UNITED NATIONS: The UN humanitarian chief predicted Tuesday that at least $1 billion will be needed urgently to avert famine in Somalia in the coming months and early next year when two more dry seasons are expected to compound the historic drought that has hit the Horn of Africa nation.
Martin Griffiths said in a video briefing from Somalia’s capital Mogadishu that a new report from an authoritative panel of independent experts says there will be a famine in Somalia between October and December “if we don’t manage to stave it off and avoid it as had been the case in 2016 and 2017.”
The undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs told UN correspondents that more than $1 billion in new funds is needed in addition to the UN appeal of about $1.4 billion. That appeal has been “very well-funded,” he said, thanks to the US Agency for International Development, which announced a $476 million donation of humanitarian and development aid in July.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, created by USAID, said in a report Monday that famine is projected to emerge later this year in three areas in Somalia’s southeastern Bay region, including Baidoa without urgent humanitarian aid.
Up to 7.1 million people across Somalia need urgent assistance to treat and prevent acute malnutrition and reduce the number of ongoing hunger-related deaths, according to a recent analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification or IPC, used by the network to describe the severity of food insecurity.
The Horn of Africa region has seen four straight failed rainy seasons for the first time in over half a century, endangering an estimated 20 million people in one of the world’s most impoverished and turbulent regions.
Griffiths said meteorologists have predicted the likelihood of a fifth failed rainy season from October to December, and a sixth failed rainy season from January to March next year is also likely.
“This has never happened before in Somalia,” he said. “This is unprecedented.”
“We’ve been banging the drum and rattling the trees trying to get support internationally in terms of attention, prospects, and the possibilities and the horror of famine coming to the Horn of Africa — here in Somalia maybe first, but Ethiopia and Kenya, probably they’re not far behind,” Griffiths said.
He said the UN World Food Program has recently been providing aid for up to 5.3 million Somalis, which is “a lot, but it’s going to get worse if famine comes.” He said 98 percent of the aid is given through cash distributions via telephones.
But many thousands are not getting help and hungry families in Somalia have been staggering for days or weeks through parched terrain in search of assistance.
Griffiths said a big challenge is to get aid to people before they move from their homes, to help avoid massive displacement.
Many Somalis raise livestock, which is key to their survival, but he said three million animals have died or been slaughtered because of the lack of rain.
“Continued drought, continued failure of rainy seasons, means that a generation’s way of life is under threat,” Griffiths said.
He said the international community needs to help Somalis find an alternative way of life and making a living, which will require development funding and funding to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Griffiths, a British diplomat, said the war in Ukraine has had an impact on humanitarian aid, with UN humanitarian appeals around the world receiving about 30 percent of the money needed on average.
“To those countries, which are traditionally very generous, my own included, and many others,” he said. “Please don’t forget Somalia. You didn’t in the past. You contributed wonderfully in the past. Please do so now.”
UN: At least $1 billion needed to avert famine in Somalia
https://arab.news/2qn7p
UN: At least $1 billion needed to avert famine in Somalia
- Famine projected to emerge later this year in three areas in Somalia’s southeastern Bay region
- Up to 7.1 million people across Somalia need urgent assistance to treat and prevent acute malnutrition
A Palestinian activist expecting a US citizenship interview is arrested instead by ICE in Vermont
- “The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian
WASHINGTON: A Palestinian man who led protests against the war in Gaza as a student at Columbia University was arrested Monday at a Vermont immigration office where he expected to be interviewed about finalizing his US citizenship, his attorneys said.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident who has held a green card since 2015, was detained at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, his lawyers said.
The attorneys said they do not know where he is. They filed a petition in federal court seeking an order barring the government from removing him from the state or country.
“The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian. His detention is an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza. It is also unconstitutional,” attorney Luna Droubi said in an email.
According to the court filing, Mahdawi was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014. He recently completed coursework at Columbia and was expected to graduate in May before beginning a master’s degree program there in the fall.
The petition describes him as a committed Buddhist who believes in “non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion.”
As a student, Mahdawi was an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and organized campus protests until March 2024. He co-founded the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the US and graduate student who recently was detained by ICE.
Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined campus protests against the war in Gaza. On Friday, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Khalil can be deported as a national security risk.
Christopher Helali, a friend of Mahdawi who lives near him in Vermont, was present outside the immigration office when Mahdawi was detained and recorded a video of Mahdawi being led away by authorities. In the video, which Helali released on social media Monday, Mahdawi is shown giving a peace sign with his hands and being led away to a car.
Helali described Mahdawi as a peaceful demonstrator who has worked to foster dialogue about the struggle of Palestinians in his homeland. Helali said he and Mahdawi were aware that Mahdawi could be detained today and that his friend went forward with the appointment anyway.
“And rightfully so, he was nervous for what was going on around him. But he was very much resolute in coming to this interview and coming today because he didn’t do anything wrong and was a law-abiding citizen, or soon-to-be citizen,” Helali said.
