Tag: Features

Top 10 Most Underrated Anime of 2023

Most anime fans will agree that 2023 was a great year for anime. Tons of new shows were released, and many major titles came and went as the year progressed, like the release of the One Piece live-action and the final episode of Attack on Titan (heartbreaking).

With so much focus on these major titles, however, many of 2023’s other anime were easily overlooked. This article will give those anime the recognition they deserve by focusing on all of the greatest underrated anime of 2023!

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Image Source: ShoPro via IMDB

Okay, so this one actually got a fair amount of recognition after its initial release. However, because it was released right in the middle of summer, it was majorly overshadowed by tons of other anime releases, making it one of the greatest yet criminally underrated anime of 2023.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is an unconventional zombie apocalypse anime that didn’t get nearly the amount of attention that it rightfully deserved. This anime follows the story of Akira, a businessman trudging his way through life while suffering at the hands of his soul-suckingly meaningless office job.

Once the undead pandemic hit, however, Akira couldn’t have been more excited; finally, he could have some well-deserved time off from his corporate nightmare! Rather than feel overcome by mortal terror at the end of the world as he knew it, Akira simply decided to go about his daily life, slaying zombies left and right, while crossing off the 100 entries on his bucket list.

Level 1 Demon Lord and One Room Hero

Image Source: Houbunsha/Seven Seas Entertainment via IMDB

This anime is criminally underrated. Similar to Zom 100, Level 1 Demon Lord and One Room Hero was released around the middle of summer 2023 alongside some pretty major anime titles, which could be the reason why it has flown under the radar for so many.

Level 1 Demon Lord and One Room Hero is about a hero, Max, who defeats a fearsome and dangerous Demon Lord named Maou. Instead of dying as everyone expected him to, however, the Demon Lord went into a deep slumber instead, to preserve his remaining power. Ten years later, he unexpectedly awakens into an adorable chibi version of himself!

Curious about his predicament and how his mortal enemy has been faring all this time, Maou visits Max to see if he’s gotten stronger in his absence. Instead, Maou learns that Max is now a total loser living in a disturbingly run-down one-bedroom apartment. Absolutely disgusted at how low his once fearsome rival has sunk, Maou the Demon Lord decides to move in with him, in hopes that they’ll both be able to regain their former glory!

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre

Image Source: Junji Ito/Netflix via IMDB

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, other than being a mouthful to say, is easily one of the most underrated anime of 2023. This anime is based on a series of short horror stories written by Junji Ito, a famous author of numerous horror manga.

If you’re a fan of horror/supernatural anime, or are just a fan of horror in general, then you would love this series. Japanese Tales of the Macabre features an animated collection of 20 of the most horrifying, macabre stories written by Juji Ito.

Each episode features one or more of his famous works, ensuring that fans of the series remain constantly on the edge of their seats. This series is pretty much only available on Netflix, which could explain its lack of popularity.

Buddy Daddies

Image Source: Aniplex of America via IMDB

How is this anime not more popular? Frankly, I was on board as soon as I saw “daddies” in the title, but after watching it, I honestly don’t see how more people aren’t just as obsessed with this anime.

Buddy Daddies is about Kazuki Kurusu and Rei Suwa, two extremely talented assassins who happen to be roommates (oh my god, they were roommates…). This pair of deadly (and attractive) assassins have literally never failed a single job; they’ve never once let a target escape and are widely considered to be the most dangerous men in their fields. All it takes is one adorable little girl to completely change their lives forever, though.

An innocent four-year-old girl is spontaneously thrust into their lives with little explanation, and they have to suddenly figure out how to juggle being cold-blooded assassins and loving, adoptive parents at the same time. These assassins are normally able to take anything that’s thrown at them, but somehow find themselves struggling with this little kid; from taking her to nursery school to feeding her balanced meals, Kazuki and Rei realize that they may just be up against their toughest job yet: parenthood.

The Gene of AI

Image Source: Nikkatsu Corporation via IMDB

The Gene of AI is a perfect choice for fans of futuristic and sci-fi anime alike, as it takes place far in the future. The world that this anime takes place in is similar to ours, but it comes with a very specific unique twist: humanoid AIs walk and live among humans in a futuristic society.

Similar to humans, these AIs suffer from a variety of ailments and illnesses, the likes of which can’t be solved by regular doctor appointments. Thankfully, Dr. Hikaru Sudo has dedicated his life to the field of medicine, and won’t turn a patient away just because they aren’t human!

Dr. Hikaru Sudo treats these humanoid AIs with the same level of professionalism and respect that he does with his human clients, though he often has to resort to illegal methods in order to treat their ailments. But as more and more AIs become afflicted with strange ailments, and the ethical lines of Dr. Hikaru Sudo’s practice become further blurred, how will humanity be able to continue existing peacefully alongside these hyper-intelligent beings?

The Fire Hunter

Image Source: WOWOW via IMDB

The Fire Hunter is admittedly a bit of wild ride, but hoo boy you’re going to love every single second of it. The Fire Hunter is easily one of the best, yet most criminally underrated anime of 2023; there hasn’t been a single person who’s watched this anime and not loved it.

The Fire Hunter takes place in a supernatural world that’s been overrun by terrible, fiery beasts known as Flame Demons. Mankind’s last hope for survival lies in the hands of the Fire Hunters, the only ones capable of facing the fiery menace.

This anime follows the story of Toko, a young girl who is miraculously saved by a Fire Hunter while being attacked by one of the beasts. The Fire Hunter who saved her tragically died as a result of the attack, and she, along with the Hunter’s dog (who also miraculously survived) must travel to the country’s capital to deliver the terrible news to the Hunter’s family. Terrible secrets about the country’s leaders, the Demons, and the very world they live in are gradually unraveled in the process, however, and it becomes a race against time itself to stop humanity from succumbing to its imminent downfall.

My New Boss Is Goofy

Image Source: Aniplex of America via IMDB

Unlike a handful of other entries on this list, My New Boss is Goofy is a very lighthearted and unproblematic anime that’ll leave you in stitches! This anime is hilariously relatable, especially to anyone who’s ever felt underappreciated in their workplace (and I mean really, who hasn’t?).

This anime follows the sad little life of Momose, a middle-aged salaryman just trying to navigate the stale and underwhelming world of corporate advertising and business sales. After having finally reached the end of his rope at his last job due to his boss’s constant harassment, Momose decides to find a new job entirely, where he’ll never have to face his tyrant of a boss ever again.

Once he’s been hired in at his new job, however, Momose suddenly becomes filled with anxiety; what if his new boss is somehow even worse than his last?? Thankfully, however, not only is Momose’s new boss, Shirosaki, the farthest possible thing from a tyrant, but he’s also a total air-headed goofball. Like, the very definition of a dumb blonde; it’s amazing that he even managed to make it to adulthood at all. As Momose’s anxiety decreases and Shirosaki becomes hopelessly more and more attached to his new employee, their relationship begins to gradually turn into something more… bromantic.

Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions

Image Source: Kadokawa Pictures Inc. via IMDB

If this isn’t one of the greatest underrated anime of 2023, then I don’t know what is; it’s the perfect combination of murder mystery and buddy-cop. Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions has been described by many as the “anime version of Sherlock Holmes” and, honestly, I totally get it. If you loved watching BBC’s Sherlock or reading through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlockian mysteries, then you’re going to fall head over heels for this anime!

In this anime, Ron Kamonohashi was once a genius lead detective capable of solving any case that was thrown his way. After one fatal mistake, however, he was forced to resign and never return to his career as a detective, causing him to fall into a terrible depression and become an isolated, reclusive member of society. Thankfully, that’s where Totomaru Isshiki comes in!

Totomaru Isshiki is a young and naive police officer who is, admittedly, pretty terrible at his job. After trying and failing to solve a horrifying serial murder case on his own, he knocks on Ron’s door to ask for help. Ron reluctantly agrees to help him, and their odd partnership as a mismatched detective team begins!

I’m in Love with the Villainess

Image Source: asmikace via IMDB

Now I’m not usually one to fawn over romance anime, but I’m in Love with the Villainess is a notable outlier in the genre. Not only is this anime hilarious and incredibly engaging, but it also tugs on your heartstrings and leaves you wanting more after every episode!

Similar to Zom 100, this anime did get some relatively decent recognition after its initial release, but fans quickly moved on to bigger and better titles directly after, leaving poor old “I’m in Love with the Villainess” in the dust. This anime is genuinely one of the most hilariously relatable and engaging anime I’ve ever seen; I can’t believe it isn’t infinitely more popular by now! Romance genre aside, this is easily one of the most underrated anime of 2023.

I’m in Love with the Villainess is about a corporate drone who suddenly awakens as Rae Taylor, the protagonist in her favorite otome game. Rather than feel something normal about her situation, like fear or confusion, she is astoundingly ecstatic about the opportunity to finally romance her favorite character: Claire François, the villainess. Armed with only her knowledge of the game and her passion for Claire’s affection, Rae sets out to finally court the girl of her virtual dreams!

Migi and Dali

Image Source: REMOW via IMDB

This anime somehow manages to be unbelievably creepy and hilarious at the same time. Migi and Dali is definitely one of the weirder titles that was released in 2023, but I guarantee that anyone who sticks around for this wild ride won’t be disappointed in the slightest. Migi and Dali is about a seemingly perfect little family that harbors a dark and mildly disturbing secret.

In this anime, Osamu and Youko Sonoyama are a lovely elderly couple who decide to adopt a young boy, Hitori, from an orphanage. Unbeknownst to them, however, their seemingly perfect adopted son is harboring an insane secret: he’s not even real.

In reality, Hitori is actually two twin boys pretending to be the same person. Migi and Dali (hence the name) are twin brothers who switch out at wildly inopportune times in a desperate attempt to make it seem as though they’re one child. Their motive behind keeping their true identities hidden remains a mystery in the beginning, but as their infallible plot begins to quickly unravel, the terrifying reason behind their deception becomes astonishingly clear…

And that’s it for our list of the greatest underrated anime of 2023! These anime may not have been among the most major titles released this past year, but that doesn’t make them any less worth watching. If you’re curious about the many other amazing anime that headlined in 2023, feel free to take a look at our other recommendations, like our “Best Shonen Anime of 2023” list!

About the author

Allysen Pierce

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December 19, 2023
Who is Mallika Sagar, the IPL’s first female auctioneer?

Mumbai, India – Mallika Sagar’s introduction to the world of auctioneering came when, as a teenager in her hometown Mumbai, she read a book with a female auctioneer as its protagonist.

“And, perhaps, a bit frivolously, I thought: ‘That’s what I want to be,’” she recollects with a chuckle.

Three decades on, Sagar finds herself at the helm of making history.

After a successful 23-year career in art auctioneering, she is set to become the first female auctioneer at the richest franchise cricket league in the world when she takes the stage at the Indian Premier League’s (IPL) 2024 auction in Dubai on Tuesday.

More than 300 cricketers will go under the hammer during the daylong event, which will be a breakaway from a trend that has seen only men – Welshman Richard Madley, Briton Hugh Edmeades and India’s Charu Sharma – spearhead the event.

“It’s extremely exciting to be asked to conduct an IPL auction,” Sagar told Al Jazeera during an hourlong chat at her Mumbai office last week.

Sagar was born into a business family in the capital of India’s Maharashtra state and has lived in the city since her return, from the United States, where she graduated with a degree in the history of art.

Now a specialist in modern art and an auctioneer at a privately-owned Mumbai-based auction house, she has long been a pathbreaker on the global art auctioneering circuit. In 2001, she became the first female auctioneer of Indian origin at the international art and luxury business Christie’s.

‘All about personality and skills’

Clad in a yellow drop-waist dress and with a cup of green tea in hand, Sagar explained how auctioneering is more down to personality and skills than gender.

“You could be the most engaging male auctioneer, the most boring female auctioneer or vice versa – it’s about personality and skills.”

The 48-year-old has been responsible for wielding the gavel at both the player auctions for the Women’s Premier League (WPL), India’s IPL-style five-team franchise tournament for women.

“Sport is gendered, so to be part of something where women cricketers have a platform at the highest level and the chance to be financially independent doing what they love, was really special.”

Being one of the few female auctioneers in India, Sagar acknowledged that the inaugural WPL auction in February may have been an unwitting stepping stone to bring her to the IPL auction, a far more scaled-up affair than its WPL equivalent.

Learning the ropes – with kabaddi

Sagar’s first stint at sport auctioneering came at the eighth edition of the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), an Indian men’s professional franchise kabaddi tournament that ranks second behind the IPL most-watched sports league in the country.

She admits sport auctioneering “was a new world” for her, given her longstanding association with art.

“It did take a little bit of training, largely to change my approach,” she said.

So what does it take to make a good auctioneer?

“Depending on what you’re selling, you have to learn the mechanics of the auctioneering process and blend it with math, theatre and drama – all wrapped up in a smile!”

The PKL experience, she said, warmed her up for the cricket auctions.

Despite a foray into sport, steering a cricket auction at the WPL proved to be a different ball game.

The scale of operations, including the requirements of catching the producer’s cue in the ear during live broadcast, added a different dimension to the job.

