Energy News Beat

India’s coaching hubs, like small-city Kota, have become big business, but as students face pressure to perform, suicide is now a pressing public health issue

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Jaipur, India – Even though Ukraine lies 6,000km (3,728 miles), two seas and half a dozen national borders away from Ali Hussein’s hometown, the raven-haired 29-year-old tour guide still feels for the war-torn ex-Soviet nation.

“India is close to Russia and we buy Russian weapons, [but] I am fully on Ukraine’s side,” he told Al Jazeera, standing next to one of the terracotta-coloured buildings that gave Jaipur, a megalopolis of 3 million people, its sobriquet of India’s “Pink City.”

He was referencing New Delhi’s decades-old ties to Moscow dating back to India’s 1947 independence and the fact that over the past five years, India has gone on a $13bn spending spree on Russian-made weaponry.

He also has personal ties to Ukraine. His cousin attended a medical school in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, like thousands of Indian students who brave harsh winters and a new language of instruction to get a degree at a much lower cost than at home or in the West.

But Hussein is a rare exception.

Dozens of Indians asked this reporter in 10 cities from Delhi to the Pakistani border a similar question: “Is the war over?”

Their lack of knowledge seems understandable.

Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since World War II is not top-of-the-hour or headline news any more. Since October, it has been eclipsed by the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But the Middle East war has not only changed the news agenda in the Global South, a term meaning Latin America, Africa and much of Asia. It has also confirmed the worst fears of many in the region – that Western powers are far less likely to empathise with Palestinian suffering, compared with that of Ukrainians.

The war in Gaza has also “nullified all the results of rapprochement between the West and the Global South, and in this context, the war benefits [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.

Ukraine is well aware of the trend. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s trip to Argentina last week is widely seen as an attempt to win the hearts and minds in Latin America.

Double standards?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with widely-reported war crimes, the shelling of civilian areas and, threats to Europe’s largest nuclear station, was met with global condemnation.

While Western nations were quick to support Ukraine, a sovereign nation with its own national identity that stood up to Russia’s occupation attempts, their backing of Israel’s operation in Gaza has raised doubts and sparked cries of hypocrisy.

“The typical comparison people make between Ukrainians and Palestinians is how the West is treating the former so differently than the latter,” said Seda Demiralp, a professor of political science at Istanbul’s Isik University.

European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for example, has consistently condemned what she has called Russian “acts of pure terror” on civilians in Ukraine, but failed to criticise Israel for its brutal campaign in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 18,000 people in just more than two months.

The alleged double standards irk Global South nations.

(Al Jazeera)

“People can argue endlessly about the reasons for the war in Ukraine, or Israel’s operation in Gaza, but for many the conclusion is obvious: the United States was critical of Russia when it killed innocent civilians in Ukraine and now it is silent when its ally Israel does the same thing in Gaza,” said Smagin.

The latest episode of the Israel-Palestine conflict escalated after Hamas, which governs Gaza, attacked southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking more than 200 captive. Israel responded quickly, promising to crush Hamas with its relentless bombardment.

Malaysia was quick to accuse the West of “ignoring Palestinians” while providing “swift” support to Ukraine.

“Why are there two different approaches? For instance, in the Ukraine crisis, the Western powers swiftly provided support to Kyiv. Unfortunately, when it comes to Palestine, it is entirely disregarded,” Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi reportedly said.

Another point of tension is rooted in perception.

Western media outlets cover the killings of Israelis in more detail than those of Palestinians – a macabre “Orientalism” that pays little attention to mass deaths in places like Afghanistan or Iraq in comparison with Western nations, a United Kingdom analyst says.

“This kind of Orientalism doesn’t want to equal the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians, ignoring the fact that there are dozens of times more victims among Palestinians,” Alisher Ilkhamov of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London, told Al Jazeera. “And considering the whole history of Palestine’s occupation – thousands times more.”

The Modi-Putin ‘bromance’

Even though czarist Russia wanted to invade India, post-colonial New Delhi developed cordial ties with Communist Moscow.

India’s nationalist premier, Narendra Modi, has not joined the international choir of critics lambasting the invasion of Ukraine and New Delhi abstained from condemning the aggression in the United Nations.

These days, the Russian-Indian trade is conducted in rupees, which New Delhi sees as a chance to make its currency convertible and more useful in global trade.

This year, New Delhi saved $2.7bn between January and October by buying 70 million tonnes of discounted Russian oil, the Reuters news agency reported in November.

And the Kremlin’s narrative seems to be especially effective in India, where 46 percent of Indians believed the Ukrainian government was under the spell of neo-Nazi ideologues – a baseless claim Putin has used to justify the war – according to a poll by YouGov Cambridge, an international pollster, conducted in October 2023.

Only 27 percent of those polled said Russia was to blame for the war, while 42 percent thought Ukraine was conducting mass murders and “genocide” of ethnic Russians.

Meanwhile, some Indian observers saw Western sanctions on Russia as a new financial tool to keep controlling the global economy.

“This led to fears that the dollar was being weaponised,” analysts Ashish Pandey and Garima Bora wrote in the Economic Times, an Indian online newspaper, in June.

“Several countries were worried that the US could use the power of its currency to target them and hobble their growth,” they wrote.

Analysts say the Western response to Palestinian suffering has underscored a double standard.

