geneva_convenience

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israeli soldiers fired on a car carrying a family in the northern West Bank, killing four people including two children, the Palestinian Authority's Health Ministry said.

The official Palestinian news agency said the family was shot late Saturday after going out to buy new clothes for the coming Eid al-Fitr holiday. Israel said it was investigating the shooting.

The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said that Ali and Waed Odeh, and two of their four children, were shot in the head. The Odehs' two surviving children had shrapnel wounds that were examined by first responders once they were granted access, the group said, accusing Israel of delaying ambulances dispatched to the scene.

Israel is set to deport a Jewish-American left-wing activist who reported that a vehicle had struck a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the South Hebron Hills on Friday, according to officials and her attorney.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards vowed on Sunday to target ‘Israeli’ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war with ‘Israel’ and the United States continues.

"If this child-killing criminal is alive, we will continue to pursue and kill him with full force," said the Guards on their website Sepah News.

The way Kaplan explains it, the good ship Overwatch started to buckle when unreasonable expectations were placed on the Overwatch League, a hugely hyped esports league founded in 2017 and closed in 2024.

"Originally the business model was going to be that they [Overwatch League] were going to do in-person events, and there's going to be big ticket sales and merch and all of that. I think, really quickly, everybody learned we can't do in-game events when we have a London team and a Shanghai team… like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good but it wasn't going to be making NFL money, whatever insanity people thought that was going to be.

"So everybody [the investors] quickly defaulted back to, 'hey, didn't Overwatch make 500 million dollars just in the live game last year?' What can we sell, and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the [dev] team, and [add to that] the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and then all the care and love that we had for the live game and the live service—like let's make events, new heroes, new maps—we're losing all these resources."

"What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO's office and he sits me down and he says—he gives me a date which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time it was 2020—and he said: 'Overwatch has to make [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted]' and then he says to me 'if it doesn't do [redacted] we're going to lay off 1,000 people, and that's going to be on you.' And that was the biggest fuck you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."

The redacted figures are due to a confidentiality agreement signed by Kaplan.

"As someone who's worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they're like 'Fortnite has 1400 people working on it, so if we just hire 1400 people and make it free-to-play, we'll make that money, right?' I had believed that I would never work in any place but Blizzard, I loved it, it was a part of who I was, and I thought that I was a part of it. And I literally thought I'd retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, but that was it. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there."

More context: https://xcancel.com/ireallyhateyou/status/2032916388482896201

The escalation of the war in the Middle East has already begun to significantly impact the region's financial markets. One of the most striking signals has been the sharp drop in Dubai's real estate index.

According to trading data on the Dubai stock exchange, the Dubai Financial Market (DFM) real estate index fell by approximately 30% in two weeks — from 16.8 thousand points to about 11.7 thousand, UNN reports.

Thus, the market effectively lost all the gains accumulated since the beginning of 2026. This decline was one of the largest in recent years and coincided with a sharp deterioration of the security situation in the region after the start of the war between Iran, the US, and Israel.

Even at the beginning of 2026, the Dubai real estate market showed record growth rates. In 2024, the real estate index grew by approximately 63%, and in 2025, it added another 30%. In early 2026, the positive trend continued: in January–February alone, the index rose by another 20–21%.