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US director Julian Schnabel has hit out at calls to boycott Scottish actor Gerard Butler who has been targeted by activists for his alleged previous support for the Israeli military.Butler gives a gripping performance as a hit man in Schnabel’s latest film — “In The Hand of Dante” — which premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.”It’s unfortunate,” Schnabel told AFP of the boycott calls by activist group Venice4Palestine which has cited Butler’s appearance at a fund-raising event for the Israeli military in 2018.”It’s not even true,” the artist and director of Oscar-nominated “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” added. “He went to a cocktail party with somebody and happened to have his picture taken. He didn’t raise that dough for them.”Butler (“How To Train Your Dragon”, “300”) was one of several stars to attend a 2018 Hollywood gala organised by the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which raised a record $60 million, according to a Variety report at the time.Other attendees included actor Ashton Kutcher and musician and Louis Vuitton menswear head Pharrell Williams, who provided entertainment. Venice4Palestine, a collective of independent Italian filmmakers, had called on organisers of the Venice festival to disinvite Butler as well as Israeli actor Gal Gadot, who also stars in “In The Hand of Dante”.Schnabel, who is Jewish and a critic of the Gaza war, told AFP that Butler had given the “performance of his life” in his movie about the theft of the original manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy”.The Venice Film Festival has ruled out disinviting actors — Butler and Gadot were not expected this year in any case — but Venice4Palestine co-founder and director Fabiomassimo Lozzi has defended the boycott call.”I believe that it’s justified in the same way I believed about 40 years ago that it was justified boycotting artists who performed in South Africa at the height of the apartheid system,” he told AFP.Israeli TV writer Hagai Levi (“Scenes From a Marriage”), another outspoken critic of the Gaza war, told AFP in Venice that any boycotts had to be targeted.  “Ninety percent of the artistic community in Israel” was against the war, he said.”Boycotting them is actually weakening the only people who can make a change, or those who are at least fighting,” he told AFP on Tuesday.

At least 21,000 children in Gaza have been disabled since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, 2023, a United Nations committee said Wednesday.Around 40,500 children have suffered “new war-related injuries” in the nearly two years since the war erupted, with more than half of them left disabled, said the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.Reviewing the situation in the Palestinian territories, it said Israeli evacuation orders during the army’s offensive in Gaza were “often inaccessible” to people with hearing or visual impairments, “rendering evacuation impossible”.At a news conference, committee member Muhannad Al-Azzeh cited the example of a deaf mother in Rafah killed alongside her children, unaware of instructions to evacuate.”Reports also described people with disabilities being forced to flee in unsafe and undignified conditions, such as crawling through sand or mud without mobility assistance,” the committee said.Restrictions on humanitarian aid being brought into the Gaza Strip were disproportionately impacting the disabled, said the committee.”People with disabilities faced severe disruptions in assistance, leaving many without food, clean water, or sanitation and dependent on others for survival,” it said.- Gaza aid restrictions -The decision to centralise aid distribution in Gaza has also made it far more difficult for the disabled to access desperately needed assistance, the committee warned.While the new private US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has four distribution points across the territory, the UN system it has largely replaced had about 400.”We can’t expect children with disabilities… to be able to run and go to the (aid) points,” said Azzeh.”This is why one of our main recommendations is that children with disabilities must be reached out to,” as a high priority for humanitarian aid, he said.Physical obstacles, such as war debris and the loss of mobility aids under the rubble, have also prevented people from reaching the relocated aid points.The committee said 83 percent of disabled people had lost their assistive devices, with most unable to afford alternatives such as donkey carts.It voiced concern that devices like wheelchairs, walkers, canes, splints and prosthetics were considered “dual-use items” by the Israeli authorities and were therefore not included in aid shipments.The committee called for the delivery of “massive humanitarian aid to persons with disabilities” affected by the war.It said it had been informed of at least 157,114 people sustaining injuries, with over 25 percent at risk of life-long impairments, between October 7, 2023 and August 21 this year.There were “at least 21,000 children with disabilities in Gaza as a result of impairments, acquired since October 7, 2023”, it said.The committee urged Israel to adopt specific measures for protecting children with disabilities from attacks, and implement evacuation protocols that take into account persons with disabilities.Israel should ensure disabled people are “allowed to return safely to their homes and are assisted in doing so”, it added.