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Ogoja, Nigeria – Rebecca stares down her sandy street past the palm trees and T-junction. No sign of Blessing. It is already after 7:30am, and their school’s morning assembly will soon start. Rebecca sighs with relief when she sees her friend running towards her. “Sorry, sorry,” Blessing gasps, “I had to queue for hours to get water this morning.” The two 15-year-olds hug and quickly make their way to their secondary school, a stone’s throw from Rebecca’s home in Ogoja, a town in southeastern Nigeria about 65km (40 miles) as the crow flies from the Cameroonian border.

The best friends sport similar buzz cuts and wear the same white blouse and navy blue skirt uniform. As they hurry to school while chatting in Pidgin, there is little to suggest that they come from different countries. Yet Rebecca Jonas was born and raised in Nigeria, while Blessing Awu-Akat is a refugee whose family fled violence in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions where Francophone government forces are fighting English-speaking separatists.

Rebecca’s family lives in town in a duplex with a gas stove and indoor bathrooms. Blessing lives in Adagom I, a settlement on the outskirts of Ogoja where almost 10,000 Cameroonian refugees reside. Her family uses firewood to cook and shares latrines and showers with other refugees. And in the morning, when everybody is waking up, she has to wait in line to use the communal water taps to wash and collect water to prepare breakfast. Which is why Blessing’s friend cuts her some slack when she is late.

Blessing’s mother Victorine Ndifon Atop stands in front of the house shared by the family of nine in the refugee settlement of Adagom I [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

An open settlement

Blessing’s family fled to Nigeria in November 2017. She remembers the morning when an army helicopter suddenly hovered over their village of Bodam, which lies close to the Nigerian border. “Everyone started running into the bush. But there, soldiers were shooting at people,” she recalls.

A friend of hers was shot, Blessing says, shivering in horror as she points at where the bullet shattered her friend’s arm. She, her parents, her three siblings and two cousins, escaped on foot to the Nigerian border unharmed, but destitute. “There was no time for us to pack. All I had was the dress I wore that day.”

Just across the border, the violence was never far away, and at night, gunshots on the Cameroonian side kept the then nine-year-old girl awake. Because the border area was not safe for the thousands of refugees, Nigerian authorities decided to move them further inland. This is how Blessing’s family was resettled at Adagom I, 63 hectares (156 acres) of federal government land that Nigeria offered to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR to use as a settlement for the refugees. “Here I finally managed to sleep through the night,” Blessing says.

Adagom I, named after the village in the Ogoja area where the refugees were resettled, is not a refugee camp with curfews, exit restrictions and separate camp schools and clinics, but an open settlement of about 3,000 households where inhabitants can come and go as they please and interact with their Nigerian neighbours freely. In Nigeria, a country already faced with the challenge of more than two million internally displaced people (IDPs), mostly in the northeast, all 84,030 UN-registered refugees from Cameroon enjoy freedom of movement, access to healthcare, education and the right to work – rights that many wealthier countries in the world do not immediately grant to foreigners seeking refuge within their borders.

The government also waived school fees for refugee children to enable them to continue their education and return to as normal a life as possible. That is how Blessing and Rebecca became classmates and best friends at Government Technical College, Ogoja.

Blessing and Rebecca head to their classroom at Government Technical College, Ogoja [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

Knowing what it’s like to be new somewhere

Blessing and Rebecca barely make it to the school assembly on time; the band has just started playing the school anthem as they rush through the wrought iron gate. When the assembly is finished, they head to their classroom, where they always sit together, preferably at the front. As they wait for their English lesson to start, they recount how their friendship started.

It was Blessing who welcomed Rebecca on the first day she came to school in March 2021. Rebecca had just moved from Lagos with her mother and brother – her father stayed behind to run his business selling home appliances. She dreaded her first day in a new school. But there was Blessing, a friendly girl who had attended the school since her family arrived in Ogoja in September 2018. She greeted the more timid Rebecca when she entered the classroom and moved over to make space for her to sit down.

“She was the first to accommodate me,” Rebecca says with a smile. “She knew how it was to be completely new somewhere.” After school, it turned out, they took the same route home, and since that first day, Rebecca has waited for Blessing to pass by her house in the mornings so they can walk to school together.

Rebecca is aware that violence drove her friend out of her country, but she does not ask her about it. “I don’t want to make her cry,” she says.

Sometimes, she sees sadness in Blessing’s eyes, and her chatty friend grows quiet. Then Rebecca tries to cheer her up by telling her a silly story or getting her to sing – they love to sing gospel songs together. Sometimes, she notices Blessing finds it hard to concentrate in class. “Then I know that afterwards, she’ll be asking to take my notes home to copy them,” she says. Even though it means she won’t be able to study that day, Rebecca says, “I have to lend her what I can. She’s my friend.”

Their English teacher Comfort Ullah Solomon, 46, remembers how lost and lonely many of the refugee students appeared when they first arrived in Ogoja. “They seemed miles away, sometimes they were not even listening, as if they were in a trance,” she recalls. When Adagom I opened in 2018, a lot of Cameroonian children came to the school. In the first year, almost one-third of the students were from Cameroon. Today, as they have moved to other schools in Ogoja, about 150 of the more than 1,000 pupils of the secondary school are Cameroonian.

Comfort Ullah Solomon teaches English to students in Rebecca and Blessing’s year [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

Sometimes, in those early days, there was friction, the teacher says. She describes an incident where a Nigerian and Cameroonian student were running around when the former playfully shouted, “I will shoot you!” The Cameroonian teenager broke down, leaving his classmate puzzled. Comfort sat down with them and explained to the Nigerian pupil the violence his classmate had fled, and how for him the game might have felt real. “They became friends,” she says.

