Six In The Morning Sunday 16 May 2021

 

Israel Gaza conflict: Deaths mount in Gaza as UN meeting begins

Forty-two people have died in the latest Israeli air strikes on Gaza, as the conflict with Palestinian militants entered its seventh day.

Gaza health officials said 16 women and 10 children were among the dead.

Israel's military said it had been targeting leaders and infrastructure linked to Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.

Hamas launched a new barrage of rockets towards southern Israel on Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, a UN Security Council meeting has begun, with international mediators hoping to broker a ceasefire.

First-hand stories shed new light on Nazi death marches

Wiener Holocaust Library in London has gathered testimonies and photographs of forced evacuations at end of second world war

Caroline Davies

Sun 16 May 2021 13.50 BST

First-hand accounts from survivors of Nazi death marches, which formed a last ruthless chapter of the genocide, are to go on display with testimonies translated into English for the first time.

During the death marches, tens of thousands of people died on roadsides of exhaustion, shot for failing to keep up, or murdered in seemingly random massacres as the Nazis moved people from concentration camps before liberation by the allies, leaving a trail of blood across Europe.

Escalation in the Middle East"It’s the First Time I Have Been Afraid of my Neighbors"

A new Gaza war appears to be developing in the Middle East. But this one isn't just pitting the Israeli military against the militants from Hamas. Hostilities have also erupted between Jewish and Arab Israelis.

By Alexandra Rojkov in Lod, Israel

The streets of Lod smell like cold ashes. The stench wafts over from the burned-out cars on the edge of the road. And from garbage dumpsters that are still smoldering. And from a Torah school, where metal chairs and tables melted in the blaze. There have been plenty of fires in the past few days in Lod, a town in central Israel. And not just here.

Israel and the Palestinian Territories have experienced a horrific eruption of violence since Monday. It began with the forced clearance of apartments in East Jerusalem inhabited by Palestinians, evictions which then led to violent riots on Temple Mount. Now, the situation is escalating into a new war in Gaza.

Singapore’s Covid success springs a leak

City-state imposes new lockdown-like measures to curb clusters linked to India's highly contagious viral variant

By NILE BOWIEMAY 16, 2021

After months of reporting nearly zero daily Covid-19 community infections, Singapore is moving swiftly to curb a resurgence of locally transmitted cases linked to India’s highly contagious B1617 variant, with lockdown-like curbs on social gatherings and public activities coming into effect from today (May 16).

The new measures are the strictest since the partial lockdown, or “circuit breaker”, that brought the city-state to a standstill last April and May. The sharp spike in community cases does, however, look set to burst a long-planned air travel bubble with Hong Kong that was set to open on May 26.

These Uyghurs were locked up by the US in Guantanamo. Now they're being used as an excuse for China's crackdown in Xinjiang

By James Griffiths, CNN

The men crouched inside the cave, their faces streaked with dust, occasionally flinching involuntarily at the explosions overhead, which seemed to shake the entire mountain.

Outside was a vision of hell.

Vast plumes of smoke and debris were thrown up into the air as US B-52 bombers and fighter jets let loose a seemingly endless barrage of missiles. The noise from the bombardment could be heard from miles away, a deep, hollow booming sound as each bomb struck.

It was December 2001, and the target of the strikes was Osama bin Laden, orchestrator of the attacks on New York and Washington three months earlier. He was believed to be hiding out, along with a core of al Qaeda fighters, in Tora Bora, a cave complex south of the city of Jalalabad, in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Anti-maskers and COVID deniers have been yelling about 'freedom' since the pandemic began. Now many of them are standing in the way of America's actual freedom.

Michael Gordon

Sun, May 16, 2021

America's anti-maskers have become America's anti-vaxxers.

Their argument against these common-sense precautions is personal freedom. The only problem with this logic, or lack thereof, is that their claims to freedom are causing the rest of us to lose ours.

It would be nice to be able to dine inside with no worry, go to the movies in a packed theater, or enjoy any of the other freedoms we enjoyed before the pandemic. But that will be impossible to do with the threat of COVID - unless we reach a certain threshold of the population who are vaccinated, probably around 80%. Who is preventing us from reaching that threshold? The 1 in 4 Americans who say they'll refuse to get vaccinated.