‘Can’t let your nervousness take over your job’

Sagar describes a usual auction as an “unknown” as it unfolds in real time.

The ones in cricket often come with last-minute mic-ups or touchups with the makeup, frenzied bidding wars traversing multiple parties or, something as seemingly easy-to-do as figuring out where the franchises are seated based on the draw that allots them their order. Their dynamism warrants significant focus and flexibility.

“You have to be alert and adaptable,” she said. “At times, despite your best efforts, there can be mistakes. You may get a syllable wrong when calling out hundreds of names. It’s best to acknowledge the error, apologise, fix it, and move on.

“Regardless of the situation, you can’t panic. You cannot let your nervousness take over your job. Having composure as part of your skillset is a must.”

Sagar swears by exercise and yoga to refuel quietude and strength of body and mind.

“There’s nothing a downward dog or a headstand doesn’t fix,” she quipped. On auction eve, she retires early to avoid mental exhaustion during the all-important hours on the job the next day.

The bedrock of a well-run auction, in her view, is being as even-keel as possible as an auctioneer, no matter the stature of the players on offer.

“It’s important to present a newcomer with the same amount of energy as you would a star player,” she said.

Among the other non-negotiables, Sagar places the utmost premium on knowing the subject – the order of the sets of players, similar to pieces of art.

“You’ve got to pace out each name well and give it enough time,” she said. “Especially, when there’s a flurry of bids for them.

“And when the frenzy slows down, give it a few seconds and ask the room, ‘Everybody sure? Last chance if you’d like to bid?’ Whether in art or cricket, rapid changes such as a last-minute raise of the paddle or a new entrant coming in are a given. It’s your job to factor them all in.”

Has her preparation for the IPL auction been any different from the WPL’s?

“No, because the basic formats are the same,” Sagar explained. “The key is to make sure you are familiar with the names. You don’t want to destroy someone’s name who’s coming up on a platform as prestigious as this – it’s their moment of glory, after all.”

On Tuesday, as Sagar reels off over 300 such names, it will be as much her moment in the sun as theirs.

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December 18, 2023
Hamas is now recruiting in Lebanon. What will that mean for Hezbollah?

Beirut, Lebanon – When Hamas put out a call for recruitment in Lebanon on December 4, several mainstream Lebanese political parties and officials denounced the move, accusing the Palestinian group of violating their country’s national sovereignty, while recalling memories of the bloody civil war.

But the recruitment for a parallel armed force might end up serving the interests of Hezbollah, according to analysts, due to the Lebanese group’s military hegemony, particularly in southern Lebanon. Hamas is believed to be recruiting in Lebanon through announcements in the country’s Palestinian refugee camps and the mosques there.

“Hezbollah is trying to enlist the support of Sunni groups [like Hamas in Lebanon] in its fight against Israel from southern Lebanon,” Hilal Khashan, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, told Al Jazeera. But any other actors won’t be able to act independently because “Hezbollah fully controls the border situation.”

After Hamas’s attacks in southern Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 civilians and military personnel, according to Israeli officials, Israel has continuously bombarded Gaza, with only a brief pause in fighting at the end of November. More than 18,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry there.

In neighbouring Lebanon, more than 100 people have died since Hezbollah first targeted Israel with missiles on October 8. Most of the dead are Hezbollah fighters who have engaged Israel’s military in what they say are efforts to prevent their opponent’s full force from coming down on Hamas.

The ‘Axis of Resistance’ in Lebanon

Relations between Hamas and Hezbollah have resumed in recent years after a schism over the civil war in Syria. Members of Hamas’s leadership left their previous base in Damascus in 2012 after condemning Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on protests.

From 2017 onwards, some Hamas members returned to Lebanon, including Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy head of the Hamas Political Bureau; Khalil al-Hayya, the leader of Hamas’s Arab and Islamic relations; and Zaher Jabarin, in charge of issues concerning Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Last year, the Hamas leadership revealed the existence of “a joint security room” for the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – an Iranian-affiliated military coalition that includes Hamas and Hezbollah among other groups. Some analysts believe it could be based in Lebanon. And in April 2023, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh visited Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Analysts believe it is unlikely that Hamas would call for an expansion in Lebanon without having first consulted Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has maintained dominance in south Lebanon for decades. But Israeli officials have recently said they can no longer accept the presence of the group, or their elite al-Radwan unit, on Israel’s northern border. That’s why Hamas’s growing presence in Lebanon could be a tactical decision that also serves Hezbollah, according to some analysts.

“Hezbollah is searching for local allies in the post-war period because its military component will come into question as Israel wants it out of the south Litani,” Khashan said. After the 2006 July war between Hezbollah and Israel, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1701, calling for a demilitarised zone from the Litani River, Lebanon’s longest river that runs from the southern seaside city of Tyre into the Bekaa Valley, to what is known as the “Blue Line”, which

But the expansion of Hamas in Lebanon would not only be beneficial to Hezbollah. As Hamas is under siege in Gaza, its popularity in the West Bank has grown, according to a recent opinion poll. In Lebanon, the group could be looking to play on their increased popularity and muscle out their political rivals Fatah.

By growing their cadre in Lebanon, “Hamas can say we strengthened our political position everywhere we exist”, Drew Mikhael, an expert on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “No political actor or party doesn’t want more power.”

A return to ‘Fatahland’

Still, the announcement caused a stir among some communities in Lebanon.

“We consider any armed action originating from Lebanese territory as an attack on national sovereignty,” Gebran Bassil, the head of the Free Patriotic Movement, a predominantly Christian party, said, rejecting the creation of what he called a “Hamas-land”.

It was a reference to “Fatahland”, a throwback to a time when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat operated as a state within a state in southern Lebanon from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The PLO used southern Lebanon to launch attacks against Israel and became an active member in Lebanon’s civil war in 1975.

Other condemnations also arrived from figures like Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati; the chief of the right-wing nationalist Lebanese Forces party, Samir Geagea; a former police chief and current MP, Ashraf Rifi; and Samy Gemayel, who leads the Kataeb, a traditional Christian party that has attempted to rebrand itself as a centre-right nationalist party in recent years, among others.

While the warning was sounded by politicians across the sectarian spectrum, the reference to a return to “Fatahland” was evoked by multiple Christian leaders in particular. Resentment against Palestinians for the role of the PLO and other factions in the civil war is still common in Lebanon, particularly among parts of the Christian community, even if many empathise with the current suffering in Gaza.

‘Complete Christian marginalisation’

With the world’s eyes on Gaza, Lebanon’s Christian leaders may be using the announcement to play inter-sectarian politics and get a leg up on opponents in Lebanon, say analysts.

“Bassil’s entire career has been an effort to ramp up rhetoric on an ethnonational discourse,” Mikhael said. “Most of the time he doesn’t speak to a national audience. It’s an internal fight with Geagea.”

Bassil and Geagea lead the two biggest Christian parties in Lebanon. But despite their stature, both are divisive figures, deeply unpopular outside their immediate support base.

The internal jockeying is indicative of a Christian retreat from national politics in Lebanon, according to Michael Young of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“There is a complete Christian marginalisation on most issues today,” Young told Al Jazeera. “When it comes to issues of national discussion, they are seemingly becoming more and more parochial. Christians don’t really pay attention to Palestinian politics and are almost mentally divorced from the Lebanese state.”

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December 17, 2023
10 Anime Gift Ideas for the Otaku in Your Life

The anime universe can be a lot to handle when first diving in, especially if you are in the market to buy a present for that special someone. We’re here to help you narrow down the search by providing you with some anime gift ideas for the holiday season.

Lenticular Artwork by Dominic Glover

Image Source: Dominic Glover

Dominic Glover has some of the most unique anime artwork, as its design changes based on the angle you are looking at. While one side showcases a focused Naruto, the other exhibits him in action during an all-out battle. It’s almost as if it’s a moving picture without the need for any electronics, creating an illusion with its different perspectives.

Glover’s collection harnesses a plethora of anime to choose from, from Demon Slayer to Dragon Ball Super to One Piece. However, you may want to get your hands on it fast since their products are typically sold out with their constant high demand.

An Ode to Attack on Titan Final Season

Image Source: Etsy & Hot Topic

If your special someone considers themself to be a member of the Scout Regiment, then you should definitely get them a gift to commemorate AOT’s finale. First up, we have the “I Survived All Parts of AOT: The Final Season” sticker, which can act as a badge of honor for dedicated fans.

You can also go for the classic Scout Regiment jackets that every Attack on Titan has wished for at some point in their life. To keep things simple, you can acquire a hoodie or shirt version at Hot Topic. Or, purchasers can go for a more cozy approach with its cloak blanket variation.

Jujutsu Kaisen Manga Woven Blankets

Image Source: Etsy

Another big anime that continues to dominate viewership is the action-packed Jujutsu Kaisen. That said, you can’t go wrong with ALLEVRO’s hand-woven manga blankets that show off the elite Satoru Gojo. The artist’s creation is perfect for those who enjoy manga and anime, reimagining these covers in an entirely new way.

ALLEVRO’s products come in many different shapes and sizes, as well as alternative design choices based on the Jujutsu Kaisen series. But if your Otaku prefers another anime, you can browse through the artist’s collection to discover other remarkable finds, including My Hero Academia, Hunter x Hunter, and Chainsaw Man.

Anime Funko Pops

Image Source: Funko

Funko’s Anime and Manga collection features many famous characters, including Dragon Ball Z, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Figures generally cost around 12 to 15 dollars, so you don’t have to spend an exorbitant amount of money, as you may have seen with other high-priced items.

If you aren’t sure which Funko to decide on, you can filter in some content by checking out the best-selling or most exclusive products. Purchasers can also take it a step further with scenic pops that typically capture an iconic moment from the show. For instance, the Pop! Moment Eren & Zeke Jaeger takes you back to the infamous conversation shown in AOT.

Studio Ghibli Steelbooks

Image Source: Crunchyroll

When in doubt about anime gift ideas, you can always rely on the Studio Ghibli collection for presents. Any anime fan will undoubtedly have at least one favorite film, and you can use it to your advantage by getting them the Steelbook version. It’s the perfect collector’s item that commemorates the breathtaking art style of Hayao Miyazaki.

The Crunchyroll shop features Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and many more. On top of that, Miyazaki has recently launched the film The Boy and the Heron, so you may want to gift them movie tickets to give them some new content.

Demon Slayer Kimonos

Image Source: Anime Kimono

Another popular anime of 2023 is none other than Demon Slayer, with the most recent Swordsmith Village arc. There’s a lot of excellent anime gift ideas for this beloved series, but the one that takes the cake is the kimono collection. You can start with the main protagonist’s iconic clothing, exhibiting the classic green and black checkered design.

It doesn’t even have to stop at Tanjiro’s get-up with the numerous variations from other lovable characters. In particular, you can purchase outfits based on Giyu Tomioka, Shinobu Kocho, and Nezuko. You can also explore Anime Kimono’s personal designs that add a unique twist to the series’ fashion.

One Piece Wanted Posters

Image Source: Etsy & One Piece Store

One Piece has taken the world by storm (again) with Netflix’s live adaptation and the exciting new content from the animated series. If there’s one thing that any OP fan wants, it’s definitely the show’s wanted posters. Your best bet would probably be Monkey D. Luffy’s famous smiley-faced bo unty or any of the other Straw Hat members like Roronoa Zoro.

But if your Otaku has been explicitly obsessed with the One Piece live-action, then head over to Etsy to claim some wanted posters there. PotterTatts’ selection showcases Monkey D. Luffy, Gold D. Roger, Buggy, and Arlong, along with various sizes (and a digital download.)

Manga Sets

Image Source: Amazon

Complete manga sets are another excellent anime gift idea that continues on the adventures in written and hand-drawn form. In general, it can be difficult to obtain each book individually, so having the set can help them experience the narrative as a whole.

One of my favorites has to be the Dragon Ball Z collection (or the Dragon Ball series, if I’m being more specific) due to its connected illustrations on its spines. Alternatively, you can go for an ongoing anime like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen to give them some insight into what’s to come. You can also purchase them an entirely new manga set that hasn’t yet debuted as an anime if you want something more unique.

SeerLight’s Anime Artwork

Image Source: Seerlight

As an anime lover myself, I’ve always marveled at Seerlight’s artwork through their usage of vibrant colors and subtle placement of anime characters. Even those who haven’t watched any anime will be in awe of its design, whether it be through the artist’s print or phone case collection.

The artwork above shows the Cowboy Bebop-inspired High-Rise, the Hunter’s Inn, and the Meteor Shower depicted in Your Name. Even more so, Seerlight has unleashed a live wallpaper series on their Patreon, which brings your phone’s photographs to life with various anime.

Personalized Anime Portraits

Image Source: Etsy

For a more personal touch, you can get your friend or family member a customized anime portrait from Etsy. The highly recommended BlueMintAnime can use your suggestions to create your very own artwork, with a maximum of six characters (pets can be included, too.) The artist can work with almost any anime, regardless of its popularity, and an added bonus of a background.

