Arriaga, Mexico – Billy Noe Martinez was less 150km from the US-Mexico border eight years ago when his journey came to an abrupt stop.

A group of men abducted Martinez, along with other migrants he was travelling with, at gunpoint, took them to a ranch, and lined them up with their face against a wall. 

The gunmen then shot them one-by-one. 

Standing at the end of the line, Martinez managed to escape through a window, hiding submerged in a river until the gunfire ended, he said.

In total 72 people were killed. Martinez is one of at least two known survivors. The perpetrators are  allegedly part of Los Zetas, an organised crime and drug trafficking network initially formed by former members of Mexican military special forces. Los Zetas and other Mexican organised crime networks have a history of holding migrants for ransom and killing them if their relatives are unable to pay, and sometimes even if they are. At least 11 people are charged in connection with the San Fernando massacre, but no one has been convicted.

Eight years after being nearly killed along what is often dubbed the migrant trail, Martinez made the difficult decision to head north through Mexico once again. When he saw the news of a huge group leaving Honduras, he decided to join for safety in greater numbers. 

More than 1,000 Hondurans initially fled their country together last month, travelling on foot and getting rides when offered. The group, dubbed a migrant caravan, quickly grew to several thousand and is currently heading in waves to Mexico City. 

Thousands more are following behind them in subsequent groups from Honduras and El Salvador. Large groups crossed the Suchiate River into Mexico this week and are now making their way up through southern Mexico.

Martinez wants to make it to the US for safety and to work and provide for his family. The migrants and refugees are not harming anyone, he said.

“I have six children,” he told Al Jazeera before quickly correcting himself: “I have five.”

Martinez’s 18-year-old son Jonathan was murdered last year. Martinez is not certain why. More than 90 percent of homicides in Honduras go unsolved.

Resting his head on the small backpack he is carrying on his journey, Martinez laid on the highway while Mexican federal police briefly blocked the thousands of migrants and refugees from advancing through the state of Chiapas.

My first time was an experience of much sadness. Let’s hope this time is better than the last.

Billy Noe Martinez, participant of migrant caravan

Last week, US President Donald Trump announced a series of drastic measures at the US southern border in response to the exodus of Central American asylum-seekers. He said his administration is finalising a plan that could include indefinite tent camp detention. More than 5,000 troops are already heading to the border and Trump said that number to grow to up to 15,000 troops. He added that troops should view rock-throwers as if they have a firearm. 

Martinez survived a massacre only to later have to bury his teenage son. He is not easily phased. Happy to be travelling with thousands of others for safety, he is hopeful he will be able to make it this time and provide for his family.

“My first time was an experience of much sadness,” Martinez told Al Jazeera.

“Let’s hope this time is better than the last.”

Editor’s note: As a protected witness, Martinez’s name was not revealed by the Mexican government, but he has since chosen to speak out about the experience and has recently given interviews to several Mexican media outlets as well as to Al Jazeera.

Image: Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

It’s never too late to send a letter to J.K. Rowling — even if it’s something you happened to write when you were a kid.

If you’re anything like the lucky fan below, you might just get an answer.

On Sunday, a Harry Potter fan from Sri Lanka tweeted a photo to Rowling. It showed a letter they said they’d written when they were 11 years old, after finishing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the first time.

Turns out sending it now proved to be a very good idea, because Rowling’s response came through less than 30 minutes later.

Every now and then, Twitter can be a magical place.

The agreement between the Pakistani government and a far-right political group that would see a Christian woman acquitted of blasphemy barred from leaving the country has no legal value, her lawyer, who has sought refuge in the Netherlands, said.

Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, spent eight years on death row after being convicted by lower courts.

Last week, the Pakistani Supreme Court acquitted Bibi, saying there were “glaring and stark” contradictions in the evidence against her.

Saif-ul-Malook, who represented Bibi for years, told Al Jazeera he fled to the Netherlands on Saturday following threats to his life.

“Pakistani law is very clear. The [relevant law] says that if a person is involved in a criminal case, or tax fraud or [other] fraud, only then can the government put them on the Exit Control List (ECL),” Malook told a press conference in the Dutch capital Amsterdam on Monday.

“There is no question of putting her name on the ECL.”

Bibi’s acquittal sparked protests by the far-right Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) party in several cities, with major roads and highways blocked until late on Friday.

