MADRID: Spain said on Thursday that it will join South Africa’s case at the UN’s top court in which Pretoria has accused Israel of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.
“Our sole goal is to put an end to the war and to advance on the road of applying the two-state solution,” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said at a press conference.
His statement came a week after Spain, along with Ireland and Norway, recognized the state of Palestine, sparking fury from Israel.
South Africa brought the case before the International Court of Justice last year, alleging that Israel’s Gaza offensive, launched in retaliation for an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel, breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
Israel has strongly denied the accusation.
Set up after World War II, the Hague-based ICJ rules in disputes between states.
The ICJ on Friday ordered Israel to ensure “unimpeded access” to UN-mandated investigators to look into allegations of genocide.
In a ruling on January 26, the ICJ also ordered Israel to do everything it could to prevent acts of genocide during its military operation in Gaza.
But South Africa has since returned several times to the ICJ arguing that the dire humanitarian situation in the territory compels the court to issue further fresh emergency measures.
On May 24, the court ordered Israel to “immediately” halt its military offensive in the city of Rafah and keep open the key border crossing there for “unhindered” humanitarian aid.
It also called for the “unconditional” release of hostages taken by Palestinian militant group Hamas during its October 7 assault that sparked the war.
ICJ rulings are legally binding but the court has no concrete means to enforce them. For example, it ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine, to no avail.
Spain joins South Africa’s case at UN top court on Gaza: minister
https://arab.news/2m7jf
Spain joins South Africa’s case at UN top court on Gaza: minister
- Spain, along with Ireland and Norway, earlier recognized the state of Palestine, sparking Israeli fury
French school to be named after teacher beheaded by militant
New name plates would be put up in the course of the current school year
VERSAILLES, France: A school in France will be named after Samuel Paty, a teacher who worked there until he was murdered by a militant for discussing Prophet Muhammad drawings in class, local authorities said after a unanimous vote in favor of the change.
Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on October 16, 2020 in an attack that horrified France.
Paty’s attacker, 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead at the scene by police.
He murdered Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“By naming the Bois d’Aulne school Samuel Paty College, we incarnate the French ideal, the republican hope that knowledge brings progress, by giving it the face of a humble, devoted and enthusiastic man, the face of Samuel Paty,” said Pierre Bedier, president of the Yvelines department where the school is located.
New name plates would be put up in the course of the current school year, his office added.
Some parents’ associations had called for the name change to be delayed, arguing that children who were deeply shocked by the 2020 events could be traumatized all over again by revisiting those memories.
They wanted the change to be delayed until after mid-2025 when all pupils who knew Paty personally will have left the establishment, to no avail.
The children “had to live through something unimaginable,” they said in a message to the town’s mayor.
Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.
Hamas leader’s death creates chance for ceasefire, US Defense Secretary says
- Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says that US Forces in the Middle East stand ready to support Israel’s defense
BRUSSELS: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s killing opens a major opportunity to negotiate a lasting ceasefire, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters on Friday, after attending a NATO defense ministers’ meeting in Brussels.
He added that US Forces in the Middle East stand ready to support Israel’s defense.
“Sinwar’s death also provides an extraordinary opportunity to achieve a lasting ceasefire, to end this awful war and to rush humanitarian aid into Gaza,” he said.
North Korean troops in Russia readying for combat in Ukraine war, South Korea says
- Facial recognition artificial intelligence technology used to identify North Korean officers in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region
- North Korea has shipped artillery rounds, ballistic missiles and anti-tank rockets to Russia since August last year – South Korean spy agency
SEOUL: North Korea has shipped 1,500 special forces troops to Russia’s far east for training and acclimatizing at local military bases and will likely be deployed for combat in the war in Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency said on Friday.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) also said it had been working with Ukrainian intelligence service and had used facial recognition artificial intelligence technology to identify North Korean officers in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region supporting Russian forces firing North Korean missiles.
