The Cyprus spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Emilia Strovolidou, has urged the country to stop forcibly pushing away Syrian refugee boats arriving from Lebanon, a practice that violates international human rights law and the principle of non-refoulement. According to reports from the Associated Press and monitoring group EuroMed Rights, Strovolidou accused Cyprus authorities of using "violent" tactics to "destabilize" boats in order to thwart refugees from arriving on the island's shores. (Jurist)

As Israel continues to threaten a full-scale assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, local, regional, and international aid groups have been scrambling to try to prepare to respond to the catastrophic humanitarian impact a ground invasion is expected to have. Facing a severe scarcity of supplies and resources, people involved in the effort say whatever preparations they are able to make will undoubtedly fall far short of the needs.

Security forces in junta-led Burkina Faso summarily executed more than 223 civilians, including at least 56 children, at the northern villages of Nondin and Soro in February, according to a Human Rights Watch report. The report says the massacres are among the worst atrocities carried out during the country's nearly 10-year internal conflict, and may amount to crimes against humanity. Survivors said they were accused by the military of being complicit with jihadists—which is a common and unfair charge that soldiers make against civilians living in areas where militants operate. Abuses like this have increased significantly under the current junta. 

The US Department of Energy on April 25 released its preliminary estimate for the nation's carbon emissions in the previous year. While falling far short of the kind of drop needed to meet the Paris Agreement goals, a dip in emissions was recorded—almost entirely due to changes in the electric power sector. US carbon emissions have been trending downward since 2007, when they peaked at about six gigatonnes. The COVID-19 pandemic produced a dramatic drop in emissions in 2020, bringing the yearly total to below five gigatonnes for the first time since before 1990, when DoE monitoring began. Carbon dioxide releases rose after the return to "normalcy"; 2023 marked the first post-pandemic decline, with emissions again below five gigatonnes.

Indian security forces killed at least 29 Naxal insurgents in Kanker Bastar district of Chhattisgarh state this month. Chhattisgarh is one of several states officially designated as affected by Left Wing Extremism (LWE), along with Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Kerala.

Russia on April 24 vetoed a UN Security Council resolution sponsored by the US and Japan which called on all nations to contribute to the peaceful use of outer space and to prevent a dangerous arms race in space-based weapons. The resolution urged nations "to refrain from actions contrary to that objective and to the relevant existing treaties in the interest of maintaining international peace and security."

Masha Gessen in a New Yorker essay draws a parallel between the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Gaza Strip, where Israel's long siege is now escalating to genocide. Some Israeli military tactics in Gaza mirror those of the Nazis in Warsaw. Yet, while some voices on the ostensible "left" go so far as to glorify Hamas, Israel's online partisans are drawing a parallel that reverses the roles, depicting Hamas as the new Nazis. In a case of paradoxical fascistic pseudo-anti-fascism, the genocidal rhetoric of figures such as hardline Israeli cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich dehumanizes the victims by portraying all Gazans as Nazis. In Episode 223 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg turns to the words of Leon Trotsky and Albert Camus to make sense of the seeming contradiction.

The California-based Center for Truth & Justice (CFTJ) published a report April 18 purporting that acts of genocide have been committed in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region and Armenian border provinces, and calling upon the International Court of Justice to open an investigation. The CFTJ claims that Azerbaijani security forces have evicted ethnic Armenians from their native lands in these areas since the war of 2020, documenting instances of torture, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings.