Tag: united states

Analysis: Has the US-led Red Sea force calmed shippers amid Houthi attacks? | Israel-Palestine conflict News

The United States-led multinational naval force that was to protect and secure maritime traffic through the Red Sea from attacks by Yemeni Houthi rebels appears significantly weakened – even if not quite dead in the water – before it ever sailed together.

Less than a week after the announcement of Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG), France, Italy and Spain have pulled out of the nearly fully-created force touted to include warships from more than 10 nations.

The decision to cobble together what is essentially an anti-Houthi coalition was almost forced on Washington. In early November, a US destroyer shot down several missiles fired from Yemen but the US tried to maintain a business-as-usual pose and not advertise that it was engaging the Yemeni group.

As long as the combative Houthis tried, unsuccessfully, to lob missiles at Israel, a country attacking Yemeni’s Arab and Muslim brethren, the US could maintain that the whole affair was not a serious regional escalation. But when their repeated attacks on ships headed to and from the Suez Canal threatened the security of international maritime routes, the US was forced to act.

The US Navy already has a huge number of ships in the region, so why would it need to ask friendly nations to contribute more?

One reason is that even with such a large force, the US cannot spare many ships for the task. The other is political unwillingness to be the only nation attacking Yemen as it would likely be interpreted, especially in the Middle East, as direct military action in aid of Israel.

US political and military dilemmas are largely conditioned by geography and Yemen’s control of the strategically important choke point where the Indian Ocean funnels into the Red Sea. The Bab el-Mandeb passage is only 29km (16 nautical miles) wide at its narrowest point.

Its approaches are bristling with warships: More than 35 from at least 12 nations that do not border the Red Sea are now in positions from which they could reach the strait in less than 24 hours. Nations along its African and Arabian shores have at least as many in their harbours.

Many of these ships were already in the region before 7 October. The northwestern parts of the Indian Ocean leading into the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandeb are probably the most notorious pirate-infested waters of the 21st century.

The civil war and breakdown of Somalia’s central government created maritime piracy on an unprecedented scale. Somali pirates venture out to sea in fast small boats, armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and intercept commercial shipping heading towards and from Bab el-Mandeb in three directions: from the Far East, passing south of India; from the Gulf, sailing around the Arabian Peninsula; and north to south along African shores.

Shipping companies demanded protection and the international community, aware of the need to keep shipping lanes open and secure, provided it. Every month, 200 ships cross the Suez in each direction carrying no less than 3 million containers.

Since 1990, the Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150) had been engaged in anti-piracy missions. More than 30 nations, mostly Western but also including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore and Turkey, took part and usually kept at least four warships on station, rotating every three to four months.

In 2022, a new force, the CTF-153, took over. When the latest war in Gaza started, the force was comprised of US destroyers USN Carney and USN Mason, Japanese destroyer JDS Akebono and a South Korean one, ROKS Yang Man Chun.

In anticipation of the arrival of stronger assets, the US ships immediately moved into the Red Sea, and both have on several occasions intercepted Houthi missiles and drones. The US Navy hurriedly deployed two aircraft carrier task groups – which include anti-aircraft and anti-submarine cruisers and destroyers, helicopter carriers, assault ships and other offensive and defensive assets – to the wider region.

It is almost certain that the White House did not immediately have a concrete action plan for involvement in the Gaza conflict, but the decision to deploy to the region naval and air power capable of taking on all potential adversaries was militarily prudent.

Meanwhile, the White House also engaged in diplomacy. The US and Iran exchanged indirect statements, assuring each other they did not seek confrontation. Iran announced that it had not been informed of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and the US did everything to avoid alienating Iran. In return, Tehran nudged the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah into refraining from a full-scale offensive. The de-escalation seemed to be working.

But then the Houthis, considered to be an Iranian proxy in much the same way as Hezbollah, decided to attack in the Red Sea, demanding Israel end its war on Gaza. They launched long-range missiles at Israel and naval missiles at US Navy destroyers that had entered the Red Sea.

Both operations failed, with all missiles and drones being on several occasions intercepted and shot down. The US Navy was convinced that its two destroyers could handle the situation, possibly being reinforced in time by a couple more.

But when tankers and container ships in the Red Sea started taking hits almost daily, the escalation was undeniable. Many of the world’s biggest shipping companies shifted from going through the Suez Canal to the longer and more expensive route around Africa. Commercial carriers now introduced a $700 surcharge on each container sailing the longer route.

