الكاتب: kafej

Kolkata, India – The skies above Eden Gardens were leaden and grey, the air thick with a stifling mix of humidity, smog and the question of which team would meet India in Sunday’s Cricket World Cup Final.

Kolkata had pulsed with vibrant colour and noise all week in the midst of concurrent festivals of Diwali, symbolising light’s triumph over darkness, and Kali Puja, celebrating the victory of good against evil.

Thursday’s semifinal wasn’t a contest of such absolutes, instead a battle between the almost-guys and the we’ve-done-it-all-before guys. South Africa have played in four World Cup knockouts without clearing the final hurdle; Australia have lifted the trophy five times, more than any other nation.

If intergenerational trauma exists, then logic suggests the opposite must also; this Australian team carries the belief that conquering the vagaries of tournament play is in their blood. It gives them a certain swagger and underlies their aggressive self-belief.

Consider the pronouncement of their captain, Pat Cummins, on the eve of the match: “We’ve got a lot of guys that have been in this situation before that have won a One Day World Cup, T20 World Cup, various other tournaments in big moments. So, I think that really helps. You can draw on that in the middle of the contest.”

Compare that to the words of his South African counterpart, Temba Bavuma, who confessed to feeling nervous: “There’s been an acknowledgement of the emotions. I don’t think you can deny or run away with that, but there’s also been solutions or mechanisms that have been given as to how to deal with that anxiety, if you feel that it overwhelms yourself.

“I think there’s only two guys in this group that have gone into a semifinal, Quinton [de Kock] and David Miller, so there’s not a lot of experience from all the other guys.”

It was admirably honest, but to openly admit to any vulnerability before a ruthless Australia is akin to slicing open your palm and shoving your hand into shark-infested waters. They only need to sense the blood.

Australia’s plan with bat and ball was to land the first punch and ensure it rattled teeth. They talked about it in team meetings and carried the blueprints onto the field. Bavuma had won the toss and elected to bat first under the heavy clouds on a pitch that had been under covers all morning; It was an invitation.

Throughout the tournament, South Africa’s batters had been a different beast when batting first, winning every match and most by enormous margins. Their only two losses came when they were forced to chase. In playing to their strength at the toss they may have unintentionally been acknowledging a weakness; a second invitation.

Australia’s opening bowlers didn’t need a third, especially in helpful conditions, made for Mitchell Starc’s dangerous swing and bounce and Josh Hazlewood’s metronomic line and length, with the added kick of spicy seam movement.

Under the relentless glare of the lights that crown Eden Gardens’ brutalist red-and-white towers, there was no hiding from the most brutal examination below. Bavuma lasted four balls before wafting and edging Starc outside his off-stump. Quinton de Kock, playing his last game for South Africa, withstood 13 deliveries and then skied a Hazlewood ball for Cummins to take a tumbling catch.

All week, trucks blaring music and crammed with locals and effigies of Kali had filled the streets around the ground, the four-armed blue-skinned goddess a blend of beauty and ferocity; the same two elements fused in Australia’s twin opening attack.

South Africa had averaged 49.44 in the powerplay across the tournament, but here they were suffocated, limping to 18 for 2 in the first 10 overs. The pair sent down 61 dot balls in the first 13 overs, effectively bowling 10 maidens between them. The teeth had been rattled and there were more blows to come.

When Aiden Markram drove hard at Starc and a thick edge flew to a diving Dave Warner at backward point, the fielder’s celebration – a gleeful jogging dance – said it all. Australia weren’t sweating, they were oozing alpha pheromones, while South Africa’s batters appeared to retreat into shells made of glass; all squirts, edges and defensive prods in an effort to stave off calamity.

That they avoided it was thanks to a stubborn David Miller, his imperious century made more impressive by the carnage that surrounded him. Supported by a typically aggressive Heinrich Klassen, Miller dragged his side to a total of 212.

In response, Australia’s batting powerplay was just as devastating, the four arms of Travis Head and Warner channelling Kali’s destructive power. After swiping unsuccessfully at Marco Jansen’s opening delivery, Head dropped to one knee and pummelled the second over cover-point for four, all mustachioed machismo. Machis-mo, if you like.

It was a tale of two power plays, with Australia dominating both. They were 72 for 2 after 10 overs and from there could sufficiently withstand the onslaught of South Africa’s spinners on a ragging pitch.

Keshav Maharaj, Tabraiz Shamsi and Aiden Markram provided the counterpunch and a few nervous moments with their fizzing deliveries, while Gerald Coetzee bowled with heart and heat, but the damage had already been done and Australia could afford to be
Australia may have lost seven wickets, it may have taken more than 47 overs, but the result had seemed a foregone conclusion long before Pat Cummins sealed the win with a boundary.

Eden Gardens was South Africa’s paradise lost; Kolkata, Australia’s city of joy.

