A former member of an elite police unit has been charged with the murder of a whistleblower who testified at a major police corruption inquiry in South Africa.

Matipandile Sotheni, 41, appeared in court accused of killing Marius van der Merwe in December last year.

Sotheni is accused of shooting dead Van der Merwe in full view of his family in a case that caused national outrage. He has not commented on the charges.

Van der Merwe, identified only as "Witness D" during his appearance at the inquiry, known as the Madlanga commission, had implicated police officials in the torture and murder of a suspected robber in his testimony.

His testimony was seen as blowing the lid on the extent of police corruption at a local level in South Africa and led to the suspension of several of the officers he had named.

Officials in Cuba reported an island-wide blackout Monday in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen. Cuba has blamed its woes on a U.S. energy blockade after Donald Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to it.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines on X noted a “complete disconnection” of the country’s electrical system and said it was investigating.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Friday said the island had not received oil shipments in more than three months and was operating on solar power, natural gas and thermoelectric plants, and the government has had to postpone surgeries for tens of thousands of people.

Some Gulf states hosting US forces may be covertly encouraging the slaughter of Iranians, Iran’s foreign ministerclaimed on Monday in a thinly veiled attack on Saudi Arabia.

Abbas Araghchi demanded clarification on reports that Mohammed bin Salman was in regular private conversations with Donald Trump urging the US president “to continue hitting the Iranians hard”.

Araghchi was responding to the second US media report in a week claiming the Saudi crown prince’s public opposition to the US attacks on Iran did not reflect his private position. “Stances should be promptly clarified,” he said in a post on X.

Iran’s foreign minister said hundreds of civilians had been killed in US-Israeli attacks, including more than 200 children.

Comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) inventories are vital for effective climate governance. However, a decade after the Paris Agreement, significant reporting gaps still exist. Emissions associated with military activities represent one such gap, with direct emissions from conflicts frequently unreported and pre- and post-conflict emissions consistently overlooked. Insufficient accounting prevents military emissions from being included in international climate agreements, undermining climate mitigation. We use open-source data in government, think tank, and civil society reports on combat operations and military installations to assess emissions from the Israel-Gaza conflict, including pre-conflict infrastructure, active conflict, and post-conflict reconstruction. We show that scope 1 and 2 emissions of open conflict exceeded 1.3 million tons CO~2~ equiv by January 2025. This value rises to 33.2 million tons CO~2~ equiv when including scope 3+ emissions of pre- and post-conflict activities like defensive fences and reconstruction, highlighting the need for more comprehensive reporting of military emissions and their significant climate costs.

Barred from publishing details of Iranian missile impacts or interceptions, local and international journalists are struggling to tell the full story.

"This war has nothing to do with NATO. It's not NATO’s war," Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told reporters in Berlin on Monday. "NATO is a defensive alliance, an alliance for the defense of its territory," he added.

Amazon Japan has notified its package delivery drivers that it is lowering compensation rates from April 5 and stated it will terminate contracts if employees do not accept the changes.

For many drivers, the rate changes the company notified them of meant a pay cut, and a number of workers have since reached out to Japan's Fair Trade Commission.

Among them is a 33‑year‑old man working as a delivery driver in the Kansai region. The job pays him about 100,000 yen ($628) per month, accounting for roughly half of his monthly earnings.

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has demanded about seven countries send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, but his appeals have brought no commitments as oil prices soar during the Iran war. Previously, he has appealed to China, France, Japan, South Korea and Britain.

Israel has launched new attacks on Beirut and Tehran, while Dubai's airport suspended flights after an Iranian drone hit a nearby fuel tank and sparked a fire

Explosions echoed across Beirut early Monday as Israel struck the Lebanese capital. It also launched a new wave of attacks on Tehran, while Dubai was forced to temporarily close its airport after an Iranian drone hit a fuel tank.

Since being attacked by the United States and Israel more than two weeks ago, Iran has been regularly hitting Israel, American bases and its Gulf Arab neighbors' energy infrastructure with drones and missiles.

It has also effectively stopped shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil is transported, giving rise to growing fears of a global energy crisis and putting pressure on Washington as consumers are already feeling the pain at the pump.

Kyiv's tools, honed over years of daily Russian drone attacks, could give a critical boost to Middle Eastern countries looking to repel attacks from Iran.

As the conflict in the Middle East escalates, Ukraine could prove to be an invaluable trove of battle-tested expertise from its own bitter and costly fight against Russia.

After months of pressure and hardened rhetoric from Washington aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, Kyiv is now also fielding requests for help as Iran’s Gulf neighbors grapple with the modern reality of drone warfare.

