Israel military says 20 children among hostages held in Gaza

Summary

1. Israel’s military says more than 20 children under 18 are among 200 hostages being held in Gaza after the Hamas attacks on 7 October
2. In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces says between 10 and 20 are over 60, and the majority of those being held are alive
3. Gaza is now a “hellhole” for civilians and time is running out to get aid into the territory, says the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees
4. UN chief Antonio Gutteres has visited the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, saying he expects the first shipment of aid to enter Gaza in “the next day or so”
5. Palestinian officials say more than 4,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing more than 1,400 people
6. On Thursday, an Orthodox Christian church compound in Gaza City where church authorities say hundreds of people were sheltering was hit
7. Israel says its jets had targeted a nearby Hamas base used to fire rockets at its territory and it was reviewing the incident

Israeli official says ‘good chance’ aid trucks will enter Gaza tomorrow

Paul Adams

Diplomatic correspondent, in Jerusalem

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres sounded extremely frustrated when he spoke in front of the still-blocked Rafah crossing earlier.

It’s not clear why today’s experimental aid convoy – just 20 trucks – has still not crossed into the Gaza Strip.

Guterres spoke of “conditions and restrictions” which needed to be addressed, but didn’t elaborate.

Despite the deal between Israel and Egypt, brokered by US President Joe Biden, it seems there are still issues to be resolved.

Israel insists that the trucks only carry food, water and medicine, and that none of it reaches Hamas.

Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.

Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters

Niger: Captive President Bazoum attempted escape, junta says

Niger’s former President Mohamed Bazoum is currently being held by the country’s military junta. He was ousted by the army in July amid a series of coups in West Africa.

Lawyers for Niger’s deposed President Mohamed Bazoum have rejected claims by the country’s military junta that he attempted to escape custody.

“We strongly reject these fabricated accusations against president Bazoum,” Mohamed Seydou Diagne, coordinator of a lawyers’ collective, said in a statement on Friday.

The lawyer said Bazoum was being held “incommunicado” which was “a new red line which has been crossed by a junta which continues to violate the fundamental rights of our client.”

Earlier, Niger’s military rulers said they had thwarted an attempt by former President Mohamed Bazoum to escape their custody on Thursday.

How Indian authorities ‘weaponised’ a New York Times report to target the press

NewsClick, a defiantly critical news site, has been in the Indian government’s sights over the past few years. But there was little to show after extensive financial probes – until the New York Times published a report which enabled Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration to use the press to attack the press.

Shortly after breakfast time on Tuesday, October 3, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta was outside his home in Gurgaon, a suburb of the Indian capital New Delhi, seeing his son off for the day when the police showed up at his place.

“Nine cops arrived at 6:30 in the morning,” recounted the renowned investigative journalist and writer in a phone interview with FRANCE 24. “I was surprised. I asked them, why have you come? They said, we want to ask you a few questions.”

True to their word, the police did have relatively few questions. But they were repeated over 12 hours at two venues, according to Guha Thakurta.

IAEA team gathers marine samples near Fukushima

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

A member of the International Atomic Energy Agency team visiting Fukushima for its first marine sampling since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant started releasing treated radioactive wastewater into the sea said Thursday he does not expect any rise in radiation levels in the fish caught in the regional seas.

The IAEA team watched flounder and other popular kinds of fish being caught off the coast earlier Thursday and brought on boats to the Hisanohama port in southern Fukushima for an auction.

“I can say that we don’t expect to see any change starting in the fish,” said Paul McGinnity, an IAEA marine radiology scientist.

Musk’s X cashes in on ‘superspreaders’ of Israel-Hamas misinformation, new report finds

 

Some of the biggest peddlers of misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Elon Musk’s X platform are premium, so-called “verified” accounts that pay the social media company formerly known as Twitter to promote their posts to boost visibility, a report released Thursday found.

Establishing the truth in any conflict can be difficult as competing sides push contradictory narratives — but some claims that are objectively and clearly false are still going viral and being seen millions of times by users of X, due in part to changes made to the platform by Musk, NewsGuard, an information analysis company, found.

NewsGuard identified seven accounts it describes as “misinformation superspreaders,” which have shared widely debunked claims about the conflict. All of the accounts, NewsGuard said, are taking advantage of changes made to X’s verification policy, which promotes posts from users who pay the company $8 a month. Verified users are also eligible to receive payments from the platform, financially incentivizing posts from the users who are actively spreading misinformation.