04-02 06:04 · 国际,新闻,BBC,国际
There were some glaring omissions in the president's primetime address, writes the BBC's Gary O'Donoghue.
Trump leaves key questions unanswered as he seeks to calm nerves over Iran war
US President Donald Trump's address from the White House on Wednesday evening was - despite some speculation beforehand - largely a rehash of what he has been saying for days about the Iran war.
In a 20-minute primetime speech, he said the "core strategic objectives" of the US-Israeli military operation were "nearing completion" after a month of war and projected it would last another two to three weeks.
There were the usual threats against Iran, too, including a repeated pledge to bomb the country "back to the Stone Age".
If you were to copy and paste his posts on Truth Social over the last week or so, you would not be far off this address to the nation.
The president did attempt to persuade Americans of the merits of this war. There is good reason for that, as polls suggest a consistent majority of voters disapprove of the military operation he launched on 28 February.
Trump urged Americans to see this war as an "investment" in their future, and suggested it was nothing compared to other conflicts over the past century or more in which the US has ended up being involved for far longer.
But there was little here for those hoping for clear answers on where this war is heading or potential exit ramps for the US. There were glaring omissions which leave a plethora of questions unanswered.
Firstly, Israel is still attacking Iran and taking incoming drone and missile attacks – including earlier on Wednesday in Tel Aviv just hours before the beginning of Passover.
A key question is whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government agrees with the timetable of a few more weeks that was provided by Trump. We simply do not know at this point in time.
Secondly, what happened to the 15-point peace plan the White House was urging Iran to accept just days ago? There was no mention of it by Trump on Wednesday night. Is Washington now ditching many of those demands, including the retrieval of its stockpile of enriched uranium?
That, too, is unclear.
The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's busiest oil shipping channels, which has been effectively closed off by Iran, is a central issue in this conflict.
The president, however, does not appear to have a settled view on it.
One moment he is demanding Iran allow tankers through, and the next he is telling allies to go and sort it out for themselves. "Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves," he said on Wednesday. "The hard part is done, so it should be easy."
He then simply said, without expanding further, that the strait would reopen "naturally" when the war was over. That is unlikely to reassure those concerned about oil prices.
Trump's pointed criticism of some allies - he said at one point that they should "build up some delayed courage" and lead an operation to reopen the strait - came after he floated the idea of pulling out of the Nato military alliance in an interview earlier on Wednesday.
But that rhetoric was completely absent from this speech, despite briefings suggesting it would be a key part of his words tonight.
Another key unanswered question relates to ground troops. What are the thousands of marines and paratroopers actually going to be doing in the region as they continue to arrive?
The truth is that after this national address, we are really none the wiser about what the president sees as victory in this war.
And given the often conflicting nature of his statements from one day to the next, everything could change at any time.
Meanwhile, the average price of gas in the US has topped $4 (£3) for the first time in nearly four years and the president's approval ratings are cratering, just months before the crucial midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
This is a US president looking for a way out of this war – and he is still casting about to find one.
Follow the twists and turns of Trump's second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher's weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
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04-02 06:04 · 国际,新闻,BBC,国际
After delays and technical issues, the first crewed Moon mission in 50 years finally took off from Florida and is now in Earth's orbit.
Watch the moment Artemis II blasts into space on historic mission
The Artemis crew are officially on their way in a historic 10-day mission around the Moon, which could take them further from Earth than anyone has ever been before.
The crew on the 10-day mission won't land on the Moon, but plan to circle it, while travelling further from Earth than anyone has ever been before. Following on from the unmanned Artemis I mission in 2022, Nasa's Artemis programme is preparing for deep-space missions - with an ultimate goal of reaching Mars in the 2030s.
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04-02 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened
InJanuary, OpenAI’s CEO of applications Fidji Simo defended OpenAI’s spaghetti-at-the-wall product approach—ads, shopping, health, a social network, browser, physical devices, video generation and an App Store-like marketplace—as variations on the same theme. “AI is going to transform everything,” Simo told Forbes at the time. “And so we don’t really think of these as completely separate bets.”
