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Wealthy, democratic countries in the global north are using harsh, vague and punitive measures to crack down on climate protests at the same time as criticising similar draconian tactics by authorities in the global south, according to a report.

A Climate Rights International report exposes the increasingly heavy-handed treatment of climate activists in Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the US.

It found the crackdown in these countries – including lengthy prison sentences, preventive detention and harassment – was a violation of governments’ legal responsibility to protect basic rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association.

It also highlights how these same governments frequently criticise regimes in developing countries for not respecting the right to protest peacefully.

A judge in the Brazilian state of Rondonia has found two beef slaughterhouses guilty of buying cattle from a protected area of former rainforest in the Amazon and ordered them, along with three cattle ranchers, to pay a total of $764,000 for causing environmental damage, according to the decision issued Wednesday. Cattle raising drives Amazon deforestation. The companies Distriboi and Frigon and the ranchers may appeal.

It is the first decision in several dozen lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in environmental damages from the slaughterhouses for allegedly trading in cattle raised illegally in a protected area known as Jaci-Parana, which was rainforest but is now mostly converted to pasture.

Four slaughterhouses are among the many parties charged, including JBS SA, which bills itself as the world’s largest protein producer. The court has not decided on the cases involving JBS.

Lebanon charged its embattled former central bank governor Wednesday with the embezzlement of $42 million, three judicial officials told The Associated Press.

Riad Salameh, 73, was charged by the Financial Public Prosecution a day after he was detained following an interrogation by Lebanon’s top public prosecutor over several alleged financial crimes.

His case has been transferred to an investigating judge, the officials added, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Salameh ended his 30-year term as central bank governor a year ago under a cloud, with several European countries probing allegations of financial crimes. Many in Lebanon blame him for the crippling financial crisis that has gripped the country since late 2019.

Enoch Burke was arrested by Irish police at Wilson's Hospital School in County Westmeath today on Monday refusing to abide by a court order instructing him to stay away.

The school board had dismissed Burke from his post after a dispute over his refusal to recognise a transgender student's new identity.

Burke was brought to the High Court in Dublin on Monday evening, where a judge ruled that he was in breach of the existing court order, and was to be returned to Mountjoy Prison.

Burke accused the court of denying him his religious rights, which included his belief in two genders, male and female. "This is a mockery of justice," he told the judge.

Young girls screamed and elbowed each other in a crush of bodies in southern Gaza, trying desperately to reach the front of the food line. Men doled out rice and chicken as fast as they could, platefuls of the nourishment falling to the ground in the tumult.

Nearby, boys waited to fill plastic containers with water, standing for hours among tents packed so tightly they nearly touched.

Hunger and desperation were palpable Friday in the tent camp along the Deir al-Balah beachfront, after a month of successive evacuation orders that have pressed thousands of Palestinians into the area that the Israeli military calls a “humanitarian zone.”

The head of Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, has warned the country’s leaders that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank is out of control and has become a serious threat to national security.

Ronen Bar issued the warning in a letter to the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the attorney general and members of the Israeli cabinet, some of whom are outspoken backers of the extremist settlers responsible for the escalating violence.

Bar’s letter, sent last week but published by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Thursday night, has highlighted the wide, acrimonious gap between the far-right wing of Netanyahu’s coalition and Israel’s security apparatus.

The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of those criticised by Bar for inflammatory behaviour, called for the Shin Bet head to be fired, triggering a rebuke on Friday from the defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people including two families in both Gaza and Lebanon, while Hezbollah fired a volley of 55 rockets into northern Israel in response.

World leaders urged restraint and tried to frame the ceasefire negotiations as heading in a positive direction.

But in an interview with Sky News, the leader of Hamas in Lebanon told us no progress had been made so far at the talks and the two sides appear to be just as far apart as ever.

Hamas is not at the negotiations but messages and updates have been passed on to them on the sidelines.

Israel has published plans for one of its proposed new settlements in the occupied West Bank, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Wednesday, upping the ante a day before planned new Gaza peace talks seen as vital to preventing a regional war.

The far-right minister said the move was a response to actions by the Palestinian West Bank leadership and countries which have recognised a Palestinian state.

"No anti-Israel or anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of the settlement. We will continue to fight against the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state. This is the mission of my life," said Smotrich.

Most United Nations member states consider settlements built in the West Bank and other territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war to be illegal under international law. Israel disputes this, citing the Jewish people's historical and biblical ties to the land.

Israel announced in June it was going to legalise five outposts in the West Bank, establish three new settlements, and seize huge swathes of land where Palestinians seek to create an independent state, further inflaming Palestinian anger.

After weeks of Israeli bombardment left them with nowhere else to go, hundreds of Palestinians have ended up in a former Gaza prison built to hold murderers and thieves.

Yasmeen al-Dardasi said she and her family passed wounded people they were unable to help as they evacuated from a district in the southern city of Khan Younis towards its Central Correction and Rehabilitation Facility.

They spent a day under a tree before moving on to the former prison, where they now live in a prayer room. It offers protection from the blistering sun, but not much else.

Israel has said it goes out of its way to protect civilians in its war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which runs Gaza and led the attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that sparked the latest conflict.

Sperm whales communicate with each other using rhythmic sequences of clicks, called codas. It was previously thought that sperm whales had just 21 coda types. However, after studying almost 9,000 recordings, the Ceti researchers identified 156 distinct codas. They also noticed the basic building blocks of these codas which they describe as a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" – much like phonemes, the units of sound in human language which combine to form words.

Pratyusha Sharma, a PhD student at MIT and lead author of the study, describes the "fine-grain changes" in vocalisations the AI identified. Each coda consists of between three and 40 rapid-fire clicks. The sperm whales were found to vary the overall speed, or the "tempo", of the codas, as well as to speed up and slow down during the delivery of a coda, in other words, making it "rubato". Sometimes they added an extra click at the end of a coda, akin, says Sharma, to "ornamentation" in music. These subtle variations, she says, suggest sperm whale vocalisations could carry a much richer amount of information than previously thought.

Months after some Israelis started to protest against aid lorries entering Gaza at the main Kerem Shalom crossing, the battle has moved to other key junctions, where rival groups of activists do their best to block or protect aid convoys.

Right-wing activists, including Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank, have uploaded dozens of videos of crowds, including some very young children, hurling food onto the ground and stamping on boxes of aid.

In one video, a group of jubilant protesters dance and celebrate on top of a looted lorry.

In another, one of the stranded lorries is ablaze.

In the West Bank, at least two drivers who were not carrying goods bound for Gaza were dragged from their cabs and beaten.

Other videos show Israeli vigilantes stopping lorries in Jerusalem and demanding that drivers show papers proving they are not transporting aid to Gaza. Their faces are uncovered and they appear to be acting with complete impunity.

"Israel doesn’t care about the world, it acts as if it was above the law because the U.S. administration is shielding it against punishment,” said Shaban Abdel-Raouf, a Palestinian displaced four times by the Israeli offensive.

"The world isn’t yet prepared to stop our slaughter at Israeli hands,” said Abdel-Raouf, who was reached by phone.