The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps puts the Israeli regime’s recent assassination of a senior IRGC advisor in Syria down to the regime’s failure in its ongoing war against the Gaza Strip.
“You assassinate Martyr [Brigadier General] Seyyed Razi Mousavi because you could not achieve anything in the Gaza battleground,” Brigadier General Ismail Qa’ani said on Friday, addressing the Israeli regime.
Mousavi, a senior IRGC commander, was martyred in a missile attack by the regime against the Sayyeda Zeinab neighborhood of the Syrian capital Damascus on Monday. He was martyred while serving as part of Iran’s military advisory mission in the Arab country.
The atrocity came amid a war that the occupying regime has been waging against Gaza since October 7 following an operation staged by the Palestinian territory’s resistance movements, dubbed Operation al-Aqsa Storm. Qa’ani considered al-Aqsa Storm to be a response to “the extensive atrocities that the Zionist regime had committed against the Muslim people of Palestine.”
At least 21,320 people, mostly women and children, have been killed during the Israeli military campaign across the coastal sliver.
Tel Aviv, however, has stopped short of realizing any of its stated goals, including obliteration of the Gaza-based resistance movement of Hamas, enabling release of the people who were taken captive during al-Aqsa Storm, and prompting forced displacement of Gaza’s population to neighboring countries.
Qa’ani likewise noted that the Israeli regime and the United States — Tel Aviv’s most dedicated ally, which has thrown all-out military and political support behind the war — had achieved nothing throughout the aggression other than killing innocent women and children.
He noted the US had been investing all of its power in supporting the Zionists, but said Washington would eventually be held accountable over its crimes.
As opposed to the Zionist regime, which has been receiving maximal Western support, the people of Gaza have solely been defended by the regional resistance front, Qa’ani, meanwhile, reminded.
‘Israel hides true number of its casualties’
The Iranian commander said the Zionist regime had, so far during the war on Gaza, incurred a sizeable number of casualties, including thousands of fatalities and as many as 500 cases of blindness.
“They, however, are not man enough to announce the number of their casualties,” Qa’ani said.
Doctors successfully extracted the parasite from the man’s abdomen.
Doctors in China were left baffled after discovering squirming worms inside a 70-year-old man’s abdomen. The finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was made when the man, with a history of colon cancer, reported to a hospital to undergo a cholangioscopy, a procedure in which doctors insert a camera either through the mouth or the skin to examine the upper abdomen for problems. The doctors found that the 70-year-old harboured a tumour in his intestine. They also discovered five parasitic flatworms wriggling in the man’s biliary tract, the network of organs that transports digestive juices from the liver to the small intestine.
According to the study, doctors in China identified the worms as clonorchis sinensis, a species of liver fluke that’s found in undercooked fish and shrimp. These parasites are native to East Asia, where raw seafood is commonly consumed. When a person eats fish and shrimp containing an immature version of the parasite, it travels to the bile duct, the gallbladder, or the liver, where it matures into adult worms measuring 15 to 20 millimetres in length and 3 to 4 millimetres in width, the New York Post reported.
The worms in the 70-year-old were discovered when the man went to the hospital to undergo a cholangioscopy. He had been previously diagnosed with a type of cancer that develops in the colon (or large intestine) though the worms are thought to be unrelated.
The doctors successfully extracted the parasite from the man’s abdomen. Following this they prescribed the patient a drug for such an infection. The medics also put the 70-year-old on chemotherapy to combat the intestinal cancer.
Notably, in most cases, the condition is asymptomatic. Patients often don’t even know that the parasite is present. However, if left untreated it can lead to complications ranging from bacterial infections to pancreatitis to liver abscesses, the outlet reported.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, in a similar case, doctors in the United States were left baffled after discovering a fully intact house fly inside a man’s intestines during a colonoscopy. The finding was made when a 63-year-old man went in for a routine colon screening in Missouri. The colonoscopy was going normal until the doctors reached the transverse colon – the top of the large intestine – and came across a fully intact fly. “This case represents a very rare colonoscopic finding and mystery on how the intact fly found its way to the transverse colon,” the doctors from the University of Missouri School of Medicine wrote in the journal.
PM Modi on Friday hailed the peace pact signed by the central and Assam governments with ULFA.
New Delhi:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday hailed the peace pact signed by the central and Assam governments with ULFA, saying the agreement paves the way for lasting progress in the state.
The ULFA’s pro-talks faction on Friday signed a peace accord with the central and the Assam governments, agreeing to shun violence, surrender all arms, disband the organisation and join the democratic process.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who was present along with Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma at the signing of the accord in the national capital, called it a golden day for the people of Assam.
Tagging a post on the pact by Shah, Modi said, “Today marks a significant milestone in Assam’s journey towards peace and development. This agreement paves the way for lasting progress in Assam.” “I commend the efforts of all involved in this landmark achievement. Together, we move towards a future of unity, growth, and prosperity for all,” Modi said in his post on X.
