Israel Holds Fire, Historic Trump Trial Begins, Samsung v. Apple

💡 SPOTLIGHT

Iran's retaliation against Israel is an internal struggle with its own rhetoric

For decades Iran's leaders have promoted the vision of martyrdom as a precept of the regime, but appear to have carefully weighed how much damage to try to inflict on Israel after its attack against its top military leaders in Syria on April 1. What does this say about the state and stability of the regime? asks Hamed Mohammadi in Persian-language media Kayhan-London.

Iran places great importance on ordinary citizens' willingness to die for their religion. Yet, following Israel's bombing of the Iranian embassy in Syria on April 1, the regime that touts martyrdom was forced to weigh how strongly to respond. If the response is ultimately seen as modest, it will undermine a major political pillar of the Islamic Republic.

Overnight on Saturday, Iran launched some 300 drones and missiles toward Israel in an unprecedented direct attack by Tehran aimed at Israeli soil. Virtually all the rockets were intercepted and no Israelis were killed. Earlier, Iranian troops reportedly seized a commercial ship with links to Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer. This all came amid reports that Iran wanted to avoid a response that would provoke a full-fledged war spreading through the Middle East.

A theme of the regime since it took power in 1979, this culture of martyrdom has its origins in the unjust killing of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Husayn in the 7th century. Shia clerics tell congregations that the objective of martyrdom is to hasten the return of Husayn's descendant, the absent Mahdi or imam of "true" believers.

Following Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran and during the subsequent war, the regime used this tradition in its call to defend the homeland, sending thousands of ill-trained youth (some barely in their teens) to the front (and to their deaths) when the country was short on arms and materials. [...]

— Read the full article by Hamed Mohammadi for Kayhan-London, translated into English by Worldcrunch.

🗞️ FRONT PAGE​​

Tel Aviv-based daily Haaretz shows the Iron Dome intercepting missiles from Iran’s historic attack on the country Saturday night on its front page. The attack was a response to the April 1 Israeli air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed seven people. President Joe Biden cautioned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to see Israel’s swift response as a “win” and advised not to counterattack Iran further to avoid escalating tensions in the region.

🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• The United States is urging restraint by Israel, while renewing efforts to push through a blocked funding package. Stressing the fact that this move is not meant to help any counteroffensive measures against Iran, President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call late Sunday that the U.S. would not take part in any retaliatory action in response to Iran’s air attack. Washington did help Israel in the shooting down of some of the 300 Iranian drones and missiles fired overnight Saturday. Israel appears to be taking time to weigh if and how to respond to Iran’s unprecedented direct targeting on Israeli soil. 

• The head of Ukraine’s military says the front-line situation is “deteriorating.” Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky wrote in a Facebook post that Russian forces are advancing towards Chasiv Yar, 9.3 miles west of the Donetsk town of Bakhmut that they conquered last year. Syrsky’s warning comes as Ukraine’s access to ammunition and equipment from the West is dwindling.

• The man who stabbed six people in Sydney seems to have been targeting women. Joel Cauchi, 40, roamed through the busy Westfield Bondi Junction on Saturday with a large knife. Five of the six people he killed were women as were the majority of the 12 injured. Police said the attacker’s father opened up about his son’s long history of mental illness and frustrations with women.

• Donald Trump on Monday becomes the first former U.S. president to stand trial in a criminal case. Jury selection begins in the New York case where Trump is accused of falsifying his business records to disguise a hush-money payment made to Stormy Daniels, a former adult film star, shortly before the 2016 election. Trump, 77, faces a maximum of four years in jail if convicted, but could avoid jail time and be fined instead. He faces multiple other criminal and civil trials, yet remains the presumptive Republican nominee for 2024.

• At least 18 people have died after landslides struck South Sulawesi in Indonesia. Images from the affected villages showed rescuers looking through rubble to locate survivors from homes that had been completely flattened by the mud. Two additional people have been declared missing.

• German commission recommends legalizing abortions within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion is illegal in Germany barring certain circumstances such as when the life of the woman is at risk or she is a victim of a violent crime. But in reality abortions are widely available and prosecutions extremely rare. Last year, Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left coalition set up the government commission of 18 experts in medicine, psychology, ethics and law, to look at possible new rules.

• A gallery in Edinburgh has invited the public to hang their art on its walls. Edinburgh Printmakers, based in a former factory in Fountainbridge, was the first open-access print studio in the UK when it first opened 57 years ago. Its new event “Then & Now, Whose Gallery is it Anyway?” will provide a space for artists to showcase their work or curate other art pieces.

📰 STORY OF THE DAY

Wolves, ancient predator and symbol of France's rural-urban divide

For the past 30 years, the number of wolves has steadily increased in France — great news for biodiversity but not for farmers, who are accusing the predator of attacking and killing their livestock. The topic, which has become explosive, is symbolic of a very contemporary divide in the country, reports Gabriel Grésillon in Paris-based daily Les Echos.

🐺 Eradicated from the country around 1930, wolves started returning to France in the early 1990s, arriving from Italy. The number of individuals has almost doubled in the past five years to reach 1,104, according to the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB). Wolf attacks have officially caused the death of just over 12,000 farm animals each year. While that figure has been relatively stable in recent years, it has been enough to arouse the farmers’ frustration and, more recently, to cause a clear political jolt.

🗯️ Behind the issue of cohabitating with wolves lie fractures tearing contemporary European societies apart. A standoff is forming between two words that ignore each other geographically and sociologically and accuse each other of bad faith. Claude Font, general secretary of the National Sheep Federation, says that there are “two worlds that can’t agree with each other”: one, made up of “those who have to live alongside predators”; and the other composed of “those who dream of wolves and biodiversity while they go back home comfortably in the evening."

🌱 Thomas Pfeiffer, history and geography profession, who is well versed in the history of wolves and its representations in human cultures, highlights the heart of the debate: as a “super predator at the top of the trophic chain,” wolves “make ecosystems healthier and restore a little balance in the imbalance.” The example of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. is often cited: the predator’s return in 1995 deeply regenerated the ecosystems there.

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com

📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO

➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED

#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS

20.8%

Samsung has overtaken Apple as the world’s top selling smartphone, securing 20.8% of the market share for the first quarter of 2024, American research firm IDC has reported. The market study found that global smartphone shipments increased 7.8% to 289.4 million units during January-March, with Samsung selling 60.1 million units. Apple fell to 17.3% of the global market share due to declining iPhone sales, dropping 10% since last year. Android smartphone companies are proving to be tough competition for Apple, now closely followed by Xiaomi, one of China’s top smartphone makers,, occupying the third position globally with a 14.1% market share.

📣 VERBATIM

“We cannot let Sudan become a forgotten crisis.”

— Christophe Lemoine of the French foreign affairs ministry, spoke about the war in Sudan at an international conference Monday. French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné and other diplomats met in Paris to draw attention to the “forgotten” war that began one year ago, and has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in decades and displaced 8.2 million people, the UN reported. “The idea is to move this crisis up to the top of the agenda,” Lemoine added. Séjourné called for aid from the international community, noting that only 5% of the UN’s latest 3.8 billion-euro humanitarian appeal has been funded. 

📸 PHOTO DU JOUR

A man walks past a mural portrait of the former supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini while carrying shopping bags in Tehran, as daily life appeared to resume as normal following the unprecedented Iranian drone and missile strike on Israel. — Photo: Sobhan Farajvan/Pacific Press/ZUMA

👉  MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH  

• Muslim And Christian Alike, Egypt's Religious Institutions Make The Economic Crisis Worse — AL-MANASSA

• Why We Flee — Every Migrant Has A (Good) Reason To Leave — STUDIO YAFA

• In Dafen, China's Masters Of Fake Art Struggle To Sell Their Own Creations— LES ECHOS

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