TLP signed an agreement with the government to end the protests, on the condition that Bibi not be allowed to leave the country, and that all protesters arrested during the demonstrations would be released.

On Sunday, however, Pakistani authorities arrested hundreds of TLP workers, implementing a separate clause of the agreement that said that anyone found to have damaged public or private property during the demonstration would be prosecuted.

TLP Chief Khadim Hussain Rizvi was among those booked for rioting, although he has not been taken into custody.

‘Fight for justice’ 

On Monday, Bibi’s lawyer Malook addressed the press conference alongside Jan Dirk van Nifterik, the director of the Dutch rights group Stichting Hulp Vervolgde Christenen (HVC, or Foundation to Help Persecuted Christians), who said that they had aided him in his escape from Pakistan.

“HVC was able to get him to the Netherlands, offer shelter and look after him,” said Nifterik. “We are grateful to Malook for his work on human rights.”

Malook said he took Bibi’s case because lawyers “do not have a religion”.

“[Lawyers] only … fight for justice, and only see that no one should be condemned unless there is evidence up to the standard.”

Malook said that he had no information on whether Bibi had been released from jail, saying the last time he spoke to a senior jail official about the matter – on Friday night – she remained in custody.

Malook himself faced numerous threats for representing Bibi, whose case has become emblematic of fair trial concerns in such cases in Pakistan.

Blasphemy is a sensitive subject in the country, and at least 74 people have been killed in violence associated with blasphemy allegations since 1990, according to an Al Jazeera tally.

Malook said that he spent days taking refuge at the French Embassy in Islamabad, before he was able to fly out early on Saturday morning.

He flew through Italy, before finally arriving in the Netherlands, he said.

The lawyer indicated that he was currently on a visit visa, but that he would be staying in the European country for an unspecified length of time. He said he would call his wife and children to join him “when I have a place for them to live”.

Asad Hashim is Al Jazeera’s digital correspondent in Pakistan. He tweets @AsadHashim.

Apple’s new iPad Pro is the biggest one yet and has got some pretty serious accessories. This week, senior tech correspondent Ray Wong unboxes not only the iPad Pro, but also the new Apple Pencil and iPad Pro Smart Keyboard Folio. Find out which specs we think are worth whispering about. 

In 2012, Nigeria witnessed the worst flood in nearly five decades. Two million people were displaced and around 363 killed. Crops, homes, and entire communities were destroyed. 

The central government swung into action and disbursed around $110m to affected states in October that year. Additional funding flowed from a public-private relief fund and the international community, including Canada, the European Commission, Japan, Norway and Sweden.

Back in Lagos, the team at BudgIT, a civil society organisation founded in 2011, watched closely. In September 2013, it sent a small research team to tour 12 affected states for a period of five months to find out whether the funds released were put to good use. 

“We discovered that these funds went into the wrong hands and people never benefited,” says Uadamen Ilevbaoje, who was part of the team.

Several decades of corruption have slowed progress in Nigeria, which is the largest oil producer in Africa. Public funds allocated for projects and services often go unaccounted for; mismanagement and corruption have fuelled inequality and poverty.

By the end of May, Nigeria became host to the world’s largest population of people in extreme poverty with some 87 million in crisis, overtaking India’s 73 million.

Across the country, but especially in remote areas, abandoned projects dot the landscape.

Citizens live without basic amenities like roads, housing, schools, potable water, hospitals and sanitation facilities.

In Maito village, in central Nigeria’s Niger state, residents continue to use a dilapidated health centre with a roof covered by bats, despite the National Primary Health Care Development Agency having approved 22 million nairas ($60,600) for a better facility.

In the rural village of Akere, in the southwestern state of Ogun, schoolchildren learn under the shade of a tree and sit on bare floors in overcrowded classrooms, despite funding of $82,000 provided for refurbishment.

According to a UN report, roughly $4.6bn is spent on bribes in Nigeria each year.

The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission reported that 60 percent of corruption cases in the country take place in procurement.

Poor transparency and accountability have allowed corruption to flourish, and a few civil society groups are trying to change the opaque environment.

Pressuring the government

In June 2014, BudgIT started the Tracka initiative to follow public projects and help communities ask serious questions that would enhance efficiency. 