But just two months later, OpenAI reversed course on its flashiest initiative yet: its once-viral, beloved-by-some Sora video model and app, and a “landmark” licensing deal with Disney that was set to include a $1 billion equity investment. The retreat points to a strategic shift toward more financial discipline within the company. Facing pressure to build products that actually make money ahead of a potential upcoming IPO — and with rival Anthropic gaining steam — OpenAI has been shedding so-called “side quests” left and right. With $13 billion in 2025 revenue but still deeply unprofitable, the company is now refocusing on areas where demand is already proven: coding and enterprise productivity tools.
Every startup pivots if things aren’t working. “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly,” CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post about Sora in October.
But OpenAI’s reversals have felt like whiplash. And with many other projects and deals announced but not yet realized — like an AI hardware product designed by famed Apple designer Jony Ive, whose company OpenAI acquired for more than $6 billion in (mostly unvested) stock, or a secretive social network based on people’s biometrics — it’s not clear which of Altman’s many promises will turn into reality.
Here are all the products and deals that OpenAI announced which haven’t lived up to the hype, whether it’s because they’re dead, delayed or still to be determined.
Products:
Sora and Disney
In December, OpenAI announced what it called a “landmark” deal with Disney where the media giant agreed to invest $1 billion and license 200 of its iconic characters for use in the AI startup’s video generation app Sora. In return Disney would stream Sora-generated videos on Disney+ and build new applications using OpenAI’s models. At the time, Altman lauded Sora as key to the future of human-computer interaction, calling it the “ChatGPT for creativity” moment.
Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger (he stepped down in mid-March) was sold on Sora, too. He lauded Altman’s ability to “look around corners” and his “respecting the value” of intellectual property. “I believed in it as an investment,” Iger told Forbes in February.
In March, OpenAI announced it was shuttering the product and scrapping the deal. Adoption of Sora, which was guzzling compute and burning an estimated $15 million a day at its peak, had fallen off a cliff. Sensor Tower and Appfigures both estimated that Sora’s lifetime in-app revenue amounted to less than $3 million. OpenAI will also discontinue Sora’s associated AI models.
“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” Disney spokesperson Mike Long told Forbes.
NSFW mode in ChatGPT
Altman first proposed the idea of allowing verified adult users to have sexual conversations with ChatGPT in October. After facing intense pushback from internal staff as well as investors, the plans have been put on hold “indefinitely,” the Financial Times reported in March. The company had previously delayed the launch due to technical issues that come with training an AI model that forays into erotica without creating illegal content, like child sexual abuse material. OpenAI confirmed the report and said it wants to do long-term research on the effects of sexually explicit chats on users before making a decision.
Instant Checkout for Shopping
In October, Walmart and OpenAI announced a deal that would allow customers to shop for 200,000 Walmart products directly within ChatGPT through a feature called Instant Checkout. But it turns out people aren’t so keen on chatbot shopping.
Sales through ChatGPT were disappointing, a senior Walmart executive told Wired, and Walmart said that conversion rates — percentage of shoppers that actually buy products shown within ChatGPT — were three times lower than those that require a user to click out to Walmart’s website. Other retailers like Shopify and Etsy also made products available for people to buy within ChatGPT, but only limited items were available for Instant Checkout, and descriptions weren’t always up-to-date and accurate.
In early March, OpenAI pulled the plug, discontinuing the Instant Checkout feature. Instead, shoppers can now browse and buy products from dedicated apps within ChatGPT, including from Walmart’s own chatbot Sparky. OpenAI said it wants to focus on helping people browse and search for products and give sellers control over checkout. “We’ve found that the i
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04-02 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one
Back in the days of 16-bit Windows, many system components were redistributable, meaning that programs that used those components could include a copy of those system components and install them onto the system as part of the program’s installer. The guidance for installing the system components was that if the installer finds a copy of the system component already on the system, then they should compare the version number of the existing file with the version number of the file being installed and then overwrite the file only if the file being installed has a higher version number. if the existing file has a higher version number, then it should be left alone.
