Susan Sarandon says she still loses film roles over support for Palestine | Gaza | Al Jazeera
Speaking at the Venice Film Festival, Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon says she continues to lose out on work for speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza, despite a broader shift in public opinion in the US.
Israeli air attacks have killed at least four people and wounded 20 others in southern Lebanon in the latest Israeli escalation despite a truce.
The strikes began at dawn on Sunday and hit Nabatieh, Arab Salim, Nabatieh al-Fawqa and Kfar Reman, Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) reported.
Click here to read more: Israeli air attacks on Lebanon kill at least four | Conflict News | Al Jazeera
Palestinians in northern Gaza are holding funeral ceremonies for about 100 people, including 60 children, whose remains were recovered from the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood.
The remains were carried on Sunday by family members from Zeitoun to al-Ma’madani cemetery in central Gaza City for burial, according to Al Jazeera’s correspondent at the scene, Ghazi al-Aloul.
Civil defence crews and family members had spent weeks digging through the ruins of homes hit during Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which began in October 2023.
Many of the victims were part of the extended Malaka family, which alone lost 55 members.
Al-Aloul said families had waited a long time to be able to bury their loved ones in “known, proper cemeteries”. He said that the chance to bury the remains of family members was “not available to every family”, noting that Israeli forces had destroyed and dug up cemeteries elsewhere in Gaza during the war.
Al-Aloul said the remains, though wrapped in shrouds resembling intact bodies, were often only fragments.
“These are bone remains and remnants of belongings that may have been found on the bodies, especially the children’s,” he said, adding that no complete bodies had been recovered from the site because “the Israeli occupation has prolonged this process, and continues to prolong it and prevent it from being completed quickly”.
Raed al-Dahshan, head of Gaza’s civil defence service, told Al Jazeera his teams had formulated plans to carry out recovery operations for thousands more missing bodies, but said the work was being held back by a shortage of heavy machinery.
“We don’t have equipment, we don’t have protective equipment” for rescue workers, he told Al Jazeera.
Dahshan said the recovery of an estimated 8,000 bodies still believed to be under rubble could be completed in about 90 days with proper equipment, but “if that equipment is barred from entering Gaza … this work will continue for years”.
He said his agency had submitted a detailed list of needed equipment to international institutions and was willing to have that machinery remain under international control rather than with the civil defence directly.
He said crews needed large excavators, personal protective equipment and search equipment to locate remains urgently.
On identifying remains, he said crews rely on survivors and neighbouring families to establish who was in a building and where they were at the time of the strike, supported by a team of engineers who sort and document findings in the field. He said Israeli forces’ failure to warn residents before strikes meant “dozens, even hundreds” of homes still required excavation.
Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN human rights office in the occupied Palestinian territories, told Al Jazeera that the scenes were a reminder of “the brutality of this conflict”, noting some of the remains dated back to November 2023.
“Thousands of people are still languishing under this rubble … We’re talking about areas that may be under Israeli military control, 70 percent of Gaza – there’s difficulty accessing these areas to extract these bodies.”
“Accountability must happen … It’s essential that we preserve the evidence we’ve been able to obtain during this sensitive period.”
Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 73,651 Palestinians have been killed and 174,592 wounded since October 2023.
Similar recovery operations in recent weeks have retrieved more than 100 bodies of people from the Abu Shariah and Hassaniya families who were killed in a single strike, as well as more than 500 bodies from the Al-Taj tower site, officials and activists said.
BERLIN — Germany's far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany, (AfD) has won the most votes in the closely watched regional election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt according to exit polls.
Projections show the party is comfortably ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but it remains unclear whether the AfD will win enough seats to secure a majority in the state parliament.
According to exit polls released on Sunday by German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF the AfD is on course to win a record 44.1% to 44.5% of the vote. The Christian Democratic Union is projected to take 18.5%.
The AfD won 20.8% in the 2021 regional election. If the projections are accurate, the CDU has halved its share of voters while the AfD doubled theirs.