She made an effort to comfort the new students. “I kept them close, told them they were worthwhile. After a while, their absent-mindedness disappeared.”

Blessing confesses she was scared when she first arrived at her new school. “I thought the Nigerians would bully us and ask us what we are doing in their land,” she recalls. But the way the school teamed up the refugees with their Nigerian fellow students for the Friday quizzes and debate teams quickly made her feel accepted.

Her 17-year-old Nigerian classmate, Benjamin Udam, admits he was also worried when the new students came. “I thought maybe they had a different way of life than us. But we turned out to be just the same,” he says.

Blessing’s Nigerian classmate Alice Abua, 16, remarks that Cameroonians prepare their soup with very little water, another mentions they dance the makossa, while another suggests their English sounds a little different. Apart from that, they don’t see any substantial differences between Nigerians and Cameroonians. And when asked who has a friend from the other country, everyone in the classroom raises a hand.

Rebecca and Blessing prepare rice and beans at Blessing’s place [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

Rice and beans

After school, Rebecca joins Blessing at her place to cook rice and beans, their favourite meal. They stroll to the settlement market to buy condiments, over the red sand paths lined with papaya, palm and mesquite trees, past the one-storey houses refugee families built with bricks and roofing sheets provided by the UNHCR.

The market vendors are a mix of refugees and locals. Janet Aricha, the woman the girls usually buy crayfish from, is from Ogoja. She never saw the refugees as a threat. “I felt bad for them,” she explains. “Imagine to lose your home and everything in a single day.”

Much like the other Nigerian sellers at the market, she saw the influx of new customers as a business opportunity. Even in town, most people agree that economic opportunities in Ogoja, home to an estimated 250,000 people, grew with the arrival of Cameroonian refugees.

Meanwhile, the girls realise the money Blessing’s mum gave them has finished before they have managed to buy all the ingredients they need. “How did we forget pepper?” Rebecca asks her friend in disbelief. But Blessing has a solution; on the way back, she asks a neighbour if she could pluck some chillies from their garden.

At home, Blessing’s mother has started the fire. While her daughter and her best friend prepare the meal, Victorine Ndifon Atop talks about life in this new place.

It’s not easy, but for the children she tries to make life as familiar as the one they left behind, the 43-year-old says. She points at the garden in front of the 20-square-metre (215-square-foot) house the now family of nine shares. The small patch of lawn is meticulously cut and the white periwinkle and hibiscus shrubs are blooming.

She only knew Nigerians from Nollywood movies when they first came to Nigeria. “In those movies, they are always shouting at each other,” she says. “So back home, we thought they were all ruffians.” But six years in Adagom I changed her mind. When the refugees first arrived, complete strangers from town brought them clothes and provisions. And one day, a Nigerian neighbour from the host community of Adagom gave her a plot of land she now grows cassava on to prepare fufu, a popular Western African dish, to sell. “They embraced us and received us like family,” she says.

Nigerian vendor Janet Aricha, right, says she feels for the Cameroonian refugees who came to the area after losing their homes to violence in their home country [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

‘They are like us’

Down the road, a five-minute walk away, Adagom I chief Stephen Makong shrugs to indicate he finds his community’s hospitality towards refugees self-evident. “Of course, we gave them land to farm on. If you don’t, what are they going to eat?” he asks.

When the village leader was told about the refugee settlement plan in his community, he saw it as a blessing. “My father taught me: for strangers to come to your house, you must be a good person.” Not everyone in his community thought so, he adds. “Some young men were afraid they would come and claim ownership of the land. But I told them they did not come to steal our land. They are running from war. You cannot drive them away again.”

But there are occasional disputes. “Even when two brothers live in a house, they quarrel,” the chief says. When some refugees cut trees in the forest for firewood, a town hall meeting was called to explain that in Cross River State you only use deadwood for cooking. But life together has been largely harmonious, most people in the village say. They have also benefitted from the settlement’s development. The UNHCR divides investments in the local infrastructure between the refugee and host community, reserving about 30 percent of its budget for the latter. The drilled wells, water taps and the widened road through the village wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the refugees.

On top of that, the locals discovered that some Cameroonians are from the same ethnic group as them – the Ejagham who live on both sides of the border. So they even share a language, says Makong. “They are like us. We are the same people.”

That cultural proximity, combined with the perceived economic advantages, could explain why Ogoja has taken in thousands of Cameroonians without much local resistance. Farmers who used the federal land where the refugees were settled may grumble a bit even though they have been compensated for the crops they could not harvest. And with inflation making everyone’s money far less valuable, the town’s economic activity has ground to a halt, much like in the rest of the West African country. But that does not make the refugees less welcome, says the chief. “We enjoy together, and we suffer together.”

This hospitality towards strangers on the run from violence is not an exception in Nigeria. Three-quarters of the Cameroonians seeking refuge in the country did not have to go to a refugee settlement – they found shelter within a community. Just as, according to the UN, more than 80 percent of Nigerian IDPs found refuge with fellow Nigerians.

Rebecca and Blessing greet each other in the morning before going to school [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

‘She is my friend’

Back at Blessing’s home, the two girls have finished cooking and sit in the shade with a plate of steaming rice topped with smoky bean sauce on the floor in front of them. For a while, the chatting stops and the only sound is the clicking of two spoons on the shared aluminium plate. When they finish their meal, Blessing teases her slender friend, “The way you eat! I don’t understand you’re not fatter.”

