Italian charity ship defies Rome to rescue 50 off Libyan coast

Rescue could spark showdown with government after order not to bring migrants to Italy

An Italian charity ship has rescued about 50 people from a rubber boat off the coast of Libya, prompting Rome to warn it is ready to stop private vessels “once and for all” from bringing rescued migrants to Italy.

The interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly declared Italian waters closed to NGO rescue vessels and has left several of them stranded at sea in the past in an attempt to force the rest of Europe to take in more asylum seekers.

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Foreign nationals suspected of Isis links ‘not wanted’ in Syrian camps

Aid agencies struggle to cope with rise in new arrivals, with scores dying on the way to the settlements

An estimated 7,000 women and children from more than 40 nations, including the US, UK, Australia and Europe, are living in tense and chaotic conditions in camps in north-eastern Syria, where they are “not wanted” due to their supposed affiliation with Islamic State.

Among them are hundreds of unaccompanied or separated children, some just babies as young as five months, according to aid groups and other sources.

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Three people dying in Yemen every day despite ceasefire agreement

Since the Stockholm deal in December, airstrikes on Hodeidah have decreased but casualties have doubled elsewhere

Yemen is continuing to experience a steady stream of violence, claiming at least one life every eight hours – despite the agreements reached between the internationally recognised government and the Houthis at talks in Sweden just over three months ago.

According to figures compiled by two international aid agencies, in some areas of the country the number of casualties, far from falling, had doubled where the conflict was flaring up.

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Social workers can do so much more than just pick up the pieces

At its best, social work can break cycles of crisis, and help people change their lives and communities

  • Guardian Jobs: see the latest vacancies in social care

Too often, social services are designed as rotating doors. They focus on individuals in crisis who, when the symptoms of the emergency have eased, are sent directly back to the stressful situation that caused all the damage – a painful, costly and tragic cycle.

There is little focus in formal social services on helping people to transform their environments to provide ongoing support and love, let alone engaging people to become advocates for their rights. Yet outside these limitations, social workers are supporting connections in communities designed to last people’s whole lifetimes. In many countries we call it “working beyond services”. There are countless examples around the world.

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US and Saudi Arabia blocking regulation of geoengineering, sources say

Delegates at UN environment assembly say the oil producers are protecting their industries

The United States and Saudi Arabia have hamstrung global efforts to scrutinise climate geoengineering in order to benefit their fossil fuel industries, according to multiple sources at the United Nations environment assembly, taking place this week in Nairobi.

The world’s two biggest oil producers reportedly led opposition against plans to examine the risks of climate-manipulating technology such as sucking carbon out of the air, reflective mirrors in space, seeding the oceans and injecting particulates into the atmosphere.

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Saudi crown prince allegedly stripped of some authority

Series of Mohammed bin Salman no-shows at high-profile meetings fed claims of rift with king

The heir to the Saudi throne has not attended a series of high-profile ministerial and diplomatic meetings in Saudi Arabia over the last fortnight and is alleged to have been stripped of some of his financial and economic authority, the Guardian has been told.

The move to restrict, if only temporarily, the responsibilities of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is understood to have been revealed to a group of senior ministers earlier last week by his father, King Salman.

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Arabs: A 3,000-Year History by Tim Mackintosh-Smith – review

A richly detailed chronicle of Arab language and culture offers thought-provoking parallels between past and present

Outside the window of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s home in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, are reminders of the long sweep of Arab history – child soldiers mourning martyrs of the country’s ongoing war, rocket salvoes, sectarian rivalries, hypnotic slogans and a mosque dating back to the seventh century and the rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula.

The view is simultaneously rich, bleak and thought-provoking: for three millennia, dynasties have come and gone, from the Sabaeans and Himyaris to the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. Later came the al Saud – the family that gave its name to a still powerful kingdom. Interactions between desert (badu) and town (hadar), semi-nomadic tribes and settled peoples, strong men and weak institutions, are a constant theme. Language, faith, and loyalty come together in complex and far-flung combinations.

