CAIRO: Egypt’s chief prosecutor has ordered the detention of three hotel workers pending an investigation into the food poisoning suffered by about 50 foreign tourists at a hotel in a popular Red Sea resort.
Public Prosecutor Hamada El-Sawy said in a statement late Sunday that the workers, including the hotel’s top chef, face accusations of endangering the guests’ lives. The workers denied the accusations, the prosecutor’s statement said.
The sickened tourists include 14 Estonians, 29 Russians and four from the Czech Republic. They were hospitalized after they had dinner over the weekend in the resort city of Hurghada, the statement said. Many have been discharged from hospital after their conditions improved, it said.
Tourism authorities have ordered the closure of the hotel, suspended its director and revoked his work license.
Russia’s TASS news agency quoted the Russian Consul General in Hurghada, Viktor Voropayev, as saying that the tourists have been accommodated at other hotels. Russia is a major source of foreign tourists visiting Egypt.
“The health condition of all the patients is satisfactory, stable and not life-threatening,” Voropayev was quoted as saying.
The incident has come as Egypt is struggling to revive its vital tourism industry, which was badly hit by the turmoil that followed the 2011 uprising, and more recently by the coronavirus pandemic.
The government has kept looser virus-related restrictions in the Red Sea resorts of Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh to try to attract foreign visitors.
Government efforts received a boost in August when Russia allowed the resumption of flights between its territory and the Red Sea resorts for the first time since a bomb by the local Daesh affiliate brought down a Russian flight over Sinai Peninsula in October 2015, killing all 224 people on board.
Egypt: 47 tourists suffer food poisoning at Red Sea resort
https://arab.news/mpd9c
Egypt: 47 tourists suffer food poisoning at Red Sea resort
- The workers, including the hotel’s top chef, face accusations of endangering the guests’ lives
- The sickened tourists include 14 Estonians, 29 Russians and four from the Czech Republic
NATO needs more long-range missiles to deter Russia, US general says
Russia’s effective use of long-range missiles in its war in Ukraine has convinced Western military officials of their importance for destroying command posts, transportation hubs and missile launchers far behind enemy lines.
“The Russian army is bigger today than it was when they started the war in Ukraine,” Major General John Rafferty said in an interview at a US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany.
“And we know that they’re going to continue to invest in long-range rockets and missiles and sophisticated air defenses. So more alliance capability is really, really important.”
The war in Ukraine has underscored Europe’s heavy dependence on the United States to provide long-range missiles, with Kyiv seeking to strengthen its air defenses.
Rafferty recently completed an assignment as commander of the US Army’s 56th Artillery Command in the German town of Mainz-Kastel, which is preparing for temporary deployments of long-range US missiles on European soil from 2026.
At a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Monday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is expected to try to clarify whether such deployments, agreed between Berlin and Washington when Joe Biden was president, will go ahead now that Donald Trump is back in the White House.
The agreement foresaw the deployment of systems including Tomahawk missiles with a range of 1,800 km and the developmental hypersonic weapon Dark Eagle with a range of around 3,000 km.
Russia has criticized the planned deployment of longer-range US missiles in Germany as a serious threat to its national security. It has dismissed NATO concerns that it could attack an alliance member and cited concerns about NATO expansion as one of its reasons for invading Ukraine in 2022.
EUROPEAN PLANS
Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo University who specializes in missiles, estimated that the US provides some 90 percent of NATO’s long-range missile capabilities.
“Long-range strike capabilities are crucial in modern warfare,” he said. “You really, really don’t want to be caught in a position like Ukraine (without such weapons) in the first year (of the war). That puts you at an immediate disadvantage.”
Aware of this vulnerability, European countries in NATO have agreed to increase defense spending under pressure from Trump.
Some European countries have their own long-range missiles but their number and range are limited. US missiles can strike targets at a distance of several thousand km.
Europe’s air-launched cruise missiles, such as the British Storm Shadow, the French Scalp and the German Taurus, have a range of several hundred km. France’s sea-launched Missile de Croisiere Naval (MdCN) can travel more than 1,000 km.
They are all built by European arms maker MBDA which has branches in Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Britain and Sweden are now participating in a program to acquire long-range, ground-launched conventional missiles known as the European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA).
