livus

African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) are the world's largest living land-based animals, reaching a height between 10 and 13 feet (roughly 3 to 4 meters) and weighing between 4 to 7 tons. One in particular, Doma, is the most dominant male in his group. Yet he seems to have developed this superiority as much through charisma and kindness as from sheer girth. All the other elephants in his herd run to him at the first sign of trouble; during calmer times, they willingly present him with their rumps in a seeming sign of submission...

Via @jeffw

At a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.

Jeff Bridges' addition to the Tron: Ares cast marks his first return to a feature film since 2018's Bad Times at the El Royale. The acclaimed actor has starred in nearly 100 different films and television series since he made his onscreen appearance in the classic television series Sea Hunt (1958 - 1961) alongside his father, Lloyd Bridges, who was in the leading role. Bridges has been nominated for Best Actor seven times throughout his illustrious career, winning for Crazy Heart in 2010.

Bridges' most recent Oscar nomination was for Supporting Actor for 2016's celebrated heist western Hell or High Water starring Chris Pine and Ben Foster. Since then, Bridges has had a supporting role in the 2017 drama The Only Living Boy in New York and the 2017 action disaster movie Only the Brave starring Josh Brolin and Miles Teller. Bridges notably played Champ in Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Golden Circle before playing Father Daniel Flynn / Dock O'Kelly in Bad Times at the El Royale in 2018.

The suffering of the Sudanese may be off camera now, but it won't be in a few months when babies are starving en masse.

Fears Israel is influencing location of dock away from the north, where famine threat is most severe. A giant floating dock is nearing completion in the eastern Mediterranean from where it will be pushed towards the Gaza shore, but there is growing uncertainty over how useful the US project will be in containing a famine.

There are concerns in the humanitarian community that Israel has co-opted the pier plan, which Joe Biden touted as a way to bring about a “massive” increase in aid to Gaza, with one aid official saying the project was in danger of becoming a “smokescreen” for the planned invasion of Rafah.

The dock has been built off US naval vessels and is expected to be in position by early May. According to several aid officials, the current plan is to anchor it not off northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is most severe, but at a point halfway up the strip where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have a stronghold.

That would mean that food aid brought in via the dock would still have to pass through an IDF checkpoint at the Netzarim corridor, a military road that bisects the strip, and which has been a choke-point stopping humanitarian deliveries reaching the north.

Some UN and other humanitarian officials fear that the aid will be diverted south to camps set up for the more than 1 million people now sheltering in Rafah. The IDF wants them to move out so that it can conduct an offensive against Hamas units in Gaza’s southernmost city.

Such an offensive would inevitably mean the temporary closure of Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings in southern Gaza, so the US-made floating dock would serve as a substitute, while at the same time diverting pressure on Israel to open northern crossing points to substantial aid traffic.

“One of the key arguments for having a dock was to put it further north so that suppliers could come in more directly to the north,” a UN official said, adding that what was actually being proposed looked more like a “smokescreen to enable the Israelis to invade Rafah”.

The title of this piece is very clickbaity but the article is quite interesting.

The two disappearances of Tom Phillips and his children.

For months, aid groups have struggled to get food to an estimated 300,000 people in northern Gaza, where the world’s global authority on food security recently predicted a famine was either already happening or would begin before July.

The crisis worsened last week when the food charity World Central Kitchen, the only organisation outside the UN regularly providing hot meals, suspended operations after Israeli strikes killed seven staff members.

“WCK was feeding around 500,000 people each day with hot meals,” said Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Programme in Cairo. “We are feeding over a million people each month, and Unrwa [the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees] is providing food to people monthly. Between the three of us, we are really trying to push back this famine.

“But this will only work if humanitarian aid workers are operating in a safe environment – there has to be respect for their protection, because of the urgent need to access the most vulnerable throughout the Gaza Strip.”

Via @BrikoX

Ethiopia’s army “summarily executed several dozen civilians” and committed other war crimes in the northwestern Amhara region earlier this year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said, as it called on the United Nations to launch an independent investigation.

The incident in the city of Merawi in late January was among the deadliest for civilians since fighting began between Ethiopian federal forces and Fano militia in the restive region in August, the New York-based rights group said in a report on Thursday.

Some 7% of Reddit’s free share float (or more) has been sold short so far, according to an estimate from the analytics company Ortex cited by Reuters. That’s something the social platform was worried would happen, noting in its prospectus that retail traders in its subreddits (and particularly on r/WallStreetBets) could cause “extreme volatility” in Reddit’s share price. Those Redditors had already signaled in posts that they were planning to short the stock.

Public data revealing short interest positions on Reddit won’t be available until April 9.

Reddit shares fell as much as 11% at market open to a low of $51.52 after an already-bad Wednesday. Bloomberg reports that Wednesday’s decline was in part due to a Hedgeye Risk Management report naming Reddit as a short idea, saying the stock could plummet 50%.

Reddit’s share price in the low $50 range is still well above its IPO price of $34, and even above its impressive first-day closing price of $48, which had investors chattering about the company’s impressive gains.

Schindler’s List director says in speech marking 30th anniversary of the USC Shoah Foundation that he is alarmed that ‘we may … once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish’.

In remarks reported by Deadline, Spielberg said: “Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I am increasingly alarmed that we may be condemned to repeat history – to once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish.”

He added: “The echoes of history are unmistakable in our current climate. The rise of extremist views has created a dangerous environment, and radical intolerance leads a society to no longer celebrate differences but instead conspire to demonise those who are different to the point of creating ‘the Other’… This is happening alongside anti-Muslim, Arab, and Sikh discrimination. The creation of ‘the Other’ and the dehumanisation of any group based on their differences, is the foundation of fascism.”

Spielberg also directly addressed the current conflict in Gaza for the first time, saying: “We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of October 7th and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza.”

A West Papua freedom movement leader is renewing calls for a UN human rights visit to Papua after new videos of Indonesian soldiers torturing a West Papuan man emerged online.

Violence by armed groups has escalated in Haiti, the poorest country in the Caribbean. The issues go back to the era in which Haiti was ruled by the colonizing power France.