Purchasers can explore the Etsy page to find even more depictions, like DoyourToon’s Haikyuu-inspired artwork. On a more bizarre note, you can turn your Otaku into a Titan using JasuDigitalArts’ many templates.

About the author

Kristina Ebanez

Kristina is a Staff Writer and has been with Twinfinite for more than a year. She typically covers Minecraft, The Sims 4, Disney Dreamlight Valley, anime, Call of Duty, and newly released games. She loves the Metal Gear Solid series (Snake Eater especially), Rockstar’s Bully, the Horizon franchise, What Remains of Edith Finch, and many more. Her dog is also an avid video game watcher, primarily when there’s a horse or a cat. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo and grew up gaming on the islands.

Kristina Ebanez

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December 15, 2023
From Kolkata’s slums to elite cricket: The story of India’s Saika Ishaque

Mumbai, India – Park Circus, a bustling neighbourhood in the heart of India’s historic eastern metropolis Kolkata, is known as a Muslim ghetto by its inhabitants and the city’s Hindu middle-class populace.

Some of the poorest slums of the city are found here at the cross-section of Kolkata’s central and southern districts in a mix of posh enclaves, malls and restaurants.

In a conservative and marginalised environment, especially for women, it is nothing short of remarkable that one of the neighbourhood’s own, Saika Ishaque, picked up cricket at a young age.

What’s more, the “ziddi” (headstrong) player from Park Circus went on to become one of Indian cricket’s breakout stars and rags-to-riches success stories of the year.

In a fairytale-like year, Saika signed a contract with the Mumbai Indians franchise in the inaugural Women’s Premier League (WPL), completed a title-winning campaign with them and made an impressive debut for India in the recent T20 series against England.

The 28-year-old left-arm spinner now finds herself knocking on the doors of the Test team as India look to build a dominant squad.

Shreyanka Patil and Saika Ishaque make their debuts for 🇮🇳 at the Wankhede 🧢#INDvENG pic.twitter.com/iJmFetRxtP

— ICC (@ICC) December 6, 2023

‘Rough and tough childhood’

Has it come easy for Saika, though?

Just ask Jhulan Goswami, the legendary fast bowler who is renowned as a poster child of improbable, against-all-odds narratives of triumph in Indian cricket.

“Saika has had a rough and tough childhood,” Goswami told Al Jazeera.

Goswami knows Saika better than most, being her former teammate in the Bengal side and current bowling coach at Mumbai Indians.

“Her family’s financial condition has always been utterly abject. She lost her father at a very young age, and coming from such a place where having two square meals a day or studying or playing is a tall ask, it’s quite incredible to see a girl having come this far and play cricket for India.”

Goswami has watched Saika’s journey unfold from up close.

The 41-year-old remembers a pre-teen Saika lugging a bat almost twice her size for practice sessions at Vivekananda Park in southern Kolkata.

“For an 11- or- 12-year-old, she had a lot of pluck, the kind of X factor you look for in young cricketers. She would come to the nets holding her mother’s hand and always used the masculine gender for Hindi words as if she were a boy: khaunga, jaunga, karunga [I will eat, go, do].”

Such slip-ups are still part of her speech. It is partly down to her upbringing in the bylanes of Park Circus, where most of her childhood friends were boys, a rarity for Muslim women there.

Her childhood was spent playing gully cricket, riding motorcycles and strutting around the neighbourhood with the air of a local gang boss.

Gozi’s words 🤝 our feelings about Saika Ishaque💯#AaliRe #OneFamily #INDvENG pic.twitter.com/6VIyWSG87D

— Mumbai Indians (@mipaltan) December 11, 2023

‘I’m here to take wickets’

To all that rizz, add a penchant for dying her hair red, green, purple and other hues.

“She has a ‘bindaas’ [carefree] character,” Harmanpreet Kaur, the India captain, who also leads Mumbai Indians, said on the eve of Saika’s India debut last week.

Echoing Saika’s iconic quip, “I’m a bowler. I’m here to take wickets” from her WPL stint, Harmanpreet added: “She has a wicket-taking mindset.”

Saika ended the T20 series with five wickets, three of which came in the third T20, which India won.

The bold spinner “loves a challenge”, according to England and Mumbai Indians all-rounder Natalie Sciver-Brunt.

“Even in her debut series for India, I saw her attack the stumps and make life difficult for batters.”

Charlotte Edwards, former England captain and incumbent head coach of Mumbai Indians, believes Saika’s personality shines through her bowling.

“She’s a real competitor and certainly a character,” Edwards told Al Jazeera.

“She’s a bit different – look how she’s got the blonde locks now!”

Goswami is credited with bringing Saika to the WPL.

“Ahead of the auction, I asked Jhulan, ‘Who’s the best left-arm spinner who’s not played for India yet?’ And she said it was Saika and sent me a video of hers,” Edwards said.

“I watched it immediately and knew instantly she was a player we wanted.”

It did help that Saika had long been a reliable wicket-taker in domestic cricket, where she has taken 140 wickets and had put in the hard yards in nearly 12 years.

From Park Circus to the big stage

Despite her domestic success, financial challenges – including costs involved in playing the game consistently and the historically limited earning opportunities for female cricketers in India – often threatened to pull Saika away from the sport.

“In many ways, the onus was on us, her Bengal teammates and the Cricket Association of Bengal, to ensure Saika doesn’t become one of the thousands of cricketers we have lost due to the lack of financial security,” Goswami said.

The tall Indian fast-bowling great gave Saika her first cricket kit but plays it down.

“Whoever could chipped in to ensure that Saika finished her schooling and kept her cricket career going. The rest is all down to her own dedication, determination and destiny.”

Saika’s first brush with cricket came on the streets of Park Circus.

Her father, encouraged by his friend, enrolled Saika in a local cricket club where she started out as a fast bowler but occasionally kept wickets too. It was at the insistence of an instructor at Vivekananda Park that the naturally left-handed Saika traded pace for spin.

“What struck me when I first saw her videos and in person was that she was slightly quicker than most left-arm spinners,” Edwards said.

“She had the ability to bowl in the powerplay, and that’s a real strength for left-arm spinners. She was really accurate in terms of what she brought to the table.”

With every wicket Saika took for Mumbai Indians – 15 in 10 matches, making her the only Indian spinner in the top 10 wicket-takers in the league – Edwards remembers turning to Goswami in the dugout to express her wonder.

“I’d tell Jhulan: ‘We’ve got the best left-hand spinner in India for 10 lakh rupees [$12,000] – an absolute steal!,’” Edwards recalled.

“And look, she is playing for India now.”

Saika Ishaque, right, took three wickets in the third and final T20 match against England [Rajanish Kakade/AP]

A fighter armed with a killer instinct

It’s a long way from where Saika found herself only three years ago. Grounded by a long shoulder-injury layoff, she lost her accuracy and rhythm to the extent that she had to be dropped from her state team.

Worried about her rapid decline, former India women’s cricketer and national selector Mithu Mukherjee put her in touch with former Bengal left-arm spinner Shibsagar Singh. Under his watch, Saika gradually rediscovered her bowling mojo and went back to her wicket-taking ways.

“The Saika I have known all these years has had that indomitable spirit: to bounce back and fight tooth and nail to overcome any hardships on and off the field,” Goswami said.

“She’s a fighter, and the adversities she faced from a young age have armed her with a killer instinct.”

Saika’s steady rise in 2023 augurs well for India as they look to build up to next year’s T20 World Cup in Bangladesh.

“The journey has just begun for Saika,” Goswami said.

“Given the ups and downs she has faced, I’d love to see her place a bejewelled crown of pride and prosperity on her mother’s head. And that would be some story, wouldn’t it?”

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December 14, 2023
Star Wars: Unlimited pushes the limits of galactic warfare — and deck building

Despite the history-changing implications of battles on Endor and Yavin, the nature of war, especially within the Star Wars universe, is one of countless skirmishes across the furthest reaches of the galaxy. Unlikely heroes and allies come together to fight on land and in space, accruing small advantages along the way to inch toward their versions of victory. The same will be true for Star Wars: Unlimited, the newest entry into the hotly contested battle for players in the world of trading card games.

Its seventh project based on the Star Wars universe, Fantasy Flight Games’ latest effort combines time-tested elements from its past ventures, along with inspiration from other popular TCGs, to make Unlimited its most dynamic version of a galactic battle yet.

“We’re trying to go in a bit of a new direction with this game in terms of streamlining things and making a really fast back-and-forth game, compared to some of our past games,” said Danny Schaefer, a designer at Fantasy Flight, in an interview with Polygon. “We definitely picked up some elements from our past [living card games] as well as some of the older Star Wars games, as well.”

One of Unlimited’s designers, Jeremy Zwirn, also worked on FFG’s previous Star Wars: Destiny dice and card game, which utilized a fast-paced tit-for-tat action system, and helped port that to the rules and vision for Unlimited.

An early demo of Star Wars: Unlimited was held at Gen Con 2023.
Photo: Fantasy Flight Games/Asmodee

“The turn structure is very quick, very interactive, and simplified,” Zwirn explained. “You don’t have something like the stack in Magic with confusing timing issues when things are happening. That worked really well in Destiny, so we wanted to carry that over to this game too.”

Another one of the game’s fundamental characteristics was borrowed from a different body of work altogether. Like many trading card games, Unlimited cards have a cost that must be paid in order to play them from your hand. But unlike Magic: The Gathering, which requires adding specific land cards that generate mana, Unlimited’s resource system is closer to Disney Lorcana and Flesh and Blood’s approach, games that allow you to use almost any card in hand as a potential resource.

“The Call of Cthulhu LCG had a somewhat similar resource system where essentially any card could be used as a resource,” Zwirn explained. “You resource one card per round, so you can eventually build up, get more powerful cards, and play them at a higher cost.”

As these varied inspirations gradually came together over more than three years of design, they eventually paved the way for more defining elements that the game’s creators introduced to make Unlimited exciting, replayable, and, in its own way, challenging.

Deck-building dynamics

Central to deck design are the game’s heroes and bases, which start on the board at the beginning of every game.

Similar to Flesh and Blood or Magic’s Commander format, Unlimited utilizes iconic Star Wars characters to serve as a deck’s primary hero. These include the likes of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Boba Fett, Chewbacca, and plenty others. Likewise, base cards depict classic locations from Star Wars stories, from the swamps of Dagobah to the Death Star Command Center and even the Catacombs of Cadera on Jedha.

The heroes provide several important contributions to each deck. For one, they have built-in abilities that impact the game in a variety of ways. These heroes can also serve as units that do battle more directly with opponents. But most importantly, heroes and bases feature colored “aspects.”

Unlimited utilizes six different “aspects” that determine the play style and possible abilities of the game’s cards. Think of them like colors in Magic, the Pokémon TCG, Hearthstone, and countless other card games.

In Unlimited, the aspects are Vigilance (blue), Command (green), Aggression (red), Cunning (yellow), Heroism (white), and Villainy (black). An Unlimited deck must have a leader and a base — your leader then provides up to two aspect icons while your base provides one. Together, the aspects that your base and hero feature then shape the cards the rest of your deck can include.

“All those permutations of mix-and-matching a leader with different bases and different aspects can create an entirely new deck,” Zwirn emphasized. “Sometimes those bases can really make or break a deck, as well.”

To highlight the basic look and structure of Unlimited’s future decks, the design team shared a few examples that feature different leaders and bases, along with some of the cards that play well with those configurations. Zwirn points to the Cunning and Villainy Boba Fett deck as one example of the importance of maximizing heroes and bases to get the most value and synergy out of the remaining cards in the deck.

A deck by Jeremy Zwirn based on the hero Boba Fett, with his base set in Jedha City.
Image: Fantasy Flight Games

“For the Boba deck, the card Cunning is an extremely powerful card that has double Cunning aspects. So to play it for only four [resources], you have to have a base and leader with Cunning aspects, which is gaining you tempo,” Zwird explained. “And the card itself creates probably the best tempo in the entire game; it can exhaust two units and bounce an enemy unit, all for four resources.”

When you break down these aspects further, you begin to see how they express the game’s play styles and color identities into classic card game archetypes.

“There are some very good aggro decks, especially on the hero side. Some very good control decks, especially on the villain side. And there are a variety of midrange decks somewhere in between,” Schaefer said.

However, don’t expect to see breakout combo decks when the game first hits shelves in 2024.

“We’re intentionally not leaning hard into combo, with the first set at least,” said Tyler Parrott, another designer on Unlimited. “There will be some combos eventually, inevitably.”

“There are combo elements to decks, but not really like ‘we’re going to kill you in one turn’ or infinite loops,” Schaefer added.

A deck by Danny Schaefer based on the hero Han Solo, with his base set to Catacombs of Cadera — also on Jedha.
Image: Fantasy Flight Games

“The Han Solo deck is about as close to combo as you’ll get in Set One, with the ability to cheat out expensive cards a little bit ahead of time,” Schaefer explained. “It’s playing You’re My Only Hope with all the cards that look at the top of your deck. It’s not like a one turn kill combo, it’s more like I got my seven drop out on turn five, or my five drop out on turn three.”

Another intriguing aspect of Star Wars: Unlimited lies in its deck-building mechanics. Decks must be a minimum of 50 cards, with a limit to only three copies of any one card.