The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) was formed in 1979 with the demand for a “sovereign Assam”. Since then, it has been involved in subversive activities that led to the central government declaring it a banned outfit in 1990.
The Arabinda Rajkhowa-led faction joined peace talks with the government on September 3, 2011, after an agreement for Suspension of Operations was signed between the ULFA and the central and the state governments.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
“Congress must step up and act without any further delay,” Joe Biden said.
Wasington:
U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday called Russia’s latest missile barrage on Ukraine a “stark reminder” that Russian President Vladimir Putin remained committed to destroying Ukraine and said “he must be stopped.”
Biden, in a statement issued during his vacation in St. Croix, said the overnight attack, which killed 31 civilians and wounded over 120 across Ukraine, was the largest aerial assault since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.
“It is a stark reminder to the world that, after nearly two years of this devastating war, Putin’s objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped,” Biden said.
Biden said Ukraine used air defense systems that the United States and its allies and partners had provided to successfully intercept and destroy many of the missiles and drones launched by Russia, and he urged Congress to approve continued aid.
“Unless Congress takes urgent action in the new year, we will not be able to continue sending the weapons and vital air defense systems Ukraine needs to protect its people. Congress must step up and act without any further delay,” Biden said.
The United States on Thursday said it would provide up to $250 million in arms and equipment to Ukraine in a final aid package this year, as top officials continued to urge lawmakers to approve another $61 billion in aid to the war-torn country.
Republicans are refusing to approve the assistance requested by Biden unless Democrats agree to tighten security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The White House has warned that without the additional appropriation U.S. aid will run out by the end of the year for Ukraine’s fight to retake territory occupied by Russian forces.
Congress has approved more than $110 billion for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, but it has not approved any funds since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives from Democrats in January 2023.
Biden said the stakes of the fight extended far beyond Ukraine to the entire NATO alliance and the security of Europe, and warned of risks to the United States.
“When dictators and autocrats are allowed to run roughshod in Europe, the risk rises that the United States gets pulled in directly,” he said. “We cannot let our allies and partners down. We cannot let Ukraine down. History will judge harshly those who fail to answer freedom’s call.”
Separately, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who is also in St. Croix, said he discussed reports of a missile temporarily entering Polish airspace with Polish Secretary of State Jacek Siewiera in a call on Friday, the White House said.
Sullivan expressed the United States’ solidarity with Poland, and pledged technical assistance as needed. He said Biden is following the issue closely.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
“Congress must step up and act without any further delay,” Joe Biden said.
Wasington:
U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday called Russia’s latest missile barrage on Ukraine a “stark reminder” that Russian President Vladimir Putin remained committed to destroying Ukraine and said “he must be stopped.”
Biden, in a statement issued during his vacation in St. Croix, said the overnight attack, which killed 31 civilians and wounded over 120 across Ukraine, was the largest aerial assault since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.
“It is a stark reminder to the world that, after nearly two years of this devastating war, Putin’s objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped,” Biden said.
Biden said Ukraine used air defense systems that the United States and its allies and partners had provided to successfully intercept and destroy many of the missiles and drones launched by Russia, and he urged Congress to approve continued aid.
“Unless Congress takes urgent action in the new year, we will not be able to continue sending the weapons and vital air defense systems Ukraine needs to protect its people. Congress must step up and act without any further delay,” Biden said.
The United States on Thursday said it would provide up to $250 million in arms and equipment to Ukraine in a final aid package this year, as top officials continued to urge lawmakers to approve another $61 billion in aid to the war-torn country.
Republicans are refusing to approve the assistance requested by Biden unless Democrats agree to tighten security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The White House has warned that without the additional appropriation U.S. aid will run out by the end of the year for Ukraine’s fight to retake territory occupied by Russian forces.
Congress has approved more than $110 billion for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, but it has not approved any funds since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives from Democrats in January 2023.
Biden said the stakes of the fight extended far beyond Ukraine to the entire NATO alliance and the security of Europe, and warned of risks to the United States.
“When dictators and autocrats are allowed to run roughshod in Europe, the risk rises that the United States gets pulled in directly,” he said. “We cannot let our allies and partners down. We cannot let Ukraine down. History will judge harshly those who fail to answer freedom’s call.”
Separately, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who is also in St. Croix, said he discussed reports of a missile temporarily entering Polish airspace with Polish Secretary of State Jacek Siewiera in a call on Friday, the White House said.
Sullivan expressed the United States’ solidarity with Poland, and pledged technical assistance as needed. He said Biden is following the issue closely.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Muhammad Hafiz Saeed has been in jail since July 17, 2019 (File)
Islamabad:
Pakistan has received India’s request for extradition of 26/11 attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said on Friday. But she said that no bilateral extradition treaty exists between India and Pakistan.
