Syria conflict: Air strikes leave Aleppo 'without water'
Intensified attacks on the Syrian city of Aleppo have left nearly two million people without water, the UN says.
The UN children's agency says fierce strikes on Friday prevented repairs to a damaged pumping station supplying rebel-held eastern areas of the city.
In retaliation, the agency says, a nearby station pumping water to the rest of Aleppo has been switched off.
The Syrian army says it is determined to retake rebel-held areas in Aleppo, after a ceasefire collapsed on Monday.
Kieran Dwyer, a spokesman for the UN's children's agency Unicef, told the BBC: "Water is no longer pumping to people in eastern Aleppo and western Aleppo, all across Aleppo, nearly two million people."
The explanations behind Russian and US airstrikes in Syria are a lesson in propaganda
It does not matter if what you are spouting is nonsense because it only has to hold up for two or three days – indeed, the UN aid convoy attack was swiftly overtaken by the riots in Charlotte, North Carolina
Airstrikes that hit the wrong target have always been justified or denied by the perpetrators with a rich blend of hypocrisy and lies. It was interesting to see this tradition of deliberate mendacity being not only maintained, but outdone in Syria over the last week. The US was seeking to explain how it had come to kill at least 62 Syrian soldiers fighting Isis in the besieged government-held city of Deir Ezzor a week ago and the Russians evading responsibility for an air attack on a UN aid convoy killing 20 people outside Aleppo five days later.
The explanation of US military officials was splendidly ingenious. As dutifully retailed by CNN, they said they believed a likely scenario was that the personnel hit were prisoners of the regime, perhaps military personnel being detained, although that is not certain.
Photos of babies in cardboard boxes highlight Venezuela crisis
OBSERVERS
Photos of newborns placed in cardboard boxes in a maternity ward have been circulating on social networks in Venezuela. They show yet another effect of the deep economic crisis shaking the country.
The pictures were published Tuesday on Twitter by Manuel Ferreira, a lawyer and opposition activist. He said they were sent to him by personnel at the maternity of Las Garzas hospital, near the city of Barcelona in Anzoategui state.
Many Indians beat war drums, others speak up against jingoism
JAWED NAQVI
NEW DELHI: The nettle stings but the jewelweed grows by its side as a foil. And so it was with the India-Pakistan tensions on Friday. There were jingoist calls to send back Pakistan’s actors and singers from Mumbai, and there was the peaceful antidote.
A Kashmiri human rights activist was detained after the high court ordered his release. India-Pakistan peace veterans promptly demanded the release of Khurram Pervez, and more.
As if TV news channels mutating into horror shows of fear and revenge was not enough, the film workers association of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), an offshoot of the rightwing Hindu Shiv Sena, on Friday set a 48-hour deadline for all Pakistani artists working in India to immediately leave the country.
Pope Francis calls out journalists: Does the media needlessly foster fear?
COUNTERING FEAR
Pope Francis rebuked Italian reporters for stirring up negative sentiment toward migrants fleeing war and fear.
The Vatican’s Pope Francis has strived to be a voice of peace and unity on a continent struggling to deal with a refugee crisis. On Thursday he spoke out once again, this time against mass media, which he says has the power to shape the public’s response to that challenge.
During an address to Italy’s national journalism guild, Pope Francis told leaders of the industry that the press has the power to act like “terrorists” when it relies on gossip and rumors, particularly while covering humanitarian crises such as Europe’s influx of migrants. Yet while studies show that the press can help shape public dialogue, some experts say that the public opinion also plays a major role in shaping the tone that is reflected in the press.
“The bottom line is that there is a complex interaction between media, public opinion, and policymaking. To some extent, they’re indistinguishable from one another,” says Oxford University media analyst Robert McNeil. “They all drive one another.”
Trump on the Egyptian dictator who killed 800 people in one day: “fantastic guy”
Updated by
This Tuesday, Donald Trump met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Thursday night, he called in to Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business to report on how the meeting went.
What he said was embarrassingly ignorant. Trump seemed to praise Sisi’s seizure of power in a military coup, then described Sisi’s counterterrorism campaign as a success when it’s actually a crushing human rights failure.
Perhaps more fundamentally, though, Trump’s comments are deeply revealing about his worldview. The praise he offers Sisi fits with a decades-old pattern of praise for authoritarian leaders — a history of Trump fetishizing a leader’s appearance of “strength” over basic democratic values. It’s a pretty disturbing quality to see in a potential president of the world’s leading democracy.
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