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Weather warnings are in place for Ireland and the UK as the newly-named Storm Debi is set to bring heavy rain and strong winds.

The storm was officially named by the Irish weather service, Met Eireann, on Sunday morning and the agency has warned that there’s a risk of “severe and damaging gusts” of wind from Sunday night.

A yellow wind and rain warning is in place for the entire country for Monday, with Met Eireann warning that it will be “very windy or stormy” amid heavy rain and possible thunderstorms and hail.

The warning comes into effect from midnight and finishes at 3pm on Monday 13 November.

A more severe orange wind warning is in place for 16 Irish counties and covers the period between 2am and midday on Monday.

Met Eireann has also issued a red warning for just off the coast of the counties of Clare, Limerick and Kerry ahead of “violent” storm force 11 winds – just one grade below hurricane force. This covers 2am to 5am on Monday.

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An orange warning is in place from 1am to 5pm for the Irish Sea, where southwesterly winds will reach storm force 10.

Meanwhile, the Met Office has issued a yellow wind and rain warning for the whole of Northern Ireland for Monday, advising that Storm Debi may cause travel disruption as well as the flooding of homes and businesses.

They’re also urging people to be wary of possible fast-flowing or deep floodwater and flying debris, which could cause a danger to life. The storm may also cause power cuts.

The weather warning for Northern Ireland comes into effect at 3am on Monday and finishes at 2pm.

Yellow warnings for rain and wind have also been issued for the north of England, the Midlands, North Wales and the northeast of Scotland.

Storm Debi’s arrival comes after parts of Ireland and the UK were devastated by floods during the preceding storms, Babet and Ciaran.

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The record-breaking Storm Ciaran battered the Channel Islands with hurricane-strength gusts of 104mph just weeks ago, leaving flights to them cancelled.

Areas of Ireland and England also suffered damage, with 10,000 homes in Cornwall being left without power while hundreds of schools were forced to close.

A menu for first-class passengers travelling on the Titanic has sold for more than £80,000 at auction.

The “remarkable” relic fetched £84,000 at Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, Wiltshire, on Saturday.

The menu, which shows signs of water damage, boasts a menu of oysters, beef, spring lamb and mallard duck.

It was served on the evening of 11 April 1912 after the liner left Queenstown in Ireland.

The Titanic struck an iceberg three days later – on the evening of 14 April – and sank the following day.

The menu measures 6.25ins by 4.25ins and bears an embossed red White Star Line flag.

It would have originally had gilt lettering with the initials OSNC (Ocean Steamship Navigation Company) alongside the lettering RMS Titanic.

‘Remarkable survivor’

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said: “The latter shows signs of water immersion having been partially erased, the reverse of the menu also clearly displays further evidence of this.

“This would point to the menu having been subjected to the icy North Atlantic waters on the morning of 15 April, either having left the ship with a survivor who was exposed to those cold sea waters or recovered on the person of one of those lost.

“Having spoken to the leading collectors of Titanic memorabilia globally and consulted with numerous museums with Titanic collections, we can find no other surviving examples of a first-class 11 April dinner menu.

“The menu is a remarkable survivor from the most famous ocean liner of all time.”

Found in a photo album

The menu was found in a photo album from the 1960s by the daughter and son-in-law of late historian Len Stephenson.

He was an expert on his hometown Dominion in Nova Scotia and collected and preserved many records.

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More than 1,500 of the 2,208 passengers and crew on board the Titanic were killed when the liner sank.

The ship was on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.

First-class passengers included multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor, millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim, Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon and socialite Molly Brown.

David McBride, a former army lawyer who revealed information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, could be facing a “life sentence” if found guilty in a trial that starts on Monday.

While Australia has established an independent special investigator into alleged war crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan, supporters of McBride point out he is facing a criminal trial before any of the perpetrators of the alleged wrongdoing he helped reveal.

“It seems strange that when clearly so many things went wrong in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, that I am the first person to [face trial]”, McBride told Al Jazeera in an interview before his trial began. “It’s extremely likely that I will be facing prison and not just short term but for quite a long time,” the defence whistleblower added.

McBride is open about the fact he leaked documents to the ABC, Australia’s public broadcaster, leading to a series of articles called the Afghan Files.

“I’ve been charged with leaking documents,” McBride said. “I’ve never made a secret of that.”

Instead, he wants the conversation to be about whether it was right to speak out.

“What I want to be discussed is whether or not I was justified in doing so,” the whistleblower says.

Although McBride, a former lawyer for the Australian and British armies, sees the information he revealed as being in the public interest, his ability to claim a whistleblowing defence has been limited by claims of national security.

He is going on trial “without the benefit of being able to rely” on a whistleblower defence, Kieran Pender a lawyer with the Human Rights Law Centre, an Australian organisation based in Melbourne, told Al Jazeera.

McBride’s trial will be heard by both a judge and jury and will begin in the Australian Capital Territory’s Supreme Court at 10am Canberra time on Monday (23:00 GMT on Sunday).

‘Wrongs of the past’

McBride has not been the first or only person to reveal information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.

Dramatically, an Australian judge found earlier this year that journalists had not defamed one of Australia’s most highly decorated soldiers Ben Roberts-Smith by saying he was “complicit in and responsible for the murder” of three Afghan men.

That case was a notable moment that came more than seven years after the Australian government established an inquiry, led by Supreme Court Justice Paul Brereton, into allegations that Australian troops had committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

In 2020, Brereton handed down findings that there was credible evidence to support allegations war crimes had been committed. As a result, the Australian government established a new Office of the Special Investigator, as an independent executive agency within the attorney general’s portfolio.