In a statement, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said, “Pakistan has received a request from the Indian authorities, seeking extradition of Hafiz Saeed in a so-called money laundering case.”
“It is pertinent to note that no bilateral extradition treaty exists between Pakistan and India,” she added.
Earlier in the day, Ministry of External Affairs official spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said India has conveyed a request to the Pakistan government regarding the extradition of Hafiz Saeed to India for facing trial in a particular case.
Addressing the weekly briefing, Mr Bagchi said, “The person in question (Hafiz Saeed) is wanted in numerous cases in India. He is also a UN-proscribed terrorist. In this regard, we have conveyed a request along with relevant supporting documents, to the government of Pakistan to extradite him to India to face trial in a particular case.
“We have been flagging the issue of activities that he’s been wanted for. This is a recent request,” he added.
Notably, Saeed, who is a UN-proscribed terrorist is the founder of terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). He was the mastermind of the deadly 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and is wanted in India in numerous cases.
Muhammad Hafiz Saeed, who has been in jail since July 17, 2019, for other charges, was sentenced in April 2022 by a special anti-terrorism court in Lahore, Pakistan, to a jail term of 33 years for “financing terrorism.”
Despite being designated a terrorist by the UN and EU in the 2000s, Saeed was neither charged nor extradited over nearly two decades. Saeed was designated as a terrorist by the United Nations Security Council in December 2008.
Meanwhile, in a development that has brought criticism, the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League (PMML), a political entity of Hafiz Saeed has fielded candidates for each and every national and provincial assembly constituency across Pakistan for the upcoming general elections slated to be held on February 8, 2024.
Hafiz Saeed’s son Talha Saeed is also going to contest the polls from National Assembly’s constituency NA-127, Lahore, Dawn reported. PMML’s central president Khalid Masood Sindhu is contesting elections from NA-130, against Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz supremo Nawaz Sharif.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Since mining developed, canaries have been sent in to check for toxins in the underground’s air before miners entered the mines. Canaries were thus ‘early warning systems’ for humanity. Humans have taken refuge, evacuated homes and guarded themselves by observing animal behaviour — behaviour which suggested an imminent disastrous event, like an earthquake.
In this context, the anthropologist Alyssa Paredes observed that
In serving as a warning signal of impending threat…sentinels also signal the existence and transcorporeality of a more-than-human collective, one that is marked as much by solidarity as by vulnerability.
That is, the nonhuman, who shares vulnerability with the human in terms of corporeal injurability, is also the humans’ sentinel. ‘Sentinel species’, as these nonhumans are called by environmental toxicologists, are lifeforms employed to measure how the environment is affected by pollution.
Human Sentinels
Intrigued by the possibility that humans could be sentinels too, the artist Sissel Marie Tonn collaborated with two scientists, Heather Leslie of the Department of Environment and Health, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Juan Garcia Vallejo of immunology and molecular cell biology, Amsterdam Medical College, to create Becoming a Sentinel Species. The project was enabled by a grant from the Dutch Bio Art & Design Award (BAD Award) 2020.
In the project, a fictional film overlaps with real-life experiments. The project focused on the possibilities of humans as sentinels. The artist’s write-up stated:
Becoming a Sentinel Species is a fictional story imagining a future in which humans explore and reflect on the role of the sentinel as an eye witness to environmental pollution.
In the film, fictional researchers inject microplastics from the sea into their blood stream and start experiencing hallucinations and odd connections of the humans with the sea. This, Tonn terms, thematises the ‘latent biological memories and hallucinations of our own watery origins in the primordial sea’. Heather Leslie states in the film about the project, ‘we are a bit of plastic too inside’, referring to the ingestion of microplastics from the environment.
Parallelly and in real life, Tonn’s blood was taken and microplastics found in everyday life introduced into it. The researchers and artists watched through the microscopes as Tonn’s macrophages — the body’s first responders to any such attack — devoured the plastic intruders.
The artist-scientist team was trying to see how the toxins in the environment upon entering the human blood stream can make the human body, a radar, a sentinel, because the human body starts behaving in certain ways — hallucinations, in the film — and, therefore, function as indexes of the state of the environment. As Leslie puts it, ‘we could also become sentinel species’.
Oceans Within Us
By employing microplastics and depicting the effects (fictionally) on the researchers, the project draws attention to oceanic origins of life.
The English and Cultural Studies scholar Astrida Neimanis in her pioneering work, Bodies of Water (2017), created the field of the ‘Blue Humanities’. Neimanis has drawn attention to the oceans — and water — within us. Neimanis writes:
[a]ttention to water’s material capacities informs a new way of thinking about subjectivity in collective rather than individualist terms.
We connect with water, in Neimanis’ posthumanist thinking.
