
Israel, forced to confront its divisions by a Jewish assassin’s bullets, today buries the prime minister who promised peace, and looks ahead to a future suddenly filled with new fears of conflict.
Related: Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’
Continue reading...Demolitions used as a ‘key means’ to ‘coerce Palestinians to leave their homes’
Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank have razed a Palestinian village, leaving 73 people – including 41 children – homeless, in the largest forced displacement incident for years, according to the United Nations.
Excavators escorted by military vehicles were filmed approaching Khirbet Humsa and proceeding to flatten or smash up tents, shacks, animal shelters, toilets and solar panels.
Continue reading...Andrea Riseborough stars as a war-zone medic going through a low-key mid-life crisis as she tries to recover by visiting the famous archaeological site
Slow, delicate and sparse, Luxor is coming out on digital this week just as all the cinemas close down again. If you have a chance to see it, try to view it in the dark, without distractions, on the biggest screen you can in order to approximate a cinema setting and to best appreciate its deep-breath pacing and dry-heat beauty.
Writer-director Zeina Durra’s feature, her second after the evocatively titled The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, follows English surgeon Hana (an unusually subdued Andrea Riseborough, giving a great, slow-burn performance) as she recovers from the horrors of working in a Syrian war zone for an aid organisation. As she rests up at a plush hotel in Luxor, the open-air museum of a town in Egypt she used to live in years 20 before, she passes the time visiting the sights and having polite interactions with other guests and tourists, all the while considering what may be an even more traumatic assignment in Yemen.
Continue reading...Robert Fisk would have been amused, if unsurprised, by the plethora of reactions, from the adulatory to the sharply critical, prompted by the news of his death, at the age of 74. As a journalist, commentator and author, in a five-decade career that focused overwhelmingly on the Middle East, Fisk expressed strong views about who was responsible for the region’s agonies, and provoked equally strong responses.
Even a partial list of his postings and assignments reads like the battle roll of the post-colonial wars he despised: post-revolution Lisbon, Belfast, Tehran, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Algiers, Kabul, Sarajevo.
Continue reading...Afghan government declares day of mourning after incident in which attackers shot dead
At least 22 people were killed and 22 wounded after Islamic State-affiliated gunmen stormed Kabul University as it was hosting a book fair attended by Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan, taking hostages and fighting gun battles with security forces for more than five hours.
The Afghan government has declared Tuesday a national day of mourning following the attack. Three attackers shot at fleeing students and gunned down others in their classrooms in what was the second assault on an educational facility in the country in recent weeks. The gunmen were shot dead by Afghan security forces, authorities said.
Continue reading...The drowning of a family of five in the Channel and a fire on a ship off the coast of Senegal should prompt action – ‘thoughts and prayers’ are not enough
“We don’t see migration as a problem at all: we see people dying at sea as a problem and the existence of the mafias as a problem.” Such was the view expressed last week by Hana Jalloul, secretary of state for migration in Spain. Days earlier, more than 140 people had died off the coast of Senegal, after their ship caught fire and capsized, in the deadliest shipwreck recorded this year. Ms Jalloul spoke of efforts to support the regional government of the Canary Islands, which is struggling to cope with the number of arrivals, and stressed her determination to combat organised crime. She also pointed to migrants’ crucial role in Spanish life, including as care workers during the pandemic.
British politicians could profit from studying her example in the aftermath of the drowning of a family of four Kurdish Iranians in the Channel. (A fifth member of the same family, aged 15 months, is missing and presumed dead.) Reports of the deaths of Rasul Iran Nezhad, Shiva Mohammad Panahi and their children drew forth platitudes from the home secretary, Priti Patel, about “thoughts and prayers”. But nothing said by her or Boris Johnson did anything to dispel the impression that their attitude to people trying to reach the UK to seek asylum is chiefly antagonistic. While Ms Patel repeated her opposition to “callous criminals exploiting vulnerable people”, there was no serious attempt to sympathise with the migrants’ desperation – or acknowledge that their reliance on smugglers is a matter not of accident but of political choice.
Continue reading...Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of an 1985 show, who say it sullies their names
Coup 53 was heralded by critics this summer as a “powerful and authoritative” documentary “as gripping as any thriller”, and judged by historians as crucial to understanding Britain’s relationship with the Middle East.
Made over 10 years by Walter Murch, the celebrated editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, in collaboration with the Anglo-Iranian director Taghi Amirani, it tells the story of covert British intervention in Iran after the second world war and stars Ralph Fiennes, left, as an MI6 spy in a reconstruction of a key incident.
Continue reading...Twenty-five years after the death of the Israeli prime minister, those who were there recall the night two bullets altered the destiny of two nations
They wanted him to wear a bulletproof vest, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Afterwards, they wished they’d pushed him harder – they should have insisted – but he was the prime minister and his mind was made up. He refused to believe a fellow citizen might pose a mortal threat.