As part of the program, Britain and Germany announced in mid-May that they would start work on the development of a missile with a range of over 2,000 km.
‘Everybody is tired’ of war in Ukraine, UN migration chief says
- Russia’s invasion has triggered Europe’s biggest refugee crisis this century, with 5.6 million Ukrainian refugees globally and 3.8 million uprooted in their country
ROME: Fatigue over the war in Ukraine and US-led foreign aid cuts are jeopardizing efforts to support people fleeing hardship, the head of the UN migration agency warned in an interview on Friday. International Organization for Migration (IOM) Director General Amy Pope was speaking a day after a Ukraine recovery conference in Rome mobilized over €10 billion ($11.69 billion) for the country.
“It’s three-and-a-half years into the conflict. I think it’s fair to say that everybody is tired, and we hear that even from Ukrainians who’ve been experiencing the ongoing attacks in their cities and often have been displaced multiple times,” she said.
“The response to it, though, has to be peace, because ultimately, without peace, there won’t be an end, not only to the funding request, but also to the support for the Ukrainian people.”
Russia’s invasion has triggered Europe’s biggest refugee this century, with 5.6 million Ukrainian refugees globally and 3.8 million uprooted in their country, according to UN data. The IOM and other UN agencies are hampered by major funding shortages as US President Donald Trump slashes foreign aid and European donors like Britain shift funds from development to defense.
US decisions will give the IOM a $1 billion shortfall this year, Pope said, saying budget reductions should be phased gradually or else Trump and others risk stoking even worse migration crises.
“It doesn’t work to have provided assistance and then just walk away and leave nothing. And what we see happening when support falls is that people move again … So (the cuts) can ultimately have a backlash,” she said.
Warning for US, praise for Italy
Pope, 51, is the first woman to lead the IOM and a former adviser to the Obama and Biden administrations who is now working with Trump’s White House on so-called “self-deportations.”
She said the IOM has decades of experience of such programs in Europe and they take time to implement, especially to prepare returnees and check they are going voluntarily.
“That doesn’t always move as quickly as governments would like,” Pope said.
Asked whether the IOM would stop working with the US if the returns turned out to be forced, she said: “We’ve made clear to them what our standards are, and as with every member state, we outline what we can do and what we can’t do, and they understand that, and it is part of the deal.”
After Rome, Pope was on her way to Washington to meet with Trump administration officials and US lawmakers. Turning to Europe, she praised Italy’s decision to increase migrant work permits to nearly 500,000 for 2026-2028, coming from a right-wing government otherwise pursuing tough border policies.
“What Italy is doing is taking a realistic look at what labor they need, what skills they need, what talent they need. And then they’re designing a system to allow people to come in through a safe and legal channel,” Pope said.
Greece to adopt legislation against migrant ‘invasion’ from Libya
- Conservative lawmakers are expected to approve emergency legislation enforcing the temporary ban
- Proposed law to allow authorities to detain asylum seekers in camps for up to 18 months
ATHENS: Greece on Friday was to enforce a three-month freeze on asylum claims from migrants arriving by boat from North Africa, to stem a surge from Libya that the government has called an “invasion.”
Conservative lawmakers, who hold a parliamentary majority, are expected to approve emergency legislation enforcing the temporary ban, allowing authorities to detain asylum seekers in camps for up to 18 months.
“We have made the difficult but absolutely necessary decision to temporarily suspend the examination process of asylum applications for those arriving by sea from North African countries,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement to German tabloid Bild on Friday.
“This decision sends a clear message, leaving no room for misinterpretation, to human trafficking networks: Greece is not an open transit route. The journey is dangerous, the outcome uncertain, and the money paid to smugglers ultimately wasted,” he said.
Greece’s migration ministry says over 14,000 migrants have reached the country this year, including over 2,000 in recent days from Libya.
“Greece cannot have boats totaling 1,000 people a day,” Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told Skai TV, adding that the country will undertake a “draconian revision” of how it deals with migrants.
Plevris – formerly a member of the far-right LAOS party and now part of Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party – has called the recent influx an “invasion from North Africa.”