This rule relies on the fact that Windows maintains backward compatibility, so the newer version still works even if used by an older program.
This doesn’t mean that installers actually followed this guidance.
It was common for program installers to overwrite any file that was in their way, regardless of the existing file’s version number. When these installers ran on Windows 95, the replaced the Windows 95 versions of the components with the Windows 3.1 versions. You can imagine how much of a disaster this caused to the rest of the system.
Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\
Basically, Windows 95 waited for each installer to finish, and then went back and checked its work, fixing any mistakes that the installer made.
An earlier design simply blocked the installer’s attempt to overwrite the file, but this ended up creating more problems. Some installers declared the installation to be a failure and gave up. Otherwise displayed an error message to the user and asked the user what to do next. (Like the user knows what to do next.) You even had installers that took even more extreme measures and said, “Okay, fine, I can’t overwrite the file, so I’m going to reboot the system and then overwrite the file from a batch file, see if you can stop me.”
Redirecting the write to a dummy file didn’t work because some installers had a validation step where they checked that the files on disk have the correct checksum, so they would notice that their attempt to overwrite the file was unsuccessful and error out.
The way that worked best was to let the installer overwrite anything it wanted and then go back and try to clean up the mess.
Bonus chatter: Some components addressed this problem by providing their own installer for the component, and telling installers, “You are not allowed to install these component file directly. Instead, you must run our custom installer. Yes, this disrupts your installer’s UI, but you installer authors have shown that you can’t be trusted to install files on your own. It’s your own fault.”
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04-02 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
Obfuscation is not security – AI can deobfuscate any minified JavaScript code
It's April 1st, but this post is not a joke.
The internet is on fire over Claude Code's (NPM CLI to be precise) "leaked" source. 512,000 lines! Feature flags! System prompts! Unreleased features! VentureBeat, Fortune, Gizmodo, The Register, Hacker News — everyone covered it. A clean-room Rust rewrite (to dodge the DMCA) hit 100K GitHub stars in nearly a day — a world record. 110K now and counting.
Here's what nobody's saying: all of that was already public! On npm. In plaintext. For years. Open unpkg.com/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js right now — that's the entire Claude Code CLI, one click away, readable in your browser. No leak required.
What "leaked" was a source map file that added internal developer comments on top of code that was never protected in the first place, plus a directory/source structure.
What Actually Happened
A .map
source map file — meant for internal debugging — was accidentally included in version 2.1.88 of the @anthropic-ai/claude-code
package on npm. Security researcher Chaofan Shou spotted it, posted on X, and the internet did the rest.
Anthropic confirmed the mistake: "This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach." The package was pulled, but by then it had already been mirrored everywhere.
The funny part? This is the second time. A nearly identical source map leak happened in February 2025. Same product, same mistake, thirteen months apart.
The Internet Lost Its Mind — In One Day
What happened next was genuinely impressive. In a single day:
-
Code dumps appeared on GitHub — like nirholas/claude-code, which was DMCA'd by Anthropic within hours but not before being forked hundreds of times.
-
Claw Code — a full Rust rewrite of the Claude Code architecture — hit 50,000 GitHub stars in 2 hours, making it the fastest repo in history to reach that milestone. It's now being actively developed as an open-source AI coding agent framework.
-
ccleaks.com popped up — a fully designed breakdown site cataloging every unreleased feature, hidden command, and build flag found in the source. Complete with shareable cards for discoveries like "BUDDY" (an AI companion pet), "ULTRAPLAN" (30-minute remote planning mode), and 44 other feature flags:
- Dozens of analysis articles on DEV Community, YouTube, and tech blogs dissecting every detail.
All of this. In one day. Software gets crazy in the AI era.
But the Code Was Already There
Here's what most of the coverage missed: Claude Code ships as a single bundled JavaScript file — cli.js
— distributed via npm. It's 13MB, 16,824 lines of JavaScript. And it's been sitting there, publicly accessible, since the product launched.
We analyzed this file at AfterPack as part of a deobfuscation case study. What we found: it's minified, not obfuscated.
