| Dear readers,
May 15 marked the anniversary of the Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled during the creation of the State of Israel during the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Seventy-six years later, Palestinians are again being displaced as the Israeli offensive in the Strip continues in Rafah, with renewed fighting in the north against Hamas militants in areas where the fundamentalist militias had been declared “dismantled.” Some 450,000 Gazans have now evacuated Rafah, the last refuge for the majority of the Strip’s population, many having been previously displaced from other areas earlier in the war. “I’ve been here for about 80 years and a catastrophe like this, I have not seen,” said one survivor of the 1948 Nakba. “Our homes have gone, our children have gone, our property has gone, our gold has gone, our incomes have gone — nothing is left. What is left for us to cry over?”
In the U.S., President Joe Biden has challenged presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump to two debates in June and September, ahead of the November election. The two presidential candidates have been sparring over the issue for weeks, with the Trump camp announcing in April that the former president is “willing to debate anytime, anyplace and anywhere.” Picking up the gauntlet, Biden said he had heard Trump “was free on Wednesdays,” in reference to the weekly recess in the ongoing hush money trial against the Republican in New York. CNN and ABC News secured the broadcast rights to the debates, which are scheduled to be held on June 27 and September 10.
Elsewhere this week, Iberian killer whales returned to the headlines by sinking a sailboat in the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain, the seventh vessel the orcas have been attributed with sending to the bottom of the sea since 2020. This curious behavior by the so-called Gladys orcas, a pod of 15 killer whales, has attracted global interest given the cetaceans’ prolific modus operandi. However, experts believe that these are not intentional attacks, but rather learned behavior that may be related to their curiosity, their fondness for play, or some form of caution. “They don’t go like a battering ram to attack the ship and sink it, and they might do so if that were their intention,” said Alfredo López, a marine biologist and spokesman for the Atlantic Orca Working Group. We hope you enjoy this selection of stories. |