Counting just those laden with Asian manufactured goods heading to Europe, the additional cost is a staggering $2bn per month. That increase gets passed on to the final customers – leading to inflation. In addition, the longer travel will soon cause distribution delays, shortages and general disruption of the economy, which every nation will feel.

The markets demanded action and the US optimistically believed it could assemble a robust force of up to 20 participating nations to carry out Operation Prosperity Guardian. Within days, high hopes were drowned in refusals. The Pentagon believed that China, a country with major interests in keeping open the sea lanes that take its exports to Europe, would join in, especially as it already has a self-supported task force of one destroyer and one frigate in the western Indian Ocean.

But Beijing replied that it had no interest in joining the OPG. Refusals also came from major Arab navies straddling Red Sea shores: Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They hinted that they did not want to be seen engaging an Arab country in this situation. The US apparently showed understanding for their position, confident that it will have no problem in attracting enough ships.

Meanwhile, France, Italy and Spain have indicated they will not join a mission under US command – only if it is a European Union or NATO force. That leaves the US with the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Greece, Canada and Australia as nations that are still, officially, on board with the OPG.

Most already have ships either in the Indian Ocean or in eastern Mediterranean and could reach the Red Sea within a few days, enabling the OPG to take charge and start escorting commercial shipping before the New Year.

The first reaction of the merchant marines came on Sunday when the Danish shipping major Maersk announced that its vessels would resume transit through the Red Sea under OPG escort. If OPG can provide safe passage, it would boost its support could influence conteiner companies like MSC and CGN, petroleum giant BP and others to return to the shortest route. But Maersk made it clear that it could return to the longer route around Africa depending on how safety conditions evolve.

Regardless of the number of participating countries, Operation Prosperity Guardian will not be just a simple act of escorting ships through the southern Red Sea. In the last few days there have been several worrying signs of a potential major escalation that could easily open another front involving major regional actors.

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Gaza, US universities and the reproduction of power | Gaza

On the morning of December 10, I awoke to two messages. The first was from my father. He was asking me to write to the US Department of State to request the evacuation of my uncle and his family from Rafah, in southern Gaza, where they are “without any food, shelter or water and very terrified from the bombing all the time”. My aunt, my uncle’s wife, was killed by the Israelis in Gaza in 2014. Now, he and his children face the real possibility of joining her in death.

The second was an email from a friend in a senior leadership role at one of the large, multilateral organisations. We attended the University of Pennsylvania together and she was dismayed by the capitulation of its current president, Liz Magill, to the right wing. But she felt, justifiably, that she was unable to speak out because of the oppressive environment at work, and in America in general.

If Magill, a moderate who stood for very little, could not stand up to a clutch of rusty pitchforks, what hope was there for a woman of colour with Middle Eastern roots?

Those two messages, coming so close together, neatly captured the various fronts of the war on Palestinian lives.

‘We believed what we wanted to believe’

I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 with a BA in political science. My experience of the school was mixed. Having resources – which Penn does – is a nice thing for lots of reasons. But having money may also indicate an excessive orientation around, and to, it.

Back then, securing a well-paying job after college was the main thrum of undergraduate life. The internships with consulting and banking firms were highly prized and expected to lead to rich offers from those same firms in New York or London.

Things don’t appear to have changed much: Penn ranked first, ahead of Princeton, Columbia, MIT and Harvard, in the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse Salary Impact study. Or, as the headline in the WSJ frames it, the school is first among “The Top US Colleges That Make Their Graduates Richer”.

Which isn’t to say that Penn was an apolitical place; the accumulation of large amounts of money cannot possibly be apolitical.

I recall an early conversation with a young woman who, upon learning I was from Palestine, responded with “there’s no such thing”. Separately, I remember being raged at by another undergraduate, in the context of my student activism, “if you don’t like it here you can go home, terrorist”.

While I suspect that Penn’s focus on money may have been a major contributor to Magill’s ultimate undoing – her testimony at Congress has been cited as a reason for the withdrawal of a $100m donation – that is not the full story.

My experience of Penn was representative of elite America’s pinched disdain for anything which threatens its conception of itself as meritocratic, deserving of exalted status and morally beyond reproach. It’s an essentially conservative posture, one that resists growth and defies all efforts at meaningful social education.