Vermont’s congressional delegation issued a statement condemning Mahdawi’s arrest, saying that instead of taking one of the final steps in his citizenship process, he was handcuffed by armed officers with their faces covered.
“This is immoral, inhumane, and illegal. Mr. Mahdawi, a legal resident of the United States, must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention,” said the statement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint.
Man charged over Tesla arson as anti-Musk wave sweeps US
- Two Tesla vehicles were badly damaged in the firebomb attack on a showroom in Albuquerque on February 9, and slogans likening Musk and his company to Nazis were sprayed on the walls
LOS ANGELES, United States: A man who allegedly torched two vehicles at a Tesla dealership and painted “Die Elon” on the side of the building has been hit with federal charges, the US Department of Justice said Monday.
The charges are the latest to be levied in connection to attacks on the EV maker, whose boss Elon Musk has become a hate figure for some over his role in slashing government as a top adviser to President Donald Trump.
Two Tesla vehicles were badly damaged in the firebomb attack on a showroom in Albuquerque on February 9, and slogans likening Musk and his company to Nazis were sprayed on the walls.
Jamison Wagner, 40, who lives in the city, in the western state of New Mexico, was also charged over a firebomb attack that hit an office of the state’s Republican Party last month.
If convicted of the two counts of malicious damage or destruction of property by fire or explosives, he could be jailed for up to 20 years on each count, the Department of Justice said.
“Let this be the final lesson to those taking part in this ongoing wave of political violence,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
“We will arrest you, we will prosecute you, and we will not negotiate. Crimes have consequences.”
Federal prosecution carries a stiff penalty compared to local law, where such a crime typically results in a sentence starting from just 18 months’ incarceration and a $5,000 fine. In March, Trump even suggested that people who vandalize Tesla property could be deported to prisons in El Salvador.
Musk, the South Africa-born billionaire chief of Tesla and SpaceX, is leading Trump’s ruthless cost-cutting drive at the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Lauded on the right, he has rapidly become one of the most controversial figures in the country.
Several Tesla dealerships and a number of cars both in the US and around the world have been vandalized, and the company’s stock price has taken a hammering.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stand in historic antitrust trial
WASHINGTON: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the witness stand on the first day of a historic antitrust trial to defend his company against allegations it illegally monopolized the social media market.
The trial could force the tech giant to break off Instagram and WhatsApp, startups Meta bought more than a decade ago that have since grown into social media powerhouses.
FTC attorney Daniel Matheson called Zuckerberg as the first witness, as it seeks to prove that Meta acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to preserve its monopoly in the social networking space.
At the hearing, Matheson focused on a communication sent to colleagues that illustrated Zuckerberg’s frustration with a lack of progress on developing a photo-sharing app to compete with Instagram’s.
“The way I read this message is that I’m not happy about how we’re executing on that project,” Zuckerberg said.
Matheson followed up by asking if that was because of Instagram’s rapid growth.
“That does seem to be what I’m highlighting,” Zuckerberg said, adding that he’s always urging his teams to do better.
Later in the day, Zuckerberg appeared frustrated when Matheson asked him about his concerns expressed about how fast Instagram was growing.
“I don’t have the full timeline of Instagram’s development in my head,” Zuckerberg said, when Matheson asked him about his mention of its growth. “You could probably get that better from somebody else.”
Matheson also asked about comments of plans to keep Instagram running, while focusing on Facebook and not investing in Instagram. Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t characterize it as a plan, and he insisted that Instagram wasn’t neglected.
“In practice, we ended up investing a ton in it after we acquired it,” Zuckerberg, who testified most of the afternoon, said.
In opening statements, Matheson said Meta has used its position to generate enormous profits even as consumer satisfaction has dropped. He said Meta was “erecting a moat” to protect its interests by buying the two startups.
Mark Hansen, an attorney for Meta, said the FTC was making a “grab bag” of arguments that were wrong. He said Meta has plenty of competition and has made improvements to the startups it acquired.
“This lawsuit, in summary, is misguided,” Hansen said, adding: “anyway you look at it, consumers have been the big winners.”
The trial will be the first big test of President Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission’s ability to challenge Big Tech. The lawsuit was filed against Meta — then called Facebook — in 2020, during Trump’s first term. It claims the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to squash competition and establish an illegal monopoly in the social media market.
Meta, the FTC argues, has maintained a monopoly by pursuing Zuckerberg’s strategy, “expressed in 2008: ‘It is better to buy than compete.’ True to that maxim, Facebook has systematically tracked potential rivals and acquired companies that it viewed as serious competitive threats.”
Facebook also enacted policies designed to make it difficult for smaller rivals to enter the market and “neutralize perceived competitive threats,” the FTC says in its complaint, just as the world shifted its attention to mobile devices from desktop computers.