“It’s a bit less consistent than if you have four-ofs, obviously,” Schaefer said. “That was partially because you see so much of your deck in a given game, we didn’t want it to be quite as easy to always see your same cards over and over — especially in the first few turns.”

According to Parrott, 50 cards is “also just a value that we’re familiar with. We have enough other games that have been 50 with three copies that we knew exactly what that was going to play like mathematically.”

Arenas of battle

One of the most unique elements to Unlimited, which fans of Star Wars will surely recognize as a recurring theme across the films and stories, are battles that occupy both land and space.

Unlimited features two arenas of play, ground and space, which are then occupied by respective units.

“One of the things we learned from the Star Wars LCG, it bounced off a lot of people for thematic reasons because the idea that Chewbacca could fight a Star Destroyer was a little bit too much of a stretch,” Parrott explained. “That was one of the big incentives to have the two lanes be separate.

Danny Schaefer’s Chewbacca deck finds its home on Hoth, naturally: “Chewy’s ability lets you play three drops or smaller and give them Sentinel, which means they have to be attacked. It’s really good for slowing the game down and stopping your aggro opponents from hitting your base. And the idea here is you play those cheap units early, stall things out a little bit, and then eventually either build up to some ramp or some removal, keep the game under control, then get to seven resources and bring out Chewy, who when he flips is a giant monster. He has Sentinel and he has Grit, which means his power goes up for each damage he takes. So once Chewy flips, it just locks down the ground and threatens to hit really hard. You’ve also got a couple eight drops in here for once you’ve gotten to that point, you can slam the door shut with your giant capital ships.”
Image: Fantasy Flight Games

However, not only does this element make the flavor of Unlimited more authentic to its source material, it also adds an important strategic element too.

“Bringing the correct ratio of ground to space units is going to matter a lot,” Parrott said. “If you go to a tournament and you expect the metagame to be heavy on people playing space aggro, then now I need to add more space units to my deck to fight against the space units, and now my ground units maybe can be fewer and they’ll go farther in the game because that is now the uncontested lane.”

Play modes and organized play

Looking ahead, Star Wars: Unlimited will feature a variety of play modes, including 1v1 and multiplayer, where players bring pre-built or fine-tuned decks to battle at stores or other casual environments.

The game will also feature draft and sealed modes, where players can open a specified number of card packs to construct a brand-new deck on the spot.

Eventually, Unlimited will also introduce its own system of organized play spanning from weekly store events to galactic championships, though more details on the specifics behind organized play are coming down the line.

Star Wars: Unlimited launches in game stores globally on March 8, 2024.

Stan Golovchuk

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December 13, 2023
Australia is preparing to burn – more fossil fuels

Australians are used to seeing messages with advice on preparing for bushfires and other extreme weather at this time of year.

“Amid the Christmas promotions, [we’re] seeing increased warnings about extreme heat and fires and how to cope and stay safe,” Belinda Noble, the founder of climate advocacy organisation Comms Declare, told Al Jazeera.

While there is nothing new about these kinds of public service announcements, the messages have taken on added meaning as the weather becomes more unpredictable and memories of severe bushfires three years ago linger.

“Australia desperately needs national public information campaigns to keep people safe,” Noble told Al Jazeera, stressing that similar campaigns were also needed on how to “reduce emissions and to combat lies about fossil fuels, renewables and climate science”.

Australia passed breakthrough climate laws in March this year, 10 months after a new centre-left Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office.

“In contrast to our last government,” the new government now “acknowledges that climate change is very real, is with us now and is worsening extreme weather and disasters,” Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of fire and rescue for the state of New South Wales told Al Jazeera.

But, Mullins added, it is “inexplicable that as they strive to reduce emissions, they undo all of their good work by continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects.”

Even as the Albanese government passed its new legislation in March, its annual Resource & Energy Major Project list included 116 new fossil fuel projects, “two more than at the end of 2021”, according to Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute.

Combined, Australia’s oil and gas expansion plans are the eighth largest of any country, the advocacy organisation Oil Change International said recently.

Many of the planned fuel projects – on land and sea – are facing opposition from Indigenous people, who are seeing the effects of fossil fuel extraction and climate change first-hand.

“My community is facing not just fracking, but mining [and] overgrazing” said Rikki Dank, the director of Gudanji For Country, an Indigenous charity. “On top of that, we are feeling the effects of climate change. The weather patterns are all over the place,” she said.

“There’s not as much rain as there used to be and the heat is becoming almost unbearable,” said Dank, who spoke to Al Jazeera from COP28 in Dubai where she was bringing attention to Australia’s plans to frack her traditional lands.

Fracking or hydraulic fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of liquid into shale rock to release gas.

“We’re seeing a lot of people in Australia lose their homes because it’s becoming too hot or because we can’t live there any more because of the mining or fracking,” she added.

But at a special COP28 meeting where leaders were encouraged to speak off-script on Sunday, Australia’s Climate Minister Chris Bowen backed calls for the global phasing out of fossil fuels.

The comments sparked confusion given Australia’s fossil fuel expansion at home.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a petrostate, but Australia is a bigger fossil fuel exporter than the United Arab Emirates, by far,” Ebony Bennett, the deputy director of the Australia Institute wrote last week, comparing Australia with the host of COP28.

Australia is “the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world,” Bennett added. The country is one of the world’s top exporters of coal with Russia and Indonesia.

‘Your whole world’

While Australia’s messages on the world stage may seem mixed, at home, the messages, at least on the dangers of fire, are much clearer.

A Queensland Fire and Emergency Services advertisement shows images like a warped dog’s bowl and a children’s bike in a burned landscape while a narrator says “your best friend” and “your whole world”.

A fire preparation sign at the Rural Fire Service (RFS) station in Shannons Flat, Australia says, ‘Sorry guys, you are all too late now!’ in January 2020 [Tracey Nearmy/Reuters]

While more disaster preparedness is welcome, Mullins says recently-announced funding is “still just a drop in the bucket and climate change is causing that bucket to leak.”

The former fire chief who is also the founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action says greater efforts are needed to address the growing climate crisis.

“It doesn’t matter how many helicopters, how many planes, or many trucks you have,” Mullins told Al Jazeera. “We cannot just deal with the damage once it has been done, we need to tackle it at its root cause – which is the continued extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas.

“We must take urgent action now to get emissions plummeting during this crucial decade”, he added, “to give some hope to future generations”.

For Dank, the solutions include drawing on the experience of Indigenous people in caring for their land as a nature-based solution.

“Unfortunately”, there is a “current culture” of “band-aid solutions for how we can fix something that’s making us uncomfortable now as opposed to actually looking at and addressing the problem,” she said.

Meanwhile, Noble says public awareness campaigns are also needed to dispel the fossil fuel industry’s influence.

“Communities need more consistent, accurate and reliable climate information to manage the massive challenges ahead,” said Noble, whose organisation is also campaigning to see misleading fossil fuel advertising banned in Australia.

“There’s no doubt people are anxious,” she added, but it is possible to turn “anxiety into action against the fossil fuel companies causing the extreme heat, fires and storms”.

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December 12, 2023
Batang Kali: A British massacre in colonial Malaya and a fight for justice

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – In the smart offices of a law firm located among the skyscrapers of the Malaysian capital, 85-year-old Lim Kok’s thoughts turn back to a crime perpetrated by British forces three-quarters of a century ago.

The decades in between have not faded Lim’s memories of the period when then-Malaya was a colony in the waning days of the British Empire.

Attempting to slow the sun setting on its colony in Southeast Asia, London sent thousands of British and Commonwealth troops to suppress a local movement fighting for independence in the aftermath of World War II.

Lim was just nine years old when his father, a hardworking ethnic Chinese supervisor at a rubber plantation, was gunned down in a hail of bullets along with 23 other innocent workers in what is still known to this day as the Batang Kali massacre.

He lost more than his father that day, Lim said.

He lost a family.

With her husband and the family’s breadwinner dead, Lim’s mother was left alone to raise six children – an impossible task for a poor rural household in the late 1940s.

Lim’s mother was forced to give her youngest child, a newly-born baby girl, up for adoption. Lim was later sent to live with a granduncle in Kuala Lumpur.

Not only was Lim’s family torn apart, but the British troops who carried out the massacre tried to cover up the atrocity by accusing their victims of being involved with the Communists fighting for independence.

The truth would surface years later as journalists, researchers and court hearings attested to the innocence of those killed by British soldiers in Batang Kali.

To this day, however, there has been no redress or official apology from British authorities, who have resisted calls to open an enquiry into the massacre that took place 75 years ago this week.

An ethnic Chinese protester leaving a white flower at the main entrance of the British High Commission building in Kuala Lumpur during a commemoration in 2008 for those massacred by British soldiers in Batang Kali in 1948. Britain has refused requests to hold an inquiry into the massacre by 14 members of the Scots Guards [File: Saeed Khan/AFP]

“I knew my dad was a genuine rubber tapper,” Lim told Al Jazeera, when asked about the colonial state’s attempt to frame the victims of the massacre as rebels.

The false accusations never made him “feel bad” as he was growing up, he said.

“The only thing bad is that they were massacred by the British soldiers.”

Though he is in his mid-80s, Lim is spry and energetic and has not given up the fight to hold the British government to account for “the suffering which we and the other relatives of the murdered persons experienced”.

“Being the offspring, we suffered a lot. Even my brothers and sisters… They have to go out in search of work at a very early age just to earn a living,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “They suffered a lot.”

The most recent fight to hold British authorities to account began in 2008 when the father of Kuala Lumpur-based lawyer Quek Ngee Meng launched a campaign for justice after researching the incident in his retirement.

When his father passed away in 2010, Quek took up the torch for the victims of Batang Kali.

The campaign for an official inquiry has taken advocates from London’s High Court to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, and onto the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Quek said the massacre has had a multigenerational impact on the families of the slain men, who were consigned to economic hardship and poverty on top of suffering the trauma of the violent deaths of their loved ones.

Many families of the victims could not afford to educate their children well. Some gave up children for adoption. Others married young or agreed to arranged marriages just to keep their families afloat following the loss of their breadwinner.

“The families were actually broken down,” Quek told Al Jazeera, explaining that it took generations for the families of victims to improve their economic and social circumstances.

“It actually wasn’t just the 24 or whoever who were killed. Many, many people are victims of this,” he said.

Quek recalls that legal action was not their first choice. An apology and a settlement would have sufficed for relatives, but a letter sent to British authorities seeking to negotiate was ignored.

“There was no middle ground that we can reach…. No offer for any talks. We just have to go on this legal journey and, yes, we lost on technical grounds,” he said.

Quek Ngee Meng, centre, presents a memorandum condemning the massacre of 24 civilians at Batang Kali to British High Commissioner to Malaysia Boyd McCleary outside the British High Commission building in Kuala Lumpur on December 12, 2008 [File: Saeed Khan/AFP]

“I felt sorry for Lim Kok and all those I couldn’t get compensation for,” said Quek, who has worked for years on the campaign on a pro bono basis.

“But, what I can get is this: All judges all agree that an atrocity at that time was committed by the British soldiers. And, the fact, the true fact, is these villagers, they were not guilty of any crime.”

“They were not Communists. There is no proof that they were sympathisers,” he said.

The details of the Batang Kali massacre are chilling.

According to court documents, in the early evening of December 11, 1948, a patrol of Scots Guards numbering 14 soldiers entered the remote settlement in Batang Kali, located among heavily jungled hills some 60km (around 40 miles) north of Kuala Lumpur. The settlement was inhabited by around 50 adults and some children who worked on the surrounding rubber plantation, which was owned by a Scottish man.

The British soldiers separated the men from the women and children and confined them overnight in a wooden long hut where they were interrogated. The soldiers carried out mock executions to terrify the unarmed male villagers in the hope of obtaining information about rebels that might have been nearby.

Troops of ‘G’ Company, Second Battalion The Scots Guards, wade through a swamp during an operation in Pahang, Malaya, in 1950 [File: AP Photo]

That night, the first victim was shot.

The following morning, the women and children, and one traumatised man, were put on a truck and driven away from the plantation. The hut in which the 23 men had been detained was opened and, in the next few minutes, all were shot dead.

With bodies strewn all around, the soldiers torched the workers’ huts and the patrol moved on, returning to their base later.

The first newspaper report in the days following the massacre described the slain men as “bandits” who were shot while trying to escape and claimed that a quantity of ammunition had been uncovered.

Shortly after, Britain’s War Office officially declared the killings as a “very successful action”.

As the truth began to emerge of what actually took place, a rudimentary enquiry headed by British legal officials in the colony was conducted and concluded within a matter of days.

Based on statements from the soldiers, and not the villagers, the conclusion was that nothing had occurred in Batang Kali that “justified criminal proceeding”.