I observed that posture later in life, as a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. There, I met some of the high-achieving minds behind President George W Bush’s catastrophe in Iraq. I remember one conversation I had with a senior State Department official who now serves as ambassador to a large country in Asia.

“Hans Blix,” I said, referring to the former head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, “told you there were no weapons of mass destruction. Why did you go to war?”

He explained, disarmingly, that “we believed what we wanted to believe”.

In seven words, he captured the essence of a system that insulates its people from accountability, which today partially explains why my family in Gaza are left to die along with the rest of the Palestinians there. It explains President Joe Biden’s priggishness and the egg on his National Security Advisor’s long face.

Reproducing power

When I first learned of the hunt for large quarry at Penn and Harvard I shrugged. I regarded the topic as a sideshow; false moralism in an alternate universe meant to distract from the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. But now I think I was probably too dismissive of what was happening, and how it related in a direct, if multifaceted, way to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The relationship between Capitol Hill, University City, where Penn rests, expansively, Cambridge and Rafah is correctly understood through the prism of power. The main role of elite higher education institutions in America is to reproduce power and the infrastructure which attends it.

If society is an organism, the university is the clonal petri dish. But in nature, nothing is reproduced perfectly; evolution is an essential feature of every biological system. And evolution within the university leads to a divergence from the staunchly guarded power structures that define our existing political order.

The grotesque threshing by the right wing, on television, in newspapers and through congressional inquiries, is animated by the awareness that young, educated people invariably think differently across generations. The assault on US universities is part of a larger effort to direct and control the evolution of thought in this society.

In this context, values are relative and speech is only valuable insofar as it isn’t performed and lies dormant in the realm of abstract ideas, like “freedom” or “the arc of the moral universe”.

Now Magill stands, unwillingly in all likelihood, as the lamb on the altar. Collateral damage in so many words. The people who demanded her resignation may not have been able to articulate their whole reason for wanting her ouster.

But they demonstrate an innate understanding of the stakes: the capacity of the organism to reproduce itself is embedded within the university, more than anywhere else.

What they fail to understand, however, is that like Daniel Dennett’s theory of the mind, independent thinking arises everywhere at once. Nothing short of a bullet to the brain can stop its emergence.

Sadly, for the people in Gaza today, the advent of a new political understanding on Palestine in the US doesn’t mean very much. My uncle and his family, and many thousands of others, may be dead by the time a new generation of Americans, whose evolution was forged by a genocide, come to power.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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‘Did not ask for ceasefire’ in Gaza: Biden after phone call with Netanyahu | Israel-Palestine conflict News

White House says the two leaders discussed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, including its ‘objectives and phasing’.

United States President Joe Biden says he did not ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in a telephone call between the two leaders.

“I had a long talk with Netanyahu today [Saturday] and it was a private conversation,” Biden told reporters on Saturday.

“I did not ask for a ceasefire,” he said, in response to a shouted question.

In a statement later, the White House said Biden and Netanyahu discussed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, including its “objectives and phasing”.

Biden “emphasised the critical need to protect the civilian population including those supporting the humanitarian aid operation, and the importance of allowing civilians to move safely away from areas of ongoing fighting,” said the statement.

“The leaders discussed the importance of securing the release of all remaining hostages.”

The call between the two leaders came a day after the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution calling for the scaling up of aid for Gaza but fell short of calling for a ceasefire or a pause in weeks-long fighting.

The resolution, which demanded “immediate, safe and unhindered” deliveries of life-saving aid to Gaza “at scale”, was passed after UNSC members wrangled for days over its wording and toned down some provisions at Washington’s insistence.

The US and Russia abstained from the vote, whose impact on the ground, aid groups fear, will be close to nil.

“This resolution has been watered down to the point that its impact on the lives of civilians in Gaza will be nearly meaningless,” Avril Benoit, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement.

“The way Israel is prosecuting this war, with US support, is causing massive death and suffering among Palestinian civilians and is inconsistent with international norms and laws,” Benoit added.

The US also opposed the demand to create a UN monitoring mechanism for aid, assuring Israel would continue to have a role in inspecting deliveries.

Netanyahu on Saturday “expressed his appreciation” for the stance taken by the US at the UN, his office said. He also “made it clear that Israel will continue the war until all its goals are completed”.