The sun is on its way down when Rebecca arrives back home, but her mother does not mind. She is happy her daughter has found such a good friend. “When I look at them, they remind me of my best friend and me back home in Akwa Ibom,” says 39-year-old Favour Jonas, referring to the Nigerian state she grew up in. “I remember how we used to gist, play and sing together as girls.”

Next year will be the girls’ final year in secondary school. Afterwards, even if they go to different universities, Rebecca is sure they will stay in touch. For now, she has more immediate things to think about. Tomorrow they have a maths and an economics exam, and Rebecca hopes Blessing won’t be late. But even if she is, she will wait for her. “I have to,” she says. “She is my friend.”

This article has been produced with the support of UNHCR.

In a Nigerian town, a day in the life of two 15-year-olds – Rebecca from Nigeria and Blessing, a Cameroonian refugee.

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Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Inside one of the rooms of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Mahmoud Zindah stays close to his father, Nader, the horrors of the past week etched on both of their faces. Their eyes are wide, darting around.

The 14-year-old and his father were among hundreds of Palestinians rounded up by Israeli forces in the Shujayea area, east of Gaza City, who endured five days of torture and degradation before they were released – without any explanation.

“One of the soldiers said I looked like his nephew and that this nephew was killed in front of his grandmother who was taken hostage by Hamas and that the soldiers will slaughter us all,” Mahmoud says, his voice trembling.

Before their ordeal, the Zindah family was trapped in their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City for two days, unable to leave as tanks advanced and artillery shelling got closer and closer. Those who dared to leave their homes for whatever vital errand were shot down in the streets by snipers.

On the third day, the family, who slept on the cold tile floor under mattresses to shield them from potential flying shrapnel, woke up to find the tanks on their street.

Mahmoud and Nader Zindah recall their arrest and torture by Israeli forces [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

“We heard the soldiers shouting and the tank tracks getting louder,” Nader, 40, says. “I felt like there was something wrong, so I went to the house behind me, which was farther from the street. Before I reached it I stopped in shock. The house was moving!

“Then I realised that the Israeli bulldozer was knocking its walls down” and soldiers were firing live ammunition as well, he adds.

Nader quickly tore some white sheets into small “flags” for each of his eight children to carry. They poked one out of their front door, as the adults shouted that there were people in the house. The bulldozer stopped, as did the shooting. But suddenly the home was full of Israeli soldiers.

“They made us empty out our bags on the floor and blocked us from picking up our money or our wives’ gold,” Nader recalls. “What little food we had, they also threw away. They took our money, IDs and phones.”

The soldiers divided the household: women and young children in one room and the men and teenage boys in another. Then they told Nader, Mahmoud, his brother-in-law and another male relative to strip, then pushed them outside.

“They rounded up at least 150 men from the surrounding homes and blindfolded and handcuffed us all in the street,” Nader explains.

Mohammed Odeh, 14, was separated from his family and taken with at least 150 other men and teenage boys to a rice warehouse by Israeli forces where he faced torture for several days [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

When the soldiers forced the men onto the backs of some trucks, Nader made sure Mahmoud was on his lap, terrified of what they would do to his son if they were separated.

“I don’t want to lose my child, nor do I want my son to lose his father,” he says.

The men quickly realised that there were also women in the truck, which kept braking suddenly, sending the prisoners falling on top of each other.

“We were all blindfolded, so we couldn’t see each other, but we heard the women telling us to look out for them like we would for our own sisters,” Nader says. “There were also younger children with them.”

The truck stopped, and once again, the men and women were separated. The men and teenage boys were taken to a warehouse where they sat on a bare floor covered in scattered grains of rice. There they were beaten, interrogated and verbally abused. There was no sleep, and the grains of rice cut their skin as they sat there, undressed.

Mohammed Odeh, 14, was taken from the same Wadi al-Arayes neighbourhood in Zeitoun as the Zindahs, where he and his family were stuck in their homes for five days, starving.

Israeli soldiers released about 10 men they had arrested on December 5, 2023 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Two of the neighbourhood boys who left to look for water were killed on the street by Israeli snipers. After the bulldozer knocked down the walls of several homes, the soldiers dragged the men and teenagers out, slapping, punching and hitting them with their guns.

“There was no reasoning with them,” Mohammed recalls. “They kept saying, ‘You are all Hamas.’ They wrote numbers on our arms. My number was 56.” When he stretches his arms out, the red marker is still visible on his skin.

“When they spoke to us in Hebrew and we wouldn’t understand, they’d beat us up,” he continues.

“They hit me in the back where my kidneys are and my legs. They took my family, and I don’t know where they are,” he says, his voice breaking.

Before they were forced inside the warehouse, Israeli female soldiers came and spat on the men, Mohammed recalls.

In the warehouse, it was common for groups of five soldiers to suddenly enter and beat one person while the others were forced to listen to his screams of pain. If any of the men and teenagers nodded off from exhaustion, the soldiers poured cold water on them.

“Their contempt for us was unnatural, like we were lesser beings,” Mohammed says.

One of the Palestinian men arrested and tortured for days by Israeli soldiers shows the number he was marked with and his swollen hands from the handcuffs [Abdelhakim Abu RiashAl Jazeera]

“Some people didn’t return from the torture sessions,” Nader says darkly. “We would hear their screams and then nothing.”