If the AfD succeeds in forming a government, it would mark the first time in Germany's postwar history that the far-right has taken control of a state government.
The party's anti-establishment appeal is no longer confined to eastern Germany; at the federal level, the party is also polling first. A win in Saxony-Anhalt would be a major breakthrough for a party that has been classified as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence authorities in several German states.
Speaking to public broadcaster ZDF, AfD federal leader Alice Weidel said Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservatives will never win another election.
"We are seeing explosive growth here," she said, referring to Saxony-Anhalt. "We are going to see explosive growth across all of East Germany — and at the federal level, too."
The AfD candidate behind that growth in Saxony-Anhalt is 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, a former marketing man with a friendly image but a radical platform.
In his videos, he is dressed in a flawlessly ironed white polo shirt or starched white dress shirt — the uniform of Germany's newly professionalized far-right.
His carefully coiffed side parting is as immaculate as his smile, something that distinguishes him from the rest of his party, whose members tend to grimace rather than grin.
But Siegmund's broad smile rarely cracks, even when he speaks about the party's biggest issue, immigration and the mass deportation of migrants. The incongruity is striking. The polished, affable politician is also a proponent of one of the hardest-right positions in contemporary European politics.
Siegmund has campaigned for mass deportations and changes to migration and education policy. The AfD has also called for changes to the region's public broadcaster and closer relations with Russia and the MAGA movement in the United States.
After the result, Siegmund declared: "We have written history."
He also thanked Chancellor Friedrich Merz, saying he had been "a very good campaigner for us."
This is a developing story.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) could bring in massive changes should it form a government in Saxony-Anhalt. The far-right party, has taken a massive lead in the Saxony-Anhalt election, although it was not clear if it will be able to form government and have its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, serve as state premier.
The Saxony-Anhalt chapter of the AfD is classified by the domestic intelligence agency as "confirmed far-right."
In its draft government program, the AfD has promised "deportation from minute one!" if it wins the election in Saxony-Anhalt. The stated goal, according to the party's election program, is simply to deport as many immigrants who have no residency permits as possible.
The party has also pledged much stricter asylum rules at all levels: It wants more detention pending deportation, mandatory work for asylum-seekers, and intends to cut all state funding for integration programs, which it refers to as an "asylum industry."
Furthermore, it wants to exclude children and adolescents who do not have permanent residency in Germany from attending regular schools. On top of that, a "Remigration Task Force" is to be established within the state government to coordinate the state's asylum policy.
Exactly how many of these measures an AfD state government would be legally able to implement remains unclear. Creating special classes for refugees could, for example, be a violation of international and European law.
And the question of who can and can't be deported falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government, not that of an individual state.
The AfD opposes immigration to Germany. In its government platform, the party calls for a "180-degree turnaround in migration policy," and its stated goal is to reduce the number of immigrants in Saxony-Anhalt.
However, the region has been suffering for years from a shortage of skilled workers, particularly in nursing and care for the elderly. The AfD's plan to end this shortage is to encourage Germans who live abroad to come back.
To this end, it plans to launch a "return program," including a proposed "return bonus" to help find housing and daycare spots for children. It is unclear how many returnees the AfD anticipates and how much money it has budgeted for the "return program."
Saxony-Anhalt has been severely affected by depopulation for over 30 years. No other German state population has shrunk more since reunification in 1990 — from around 2.9 million people then to 2.1 million today.
Economic researchers like Reint Gropp, president of the Halle Institute for Economic Research, have warned that an AfD government is likely to exacerbate the skilled worker shortage.
"Highly qualified professionals, in particular, have options," he told Die Welt newspaper on Tuesday. "If they feel they are unwelcome or can expect hostility, they will choose other regions."
The 16 state governments have virtually no authority over Germany's foreign and defense policy, though they can influence political debates via the Bundesrat, the chamber of parliament that represents the states. In that context, an AfD state premier would carry considerable political weight.
