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Every morning, university professor Hassan El-Nabih straps his briefcase and laptop to his bicycle and rides out in search of a place with electricity and an internet connection, hoping to reach his students online.

Before Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, a professor on a bicycle was not a common sight. Today, it has become a reality imposed by the war – a practical option, one of the only options, given damaged infrastructure and decimated public transport.

“My car was severely damaged in December 2023 while it was parked in the Shujayea neighbourhood [of Gaza City],” El-Nabih said.

“I was visiting relatives when an Israeli air strike struck a nearby building … shattering both windscreens and crippling the engine. With my car unusable and fuel almost impossible to find, I had to adapt.”

The genocidal war has severely damaged the besieged enclave’s transport infrastructure, with total losses estimated at roughly $2.5bn. A joint report by the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations found that about 81 percent of Gaza’s road network has been damaged or destroyed, leaving many areas isolated and basic transport services largely suspended.

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Over the span of four years, 50-year-old Fidda Mohammad Naasan and her family have been violently uprooted from their homes and lands in the occupied West Bank, not once but twice. Now, after relocating for a second time they continue to face relentless, daily attacks and abuse from Israeli settlers and soldiers determined to force them off their lands yet again.

The most recent large-scale attack on Naasan’s family took place on December 7. Israelis raided Naasan’s current home in the al-Khalayel area on the edges of al-Mghayyer village in the central West Bank.

“I was sleeping in my room with my 13-year-old grandson next to me. At 1:30 a.m., a group of five settlers raided my room, all masked, carrying pipes. They beat me on my forehead until I lost consciousness,” Naasan told Drop Site News.

Naasan was hospitalized for two days and was forced to undergo cardiac catheterization surgery following heart complications and a severe rise in her blood pressure. Her nephew also suffered cuts to his head and required six stitches.

“While he was beating me, the settler kept shouting: ‘Don’t you want to leave? If you don’t leave we will kill you,’” she recalled. “I lied and told him I would leave just so he would stop beating me.”

Naasan and her family once lived on their ancestral lands in the Wadi Daliyeh area south of Fasayil village in the central Jordan Valley. With a water spring and vast grazing lands, the area is ideal for Palestinian Bedouins who depend on livestock for income. From there, they were driven off their land by settlers to an area near the village of Turmusayya in the central West Bank where they spent the next two years.

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Russia offered the US a $12 trillion economic cooperation package, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

The offer, dubbed the “Dmitriev package” after Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, who also runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, was identified by Ukrainian intelligence, Zelensky told journalists during a closed-door briefing.

“Intelligence showed me the so-called ‘Dmitriev package’ that he presented in the US – it amounts to around $12 trillion,” the Ukrainian president said.

“It is supposedly a package of economic cooperation between America and Russia,” he added. “So we are hearing about the possibility of such or similar bilateral documents [to be signed] between America and Russia.”

The development points to a renewed push by Moscow to court US President Donald Trump, as Ukraine and Russia continue to vie for Washington’s support while the US presses for a diplomatic settlement.

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Foreign aid spending is back in the U.S. government's budget, after a year in which the Trump administration cut billions of dollars to global health and humanitarian assistance.

On Tuesday evening, President Trump signed the spending bill that would fund much of the government through September 30.

In that legislation, Congress has allocated $50 billion for foreign aid in 2026 — a 16% cut from 2025. Still, it's a lot more money than the administration had signaled it wants to spend on foreign aid in its proposed budget.

The foreign aid package includes funding for a variety of issues, such as military aid to Egypt, Israel and Taiwan. However, it also includes money for initiatives aimed at supporting democracy, scholarship programs, U.S. embassy operations and health and humanitarian programs around the world.

Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that the bill advances the priorities of the American people. "This fiscally responsible package would realign U.S. foreign assistance and make America safer and stronger on the world stage."

Aid groups also welcomed the package, even as they noted the reduction in funding for humanitarian assistance compared to previous years.

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Attorneys for the Trump administration are aiming to deport Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy whose photograph in a bunny hat in snowy Minneapolis circulated globally after his detention last month by federal officials during the aggressive anti-immigration crackdown there.

The child, Liam, returned home to Minnesota earlier this week after being taken into custody alongside his father last month and transferred to a notorious family detention facility in Texas.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Friday it is seeking a deportation order for the Ecuadorian boy.But the department has denied that it is seeking to expedite his and his father’s removal from the US after a lawyer for the family characterized the government’s action as such to the New York Times.

The lawyer, Danielle Molliver, described the move to the newspaper as “extraordinary” and possibly “retaliatory”.

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A federal judge has reversed a freeze put on funds by Donald Trump for $16bn in enhanced rail links connecting New York and New Jersey amid reports that the US president wants major travel landmarks named after him in return for continued investment.

The Gateway Project will build a new commuter rail tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey under the Hudson River on the western side of New York City and repair a century-old tunnel used by more than 200,000 travelers and 425 trains daily.

The existing River tunnel was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and needs frequent emergency repairs that disrupt travel on the nation’s most heavily used passenger rail line.

The US district judge Jeannette Vargas in New York on Friday handed down the temporary ruling hours after New York and New Jersey authorities said construction would halt for lack of funding.

Vargas said the states were likely to succeed on their claims that a Trump administration directive freezing the funds was arbitrary and ran afoul of legal procedures for making policy changes.

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Former President Bill Clinton blasted Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Friday as he and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepare to sit for depositions in the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

After Republicans and Democrats on the Committee threatened the Clintons with contempt if they ignored subpoenas, the couple agreed to testify under oath about their relationship with Epstein on Feb. 26 and 27.

The depositions are scheduled to be in-person, private and both videotaped and transcribed ― the same format the committee used when it heard from former special counsel Jack Smith during a closed-door hearing in December.

Hillary Clinton lashed out at Comer on Thursday, saying on social media, “If you want this fight ... let’s have it―in public.”

The former president offered his own blistering multi-part Comer critique on Friday, calling the investigation of the couple’s Epstein connections “pure politics” that only serve “partisan interests.”

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Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is coming under scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties for delays in transmitting a whistleblower complaint and her involvement in two different seizures of voting records.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard’s office had failed to relay a whistleblower report made last May accusing her of wrongdoing to Congress.

Two days later, Gabbard’s office confirmed its involvement in the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico, news that came after the DNI was spotted during the execution of a search warrant in Fulton County, Ga.

Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been highly critical of Gabbard on both fronts, hammering her for failing to swiftly turn over the whistleblower report while calling her involvement in voting a threat to the coming elections.

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