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The Qatari government has informed the US and Israel it will stop mediation efforts to halt the conflict in Gaza because it no longer thinks the parties are negotiating in good faith

Qatar informed Israel, Hamas officials, the US and Egypt of the decision after a US delegation including the CIA director, Bill Burns, visited Doha for inconclusive meetings in late October.

Its government had concluded that the warring parties were focused on “political optics” rather than genuine security concerns, the diplomatic source said, and had tried to undermine the process “by backing out from some of the commitments”.

In April Doha had briefly asked Hamas commanders to leave the country, after the prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, announced Qatar was going to review its mediation role. They headed to Turkey but within weeks Israel and the US government had asked Qatar to bring them back in order to intensify negotiations. The Qataris are trusted by senior figures on and have a long track record in mediation.

Western and regional politicians and diplomats who favour allowing Hamas to stay in Qatar warned that if it is pushed out, it will hinder engagement with Hamas figures potentially more inclined to compromise, and could allow more hostile states such as Iran to boost their hold over the group.

Occupational stress is a trigger for Rebecca Wilde, a 32-year-old tech worker in Buckinghamshire. Four years ago, work pressures combined with family issues affected her sleep, leading to a severe manic episode. She was hospitalised for a month and a half, and diagnosed with type 1 bipolar disorder, also known as bipolar 1, a mood condition that can have devastating consequences if not managed well. Mania, and sometimes psychosis, is present in type 1.

Wilde was experiencing both: at one point, she thought she could talk to dogs. She was put on the antipsychotic drug olanzapine and another mood stabiliser, lithium. She has now been taking lithium alone for a year, and it has been transformative. “On the lithium, I definitely feel like me,” she says.

While Wilde was transitioning to lithium only, researchers were furiously debating the evidence around the drug. In 2023, the journal Bipolar Disorders published an editorial co-written by editor-in-chief Gin S Malhi, titled “Lithium first: not merely first line”. This asserted that lithium should be considered not only as one of several possible initial treatments for bipolar disorder, but as the first and foremost of these. Lithium “needs to be championed”, maintains Malhi, a visiting psychiatry professor at Oxford University.

This is not the only heated dispute among lithium researchers from the past couple of years. A 2024 critique led to professors trading words such as “pseudoscience” and “extraordinarily venomous”. Feuds such as these point to the high stakes over the declining popularity of lithium.

Medicinal lithium is remarkable. There is more evidence of lithium’s effectiveness in managing bipolar disorder than for any other medicine. As a naturally occurring ion, lithium can’t be patented. And unlike most medicines, it’s not metabolised by the body.

Malhi explains why this is significant: “With lithium, the body can be thought of simply as a bucket of water with input and output of fluid. Then, whatever lithium you add gives you a plasma level. It means we can accurately make changes with sensitivity around plasma levels and clinical response and tolerability.”

What just happened in Berlin?

The chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the SPD, sacked his finance minister, Christian Lindner, the FDP leader, on Wednesday night after months of disagreement over how to deal with the gaping hole in Germany’s budget.

Scholz wants to boost spending by taking on more debt, citing the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Lindner opposed this and insisted instead on an array of tax and spending cuts that the SPD and Greens said were impossible to accept as they would torpedo much of the government’s programme. At stake: welfare payments, climate emergency measures and support for Ukraine (Germany is its second biggest backer after the US).

Whether Scholz called Lindner’s bluff by sacking him before he walked is up for discussion. Both men have vented their anger towards each other, with Scholz accusing Lindner of being “small-minded” and “egotistical” and failing to see the bigger picture – namely huge geopolitical challenges. Lindner accuses Scholz of “trivialising” the concerns of ordinary Germans.

France has summoned the Israeli ambassador over the incident, the latest of several controversies involving the Eleona sanctuary on the Mount of Olives, which along with three other sites make up the French national domain in the Holy Land.

The sites have been the focus of diplomatic incidents in the past. The national domain was attributed to France before Israel’s creation in 1948 and is administered as a private property by the French consulate in Jerusalem.

According to an AFP journalist who witnessed the incident, Israeli police entered the site and surrounded the two French gendarmes before pushing one of them to the ground.

The gendarme identified himself and shouted “Don’t touch me” several times, according to the journalist. Both gendarmes were then led into police cars, before being later released.

Ireland intends to join South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice before the end of the year, its foreign minister said on Thursday.

Micheal Martin's comments came as the Irish parliament passed a non-binding motion agreeing that "genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza".

South Africa in December brought a case before the ICJ, arguing that the war in Gaza breached the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, an accusation Israel has strongly denied.

Several nations have added their weight to the proceedings, including Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, Chile and Libya.

Ireland had said it would file a submission to the court once South Africa had submitted a document supporting its claims, which it did on Monday.

Police in Germany have arrested eight suspected members of a far-right terror cell alleged to have been plotting the armed takeover of eastern regions to establish a Nazi-inspired regime that would carry out “ethnic cleansing”, federal prosecutors said.

Amid a crackdown on neo-Nazi militants, the German nationals calling themselves Sächsische Separatisten (Saxonian Separatists) were taken into custody on Tuesday in pre-dawn raids on 20 premises in eastern Germany and the Polish border city of Zgorzelec, with another seven suspects in investigators’ sights.

Over the last year, the Israeli military has received at least 100 of Oshkosh armored vehicles like the one in the video. They arrived on vessels operated by the commercial shipping and logistics giant A.P. Moller Maersk.