More than 200 killed in 24 hours

Israel has continued to bomb Gaza for nearly 80 days, with more than 200 people killed in the past 24 hours.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said the death toll since the start of the attacks rose to 20,258 on Saturday, most of them being women and children.

According to UN estimates, the war has displaced 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population.

The UN has described the situation in Gaza as “beyond catastrophic”, with residents struggling to find food, fuel and water, while living in crowded shelters or tents.

In a post on X, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said it “cannot deliver meaningful aid” while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continues.

“It is extremely tragic that politics stand in the way of 2.2 million people’s survival in Gaza,” UNRWA spokesperson Tamara al-Rifai said at a news conference on Saturday.

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The US is no country for old men | Opinions

Shortly prior to his death from prostate cancer in August of this year at the age of 72, my father emerged from a state of muteness to recite, with a burst of energy, the 1927 poem, Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That is no country for old men.”

My mother, my uncle, and I were present for the impromptu performance, which took place in my father’s bed in Washington, DC, where he had commenced in-home hospice care after the chemotherapy treatments that had been forced upon him by profit-oriented doctors had accelerated his demise.

This was but one of many poems my father had memorised as a young man intent on honing his intellectual credentials; my mother and uncle – who in their youth had also fallen under the influence of my dad’s cerebral pursuits – joined in on the lines they remembered. Having completed his vehement recitation, my father resumed his generally mute state, which was thereafter punctuated only by intermittent outbursts about wanting to die.

I have no way of knowing what was going through my dad’s mind during that final poetic eruption, but the first line of the Yeats poem did seem to be a fitting commentary on the country in which we found ourselves – the one where we had all been born and the one my parents and I had spent years avoiding. My mom and dad had only relatively recently returned to reside in the homeland after nearly eight years in Barcelona; I had flown into Washington in August from Turkey, which was one of my regular stops in a 20-year self-imposed exile.

Indeed, my father’s final months had merely confirmed that the US is “no country for old men”. Counterproductive chemotherapy treatments were but one of the ways he had been milked for all he was worth, before being turned over as prey to the lucrative realm of funeral and cremation services.

For example, for a one-month prescription of the prostate cancer drug Xtandi, a medication developed with none other than US taxpayer money, my father had been charged $14,579.01 – ie, more than many people in the United States earn in several months. For folks lacking the means to pursue healthcare and other basic needs, US capitalism can be deadly, too.

And while US society specialises in oppressing a wide range of demographics – minus, of course, the elite minority that thrives on acute inequality – the treatment of the elderly is particularly cynical. Having outlived their labour-based exploitability as cogs in the capitalist machine, older people become decaying objects from which profit must continue to be extracted until the very last minute.

According to the results of a West Health-Gallup survey published in 2022, approximately one in four Americans aged 65 and older and three in 10 Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 said they had sacrificed basic needs, such as food, to pay for healthcare.

The study found that older women and Black Americans were disproportionately affected and that punitive health care costs constituted a significant source of stress in the daily lives of older Americans, with stress naturally only exacerbating existing medical issues.

Add vampire-like insurance companies to the mix, and the panorama becomes ever more morbid. The prohibitive fees associated with many programmes – coupled with insurance outfits’ frequent refusal to cover lifesaving treatments – means that life itself continues to be a privilege and not a right in the United States.

Then there’s the $34bn assisted-living industry, which a recent Washington Post investigation revealed to be plagued by wanton neglect despite charging an average of $6,000 a month per resident. Since 2018, the Post reported, more than 2,000 residents have wandered off unnoticed from such facilities, and nearly 100 of them have died after doing so.

So much for “assisted living”.

To be sure, the loneliness and isolation that so often attends old age in the US does nothing to increase life expectancy; nor does the unique stigma that US “culture” attaches to ageing. As the American Psychological Association (APA) has noted, institutionalised ageism in the United States entails a “host of negative effects, for people’s physical and mental wellbeing and society as a whole”.

Granted, loneliness and isolation are often lifelong afflictions for inhabitants of the so-called “land of the free”, where the collective mental wellbeing is hardly helped by a dog-eat-dog insistence on individual success at the expense of communal and family bonds and the conversion of human beings into consumerist automatons.

And the cutthroat, transactional nature of existence in the US culminates, appropriately, with elderly bodies being put up for grabs by pharmaceutical companies, nursing homes, and the corporate racket known as the US healthcare system.