For example, since the start of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, Germany has largely halted oil imports, but the AfD's election platform calls for a rapprochement with Russia and an end to sanctions.
The call is largely symbolic, as Saxony-Anhalt is bound by federal sanctions, but an AfD state premier could set a new tone in the Bundesrat.
The AfD also wants to expand Russian language instruction in schools and specifically recruit native Russian speakers for this purpose.
On Ukraine, meanwhile, the AfD is taking a harder line, calling for a "return offensive" for Ukrainian refugees. Again, a state government cannot deport Ukrainians from Germany — that is regulated by federal policy.
Particularly controversial is the AfD's call for a kind of auxiliary police force. The regular police are "overwhelmed" by the task of ensuring security, according to the AfD's program for Saxony-Anhalt: "We will therefore establish a voluntary citizen patrol as a third pillar of the local security architecture."
Legal scholar and criminologist Thomas Feltes, of Ruhr University Bochum, warns against the idea. "It is the police's duty to ward off dangers and ensure the protection of the public. Only the police are authorized to use force in doing so," he wrote in a column for the outlet Legal Tribune Online.
A "citizen patrol," he said, would basically be a vigilante group that would have a negative effect on public safety: "Where such groups are active, the fear of crime is only stoked — not only among the participants, but above all among everyone else, and not just among 'concerned' citizens," he wrote.
A central tenet of the AfD's governing platform is so-called identity politics. It aims to promote a positive image of German history, and advocates a fundamentally different view of the country's past. The party describes the process of coming to terms with German crimes during the Nazi era as the "perpetuation of a guilt complex" and wants to change school curricula accordingly.
It has also declared war on social diversity: Rainbow flags, as symbols of diversity, are to be banned in schools. It rejects the world-famous Bauhaus architecture — which flourished in Saxony-Anhalt — as "too globalist" and calls for a "patriotic cultural policy."
To that end, it wants to redirect funding away from the many pro-democracy projects that receive state funding for their work. In its platform, the AfD has rejected any continuation of these payments.
Tomio Okamura, the far-right president of the Czech parliament's lower chamber, congratulated the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on its success in the Saxony-Anhalt state election.
According to Okamura, this is the result of the "bad politics" by the "liberal, EU-friendly" parties in Germany.
Okamura's far-right SPD party is part of the Czech governing coalition.
An AfD-led government could bring major changes to migration, education and social policy in Saxony-Anhalt.
The party wants more deportations, mandatory work for asylum-seekers and cuts to integration programs. It also plans to change school curricula, ban rainbow flags in schools and reduce funding for pro-democracy projects.
Some proposals could face legal limits or fall outside state powers. The AfD also wants closer ties with Russia, although foreign policy is mainly decided at the federal level.
For a closer look at what an AfD-led government could mean for Saxony-Anhalt, read our full analysis here.
"We're going to have to live with this result," the CDU's lead candidate Sven Schulze said after congratulating the AfD on becoming the Saxony-Anhalt's strongest party.
The election results of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the Saxony-Anhalt state election is a "serious" moment, France's Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad said.
"This is a serious moment in Europe, seeing the far right win in a regional election in Germany," Haddad posted on his X account.
"We must listen with humility to the anger, the concerns, the fears, and respond to them," he added.
"We have made history," said Ulrich Siegmund, the lead candidate for the far-right AfD, after the party won around 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt.
An India-born U.S. citizen accused of stealing at least $600,000 through a federal food-benefits scheme has been arrested in India.
His arrest marked the fifth capture under the FBI's newly launched Most Wanted Fraudsters initiative.
Manjit Singh Bedi was arrested Friday in Jalandhar, Punjab, after U.S. authorities alleged that he fled the country while facing federal fraud charges.
Click here to read the full story: Suspected fraudster wanted in US captured in India over alleged SNAP scam
