World roundup: March 18 2024

Stories from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Haiti, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

March 18, 1921: The Peace of Riga formally ends the 1919-1920 Polish-Soviet War. The Poles emerged mostly victorious, regaining some of the territory that had been lost to the Russian Empire during the three 18th century partitions of Poland, and the outcome put a damper on Bolshevik plans to try to spread their revolution to other parts of Europe. Poland’s borders with what had by then become the Soviet Union were of course redrawn again during and after World War II.

March 18, 1965: During the Voskhod 2 space mission, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes the first person to conduct a spacewalk. Leonov exited the Voskhod spacecraft and spent 12 minutes, 9 seconds in space. The mission’s end the following day almost became a tragedy when weather forced the capsule to touch down off course, in the heavily forested Upper Kama Upland region. Leonov and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, had to spend the night in the forest because the terrain made their planned airlift impossible and ground rescuers couldn’t reach them until the following day.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Northern Gaza is already well beyond the internationally recognized threshold for famine, the Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification monitoring group announced on Monday. The IPC characterizes a “famine” as a condition in which 20 percent of the population of a given area is suffering from its most severe level of food insecurity, and it estimates that some 70 percent of the people in northern Gaza are in that condition. Tracking deaths in northern Gaza has become all but impossible, but with figures like this if the population isn’t already beginning to die en masse of starvation that eventuality surely isn’t far off. Overall the IPC says that some 1.1 million people, roughly half of Gaza’s population, are in that most severe level of food insecurity, which is the largest percentage of a territory’s population to receive that rating since the IPC system was created in 2004.

Elsewhere: