The Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing a dramatic deterioration of infrastructure and displacement of citizens as a result of armed violence, flooding and the world’s largest hunger crisis. In recent months, rampant violence of armed groups has forced more than half a million people to flee their homes, while the United Nations says some 3,000 families also lost their homes after recent intense flooding and mudslides in the eastern part of the country.

On the same day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kyiv to announce $1 billion in new U.S. aid to Ukraine, 17 Ukrainians were killed in a Russian missile attack on a Donetsk market. “It’s very painful for me to see all the streets and cities that I spent my childhood in to be completely destroyed by the ongoing war,” says Hanna Perekhoda, Ukrainian historian from the Donetsk region on a speaking tour of the U.S.

A military judge at Guantánamo has thrown out the confessions of Saudi man Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri because he had been tortured and waterboarded at secret CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo. Psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were paid at least $81 million by the CIA to develop and then implement the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, had waterboarded al-Nashiri at a CIA black site.

As the Africa Climate Summit wraps up in Nairobi, we get an update from Kenyan climate justice organizer Eric Njuguna. He says the focus by Western leaders and multinational companies on establishing carbon markets in Africa amounts to a “ticket to pollute” without directly addressing the need to phase out fossil fuels. Njuguna says a key demand from activists is to create access to climate financing without new debt burdens on the continent’s governments.

The Biden administration is expected to send armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine as part of the latest military aid package, even though the weapons are radioactive and their use causes contamination that is hazardous to human health. It’s the latest escalation in the war between Ukraine and Russia that nonproliferation activists warn could possibly lead to a nuclear confrontation.

Georgia is intensifying its crackdown against opponents of Cop City, with the state’s Republican attorney general announcing sweeping indictments of 61 people on racketeering charges over protests and other activism related to the $90 million police training facility planned to be built in Atlanta.