At one point, Mahmoud told his father that his wrists were bleeding from the handcuffs. A soldier overheard, asked where it hurt and then proceeded to press down on the spot. Nader tried to shield his son, and one of the soldiers tried to drag the teenager away. When Mahmoud resisted, he was kicked in the face. The mark is still visible.

“My dad kept shouting at them that I’m a child and threw himself on top of me,” he says. “I heard a soldier speaking in an American accent, and I told him in English that I’m just a kid that goes to school.” Their words fell on deaf ears.

Blindfolded and handcuffed the entire time, the men and boys endured hours of beatings.

“They cursed at us, spewing the most foul language,” says Nader, who suffered a particularly painful blow to his head. “Some of them spoke Arabic. Every time you tried to talk, asking to go use the bathroom or wanting a drink of water, they would come and beat us up, using the butts of their M16 rifles.”

The soldiers interrogated them and threatened to kill them all. They accused the Palestinians of stealing their army jeeps and raping Israeli women. When they asked Mahmoud where he was on October 7 and he answered that he was sleeping at home, the soldiers hit him, he says.

“They have this unbelievable racism. They really hate us,” Nader says. “This isn’t about Hamas. This is about wiping us all out. This is about a genocide, signed off by [US President] Biden.”

The men were given only a few drops of water and some scraps of bread to eat. Some were forced to relieve themselves on the spot while others were handed a foul-smelling bucket.

On the fifth day, Nader, Mahmoud, and 10 other men were taken to Nitzarim, a former settlement south of Gaza City that had been turned into farmland after the 2005 Israeli disengagement. It is now an Israeli checkpoint just before Wadi Gaza and the men were released there and told to head south.

The group took off their blindfolds and let their eyes adjust to the light after days of darkness. They were exhausted and hungry and still did not have any clothes. After walking painfully for two hours, a group of Palestinians spotted them.

“They clothed us and gave us water,” Nader says. “An ambulance was called, and we arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where we were immediately given IV fluids.”

“I thought I didn’t have a chance of getting out alive,” he adds.

“It was hell on earth. It was like spending five years in that warehouse. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

Rounded up by Israeli forces in Gaza City, Palestinians describe being stripped, blindfolded, numbered and tortured

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Israeli forces have carried out deadly raids in the occupied West Bank while shelling and bombing many areas in the Gaza Strip in advance of a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting to discuss an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.

At least four Palestinians were killed on Tuesday in the most intense raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, where the Israeli army fired a missile at youths, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported.

Twenty people – including seven children and at least five women – were killed in Israeli attacks on Rafah, in southern Gaza on the border with Egypt, while two people were killed in Khan Younis in Israeli artillery shelling, according to Palestinian medical sources.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said the raids in Jenin were ongoing, as some residents put up roadblocks to deter Israeli forces.

“Palestinians say these raids are continuing without any real deterrence and that the Israeli forces have been given an open hand,” said Ibrahim.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said Israel’s military was blocking ambulances from the Jenin refugee camp, which was targeted in the raid, to treat the wounded.

Israeli forces also launched raids in other West Bank towns, arresting some 50 people in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, and Tubas, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported.

Israeli incursions into the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have also escalated since the outbreak of war. Israeli forces or settlers have killed 270 Palestinians since October 7, bringing the total number of killed this year to 487.

As Rafah and Khan Younis reeled from overnight air raids, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah, said: “There’s concern that there are people trapped under the rubble.”

“The search continues, but again, it’s very, very basic and simple. There are no machines or equipment to help people,” he added.

More than two months of Israeli bombardment on Gaza has killed about 18,200 Palestinians, including 7,729 children, and displaced 90 percent of its population. Humanitarian aid officials warn of a collapsing health system and “apocalyptic” conditions in the small pocket of southern Gaza, where most Palestinians are now crammed.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces raided Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, a Health Ministry spokesperson said, after besieging and shelling it for several days,

In a post on Telegram, Ashraf al-Qudra added that Israeli forces were gathering males – including the medical staff – in the hospital courtyard, who he feared may then be arrested.

“We call on the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the International Committee of the Red Cross to act immediately to save the lives of those in the hospital,” he said.

The new attacks and mounting casualties come ahead of a vote in the UNGA later on Tuesday on an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.

The last time the assembly met on this issue was on October 27, when 120 countries voted in favour of a Jordanian resolution calling for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities”.

Egypt and Mauritania invoked Resolution 377A (V) to call for an emergency meeting, which states that if the UN Security Council is unable to discharge its primary responsibility of maintaining peace, the UNGA can step in.

Four Palestinians killed in Jenin and 22 in southern Gaza, while Kamal Adwan Hospital raided in the north.

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Nearly a thousand Burundian soldiers have left DR Congo after their mission was terminated by Kinshasa

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Moscow is ‘very attentively’ watching as US President Joe Biden and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy meet in Washington.

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A UN refugee agency says too many people in the Palestinian enclave haven’t eaten for days

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Japan’s shipping giant NYK is working with Namura Shipbuilding and Sasebo Heavy Industries to replace the main propulsion on steam turbine–driven Moss-type LNG carriers with a dual-fuel diesel engine.

In October, NYK has received an approval in principle from the Japanese classification society Class NK to convert the steam turbine of an LNG carrier to a dual-fuel diesel engine.

According to a statement by NYK, this is the first AiP granted by Class NK for main engine conversion on LNG carriers.

