Good morning.
A former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has said that what Israel “is doing now in Gaza is very close to a war crime”.
Olmert, prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview with the BBC that the “obvious appearance” of the campaign was that Israel was killing many Palestinians, and that “from every point of view, this is obnoxious and outrageous”. His comments came after the leader of Israel’s center-left Democrats party said his country was becoming a pariah nation that “kills babies as a hobby”.
Echoing warnings from the UN on Tuesday over Israel continuing to block food from starving Palestinians, the MSF aid group on Wednesday said that the volume of aid Israel had begun to allow into the Gaza Strip was completely insufficient and was being used as “a smokescreen to pretend the siege is over”.
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How are other countries responding? The UK on Tuesday suspended talks over a new free trade deal, while the EU – Israel’s largest trading partner – said it would review its agreement with Israel.
Trump rolls out Golden Dome missile defense project
Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he would be pressing ahead with a missile defense system that could cost up to $540bn.
Referred to as the “Golden Dome”, Trump imagines the system as shielding the US from strikes using ground and space-based weapons. He said Republicans had agreed to allocate $25bn in initial funding.
The congressional budget office estimates that the final cost could be more than 20 times that over the next two decades.
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Who will lead it? Trump announced that Gen Michael Guetlein of the US Space Force would oversee the implementation of the project.
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What will it look like? That is still unclear. In general it appears similar to Israel’s “Iron Dome”, but Trump has yet to decide which of the three Pentagon proposals – small, medium or large – he wants to pursue.
Judge orders US officials to keep custody of migrants flown to South Sudan
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to keep a group of migrants being flown to South Sudan in the custody of US immigration authorities after saying their deportation appeared to be in breach of a court order.
In an eleventh-hour virtual hearing, the US district judge Brian Murphy in Boston said officials could be held in criminal contempt if he found they violated his previous order banning the rapid deportation of migrants to states that were not their country of origin, before they could voice concerns about the risk of torture or persecution.
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How could authorities comply with the request? They could turn the plane around, or they could keep the migrants in the airplane on the tarmac when it lands.
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What’s the situation in South Sudan? There are fears that a civil war could erupt again soon. Conditions are dangerous even for local people.
In other news …
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Aid cuts driven by the dismantling of USAID are threatening efforts to reduce maternal deaths in Nigeria, which has nearly a third of the total globally.
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The world’s first gonorrhoea vaccine will be introduced in England amid rising cases of the sexually transmitted infection.
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The private secretary and an adviser to Mexico City’s mayor have been shot dead in an ambush in broad daylight in a central neighborhood.
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Most AI chatbots can be easily tricked into giving harmful responses, a study has found, allowing them to help users commit crimes.
Stat of the day: Almost half a billion young people ‘will be obese or overweight by 2030’
Young people’s health has reached a “tipping point”, the authors of new research have warned, with 464 million people aged between 10 and 24 predicted to be obese or overweight by 2030 – 143 million more than in 2015. Rather than being “just a matter of individual choices”, the authors said the rise was being caused by poor food and health systems.
Don’t miss this: How amputee football supports Ukraine’s survivors
Before Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine had just 10 registered amputee footballers. But with estimates suggesting up to 50,000 people have lost limbs since then, there are now 170 Ukrainian amputee footballers. One described a new player who came to a session with his young daughter: “I took the ball, kicked it towards the little girl and told her to pass it to her father. They started to play between themselves, and that’s how I first saw him smile after his injury. Now he’s the soul of the party and a totally different person.”
Climate check: Fires last year caused record loss of world’s forests
Fires, resulting from global heating, overtook agriculture and logging to become the main cause of the destruction of the world’s forests last year, according to new data. The loss of forests has reached its highest level, with an area the size of Italy disappearing from burning, farming, logging and mining.
Last Thing: Surviving New York’s 50-hour, non-stop techno festival
With New York’s reputation as a techno hub on the decline, the Guardian’s Michelle Hyun Kim reported back from the city’s 50-hour Wire festival, where she subsisted off “fig bars and electrolyte packets” as there was no food on offer. “Amid incense smoke and overlapping limbs stretched across astroturf, I felt like my skin could eventually grow moss if I stayed long enough,” she writes of the ambient stage.
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