World
Watch: Here’s why you should care about France’s presidential election

French voters will on April 24 select their subsequent president after backing Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen for the second spherical.
Whether or not the French citizens will select to remain the course and again the centrist incumbent or select the far-right chief can have a huge impact not simply on the nation, but in addition on the European Union and the West generally. France stays one of many world’s main financial and navy powers.
Macron and Le Pen have broadly completely different opinions on most matters from run the economic system, France’s position within the EU, and the EU’s place in France in addition to on overseas coverage, the latter a very sizzling subject as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wages on.
Watch the video above to study extra about how these elections will impression you.

World
Israeli soldiers used 80-year-old Palestinian as Gaza human shield: Report

Israeli army forced elderly man to scout buildings with an explosive cord tied around his neck, before he was later shot dead along with his wife.
The Israeli military forced an 80-year-old Palestinian man to act as a human shield in Gaza by tying an explosive cord around his neck and threatening to have his head blown off, an investigation by the Israeli outlet The Hottest Place in Hell has found.
A senior officer from the army’s Nahal Brigade tied the explosive cord around the man’s neck before he was ordered to scout houses. After eight hours, soldiers ordered the man to flee with his wife from their home in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood in May, said +972 magazine, which reported the piece in partnership with The Hottest Place in Hell.
But when another Israeli battalion spotted the elderly couple on the street, they were shot dead on the spot, according to Israeli soldiers present at the scene.
The Israeli soldiers had initially encountered the couple in their home. They told Arabic-speaking soldiers that they were unable to flee to southern Gaza due to mobility difficulties.
But even in his condition, the soldiers forced the unnamed 80-year-old to walk ahead of them with his cane, while his wife was detained in their house.
A soldier told the investigation that the commander had decided to use the Palestinian couple as “mosquitoes”, referring to a procedure where the Israeli army forces Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields to protect the Israeli forces from being shot or blown up.
“He entered each house before us so that if there were [explosives] or a militant inside, he would [take the hit] instead of us,” one soldier said.
“He was told that if he did anything wrong or didn’t follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body.”
The man was forced to act as a human shield for eight hours, before he was ordered, along with his wife, to walk towards the so-called “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza.
But the soldiers did not care to tell nearby Israeli divisions that the couple was going to pass through the area, according to the testimonies.
“After 100 metres, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,” a soldier said. “They died like that, in the street.”
Al Jazeera has reached out to the Israeli army for comment on the reported incident.
Israeli forces’ use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been extensively reported on, despite it being forbidden under international law.
In August, the Israeli daily Haaretz published an expose revealing that Israeli troops had abducted Palestinian civilians, dressed them in military uniforms, attached cameras to their bodies, and sent them into underground tunnels as well as buildings in order to shield Israeli troops.
“[I]t’s hard to recognise them. They’re usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they’re always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks,” the Haaretz article said. But if you look more closely, “you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs and their faces are full of fear”.
In the occupied West Bank in June, Israeli forces tied a wounded Palestinian man to the hood of their military jeep, in an apparent use of a human shield.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territory, slammed the incident, calling it “human shielding in action”.
And in January 2024, Palestinian shop owner Bahaa el-Din Abu Ras, 36, recounted how Israeli soldiers used him as a human shield for nearly two hours in Dura, in the occupied West Bank.
“So many questions went through my mind: Will I get to go back to my family? Will I be shot or would a rock hit me? Will I be arrested by these soldiers for whatever reason? When or how can I be released, in the middle of this warzone?” Abu Ras said. “I spent about an hour and a half like that, not sure when I would be killed and whether I would ever rest again.”
World
Video: German Chancellor Accuses JD Vance of Election Interference

new video loaded: German Chancellor Accuses JD Vance of Election Interference
transcript
transcript
German Chancellor Accuses JD Vance of Election Interference
At the Munich Security Conference, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rebuked U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s call for German leaders to allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their government.
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Well, thank you and thanks to all the gathered delegates. We really reject any idea of cooperation between parties, other parties and these extreme right parties. It is not others to give us the advice to cooperate with these parties, which we are not working with for good reasons, especially when looking to the history of our country.
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World
Sicilian mafia bosses complain on wiretaps about lack of quality recruits, reminisce about 'The Godfather'

What happened to never going against the family?
Leaders within the Cosa Nostra, Sicily’s mafia, have reportedly complained that mob recruits aren’t what they used to be, as nearly 150 people associated with the group were arrested this week.
“The level is low, today they arrest someone and if he becomes a turncoat they arrest another… wretched low-level,” former Cosa Nostra boss Giancarlo Romano said in a wiretapped conversation last year before he was killed in a shootout, according to BBC News.
Romano also revealed that he was nostalgic for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic “The Godfather,” about a fictional mob family in New York.
JAPANESE MOB BOSS PLEADS GUILTY IN NEW YORK TO CONSPIRING TO TRAFFIC NUCLEAR MATERIALS TO IRAN
Carabinieri officers in Sicily. (Valeria Ferraro/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“If you watch ‘The Godfather,’ the connections he had… he was very influential because of the power that he built at a political level,” Romano told his associate.
He continued, “But us – what can we do? We’re on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it’s others who do it. We used to be number one, now it’s others… we’re just gypsies.”
The mobsters also seem to like actor Robert De Niro, who played Vito Corleone in “The Godfather Part II,” and Spider-Man as other wiretaps revealed them as nicknames for each other, according to The Guardian.
This week Sicilian officers conducted early morning raids, serving 183 arrest warrants on those believed to be associated with the Cosa Nostra for crimes ranging from mafia association to extortion and attempted murder. Of those, 36 were already in custody.
While raids like this week’s have weakened the Cosa Nostra, Italian officials warn they are still a threat.
FORMER MAFIA HITMAN SENTENCED TO 25 YEARS FOR KILLING OF BOSTON CRIME BOSS JAMES ‘WHITEY’ BULGER
“The investigations that led to Tuesday’s arrests demonstrate that Cosa Nostra is alive and present and communicates with completely new communication channels,” Maurizio de Lucia, chief prosecutor of Sicily’s capital of Palermo, said at a press conference, referencing the mafia’s use of encrypted apps to communicate with each other. “It is doing business and trying to rebuild its army.”
Domenico La Padula, with the Italian Carabinieri police, told The New York Times this week that the Cosa Nostra “is far from dead.”
He said they have been able to survive by finding “new energy and new strength,” with new recruits and 21st-century criminal ventures like online gambling.

Palermo, Sicily’s capital. (Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The Cosa Nostra has remained “strongly tied to the rules of its founding fathers and its ancient rituals,” the Carabinieri told The Times, adding that their use of encrypted devices has “limited the need for traditional meetings and gatherings to the bare minimum.”
John Dickie, who wrote “Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse and Cosa Nostra, A History of the Sicilian Mafia,” told The Telegraph that Italian authorities have become “fantastic” at surveilling the mafia.
“Mafia dons have been caught boasting how good their anti-bugging devices were, at the same time that they were being bugged,” he revealed.
Dickie also agreed that the Cosa Nostra appears to be “in decline.”
“You only have to read the phone taps where the bosses are saying ‘it’s not like it used to be,’” he said. “This is about the fifth time that the bosses have tried to reorganise the cupola since the early 1990s. Every time they have been thwarted. The authorities were on to them.”
He continued, “These arrests mean that Cosa Nostra has another big task to rebuild, and they show that the state is still stronger than the mafia.”
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