“Bombing the Ras Isa fuel port is not just an attack on infrastructure, it’s an attack on the lifelines that keep millions of Yemenis alive,” Aisha Jumaan, president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, told Antiwar.com.

“Without fuel, hospitals will cease to function, clean water will be scarce, and food supplies will diminish. We saw this during the Saudi blockade on Yemen where fuel shortages crippled hospitals, cut off clean water, halted farming, and stifled humanitarian aid,” Jumaan said.

https://archive.ph/BS3QV

China’s domestically developed C909 passenger jet has expanded its regional presence, with two of them beginning commercial operations with Vietnam’s budget airline VietJet on Saturday.

Their debut makes Vietnam the third Southeast Asian country to sign on the planes made by the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), after Indonesia and Laos.

According to a statement from Comac on Saturday, the civilian jets have been leased from Chinese regional carrier Chengdu Airlines, and will operate on domestic routes between Vietnamese capital Hanoi and Con Dao Island off southern Vietnam, and between Con Dao Island and business hub Ho Chi Minh City.

News of the VietJet lease came days after Vietnamese regulatory reforms allowing airlines to import aircraft certified by Brazil, Canada, Russia, Britain and China. The government decree, which took effect on April 13, expands a previous policy that restricted imports to aircraft certified by Vietnam, the United States or the European Union.

Comac, which aims to advance China’s goal of technological self-sufficiency, is seen as a potential challenger to the Airbus-Boeing duopoly in the global market. Comac’s narrowbody C919 passenger jet – viewed as a direct competitor to the single-aisle Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 families – is rapidly expanding production and commercial operations, while the widebody C929 is reportedly in the detailed design stage.

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The “Israeli” military announced that a soldier had been killed on Saturday in the fighting in Gaza, the first fatality since a ceasefire with Hamas collapsed in mid-March.

The military said Sergeant Major Ghaleb Sliman Al-Nasasra, 35, fell during combat in northern Gaza, adding that three others were also wounded.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28876360

Bethan McKernan in Jerusalem
Sat 19 Apr 2025 12.54 EDT

"...Israel appears confident that it can maintain the siege with little international pushback.

It is also moving ahead with large-scale seizures of #Palestinian land for security buffer zones, and plans to shift control of aid delivery to the army and private contractors, exacerbating fears in #Gaza that #Israel intends to maintain boots on the ground in the territory long-term and permanently displace its residents."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28874997

By Ahmed Dremly in Gaza City, occupied Palestine and Mera Aladam
Published date: 18 April 2025 11:35 BST

[article contains much detail about #Hassouna's life, tragically cut short by #Israeli strike]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28875206

By Mera Aladam
Published date: 18 April 2025 15:22 BST

""As rights advocates and lawyers, we are ashamed to even talk about the levels of torture happening," she said, citing stomping on faces, humiliation and forced consumption of sewage water as some of the lighter treatment Palestinians face.

"Their honour is stepped on every day, every minute. Their mistreatment is incredibly horrible.""

Ecommerce giants Alibaba, JD.com and Pinduoduo are leading Chinese internet groups in launching multibillion-dollar initiatives to help traditional exporters switch to domestic sales, as part of a national campaign to cushion the country’s economy from an escalating trade war with the US.

Alibaba has set up a task force to source goods from exporters in more than 10 provinces across China. Taobao and Tmall, its ecommerce marketplaces, have promised to offer higher commissions and better exposure on their platforms to encourage at least 10,000 exporters to sell 100,000 items. Alibaba’s supermarket chain Freshippo also said it had created special “green channels” for export suppliers to sell their products on its shelves.

As well as the cancelling of the “de minimis” duty exemption on small packages worth less than $800, Chinese sellers face tariffs of 125 per cent on many of the goods they have been shipping to the US, making such sales uneconomical.

Li Chengdong, founder of Beijing-based ecommerce consultancy Haitun, said “political” considerations had driven Chinese tech giants to “voluntarily take on social responsibilities”.

Chinese tech groups have been reined in and reminded of their social responsibilities by Beijing since a government crackdown in 2020. President Xi Jinping met leading entrepreneurs in February, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Tencent’s Pony Ma and Meituan’s Wan Xing, in a sign that the sector was back in favour.

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China’s imports of US liquefied natural gas have completely stopped for more than 10 weeks, according to shipping data showing how the Sino-American trade war has spread to energy co-operation.

The freeze on US LNG is a repeat of a block on imports that lasted for more than a year during Donald Trump’s first term as president.

But the impact of the stand-off has potentially far-reaching implications, strengthening China’s energy relationship with Russia and raising questions over the huge expansion of multibillion-dollar LNG terminals that is under way in the US and Mexico.

China’s ambassador to Russia said earlier this week that China would probably step up its imports of Russian LNG instead. “I know for sure that there are a lot of buyers. So many buyers are asking the embassy to help establish contacts with Russian suppliers, I think there will definitely be more [imports],” said Zhang Hanhui.

Russia has emerged as the third-largest supplier of LNG to China, behind Australia and Qatar; the two countries have also been negotiating over a new gas pipeline, the Power of Siberia 2.

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On Wednesday, the Global Legal Action Network (Glan), the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) and the Hind Rajab Foundation formally submitted the warrant request to the UK's attorney general and director of public prosecutions. The submission for an arrest warrant argued that Saar was criminally responsible for the Israeli military's attack on the Kamal Adwan hospital late last year.

A spokesperson for the attorney general's office said: "The law officers have declined to provide consent to the prosecution of Gideon Saar." They added: "International law requires that immunity is accorded to serving ministers for foreign affairs in domestic criminal proceedings irrespective of the subject matter, or gravity, of any complaint."

Glan director Gearóid Ó Cuinn told MEE his organisation has seen evidence that "Mr Saar made plans to prematurely leave the UK before he was made aware of the attorney general’s decision". "This was an active intervention by UK authorities to protect an unindicted war criminal in the midst of the ongoing extermination in Gaza," he said.

Chinese scientists have achieved a milestone in clean energy technology by successfully adding fresh fuel to an operational thorium molten salt reactor, according to state media reports.

It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.

The development was announced by the project’s chief scientist, Xu Hongjie, during a closed-door meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences on April 8, the official Guangming Daily reported on Friday.

The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.

Some experts see the technology as the next energy revolution and claim that just one thorium-rich mine in Inner Mongolia could – theoretically – meet China’s energy needs for tens of thousands of years, while producing minimal radioactive waste.

A much bigger thorium molten salt reactor is already being built in China and is slated to achieve criticality by 2030. That research reactor is designed to produce 10 megawatts of electricity.

China’s state-owned shipbuilding industry has also unveiled a design for thorium-powered container ships that could potentially achieve emission-free maritime transport.

Meanwhile, US efforts to revive the development of a molten salt reactor remain on paper, despite bipartisan congressional support and Department of Energy initiatives.

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