Here's the difference. Minification — what every bundler (esbuild, Webpack, Rollup) does by default — shortens variable names and removes whitespace. It makes code smaller for shipping. It was never designed to hide anything.
Obfuscation encrypts strings, flattens control flow, injects dead code, adds anti-tamper mechanisms. It's designed to make reverse engineering computationally expensive.
Claude Code has the first. Zero of the second.
All 148,000+ string literals sit in plaintext. Every system prompt, every tool description, every behavioral instruction — right there in the JavaScript, readable with a text editor. No source maps needed.
We Asked Claude to Deobfuscate Itself
Here's where it gets interesting. We didn't need source maps to extract Claude Code's internals. We asked Claude — Anthropic's own model — to analyze and deobfuscate the minified cli.js
file.
It worked. Extremely well.
Using a simple AST-based extraction script, we parsed the full 13MB file in 1.47 seconds and extracted 147,992 strings. After categorizing them:
- 1,017 system prompts and instructions
- 431 tool descriptions
- 837 unique telemetry event names (all prefixed with
tengu_
— Claude Code's internal codename) - 504 environment variables controlling the product's behavior
- 3,196 error messages
- Hardcoded endpoints, OAuth URLs, a DataDog API key, the complete model catalog
Every single string. Extracted in under 2 seconds. No decryption. No deobfuscation. Just parsing.
And we're not the only ones who figured this out. Geoffrey Huntley published a full "cleanroom transpilation" of Claude Code months before this leak — using LLMs to convert the minified JavaScript into readable, structured TypeScript. His key insight: "LLMs are shockingly good at deobfuscation, transpilation, and structure-to-structure conversions."
The source maps didn't reveal the code. The code was already revealed. Source maps just added comments and a source tree structure on top.
What Source Maps Actually Added
To be fair — source maps did surface some genuinely sensitive information that wasn't easily extractable from the minified bundle:
Internal code comments. Developer notes, TODOs, rationale for decisions. The kind of thi
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04-02 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
InspectMind AI (YC W24) Is Hiring
InspectMind AI • San Francisco • Full-time
$120K – $220K + Equity
The Mission
Every building is designed using drawings that often contain hundreds of mistakes.
These mistakes lead to costly delays, rework, and sometimes unsafe structures.
We’re building the AI Plan Checker — a system that reviews full construction plan sets (drawings, specs, calculations) in PDFs and finds issues before anything gets built.
Our goal is simple: every construction project in the world gets checked by AI before permitting and construction. Faster approvals. Fewer mistakes. Safer buildings.
Traction
• 100%+ month-over-month growth
• Hundreds of paying customers
• Thousands of projects processed
• Engineers finding hundreds of real issues per project
• Fully self-serve product
This is already being used in real workflows. So far, InspectMind AI has been used to check drawings across projects in data centers, universities and K–12 schools, hospitals and clinics, large multifamily and senior housing, energy infrastructure (battery storage, utility terminals), commercial spaces, and more, supporting architects, engineers, contractors, owners and developers across the US, Canada, Europe, South America, and Asia.
The Problem
Our AI can already find a lot of issues.
Now we’re focused on what matters most:
• Turning thousands of raw issues into clear, high-signal insights
• Reducing false positives and noise
• Making results trustworthy and actionable
• Driving repeat usage and team adoption
This is a hard technical problem across computer vision, AI agents design, and system design.
What You’ll Do
• Build core product features end-to-end (frontend, backend, AI)
• Improve accuracy and signal-to-noise of results
• Work directly with users (engineers, architects, contractors, developers)
• Own major parts of the product from idea to production
• Ship fast and see immediate real-world impact
What We’re Looking For
• 2–5+ years of experience shipping production code
• Our product is built entirely by AI. You need to use coding agents like Claude Code and Codex effectively to ship quickly while maintaining code quality and security.
• High velocity and strong ownership
• Strong intrinsic motivation to learn and grow
• Good product instincts and user empathy
• Excited by ambiguity and hard problems
Tech stack
AWS + NextJS
Why This Is Special
Your work will directly impact real buildings and real safety. If we succeed, every construction project globally will run through systems you helped build.
Team
• Ex-Google, Airbnb, Berkeley, CMU
• Former founders and early engineers
• YC W24, AI Grant, top VCs
Small team, high ownership, fast execution.
How We Work
• Fast-moving, product-focused
• Direct access to users
• No bureaucracy
Interview Process
• Intro call
• Technical interviews
• Trial project
• Offer
Apply
If you want to build something that matters and push AI into the real world, we’d love to talk.
InspectMind AI is building AI plan-checking software for the construction industry. We help engineers, architects, contractors, and consultants catch coordination issues, code-related risks, and costly errors across drawings, calculations, and specifications before they turn into delays, RFIs, and rework. We are a fast-moving startup focused on bringing modern software and AI into one of the world’s largest and most important industries, with the goal of making project review faster, smarter, and more reliable.
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04-02 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
AI for American-produced cement and concrete
- Meta is continuing its long-term roadmap to help the construction industry leverage AI to produce high-quality and more sustainable concrete mixes, as well as those exclusively produced in the United States.
- Concurrent with the 2026 American Concrete Institute (ACI) Spring Convention, Meta is releasing a new AI model for designing concrete mixes – Bayesian Optimization for Concrete (BOxCrete), as well as the foundational data used to develop award-winning concrete mixes.
- Meta’s open source model for sustainable concrete is available today on GitHub.
Every year, the United States pours roughly 400 million cubic yards of concrete, enough concrete to pave a two-lane highway that circles the Earth multiple times. It’s the backbone of our bridges, data centers, highways, and homes. However, while we produce most of our ready-mix concrete domestically, we import nearly a quarter of the cement that makes it. Meta’s AI is helping change that.
Concrete consists of a mix of cement and cementitious materials, aggregates, water, and chemical admixtures. Concrete suppliers have to design concrete mixes to meet competing requirements: strength, speed, ease of handling, cost, and sustainability. Traditional concrete mix design relies heavily on trial-and-error in the lab, engineer intuition, and decades of accumulated knowledge—a workflow that is slow and expensive to adapt.
Cement is a key element of concrete, thus imported cement can have a significant impact on U.S. suppliers, stifling U.S. manufacturing, jobs and investments. While ready-mix concrete is typically produced domestically, the cement required for it is heavily imported, with roughly 20-25% of U.S. cement consumption met by imports. Additionally, cement made in the U.S. complies with U.S. performance and environmental standards that are not consistent internationally.
At the same time, ensuring products are produced domestically—a process often called reshoring — generally increases manufacturing jobs in the United States. Reshoring and related foreign direct investment (FDI) have brought over 1.1 million jobs back to the U.S. since 2020, and manufacturing has one of the highest economic multipliers; with every $1.00 spent in manufacturing adding $2.69 to the U.S. economy. The cement and concrete sector alone contributes more than $130 billion annually and supports roughly 600,000 jobs — yet imports still supply about 23% of total domestic demand. To capture more of that value at home, U.S.-based concrete producers want to incorporate more U.S.-made materials in their mixes.
Different cements have different chemistries, and a mix that works perfectly with one cement might fail entirely with another. As a result, producers need a way to rapidly explore and validate new formulations without spending months in the lab.
Real-World Impact Across the U.S.
Meta and its partners have already received a number of awards for these innovations in concrete design, including a 2025 Building Innovation Award for Best Partnership (shared with Amrize) and a Slag Cement Award in 2025 for Sustainable Concrete Project of the Year (shared with Amrize and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). But the impact of this model is also being felt through on-the-ground collaborations in several states through partnerships with large-scale concrete manufacturers and software companies.
Illinois
Meta has been partnering closely with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Amrize, the largest cement and concrete manufacturer in North America, headquartered in Chicago, IL., on the implementation of AI for sustainable and domestically-produced concrete. Amrize operates 18 cement plants, 141 cement terminals and 269 ready-mix concrete sites across North America. Their scale makes them an ideal partner for demonstrating how AI can transform mix design at industrial volumes. Amrize recently launched a Made in America cement label, which guarantees the cement meets rigorous U.S. standards and was manufactured in the U.S. by a domestic workforce with American materials. The company also recently announced close to $1 billion of capital investments in 2026 in part to increase domestic cement production.
Meta and Amrize will be presenting at the American Concrete Institute (ACI) Spring Convention, along with researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to further showcase our partnership leveraging AI for lower-emission, domestically-produced concrete.
Alongside the event, Meta is releasing a new AI model for designing concrete mixes, Bayesian Optimization for Concrete (BOxCrete). BOxCrete improves over Meta’s previous models with more robustness to noisy data as well as new features including the ability to predict concrete slump (an important indicator of concrete workability).
Coupled with BOxCrete, Meta is releasing the foundational data used to develop the novel concrete mix used in our Rosemount, MN data center. This foundational data is the best
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04-02 00:00 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
The population count, which was delayed by five years, will include caste enumeration for the first time in a century.
India has begun counting its population in the world’s largest census, which will include caste enumeration for the first time in nearly a century.
This year’s census is a $1.24bn exercise during which more than three million Indian officials will spend a year surveying about 1.4 billion Indians about their household composition, living conditions and access to basic amenities.
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The last census was conducted in 2011. Another one was due in 2021, but it was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving India’s data on such things as its demographics, housing conditions and welfare amenities outdated.
How will the gargantuan task of counting more than a billion people spread out across a vast country be carried out, and why is the latest census being watched particularly closely?
Here’s what we know:
How will India’s census take place?
According to the Press Information Bureau, India’s first modern census was conducted from 1865 to 1872 during the British colonial period, but it did not happen simultaneously across all regions of the country. It was only in 1881 that India conducted its first coordinated census.
After independence in 1947, India conducted its first census in 1951.
The census this year, which is the eighth since independence, will take place across the country’s 28 states and eight union territories (federally run territories), which include more than 7,000 towns and 640,000 villages.
For the first time, the census will be conducted digitally. Its 30 million enumerators will use digital tools like mobile applications on smartphones to collect and submit data by asking people 33 questions. Individuals will also have the option to self-enumerate through an online portal and then receive a unique digital ID, which can be submitted to the officials collecting data.
The census will take place in two phases.
At a news conference in India’s capital, New Delhi, on Tuesday, Registrar General and Census Commissioner Mritunjay Kumar Narayan said the first phase of the census begins on Wednesday and will continue until September.
During this phase, known as the House Listing and Housing Census, people will be asked “How many people live in your house?” “Do you own the house?” and questions linked to the household’s access to basic amenities like fuel, water, electricity, internet and transport.
The second phase, known as the population enumeration phase, will take place in February and will focus on gathering socioeconomic details and information on education, migration and fertility. Caste enumeration will take place in this phase.
The census is scheduled to conclude next year on March 31.
Why is a census important?
Dipa Sinha, a development economist who works on social policy, said that along with counting the number of people in the country, a census shows demographic trends.
“It also tells us the distribution between rural and urban areas. It gives broad demographic structure,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that details of people’s occupations and religions are also collected in census surveys.
She said such information helps governments plan policies and citizens to claim their rights. Census data also form the basis for allocations under antipoverty programmes, she noted.
Sinha added that India’s latest census is drawing particular attention because the government is planning a delimitation exercise, which is basically redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies based on population.
Politicians in southern India, where population growth has been stalling, have raised concerns that if delimitation is done purely based on population size, then northern India, where most of India’s population is located, will get outsized political representation. The bulk of representation in the Indian Parliament already comes from the north, which has been a source of north-south tensions.
“So given that the population has grown at very different places in different parts of the country, the information from this census could become highly politically relevant,” Sinha said.
In addition, “the government has passed a women’s reservation bill last year, which says that once the new census is in place and the delimitation is done, the country would have one-third reservation for women in the parliament. So all of this makes the census something that has an impact,” she added.
How has India’s census evolved?
When India’s census was carried out under British rule, questions mainly focused on registering household data, such as the number, age and gender of residents, their caste and religion. How proficient a person was in the English language was also part of the data collected in the census then.
Postcolonial India’s census has evolved to include question
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04-02 00:00 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
Celebrations in the Israeli parliament mark the passing of legislation intended to apply to Palestinians only.
When Israel passed a death penalty law that solely targets Palestinians, it was to be expected that the country’s far right would celebrate. Even as much of the international community roundly condemns Israel for the law – with the United Nations human rights chief calling it a possible “war crime” – there has been little pushback inside Israel.
According to Israeli rights groups and analysts, the introduction of a death penalty targeting people by their ethnicity is just the latest iteration in a long line of legal measures described as having normalised an “apartheid” legal system under which Palestinians are subject to codified discrimination to the benefit of their Israeli neighbours and occupiers.
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The new law means that military courts in the occupied West Bank, which solely try Palestinians, will, by default, impose the death sentence on anyone found guilty by Israel’s legal system of carrying out an unlawful killing of Israelis when the act is defined by the court as “terrorism”.
Conversely, any Israeli citizen charged with an unlawful killing in the occupied West Bank – such as the seven Palestinians killed during a spike in settler violence that has followed the start of the Israel-United States war on Iran – are tried in Israel’s civilian courts.
Conviction rates for Palestinians tried in military courts run to 99.74 percent. In contrast, the conviction rate from 2005 to 2024 for Israelis tried for crimes committed in the West Bank is about 3 percent.
Hardwired discrimination
“I wasn’t surprised,” Arab lawmaker Aida Touma-Suleiman of the left-wing Hadash party said. She responded to the voting results by leaving the parliamentary chamber in disgust.
“I knew there’d be scenes of happiness once it passed, and I just didn’t want to be there to see it,” she continued. “I’d already seen enough through three weeks of deliberations. I couldn’t see any more.”
Touma-Suleiman said that while she expected celebrations from far-right anti-Palestinian figures, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it was particularly “painful” seeing “the public feel exactly the same way”.
Laws passed since Israel’s inception in 1948 at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to flee from their homes have entrenched inequality between Palestinians and Israelis.
Some of these include the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, which enabled the seizure of land and homes belonging to Palestinians displaced in 1948, and 2003’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which in effect blocks reunifications for Palestinian families divided by Israel’s occupation.
In 2018, the Nation-State Law championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu codified Jewish legal supremacy in matters of identity, settlement and collective rights; downgraded the Arabic language; and asserted a constitutional preference for Jewish self-determination.
“Fundamentally, this is an apartheid regime,” Yair Dvir from the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told Al Jazeera.
“There are entire sets of laws that differentiate between Jews and Palestinians. There’s nothing new in this. It goes back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 and the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967,” he said.
In this light, Dvir said, the new death penalty law was not the exception as much as it was the rule.
“It’s part of the system and what makes up daily life for people here,” he said. “It shapes how people see reality. This is not an extraordinary incident. It’s just an extreme example – denying Palestinians the right to life – of what most people in Israel accept as normal.”
According to Dvir and other Israeli analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, the dehumanisation of Palestinians has deepened to the point where capital punishment not only can pass with little dissent but is also openly celebrated by parliament members.
Fast-tracked oppression
“This is just the latest example in a series of blatant violations of international law and Israel’s own basic laws, which provide at least the fig leaf of democracy and equality,” Tirza Leibowitz, the deputy director of projects at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s not just the prison conditions,” under which thousands of Palestinians are subject to inhumane conditions while often being held without charge, she said. “It’s a legal system that either refuses to investigate crimes against Palestinians or actively shields the abuse, torture and medical neglect of them.”
There are currently more than 100 Palestinians whose killings in the West Bank since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023 have yet to be
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04-02 00:00 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
The US has deployed thousands of additional Marines and airborne troops to the Middle East since the Iran war began.
The United States is continuing to build its military presence in the Gulf as its war with Iran enters its second month.