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Iran sentences US navy veteran Michael White to 10 years in jail

  • Lawyer says 46-year-old convicted on two charges
  • ‘Unclear’ if charges politically motivated, attorney adds

A US navy veteran has been sentenced to 10 years in an Iranian prison, his family’s lawyer said, after he was arrested last July while visiting an Iranian woman in the city of Mashhad.

Related: Reporter Jason Rezaian on 544 days in Iranian jail: ‘They never touched me – but I was tortured’

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Algeria protests grow as elite distances itself from ailing president

Senior figures in ruling FLN show signs of backing demands for Bouteflika to step down

Thousands of demonstrators have protested in the centre of the Algerian capital for a fourth consecutive Friday, as the country’s political elite began distancing themselves from the ailing 82-year-old president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Despite a heavy police presence, crowds gathered at Algiers’ Grande Poste square hours before the scheduled start of a demonstration calling on Bouteflika to step down after two decades in power.

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France repatriates five orphaned children of jihadists from Syria

French intervention likely to add weight to criticism of UK’s reluctance to do likewise

France has repatriated five orphaned children of French jihadists from camps in north-east Syria, where a five-year offensive against Islamic State is drawing to a close.

Among the children repatriated were the three sons of a French woman who died under Isis rule. Officials retrieved them from a camp in northern Syria where they were being held with as many as 3,000 other children of Isis families.

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Rockets fired from Gaza target Tel Aviv for first time since 2014

No group immediately claims attack as Israeli army says no damage or injuries reported

Militants in Gaza have fired two rockets towards Tel Aviv, the first such attack since the war between Israel and Hamas in 2014.

Rocket sirens wailed in the densely populated Mediterranean city on Thursday evening, alerting residents to rush to bomb shelters. Videos posted online by locals showed empty streets and captured the blare of “code red” sirens, used to warn of imminent attacks.

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Senate passes resolution to end US support for Saudi war in Yemen

The approval puts Congress on a collision course with Donald Trump in an unprecedented rebuke of his foreign policy

The Senate has voted to end US support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition’s war in Yemen, bringing Congress one step closer to a unprecedented rebuke of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Lawmakers have never before invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to stop a foreign conflict, but they are poised to do just that in the bid to cut off US support for a war that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe.

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One-state solution gains ground as Palestinians battle for equal rights

Belief in two-state solution crumbles as up to 600,000 Israeli settlers remain on occupied land

Maybe it wasn’t the wisest choice for a Palestinian activist living under the close watch of Israeli security. But Fadi Quran was obsessed and determined: he would study nuclear physics at Stanford University.

“I got stopped at the border a lot,” he joked years later of the times he passed through Israeli passport control after graduating. “To be honest, when I first started I just wanted to win a Nobel prize in physics. I was 18 years old. I loved the stuff.”

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Egypt executed 15 people in February. Why is the UK staying silent? | Rhys Davies

Britain is Egypt’s largest foreign investor. Yet at the recent Arab-EU summit, Theresa May was oddly quiet on rights abuses

While there may be “a special place in hell” for those who backed Brexit without a plan, regimes that execute people after fundamentally flawed trials get their own summit. Just a fortnight ago, Donald Tusk and the leaders of the EU met with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, at the Arab-EU summit in Sharm el-Sheikh – days after his regime executed nine people.

The summit was co-chaired by Tusk and Sisi. Tusk and other European leaders, including Theresa May, were curiously silent at the summit about the fate of Egypt’s political prisoners. The execution of the nine – convicted after unfair trials in which human rights campaigners say confessions were elicited by torture – was the third consecutive week of executions. In total 15 people were put to death in February in Egypt.

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Is Algeria on the cusp of freedom, or does Bouteflika have one last play?

