World roundup: November 22 2024
Stories from Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Ukraine, and elsewhere
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Just a reminder that Sunday’s roundup will be our last before the US Thanksgiving holiday, and we will resume our regular schedule on December 3.
TODAY IN HISTORY
November 22, 498: Rival groups of Roman clergy separately elect two different popes, Symmachus and Laurentius, to replace the departed Anastasius II (who had died on November 19). This papal election took place at the height of the Acacian Schism, a period during which the western and eastern Christian churches were at odds over the growth of Miaphysitism (the belief that Jesus was of one unified human-divine nature as opposed to the orthodox view that Jesus was of two separate natures, one human and one divine) in the east. Roman clergy were divided between a majority who supported a hard line against eastern church leaders (who elected Symmachus) and those who supported reconciliation (who elected Laurentius). After several tense years, Laurentius left Rome and tacitly abandoned his claim to the papacy in 506 under the threat of an intervention by Ostrogothic ruler Theodoric the Great. The schism ended under Symmachus’s successor, Pope Hormisdas, in 519.
November 22, 1963: US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, either by Lee Harvey Oswald or [REDACTED]. Oswald was later arrested and then was himself killed while in police custody on November 24, either by Jack Ruby or [REDACTED]. Successive US presidents have promised to declassify documents related to the assassination, but those promises have so far been [REDACTED].
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations’ COP29 climate summit was supposed to wrap up on Friday but it sounds like attendees are sticking around to try to salvage some sort of climate financing agreement. Developed nations reportedly offered to make a new pledge of $250 billion per year in support for developing nations to cope with climate change and transition to renewable energy. This is just a teeny bit lower than the $1.3 trillion that developing nations are demanding. It’s not really much of an increase over the $100 billion that developed nations pledged for this task back in 2009—a pledge they only finally fulfilled in 2022. Panama’s lead negotiator, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, said that the $250 billion offer “spit on the face of vulnerable nations like mine,” while the Climate Action Network International called it a “joke.” We’ll put them down as “maybes.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on Friday that at least 281 humanitarian workers have been killed worldwide in 2024, making it the deadliest year for aid personnel on record with about five weeks still to go. Many of them have been killed in Gaza, but the OCHA also cited conflicts in places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine as major drivers of these casualties.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Arab Center’s Jonathan Kuttab explains how the Israeli government has chipped away at legal distinctions between civilians and combatants:
One area where Israel’s degradation of international law is most evident is in its systematic erosion of the distinction between civilian and military targets, and between combatants and noncombatants, during military operations. This is known as the principle of distinction, which is considered the cornerstone of International Humanitarian Law.
As a reminder, much of international law was codified and clarified after the two World Wars, when the community of nations—horrified at the carnage and destruction and fearful of the proliferation of increasingly lethal weapons—decided to create structures of institutions and enact conventions and agreements that would regulate and decrease the possibility of such horrors in the future. The creation of international tribunals, the United Nations Charter, the International Criminal Court, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and many other agreements, conventions, and institutions were established and flourished. Despite occasional setbacks and breaches, they generally held firm and even expanded the notion of a world order governed by law and not just by brute force and military might.
In its Gaza war, and later in its Lebanon fighting, Israel has systematically violated—and justified its violation of—the principle of distinction. It may be instructive to trace how this was done, as Israel is using the same process to render the principle inoperable.
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