World roundup: July 24 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, the Philippines, Algeria, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 24, 1261: With much of the city’s garrison apparently out on a raid, a small group of soldiers from the Nicene Empire enters and seizes control of Constantinople in a nighttime incursion. Latin Emperor Baldwin II and most of the city’s grandees were evacuated by Venetian ships. The Nicene capture of Constantinople ended a 57 year war to reestablish the Byzantine Empire following its elimination during the Fourth Crusade. The restored empire was ruled by the Palaiologos Dynasty through its final collapse in 1453.

July 24, 1923: The Treaty of Lausanne formally ends the Turkish War of Independence and establishes the borders of the Republic of Turkey. The treaty superseded the World War I Treaty of Sèvres, which partitioned Anatolia and was so punitive that it motivated the remnants of the Ottoman/Turkish military to resist.

INTERNATIONAL

• Monday appears to have been the hottest day ever recorded, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the previous hottest day ever recorded was, uh, Sunday. The average global temperature topped out at 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.89 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday, edging out the previous day’s high by 0.06 degrees. It’s not terribly surprising that the planet got a little warmer on Monday than it was the day before. What is kind of surprising, and not in a good way, is that these records are being set in the absence of an El Niño, the previous one having ended earlier this year. That suggests these latest records are mainly about climate change.

• The good news is that wealthy Western nations (chiefly Australia, Canada, Norway, the UK, and the US), who a) are primarily responsible for wrecking the climate and b) don’t really need the extra energy supplies or revenue, are going to belch another 12 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere from all the new oil and natural gas exploration projects they’ve either approved or will be approving throughout 2024. The Biden administration has managed to lead the world in issuing new oil and gas licenses. Somehow it expects to convince China and much of the developing world to go green despite this—do as we say not as we do, I guess.

• In another development with climate ramifications, new research suggests that metallic deposits on the ocean floor are producing oxygen. This discovery of so-called “dark oxygen” could change how scientists conceptualize the origins of life on earth, since it means photosynthesis isn’t the only way that oxygen could have been introduced. The reason this has climate ramifications is because these are the same metal deposits that companies and governments want to harvest because they’re a source of the rare earth materials that are critical for green technologies. But if those metal deposits are making oxygen, it seems likely that mining them will have calamitous effects on deep sea ecosystems.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Writing for +972 Magazine and Local Call, Yesh Din’s Dan Owen says that the Israeli military (IDF) is working hard to obfuscate its war crimes:

As these accusations pile up, Israel is beginning to launch another large-scale operation alongside its ongoing military campaign: the biggest crime cover-up in the country’s history.

Israeli leaders and diplomats repeat ad nauseam the well-worn mantra that Israel’s army is the most moral in the world. This claim is based, among other things, on the military’s supposedly robust legal mechanisms that ostensibly approve every attack and investigate suspicions of international law violations. In its arguments at the ICJ against the accusation that Israel is committing genocide, Israel’s defense team repeatedly praised these legal mechanisms: even if Israeli soldiers commit war crimes, the lawyers argued, the system is capable of investigating them on its own.

However, a new report that I authored for the human rights group Yesh Din shows how the main role of Israel’s military law enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism. Indeed, +972 Magazine and the Guardian recently revealed that Israeli intelligence agencies surveilled the activities of the ICC, in part to determine which incidents were being referred to the prosecutor’s office for investigation; in doing so, Israel could retroactively open investigations into those same cases and then reject the ICC’s mandate on the grounds of the “principle of complementarity.”

Elsewhere: