geneva_convenience

Ukraine’s relationship with the UK has “got worse” since the Labour government took power in July, officials in Kyiv have told the Guardian, voicing frustration over Britain’s failure to supply additional long-range missiles.

The UK prime minister is yet to visit Ukraine four months after taking office and a frustrated Kyiv has said that a trip would be worthless unless Keir Starmer committed to replenishing stocks of the sought-after long-range Storm Shadow system.

“There’s no point in his coming as a tourist,” one senior figure in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration said at a time when Ukraine is acutely concerned about the impact that Donald Trump’s US election victory will have on its war effort.

Ukraine is growing increasingly unhappy with London as Russian troops advance in the east of the country at their fastest rate since 2022, with US officials concluding that the frontlines can no longer be considered static. Ukrainian commanders said they were heavily outgunned.

GENEVA, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Friday nearly 70% of the fatalities it has verified in the Gaza war were women and children, and condemned what it called a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.

The U.N. tally since the start of the war, in which Israel's military is fighting Hamas militants, includes only fatalities it has managed to verify with three sources, and counting continues.

The 8,119 victims verified is a much lower number than the toll of more than 43,000 provided by Palestinian health authorities for the 13-month-old war. But the U.N. breakdown of the victims' age and gender backs the Palestinian assertion that women and children represent a large portion of those killed in the war.

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Argentina's President Javier Milei on Wednesday replaced Foreign Affairs Minister Diana Mondino after she voted in favor of lifting the U.S. embargo against Cuba at the United Nations.

Milei, a libertarian who took office in late 2023, is unabashedly pro-United States and has taken a cooler stance toward leftist trade partners in the region and overseas, including by taking steps to distance Argentina from Cuba and Venezuela.

Earlier on Wednesday, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly called on the United States to end its decades-long sanctions regime on Cuba, in a non-binding resolution opposed only by the U.S. and Israel.

Milei, who has said that he wants Argentina to be in line with the U.S. and Israel, shared a post on social media from a lower house lawmaker praising his government for "not supporting nor being an accomplice of dictators."

Israeli hooligans provoked clashes with Dutch youth in Amsterdam on Thursday after they chanted racist anti-Arab slogans, tore down Palestinian flags and ignored a minute of silence for the Spanish flood victims.

The attacks by some of the travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv fans occurred on Wednesday and Thursday in different parts of of the Dutch capital ahead of their Uefa Europa League match against Amsterdam club Ajax.

Hooligans were seen removing at least two Palestinian flags from what appeared to be the front of locals' homes a night before the match, according to the AD daily newspaper.

An Arab taxi driver was also attacked by mobs who appeared to be with the Israeli fans, although police said they couldn't identify the nationality of the attackers as no arrests were made.

A group of Israeli fans gathered in the Dam Square on Wednesday were filmed sparking confrontations with locals, shouting “Fuck you” at some of them and “Fuck you Palestine”.

Ahead of match on Thursday, fans heading to the Johan Cruyff Arena stadium were seen shouting: “Let the IDF (Israeli army) fuck the Arabs”.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof called the clashes “unacceptable antisemitic attacks” but failed to mention the assaults by the hooligans against Dutch citizens.

• Most Trump voters were white, a trend that continued from 2020:

Slightly more than 8 in 10 Trump voters in this election were white, roughly in line with 2020. About two-thirds of Harris’ voters were white, and that largely matched President Joe Biden ’s coalition in the last election. White voters make up a bulk of the voting electorate in the United States, and they did not shift their support significantly at the national level compared to 2020.

• Trump’s share of Black voters rose slightly, driven largely by younger men:

Nationally, about 8 in 10 Black voters supported Harris. But, that was down from about 9 in 10 in the last presidential election who went for Biden.

• Slightly more Hispanic voters supported Trump in 2020:

While Harris won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won.

• Narrow gains with women benefitted Trump:

Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was somewhat narrower than Biden’s. Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump. His support held steady among white women — slightly more than half supported him, similar to 2020.