Tracka staff extract capital projects from the budget and design a pamphlet containing the project title, amount and phone number of public officials for each of the 22 states where it operates.

Armed with these details, tracking officers who have been recruited and trained visit the communities, hold town hall meetings with communities and help them ask government agencies and legislatures to complete projects which have either been abandoned or yet to start.

Tracking officers also take photos and upload them on Twitter and Facebook, adding pressure on government ministries to act transparently.

Through its work, Tracka was able to speed up the construction of a school in Iwoye Ilogbo in Ogun state, a primary healthcare centre in Delta state and boreholes in Edo and Anambra states.

In addition to Tracka, there is the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), which is working to promote citizen participation in governance.

It uses radio and social media to monitor public procurement processes and push for greater access to information on public projects following the passage of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act in 2011.

“As soon as the FOI Act was passed, we jumped on it and began to use the provisions of the law to advocate and litigate for improved disclosure of public information,” said Nkem Ilo, head of PPDC.

“With more use of the FOI, we began to receive more responses to our requests, which meant the availability of datasets.”

In 2015, using data acquired from procuring entities over the years, PPDC worked with the Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism and the School of Media and Communication at the Lagos-based Pan-Atlantic University to develop a web-based platform known as Budeshi, which means “open it” in the Hausa language.

Budeshi links budget and procurement data to public projects in a structured format, opening up publicly funded services for scrutiny.

Citizens can now look up public services by searching for the procuring entity – usually government ministries and agencies – as well as the project title, the state where the initiative is being implemented, or the year, and even pick from a list of contractors.

So far, Budeshi has data on 6,571 contracts in Nigeria from more than 100 public institutions. Budeshi is now fully deployed in Uganda and plans to start the platform in Kenya and Malawi are under way.

Every year, on the International Right to Know Day, September 28,- PPDC ranks government ministries, departments and agencies based on their responses to freedom of information requests mostly on public expenditure; the corporate affairs commission is currently first.

Much of the funding for these organisations comes from institutional and private donors, including the UK Department for International Development, the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar network, Indigo Trust and National Endowment for Democracy.

These initiatives are the future for a good governance drive and I appreciate they all do in this risky political space.

Olajide Oluwaseun, architect in Lagos.

Hamza Lawal, a tech-savvy activist, started the Follow the Money campaign in June 2012, following the deaths of hundreds of children from lead poisoning in the northern Nigerian state of Zamfara. 

Though several villages had been cleaned up by late 2012, one – Bagega – caught Lawal’s attention because, by January 2013, money released still hadn’t reached the victims.

Using the hashtag #SaveBagega, the campaign was able to get clean-up operations started in the village, helping hundreds of children to receive care. 

In December 2013, Lawal started a full-fledged movement known as Connected Development (CODE) with Follow the Money. With a team of nearly 40 people and community reporters in Nigeria 36 states, CODE’s campaigns are driven by hashtags connecting the name of community and the project that needs to be tracked.

“The idea of using hashtags is to be able to document projects and track them on social media,” said 31-year-old Lawal, now the CEO of CODE, “and this repository would be online so that other young people can learn from it.”

Follow the Money now has over 2,000 members and this year expanded to Kenya and The Gambia. Last year, it won the One Africa award which came with $100,000 to support their work.

The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP, meanwhile, which is concerned with promoting transparency and accountability in government, including public expenditure.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, SERAP requests information on contracts awards and has even sued ministries and agencies that refuse to release information. 

Through a partnership with BudgIT, it was able to get the public procurement agency in Lagos to make available the Lagos State Procurement Journal from 2012 to date. 

SERAP has been published several reports on health, education, electricity and water sectors. 

It has also partnered with CODE and the Paradigm Leadership Support Initiative, which was started in 2016 to help citizens track and report development projects in their communities.

Some citizens are happy that things are changing, albeit slowly. 

“Tracka, Udeme and Budeshi are checking public expenditure which over the years have been full of excesses, misappropriation and greed by inflation of contracts,” says Olajide Oluwaseun, an architect in Lagos.

“These initiatives are the future for a good governance drive and I appreciate they all do in this risky political space. We need and must build an alliance, not a political party, an alliance of voices that want and need to be heard.”

But some challenges remain.

Access to information on public expenditure is not always available upon request. Some ministries, agencies and departments either do not respond to freedom of information requests or completely ignore them. 