“The three companies will proceed with a detailed design of steam turbine conversion, aiming to improve environmental performance, make efficient use of existing vessels, and contribute to stable LNG transportation,” NYK said.

The shipping firm said LNG is “promising as an essential transition energy for realizing a decarbonized society”, while LNG transportation demand is expected to “grow steadily.”

On the other hand, the shortage of LNG carriers is a concern due to the limited number of new LNG carriers that can be ordered and the retirement of steam turbine–driven LNG carriers due to their inferior fuel economic performance compared to diesel engine LNG carriers, it said.

To solve this problem, the three companies will replace the main propulsion of steam turbine–driven LNG carriers with dual-fuel, low-speed diesel engines, called X-DF engines, according to NYK.

NYK said the Moss-type LNG tanks installed on steam turbine–driven LNG carriers are “durable and can withstand long-term use.”

Therefore, in addition to improving fuel economic performance, the engine replacement contributes to an efficient use of the ship’s resources, NYK said.

NYK’s president and CEO, Takaya Soga, recently said that NYK is working to further expand its giant fleet of LNG carriers and LNG-powered vessels.

According to NYK’s second-quarter FY 2023 earnings presentation, NYK had 115 LNG carriers in its fleet as of September 30, including pre-delivery vessels with long-term charters.

Moreover, out of these, 86 LNG carriers are in operation.

The presentation does not show how many of these vessels are steam turbine–driven Moss-type LNG carriers.

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Major grid operator warns legal agreement to shutter coal plant will devastate electric reliability

Highlights of the Podcast

00:00 – Intro
02:14 – Major grid operator warns legal agreement to shutter coal plant will devastate electric reliability
06:58 – India to Boost Oil Refining Capacity by 1 Million Bpd a Year Until 2028
09:07 – Markets Update
11:02 – Occidental to Buy Oil Driller CrownRock for $10.8 Billion
16:05 – Outro

 

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Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Michael Tanner: [00:00:14] What is going on, everybody? Welcome to another edition of the Daily Energy News Beat. Stand up here on this gorgeous who’s day December 12th, 2023. As always, I’m your humble correspondent Michael Tanner, coming to you from an undisclosed location here in Dallas, Texas, rocking a solo show tonight. So Stu has the night off. So I’m filling in so low, but we still have a great show. I mean, the big news of the day, Occidental officially officially buying a crown rock or crown quest for about $12 billion. I‘ll cover that really later. The majority of that deal in my finance segment. But to be honest, that’s the big news of the day. So I wanted to mention it upfront. First part of the show, guys. I’ll quickly cover two articles that Stu dropped on energy news today. Major Grid Operator Warns of Legal Agreement to Shutter Coal Plant Will Devastate Electric Liability. This goes right in line with a lot of the stuff. So you know, I’ve talked about grid reliability. So glad to cover that one. And then finally, India to boost oil refining capacity by 1 million barrels per day a year until 2028. Absolutely good for India, but it’s pretty incredible what they’ve pledged to do. So we’ll we’ll cover that. I then I’ll move over and again, cover the crown, the crown West Occidental, along with some other oil and gas financial information. But before we do all that, guys, remember, the news and analysis you are about to hear is brought to you by the world’s greatest website. www.energynewsbeat.com the best place for all your energy news. Stu and the team do a tremendous job of keeping that website up to speed with everything you need to know to be the tip of the spear. When it comes to the energy business, you can check out [email protected] A way to interact with the show. You can also hit the description below, see all the links to the articles, all the timestamps. You could jump ahead, not have to listen to me for first. Only listen to me as long as you need, which is nice. Dashboard.energynewsbeat.com. It’s kind of our data news combo. Great place to check out and see if you have any interesting information there. And with that, guys, we’re going to go ahead and kick it off. [00:02:14][119.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:02:14] So let’s start with major grid operator. Warren’s legal agreement to shutter coal plant will Devastate electric Liability. This is a really interesting, interesting article here. We have in a follow up letter obtained by Fox Business this week. PJM Interconnection, which oversees the electric supplies across the mid-Atlantic, repeatedly warned of a shutdown of the Brandon Shaw’s coal plant is warned that the shutdown of this brand will occur in the Maryland area will result in 1 million customers having, quote, degraded grid reliability, which includes the entire city of Baltimore. The plant’s operator confirmed that they are deactivating that Brandon Shaw’s coal plant in June 2025 as part of an agreement with, you guessed it, the Sierra Club. I mean, that’s the crazy part. We’ve we’re taking our grid reliability advice from the Sierra Club. This is an interesting quote from PJM President. I see you, Manitoba. As you are aware, talent is currently prevented from continuing to run without conversion beyond its stated DBA action date under a reliability must run framework to a private agreement. It entered in with you either PJM, the federally designated regional grid operator charge of maintaining grid Larry nor the state of Maryland is a party to this agreement. I mean, are you kidding me, folks? So the owners of this coal plant where they again, Texas based Talen Energy, they made a private agreement with the Sierra Club. Not not government, not the EPA, not another actual government jurisdiction, the Sierra Club. Again, the Sierra Club. He goes on to say, this situation requires immediate attention, failure to come to a resolution. This could result in the degrade grid reliability of over 1 million Maryland customers during peak hours, including the entire city of Baltimore for years and for years between the state. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Point of the matter is, guys, this is what happens when you let non I would say non-experts because anyone’s an expert now and experts are always wrong. We’ve seen that time and time again. But when you let people who are so far detached from the actual ground operations to make the Sierra Club isn’t what’s going on in Maryland or Baltimore, they could care less. They’re you know, there’s they’re sitting somewhere probably in their really nice New York City penthouse conference suite that they’ve got, you know, pretending to be, you know, care about the environment. But really what they’re trying to do is to shut down an increase. The grid is reliability. It’s absolutely unbelievable. We’ve got an issue now with so much solar that we can’t get and wind that we can’t get hooked up to the grid. But now we’re shutting off coal exactly when we need it. And we can’t necessarily get the same grid reliably. It’s absolutely unbelievable. Again, I’m all for shutting down coal. It’s clear that there’s a huge amount of emissions that come from coal, natural gas. Where is the solution on how to transition this? They’re just going to shut it down. Well, Sierra Club is going to shut it down. Do you live in Bolt? It’s clear they’re not they don’t live in Maryland. It’s clear the headquarters of. The Sierra Club or not. It’s absolutely unbelievable. The letter further goes on to say that both the Sierra Club and Talon Energy should amend the agreement to allow the coal bed to continue providing power for customers and the necessary transmission projects are completed. According to the PGA prematurely closing Brandon Shores sparks the need for new infrastructure to transport electricity from other sources. But such transmission upgrades aren’t expected to be finished until 2028, three years after the plan. Brandon George goes, Well, it’s only three years, guys. You’ll survive, right? I mean, you’ll be fine. It’s EPA. Does it snow in Maryland? I don’t even know. Pride on snow. You’ll be fine. I’m actually. I’ve gone the other way on this one. Shut it down. I’m kidding. But I mean, in all reality, folks, this is, again, the problem. When you mix ideology with common sense. Obviously these people have the ideology of shot coal. Now, the problem is they’re not thinking of a second order of fact. You know, the PJM, you know, again, this is a federal grid operator. Okay. So this isn’t you know, this isn’t necessarily, you know, some, you know, crazy, you know, you know, Republican style. You know, you know, it’s not the Electric Reliability Council with yes, of course they’re going to say the grids unreliable part of their job. The interesting part of the matter is, though, is that these guys, again, are fairly nonpartisan. They just want to deliver energy to as much people as possible. It’s why we have these grid operators, these large scale grid operators. It’s pretty interesting. They operate 65, they serve 65 million customers and sell and coordinate movements of wholesale electricity in 13 states. So they know what they’re doing here and they’re not necessarily in it as much as you would think for profit, but they are for grid reliability. So just like that, we’re shipping off coal Again, not a bad thing, but we’re doing it without the idea. Thanks to the Sierra Club. Got to love it. I got to love it. [00:06:58][283.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:58] Let’s move on here. India to boost oil refining capacity by 1 million barrels per day a year until 2028. Absolutely unbelievable. India, who is the third largest crude oil importer, expects to raise its refining capacity by about 1.12 million barrels per day each year until 2028. This is according to India’s junior oil minister, Rameshwar Teli total Indian refining capacity expenses increased by 22% in five years from the 254 million metric tons per year, which are equal to about 5.8 million barrels per day, Delhi told lawmakers. Right now, crude processing capacity is set to grow by 56 million tonnes a year. The Government expects to boost refining capacity to meet the to be adequate to meet the country’s fuel demand in the long term. This is absolutely crazy. You know, India has been planning to increase its refining capacity for years as it’s hoping and really attempting to get rid of this idea that China is going to kind of control the next wave of refining. India’s coming in, say, no, no, no, we’re going to do it here. To give you guys an idea, two years ago, India’s state held oil refiners were planning to spend as much as 27 billion or 2 trillion Indian rupees on raising the country’s refining capacity by 20% by 2. You know, they’re one of the fastest growing economies. They’ve been buying crude oil. They’re one of the few people buying crude oil from Russia still now. So, you know, like them or hate them, India has been planning to increase its refining capacity for years as it’s hoping and really attempting to get rid of this idea that China is going to kind of control the next wave of refining. India’s coming in, say, no, no, no, we’re going to do it here. To give you guys an idea, two years ago, India’s state held oil refiners were planning to spend as much as 27 billion or 2 trillion Indian rupees on raising the country’s refining capacity by 20% by 2So you can kind of get that apples to apples comparison, which is absolutely interesting. India doing what they should do for the people. [00:09:06][128.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:09:07] But let’s move over to finance Guys know not much that really happened that we saw the S&P 500 jump about 3/10 of a percentage point. Nasdaq does the biggest move. It’s up about 8/10 of a percentage point. A ten year yields hold stand at about 44.23%, only about a quarter of a percent or only about a 5/10 of a percentage point change there. Bitcoin does drop a little bit, about six percentage points currently trading 41,208 as we record this crude oil fairly steady ish day 7141 as we record this about 545 here on the 11 are Brant oil 7660 natural gas up a little bit from it from its opening of about a little under $3 or a little below $3 and $2.30 excuse me, currently trading $2.44. I mean, investors are still, you know, fairly wary of what’s going on right now. You know, it’s pretty you know, it’s all I’ll say is this, folks, is that these oil cuts that keep coming from OPEC literally are not doing enough to offset this softer fuel demand expectation. And softer crude oversupply that we think is going to happen next year. So it’s probably somewhere around that level in terms of of where some of these things are. So absolutely interesting from a crude oil standpoint, you know, the softness we’re experiencing right now. I can’t necessarily tell you how long it’s going to continue. If it won’t continue, if, you know, keep pushing. I think the one thing that’s clear, though, is that the softness is going to continue, I think, into Christmas. And I don’t think we’re going to see you know, I don’t they were associated by year end. I think we’re going to roll into the new year somewhere around $75 on that WTI side. But what we’ll kind of have to wait and see. It’s really unfortunate what’s happened in the natural gas markets right now. I would have expected, again, a lot more strength this winter. But, you know, with considering the oversupply of natural gas that is really starting to rear its ugly head from the $9 natural gas space, I think, you know, we’re kind of paying for the sins of $9 gases, as I like to say. But I want to move I want to move over to the big deal of the day. [00:11:12][124.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:11:12] Occidental buying crown quest for $12 million or 12 or 12 million or $12 billion, 10.8 billion of that is actually assumed. The transaction price with about 1.2 billion in assumed debt. Really interesting on this one. It’s their largest purchase for Occidental since their takeover, Anadarko back in 2018, 2019. It really cements and really is the one of the one of the final. I don’t see the final, but one of the final dominoes to fall when it comes to that large Midland Basin operators. You know, this was kind of once I once pioneer yeah left left town really the only consolidated operator right there was Crown Quest or really Crown Rockets. It’s a joint venture between, you know, Crown Crown Quest operating, which is the Dunn family out there, and Midland and Lime Rock Resource Partners, which is an Absolutely absolutely. You know, we’re not sure the details on the breakdown of kind of who owns white whether you know, is it a 5050 joint venture. You know I the stuff I’ve read, it’s 6040. But to give you an idea. Crown rock there, the third largely closest held oil and gas producer in the Permian basins, they do about 170,000 BOE per day. You know, a couple interesting thing here. I think on Oxy’s side, there’s this it’s I think it’s a good deal. I don’t know. I want to hesitate to say it’s a great one of the reasons I say that is tomorrow on our deal spotlight or boldly recording this on Tuesday. We’ll we’ll see how quickly we can get this cranked out. We’re going to do our second ever deal spotlight and we’re actually going to dive into this deal and kind of give you why I think this deal is probably it’s an okay deal. I think when you’re talking about buying production, it’s not horrible. I think the issue the issue with what I see in this deal comes within the undeveloped locations. I’ll get to that. [00:12:57][105.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:12:57] But first, I think, you know, to give you an idea, Occidental’s assuming are one point billion in debt, you know, this is an interesting deal because it’s all stock you’ve got. Let me find the the actual breakdown here should be I thought it was 6 billion of of stock and then it was it’s basically in mostly an all stock deal. Let me see if I can find some of the deals up here. Not really. But let me go see if I can find it on this one here on this press release, you got 95 press releases for these things. So let’s let’s break it down here. They talk about increased cash flow. We got to love that. I’m going to tell you how they fund this thing. And one of the things we’re definitely going to get it to are we’re going to get into. Right. Here’s the deal. All right. Yeah. So $12 billion, they’re financing the purchase of nine point billion, 9.1 billion of new debt. They’re going to issue about 1.7 billion of common equity and about assume 1.2 billion of existing debt. So I lied. They’re going to pay cash for this thing, but they’re paying debt. You got to love it. Nothing like a good debt transaction for some PDP 9.1 billion and it’s a lot of parts. So don’t get me wrong. So there’s the breakdown. 9.1 billion of new debt, 1.7 billion of new equity. Think you know, the Dunn family likes that. And then they’re going to assume the 1.2 billion of debt outstanding specifically by Crown rock or Crown. Quest The thing I want to highlight here specifically is the fact that they’re they’re claiming 1700 undeveloped locations, including 1250, what they call developmental ready locations at sub 60 WTI break even. [00:14:30][92.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:14:31] Apparently they’ve got 750 locations that are sub 40 WTI break even, which apparently increases their onshore sub break even door to 25%. What they’re telling you is that 25% of their locations or undeveloped locations have less than a 25 or break even at sub 40, which seems crazy to me. That’s part of what we’re going to break down because this this deal, whether this deal is good or not, all hinges on those location because, you know, you’re only talking that the PDP is only worth about two, 3 billion. So for a $12 billion purchase price or really 10.8 billion, you’re going to have to break that down. So you do the math. It’s 4.8 million per undeveloped location now. Holy smokes. I don’t know about you, but that is going to be a very high tier to pass. Sure, if you got wells to break even at sub 40 possibility. But now you’re talking 4.8 million per location. But you don’t believe we’re going to break this deal down tomorrow? Kind of dive into probably build a few type curves, talk about what we think. You know this where this purchase price could have gone. I think it’s going to be actually a great, great piece. I’d highly recommend checking that out. It’s new series Deal Spotlight. Our first one is up right now where we do a non-op Afy over there in in the Eddy County, some big Wells Matador still in there. So we got to love that. But check us out again. You’ll be able we’ll be able to cover this on Deal Spotlight and to give you an inside baseball bowl. I think it’s a good deal. But I think, you know, I don’t think it’s going be a great deal if only because of that $4.8 million per undeveloped location. [00:16:04][93.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:05] Actually, all I’ve got, though, guys, appreciate you sticking with me here. Stu and I will be back in the chair tomorrow to keep you guys up to speed with everything you need to know in the energy business. But for Stuart Turley, Michael Tanner and the entire energy news beat family, we will see you tomorrow. [00:16:05][0.0][947.4]

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