• Trump saw a modest increase with men:

Trump made a similar gain among men, with a modest shift increasing his advantage. The shifts by gender were concentrated among younger voters, as well as Black and Latino voters. White voters across genders and older voters across genders voted similarly in 2024 as they did in 2020.

A pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng outperformed the pollsters by correctly predicting a Trump victory. Virtually all of the professional prognosticators anticipated either a Harris win or a race that would be too close to call on Tuesday night.

The pollsters have once again been exposed as little more than a glorified Rasputin class, soothsayers whispering into the ears of the elite in Washington and New York. “US election ‘oracle’ predicts surprise Kamala Harris win,” one representative news article declared on Sunday, referring to the widely touted Selzer poll finding Harris leading in Iowa. Trump has since won the state by over 10 points.

Those Rasputins and their council of fools made well over $1.5 billion from the presidential election, advising and advertising Harris to defeat. Whatever we’ll learn about why the Vice President failed so badly, one thing is clear: her campaign advisors don’t know America.

Humility seems in order: about the limits of polling, about the Democratic Party’s lack of working class appeal, about Kamala’s performance in the popular vote, and about the major media’s obliviousness. Instead of humility, though, the “strategic” political class are in full-on We Did Nothing Wrong mode.

Despite the Democrats losing the popular vote in the election to the Republicans for the first time since 2004 - and by more than five million votes - many pro-Kamala Harris social media users aimed their frustrations at pro-Palestine voters, specifically Arabs and Muslims, on Wednesday.

Even if Harris had managed to win Michigan in the electoral college, which is home to a significant Muslim and Arab voting bloc, she would have still lost the election.

"Asian, Black, Hispanic and white voters all moved towards Trump. "Harris only increased her vote share among the over-65s and with white college-educated women," the FT report said.

One X account user posted: "Fuck Gaza at this point! And I mean that from the bottom of my ass! They at harris rally screaming every time she speak and never at a trump rally! Good! Let Israel run wild on them."

Donald Trump wants to remove US troops from northern Syria rather than leaving them as "cannon fodder" if fighting broke out between Turkey and Kurdish fighters, Robert F Kennedy Jr said on Wednesday.

Speaking to Tucker Carlson during a live broadcast covering the US presidential election result, the Trump ally, who is expected to play a major role in his government, said the president-elect had expressed his intentions for northern Syria during a plane journey.

"We were talking about the Middle East, and he took a piece of paper and he drew on it [a] map of the Middle East with all the nations on it, which most Americans couldn't do," he told the right-wing broadcaster.

The Knesset approved the second and third readings of the proposed law to expel the families of terrorists during the early hours of Thursday morning, Israeli media reported.

61 Knesset members reportedly supported the proposal, and 41 opposed it. The law grants the interior minister authority, following a hearing, to order the deportation of a terrorist’s family member—such as a father, mother, sibling, child, spouse, or common-law partner—to Gaza or another location.

Israeli internal intelligence arrested four Israelis, one of whom works in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, on charges of leaking and falsifying classified documents concerning the ongoing war on Gaza, an Israeli court revealed over the weekend.

The fabricated documents allegedly leaked by one of Netanyahu’s aides were falsely attributed to the late Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar. The revelations of the recent fabrications repudiate Israeli propaganda claims of Hamas’s alleged intransigence in ceasefire negotiations throughout the war, especially during the last round of negotiations over the summer.

During those negotiations, Netanyahu had insisted that Israel must maintain a permanent military presence along the Philadelphi corridor, a strip of land bordering Gaza and Egypt, because he claimed that Hamas was using it to smuggle weapons and supplies.

At around the same time, the leaked documents falsely claimed that the Philadelphi corridor was to be used by Hamas to smuggle Israeli captives out of Gaza alongside Sinwar.

The leak case was classified by Israel’s military censor until the Israeli court revealed the name of the main suspect. According to Israeli reports that followed the easing of censorship, highly classified documents acquired by the Israeli army in Gaza were misquoted, misattributed, and selectively leaked alongside fabricated information to the media in a way that served Netanyahu’s purpose of sabotaging a potential ceasefire and captives exchange deal — in service of his agenda of prolonging the war.