That said, the US is, in fact, a fine country for some old men – such as former warmongering diplomat Henry Kissinger, who perished at home in Connecticut in November at the ripe old age of 100 after spending a good part of his life causing the deaths of countless people worldwide.

Not long after my father’s death in August, I fell into conversation with a Bolivian man in his 50s who had resided in Washington for more than two decades and who expanded on the “no country” theme. He planned to stick it out for another 10 to 15 years before returning to his home city of Cochabamba, he told me, because he couldn’t afford to be old in the US.

And while the US may be “no country for old men”, it’s not much of a country for anyone else, either.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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UN resolution on Gaza aid criticised as ‘insufficient’, ‘meaningless’ | Israel-Palestine conflict News

The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution on more aid for Gaza after several days of delays and weakened language that did not call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, prompting a backlash with some describing it as “woefully insufficient” and “nearly meaningless”.

The resolution merely called for steps “to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities”, and was adopted on Friday with 13 votes in favour, none against, and the United States and Russia abstaining.

It also demanded that all parties “facilitate and enable the immediate, safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale” to Palestinian civilians.

It came after several postponements and difficult closed-door negotiations aimed at reaching a compromise in the language that would not be rejected by Washington, which vetoed another UNSC resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire earlier this month.

While UNSC resolutions are legally binding, Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher said that Israel and other countries have ignored them in the past.

“The circumstances and the consequences for people refusing to follow these Security Council resolutions seem to be much worse for some countries than others,” said Fisher, reporting from occupied East Jerusalem.

Palestinian officials have said that more than 20,000 people, about 70 percent of them children and women, have been killed in Israel’s land, air and sea offensive in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war on October 7.

While top UN officials and international aid agencies welcomed the call for more humanitarian assistance, they said the resolution does not go far enough with the majority of the enclave’s population of 2.3 million displaced, the imminent threat of famine and the spread of diseases.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a post on X that he hopes the resolution can improve the delivery of aid, “but a humanitarian ceasefire is the only way to begin to meet the desperate needs of people in Gaza and end their ongoing nightmare”.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, welcomed the resolution but reiterated the need for an “immediate ceasefire”.

Oxfam America’s Scott Paul stressed to Al Jazeera that aid to Gaza “can’t work while the bombs are falling and destroying houses, factories, farms, mills, [and] bakeries”.

“There’s no point in bringing in flour if you can’t bake bread with it. So the focus is entirely wrong,” Paul said.

International medical charity Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) said the measure fell “painfully short” of what is needed to address the dire humanitarian crisis.

“This resolution has been watered down to the point that its impact on the lives of civilians in Gaza will be nearly meaningless,” MSF-USA Executive Director Avril Benoit said in a statement.

“Anyone with a conscience agrees that a massive scale-up of the humanitarian response in Gaza must take place without delay.”

All efforts to address the “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza must be welcomed, said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, but emphasised that “nothing short of an immediate ceasefire is enough”.

She said the resolution “was watered down significantly” and “insufficient” and added that it is “disgraceful that the US was able to stall and use the threat of its veto power to force the UN Security Council to weaken a much-needed call for an immediate end to attacks by all parties”.

Tamer Qarmout, assistant professor in public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera that the vote showed how the UN has become “irrelevant” to resolving the war.

“When the UN was formed after World War II, it was supposed to tackle, to prevent similar conflicts such as the one happening in Gaza,” he said. “But it’s a political organisation that is controlled by powerful countries, especially those with veto power at the UN Security Council. So politics is there in every policy and little detail of the UN work.

“I don’t think this war can be resolved through UN channels … The UN is becoming irrelevant, marginalised, very politicised and its mandate is being questioned now,” he added.

Ardi Imseis, assistant professor of international law at Queen’s University in Canada, said the UNSC has yet again failed in its responsibility to safeguard international peace and security due to the actions of one member, the US, which is protecting its ally Israel.

Today, he told Al Jazeera, the two “find themselves out on a limb against the whole of the international community and all of it at the expense of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip – defenceless, starved, chased out of their homes, subject to a scorched earth tactic”.

Here are some other reactions to Friday’s vote:

Palestine

Palestine’s envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, said in a speech following the vote that the resolution was a “step in the right direction” but that what was necessary was an immediate ceasefire.