Israel has long used armored vehicles as killing machines throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. Images of Palestinians crushed by Israeli tanks and trucks are now grimly familiar to anyone paying attention to the ongoing Israeli onslaught in Gaza.

Analyzing shipment export data from over 2,000 shipments over the last year, the researchers report that they were able to reveal a commercial supply chain rife with materiel bound for use in Israel’s assault on Gaza. The researchers said the available shipping data suggests that Maersk ships violated a Spanish embargo policy by transiting through the port of Algeciras.

The Spanish embargo bars cargo ships carrying weapons that could be used for war crimes from making calls in Spanish ports; in May, the foreign ministry said the rule would apply to military goods bound for Israel. Since then, Maersk ships with military goods headed for Israel, including equipment for putting bombs on aircraft, frequently transited through Algeciras, one of the largest ports in Europe, said Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International researchers. (Maersk did not respond to a request for comment.)

“We can clearly state that Spain is violating the law,” said Irene Montero, a member of European Parliament from the Spanish left party Podemos. “Article 8.1 of Law 53/2007 on the Foreign Trade of Arms states that the authorization for the transit of military material must be suspended when there are ‘rational indications’ that the material will be used to exacerbate conflicts, in a manner contrary to human dignity, or in a human rights violation.”

Nov 4 (Reuters) - Some of the biggest Chinese-owned solar factories in Vietnam are cutting production and laying off workers, spurred on by the expansion of U.S. trade tariffs targeting it and three other Southeast Asian countries.

Meanwhile, in nearby Indonesia and Laos, a slew of new Chinese-owned solar plants are popping up, out of the reach of Washington's trade protections. Their planned capacity is enough to supply about half the panels installed in the U.S. last year, Reuters reporting shows.

Chinese solar firms have repeatedly shrunk output in existing hubs while building new factories in other countries, allowing them to sidestep tariffs and dominate the U.S. and global markets despite successive waves of U.S. tariffs over more than a decade designed to rein them in.

"It's a huge cat and mouse game," said William A. Reinsch, a former trade official in the Clinton administration and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It's not that hard to move. You set up and you play the game again. The design of the rules is such that the U.S. is usually one step behind."

China accounts for about 80% of the world's solar shipments, while its export hubs elsewhere in Asia make up much of the rest, according to SPV Market Research. That's a sharp contrast to two decades ago when the U.S. was a global leader in the industry.

America's imports of solar supplies, meanwhile, have tripled since Washington began imposing its tariffs in 2012, hitting a record $15 billion last year, according to federal data. While almost none came directly from China in 2023, some 80% came from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia – home to factories owned by Chinese firms. Washington slapped tariffs on solar exports from those four Southeast Asia nations last year and expanded them in October following complaints from manufacturers in the United States.

In a seven-page memo, Frank Hoffmeister, the director of the EU foreign service’s legal department, argued that while European law required the labeling of settlement products, a ban on their import and sale was still up for debate.

Hoffmeister, the EU legal note’s author, is also the Brussels-based director for the foreign and security policy working group of Germany’s liberal Free Democratic Party, which is a strong supporter of Israel’s war in Gaza. The FDP, for which Hoffmeister previously served as Brussels vice chair, has called for a freeze on EU and German payments to Palestinian institutions and programs until a special audit has ensured that no cash goes “to finance Islamist terror.”

Between 2020 and August 2023, European investors put up an estimated $164.2 billion of loans and guarantees for businesses “actively involved” in Israeli settlements — and held $144.7 billion of shares and bonds in the same firms, according to an estimate from a coalition of groups opposing European investment in settlements.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, told The Intercept that the EU’s attitude to the ICJ opinion was “legally flawed, politically damaging, and morally compromised.”

UNICEF says more than 50 children have been killed in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp in the past 48 hours, with the Save the Children charity saying the high number shows “the intensity of this conflict and this war on children”.

“Children are under constant bombardment, in constant fear,” Rachel Cummings, Save the Children International’s Humanitarian Director and Team Lead in Gaza, told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

Israeli foreign intelligence agency Mossad has reportedly been implicated in an espionage scandal targeting Italian prime minister and senior officials, Yedioth Ahronoth reported yesterday.

According to the paper, Mossad has been involved in deals with the Milan-based private investigation firm which is made up of current and former senior members of the security services and who have stolen personal information on politicians, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and public figures, to be used for extortion.

The paper said at least four people are under arrest and dozens more under investigation, adding that cyber security experts and hackers may have breached the servers of Italy’s Interior Ministry.

Italian media outlets described the case as a “conspiracy of the highest level that involves members of the mafia and officials in the intelligence services, along with foreign intelligence services including the Mossad.”

Meloni described the plot as “unacceptable” and a “threat to democracy.”

ILGA World said The Aguda’s proposal to hold the group’s next world conference in Tel Aviv had violated its aims and objectives, and it is now reviewing The Aguda’s larger compliance with the ILGA World constitution.

The Aguda’s bid had been due to be voted on at ILGA World’s conference this month in Cape Town, South Africa.

“We recognise the historical experience with apartheid and colonialism in South Africa: even the possibility of voting on such a bid in their home country would have been at odds with the unequivocal solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

The move follows an open letter by three Palestinian LGBTQ+ organisations to ILGA World last month, raising major concerns about how Israeli LGBTQ+ groups have historically helped “pinkwash” and divert attention from Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.