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After Tide of Memoirs From Americans, an Iraqi Journalist Offers Inside Account of War’s Destruction

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

American journalists and soldiers have published countless memoirs about their experiences in the Iraq War. But a new book by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad provides a radically different perspective: that of an ordinary Iraqi who witnessed firsthand the decimation of his country.“The occupation was bound to collapse and fail,” Abdul-Ahad writes of the U.S. invasion in his remarkable memoir, “A Stranger in My Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War.” As Abdul-Ahad goes on to explain, “A nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy.”Abdul-Ahad is among a generation of Iraqi writers and journalists who lived through the conflict and, two decades later, are finally being heard. What he has to say not only confronts the self-serving narratives of the war’s supporters and revisionists, but also bitterly confronts how the Iraqi people were used as pawns in a war that was launched in their name.“We were all merely potential coll...

Kyiv and Berlin slam Putin’s plan to station nuclear weapons in Belarus

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

Officials in Kyiv and Berlin condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Moscow would station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus.The Kremlin “took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, tweeted on Sunday.Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, added that the move was a violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, something that Putin denied in his announcement on Saturday. Podolyak tweeted that Putin “is afraid of losing & all he can do is scare [us] with tactics.”Putin said on Saturday that Russia would construct a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by July. He likened the plans to the U.S. stationing its nuclear weapons in Europe, and said Russia would retain control of the nuclear arms stationed in Belarus.“The United States has been doing this for decades,” Putin w...

Police investigating stabbing at Jackson Square MBTA station

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

Transit police are investigating a stabbing at the Jackson Square MBTA station in Jamaica Plain late Saturday night.Officers responding to a reported stabbing around 9 p.m. found a man suffering from apparent stab wounds and assisted in transporting him to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.Anyone with information is asked to call police.No additional information was immediately available.This is a developing news story; stay with 7NEWS on-air and online for the latest details.

Garage goes up in flames in Lawrence

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

Lawrence firefighters extinguished a garage fire that broke out late Saturday night.Crews responding to a reported garage fire in the area of 4 Champlain Ave around midnight found flames threatening to spread to other garages, officials said.Multiple vehicles were damaged and the garage suffered heavy fire, water, and smoke damage. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.No additional information was immediately available.This is a developing news story; stay with 7NEWS on-air and online for the latest details.

Patrick Beverley relishes the old and new in his return to Chicago: ‘Wherever I’m going, I’m going home,’ the Bulls guard says

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

When Patrick Beverley finally came home, it wasn’t to the Chicago he used to know.This is a natural progression for any NBA athlete. Hometowns become a stop in the offseason calendar, stuck as a childhood memory as the city evolves without the athletes it raised.Now that he’s back, Beverley finds Chicago familiar and foreign all at once. He lives on a different side of the city than he grew up on, commutes each day to work at the arena where he used to sneak into games as a kid.But even with the novelty created by spending a decade away from home, Chicago is still the place that defined Beverley, a place he never really left.“I feel it every time I come into practice. I feel it every time I leave practice,” Beverley, 34, said. “I feel it every time I come into a game the same as when I leave the game. Wherever I’m going, I’m going home. I just can’t believe I’m in Chicago. It almost feels too good to be true.”It is somethin...

Travel disruption hits Germany on eve of transport strike

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

BERLIN (AP) — An increased number of travelers in Germany boarded trains and planes on Sunday, a day before a major one-day strike that aims to bring the country’s transportation system to a standstill.But even advance travel was met with disruption in some places as Munich airport already shut down because of the impending strike on Monday, and technical problems affecting German airline Lufthansa in Frankfurt led to flight delays and cancellations at the country’s biggest airport.Munich Airport, the country’s second-busiest, said that the ver.di union was hitting it with two days of strikes and it has no regular passenger or cargo flights on either Sunday or Monday. A total of around 1,500 connections were affected, and takeoffs and landings were only possible for emergency humanitarian flights, German news agency dpa reported.German unions have called on thousands of workers across the country’s transportation system to stage a one-day strike as employees in many sect...

Group says Libyan coast guard fired shots over rescue ship

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

CAIRO (AP) — Libya’s coast guard fired warning shots over a humanitarian vessel as it attempted to rescue a rubber boat carrying migrants off Libya’s coast, a sea rescue group said. The coast guard went on to return some 80 Europe-bound migrants to Libyan soil. The incident Saturday in international waters was the latest reckless sea interception of migrants by the Libyan coast guard, which is trained and financed by the European Union to stem the influx of migrants to Europe, said the SOS Mediterranee group, whose vessel was warned off by the coast guard.A spokesman for the coast guard didn’t respond to a request for comment.The Ocean Viking, a rescue ship chartered and run by the non-profit SOS Mediterranee, was responding to a distress call to help the rubber boat carrying migrants in the Mediterranean Sea when a Libyan coast guard vessel arrived at the scene, the group said.The coast guard vessel “dangerously” approached the rescue ship, threatening its crew “with guns and...

‘Nothing to come back to,’ says Ukrainian woman in Canada, her beloved home destroyed

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

IRPIN, Ukraine — Oleksandra Verovkina and her son, Danylo, would stroll half a block through the back alley behind their apartment to a large forest. They would walk hand in hand beneath the tall trees, the air filled with the scent of pine resin, until the three-year old lost steam, and then return home.The bright orange dining room in their fourth-storey apartment soaked up the sun streaming in from the skylight in the roof. Oleksandra would place a cup of hot chocolate on the child-sized table where Danylo worked away on his favourite puzzle, a map of the world. When they did not feel up to a walk they would venture outside to the parking lot beside the white stucco building, where her son played on a bright yellow, metal play structure with a slide and swing. They were often joined by his best friend, who lived two floors below.Oleksandra, 36, had dreamt of leaving Ukraine for Canada since 2014 when separatist forces first seized the Donbas region where she lived at the time. Bu...

Piper down: Village in New Brunswick wants giant sandpiper returned to pedestal

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

FREDERICTON — A new sculpture has been commissioned and a platform has been built — but a New Brunswick village’s oversized avian avatar has still not returned to its roost.Standing 2.4 metres high and weighing 135 kilograms, the statue of a semipalmated sandpiper was once the pride of Dorchester.Since 2001, Shep — named after nearby Shepody Bay — had pointed thousands of tourists and townsfolk to the mudflats of the Bay of Fundy, where the pint-sized shorebirds gather in late July in a pit stop on their flight from the Arctic to South America.After the original wooden statue started to rot and had to be removed three years ago, local officials commissioned a $10,000 reincarnation made of steel, epoxy and fibreglass. The result is now sitting in the workshop of artist Robin Hanson in French Lake, N.B., as municipal officials try to untangle what one former official said is “red tape” grounding the bird.A recent municipal amalgamation has stalled payment for the scu...

Berliners vote to decide on climate goals for city

Published Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:48:53 GMT

BERLIN (AP) — Berlin voters were asked Sunday to decide on a proposal that would force the city government to drastically ramp up the German capital’s climate goals. The referendum calls for Berlin to become climate neutral by 2030. The target means that in less than eight years, the city would no longer be allowed to contribute further to global warming.An existing law sets the deadline for achieving that goal at 2045, which is also Germany’s national target.The center-right Christian Democratic Union, which won a recent local election in the capital and is likely to lead its new government, opposes the earlier target but would be bound to implement it if the referendum passes.While surveys showed Berliners narrowly in favor of the proposal, enthusiasm was muted on Saturday. A rally and concert at the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate drew far fewer than the 35,000 people organizers had hoped for.The referendum requires the support of at least 25% of the city’s 2.4 million eligible vo...