He said Palestine supported the amendment to the resolution that was proposed by Russia, but was rejected by the US. An early draft had called for an immediate ceasefire, and the Russian amendment called for the “suspension” of fighting, which was also opposed.

“What we are dealing with is an attempt at the destruction of our people, and their displacement forever from their land. This is Israel’s goal, its true objective. No future for Palestinians in Palestine,” Mansour said.

Israel

Speaking during the council meeting, Israeli envoy Gilad Erdan said, “The UN’s focus only on aid mechanisms to Gaza is unnecessary and disconnected from reality” and it should focus on releasing captives held in Gaza.

Erdan thanked the US for its support during negotiations on the resolution, which according to him, kept in place Israel’s ability to continue inspecting aid that enters Gaza.

Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said in a social media post that Israel would continue its war in Gaza “until the release of all the hostages and the elimination of Hamas in the Gaza Strip”.

 

Hamas

The armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza did not appear to share the Palestinian Authority’s stance on the resolution, saying in a statement that it does not do enough to meet the needs of besieged Palestinians in the Strip.

“During the past five days, the US administration has worked hard to empty this resolution of its essence, and to issue it in this weak formula … it defies the will of the international community and the United Nations General Assembly in stopping Israel’s aggression against our defenceless Palestinian people,” a Hamas statement said.

United States

The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Washington believes the resolution “calls for urgent steps to immediately allow safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access and to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities”.

She also said she would ignore Russia’s “rant” on the resolution and criticised Moscow for “creating conditions that they are complaining about now in their unprovoked war in Ukraine”.

Russia

Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian envoy, said the US moves on the resolution had resulted in a “toothless” and “neutered” draft.

Nebenzia particularly criticised the diluted language that called for the creation of “conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities”, saying it fell short of actually pausing fighting and would give Israel a “free hand” to continue its operations.



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Who wins the race for electric cars? | Automotive Industry

The global race for electric vehicles is at full speed and it is driving geopolitical rivalries.

For every seven cars sold around the world last year, one was electric. And global sales of electric cars are expected to set another record this year.

Governments are offering incentives to buy cleaner cars, as part of a push to reduce carbon emissions.

China is leading the race right now.

But, United States President Joe Biden wants to change that – and he’s spending billions of dollars to boost production in the US.

Meanwhile, the European Union is playing catchup, and investigating allegations that Beijing isn’t playing by the rules.

Plus, how green are electric cars compared to fossil fuel ones?

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US accuses Iran of being ‘deeply involved’ in Houthi attacks in Red Sea | Crime News

White House says Tehran is providing Yemeni rebel group with weapons and tactical intelligence.

The United States has accused Iran of being “deeply involved” in attacks by Houthi rebels on commercial ships in the Red Sea.

Tehran’s support for the Yemeni rebel group includes both weapons and tactical intelligence, the White House said on Friday as it presented newly declassified intelligence purporting to show Iranian involvement in the attacks.

“We know that Iran was deeply involved in planning the operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea,” White House national security spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

“This is consistent with Iran’s long-term material support and encouragement of the Houthis’ destabilising actions in the region.”

“This is an international challenge that demands collective action,” Watson said.

The White House said that visual analysis showed nearly identical features between Iran’s KAS-04 drones and the unmanned vehicles used by the Houthis, as well as consistent features between Iranian and Houthi missiles.

Al Jazeera could not independently verify the White House’s claims.

The Houthis, who control large parts of Yemen including the capital Sanaa, have launched dozens of drone and missile attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea in what the group has described as a show of support for Palestinians facing Israeli bombardment in Gaza.

The attacks have effectively rerouted a large portion of global trade by forcing freight companies to sail around Africa, imposing higher costs and delays to deliveries of energy, food and consumer goods.

More than a dozen shipping companies, including the Italian-Swiss giant Mediterranean Shipping Company, France’s CMA CGM and Denmark’s AP Moller-Maersk, have suspended transit through the Red Sea due to the attacks.

Washington earlier this week announced the launch of a multinational force, involving more than 20 countries, to protect vessels transiting the Red Sea.

Last week, a US guided-missile destroyer shot down 14 attack drones believed to have been fired from Houthi-controlled regions of Yemen.

The Houthi leadership has warned that they will strike back at “American battleships” and “American interests” if they are attacked.

Tehran has said it supports the Houthis politically but denies sending the group weapons.