“We should be proud that Australia set up this process as a meaningful way to address these allegations,” Rawan Arraf, the executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, told Al Jazeera.

But while Arraf notes that McBride’s trial is separate from other processes related to justice for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, she questions what it says about the Australian government’s priorities that his trial is proceeding first.

“Where is their priority in this?” Arraf asked. “Prosecuting a whistleblower or prosecuting those alleged crimes?”

Although one former soldier was charged earlier this year, McBride is still the first to stand trial.

Arraf adds that the Australian government has been “slow” to implement a recommendation to provide “compensation, or as we would say, reparations to Afghan victims and their families impacted” by alleged Australian crimes.

“Australia still has a long way to go to adequately address the legacy of its military involvement in Afghanistan,” Kobra Moradi, from the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation, told Al Jazeera, adding that “while some progress has been made” the trial of McBride was a setback.

“People should not be punished for telling the truth,” Moradi said.

For McBride, despite the trial going ahead, he still thinks revealing the information he did was important.

“It’s important for me to show that there are people in the West, especially people in the Western war machine who do get [that] we are not above the law,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We cannot have this kind of colonial mindset where we’re always right without ever having some sort of insight into our own actions and accountability for those activities we carry out overseas, especially involving violence and imprisonment,” McBride said. He wants people to know “there are people who are working to right the wrongs of the past,” he added.

Despite acknowledging he is concerned about his trial going ahead, McBride says he has people contacting him from Afghanistan and around the world “and that always lifts my spirits”.

Journalists and whistleblowers

McBride’s case is just one of several examples of whistleblowers and journalists in Australia facing consequences for speaking out.

In June 2019 the Australian Federal Police raided the offices of the ABC, with a warrant to search reporters’ notes, emails and story drafts in relation to the so-called Afghan Files. Police later dropped the investigation in 2020.

McBride is also not the only whistleblower currently, or recently, facing prosecution in Australia.

But he is going on trial “without the benefit of being able to rely” on a whistleblower defence, Pender, his lawyer, says.

“David McBride tried to argue that he was protected under whistleblowing law,” says Pender, “The government made a last-minute national security claim in relation to that argument that ultimately meant it was never decided by the court.”

Instead, supporters of McBride have been calling for the Australian attorney general to intervene in his case.

In 2022, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus did intervene in the prosecution of another Australian lawyer, Bernard Collaery, leading to the case against him being dropped.

Collaery had been charged with conspiring to release classified information about alleged Australian spying on the then newly formed nation of East Timor during negotiations over oil and gas boundaries in the Timor Sea.

Asked about whether the attorney general would consider a similar intervention in the case of McBride, a spokesperson told Al Jazeera: “The attorney general’s power to discontinue proceedings is reserved for very unusual and exceptional circumstances.”

The spokesperson also said that the Australian government is currently planning to pursue further whistleblower reforms, though it seems unlikely these will be applicable to McBride’s trial this week.

The number of people to have been killed in Gaza over the last month now stands at more than 11,000, according to officials in Gaza.

This figure has been the subject of much debate because it’s released by the Gazan Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas – the governing body in Gaza.

It has led some, including President Joe Biden, to suggest it might be an exaggerated figure.

“I have no notion whether Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed, I’m sure innocents have been killed and it’s a price of waging a war…” Biden said two weeks ago.

But this past week, the US assistant secretary of state for near Eastern affairs, Barbara Leaf, told politicians on Capitol Hill that the number to have been killed could actually be higher.

“We think they are very high, frankly, and it could be that they are even higher than are being cited,” she said.

Examination of data from previous Gaza conflicts – the Hamas-run health ministry’s counts compared with the post-war United Nations analysis – shows that the initial data is broadly accurate with, at most, a 10-12% discrepancy:

• 2008 war: The Gaza Health ministry reported 1,440 Palestinians killed; the UN reported 1,385
• 2014 war: The Gaza Health ministry reported 2,310 Palestinians killed; the UN reported 2,251
• 2021 war: The Gaza Health ministry reported 260 Palestinians killed; the UN reported 256

The Ministry of Health in Gaza is a body of civil servants. The data is collected by hospital staff as casualties arrive. The data is ultimately also confirmed by the MoH in Ramallah, which is not run by Hamas.

More clarity is needed on how many of those killed were armed militants fighting for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Health Ministry does not record how people were killed. They are all reported as victims of the “Israeli aggression”.

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The Israeli military says they killed 1,500 Hamas fighters during the 7 October massacre. The Israeli government believes that number is included in the Hamas toll.

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, this weekend: “Hamas’ death toll (no reason to accept at face value anyway) includes: The terrorists who did October 7, people killed from its own misfiring rockets (everyone at Al Ahli!) [the hospital which was hit two weeks ago], everyone it told not to evacuate / stopped from evacuating after Israel urged them to leave for safety.”

More than half of casualties are women and children, say Hamas

We do not know how many Palestinian combatants have been killed since the Israeli bombardment and ground invasion began.

The IDF has reported numbers in the scores on a day-to-day basis in the ground invasion and it said on Saturday that Israeli troops had “killed 150 Hamas terrorists” in a single battle.

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Estimates for the total number of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants varies widely from 15,000 and 50,000. The variance is likely to be because they range from elite militant units to a less structured group of combatants.

Based on a 212-page Hamas database published after President Biden’s comments, the demographic of the dead showed more than half were women and children.

In a news conference this past week, announcing that the total killed had reached 10,000, Health Ministry authorities said more than 2,600 were women, more than 4,000 were children and more than 25,000 people have been injured.

More than 2,000 have been reported missing.

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