In more than 13,000 containers, North Korea has shipped artillery rounds, ballistic missiles and anti-tank rockets to Russia since August last year, the agency said, based on the remnants of weapons recovered from the battle front in Ukraine.
In all, more than eight million artillery and rocket rounds have been shipped to Russia, it said.
“The direct military cooperation between Russia and North Korea that has been reported by foreign media has now been officially confirmed,” the spy agency said in a statement.
Earlier, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called an unscheduled security meeting with key intelligence, military and national security officials to discuss North Korean troops’ involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Yoon’s office said.
“The participants ... shared the view that the current situation where Russia and North Korea’s closer ties have gone beyond the movement of military supplies to actual dispatch of troops is a grave security threat not only to our country but to the international community,” it said.
Yoon’s office said South Korea, together with its allies, has been closely tracking North Korea’s troop dispatch to Russia from the initial stages.
South Korea will respond to the North’s activities with all available means, it added, without elaborating on what actions it might take.
South Korea, which has emerged as a major global arms exporter, selling fighter jets, mechanized howitzers and missiles, has come under pressure from some Western allies including Washington to help arm Ukraine with lethal weapons but has stopped short of openly doing so.
Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College in London said despite the gravity of the development, it may not be heavy enough to shift Seoul’s position.
“When it comes to South Korea, I think that its red line is Russia providing support to North Korea that allows Pyongyang to substantially improve its nuclear and missile program, not North Korea’s support for Russia.”
RUSSIAN UNIFORMS, FAKE IDS
Vessels belonging to Russia’s Pacific Fleet were detected moving about 1,500 North Korean special forces troops to Vladivostok from Oct. 8 to 13 and are expected to resume the shipment of troops soon, the NIS said.
The troops have been supplied with Russian military uniforms and weapons as well as fake identification documents for when they are deployed for combat, the NIS added.
The agency said it used facial recognition AI to identify with a high degree of accuracy technical military officers from the North Korean military in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine where they are supporting Russia’s missile offensive and helping with technical glitches.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused North Korea on Thursday of deploying officers alongside Russia and preparing to send 10,000 soldiers to help Moscow’s war effort, although NATO’s chief Mark Rutte said there was no evidence of Pyongyang’s presence at this stage.
Since their leaders’ summit in the Russian far east last year, North Korea and Russia have dramatically upgraded their military ties and they met again in June to sign a comprehensive strategic partnership that includes a mutual defense pact.
Russia and North Korea both deny they have engaged in arms transfers. The Kremlin has also dismissed South Korean assertions that North Korea may have sent some military personnel to help Russia against Ukraine.
North Korea has 1.28 million active duty troops, according to South Korea’s latest data, and has stepped up its development of a series of ballistic missiles and a nuclear arsenal, fueling regional tension and drawing international sanctions.
Deploying troops to Russia, if confirmed, would be its first major involvement in a war since the 1950-53 Korean War.
North Korea reportedly sent a much smaller contingent to the Vietnam War and to the civil conflict in Syria.
Putin says BRICS will generate most of global economic growth
- Putin hopes to build up BRICS — which has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates as well as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa
MOSCOW: The BRICS group will generate most of the global economic growth in the coming years thanks to its size and relatively fast growth compared with that of developed Western nations, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.
Putin hopes to build up BRICS — which has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates as well as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — as a powerful counterweight to the West in global politics and trade.
The Kremlin leader is due to host a BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan on Oct. 22-24.
“The countries in our association are essentially the drivers of global economic growth. In the foreseeable future, BRICS will generate the main increase in global GDP,” Putin told officials and businessmen at BRICS business forum in Moscow.
“The economic growth of BRICS members will increasingly depend less on external influence or interference. This is essentially economic sovereignty,” Putin added.
Next week’s summit is being presented by Moscow as evidence that Western efforts to isolate Russia over its actions in Ukraine have failed.
Russia wants other countries to work with it to overhaul the global financial system and end the dominance of the US dollar.