A protester representing a British soldier portrays the Batang Kali massacre scene during a protest in front of the British High Commission building in Kuala Lumpur in December 2008. British troops during the ‘Malayan Emergency’ said they severed the heads of suspected rebels for identification purposes [Saeed Khan/AFP]

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December 11, 2023
‘Alarming’: Palestinians accuse ICC prosecutor of bias after Israel visit

Occupied West Bank — On December 2, Eman Nafii was one of dozens of Palestinians invited to meet Prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court in the occupied West Bank. As the wife of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israel, Nafi wanted to speak to Khan about her husband and the Israeli occupation.

But Khan spent most of the meeting talking, before his team gave Nafi and other Palestinian victims just 10 minutes to share their stories.

“People got angry. They told him, ‘You are coming to listen to us for 10 minutes? How are we going to tell you about our stories in 10 minutes,” Nafi told Al Jazeera.

“One of the women (with us) was from Gaza. She lost 30 members of her family in the (ongoing war). She shouted, ‘How can we explain this in 10 minutes.’”

While Khan ended up listening to the victims for about an hour, Palestinians fear that he is applying a double standard by solely focusing his efforts on Hamas and ignoring the grave crimes Israel is accused of having perpetrated over two months of a deadly war.

Many were disappointed that Khan accepted an Israeli invitation to visit Israeli communities and areas that Hamas attacked on October 7, while declining an offer from Palestinians to visit the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.

During his three-day visit, Israel also did not allow Khan to enter Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 17,000 people and displaced most of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants from their homes since October 7.

Most of those killed have been women and children, while thousands of young men are now being rounded up, many of them stripped and taken to undisclosed locations. Legal experts have warned that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza may soon amount to genocide.

Despite the mounting evidence and ongoing atrocities, Khan has shown little interest in seriously probing Israel, according to Palestinian officials, victims and legal scholars.

“Khan became enthusiastic to start this investigation [in the occupied territories] after October 7. That’s alarming,” said Omar Awadallah, who oversees UN human rights organisations as part of the Palestinian Authority, the political body governing the West Bank.

“[The Palestinian Authority] gave him retroactive jurisdiction from 2014. [Khan] cannot say that he didn’t see crimes being committed [in the occupied territories] from 2014 until October 7,” Awadallah told Al Jazeera.

A viable alternative?

On January 2, 2015, the state of Palestine became a signatory to the Rome Statute, giving the ICC jurisdiction to investigate atrocities such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The move was perceived as a victory for Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, which were fed up with the Israeli judicial system for not punishing Israeli officials, settlers and soldiers who were committing crimes in the occupied territories such as land theft and extrajudicial killings.

According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation that opposes illegal settlements in the West Bank, Palestinians harmed by Israeli soldiers have a less than one percent chance of obtaining justice if they file a complaint in Israel.

While the ICC offers an alternative to Israeli courts, no arrest warrants have been issued against Israeli officials or soldiers for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank, according to a legal expert from Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights organisation that advocates for justice in Gaza.

“We have submitted plenty of legal analysis and evidence to the office of the prosecutor even before Khan was elected,” the expert, who asked for anonymity due to a fear of reprisal from Israeli authorities, told Al Jazeera. “We believe that [Khan’s] office has enough evidence to issue warrants for Israeli political and military leaders by now.”

After returning from his three-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, Khan released a statement that made little mention of the mounting evidence implicating Israel in committing crimes against humanity such as that of apartheid in the West Bank and war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza.

Khan merely said that his visit was not “investigative in nature” and called on Israel to respect the legal principles of “distinction, precaution and proportionality” in its ongoing bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza.

Khan had a different tone when addressing Hamas’s October 7 attacks, calling them “serious international crimes that shock the conscience of humanity”.

Khan’s statement angered the Palestinian victims that he met briefly in Ramallah.

“What made us really unhappy was what he wrote after the visit,” said Nafi. “He is not supposed to draw an equivalence between the victim and their killers. We wanted him to tell the Israelis to stop what they are doing to detainees and to [stop] what they’re doing to Gaza.”

Al Jazeera submitted written questions to Khan’s office which raised Palestinian criticisms of his visit to the West Bank and his statement. His office responded by emailing Al Jazeera several of Khan’s previous statements, without answering any of the questions.

Politically compromised?

In September 2021, Khan said that he would deprioritise crimes committed by American forces in Afghanistan and focus his probe on the atrocities that the Taliban and the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K) carried out.

Critics believe that Khan was acquiescing to political pressure from the United States – a state that is not a party to the Rome Statute – which sanctioned Khan’s predecessor for daring to open a case against American troops in Afghanistan.

But Khan justified his decision by claiming that the court had limited resources and that the Taliban and Islamic State committed more serious crimes. Palestinians now fear that Khan could cite a similar justification to investigate Hamas, but not Israel.

“We have yet to see that any prosecutor has taken the question of Palestine seriously, which shows that the whole system of international law has been torn into pieces,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian legal scholar.

Buttu added that the ICC has effectively become a court that acts in the political interest of powerful Western states, rather than in accordance with strict legal principles.

She cited Khan’s decision to indict Russian President Vladimir Putin on accounts of war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The ICC has become a very political court that managed to issue indictments against Putin,” she told Al Jazeera. “But eight weeks into what is presumably the worst man-made disaster [in Gaza] and the prosecutor has remained silent and only comes [to visit] at the request of Israel.”

Nafi agreed and added that Khan can’t claim to be ignorant or unaware of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians.

“How many people does he want to see killed until he speaks up,” she told Al Jazeera. “I want him to be brave enough, to say the truth and to say it in public.”

Additional reporting by Al Jazeera correspondent Zein Basravi.

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December 8, 2023
People in Arab countries march in support for Gaza

Protesters took to the streets on Friday in several Arab countries in a show of support for the Palestinians against a continuing Israeli military campaign in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

In Jordan, a huge march was staged in the centre of the capital Amman following Friday prayers.

Some protesters chanted: “People want the liberation of Palestine,” “We die and Palestine lives,” Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad reported online.

Thousands of people meanwhile held an anti-US protest near the US embassy in Amman, according to al-Ghad.

Jordan, which maintains diplomatic links with Israel, has a large Palestinian community.

In Lebanon, dozens of people staged a silent sit-in near the French embassy in Beirut, protesting the killing of civilians in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire.

The protesters put ribbons on their mouths on which was written: “Gaza ceasefire”.

They also displayed in front of them body bags representing dead civilians in Gaza.

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December 8, 2023
Playing with friends, shot dead by Israel: A Jenin boy’s final moments

Jenin, occupied West Bank — Suleiman Abu al-Waf will never forget the “thumping sound” that forever changed his life.

The 47-year-old, a general physician in the Jenin Directorate of Health, was sitting at home with his younger son and two daughters on November 29. The Israeli army had raided the city’s refugee camp that day, ripping up streets, ordering people to leave their homes at gunpoint, and bombing a house.

But once word spread that the army had withdrawn, Suleiman’s elder son, 15-year-old Basil, told his father he wanted to go out and play with his friends. “He insisted, so I allowed him to go out and warned him not to go far,” Suleiman recalls. Basil was playing in the al-Basateen neighbourhood, far from the refugee camp. “It is known as a very quiet area,” Suleiman says.

So when he heard the sound, he knew something was wrong. “I picked up my phone and called Basil more than once. He did not answer,” the father says.

He ran out of his house and saw another boy, eight-year-old Adam Samer al-Ghoul on the street, injured in his head. Another boy came running up: “Uncle, Basil is injured.” When Suleiman got to his son, he saw paramedics trying to revive him. They refused to believe he was a doctor, so they kept him away from his son.

But Suleiman knew instantly. “From the first sight of Basil, I knew that he was a martyr. Praise be to God.”

Basil and Adam, young boys playing in Jenin, were shot dead by Israeli soldiers during the Jenin raid, in which two adults were also killed. A video that captures the boys being shot has since gone viral. The Israeli army arrested 15 others from the refugee camp, which has been a central focus of battles between them and Palestinian resistance fighters.

The boys were among more than 260 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7. Israeli bombing and artillery fire have also killed more than 17,000 people in Gaza in this period, including at least 7,000 children.

Dreams destroyed

Basil was studying at Jenin Secondary School in the 10th grade. “His mother, a pharmacist, and I dreamed that he would become a doctor and that he would study medicine — but we never pressured him to choose any stream,” Suleiman says.

Now, those dreams have been replaced by an indescribable sorrow for the family of Basil, among at least 63 children killed in Israeli attacks in the West Bank since October 7. “The pain is very difficult,” the father says. “What happened is heavier than the mountains, a feeling that only the parents feel.”

Basil’s uncle Hazem Abu al-Wafa, who works in a medical analysis laboratory, describes his nephew as a simple child.

“Basil is a child who does not know anything in life except his school, his books, and playing with his friends, like the interests of any other child,” Hazem says.

Hazem, his brother Suleiman and the rest of their family usually meet every weekend in the village of Silat al-Harithiya, where they have a home. That’s where Hazem last met his nephew — the weekend before his death.

The family, Hazem says, values education, a consequence of how they were brought up.

“We grew up in an environment that made us celebrate if one of our children gets a good grade,” he says.

“Our father worked for us a lot, and he was a teacher.” Suleiman and Hazem are among nine siblings — five brothers and four sisters. “We are all university graduates.”

Basil was also a good friend, says 14-year-old Hassan al-Masry. The two first met earlier in the year and over play and jokes, quickly became close friends. The day before Basil was shot, they were sitting with other friends. They made a fire as they chatted.

“We were happy and laughing, and nothing could be better than this,” Hassan recalls.

The next day, he was sitting with Basil at their usual hangout spot, when Hassan’s mother called him home for lunch.

It was while he was eating that he heard the sound of bullets and people shouting. “ I ran outside,” he says.

His friend, and Adam, were dead.

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December 7, 2023
Was John Lennon's killer brainwashed by FBI? Cops thought he'd been 'programmed'
WHEN Mark Chapman fired four shots into John Lennon four decades ago there seemed little doubt who was responsible for the cold-blooded murder.

Immediately after the shooting outside the former Beatle’s New York home on December 8, 1980, the killer dropped his gun and waited for the police to arrive.

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Was the former Beatle a target of the FBI? John Lennon with wife Yoko Ono in New York in 1980 – the year he was killedCredit: Rex

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A police lieutenant who questioned Chapman reportedly told British barrister and writer Fenton Bresler: ‘He looked as if he could have been programmed’Credit: PA:Press Association

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Confidential documents reveal that the FBI considered John and Yoko ‘dangerous’ and that President Richard Nixon wanted their activities – such as ‘bed-ins for peace’ stoppedCredit: Hulton Archive – Getty

But a new documentary series raises questions about whether Chap-man could have been hypnotised or controlled by shadowy forces.

In the three-part Apple TV+ series a pal of John’s reveals for the first time that the singer’s widow Yoko Ono asked him to look into a possible conspiracy.

And he discovered that the US secret services had followed and bugged the peace-campaigning couple because of their radical ideas.

Confidential documents reveal that the FBI considered them “dangerous” and that President Richard Nixon wanted their activities stopped.

If jobless oddball Chapman seems an unlikely assassin, the fact that the CIA had carried out experiments to see if mind control was possible only adds to the murder’s mystique.

Elliot Mintz, who used to be a spokesman for John and Yoko, says: “I’ve never expressed this before.

“One of the things Yoko asked me was to look into the various conspiracy theories after John’s murder.

“The two of them were convinced that the Dakota building, their apartment area, was being bugged.”

Phone tapped

John and Yoko were arguably the world’s best-known peace campaigners during the Vietnam War.

In 1969 they held “bed-ins for peace” and John released the anti-war anthem Give Peace A Chance.

That year Republican Nixon became US President and approved the secret carpet-bombing of Vietnam’s neighbour Cambodia.

John believed his phone was being tapped and saw men loitering outside his door.

He once said: “I realised this was serious. They were coming for me, one way or another.”

While that might sound paranoid, the FBI really were on his tail. Confidential files revealed that agents had been ordered to follow and wire-tap the couple.

At the end of one document, a note in capital letters says: “All extremists should be considered dangerous.”

Elliot, 78, who was also a DJ on underground radio, says: “There were hundreds and hundreds of pages written to the director of the FBI from Richard Nixon, where it was determined that John and Yoko were to be followed, monitored and steps were taken on the highest level of government to do something about the Lennon problem.”

Following the Watergate scandal Nixon was forced to resign in shame in 1974 and a year later US forces exited Vietnam for good.

But John remained a thorn in the side of the US government.

He expressed a distrust for the police, took illegal substances and his 1971 single Imagine asked people to think of a world with no possessions or national borders.

In his final interview, recorded just hours before his death aged 40 and aired in the documentary, John said: “People have the power to make the society they want.”

Repeated attempts by British-born John to obtain US citizenship had failed. But he had largely kept a low profile for five years before his murder and didn’t appear to be a critic of President Jimmy Carter.

However, Chapman did not have an obvious motive either. Various bizarre explanations have been given, with the killer once saying he did it to promote the reading of JD Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher In The Rye.