President’s promise of ‘deep reforms’ has calmed protests but may not be the end of the crisis

In the first line of Abdulaziz Bouteflika’s letter to the nation on Monday night, the Algerian president said the country was living through a sensitive stage of its history. On this, at least he and his compatriots are agreed.

The 82-year-old politician, who has had a series of strokes that have left him in poor health, has been in power since 1999. The announcement that he would not be seeking a further five-year term caused widespread celebration. This was the principal demand of the hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – who marched peacefully through cities and towns across Algeria on Friday in protests on a scale not seen for decades.

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Gaza’s generation blockade: young lives in the ‘world’s largest prison’

Anger and frustration for generation of Palestinians who have spent their entire lives in the fenced-off territory

Cruising south along Israel’s coastal highway, there are almost no signs that you are approaching Gaza. Two million people live trapped on a thin slice of land along the Mediterranean, but someone could easily drive right past and miss it altogether.

For visitors to the strip, restricted mainly to diplomats, aid workers and journalists, the last stop in Israel is a service station, where Red Sea-bound tourists and commuters sip lattes and eat chocolate croissants at an American-style coffeehouse. Walking back to their cars, they may glimpse the only hint of Gaza’s existence – a white orb high in the southern sky, a tethered surveillance balloon that provides the Israeli army with a 24-hour overhead view of the enclave.

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The Guardian view on the Israeli elections: Netanyahu debases his office – again | Editorial

Next month’s poll is a referendum on a prime minister who has triumphed by fuelling divisions

Israel is not a state of all its citizens, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu declared on Sunday. His words should be shocking, but in truth they made explicit the message of last year’s nation state law, rendering Palestinians in Israel second-class citizens. They would be shameful if he were capable of shame. Mr Netanyahu’s campaign for re-election in the face of a bribery and fraud indictment shows he is not. He has prospered by fostering division.

This latest act of cynical bigotry is simply par for the course. The same is true of Mr Netanyahu’s awful turn to far-right parties for support. Mr Netanyahu orchestrated the merger of the racist anti-Arab Jewish Power and the pro-settler Jewish Home parties to help them pass the electoral threshold and him put together a coalition. Jewish Power includes followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in Israel and is designated by the US and EU as a terror organisation.

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Algerian president says he will not run again after weeks of protests

Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s decision not to seek a fifth term comes a day after general strike began

The Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has withdrawn his bid for a fifth term in office after mass protests against his rule and postponed elections scheduled for April to allow for consultation on reforms “for a new generation”.

Bouteflika made the surprise announcement on Monday in a letter to the Algerian people released by his office. The 82-year-old leader, who has been in power for two decades, acknowledged three consecutive weeks of demonstrations against his rule in which hundreds of thousands of people from across Algerian society took to the streets.

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Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh jailed ‘for 38 years’ in Iran

Lawyer sentenced to decades in prison and 148 lashes, husband writes on Facebook

Nasrin Sotoudeh, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, has been handed a new sentence that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

Sotoudeh, who has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory headscarf, was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, her lawyer said.

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Britain’s flawed dialogue with Sudan regime | Letters

The UK should call for an immediate political transition to end nearly 30 years of repressive rule, say eight signatories including Lutz Oette

We wholeheartedly agree with your editorial (7 March) stating that the demonstrators in Sudan calling daily for freedom and the rule of law “do not want a different version of this regime, or more conflict”. The problem is indeed the regime, not just a president indicted for genocide by the international criminal court and for whom, despite their public claims to support the ICC, many external actors seek a “soft landing” in the name of stability. Sudan is not stable for the Sudanese people.

Nevertheless, Britain has engaged in a flawed strategic dialogue with the regime. It has spearheaded the Khartoum process, a supposed partnership with the brutal and corrupt Sudanese regime to “manage” (in other words, to stem) migration to Europe. That process relies on the notorious rapid support forces, mainly former Janjaweed, which the ICC has implicated in war crimes in Darfur. Most Sudanese migrants are in any case refugees fleeing their repressive regime, including the very forces now tasked with capturing them.

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