Hotels, airports and residential buildings have been hit in cities across the Gulf, wreaking havoc as Iran targets the U.S. military bases hosted by its neighbors. It’s a picture all too familiar in Ukraine, whose skies are swarmed by hundreds of Russian drones on a nightly basis, many of them of the Shahed type designed in Iran.

Defence analyst says torpedo strike is a ‘humiliation’ for Modi’s government that disregarded a US defence partner

The attack on the warship left senior military figures and analysts in the region stunned, provoking fears that Donald Trump’s Middle East war will have wider ramifications for the geopolitically sensitive Indian Ocean region.

Iran called the attack an “atrocity” but the Trump administration was insistent that Dena was a fair target. In a press conference, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, did not disguise his glee as he said Dena had thought it was safe until it died a “quiet death”. That same week, Trump boasted of the strategy by the US military to strike, rather than capture, about 50 Iranian ships in the conflict. “They like sinking them better,” said the US president, chuckling.

India’s former chief of naval staff, Adm Arun Prakash, said the attack on Dena was legal as it took place in international water but was nonetheless “shocking” on multiple fronts.

“The US navy could have sunk this ship anywhere on the way back to the Persian Gulf,” said Prakash. “We are supposed to be friends and partners of the USA. To bring the war to right to our doorstep was a perverse act.”

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

Foreign countries and firms that wish to buy Ukrainian drones should not be able to bypass the Ukrainian government by talking directly to manufacturers, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in remarks released Sunday. Zelenskyy said a new system was needed to prevent this from happening, and that his government had already reprimanded one manufacturer for selling interceptors without considering the implications for Ukraine’s defences. The US-Israel war with Iran has sparked renewed interest in Ukrainian drone interceptors, with the United States and its Middle Eastern allies looking for ways to counter Iranian drone attacks.

Zelenskyy appeared to push back against Donald Trump’s claim that the US did not need Ukraine’s help on drone defence. The US has reached out to Ukraine “several times” to ask for help for a particular country, or for support for Americans, Zelenskyy said. “All our institutions received these requests, and we responded to them,” he told a briefing, without providing specifics.

Donald Trump is a “very transactional” president, whose repeated demands on Iran must be seen in this context, one of Keir Starmer’s most senior ministers has said in an unusually blunt UK assessment of relations between the countries.

Asked about the US president’s threats of some sort of retaliation against allies who do not supply ships to try to free up the strait of Hormuz, Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, said the UK was not obliged to agree to every US request.

After Trump again criticised the UK for a perceived lack of enthusiasm in helping the US-Israeli war against Iran, McFadden said it was important to separate the US president’s “rhetoric” from the more important issues.

In an overnight interview with the Financial Times, Trump reiterated his frustration at the UK for not sending ships to the strait of Hormuz, the vital sea freight passage that has been all but closed by Iranian retaliatory attacks.

Few doubt that in the first days of the new war in the Middle East, the initiative belonged to the US and its ally Israel. Now it seems less sure, however.

Mohsen Rezaee, a senior officer in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, on Sunday said “the end of the war is in our hands” and called for the withdrawal of Washington’s forces from the Gulf and compensation for all damage caused by the assault.

Three weeks ago, it appeared unlikely that Tehran’s senior officials would ever sound quite so confident.

The US and Israel prove each day their massive conventional military superiority with more strikes on Iran, but it could appear the initiative is slipping away from them.

Donald Trump has given multiple timelines for the duration of the conflict, but in recent days has suggested it would only end after Iran has been forced to make concessions. Many analysts believe the US is getting trapped in a much longer war than it wanted.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44552446

Six members of a Palestinian family went out for a ride in the car. Only two made it back home.
March 15, 2026

https://archive.ph/v1a7X

As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.

The Israeli police and military, in a joint statement Sunday morning, said that border police officers and soldiers, while on a mission in Tammun to arrest suspected terrorists, had “sensed danger” after a vehicle “accelerated towards” them and “responded by shooting.” They said the circumstances of the episode were being investigated.

UK and Japan among countries that are considering options but yet to commit warships to blockaded shipping route

Countries including the UK, Japan, China and South Korea have said they are still considering their options but without making commitments after the US president, Donald Trump, urged them to send warships to the strait of Hormuz to secure the vital shipping route.

The effective closure of the strait of Hormuz by Tehran, in retaliation for airstrikes by the US and Israel, has proved catastrophic for global energy and trade flows, causing the largest oil supply disruption in history and soaring global oil prices.

However, the international response to Trump’s call for the dispatch of warships has so far proved vague and reluctant, with countries unwilling to commit to a military response that could prove treacherous for their navies.

Donald Trump made clear that his personal grudge with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t abated during a phone interview with NBC News.

Speaking with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Saturday, the president knocked Zelensky for offering assistance to the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, the latter of which the Ukrainian president said on Friday were seeking his aid in sharing drone detection technology.

The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” Trump told Welker.