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs last month rejected Israeli accusations that the Houthis were acting with its guidance when they seized an Israeli-owned ship and denied responsibility for a drone shot down by a US guided-missile destroyer.

The Houthis, which have effectively maintained a United Nations-brokered truce with the Saudi-backed government since last year, rose up against the Yemeni government in 2014, triggering a devastating civil war.

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US Supreme Court declines to speed up ruling on Trump immunity claim | Donald Trump News

Decision by the nation’s top court turns down a request by prosecutor Jack Smith to expedite review of immunity plea.

The top court in the United States has declined to rule on whether former President Donald Trump can claim immunity for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, rejecting efforts by prosecutors to expedite review of the question.

The Supreme Court rebuffed the request from US Special Counsel Jack Smith on Friday, kicking it back to a lower court for continued review.

The decision came as Trump faces a slew of legal troubles, some of them related to his efforts to seize office after the 2020 election despite his loss to current President Joe Biden.

Earlier this week, a top court in the state of Colorado ruled that Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by his supporters, in an effort to halt the certification of his election loss, disqualified him from appearing on the state’s ballot in the 2024 election.

Trump has said that he should be immune from charges relating to efforts to overturn the 2020 election on the grounds that former presidents cannot face charges for actions related to their official responsibilities.

Prosecutor Jack Smith has alleged that Trump worked to obstruct Congress and defraud the US government through a wide-ranging effort to reject the will of the voters.

A Congressional panel investigating the January 6 riot concluded that Trump knew that his persistent claims that the election had been stolen through massive fraud were devoid of evidence, but pushed to nullify the election results anyway.

Those findings have done little to change Trump’s popularity within the Republican Party, and he remains the conservative party’s clear frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 presidential election.

On December 1, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that Trump was not immune from prosecution relating to his efforts to overturn the election. Trump quickly appealed that decision, and his trial is paused until the appeal is sorted out.

Special Counselor Smith then petitioned the Supreme Court on December 11 to review the case, asking the highest court to leapfrog the lower court in order to speed up the trial, currently scheduled to begin in March.

The court declined that request on Friday, sending it back to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has signalled that it will move quickly to resolve the matter.

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Who might be the next US president? | Joe Biden

Biden and Trump are frontrunners in an uncertain contest.

Next year’s US presidential election is predicted to be a contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

But not even that is certain in the most uncertain of election campaigns.

So who else might be in the mix? And what are the important issues?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Tim Constantine – Senior vice president of diplomacy and external affairs at Washington Times and host of The Capitol Hill Show

Thomas Gift – Director of the Centre on US Politics at University College London

Arshad Hasan – Democratic political strategist

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Biden pardons thousands of marijuana offenders, gives clemency to 11 people | Drugs News

The US president says the actions are meant to address disparities in sentencing that have long taken a toll on the Black community.

US President Joe Biden has pardoned thousands of people convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, says the White House.

Friday’s action, Biden’s latest in executive clemencies meant to rectify racial disparities in the justice system, broadened the criminal offences covered by the pardon.

Biden has also granted clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called “disproportionately long” sentences for non-violent drug offences.

In a statement, he said his actions would help make the “promise of equal justice a reality”.

“Criminal records for marijuana use and possession have imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities,” Biden said.

“Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs.”

The categorical pardon built on a similar round issued just before the 2022 midterm elections that pardoned thousands convicted of simple possession on federal lands.

The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but a fifth of its prisoners, and a disproportionate number of them are people of colour, a large segment of Biden’s support base.

Biden has been gearing up for an intense year of campaigning in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election as his popularity sags, especially among young people.

Some of the people pardoned were serving life sentences, the White House said, including Earlie Deacon Barber of Alabama for cocaine distribution and Deondre Cordell Higgins of Missouri for distributing crack cocaine.

Given recent reforms, each would have been eligible for reduced sentences if they were sentenced today.

Some of the long sentences reflect longstanding disparities in sentencing for crack-vs-powder cocaine convictions. Legal experts have now said that such punishments do not aid public safety and disproportionately affect Black communities.

Biden’s new marijuana proclamation pardoned people who were “committed or were convicted of the offense of simple possession of marijuana, attempted simple possession of marijuana, or use of marijuana,” including for use and possession on certain federal lands.

As of January 2022, no offenders sentenced solely for simple possession of marijuana were in federal prisons, the US Sentencing Commission found this year.

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