And so a quarter of a century ago, on the night of 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin stood before a vast and grateful crowd in Tel Aviv at a peace rally, protected by nothing more than a jacket, tie and white cotton shirt. The size of the rally had surprised him: he was a shy man, awkward with attention, and he had doubted that thousands of Israelis would come out to show support for him and his attempt to make peace with the Palestinians. He told aides he feared the city’s central plaza – not yet called Rabin Square – would be empty.
Continue reading...Demonstrations held in Pakistan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories and Afghanistan
Tens of thousands of Muslims in Pakistan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and elsewhere joined protests on Friday over the French president Emmanuel Macron’s vow to protect the right to caricature the prophet Muhammad.
Demonstrations in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, turned violent as 2,000 people who tried to march towards the French embassy were pushed back by police firing teargas and using batons. Crowds of Islamist activists hanged an effigy of Macron from an overpass after pounding it with their shoes.
Continue reading...Tunisian Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, gave no indication he was contemplating violence
The 21-year-old Tunisian man who is accused of using a kitchen knife to kill three people in a church in Nice spoke to his family 12 hours before the attack, giving no indication he was contemplating violence.
Brahim Aouissaoui grew up among eight sisters and two brothers in a modest home on a potholed road in Thina, a working-class neighbourhood in an industrial zone close to Sfax, a major port on Tunisia’s eastern coast.
Continue reading...Iranian man held on suspicion of manslaughter following deaths of at least four people
An Iranian man has been held on suspicion of manslaughter following the deaths of four people, and the disappearance of a further three who are believed to have died, as they attempted to cross the Channel.
Iranian Kurds Rasul Iran Nezhad and his wife, Shiva Mohammad Panahi, both 35, and two of their children, Anita, nine, and Armin, six, drowned on Tuesday as they tried to reach Britain by boat after departing from near Dunkirk.
Continue reading...Moore-Gilbert, who has Australian and British citizenship, had been held in Qarchak, widely regarded as the worst female prison in Iran
The detained British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert has been moved back to Tehran’s Evin prison, sources with knowledge of her case have confirmed to the Guardian.
Moore-Gilbert is understood to be back in the secretive ward 2A of Tehran’s largest prison, where she had spent much of the past two years under the control of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Continue reading...Twenty years after a landmark UN resolution, leading figures share insight on women’s vital role in mediating conflict
In October 2000, the UN security council adopted resolution 1325 – the first resolution that acknowledged women’s unique experience of conflict and their vital role in peace negotiations and peacebuilding. Twenty years on, we speak to four women helping keep the peace around the world.
Continue reading...Members of security and intelligence committee snub invite in protest at invasive treatment of women before flight to Sydney
Australian politicians from the major parties have pulled out of a formal dinner at the Qatari ambassador’s residence in protest at the invasive treatment of women at Doha airport.
Members of parliament’s security and intelligence committee have taken the stand as political pressure grows for the government to strengthen its response to the compulsory medical examination travellers endured before travelling from Doha to Sydney on 2 October.
Continue reading...Netanyahu’s clear choice for US president seen as ‘extremely dangerous’ in Palestine
Anyone in any doubt about Benjamin Netanyahu’s preferred candidate in the US presidential election need only visit his personal Twitter account.
Right at the top, behind the headshot of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is a banner photo of him with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, their eyes fixed on each other.
Continue reading...Food security crisis means acute malnutrition among under-fives at highest levels since war engulfed the country
Almost 100,000 children under the age of five are at risk of dying in Yemen as the country slides back into a hunger crisis.
An analysis by UN agencies says the coronavirus pandemic, economic problems and conflict have led to the highest levels of malnutrition ever recorded in parts of the country.
Continue reading...Rasul Iran Nezhad and Shiva Mohammad Panahi drowned along with their children Anita and Armin
Four Iranian Kurds who died trying to cross the Channel in high winds were members of one family who paid smugglers thousands of euros after two failed attempts to reach Britain, the Guardian has been told.
Rasul Iran Nezhad and his wife, Shiva Mohammad Panahi, both 35, and two of their children, Anita, nine, and Armin, six, drowned as they tried to reach Britain by boat, according to a relative of the family and the Iranian-Kurdish human rights organisation Hengaw.
Continue reading...Border agency Frontex accused by campaigners and MEPs of evading its responsibilities towards people in distress
The EU has been accused of condemning migrants to death by critics of its recent €100m (£90m) deals for drone surveillance over the Mediterranean Sea.
Campaigners and MEPs have accused the EU’s border agency Frontex of investing in technology to monitor migrants from afar and skirt its responsibilities towards people in distress.
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