China, India and the UAE confirmed on Friday that their leaders would attend the summit in Kazan.
Putin cited some of the
initiatives
that Russia has previously outlined ahead of the summit, including a joint cross-border payments system and a reinsurance company.
He called on the New Development Bank, the BRICS’ only functioning multilateral development institution, to invest in technology and infrastructure across the countries of the Global South.
“As a development institution, the bank already serves as an alternative to many Western financial mechanisms, and we will naturally continue to develop it,” Putin said. He called for more investment in e-commerce and artificial intelligence.
Putin sought to promote Russia’s new transport megaprojects such as the Arctic Sea Route and the North-to-South corridor, linking Russia to the Gulf and Indian Ocean through the Caspian Sea and Iran.
“It is the key to increasing freight transportation between the Eurasian and African continents,” he said.
King Charles arrives in Australia for landmark tour
- The king is on a nine-day tour of his far-flung Australian and Samoan realms
- His long-planned trip is designed to bolster the monarchy among an increasingly ambivalent Australian public
SYDNEY: King Charles III touched down in Australia Friday, kicking off the most strenuous foreign trip since his life-changing cancer diagnosis eight months ago.
After a grueling 20-plus hour journey, the 75-year-old monarch and his wife Queen Camilla landed in a rain-sodden Sydney, and were greeted by local dignitaries and posy-bearing children.
“We are really looking forward to returning to this beautiful country to celebrate the extraordinarily rich cultures and communities that make it so special,” the couple said in a social media post ahead of their arrival.
The king is on a nine-day tour of his far-flung Australian and Samoan realms that will feature a public barbecue, famed landmarks and reminders about pressing climate dangers.
He is the first reigning sovereign to set foot Down Under since 2011, when thronging crowds flocked to catch a white-gloved wave from his mother Queen Elizabeth II.
His long-planned trip is designed to bolster the monarchy among an increasingly ambivalent Australian public, whose British heritage is now just one element in a melting-pot nation.
There was an early hiccup, however. Plans to project a montage of images of Charles onto the sails of Sydney’s famed Opera House were briefly delayed because a cruise ship called the Queen Elizabeth was blocking the view.
“I think most people see him as a good king” said 62-year-old Sydney solicitor Clare Cory, who like many Australians is “on the fence” about the monarchy’s continued role in Australian life.
“It’s a long time. Most of my ancestors came from England, I think we do owe something there,” she said, before adding that Australia now looks more to the Asia-Pacific region than a place “on the other side of the world.”
Still, Australia is a land of many happy memories for Charles and the trip is said to be personally important to him after a period of cancer treatment.
He first visited as a gawky 17-year-old in 1966, when he was shipped away to the secluded alpine Timbertop school in regional Victoria.
“While I was here I had the Pommy bits bashed off me,” he would later remark, describing it as “by far the best part” of his education.
Bachelor Charles was famously ambushed by a bikini-clad model on a later jaunt to Western Australia, who pecked him on the cheek in an instantly iconic photo of the young prince.
He returned with wife Diana in 1983, drawing mobs of adoring fans eager to see the “people’s princess” at landmarks like the Sydney Opera House.
In 1994, a would-be gunman fired two blanks at Charles as he gave a speech on Sydney harbor — a mock assassination staged as a human rights protest.
With six days in Australia and five more in Samoa, it will be Charles’s longest overseas tour since starting treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer.
He made a brief trip to France this year for D-Day commemorations.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a lifelong republican, has made no secret of his desire to one day sever ties with the monarchy.
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth, his government replaced the monarch’s visage on the country’s $5 note with an Indigenous motif.
A recent poll showed about a third of Australians would like to ditch the monarchy, a third would keep it and a third are ambivalent.
For now, at least, the question of a republic is a political non-starter.
Charles’s looming presence has so far done little to stoke republican sentiment.
He carefully tiptoed around the question on the eve of his arrival, reportedly saying it was ultimately a “matter for the Australian public to decide.”