Neimanis points to flows and entanglements as a key feature of human and nonhuman lives. However, these flows and entanglements are subject to the stresses and strains of capital, geography and power structures, as Neimanis, whose focus is also on the materiality of flows, alerts us to.
Now, with the oceans within us, Neimanis and others have noted that plastic wastes, leftover materials from the wars, rotting machinery, even footwear and fishing nets are also a part of what we are. That is, the junk in the ocean enters not just animal bodies, but human bodies as well. The waterscapes of the planet of which we are made have been transformed into toxic ecosystems by human action, and the effects are ruinous to all lifeforms.
Becoming a Sentinel Species builds on this alignment of systems of flows — water, blood — that Neimanis has scrupulously delineated, and their toxic contents.
Species Exceptionalism
Species exceptionalism has marked human behaviour over the planetary timescale. Tonn, Leslie and Vallejo show how microplastics enter and impact the human body’s immune systems (macrophages) in real-life. With this, they also show how we are linked to other species and lifeforms through a shared toxicology: microplastics enter marine lifeforms and us.
Now, while speciesism — the hierarchy between species, as created by humans, enabling humans to exploit and ‘use’ other species — and concomitant exceptionalism have rendered the other lifeforms open to greater and greater degrees of exposure, thanks to human efforts at pollution, this project asks: why should humanity not serve as indicators of toxic biomes?
When toxins invade a biome, humans and nonhumans are differentially and unequally affected. The violence upon bodies is differential, in other words. But species exceptionalism assumes that all species are affected by what humans do. Environmental toxification cannot be ‘read’ as the problem of some species. The other-than-humans have been drawn into this drama of environmental toxification due to human actions. The project, therefore, shows continuities and alignments of species within the larger crisis of environmental toxification.
One of the most startling insights from the project is that canaries, vermin, roaches, dogs and birds need not be our sentinels. That is, humans need not be exceptional to the category of ‘sentinel species’.
Becoming a Sentinel Species is brilliant art work for the Anthropocene.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian says Hamas has informed the Islamic Republic that it has sufficient capabilities to continue the confrontation with Israel in the besieged Gaza Strip for months.
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Veteran wicketkeeper-batter Dinesh Karthik feels India pacer Mohammed Shami‘s injury has proved to be a huge setback for the team in the ongoing first Test against South Africa in Centurion. Dean Elgar led South Africa’s charge after India were bowled out for 245 in the first innings. Elgar scored 185 as the Indian pacers struggled to pick wickets at regular intervals, allowing South Africa to take a sizeable lead in the first innings. Shami was ruled out of the two-match series due to an ankle injury.
“The man has grown in stature as a bowler and as a leader of the pack. He is an able lieutenant to Jasprit Bumrah. You can imagine with the upright seam on this kind of pitch. I promise you, he would have definitely gotten a few wickets. The Indian team really misses him,” Karthik said on Cricbuzz.
Karthik also suggested that Bumrah and Siraj did not get enough support from debutant pacer Prasidh Krishna and Shardul Thakur, who were pretty expensive in the first innings.
“Shardul Thakur and Prasidh Krishna going for close to 118 runs in their 27 overs. On the other hand, Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj going for just 111 in their 31 overs. Siraj was a tad bit expensive, especially in the last spell, they also bowled some brilliant balls. You could see every time they were on, you got the feeling that they could get you a wicket or two. Whereas with Shardul or Prasidh, you had to wait for a batter to make a mistake,” he added.
Elgar missed out on a double century as Shardul Thakur got the better of him before Lunch on Day 3.
For India, KL Rahul had earlier flexed his batting muscles in the visitors’ middle-order as he scored 101 out of their total of 245, hitting 14 fours and four sixes.
India are searching for a first series win in South Africa.
BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John Johnson. (Representational)
BuzzFeed’s Marcela Martin has announced her intention to resign as president effective January 12 to pursue other opportunities, the digital media firm said on Friday.
The company is unlikely to look for a replacement as the president’s responsibilities will be absorbed by the CEO and other executives.
Martin’s departure, which comes closely after the exit of CFO Felicia DellaFortuna in November, was not due to any disagreement with the company, BuzzFeed said in a regulatory filing.
BuzzFeed, which shuttered its news unit in April, was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John Johnson, and went public in 2021 through a blank-check merger.
The news division of BuzzFeed was once viewed as a serious challenger to legacy media companies and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for coverage of China’s mass detention of Muslims, but it failed to find a working business model and was a consistent money loser.
Like other digital media outlets, BuzzFeed’s reliance on advertising made it susceptible to downturns as marketers shifted to TikTok and other social media platforms.
Ozy Media sued BuzzFeed along with another news media outlet Semafor and its founder Ben Smith last week for allegedly stealing trade secrets from the now-shuttered U.S. media and entertainment company.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