The move has been criticized by rights groups as a violation of international and EU law, and opposition parties have called it unconstitutional.
Noting an “exceptional” situation, European Commission migration spokesperson Markus Lammert said on Thursday: “We are in close contact with the Greek authorities to obtain necessary information on these measures.”
Greece took similar steps in 2020 during a migration surge at its land border with Turkiye.
To manage the influx, the government could reopen camps built after the 2015 migration crisis, government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said this week.
Mitsotakis also told parliament that it would build up to two additional camps on the island of Crete.
Kremlin says it awaits ‘major statement’ from Trump
- Trump has expressed frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Russia-Ukraine conflict
MOSCOW: Russia is awaiting the “major statement” that US President Donald Trump announced he would deliver on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
Trump told NBC News on Thursday that he will make a “major statement” on Russia on Monday, without elaborating what it will be about.
In recent days, Trump has expressed frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
When asked about the new NATO weapons deliveries to Ukraine, Peskov called it “just business” as Kyiv had already been receiving weapons prior to this development.
Rubio meets China’s Wang in Malaysia amid trade tension
- Washington’s top diplomat is in Malaysia on his first trip to Asia since taking office
- Marco Rubio’s visit is part of an effort to renew US focus on the Indo-Pacific region
KUALA LUMPUR: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kuala Lumpur on Friday, their first in-person meeting at a time of simmering trade tensions between the two major powers.
Washington’s top diplomat is in Malaysia on his first trip to Asia since taking office, attending the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Regional Forum alongside counterparts from Japan, China, South Korea, Russia, Australia, India, the European Union and Southeast Asian states.
His meeting with Wang comes amid escalating friction globally over US President Donald Trump’s tariffs offensive, with China this week warning the United States against reinstating hefty levies on its goods next month.
Beijing has also threatened to retaliate against nations that strike deals with the United States to cut China out of supply chains. Rubio’s visit is part of an effort to renew US focus on the Indo-Pacific region and look beyond conflicts in the Middle East and Europe that have consumed much of the Trump administration’s attention.
But that has been overshadowed by this week’s announcement of steep US tariffs on many Asian countries and US allies that include 25 percent on Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, 32 percent for Indonesia, 36 percent for Thailand and Cambodia and 40 percent on Myanmar and Laos.
Analysts said Rubio would be looking to press the case that the United States remains a better partner than China, Washington’s main strategic rival, during the visit. The State Department said Rubio met counterparts of Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia on Friday.
A day earlier, he told Southeast Asian foreign ministers the Indo-Pacific remained a focal point of US foreign policy.
China, initially singled out with tariffs exceeding 100 percent, has until August 12 to reach a deal with the White House to keep Trump from reinstating additional import curbs imposed during tit-for-tat tariff exchanges in April and May.
‘Bullying behavior’
China’s Wang has been fierce in his criticism of the United States in Kuala Lumpur and told Malaysia’s foreign minister the US tariffs were “typical unilateral bullying behavior” that no country should support or agree with, according to remarks released by Beijing on Friday.
He told Thailand’s foreign minister the tariffs had been abused and “undermined the free trade system, and interfered with the stability of the global production and supply chain.”
During a meeting with his Cambodian counterpart, he said the US levies were an attempt to deprive Southeast Asian countries of their legitimate right to development.
“We believe that Southeast Asian countries have the ability to cope with complex situations, adhere to principled positions, and safeguard their own interests,” Wang said, according to China’s foreign ministry.
The foreign secretary of US ally the Philippines said on Friday President Ferdinand Marcos Jr would meet Trump in Washington this month and discussions would include the increase in the US tariff on its former colony.
Rubio told reporters on Thursday he would also likely raise with Wang US concerns over China’s support for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
“The Chinese clearly have been supportive of the Russian effort and I think that generally, they’ve been willing to help them as much as they can without getting caught,” he said.
Rubio met together with Japanese foreign minister and South Korea’s first vice foreign minister in Malaysia on Friday, at a time of concerns about the tariffs.
According to a US State Department statement, they discussed regional security and a strengthening of their “indispensable trilateral partnership” including security and resilience of critical technologies and supply chains, energy, trusted digital infrastructure, and shipbuilding.
