Interesting News from Around the World

• Gen Z's nostalgia for the early 2000s is sparking a revival of landline phones, seen as a retro-chic escape from the digital age.

• Influenced by '90s and 2000s TV shows, young adults like Nicole Randone and Sam Casper embrace landlines for their vintage appeal.

• Urban Outfitters capitalizes on Gen Z's love for nostalgia by selling retro items like landline phones alongside fashion trends from the '90s and 2000s.

"It’s not ‘Navalny died’, but ‘Putin killed Navalny’,” Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, said.

Grigory Yavlinsky, a veteran liberal, said Navalny’s death showed the need for reform and echoed many opposition figures in saying he feared for the health of other activists in jail.

The United States owes the most but continues to make partial payments. According to UN sources, the US owes $1.1 billion to the UN’s regular budget for 2023 and 2024 plus additional arrears. The Biden administration wants to pay, but Congress has not passed a budget that would allow it to do so.

China, the second biggest contributor, didn’t pay its dues until November, which exacerbated the UN’s liquidity problems.

Delegations from China, Russia, Cuba, and others have been trying for years to defund UN human rights work in the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee, which oversees the budget. Their attempts in December to block funding for investigations into grave human rights abuses in Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Nicaragua and elsewhere failed.

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“The International Court of Justice is set for the first time to broadly consider the legal consequences of Israel’s nearly six-decades-long occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinian people,” said Clive Baldwin, senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch.

“Governments that are presenting their arguments to the court should seize these landmark hearings to highlight the grave abuses Israeli authorities are committing against Palestinians, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

Fifty-two countries and three international organizations will participate in the oral proceedings, more than in any other case since the world’s highest court began functioning in 1946.

“The family had been displaced from the north of Gaza and took shelter in Rafah. We will be relentless until those responsible [are] brought to justice,” Husam Zomlot said.

There are growing international concerns about the prospect of a ground offensive on Rafah, where more than 1 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering. At least 28,663 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to its health ministry, which is run by Hamas.

Children and adolescents are especially susceptible to harm because their brains are not fully developed, the lawsuit said.

"Youth are now addicted to defendants’ platforms in droves,” according to the 311-page filing in Superior Court in California, where the companies are headquartered.

The country’s largest school district, with about 1 million students, has had to respond to disruptions in and out of the classroom, provide counseling for anxiety and depression, and develop curricula about the effects of social media and how to stay safe online, according to the filing. The city spends more than $100 million on youth mental health programs and services each year, Mayor Eric Adams’ office said.

Carmaker Stellantis halted production in Russia in April 2022.

But the decision did not stop Russian operators from joining forces with a Chinese partner the following year to start making new versions of Stellantis' Citroen models, according to customs data and two people familiar with the matter. Advertisement

In December last year, Russian company Automotive Technologies imported at least 42 car kits for assembling the Citroёn C5 Aircross model at the Kaluga plant, which is still majority-owned by Stellantis, customs records drawn from a commercial trade data provider showed.

Manufactured in China, the kits were produced by China's Dongfeng Motor Group, the data showed.

Automotive Technologies was assembling the Citroёn C5 Aircross at the Kaluga factory, according to two employees at different Russian car dealerships. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is not public.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/8961863

Emily Chen, 50, disappeared after flying into Nanjing Lukou international airport in December on a visit from Doha, where she lives.

According to her husband, US citizen Mark Lent, Chen messaged her family to say that she had landed but she then did not emerge from the airport. Four days later, her son received a letter from the national security bureau in Dalian, a city more than 570 miles away, saying that she had been detained on 30 December on suspicion of illegally providing state secrets to overseas parties – a charge that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years, or longer for more serious cases.

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France announces constitutional amendment aimed at curbing immigration in its overseas territory near Madagascar.

France has announced a controversial plan to amend the constitution to restrict citizenship to people born to immigrants in the overseas territory of Mayotte in a move aimed at curbing immigration to the Indian Ocean islands.

The move has been welcomed by the far-right but opposed by socialists who say birthright citizenship rule is “non-negotiable”. Leftist leaders fear the constitutional amendment will open Pandora’s box as the far right will try to emulate it in mainland France.

The announcement comes less than three weeks after France’s highest court scrapped large parts of a new immigration law designed to toughen access to welfare benefits for foreigners and curb immigration – a hot potato in the country.

Here is more about Mayotte – an archipelago between Madagascar and the African mainland – and why the change has triggered controversy.

read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/14/why-is-france-revoking-birthright-citizenship-in-mayotte