President Joe Biden announced Feb. 4 the United States will end support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen that has deepened suffering in the Arabian Peninsula's poorest country. "This war has to end," Biden told diplomats in his first visit to the State Department as president, saying the conflict has created a "humanitarian and strategic catastrophe." Biden pledged an end to "relevant" US arms sales, while giving no immediate details on what that would mean. The administration had already said it is pausing some of the billions of dollars in arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled Jan. 28 that the United Kingdom does not hold sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, allowing the dispute between Mauritius and Maldives in regards to the delimitation of their boundaries to proceed. The ruling follows a preliminary objection from the Maldives government, which claimed that the tribunal could not decide the matter due to the existing dispute between Mauritius and the United Kingdom regarding the sovereignty of the archipelago. The tribunal rejected the objection.

The first nuclear disarmament treaty in more than two decades came into force on Jan. 22, following its 50th ratification last October, which triggered the 90-day period required before the treaty entered into effect. The UN completed negotiations on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at its New York headquarters in July 2017. The treaty constitutes "a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading to their total elimination." Following negotiations, the treaty was open to signatories beginning in September 2017.

Northern Ireland's Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced Sept. 29 that after reviewing the evidence against 15 British soldiers suspected of killing civilians in Derry on "Bloody Sunday," Jan. 30, 1972, they will maintain the decision not to pursue prosecution. The final decision, announced in a statement from the PPS, upholds an earlier one from March 2019, which found that "the available evidence is insufficient to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction." After the 2019 announcement, families who lost loved ones and survivors injured in the massacre asked for a review of the decision. In her statement, PPS senior assistant director Marianne O'Kane said, "It is understandable that a number of the bereaved families and injured victims subsequently exercised their right to request a review of decisions relating to 15 of those suspects originally reported." However, she went on to say, "I have concluded that the available evidence is insufficient to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction of any of the 15 soldiers who were the subjects of the reviews."

So, a banner with the phrase "THE JEWS WANT A RACE WAR" was hung from an overpass above the heavily trafficked Interstate 405 in Los Angeles on Aug. 22. As JTA reports, an accompanying banner plugged the perpetrators' website, Goyimtv.com. The site prominently displays a video of their followers standing on the overpass with the banners. Verbiage on the site also reads: "All members of the community and wider society should be treated as equals with the same rights, regardless of their race, age, sex, religion, political beliefs, or any other immutable attribute or self assigned designation UNLESS YOU'RE A JEW or THE SHABBOS EQUIVALENT." This appears to be a reference to the phrase "Shabbos goy," originally meaning a non-Jew who carries out certain tasks that religious Jews are barred from doing on the Sabbath, but now taken up the radical right to mean a dupe of the Jews.

Stuart Christie, the legendary anarchist and anti-fascist militant most notorious for his 1964 assassination attempt on Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, died Aug. 15 at his home in East Sussex, England. The cause of death was given as lung cancer. At 74, Scottish-born Christie was still an international icon of the anarchist movement, seen as a bridge between the era of "classical" anarchism in the early 20th century and the resurgent radicalism of the New Left that emerged in the 1960s.

In the imperial carve-up of northern Syria, US troops have since late last year been controlling the oil-fields of Deir ez-Zor province, in collaboration with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Now reports are emerging that the Kurdish autonomous administration in the region has signed a 25-year contract with a little-known US company for exploitation of oil in SDF-held territory. The company, Delta Crescent Energy, incorporated in Delaware in February 2019, still apparently lacks a website. But its partners are said to include former US ambassador to Denmark James Cain; James Reese, a former officer in the US Army's elite Delta Force; and John P. Dorrier Jr., a former executive at UK-based GulfSands Petroleum. The GulfSands website indicates the British company has oil contracts in Syria that are "currently under Force Majeure as a result of EU sanctions."

Hong Kong will postpone Legislative Council elections originally scheduled for Sept. 6 by one year, citing a resurgence in COVID-19 cases. In making the announcement July 31, Chief Executive Carrie Lam invoked the city's Emergency Regulations Ordinance. (HKFP, RTHK) But Beijing's political imperatives are pretty clearly behind the decision. This was acknowledged by Lau Siu-kai, vice president of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong & Macau Studies, Beijing's own leading think-tank on the semi-autonomous territories. Framing the issue in Great Power terms, Lau said that "the serious international situation between the United States and China...prompts Beijing into doing something to prevent the hostile forces from taking over LegCo and to make sure that the national security is safeguarded." (RTHK)