KYIV, Ukraine: Ukraine accused its Moscow-allied neighbor Belarus Sunday of “concentrating” troops on the countries’ shared border and warned Minsk against “unfriendly actions,” in a statement by Kyiv’s foreign ministry.
The statement came as Kyiv mounts an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region and as Russia continues its advance into eastern Ukraine.
Belarus had allowed Russian troops to use its territory as a launchpad for their February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The statement said Ukrainian intelligence had recorded Belarus “concentrating a significant number of personnel.... in the Gomel region near Ukraine’s northern border under the guise of exercises.”
It added: “We warn Belarusian officials not to make tragic mistakes for their country under Moscow’s pressure, and we urge its armed forces to cease unfriendly actions and withdraw forces away from Ukraine’s state border to a distance greater than the firing range of Belarus’ systems.”
Kyiv accused Belarus of building up equipment and troops on the border, saying it had recorded the presence of Wagner fighters — some of whom are being hosted by Belarus after their leader’s failed rebellion last year.
Ukraine warned that military exercises in the border area pose a “global security” threat due to how close the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant — site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
“We emphasize that Ukraine has never taken and is not going to take any unfriendly actions against the Belarusian people,” the foreign ministry added.
Belarus has been ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994.
In 2022, he had allowed Russian troops to station in Belarus during what Russia and Belarus called “drills” before they launched their invasion in February.
Belarus is politically and economically reliant on Russia.
Kyiv says Belarus ‘concentrating’ troops on border, warns against ‘unfriendly actions’
https://arab.news/27ktk
Kyiv says Belarus ‘concentrating’ troops on border, warns against ‘unfriendly actions’
- Belarus had allowed Russian troops to use its territory as a launchpad for their February 2022 invasion of Ukraine
US senator condemned over comments to Arab American during Senate hearing on hate crimes
- John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, accuses leading civil rights activist of supporting terrorist organizations and tells her to ‘hide your head in a bag’
- Maya M. Berry tells Kennedy: ‘You, asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question, very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country’
CHICAGO: John Kennedy, a US senator from Louisiana, is facing criticism for anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate and name calling during a Senate hearing on the issue of hate crimes, after he accused the Muslim American head of a civil rights advocacy group of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin convened the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, titled “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America,” in Washington on Tuesday to discuss an alarming rise in such crimes against Arabs and Muslims and other minority and religious groups.
He began by highlighting the case of Wadee Alfayoumi, a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy who died on Oct. 14, 2023, when he was stabbed 26 times by the landlord of the building in which his family lived in Plainfield, Illinois. His mother, Hanaan Shahin, was severely injured in the attack.
The proceedings turned ugly, however, when Sen. Kennedy, a Republican member of the committee (who is not a member of the famous Kennedy political dynasty), accused an Arab American civil rights leader who was testifying at the hearing of being a supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Maya M. Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, had read a lengthy statement in which she detailed the increase in hate crimes in the US in recent years against not only Arabs and Muslims but against Jewish Americans as well.
Citing the most recent official data, she said that in 27 states and the District of Columbia, “law enforcement agencies reported a combined 10,881 hate crimes in 2023, up from 10,171 in 2022 and 9,304 in 2021. This total includes 180 anti-Arab hate crimes, up from 104 in 2022 and 98 in 2021; and 2,073 anti-Jewish hate crimes, up from 1,311 in 2022 and 1,029 in 2021.”
Rather than commenting on the figures, Kennedy told Berry, “You should hide your head in a bag,” after accusing her of being a supporter of Hamas, an allegation Berry immediately denied.
In response to Kennedy’s shocking personal attack, she said: “Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support. But you, asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question, very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”
Kennedy nevertheless persisted, accusing Berry of also supporting Hezbollah and “Iran, which has a hatred of Jews.” He ignored her repeated responses that she did not support any of them.
“I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing,” she said. “I don’t support violence, whether it is Hezbollah or Hamas or any other entity that involves it. As a Muslim woman, I do not support Iran, either.”
Kennedy ignored her protestations as he continued to repeat his accusations and told Berry: “You should hide your head in a bag.”
Arab and Muslim organizations in the US condemned Kennedy for his comments, including the Muslim Civic Coalition in Washington, which said: “The congressional hearing laid bare the state of the American political system and it is ugly, paid for by special interests and paved with bias and racism.
“Every resilient community has been marginalized, often dehumanized and regularly faces hateful rhetoric from our own government officials — African American, Chinese, Indigenous, Latino, Arab, Muslim, Jewish.
“This congressional hearing on hate was a reminder that we have come far and yet we have far to go. This congressional hearing revealed that we must be resolute and, yes, we will change hate into inclusion one day.”
The hearing was not the first occasion on which Kennedy has faced criticism for comments about members of other ethnic groups, races or nationalities.
On May 17 last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (no relation), who ran as an independent candidate for US president this year before dropping out of the race in August, accused him of making racist comments, saying: “United States Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana went on an irresponsible tirade that insulted the people and government of Mexico. He stated that if not for us, Mexicans ‘would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.’ He also suggested that the US invade Mexico to subdue the drug cartels.”
US, European diplomats to discuss Mideast tensions on Thursday in Paris: sources
- The meeting will take place as fears grow of an all-out war engulfing the region
- US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join his counterparts from Washington’s allies in the French capital
PARIS: Senior diplomats from the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Italy will meet on Thursday in Paris to discuss the spiralling tensions in the Middle East, sources said on Wednesday.
The meeting will take place as fears grow of an all-out war engulfing the region, with conflict raging in Gaza and after two days of exploding pagers and other devices in Lebanon, an unprecedented attack the country’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group has blamed on Israel.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join his counterparts from Washington’s allies in the French capital after discussing the possibility of a Gaza war truce in Cairo.
During his visit, aimed at salvaging stalled negotiations mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States to end the conflict, he said a ceasefire in Gaza would be the best way to stop violence from spreading across the Middle East.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who said he will attend, added that the group would also discuss the war in Ukraine.
Germany has stopped approving war weapons exports to Israel, source says
- A source close to the ministry cited a senior government official as saying it had stopped work on approving export licenses for arms to Israel pending a resolution of legal cases
- Legal challenges across Europe have also led other allies of Israel to pause or suspend arms exports
BERLIN: Germany has put a hold on new exports of weapons of war to Israel while it deals with legal challenges, according to a Reuters analysis of data and a source close to the Economy Ministry.
Last year, Germany approved arms exports to Israel worth 326.5 million euros ($363.5 million), including military equipment and war weapons, a 10-fold increase from 2022, according to data from the Economy Ministry, which approves export licenses.
However, approvals have dropped this year, with only 14.5 million euros’ worth granted from January to Aug. 21, according to data provided by the Economy Ministry in response to a parliamentary question. Of this, the “weapons of war” category accounted for only 32,449 euros.
A source close to the ministry cited a senior government official as saying it had stopped work on approving export licenses for arms to Israel pending a resolution of legal cases arguing that such exports from Germany breached humanitarian law.
The ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
In its defense of two cases, one before the International Court of Justice and one in Berlin brought by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the government has said no weapons of war have been exported under any license issued since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, apart from spares for long-term contracts, the source added.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, according to the local Hamas-controlled health ministry. It has also displaced most of the population of 2.3 million, caused a hunger crisis and led to genocide allegations at the World Court, which Israel denies. No case challenging German arms exports to Israel has yet succeeded, including a case brought by Nicaragua at the ICJ.
DISAGREEMENT ON ARMS EXPORTS IN GERMAN GOVERNMENT
But the issue has created friction within the government as the Chancellery maintains its support for Israel while the Greens-led Economy and Foreign ministries, sensitive to criticism from party members, have increasingly criticized the Netanyahu administration.
Legal challenges across Europe have also led other allies of Israel to pause or suspend arms exports.
Britain this month suspended 30 out of 350 licenses for arms exports to Israel due to concerns that Israel could be violating international humanitarian law.
In February, a Dutch court ordered the Netherlands to halt all exports of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel over concerns about their use in attacks on civilian targets in Gaza.
President Joe Biden’s administration this year paused — but then resumed — shipments of some bombs to Israel after US concerns about their use in densely populated Gaza.
Approvals and shipments of other types of weapons, in more precise systems, continued as US officials maintained that Israel needed the capacity to defend itself.
Alexander Schwarz, a lawyer at ECCHR, which has filed five lawsuits against Berlin, suggested that the significant decline in approvals for 2024 indicated a genuine, though possibly temporary, reluctance to supply weapons to Israel.
“However, I would not interpret this as a conscious change in policy,” Schwarz added.
Hungary refuses to pay fines for breaking EU asylum rules
- The European Court of Justice described Hungary’s actions as “an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law”
- Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán slammed its ruling as “outrageous and unacceptable”
BRUSSELS: The European Union on Wednesday began the process of clawing back hundreds of millions of euros in funds meant to go Hungary after its ant-migrant government refused to pay a huge fine for breaking the bloc’s asylum rules.
