World roundup: February 19 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Canada, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

February 19, 197: The Roman army under Emperor Septimius Severus faces off against forces loyal to Roman usurper Clodius Albinus in the Battle of Lugdunum (AKA the modern French city of Lyon). After a two day fight Severus and his army were victorious, and Albinus either committed suicide or was murdered. Exact casualty figures are obviously impossible to tabulate, but there were a large number of Roman soldiers involved (a total of between 100,000 and 150,000, split more or less evenly between the two principals) and later reports suggest high casualties on both sides. Consequently, many historians hold that Lugdunum produced the greatest number of Roman military casualties of any single battle in the history of the empire.

February 19, 1942: US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs “Executive Order 9066,” which in so many words permitted the forced relocation of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans to internment camps. Roosevelt finally suspended the order in December 1944 and the camps were shut down by 1946. If December 7, 1941, was “a date which will live in infamy” because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this date lives in a different kind of infamy. In an act of pure xenophobia for which the US government eventually apologized and made reparations payments—when I say “eventually” I mean survivors received reparations in the 1990s—the Roosevelt administration incarcerated tens of thousands of people without charge and in the process destroyed their lives and livelihoods.

INTERNATIONAL

A new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday finds that the Earth’s glaciers lost 36 percent more ice from 2012 to 2023 than they did from 2000 through 2011. While not exactly surprising, the results do suggest that glacier loss is going to be more rapid than previous models may have anticipated, accelerating sea level rise and the loss of critical freshwater sources in many parts of the world.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

According to the Humanity and Inclusion NGO, “more than 15 million” Syrians are at risk from unexploded ordinance as the country emerges from its civil war. That’s out of a population of some 23 million total. HI’s experts estimate that somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 explosive munitions used during the conflict failed to detonate—a problem particularly common to the “barrel bombs” that Bashar al-Assad’s military used to drop from helicopters. Undiscovered Islamic State booby traps are another major part of this threat. A massive cleanup operation is in order but any attempt to arrange something like that is likely to be hampered by a lack of funds and by Western sanctions.