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John signing a copy of his album for Mark Chapman – who, just a few hours later, would shoot dead the ex-BeatleCredit: New York News

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Elliot Mintz says: ‘There were hundreds and hundreds of pages written to the director of the FBI from Richard Nixon, where it was determined that John and Yoko were to be followed’Credit: Getty

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Fenton Bresler believed Chapman was a victim of a mind control programme and put the blame on the CIA in his 1989 book The Murder Of John LennonCredit: Apple TV

He had modelled himself on its main character Holden Caulfield, a symbol of teenage rebellion.

But the prosecution claimed Chap-man simply wished to be famous.

In one confession, he said: “I thought I would turn into somebody if I killed somebody.”

Witnesses to the murder certainly found his behaviour odd for a killer.

Taxi driver Richard Peterson says in the show: “After he shot him, Chapman was still standing there with the gun, took off his overcoat and pulled out that book and held it up — Catcher In The Rye.”

The police officers were equally puzzled by Chapman. One, Tony Palma, asked him: “Do you realise what you’ve done?” and the accused replied: “Yes, I just killed myself, I’m John Lennon.”

A police lieutenant who questioned Chapman reportedly told British barrister and writer Fenton Bresler: “He looked as if he could have been programmed.”

Chapman, a married man who lived in Hawaii, admitted to the killing, but Detective Ron Hoffman, who was in charge of the investigation, speculated that there could be more to the case.

He says: “We had the killer, we were positive about that, we wanted to close every possibility that he had no help.

“Was he alone, was there somebody behind the lines, was it a conspiracy — all these questions started running through my mind.” In Chapman’s room Hoffman found his personal effects carefully laid out on a desk, including his passport and a Bible open at the Gospel of John.

This pointed to a premeditated act and there was no evidence he corresponded with a co-conspirator, though that still leaves the hypnosis theory.

From the 1950s, the CIA ran a 20-year top-secret project, codenamed MKUltra, that used drug addicts and mental health patients in mind-control experiments.

Chapman fits that profile because he had both a history of suicidal feelings and drug abuse.

His former girlfriend Jessica Blank-enship, who met him at a church retreat aged 16, remembered him having a nervous breakdown and trying to kill himself.

She adds: “He particularly liked The Beatles until John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus Christ.”

Childhood friend Vance Hunter recalled Chapman taking “eight hits of LSD 25, which was very powerful” over one weekend, and trying opium.

After the killing Chapman was repeatedly interviewed by the police and his own legal team.

On one tape he described the seconds before firing the gun, saying: “All I remember is I had a voice in my head saying, ‘Do it, do it, do it, do it’.”

Over the years since the killing, conspiracy theorists have been out in force.

Fenton Bresler believed Chapman was a victim of a mind control programme and put the blame on the CIA in his 1989 book The Murder Of John Lennon.

In 2018 documentary Drugs As Weapons Against Us, John Potash suggested the same agency played some part in John’s death.

But Potash has also claimed the CIA had a hand in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur and the suicide of rocker Kurt Cobain.

One other mysterious detail is that President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr also had a copy of Catcher In The Rye.

Reagan survived being shot at close range by Hinckley in 1981, just three months after John’s murder.

But the idea that the former Beatle was killed by the State has gathered few supporters. Even Chapman’s own lawyers did not put forward that defence.

Instead his legal team maintains that the miscarriage of justice in this case was allowing a psychologically disturbed man to enter a guilty plea.

But the court decided Chapman was of sound mind and in August 1981 he was sentenced to 20 years to life. He remains in prison today, after 12 parole hearings.

David Suggs, who helped to put Chapman’s defence together, says: “This isn’t a whodunnit. Our intention was to prove this man was insane.”

Indeed, insanity remains a credible reason for the murder, and Suggs adds: “He thought he was going to turn literally into Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.”
- John Lennon: Murder Without A Trial is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
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Elliot Mintz in ‘John Lennon: Murder Without A Trial,’ now streaming on Apple TV+Credit: Apple TV

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A vigil attended by 50,000 of Lennon’s fans in New York’s Central Park after his killing
Grant Rollings

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December 7, 2023
Israeli women were raped at gunpoint – could Hamas animals sink any lower?

HIDING for his life, Yoni Saadon watched in horror as a Hamas mob man-handled a woman “with the face of an angel”.

The Israeli had crept under the stage at the Supernova desert rave when it was attacked by armed-to-the-teeth terrorists.

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Israeli soldiers look at photos of people killed and taken captive by Hamas militants during their attack on the Supernova desert rave on October 7Credit: AP

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Footage shows an armed Palestinian militant walking around the music festivalCredit: AFP

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Members of the security forces continue to search for identification after the attack – while harrowing testimony has revealed the extent of atrocities on that dayCredit: Getty

After an hour, the 39-year-old dad of four peeked out: “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her.

“She was screaming, ‘Stop it — I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’

“When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters.”

Yoni’s harrowing testimony to the Sunday Times of rape as a weapon of terror is far from unique.

Yet the welter of vivid evidence reported by respected media outlets — and Hamas’s own sick videos — have not swayed many who would normally be natural allies of raped and mutilated women.

Shamefully, there has been no widespread crescendo of outrage from feminist groups, #MeToo activists, human rights campaigners and social justice warriors.

There were no circular letters signed by famous luvvies. And no special hashtag for the defiled women of Israel.

It appeared that sympathy for the Palestinian cause meant some could find no place in their hearts for raped and butchered Israeli women.

It led Israeli tech boss Danielle Ofek to launch a campaign on Twitter/X with the hashtag #MeTooUnlessUrAJew — its aim to gather a million signatures to acknowledge that every woman’s life is equally precious.

Despite the deafening silence, multiple heart-wrenching accounts of the rape and mutilation of women have emerged since the massacre.

This week the BBC told how Israeli police had shown journalists the video testimony of another Supernova survivor.

It’s an extremely shocking and graphic account of barbarity.

The woman, known as Witness S, first told how Hamas passed a female partygoer from one attacker to another.

Then she said: “She was alive. She was bleeding from her back. They sliced her breast and threw it on the street. They were playing with it.”

Witness S then told how the victim was passed to another man in uniform, who shot her in the head while he was raping her.

The BBC also quoted a survivor from the festival saying in a statement: “Some women were raped before they were dead, some raped while injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies.

“I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do.”

And a morgue worker said: “There is evidence of mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis — women, grandmothers, children.”

Photographs from massacre sites show dead women naked from the waist down, or with their underwear ripped to one side, their legs splayed and with signs of trauma to their genitals and legs.

Israeli police commander Shelly Harush, leading the investigation into the rapes, said: “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.”

Israel’s Women’s Empowerment Minister May Golan said the “very, very few” victims of rape or sexual assault who survived the attacks were having psychiatric treatment.

She added: “The majority were brutally murdered. They aren’t able to talk — not with me, and not to anyone from the government or from the media.”

Most social media users would have seen the highly distressing images of a handcuffed woman taken hostage, with cuts to her arms and her trousers bloodstained.

Yet the silence from many has left Israeli women feeling ignored by the global feminist movement.

The United Nations organisation UN Women — which calls itself “the global champion for gender equality” — had nothing initially to say after the mass rapes on October 7.

Despite publishing a report on women in the region a few days after the outrage, it remained silent.

‘Unverified accusation’

Nearly two months after the rape and murder spree — and following intense lobbying by Israeli women’s groups — UN Women finally acknowledged the sexual attacks.

It released a statement saying the organisation was “alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence” during the October attacks.

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One woman was wedged between two fanatics as they carried her away on a motorbikeCredit: AP

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Noa Argamani, 25, was snatched from a music festival as she begged for her lifeCredit: Supplied

But Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen slammed the statement as “weak and late”.

In Canada an open letter has been gathering signatures among politicos, but rather than decry the Hamas killings and sexual attacks, it denied that women were raped.

It criticised opposition New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh for having “repeated the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence.”

Astonishingly, it was signed by Samantha Pearson, director of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Centre.

The Jewish Federation of Edmonton wrote: “Shouldn’t a sexual assault centre believe all victims, and not just the non-Jewish ones?”

Pearson was fired from her role.

In Britain, Guardian newspaper posterboy Owen Jones — who was at a screening of Hamas atrocities put together by the Israeli Government — said there was no “conclusive evidence” of rape in the images he witnessed.

He added: “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera.”

The Israel Defense Forces said only footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed was used out of respect to their families.

It was left to fellow Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff to point out last week that after reports of the rape of Yazidi and Ukrainian women she couldn’t remember “too many sceptics demanding to see video proof”.

Jones later tweeted: “All allegations of rape and sexual assault must be investigated, including those alleged against Hamas during 7th October atrocity”.

On Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Press conference: “I say to the women’s rights organisations, to the human rights organisations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation — where the hell are you?”

Last week UN secretary general António Guterres finally said that the “numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas” should be “vigorously investigated”.

Israeli author Hen Mazzig tweeted: “So, it took the top man in the humanitarian world almost TWO MONTHS to believe women and say that there are “reports” of rape that should be investigated?

“No, sir, it must be condemned, NOW, with your full chest.”

Oliver Harvey

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December 6, 2023
The Sims 4: For Rent Is a Builder’s Dream Packed With Some New Challenges

When the City Living EP initially dropped, many Simmers weren’t too keen on the segregated apartment lifestyle that it introduced. However, this impression has since changed with the upcoming Sims 4 For Rent pack that finally ushers in a multi-family household.

I got the chance to attend a For Rent early digital event to get a sneak peek at these new features, showcasing a more complex side to the classic Build Mode. The life of a Property Owner was one of the first big changes I was surprised to see, given that landlord roles are relatively designated for NPCs.

Although Property Owners aren’t involved with any new careers, it most certainly seems like a job through its extensive tasks. Like most Sims content, the role showcases realistic elements of what landlords actually experience concerning rent and house rules. You’ll be able to set the rent to your preferred intake and even let some members live there completely free (not too realistic, but I wish it was).

Image Source: Maxis Studios via The Sims 4 Gameplay Trailer

Depending on the items you place during Build Mode, you’ll need to manage the upkeep of your units in order to get the best rating. Unfortunately, there will be a few curveballs with the new Mold Challenge and Tenant Revolts, but what’s life without a few hiccups along the way?

Once the For Rent EP releases, I’ll probably lean toward the Property Owner life simply because it seems more eventful than the Tenants. Not to say that the household members won’t have their hands full with activities; I just think the best way to experience the pack is through the landlord’s management system.

But, of course, the big star of the show is the intricacy of the new Build Mode system. This time around, you’ll discover the latest Residential Rental Lot types that can be divided into multiple units. Simmers can have upwards of six units on their property, with a maximum of 99 in a single save. That means you can have six different families in a singular area to create more intriguing stories that the series is known for.

While The Sims 4 already has some neighborly features, I feel that the For Rent EP will bring in even more group-filled events, primarily with the arrival of Pool Parties and Potlucks.

Each unit will have its own designated location in the house, and you’re more than welcome to attach multiple rooms to one family. Shared rooms will also expand on the neighborly approach, where everyone can hang out together, from entertainment spaces to skill-focused hubs.

Image Source: Maxis Studios

It’s all about the feeling of togetherness that genuinely makes The Sims 4 For Rent more inviting, rather than separating everyone with each individual house.

On the other hand, I know some Simmers weren’t too happy about the loading screens that occur whenever switching between these units. Based on what I’ve seen in the For Rent preview event, it only lasts a few seconds, so it shouldn’t be too frustrating. Yes, it will probably be annoying at times, but that’s the price you have to pay with the abundance of Sims on a Lot.

Apart from the building features, I was pleasantly surprised to see what other content was packed in The Sims 4’s latest expansion pack. Considering that the world was inspired by Southeast Asia, recipes have been completely revamped with delicious meals like Tofu Pad Thai, Khao Niao Mamuang, and Burmese Samosa Soup. As an Asian-American myself, I’m happy to see recipes I’ve grown up with, especially with the classic Halo-Halo.

The Night Market offers more meals with its various stalls, giving you more of a reason to go out during the late hours of the day. You can also explore the new Tomarang world to discover hidden treasures at the Tiger Sanctuary and a mysterious cave. Though, I would’ve liked to see more interactive features for this content, as it only centers around choice-based gameplay.

Image Source: Maxis Studios

Sims, in general, have been introduced to new traits and Aspirations. If you want to know more about the world, I would highly suggest trying out the Fount of Tomarani Knowledge Aspiration since it includes objectives that cover the entirety of the latest universe. Elders will also be getting their first-ever trait, only catered to them, using the Wise characteristic.

It’s nice to see the older generation get some love, as the newest entries heavily focus on the younger ages. However, if you do want to see more content for the little ones, you can look forward to the addition of Marbles and Hopscotch.

Even with all these features for The Sims 4 For Rent, you can still anticipate another new element regarding Secrets. That’s right; gossip has taken over a new meaning in the latest EP by finding all your favorite Sims’ dirty little secrets. Not only can you discover them from word of mouth, but you can also snoop around someone’s house to take a dip on the wild side.

These tiny details separate For Rent from the previous City Living pack. Maxis Studios could’ve simply gone with the new unit features and left it from there, yet it’s so much more than that. As much as we could’ve wished for this type of content with the City Living EP, I’m just happy to see the series evolve in so many different ways.

