Are you ready for a digital death?

 Al Jazeera English

In mid-June, after I had been in Italy for two weeks, I got around to reading the June 4 edition of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, which I had bought – on June 4, of course – in accordance with my never-fulfilled vision of being one of those people who buys and reads a physical newspaper every day.

Prominently featured was coverage of the murder of 29-year-old Giulia Tramontano, who had been stabbed to death outside Milan in May by her boyfriend Alessandro Impagnatiello. She was seven months pregnant.

Page 12 of La Repubblica was devoted to the WhatsApp correspondence between Tramontano and Impagnatiello, helpfully colour-coded and divided into categories like “the quarrel about the lipstick”; “the separation announcement”; “the future of the baby”; and “the messages after he killed Giulia”.

To be sure, humans have always exhibited a certain fascination with murder. But the digital era has created novel opportunities for morbid voyeurism – while also raising obvious issues of privacy. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel wants to turn Jenin into another Gaza, siege by siege

 Al Jazeera English

One of the protagonists of Palestinian actor-director Mohammad Bakri’s 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin – which deals with that year’s Israeli military attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank – is a young Palestinian girl with brown bangs and no-nonsense eyes.

Picking her way in her school uniform through the rubble of the onslaught that killed 52 Palestinians, she swears: “We will not give up. Yes, they destroyed everything but we will rebuild it.” She also warns: “We’ll keep on having children. They’ll become stronger and braver than ever.”

Fast forward 21 years, and Jenin is once again on the receiving end of Israel’s fetish for destruction.

On June 19, Israeli combat helicopters fired missiles into the camp, ostensibly as part of an arrest operation that ended up killing five Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl named Sadeel Naghniyeh.

Then in early July, in the worst attack on the West Bank since 2002, the Israeli armed forces terrorised the inhabitants of Jenin for two days and killed at least 12 people, including children. The massive aerial and ground assault involved helicopter gunships, missiles, drones, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers.

That is what happens, it seems, when Palestinians keep rebuilding – and keep existing. Indeed, Al Jazeera quoted 56-year-old camp resident Ahmed Abu Hweileh on the takeaway from the bloody escapade: “The message to the world and the occupation is that this camp will keep on going. They tried to destroy it and it came back up.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Towards a Chinese missile crisis?

 Al Jazeera English

We have all heard the story. In October 1962, the world nearly suffered a nuclear holocaust on account of the so-called “Cuban missile crisis”, when the villainous Soviet Union undertook to install weapons of mass destruction on the island of Cuba, just 150km (93 miles) off the coast of the United States.

Often lost in the narrative – even to this day – is that Soviet missile activity in the Caribbean transpired only after the US had installed nuclear-equipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.

More than sixty years later, Cuba is still a thorn in the side of the US, in spite of the ongoing, asphyxiating US embargo – which dates from the same year as the missile crisis and constitutes a weapon of mass destruction in its own right.

The Soviet Union is long gone, but the annoyingly resilient island nation has now allegedly decided to play host to yet another existential menace: the People’s Republic of China.

On June 8, the right-wing Wall Street Journal breathlessly reported that Cuba would soon boast a “secret Chinese spy base” focusing on the US, with Beijing signing up to pay Havana billions of dollars for the “eavesdropping facility”. Then on June 20, the same newspaper sounded the alarm regarding a new joint Chinese-Cuban military training arrangement on the island, raising the “prospect of Chinese troops on America’s doorstep”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

SCOTUS is ramping up oppression in ‘the land of the free’

 Al Jazeera English

It is that time of year again: when the United States Supreme Court ruins everyone’s summer with its sociopathic rulings.

Last summer, on June 24, the top judicial body overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationwide in 1973. Hardest hit by the decision were poor women of colour, such being the institutionalised inequality that prevails in the world’s self-appointed paragon of justice.

The day prior to the demise of US abortion rights, the Supreme Court enshrined the right to carry a gun outside the home. This came almost one month after a gunman massacred 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Now in 2023, the court has proven equally committed to eroding the potential for wellbeing among significant sectors of the US population.

Take the recent ruling that bans colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, a reversal of affirmative action policies that were meant to fuel diversity in schools and to atone, to some extent, for the country’s lengthy history of racialised socioeconomic oppression. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.