In June, the EU’s top court ordered Hungary to pay 200 million euros ($223 million) for persistently depriving migrants of their right to apply for asylum. The court imposed an additional fine of 1 million euros for every day it failed to comply.
The European Court of Justice described Hungary’s actions as “an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán slammed its ruling as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
The EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, said that given Hungary’s failure to pay or provide information about its intentions, Brussels is “moving to what we call the off-setting procedure” by taking the money from common funds that would otherwise go to Budapest.
“So, what we are going to do now is to deduct the 200 million euro from upcoming payments from the EU budget toward Hungary,” commission spokesman Balazs Ujvari said. He said it would take time to identify which parts of Hungary’s funding could be deducted.
Ujvari said the commission has also sent a first payment request on the daily fines amounting to 93 million euros ($103 million) so far. “Counting from receipt, the Hungarian authorities will have 45 days to make that payment,” he said.
Hungary’s staunchly nationalist government has taken a hard line on people entering the country since well over 1 million people arrived in Europe in 2015, most of them fleeing conflict in Syria.
The case against it concerned changes Hungary made to its asylum system in the wake of that crisis, when some 400,000 people passed through Hungary on their way to Western Europe.
The government in Budapest ordered fences with razor wire to be erected on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia and a pair of transit zones for holding asylum seekers to be set up on its border with Serbia. Those transit zones have since closed.
In 2020, the ECJ found that Hungary had restricted access to international protection, unlawfully detained asylum applicants, and failed to observe their right to stay while their applications were processed.
The transit zones were closed in 2020, shortly after that ruling.
But the commission, which is responsible for monitoring the 27 EU member states’ compliance with their shared laws, took the view that Budapest had still not complied and requested that the ECJ impose a fine.
After the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in 2020, the government also pushed through a law forcing asylum seekers to travel to Belgrade or Kyiv to apply for a travel permit at its embassies there before entering Hungary. Only once back could they file their applications.
People have the right to apply for asylum or other forms of international protection if they fear for their safety in their home countries or face the prospect of persecution based on their race, religion, ethnic background, gender or other discrimination.
Gavi to buy 500,000 mpox vaccine doses from Bavarian Nordic
- Gavi said it will spend up to $50 million on the plan, which includes the transportation, delivery and costs of administering the vaccines
- Around 3.6 million doses of mpox vaccine have already been pledged to the DRC by rich nations which have stockpiles, WHO has said
LONDON: The global vaccine group Gavi will buy 500,000 doses of Bavarian Nordic’s mpox vaccine, its first purchase of the shot to help battle an outbreak in parts of Africa, the group said on Wednesday.
In 2024, there have been more than 25,000 suspected mpox cases and 723 deaths in Africa, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the World Health Organization, which has declared the outbreak a global health emergency.
Gavi, a public-private alliance which co-funds vaccine purchases for low-income countries, said it will spend up to $50 million on the plan, which includes the transportation, delivery and costs of administering the vaccines. The doses are due to be delivered this year.
Around 3.6 million doses of mpox vaccine have already been pledged to the DRC by rich nations which have stockpiles, the World Health Organization has said, but only a small portion has arrived so far. The WHO approved the vaccine for use on Friday last week.
Gavi’s purchase, using a new facility set up after the COVID-19 pandemic to respond quickly to public health emergencies, could speed up the response in Congo and other affected countries.
Also on Wednesday, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said it would provide $9.5 million to support Congo with its emergency response at the request of the government there, including surveillance, laboratory systems and risk communication.
The price of the vaccine was not disclosed. Gavi’s $50 million investment would likely equate to less than around $100 per vaccine, because transportation and logistics are included in the total. The figure is lower than previous estimates of the cost.
Gavi chief executive Sania Nishtar said the priority was working with partners “to turn these vaccines into vaccinations as quickly and effectively as possible and, over time, to build a global vaccine stockpile.”
The deal will significantly increase the availability of mpox vaccine for African countries, Bavarian Nordic chief executive Paul Chaplin said. Last week, the company said it would push back some existing orders to 2025, based on US government contracts, to focus on market needs now.
Mpox, which spreads through close contact and typically causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions, has been a public health problem in parts of Africa for decades. But vaccines have never previously been available outside clinical trials in affected countries in Africa, even after a different strain of the virus spread globally in 2022 and high-income countries used vaccines to help stem the outbreak.