The Sims 4 For Rent makes building much more exciting while providing players a sense of togetherness. It could give you a brand-new outlook on past worlds, as the EP can be used in other variations. I’m already planning out my own builds, from anime-inspired apartments to a legacy of families, and I’m sure other Simmers will establish more ideas to maximize the series’ impactful storytelling.

About the author

Kristina Ebanez

Kristina is a Staff Writer and has been with Twinfinite for more than a year. She typically covers Minecraft, The Sims 4, Disney Dreamlight Valley, anime, Call of Duty, and newly released games. She loves the Metal Gear Solid series (Snake Eater especially), Rockstar’s Bully, the Horizon franchise, What Remains of Edith Finch, and many more. Her dog is also an avid video game watcher, primarily when there’s a horse or a cat. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo and grew up gaming on the islands.

Kristina Ebanez

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December 1, 2023
Report shows $141M spent in Alberta for ‘The Last of Us’ TV show | Globalnews.ca

The popular video game-turned TV show, The Last of Us was a huge success for the Alberta economy.

According to a new report by Oxford Economics, $141 million was spent across the province to ensure the show became a reality, making it the largest series ever filmed in Canada.

“Including $70 million on labour and $70 million at local businesses, so that’s everything from hotels, airlines, lumber, paint, set (decorations), vehicle rentals, you name it, they spent a lot of money in the province,” said Brock Skretting, director of Creative Industries with Economic Development Lethbridge.

2:15
Southern Alberta woman who delivers calves secures Last of Us Emmy nomination for hairstyling

The Last of Us has also been nominated for 24 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, and helped employ talented workers like Chris Glimsdale from Claresholm, who was nominated in the Outstanding Contemporary Hairstyling category.

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Glimsdale says the biggest challenge during her time working on the show was keeping everyone organized and applying hair to the infected zombies.

“And HBO is very gracious in letting us have what we call ‘the boot camp,’ so the stylists would come in and practice how to lay hair and how to lay the pieces even though they had never done it before.”

4:50
Travel Alberta sharing The Last of Us locations online

The show was filmed in several southern Alberta communities, including Waterton Lakes National Park and Fort Macleod, and organizations in both towns say the future is looking bright for the film and television industry.

“When people are passing through town and it’s not through The Last of Us, they’re thinking of Interstellar, Brokeback Mountain, Fargo, you name it, they’re usually going and visiting those places,” said Mackenzie Hengerer, member of the Fort Macleod Heritage Tourism Alliance.

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President of the Waterton Park Chamber of Commerce, Shameer Suleman says: “I think this is a great springboard for us and hopefully we’re able to parlay this into more films and TV.”

Overall, the first season of The Last of Us generated more than $182 million for Alberta’s GDP and helped support 1,490 jobs across the province.

Production for Season 2 will head west to Vancouver starting in January of 2024.

1:56
The Last of Us to starts filming in Vancouver in January

&copy 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Micah Quintin

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November 30, 2023
Panama celebrates court order to cancel mine even as business is hit

For more than a month, protests against Central America’s largest open-pit copper mine have held Panama in a state of siege. Roadblocks have caused gas and propane shortages. Many supermarket shelves have run bare. Restaurants and hotels have sat empty.

But on Tuesday, protesters in Panama got the news they were waiting for.

The country’s Supreme Court of Justice ruled that Panama’s new mining contract with the Canadian company First Quantum was unconstitutional.

Protesters danced in the streets in front of the Supreme Court. They waved the red, white and blue Panamanian flag and sang the national anthem.

The ruling, a big blow for investors and the country’s long-term credit rating, is, for the moment, a source of relief for Panama, which has been shaken by the country’s largest protest movement to plague the country in decades.

The news of the Supreme Court ruling came early on Tuesday – the day of the anniversary of Panama’s Independence from Spain.

“Today, we are celebrating two independences,” 58-year-old restaurant worker Nestor Gonzalez told Al Jazeera. “Independence from Spain and independence from the mine. And no one is going to forget it.”

People turned out to celebrate. The bistro where Gonzalez works, in the western province of Chiriqui, was packed with patrons by noon – something the restaurant had not seen since mid-October.

“We are so happy,” said Gonzalez, “because, we had been locked up in the province of Chiriqui for 35 days, without gas, without propane and with little food. I had to go look for firewood in the mountains because I had no propane to cook with. So thank God that the justices took a stand and issued this ruling.”

The mine, known as Cobre Panama, has been in production since 2019, and extracting 300,000 tonnes of copper a year. It represents roughly five percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 75 percent of Panamanian exports. The mining sector contributes roughly seven percent of Panama’s GDP with Cobre Panama as the country’s most important mine.

But protesters said Cobre Panama was a disaster for the country’s environment and a handout to a foreign corporation.

“I’m protesting because they are stealing our country. They are just handing it over,” said Ramon Rodriguez, a protester in a yellow raincoat in a march in late October, after protests ignited against the mine. “The sovereignty of our country is in danger. That’s why I’m here.”

This question of sovereignty is particularly important for Panamanians, who fought throughout the 20th century to rid the country of the United States-controlled Panama Canal Zone. This was an area almost half the size of the US state of Rhode Island that sliced through the middle of Panama.

“This contract is bad. It never should have been made. Never. So you have to fight,” said Miriam Caballero, a middle-aged woman in a grey sweatshirt who watched the October protest pass.

Protesters said Cobre Panama was a disaster for the country’s environment and a handout to the Canadian firm that had the mining contract [Michael Fox/Al Jazeera]

Impact on foreign investment

This was not the first contract with the mine. In 2021, the Supreme Court declared the previous contract unconstitutional for not adequately benefitting the public good. The government of President Laurentino Cortizo renegotiated the contract with improved benefits for the state. This was fast-tracked through Congress on October 20. Cortizo signed it into law hours later.

The president and his cabinet had applauded the new contract, saying it would bring windfall profits for the state.

“The contract ensures a minimum payment to the state of $375m dollars a year, for the next 20 years,” Commerce Minister Federico Alfaro told Panama news outlet Telemetro. “If you can compare this with what the state was receiving before, which was $35m a year, it’s a substantial improvement to the past.”

Cortizo promised to use the funds to shore up the country’s Social Security Fund and increase pensions for more than 120,000 retirees.

After the protests spiralled out of control, he announced a moratorium on all new mining projects and promised to hold a referendum over the fate of Cobre Panama. The idea didn’t gain traction. The protesters wouldn’t budge.

Members of Panama’s business sector have blamed Cortizo for mishandling the crisis and refusing to use a heavy hand to end the roadblocks and stop the protests. Last week, they said it had cost the country $1.7bn.

Cortizo, whose approval rating was already down to 24 percent in June, responded to this week’s court ruling, stating, “All Panamanians need to respect and abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court.”

Analysts say the protests and the ruling will have an impact for foreign companies looking to do business in Panama.

“I believe this court ruling is sending a very clear message to foreign investors,” Jorge Cuellar, assistant professor of Latin American studies at Dartmouth College, told Al Jazeera. “If this is the kind of foreign investment that politicians and capitalists are innovating in 2023, then Panamanians want no part of it.”

But this stance will likely come at a price.

In early November, after more than a week of protests, rating agency Moody’s downgraded Panama’s debt to the lowest investment-grade rating. It cited financial issues and noted the political turmoil. JP Morgan analysts said, at the time, that if the mining contract were revoked, it would substantially increase Panama’s risk of losing its investment-grade rating.

First Quantum also has much to lose. Its shares have lost 60 percent of their value over the last month and a half. More than 40 percent of the company’s production comes from the Panamanian mine.

Over the weekend, the company notified Panama that it planned to take the country to arbitration under the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries.

But in a statement released after the ruling, First Quantum said, “The Company wishes to express that it respects Panamanian laws and will review the content of the judgement to understand its foundations.”

Protesters said the country’s sovereignty was at stake [Michael Fox/Al Jazeera]

‘Jobs at risk’

The announcement is also a blow for the employees of the mine. The mine employs roughly 6,600 people – 86 percent of whom are Panamanian – and a total 40,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The Union of Panamanian Mine Workers, Utramipa, announced its members would march in several cities on Wednesday against the Supreme Court decision and in defence of their jobs.

“We are not going to allow them to put our jobs at risk, which are our means for supporting our families,” the union said in a statement.

Last week, Utramipa member Michael Camacho denounced the protests on the news outlet Panama En Directo. Operations at the mine were suspended last week due to protests at its port and the highway in and out of the facility.

“What about us, the workers? We are also Panamanians. We have the right to go to our homes and return to our place of work,” said Camacho. “But at this moment, we are being held hostage by the protesters, by the anti-social, the terrorists – which is what we should call them – and the people that stop us from passing.”

For the majority of Panamanians, the Supreme Court ruling is a welcomed sign that the country is on the road to normalcy.

Protesters in some provinces have promised to stay in the streets until the Supreme Court ruling is officially published – which usually takes a few days – or until the mine is closed for good. But many roadblocks have now been cleared, highways that stood empty for weeks are now open, and gas stations are rolling back in business.

“We are in a new phase,” Harry Brown Arauz, the director of Panama’s International Center of Social and Political Studies, told Al Jazeera. “The protests, as we have seen until now, should be lifted. And the government has said that it will begin the process of closing the mine in an orderly manner. This can generate confidence in the population, which had been lost.”

Arauz says the protest movement and the ruling are a powerful sign of the strength of Panama’s democracy, which the country regained just over 30 years ago.

“This is a really important moment,” he says. “It marks a before and after for Panamanian democracy.”

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November 30, 2023
‘We’re not here to beg’: Gaza residents’ anger over steep rise in prices

Deir el-Balah, central Gaza Strip – As the sounds of war quietened with the advent of the first truce between Israel and Hamas since October 7, the markets in the Gaza Strip have been flooded with shoppers, desperate to buy food supplies and winter clothes.

But the cost of these products has skyrocketed, particularly for basic foodstuffs, sparking anger and resentment among shoppers who blame shopkeepers and stallholders for high prices.

Imm Abdullah, who was displaced from her home in the Nassr neighbourhood in Gaza City a month ago after Israel ordered people in northern Gaza to move south, has been staying at one of the United Nations-run schools in Deir el-Balah with her 12 children and grandchildren. She said conditions in the school have become desperate, with no water and barely any provisions.

“When the Israelis threw leaflets down at us, I left with my family wearing just my prayer clothes,” she said. “At the school, we barely get food assistance. The other day we got a can of tuna. How am I supposed to sustain my family with that?”

Prices of basic food products in Gaza have soared since the start of the war [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Imm Abdullah had come to the town’s market to try to buy food and some warmer clothes for herself and her grandchildren, as the weather had turned cold. But after visiting different stalls to look for basic food products, her exasperation bubbled over.

“I don’t believe the merchants when they say the prices are out of their control,” she said. “They can regulate prices and be considerate of the fact that we are going through exceptional times, which is not something they should take advantage of.”

She rattled off a list of products that are now unaffordable: Bottled water, which used to be 2 shekels ($0.50), is now 4 or 5 shekels ($0.80-$1). A carton of eggs is 45 shekels ($12). A kilo of salt, which used to be 1 shekel is now 12 ($3.20), while sugar is 25 shekels ($6.70).

“It’s so unfair,” Imm Abdullah said. “I can’t take it any more and some days I go sit by the sea and weep because I don’t know how to feed or sustain my family. Sometimes I wish we had stayed in our home and got bombed instead of going through this.”

Billions lost due to blockade

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the poverty rate in the Gaza Strip has reached 53 percent, with one-third (33.7 percent) of Gaza residents living in extreme poverty.

Approximately 64 percent of households in Gaza are without enough food, and unemployment is at 47 percent – one of the highest rates in the world.

According to Elhasan Bakr, an economic analyst based in Gaza, the price distortion has led to inflation of between 300 and 2,000 percent for various products.

Even before October 7, a 17-year Israeli blockade on the coastal enclave had resulted in the loss of $35bn to the Palestinian economy.

“The latest Israeli aggression has been another nail in the coffin of Gaza’s economy,” Bakr told Al Jazeera. “The direct loss to the private sector has surpassed $3bn, while the indirect losses are more than $1.5bn.”

Elhasan Bakr, an economic analyst from the Gaza Strip [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

The agricultural sector, he added, has suffered a direct loss of $300m.

“This includes the uprooting and bulldozing of fruitful trees in the agricultural lands in the north and east near the Israeli fence, which means that it will be another few years before farmers can reap what they sow,” he explained.

“We are talking about a total paralysis of economic activity in Gaza. There are 65,000 economic facilities – ranging from the agricultural to the service industries – in the private sector which have been either destroyed or stopped working because of the war. This has resulted in a huge loss of jobs, which in turn leads to a complete lack of food security.”

Furthermore, the small amount of aid that has been allowed by Israel to enter Gaza is insufficient to cover the needs of the almost one million displaced people staying at UN schools for even one day.

“From October 22 to November 12 – in those 20 days – fewer than 1,100 trucks entered the Gaza Strip,” Bakr said. “Fewer than 400 of these trucks carried food products. Barely 10 percent of Gaza’s food sector needs are met. This is nowhere near enough, especially when you consider the fact that, before October 7, at least 500 trucks used to enter the Strip on a daily basis.”

The Gaza Strip, he added, would need 1,000 to 1,500 trucks a day to deliver the needs of the population of 2.3 million.

Mohammed Yasser Abu Amra (left) receives money from a shopper in the Deir el-Balah market [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

‘We had to walk past dead bodies to shop’

In the Deir el-Balah market, Mohammed Yasser Abu Amra stands over the bags of spices and grains that he sells each day that the truce lasts.

“The war has affected everything, from delivery costs to supplies,” the 28-year-old said. “Whatever I have now, once that is finished I won’t have the money to buy the same products because it’ll be more expensive, so that leaves me no choice but to raise prices to break even.”

The main reason for the price rises, he said, is the closure of the border crossings, which has led to wholesale merchants selling products to shopkeepers at much higher prices.

“Lentils used to be 2 shekels ($0.50) per kilo and we would sell it for 3 ($0.80),” Abu Amra said. “Now we buy it for 8 shekels ($2) and sell it for 10 ($2.60).”

A bag of fava beans used to be 70 shekels ($18) and is now priced at 150 shekels ($40), he added, while previously a bag of cornflour would be 90 shekels ($19) but is now 120 shekels ($32). Abu Amra’s neighbour, also a shopkeeper, lost his home and warehouse in an Israeli attack, resulting in the loss of $8,000 worth of produce.

Another shopper, Imm Watan Muheisan, said loudly – to the chagrin of nearby shopkeepers – that the current prices are “insane”.

“If you have 1,000 shekels ($270), you can only buy a handful of food items,” she snapped. “One kilo of potatoes is now 25 shekels ($6.70), it used to be three kilos for 5 shekels ($1.70).”

The mother of seven, who fled her home in the Shati (Beach) refugee camp east of Gaza City four weeks ago, is sheltering at the Deir el-Balah UN school for girls where, she said, she and her family are barely surviving.

“We walked here and had to pass by the dead bodies on the street,” she said. “We used to wear our best clothes to market… we’re not here to beg.”

Imm Watan Muheisan called the current prices of food products ‘insane’ [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Black market prices take over

Ahmad Abulnaja, an 18-year-old shopkeeper, began selling clothes with his older cousin Ali at the beginning of the war. He agreed that wholesale merchants are behind the increase in prices.

“A tracksuit used to sell for 20 to 25 shekels ($5.30 – $6.70) but now it’s 45 ($12),” he said. “That is, the merchant I get my supplies from has raised the price because the supply is dwindling.”

Price hikes are more pronounced on food products rather than clothes, but the demand for clothes is also high as displaced people try to buy warm clothes with winter setting in. were forced to flee their homes in northern Gaza without bringing their possessions.

Abulnaja’s cousin, Ali, said he believed the informal prices will be around for a long time because the scale of destruction in Gaza is so immense and the demand for products shows no sign of abating.

“It’ll be a while before we have a solution,” he said. “Even if more products enter the Gaza Strip, there’s nothing to stop one merchant from selling a product at the price he sets, especially since northern Gaza is cut off from the rest of the Strip.”

There is also the issue of the lack of compensation for businesses, the economic analyst, Elhasan Bakr, said. He pointed to the fact that in the aftermath of previous Israeli wars on the enclave, donor aid has centred on rebuilding housing units, rather than supporting the economy.

According to UN estimates, the last four Israeli offensives on the Strip between 2009 and 2021 caused damage estimated at $5bn, but none of the damage in the 2014 and 2021 wars had been repaired.

Ali Abulnaja sells clothes in a stall in the Deir el-Balah marketplace [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

“We are talking about the devastation of the basic infrastructure which would need months to rebuild, from roads to communications towers to electricity installations and sanitary extensions,” Bakr said.

But until then, the Palestinian economy will not recover unless there is a huge international effort in aid, and poverty and unemployment levels will reach new record highs.

“Gaza at its present stage is unliveable,” Bakr said, adding that more than 300,000 people have lost their homes.

“We need a minimum of five years just to go back to where we were before the war started.”

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November 30, 2023
Sudan aid workers risk ‘kidnap and rape’, experts warn

Cairo, Egypt – A large gathering of international and grassroots aid organisations working in Sudan has met to discuss the increasingly desperate needs of people on the ground as the armed conflict continues to take lives and displace hundreds of thousands – as well as how to work together more effectively.

International organisations need to communicate and coordinate more effectively with local groups, Mawada Mohammed, head of psychological rehabilitation and community development organisation Ud, in Khartoum, told Al Jazeera at the Sudan Humanitarian Crisis Conference in Cairo (November 18 to 20).

She said this “lack of coordination among themselves and between them and governments or international organisations” is one of the greatest challenges local groups face.

CEO of diaspora-led humanitarian organisation, Shabaka, Bashair Ahmed told Al Jazeera: “Local responders should have a voice in high-level policy and advocacy … they must be provided with the tools and skills to do so, and not just invited to be dressing.”

Kidnap, rape and assault

Since the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began a military campaign to seize control of Khartoum on April 15, more than 10,000 people have been killed and at least six million displaced due to the heavy fighting that has spread through most states.

The head of the World Health Organization warned that the conflict in Sudan is having “a devastating impact on lives, health and well-being”, as aid agencies raised the alarm that their Sudanese workers are being kidnapped, raped and assaulted.

In a speech to the conference, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly 700 million Sudanese children suffer “severe, acute malnutrition” and the country’s beleaguered healthcare system is nearing “a breaking point”.

Dr Abubakr Bakri, operations manager for Eastern Africa at Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF), called for humanitarian workers to be provided with security.

MSF staff have endured beatings, death threats and theft during the past months of the conflict, he said. He added that violence and threats were mainly directed towards MSF’s Sudanese staff, a point echoed by other NGOs at the summit, who said female local staff have also been kidnapped and raped.

NRC’s Jan Egeland speaks at the Sudan Humanitarian Crisis Conference, on November 20, 2023 [Bianca Carrera/Al Jazeera]

Aid organisations said they are unable to reach places where people need the most assistance due to fighting and blockades, and warned that local workers are in increasing danger.

Experts from NGOs highlighted that more than half of Sudan’s population – 25 million people – are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance and the medical situation is critical, with 70 to 80 percent of all hospitals out of service across the country.

At least seven areas have come under siege by the RSF in Khartoum alone, Mukhtar Atif, a volunteer for the Emergency Response Rooms, said. Other areas away from the capital have been completely cut off by fighting, rendering the arrival of humanitarian supplies impossible, he added.

“There is a mounting difficulty in providing humanitarian assistance to citizens who find themselves in conflict zones,” Mohammed Salah, a Sudanese activist and member of the Emergency Lawyers group, told Al Jazeera.

A call for humanitarian corridors

Salah joined the conference in Cairo after more than 48 hours of travelling from Gezira State in Sudan, where he has been staying since his home in Khartoum was overrun by fighting. He said the 1,020km (634-mile) journey to the airport at Port Sudan was full of checkpoints operated by the Sudanese Army, at which all passengers were searched and interrogated.

The checkpoints operated by both RSF and Sudanese Army forces pose a significant obstacle to the movement of people and goods, making humanitarian responses to urgent needs extremely difficult, experts said.

International relief organisations, including conference co-organiser the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), called for the creation of humanitarian corridors to enable aid workers to assist those in need.

NRC’s Secretary-General Jan Egeland said aid and staff convoys were not being allowed to perform their humanitarian duties, especially in the areas that are suffering the most due to the raging conflict – Khartoum and Darfur.

“Unfortunately, there is no way to put pressure on the warring parties to force them to open safe corridors and paths. We continue to urge them to do so but without success,” Salah said.

Women who fled war-torn Sudan sit at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees transit centre in Renk, Renk County of Upper Nile State, South Sudan on May 1, 2023 [Jok Solomun/Reuters]

One month ago, MSF announced that it had been forced to suspend life-saving surgical activities at the Bashair Teaching Hospital in south Khartoum because of the military blockade on supplies.

Aid officials and experts said, however, that nothing can be achieved without political and diplomatic efforts. Lawyer Mohammed Salah said: “The international community must put pressure on the warring parties to put an end to this human suffering and war.”

As NRC’s Egeland noted when he opened the conference, there is no “humanitarian solution for a horrific war”.

“There are political and diplomatic solutions for the war and for the rebuilding of the country, accompanied by humanitarian assistance.”

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November 25, 2023
Trump or Milei? Match the quote to the firebrand leader and see if you’re right

FIRST it was maverick world leader Donald Trump posting bizarre and deluded tweets through his four-year US presidency.

Now he has a rival – Argentina’s new right-wing leader Javier Milei, who has already created a stir with revelations of tantric sex and threesomes, as well as speaking to his dead dog.

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Argentina has just elected right-wing leader Javier Milei, who wields chainsaws at ralliesCredit: AP

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The controversial leader is not unlike Donald Trump – so can you guess which president said what?Credit: Reuters

Trump and Milei admire each other and are not afraid to speak their minds, but how alike are they?

Can you work out which of them was responsible for which crazy quote? Try Samantha Yule’s quiz.

Answers below.

1. “Can you believe I’m a politician? I can’t even.”

2. “The sale of human organs is merchandise.”

3. “For me the state is an enemy, as are the politicians who live off it.”

4. “A murderer is a murderer. A thief is a thief. And that’s what you call them. They’re an organised crime group, the biggest in the world, called ‘the state’. Why should I treat them any other way?”

5. “I tested positively toward negative, right? So no. I tested perfectly this morning, meaning I tested negative. But that’s a way of saying it. Positively toward the negative.”

6. “Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”

7. “If I had to choose between the state and the Mafia, I would choose the Mafia because the Mafia has codes, the Mafia adapts, the Mafia doesn’t lie. And above all, the Mafia competes.”

8. “I like kids. I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”

9. “I think apologising’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologise, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.”

10. “When you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.”

11. “Each man has his own dynamic. In my case, I ejaculate every three months.”

12. “Mickey Mouse is the aspiration of every politician because he is a disgusting rodent whom everybody loves.”

13. “I will not be apologising for having a penis. I don’t have to feel ashamed of being a man.”

14. “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

15. “On promising to stop government benefits as they are “based on that atrocity that says that where there is a need, a right is born, its maximum expression being that aberration called social justice”.

16. “To be blunt, people would vote for me. They just would. Why? Maybe because I’m so good looking.”

17. “Marriage is a horrible institution, first because it is a contract for life. I don’t want marriage, I don’t want regulations.

“With marriage, the relationship worsens because, since breaking that contract is costly, what appears, it’s called the moral hazard, so you take more risks. Men get fat, women take less care of themselves, and a whole series of deteriorations occur . . . ”

18. “Sorry, losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest, and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”

19. Climate change is a “socialist lie”.

20. “It’s really cold, they’re calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming.”

Answers

1. Trump

2. Milei

3. Milei

4. Milei

5. Trump

6. Trump

7. Milei

8. Trump

9. Trump

10. Trump

11. Milei

12. Milei

13. Milei

14. Trump

15. Milei

16. Trump

17. Milei

18. Trump

19. Milei

20. Trump

Michael Shersby

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November 25, 2023
Promising Young Woman writer-director Emerald Fennell says her latest, Saltburn, is a ‘lick the rich’ movie

As the environmental, political, and above all, economic tension between the ultra-rich and the rest of the world continues to grow, it’s a topic that keeps driving dark, memorable movies — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest film festival, including this year’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which played as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, seems to fit the bill perfectly as well: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, sure to turn up in awards-season conversation again) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is part horror movie, part classic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or just to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell told Polygon she doesn’t entirely see Saltburn as yet another eat-the-rich exercise.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she said.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating experience: a visually rich, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a while to fully unfold within the film, is obsessed with the luxury, comforts, and casual arrogance of Felix and his wealthy family. But as they spend more time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the family estate, they also drop hints that he’s probably just the plaything of the season, likely to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the challenging, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t entirely sympathetic toward Oliver, who’s clearly grasping and needy as well as ruthless. At the same time, it isn’t fully on board with Felix and his superficial, selfish family members, either.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has explained in other interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the internet, and parasocial relationships, about the kind of connections people make from a distance and build into elaborate, often unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the kind of superstar who would earn a fandom: He’s handsome, charming, and skilled at everything he tries, but he’s also surprisingly kind.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell said. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about toxic hunger, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting something that they’re willing to cut any moral corners to get there. In terms of other connections, though, Fennell says her own obsessions may be showing in the new film.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The reason Saltburn feels like so many classic British stories about class, Gothic manors, and dark secrets is because Fennell wanted the movie to be a recognizable world, a genre exercise where viewers think they know what the rules are, and what’s coming next.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell said. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as other comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that both Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love stories. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It may seem a little counterintuitive to compare internet fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of these books and online obsessions as closely connected.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she said. “If the Gothic tradition is about an outsider being introduced to a world which is both desirable and frightening — that’s absolutely what we’re doing with the internet, and our relationship with the world of fame and beauty.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing one of the more visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, where Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell said, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

Tasha Robinson

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November 25, 2023