The February 28 launch of “Operation Epic Fury”, the joint US-Israeli air campaign targeting Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure, has continued for more than four weeks with strikes across Iran, killing thousands.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on Tuesday that the US had deployed a third aircraft carrier, the USS George HW Bush, to join two carrier groups already in the region – the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, and the USS Gerald Ford, which is currently undergoing maintenance and repairs in Croatia.
On board these carriers and their accompanying warships are thousands of sailors, Marines and specialised support personnel.
Al Jazeera explains what the various forces sent to the Middle East are and their combat capabilities.
What is a Carrier Strike Group (CSG)?
The military doesn’t deploy an aircraft carrier by itself. A Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is the aircraft carrier plus its escort ships and support units that act as a floating base. As of April 1, the USS Abraham Lincoln is the only carrier currently launching daily combat sorties against Iranian targets. The USS George HW Bush is currently in transit and is expected to eventually replace the Ford, which has been on an extended deployment in the Mediterranean.
A CSG typically includes:
- An aircraft carrier.
- Approximately 60-75 fighter jets and helicopters.
- Usually 2-4 Burke-class destroyers.
- A guided-missile cruiser.
- Typically, a submarine for underwater protection.
- Supply ships.
What is an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG)?
An Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) acts as a mini aircraft carrier and carries US Marines and equipment for landing operations. The main feature of an ARG is that it can launch sea-to-land invasions. The USS Tripoli ARG is currently active and stationed, having arrived in the Middle East on March 27, while the USS Boxer ARG is en route and expected to arrive in mid-April.
An ARG typically includes:
- Three specialised ships.
- Approximately 2,200 Marines, known as a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU).
- Short-takeoff aircraft.
- Landing craft for beach assaults.
The main difference between an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is their mission. An ARG is built to put troops on land, while a CSG is built to project air power and fight major wars at sea.
What is a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU)?
A Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is a self-contained, rapid-response force typically consisting of 2,200 to 2,500 personnel from the United States Marine Corps, capable of conducting sea-based combat and humanitarian missions.
On Friday, US Central Command confirmed that 2,200 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) had arrived in Middle Eastern waters after being ordered to depart Sasebo, Japan, where they are normally stationed, on March 13.
A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, carrying roughly 2,500 Marines from the 11th MEU, is also inbound after leaving San Diego on March 18.
Additionally, the Pentagon ordered approximately 2,000 soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to begin moving to the Middle East.
The additional deployments will add to the 50,000 US troops already stationed in the Middle East.
Which units make up an MEU?
The 2,200 Marines and Sailors within an MEU are divided into four specific roles, including:
- Command Element (approximately 200 troops): For planning, coordination, and command-and-control.
- Ground Combat Element (approximately 1,200 troops): Built around an infantry battalion with artillery and armoured vehicles.
- Aviation Combat Element (approximately 500 troops): Composite squadron with transport helicopters and attack aircraft.
- Logistics Combat Element (approximately 300 troops): Provides up to 15 days of self-sustainment, including medical, engineering and maintenance.
How are they deployed?
MEUs are almost always deployed by sea, on board a three-ship Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), which essentially acts as a floating base.
These ships typically include:
- A Landing Helicopter Assault/Dock – Essentially a small aircraft carrier that carries short-takeoff aircraft, including Ospreys, F-35Bs, Harriers, and Attack Helicopters.
- An Amphibious Transport Dock – A mid-sized ship that carries a mix of troops and heavy vehicles.
- A Dock Landing Ship – Focuses mostly on carrying cargo and heavy gear.
When are MEUs deployed?
MEUs can carry out sea-to-land assaults, raids, evacuations, humanitarian aid, disaster relief and other military operations. They are usually the first at the scene of a conflict.
How many MEUs does the US have?
The United States Marine Corps maintains seven active Marine Expeditionary Units, two of which – the 31st MEU and the 11th MEU – are assigned to the Iran war.
The MEUs are divided between the East Coast, the West Coast and the Asia Pacific. They include:
- East Coast: 22nd MEU, 2
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