In addition, despite the presence of a procurement law passed in 2007 to ensure contractors follow due process, public procurement has been dogged by contract splitting; the use of fake documents by bidders, some of whom have multiple companies; government ministries and agencies collaborating with contractors to siphon money; and, importantly, delays in investigating and prosecuting cases of misappropriation or graft.

“We don’t have a culture of punishing offenders,” says Ike Fayomi-Awodele of the public administration department at Obafemi Awolowo University in Osun state.

To solve this, Uadamen Ilevbaoje, now the project lead of Tracka, believes more awareness is needed. 

“We need more and more sensitisation and awareness. If there is awareness, citizens would ask more questions and politicians would be forced to do the right thing.”

This tablet was made with education in mind. Acer’s goal is to sell these at a lower cost per unit to schools for young students. The tablet doesn’t have too many bells or whistles, but it does have a headphone jack. If you’re in the market for a durable and low-key tablet, the Acer Chromebook Tab 10 is also available to the public for $329. Alix Aspe has all the specs on this week’s episode of Power Up.

The United States has reimposed oil and financial sanctions against Iran, significantly turning up the pressure on Tehran in order to curb its alleged missile and nuclear programmes.

The move on Monday will restore US sanctions that were lifted under a 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by the administration of President Barack Obama, and add 300 new designations in Iran’s oil, shipping, insurance and banking sectors.

The Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed to break the sanctions imposed on Tehran’s vital energy and banking sectors.

“America wanted to cut to zero Iran’s oil sales … but we will continue to sell our oil … to break sanctions,” Rouhani told economists at a meeting broadcast live on state television on Monday.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Bahram Qasemi told state TV that the new sanctions are part of a psychological war launched by Washington.

Today, US defied UN top court & Security Council by reimposing sanctions on Iran that target ordinary people. But US bullying is backfiring, not just because JCPOA is important, but because the world can’t allow Trump & Co. to destroy global order. The US—& not Iran—is isolated. pic.twitter.com/206g1BFqbU

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) November 5, 2018

“[US President Donald] Trump’s administration is addicted to imposing sanctions … America’s economic pressure on Iran is futile and part of its psychological war against Tehran,” Qasemi told a weekly news conference.

Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from Tehran, said the strong talk coming from Iran was a defence strategy.

“Many Iranians we speak to here tell us consistently that they have come to learn the only language the United States understands is the language of strength.”

Before a campaign rally for the US midterm elections, US President Donald Trump on Sunday said that Iran was already struggling under pressure by his administration. 

“The Iran sanctions are very strong; they are the strongest sanctions we have ever imposed. And we will see what happens with Iran, but they’re not doing very well, I can tell you,” he said.

‘Worst ever’ agreement

Trump announced in May that his administration was withdrawing from what he called the “worst ever” agreement negotiated by the US and reimposed a first round of sanctions on Iran in August.

Other parties to the deal, including Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, have said they will not leave.

The Foreign Ministry’s Qasemi said Iran is in constant contact with other signatories of the nuclear deal that saw most international financial and economic sanctions on Iran lifted in return for Tehran curbing its disputed nuclear activity under UN surveillance.

“We are in regular contact with other signatories of the nuclear deal … setting up mechanisms to continue trade with the European Union will take time,” Qasemi told a weekly news conference in Tehran.

China, India, Italy Japan, Greece, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey – all top importers of Iranian oil – are the eight countries granted temporary exemptions from the sanctions to ensure crude oil prices are not destabilised, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday. 

Anger in Iran

Earlier, thousands of Iranians rallied to mark the anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Addressing the rally in Tehran on Sunday, Iran’s military chief, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned Trump against overreaching when dealing with Iran.

“I want to say something to America and its weird president,” Jafari said.

“Never threaten Iran, because we can still hear the horrified cries of your soldiers in the [desert] … and you know it better, how many of your old soldiers in American society commit suicide every day because of depression and fear that they suffered in battlefields.

“So, don’t threaten us militarily and don’t frighten us with military threats,” he added.

Over the past year, Tehran has accused Trump of waging “economic warfare” and devastating its economy.

In his speech, Jafari assured the crowd that Trump’s attacks on Iran’s economy were a desperate attempt to defeat the republic and were doomed to fail.