Top diplomat says Amman’s priority is to end ‘Israel’s barbarism in Gaza’, which can no longer be seen as self-defence.

Jordan has said that it won’t sign a deal to provide energy to Israel in exchange for water – an agreement that was planned to be ratified last month.

“We had a regional dialogue about regional projects. I think that all of this …, the war [has] proven, [it] will not proceed,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told Al Jazeera on Thursday, referring to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

“We will not sign this agreement any longer. Can you imagine a Jordanian minister sitting next to an Israeli minister to sign a water and electricity agreement, all while Israel continues to kill children in Gaza?” asked the top diplomat of Jordan, which borders Israel to the east.

Jordan and Israel have held a fragile peace agreement since 1994, which returned some 380km (236 miles) of Jordan’s occupied land from Israeli control and resolved long-standing water disputes.

“We [Jordan] signed the peace agreement in 1994 as part of a wider Arab effort to establish a two-state solution. That has not been achieved. Instead, Israel has not upheld its part of the agreement. So the peace deal will have to remain on the back burner gathering dust for now,” he said.

All of Jordan’s efforts were focused on ending what Safadi described as the “retaliatory barbarism carried out by Israel” in Gaza.

“Israel’s aggression and crimes [in Gaza] can no longer be justified as self-defence. It has been killing innocent civilians and attacking hospitals,” he told Al Jazeera.

“If any other state had committed a fraction of what Israel is doing now, we would have seen sanctions imposed on it from every corner of the globe,” he added.

This month, Jordan announced it was “immediately” recalling its ambassador to Israel in response to the war in Gaza, accusing Israel of creating an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe”.

Safadi said Jordan would never enter into a dialogue about who runs Gaza after the war, considering such a move now could be seen as a green light to Israel to do whatever it wants.

“If the international community wants to talk about this, it must stop the war now,” he added.

Jordan, like other Arab and Muslim countries, has strongly condemned Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in which more than 11,600 people have been killed, including more than 4,700 children. Israel has also launched a ground offensive and restricted supplies of water, food and electricity to the enclave.

Safadi spoke as the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, warned of a “deliberate attempt to strangle” its operations in the Gaza Strip and said it risks shutting down all its humanitarian work because of a lack of fuel.

Israel cut off fuel shipments into the Gaza Strip as part of a “complete siege” on the area after Hamas fighters from Gaza launched an attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.

The 22-year-old ran over and killed four members of the family in 2021, leaving nine-year-old boy orphaned.

A Canadian man inspired by white nationalist beliefs has been found guilty of murdering four members of a Muslim family by running them over with a pick-up truck in an attack that sent waves of shock, grief and fear across the country and spurred calls to tackle Islamophobia.

On Thursday, 22-year-old Nathaniel Veltman, who had railed against immigration and Islam, was convicted of attacking the family in the Ontario town of London in June 2021.

“He was hunting for Muslims to kill,” prosecutor Fraser Ball said in closing arguments, adding that Veltman had donned body armour and a shirt bearing a crusader emblem.

Salman Afzaal, 46; his wife, Madiha Salman, 44; their daughter Yumnah, 15; and Afzaal’s mother, Talat, 74, were killed. The couple’s nine-year-old son suffered serious injuries but survived. The family, originally from Pakistan, had been out for a walk near their home.

Prosecutors called the attack an act of “terrorism”, and Veltman, convicted on four counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder, faces life imprisonment with no chance for parole for 25 years.

During the 10-week trial, the jury heard that Veltman had authored a far-right screed in which he described his hatred of Islam and opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism.

After driving directly into the family, Veltman gave himself up to the police and said he had wanted to “send a strong message” against Muslim immigration.

In the manifesto, Veltman wrote, “I am a white nationalist,” and said white people were “facing genocide”. Prosecutors said he also repeatedly watched the video of a mass shooting by a white supremacist in New Zealand that killed 51 people.

For members of Canada’s vibrant Muslim community, Ball said, that the message was terrifyingly clear: “Leave this country or you and your loved ones could be next.”

The attack, which left three generations of the family dead and pieces of the victims’ clothing stuck to the front of Veltman’s truck, was the deadliest against Canada’s Muslim community since 2017 when a man, who had consumed far-right anti-Muslim material, gunned down six people in a Quebec City mosque.

The defence argued that Veltman suffered from numerous mental health issues and had asked that his charges be downgraded to manslaughter.

A sentencing hearing was scheduled for December 1.

“While this represents an important step towards closure for the Muslim community, and our city at large, it is by no means the end of that journey,” London Mayor Josh Morgan said in a social media post on Thursday.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims posted on X that it was “relieved that justice has been served”, adding, “We have to reflect deeply on the violent Islamophobia that has gripped our country.”

We are relieved to see that the man who killed four members of #OurLondonFamily has been convicted on all counts.

