World roundup: July 19 2024

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

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 19, 64: The Great Fire of Rome ignites in the area around the Circus Maximus under uncertain circumstances. The conflagration would continue to rage for six days before subsiding, only to reignite and rage for another three days. The actual circumstances behind the fire have been lost in an ocean of legends and rumors. Chief among these is the story that Emperor Nero blamed the fire on Christians and under that pretense launched the first imperial persecution of the nascent religious sect. Another theory has Nero himself ordering the fire in order to destroy Rome and rebuild it to his own tastes (in this narrative he uses the Christians as a scapegoat to escape his own culpability). Modern scholars seem generally to be skeptical of these theories. A more mundane but also more plausible theory is that the fire started accidentally and spread quickly due to high winds.

French painter Hubert Robert’s 1785 The Fire of Rome, 18 July 64 AD (Wikimedia Commons)

July 19, 711: The Battle of Guadalete

July 19, 1864: The Third Battle of Nanjing ends with a decisive Qing victory and the final eradication of the rebel Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The battle, which ended after the death of rebel leader Hong Xiuquan and saw the Taiping forces lose perhaps as many as 100,000 men (double that if you include losses incurred over the course of the entire siege, which began in March), was the last major engagement of the Taiping Rebellion.

INTERNATIONAL

Friday was apparently an exciting day in the cyber realm. This is decidedly not a tech newsletter so I’ll turn to CNET for details:

Hospitals, banks, airports, airlines and broadcasters worldwide were impacted by a massive, ongoing IT outage Friday. Thousands of Windows PCs, which many companies and organizations rely on as part of their critical internet infrastructure, were hit by the CrowdStrike outage. Perhaps most concerning, several US states reported that their emergency 911 call centers were also hit.

The outage was blamed on a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The company handles the security of many Windows PCs and services around the world. In a statement Friday morning, CrowdStrike said the issue had been "identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

Microsoft Regional Director Troy Hunt called it "the largest IT outage in history" in a post on X.

Many systems are still recovering, though CrowdStrike has reportedly solved the problem so this is now a matter of fixing individual computers that were affected. Anyway I think the most important thing is that we learn absolutely nothing from this incident and continue to increase our societal dependence on tech as before.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

In a case that predates the situation in Gaza, the United Nations International Court of Justice ruled on Friday that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories (East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank) has become a “de facto annexation” in violation of international law. It determined that Israel should end said occupation and withdraw its settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as soon as possible. HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed offers more detail and a sober assessment of what it means:

The court found that Israel is committing major violations of international law, including “de facto annexation” of occupied land and breaking the global prohibition against racial discrimination and apartheid. It concluded that Israel should take steps like evacuating settlers and making reparations to affected Palestinians. It also emphasized Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and said other countries are obliged to cease support for Israel’s occupation and to help end the policy “as rapidly as possible.”

The advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice covers Israeli practices in the occupied West Bank, in East Jerusalem (which Israel claims as its own territory) and in the Gaza Strip.

The opinion from the panel of 15 judges from around the world, selected by the U.N. General Assembly, is non-binding and has no immediate consequences.

The ICJ previously issued an opinion in 2004 saying Israel’s construction of a “separation wall” in the West Bank was illegal, yet the wall is still standing 20 years later.

Still, the assessment from the court will likely increase pressure on Israel and its allies, including the U.S., for progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Opponents of the status quo ― in which little movement is occurring toward a settlement, while America and other Western states provide Israel with military and diplomatic support regardless of its treatment of Palestinians ― now have a new basis to say these conditions are illegitimate.