But his optimistic tone stood in stark contrast to the widespread economic chaos Iran has endured during the past 12 months, including a nosedive in the value of its currency, a shake-up of President Hassan Rouhani’s economic team – which saw several senior ministers dismissed – and nationwide protests against price increases and dire economic conditions.

Based on the figures from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Iran’s petroleum exports hit $52.728bn in 2017. Its crude oil exports stood at 2,125,000 barrels per day during the same year, while its natural gas exports reached 12.9 billion cubic metres.

Those numbers, however, have already dropped in the current year.

In India, for example, crude oil imports from Iran dropped from 690,000 barrels per day in May to around 400,000 barrels per day in August, Vandana Hari, a Singapore-based global oil market analyst, said.

Iran’s energy sector accounts for up to 80 percent of the country’s income from exports, according to the US Energy Information Administration, so a disruption could bring serious pain to its financial bottom line and its people.

Aside from the energy industry, others outfits and activities being sanctioned include:

• Iran’s port operators and shipping industry, which is also linked to the transport of oil and gas.
• Petroleum-related products and transactions from Iran.
• Transactions by foreign financial institutions with Iran’s central bank and other banking institutions.
• Insurance and reinsurance institutions, which insure tankers that transport oil and gas.
• US-owned or controlled corporations with business activities with Iranian government and individuals.
• Individuals, whose named were previously removed from the sanctions list, could also be included.
• Iran-related SWIFT transactions could also be flagged.

  US Sanctions [Al Jazeera]

Image: In Pictures via Getty Images

This year marks 100 years since the end of World War I. 

700,000 British soldiers lost their lives in the war, which was fought from 1914 to 1918. The fallen soldiers are being commemorated at The Tower of London in the British capital with a pretty spectacular light show. 

10,000 individual flames are being lit every night around the 950-year-old castle in central London. The flames will be lit from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. every night until Armistice day on November 11th — the day marking the truce signed in 1918.

The installation, located in the old moat of the fortress, is entitled “Beyond the Deepening Shadow.”

Image: In Pictures via Getty Images

The installation was designed by artist Tom Piper, who previously worked on the 2014 installation “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” — a project which involved 800,000 ceramic flowers being spread throughout the moat surrounding The Tower of London. 

Image: In Pictures via Getty Images

The title of this year’s installation derives from a war sonnet by poet Mary Borden, which reads:

“They do not know that in this shadowed place/
It is your light they see upon my face.”

Image: In Pictures via Getty Images

The torches will be lit for the last time on November 11th.

In February 2017, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked expressed concern about “decreasing support for Israel in the Democratic party”, telling her Jewish American audience that the problem was “a strategic issue” for Israel.

“I couldn’t sleep after I saw a poll two weeks ago”, she added.

A new US poll on the same topic will not help Shaked rest easy. The results indicate that key trends identified in recent years show no signs of slowing; Israel’s reputation is deteriorating among demographics such as Democrats, younger voters, African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

The fact that the US public’s view towards Israel remains positive overall masks an increasingly partisan divide; the Economist/YouGov poll found that only 25 percent of Democrat-voters consider Israel an “ally” of the US, compared with 57 percent of Republicans.

As Israeli newspaper Haaretz observed, the poll “shows that support for Israel is directly co-related to gender, age, economic status and political outlook. It is strongest among older, well-to-do, conservative white men and weakest among young, liberal, minorities and women”.

But are such polls a genuine cause for anxiety among Israel’s supporters? “There certainly is a segment of the Jewish Israeli public that is concerned with the country’s declining reputation,” Edo Konrad, an Israeli journalist for +972 Magazine told Al Jazeera.

“But the majority of Israeli Jews have either grown apathetic to the political situation writ large, or support the Netanyahu government’s lurch towards hyper-nationalism,” Konrad said.

Partisan divide

This lurch is one of the drivers for a “partisan divide” towards Israel and the Palestinians that the Pew Research Centre declared in January to be “now wider than at any point since 1978” – a divide that is slowly changing the political landscape in the US.

Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic Party leadership was one example of a change in discourse about Israel – the polarised response to Donald Trump‘s nomination of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel was another.

These developments are the consequences of different factors, from years of grassroots activism on Palestine, to the legacy of Netanyahu‘s efforts to back Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, and undermine Barack Obama’s Iran negotiations.