A Swiss court on Wednesday weighed up whether to hear a landmark climate case pitting residents of a tiny Indonesian island being swallowed by rising sea levels against cement giant Holcim.”It is like a David versus Goliath struggle,” one of the plaintiffs, Asmania, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told AFP after the …

Indonesian islanders take on Swiss cement group in climate case Read More »

The director of a new film about a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza told the Venice Film Festival Wednesday she wanted to give “a voice and a face” to victims.”We’ve seen that the narrative all around the world is that those dying in Gaza are collateral damage, in the media, and I think this is so dehumanising,” Franco-Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania told journalists ahead of the world premiere of “The Voice of Hind Rajab”.”And that’s why cinema, art, and every kind of expression is very important to give those people a voice and a face.”Gaza has been front and centre at the prestigious event in Venice after a group of filmmakers and others called on festival organisers to more forcefully condemn the war.Ben Hania’s film is one of 21 in the running for the Golden Lion prize.It tells the true story of the girl who pleaded with emergency services to come and rescue her after Israeli forces killed the rest of her family in their car while evacuating from Gaza in January 2024.The movie uses the actual audio from phone calls Hind made with the Red Crescent.”This movie was very important for me because when I heard the first time the voice of Hind Rajab, there was something more than her voice,” said Ben Hania.”It was the very voice of Gaza asking for help and nobody could enter,” she added.”It was like a kind of strong desire and the feeling of anger and helplessness that gave birth to this movie.”Ben Hania was the first filmaker to represent Tunisia at the Academy Awards in 2021. adp/ams/jj

Pizzeria owner Saeed is unable to take or serve orders at his restaurant in the Iranian capital, his business stalled by rolling power outages that have compounded the country’s many economic woes.”Outages often hit right in the middle of lunch service, the worst time for restaurant owners,” the 48-year-old entrepreneur told AFP from his pizzeria in an upscale neighbourhood of northern Tehran, requesting to be identified only by his first name.Prolonged power cuts, which also disrupt water and internet access, have become routine, with officials blaming fuel shortages, drought, decrepit infrastructure and soaring demand in the sweltering heat.The burden on small businesses, already struggling to make ends meet, is likely to worsen with European powers moving to reimpose sanctions if an agreement is not reached on Iran’s nuclear programme in the coming weeks.The Iranian currency is already in free fall, exacerbating chronic hyperinflation.Tehran has seen one of its hottest summers on record this year, with temperatures around 40C prompting the government to repeatedly shut banks and public offices to conserve energy and water.Last Friday, state television reported electricity consumption reached 73,500 megawatts, approaching the all-time record of 79,000 megawatts recorded in 2024.Without sufficient fuel to operate the power plants, authorities are forced to ration electricity to prevent overloading the ageing grid, instituting daily two-hour cuts across the country.No electricity means no internet, and so no online orders for Saeed — a significant portion of his business.”Orders have fallen drastically,” said Saeed, who regularly misses online requests placed during outages.To stay afloat, he says he has been forced to lay off staff and cut back further on electricity use.- ‘Unavoidable’ -Last month, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian acknowledged the strains the energy crisis was causing, pledging reforms to attract investment.He however conceded that, for now, “cutting off electricity was unavoidable.”Across Tehran, butchers, bakers, pastry shops, and even ice cream vendors suffer heavy losses in the meantime.In the city centre, a pastry chef showed AFP  rows of refrigerators, empty or at most half-filled after a power outage stalled his process.”Dry pastries can survive in the fridge for maybe two hours,” he told AFP. “But the soft ones, especially chocolate ones, collapse.” “They go mushy, and nobody buys them,” the grey-haired patissier complained, saying the worst part of the outages is their unpredictability.Authorities publish outage schedules by area, but the cuts often still occur at erratic times.”Sometimes it happens two hours before schedule, right when we’re in the middle of production,” he said, at which point he can only watch his creations go bad.- Wilted icing -Videos circulating widely on social media in recent weeks have shown bakery workers throwing out trays of spoiled goods, including dough and decorative cakes, colourful icing wilting in the heat.Butcher Hossein Hajabassi has been forced to do the same, his business quickly shrinking as meat prices soar and purchasing power plummets.”Chicken breasts and fillets, but also lamb liver, which are already very expensive, spoil very quickly,” said the butcher in his sixties.”I sometimes take the meat home to avoid wasting it.”