World Briefing: September 24, 2024

Thousands of families from southern Lebanon packed cars and minivans with suitcases, mattresses, blankets and carpets and jammed the highway heading north toward Beirut on Monday to flee the deadliest Israeli bombardment since 2006. Some 100,000 people living near the border had already been displaced since October, when the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israeli forces began exchanging near-daily fire against the backdrop of the war in Gaza. As the fighting intensifies, the number of evacuees is expected to rise. In Beirut and beyond, schools were quickly repurposed to receive the newly displaced as volunteers scrambled to gather water, medicine and mattresses. In the coastal city of Sidon, people seeking shelter streamed into schools that had no mattresses to sleep on yet. Many waited on sidewalks outside. - AP

Russia was left badly isolated at a high-profile UN summit in New York when it made a surprise move to derail an ambitious pact designed to revive the UN – and failed. Russia’s move to defer adoption of the agreement on the grounds that it supposedly represented Western interests was rejected on Sunday by 143 votes to seven with 15 abstentions. The Russian delegation said that if the planned vote endorsing the high-profile “pact for the future” were not deferred pending further talks, it would seek to move an amendment asserting the key issues addressed in the pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not seek to intervene. But the overwhelming UN general assembly vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment. The Russian move, at the outset of the two-day “summit for the future,” looked diplomatically clumsy, if perhaps designed for domestic consumption. It angered speakers from the African Union (AU) and Mexico, underlining that Moscow had only limited support, notably from Belarus, Venezuela, Syria and Iran. The AU, led by the Republic of Congo, called for the Russian amendment to be rejected. The pact is seen by many in the global south as both a well-intended and necessary collective effort at UN renewal as well as a personal legacy for a relatively popular UN secretary general António Guterres. But the controversy underlined the extent to which ideological divisions have damaged multilateral cooperation at the UN, the very issue that the pact was seeking to address. Russia objected to 25 provisions in the draft pact, including asserting the primacy of national jurisdiction and rejecting language on universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights, as well as gender empowerment more broadly. - Guardian

Now comes the hard part for the Pact, AP reported: uniting the world’s divided nations to move quickly to implement the agreement’s 56 actions. As Czech President Petr Pavel put it Monday at the summit meeting surrounding the pact: “Our work begins at home.”

Human rights in Russia have “severely deteriorated” since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, culminating in a “systematic crackdown” on civil society, a UN report has found. The investigation details police brutality, widespread repression of independent media and persistent attempts to silence Kremlin critics using punitive new laws. Mariana Katzarova, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, was denied entry into the country and compiled the report by speaking to political groups, activists and lawyers. She found “credible reports” of torture and allegations of sexual violence, rape and threats of sexual abuse by police. The Kremlin has not commented publicly since its release. Human rights abuses in Russia have been well documented during the Vladimir Putin era, but the latest UN report pays particular attention to how the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has accelerated what it says was previously a “steady decline”. It details how laws passed in recent years targeting the spread of so-called fake news, and individuals or organisations deemed to have received foreign support, have sought to “muzzle” any opposition, both physically and online. The new laws have led to “mass arbitrary arrests” and long prison sentences, it adds. - BBC

Pilots, aviation industry officials and regulators said spoofed Global Positioning Signals are spreading beyond active conflict zones in Ukraine and the Middle East confusing cockpit navigation and safety systems and taxing pilot’s attention in commercial jets carrying passengers and cargo. The attacks started affecting a large number of commercial flights about a year ago, pilots and aviation experts said. The number of flights affected daily have surged from a few dozen in February to more than 1,100 in August, according to analysis from SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences - WSJ

The People’s Liberation Army has sent its commander responsible for the South China Sea to the United States for the first time since Beijing shut down military ties more than two years ago. China’s defence ministry on Monday confirmed that General Wu Yanan, who heads the PLA Southern Theatre Command, held a meeting with US Indo-Pacific commander Admiral Samuel Paparo during the Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defence Conference in Hawaii last week. It follows a video call between the commanders earlier this month, as the two militaries start to re-engage after communication channels were cut - SCMP

Telegram will disclose users' phones and IP addresses to authorities at their requests, the messenger app's founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, said on Sept. 23. “To further deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world. We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests," Durov wrote on Telegram. "Over the last few weeks, a dedicated team of moderators, leveraging AI, has made Telegram Search much safer. All the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible," Durov wrote. Durov, a native of Russia, was detained in Paris last month and later released on a $5.5 million bail for alleged "complicity in the administration of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction, in an organized gang." - RFE/RL

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