In addition, as Brookings Institution scholar Tamara Cofman Wittes and former US envoy Daniel Shapiro noted in January, “some Americans have come to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of human rights”.

“In recent years and months”, Zena Agha, a New York-based US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think-tank, told Al Jazeera, “support for Israel has become a partisan issue with many liberals not only questioning Israeli actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, but also interrogating blind support for Israel itself.

“It does represent a genuine problem for Israel, who has put all its eggs in one basket – a basket which dangles precariously on the arm of the far right,” Agha said.

This embrace of the far right is taking place both at the level of activism – for example, the invitation extended to former football hooligan and Islamophobic campaigner Tommy Robinson by US-based pro-Israel groups – as well as at state-level.

In recent years, Netanyahu has either visited or hosted Hungary’s ethnonationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, and the Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte. Netanyahu warmly welcomed the election victory of Brazil’s far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro – who has vowed to visit Israel and relocate his country’s embassy to Jerusalem.

“It’s hard not to conclude that the [Israeli] government considers the far right in the United States and elsewhere a partner in the battle against extremist Islam and ‘infiltrators’,” stated an editorial in Haaretz on 30 October, “and sees its strengthening as a stamp of approval for continuing the occupation and deporting asylum seekers”.

According to Konrad, “Israeli politicians have made a conscious decision to turn away from American liberal Jewry in favour of far-right Jewish figures such as [Republican donor] billionaire Sheldon Adelson, as well as xenophobic nationalist leaders like Orban”.

The liberal-left estrangement and growing embrace of the far right are trends that are likely to continue, and even accelerate. Among Democrats, the grassroots shifts are now beginning to rise to the top – consider the new “cluster of activist Democrats” heading for election to the House, or the 10 letters and joint statements from legislators since June 2015 highlighting Palestinian rights.

“So long as Israel continues to commit atrocities against Palestinians and violate Palestinian rights, it will continue to lose progressives and liberals worldwide”, said Agha. “The only way I can see the trend being reversed is if Israel itself changes course”.

For now, however, there is precious little sign of such a shift. Such a trajectory is risky for Israel, including with respect to the effect on American Jews, a traditional pillar of support.

“American Jews, for the most part, are left-leaning Democrats who value civil liberties and minority rights, while at the same time maintaining support for the State of Israel,” said Konrad.

“But with the Israeli government building alliances with authoritarian and antisemitic leaders around the world, and continuing to maintain a military dictatorship over the Palestinians in the occupied territories, American Jewry is realising that its political interests and that of Israel do not necessarily align,” he added.

Writing last week on the government’s embrace of far-right leaders, Eyal Nadav, foreign news editor-in-chief on Israel’s Channel 10 news, cautioned that “foreign policy is not short-term based, but mainly relies on long-term relations”.

“What will happen the day after Orban, Duterte, US President Donald Trump and others leave office? Does Israel have friendly relations with these [future] leaders, or relations of public political support?”

There is also an opportunity for Palestinians, who, Agha believes, “can, should and are capitalising on these developments”, especially by “aligning Palestine with similar and shared struggles around the world, from indigenous rights in the Americas and Oceania, to black liberation and ending mass incarceration and police brutality in the States”.

Agha, like other Palestinian analysts, as well as activists, is cautious about the disparity between developments at the grassroots, which “have yet to filter up to the corridors of power”.

However, she told Al Jazeera, should Palestinians “work with progressive candidates and representatives”, then there is an opportunity “to make sure that support for Palestine is part and parcel of their vote and their expectations once elected”.

Image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for American Expres

Ariana Grande is indisputably a legend. But, almost as legendary as Ari herself, is her ponytail.

This is a ponytail which defies gravity and just, like, the laws of what’s scientifically possible with human hair. 

Those of us with long hair will know that trying to master the high pony look is a downright painful ordeal. An ordeal that Grande isn’t entirely unfamiliar with, as it turns out. 

Camila Cabello posed a question to Ari on Sunday that countless others have all been wondering: “ITS SO PAINFUL HOW DO YOU DO IT.” 

“well u actually have hair so that prolly makes it a lil more painful….nah jk i’m in constant pain always and don’t care at all,” replied Grande. 

Rather you than me, Ari.