We are relieved that justice has been served.

This is a time for reflection and solidarity. With the family. With the community in London, Ontario.

We have to… pic.twitter.com/a8woB2EDK1

— NCCM (@nccm) November 16, 2023

The Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza has gone ‘completely out of service’ due to a lack of supplies and an overwhelming number of patients amid Israel’s assault on the besieged territory, hospital director Atef al-Kahlout has said.

Footage from the hospital in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip shows wounded Palestinians lining the hallways of the facility and lying prone amid pools of blood.

“We cannot offer any more services … we can’t offer patients any beds,” al-Kahlout told Al Jazeera on Thursday.

While the hospital has a capacity of 140 patients, al-Kahlout said some 500 patients are currently inside the hospital.

He said 45 patients are in need of “urgent surgical intervention”, and called on ambulances “not to bring any more wounded people” to the facility due to the lack of capacity.

He says the hospital’s departments are “unable to carry out their work”. Health workers at the hospital cited a critical shortage of supplies.

“We don’t have beds,” a health worker told Al Jazeera on a tour of the building.

“This person needs an intensive care unit,” he added pointing to a young man lying on the ground while being tended to by a nurse.

“And [here],” he says pointing to another patient with an amputated leg, “we have no medicine.”

“We receive wounded people from Wadi Gaza to Beit Hanoon,” he says, “some have been here for 10 days.”

Nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been wounded since Israel began its assault on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas carried out a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.

More than 11,400 people have been killed, including more than 4,600 children, in the Israeli assault on Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel has also severely restricted supplies of water, food, electricity and fuel, with aid agencies warning of a humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave.

“Medical teams [at the Indonesian hospital] were forced to amputate some patients’ [body parts] due to the rotting of the organs,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Khan Younis, adding that the hospital is unable to transfer the injured elsewhere.

“All hospitals in Gaza City and the north have stopped operating,” director al-Kahlout said.

The Indonesian Hospital, located near the Jabalia refugee camp – the largest in Gaza – has also been sheltering hundreds of displaced people who sought shelter there.

The vicinity of the hospital had been struck multiple times by Israeli forces, with at least two civilians killed in those strikes between October 7 and 28, according to Human Rights Watch.

Israel’s military has alleged the Indonesian Hospital is used “to hide an underground command and control centre” for Hamas. Palestinian officials and the Indonesian group that funds the hospital have rejected the claims.

Meanwhile, concerns are growing for the thousands of civilians trapped at al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, amid an ongoing Israeli raid. Israel says the hospital harbours a Hamas command centre, a claim the group has denied.

White House spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday the United States was “confident in our own intelligence assessment” that Hamas has been using the hospital “as a command and control node, and most likely as well as a storage facility”.

Late on Thursday, the Israeli army published videos it said showed a Hamas tunnel shaft and a vehicle “containing a large number of weapons” uncovered at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital complex.

New York state has sued PepsiCo for allegedly polluting one of its rivers with plastic bottles and wrappers.

The lawsuit accuses the soft drinks company and its Frito-Lay subsidiaries of creating a public nuisance by the mass production of the single-use items, some of which inevitably fall or blow into the Buffalo River when they are discarded.

The legal action alleges PepsiCo has hurt the environment, claiming it is partly responsible for litter that ends up in water supplying the city of Buffalo with drinking water.

The lawsuit was filed in the state’s Supreme Court by attorney general Letitia James who said: “No company is too big to ensure that their products do not damage our environment and public health.

“All New Yorkers have a basic right to clean water, yet PepsiCo’s irresponsible packaging and marketing endanger Buffalo’s water supply, environment, and public health.”

The attorney general’s office noted that a 2022 survey named PepsiCo as the single largest identifiable contributor to plastic waste in the Buffalo River.

It found that of 1,916 pieces of plastic waste containing an identifiable brand, 17.1% were produced by PepsiCo. McDonald’s was a distant second.

The lawsuit links the plastic waste to the prevalence of microplastics, which are pieces less than 5mm in length and could be harmful to human health if ingested.

Ms James, a Democrat, wants PepsiCo to warn customers about the potential health and environmental risks of its packaging.

The lawsuit also wants the court to force the company to develop a plan to keep its packaging out of the Buffalo River, and seeks financial penalties and restitution.

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PepsiCo, which is headquartered in Westchester County in New York, said in a statement that it was serious about “plastic reduction and effective recycling”.

It did not directly comment on the lawsuit’s claim that it was legally responsible for keeping litter out of the Buffalo River.

Last week, Coca-Cola, Danone and Nestle were accused of misleading claims about the number of recycled plastics they use.

Lawyers complained to the European Commission that the firms’ claims that their single-use plastic bottles are either 100% recycled or 100% recyclable bottles aren’t accurate.