Facebook bought Instagram — then a scrappy photo-sharing app with no ads and a small cult following — in 2012. The $1 billion cash and stock purchase price was eye-popping at the time, though the deal’s value fell to $750 million after Facebook’s stock price dipped following its initial public offering in May 2012.
Instagram was the first company Facebook bought and kept running as a separate app. Up until then, Facebook was known for smaller “acqui-hires” — a type of popular Silicon Valley deal in which a company purchases a startup as a way to hire its talented workers, then shuts the acquired company down. Two years later, it did it again with the messaging app WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion.
WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook move its business from desktop computers to mobile devices, and to remain popular with younger generations as rivals like Snapchat (which it also tried, but failed, to buy) and TikTok emerged. However, the FTC has a narrow definition of Meta’s competitive market, excluding companies like TikTok, YouTube and Apple’s messaging service from being considered rivals to Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta, meanwhile, says the FTC’s lawsuit “defies reality.”
“The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others. More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final. Regulators should be supporting American innovation, rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI,” the company said in a statement.
In a filing last week, Meta also stressed that the FTC “must prove that Meta has monopoly power in its claimed relevant market now, not at some time in the past.” This, experts say, could also prove challenging since more competitors have emerged in the social media space in the years since the company bought WhatsApp and Instagram.
Meta’s fate will be decided by US District Judge James Boasberg, who late last year denied Meta’s request for a summary judgment and ruled that the case must go to trial.
While the FTC may face an uphill battle in proving its case, the stakes are high for Meta, whose advertising business could be cut in half if it’s forced to spin off Instagram.
Meta isn’t the only technology company in the sights of federal antitrust regulators, Google and Amazon face their own cases. The remedy phase of Google’s case is scheduled to begin on April 21. A federal judge declared the search giant an illegal monopoly last August.
Trump blames Zelensky for ‘millions’ of deaths in Russian invasion
- Donald Trump: ‘Let’s say Putin number one, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky’
- Trump: ‘You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size, and then hope that people give you some missiles’
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump resumed his attempts Monday to blame Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths.
Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelensky six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden.
The Republican told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.”
“Let’s say Putin number one, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky,” Trump said during a meeting with the visiting president of El Salvador.
Trump then doubled down on his attack on Zelensky.
“He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” he said dismissively of the Ukrainian leader’s attempts to maintain his country’s defense against the Russian invasion.
“When you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war,” Trump said. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size, and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
Relations between Trump and Zelensky have been tense ever since the US president stunned the world by opening talks with Russia in February.
In the run-up to their televised row on February 28 Trump repeatedly echoed Moscow’s talking points — blaming Ukraine for the war and calling Zelensky a “dictator without elections.”
Zelensky has since tried to patch things up, including sending a delegation to Washington last week to discuss a mineral deal Trump has called for, that would give the US preferential access to Ukrainian natural resources.
But the US leader has stepped up his rhetoric in the last few days.
Trump however insisted a deal to end the Ukraine war was possible, despite Ukrainian accusations that Moscow is stalling.
“I want to stop the killing, and I think we’re doing well in that regard. I think you’ll have some very good proposals very soon,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments came despite a deadly Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday that killed at least 35 people, one of the deadliest attacks of the war.
The US president said on Sunday that the attack was a “mistake” but did not elaborate. Russia insisted Monday that its missiles hit a meeting of Ukrainian army commanders.
Zelensky urged US counterpart Donald Trump in a CBS interview broadcast Sunday to visit his country to better understand the devastation wrought by Russia’s invasion.
French hospital staff, relatives sue ministers over work-related suicides
- France’s public hospitals have been forced to drastically slash spending in recent decades, and doctors and nurses have long complained of insufficient staffing and low pay
PARIS: French healthcare workers and relatives of colleagues who killed themselves have filed a legal complaint against two ministers over “deadly working conditions” in public hospitals they say are causing suicides, their lawyer said Monday.
France’s public hospitals have been forced to drastically slash spending in recent decades, and doctors and nurses have long complained of insufficient staffing and low pay.
Nineteen plaintiffs have now accused Health Minister Catherine Vautrin and Higher Education Minister Elisabeth Borne of allowing “totally illegal and deadly working conditions” for workers and staff in training at public hospitals across France, according to the complaint seen by AFP.
They charge in the complaint they filed on Thursday that the ministers hold overall responsibility for workplace harassment and involuntary manslaughter over the deaths by suicide.
A member of Vautrin’s team told AFP she did not wish “to comment at this stage.”
Also contacted by AFP, Borne was not immediately available for comment. The complaint described a system of “coercion to illegally organize work overtime,” “threats” and “forced labor outside any regulatory framework,” as well as “totalitarian” management practices.
Case files had been “individually or systematically completely ignored,” with “no political awareness or willingness to change” current public hospital policies, it read.
It said conditions were particularly dire in three hospitals in the northeastern region of Alsace, Herault area in southern France, and the Yvelines region west of Paris, which had “witnessed a particularly preoccupying wave of suicides.”
