Are we sliding back to the chaos of the 1930s?
Updated 0835 GMT (1635 HKT) July 22, 2018
US President Donald Trump swept through Europe like a hurricane. He asked why his country was obliged to defend its allies, carped about "unfair" trade practices, blasted the UK and Germany as weak on migration and suggested President Vladimir Putin was as credible as America's own intelligence agencies when it came to Russian hacking.
Trump reprised his role as a cheerleader for Brexit and complained that everyone was taking advantage of the US. Negotiating with Putin would be easier than dealing with allies, he said. It was all transactional, about price tags and deals. Values found little airtime.
At almost every step, in tweet after tweet, he sneered at the liberal western order built from the ashes of World War II, underwritten through institutions like NATO and the UN and protected under the US nuclear umbrella, an order that has given much of the world unrivaled peace and prosperity.
Israel evacuates 800 White Helmets from Syria to Jordan
Jordan says it has taken in the volunteers and their families and plans to transfer them to the UK, Canada and Germany.
Israel has evacuated 800 White Helmets rescuers and their families from Syria to Jordan overnight at the request of the United States and European countries.
On Twitter, the Israeli military said it had "recently completed a humanitarian effort to rescue members of the Syrian civil organisation and their families" after a "request of the United States and additional European countries".
The Israeli military also tweeted that the "civilians were subsequently transferred to a neighbouring country".
Meet the girl who dreams of being Gaza’s first Olympic swimmer
Fatima Abu Shedeg dreams of leaping from the blocks at Tokyo 2020Bel Trew Middle East Correspondent
A 13-year-old girl from Gaza who has survived three wars is an unlikely candidate for an Olympic swimming champion. Until four years ago Fatima Abu Shedeg was not only unable to swim but had never been in a pool.
Yet despite the challenges she has faced, she spends her days dreaming of stepping onto the starting block at the Tokyo 2020 Games as Gaza’s first Olympic swimmer.
In 2014, Fatima lost her father during the last war with Israel, which raged for 51 days and left more than 2,200 Palestinians and 73 Israelis dead. She saw her uncle’s legs blown off in the same airstrike that killed her father and destroyed most of their home in Beit Lahia, north Gaza.
'69 People on My 69th Birthday'Suicide Casts Doubts On German Deportation Policies
As Germany's interior minister joked about deporting 69 refugees on his birthday last week, news emerged that one of those Afghan deportees had committed suicide in Kabul. The man's treatment raises serious questions about the country's deportation policies. By DER SPIEGEL Staff
Jamal Naser Mahmodi died just as he had recently lived: lonely and isolated. In the hours before his death, he was no longer the hopeful young man who had come to Germany from Afghanistan seven years earlier. He was, in his own eyes, a failed man. But he was also a convicted criminal and a man whose application for asylum had been rejected.
Mahmodi, 23, was one of the Afghans who arrived in Kabul on July 4 on a deportation flight that coincided with the birthday of German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. It was a coincidence, but Seehofer seemed to be satisfied. "On my 69th birthday of all days, 69 people -- and I didn't order this -- were returned to Afghanistan. That's far above the usual number," he said with a grin as he presented his "Migration Masterplan" last Tuesday. He seemed pleased with himself. It may have been a joke, but even members of his own party found it to be distasteful.
Huge wildfires are spreading in California, Oregon, and Colorado. They’re poised to get worse.
The fire season now runs almost year-round, and 2018 is already worse than usual.
By
Wildfires have almost become a year-round threat in some parts of the western United States. From Colorado to California, it feels like the blazes from last year never went out.
Flames ignited forests and chaparral virtually nonstop in 2017, and the year ended with record infernos in Southern California that burned well into 2018.
Officials don’t refer to “fire seasons anymore but rather to fire years,” Jennifer Jones, a spokesperson for the National Interagency Fire Center, told me in an email.
The NIFC reports that this year, wildfires have burned more than 3.5 million acres, a bit behind the 4.5 million acres that had burned as of this time last year.
‘They were so cruel’: Honduran baby taken at US border rejoins parents
Family tell of ‘suffering’ of five-month separation in case that came to symbolise Donald Trump’s immigration policy
A 15-month-old baby who came to symbolise the US government’s draconian policy of separating immigrant families did not recognise his parents when they were reunited in Honduras, his tearful mother has said.
Adalicia Montecinos said her son, Johan, had “suffered everything that we have been suffering”, after spending five months at an Arizona shelter, after being separated at the Texas border from his father who was deported.
“I kept saying ‘Johan, Johan’, and he started to cry,” Montecinos said.
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