MELBOURNE, Australia: A woman appeared in an Australian court on Monday charged with a May assault on the Indigenous senator who shouted at King Charles III during a royal reception last week.
The assault allegedly occurred on May 25, when independent Sen. Lidia Thorpe attended an Australian Rules Football match in her hometown of Melbourne.
Ebony Bell, 28, appeared by a video link in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. She has been charged with two counts of recklessly causing injury and three counts of unlawful assault at a stadium.
A police statement described the 51-year-old senator’s injuries from the alleged assault as “minor.”
But she said in a statement to the AP on Monday she had “sustained serious nerve and spinal injuries in my neck, which required spinal surgery and a plate to be inserted.”
The assault was reported to police the next day and Bell was arrested on July 25. The women knew each other, but the motive for the alleged attack was not explained in court.
Bell’s lawyer Manny Nicolosi told Magistrate Belinda Franjic the prosecution case had “real deficiencies.” He said the prosecution had on Friday made an “offer,” an apparent reference to a plea deal.
“I haven’t had enough time to really consider it,” Nicolosi told the court.
Nicolosi explained that his Indigenous client hadn’t appeared in court in person because of “recent threats.” The lawyer did not elaborate on those threats.
Bell remains free on bail until she appears in court next on Nov. 22. The magistrate agreed to allow her to appear again by video.
Thorpe made her first public statement about the alleged assault after she launched an expletive-laden rant at Charles during a reception in Australian Parliament House in Canberra last week.
“You are not our king. You are not sovereign,” Thorpe yelled at Charles as she was led by security guards from the reception.
“You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” she added.
The main opposition party has called for Thorpe to resign from the Senate due to her attitude toward Charles, who is Australia’s head of state, and have requested legal advice.
Thorpe is renowned for high-profile protest action. When she was affirmed as a senator in 2022, she wasn’t allowed to describe the then-monarch as “the colonizing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.” She briefly blocked a police float in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Madri Gras last year by lying on the street in front of it. Last year, she was also banned for life from a Melbourne strip club after video emerged of her shouting abuse at male patrons.
She revealed her injuries after The Australian newspaper reported she had missed 16 of the Senate’s 44 sitting days this year.
“I was ordered by the doctor not to travel and could not attend parliament after I sustained the injury and during recovery from surgery. My doctor told me to take time off work,” her statement said.
“I would have preferred to keep this matter private and I will not be commenting on it further at this stage,” she added.
Thorpe was widely criticized for being disrespectful to the monarch during her outburst last week.
She faces a further backlash next week when senators sit for the first time since the royal visit.
Her office said Monday she has not decided whether she plans to attend senate committee meetings in person or remotely.
She also raised questions about the validity of her appointment to the Senate when she recently said she had deliberately affirmed her allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her “hairs,” rather than “heirs,” during her affirmation ceremony in 2022 to exclude Charles. Thorpe later walked back that statement, saying the mispronunciation was accidental.
Lawyers agree that a mispronunciation did not invalidate an affirmation and that Thorpe also signed a written version of the affirmation of allegiance with the correct wording.
Sydney University constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey said the Senate’s ability to discipline Thorpe was limited because her outburst occurred outside the chamber in Parliament’s Great Hall.
Woman charged with assaulting Australian senator who shouted at King Charles III
https://arab.news/wrhgj
Woman charged with assaulting Australian senator who shouted at King Charles III
- The assault allegedly occurred on May 25, when independent Sen. Lidia Thorpe attended an Australian Rules Football match in Melbourne
Russian state media says Moscow spirited a US citizen working for it out of Ukraine
- The US embassy in Moscow said it could not comment “due to privacy concerns”
MOSCOW: Russian state media said on Monday that Moscow’s forces fighting in Ukraine had successfully extracted a US citizen from eastern Ukraine who had secretly helped them target Ukraine for at least two years.
State media published a picture of the purported American in civilian clothing embracing a group of what looked like Russian special forces wearing combat uniforms. His face was blurred out in the photograph.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm the Russian reports which cited Moscow’s forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine as saying they were calling the American “Kenneth M.”
The US embassy in Moscow said it could not comment “due to privacy concerns.”
Russian media cast the man as “The Quiet American” after the 1955 novel by Graham Greene which tells the story of early US involvement in Vietnam through the adventures of a British journalist and an American agent.
Russian forces in the Donetsk region were quoted as saying that Russian special forces and army units had spirited the American out of eastern Ukraine and that he had been supplying Russia with “valuable intelligence” for two years.
Russian media said he had supplied information that had allowed the Russian military to “execute precision strikes against the enemy.”
“The life of the rescued American is not in danger,” Rusisan-backed forces in Donetsk were cited as saying. “The issue of granting political asylum and becoming a citizen of Russia is being resolved.”
Inside the secret train evacuating wounded Ukrainian soldiers
- Blue-and-yellow carriages of this train operated by the military are carrying wounded soldiers to hospitals away from the precarious front line
Undisclosed, Ukraine: It looks like an ordinary train waiting to depart an ordinary station, but through its fogged windows, a Ukrainian serviceman with face injuries lies stretched out on a gurney.
All of the other blue-and-yellow carriages of this train operated by the military are carrying wounded soldiers to hospitals away from the precarious front line.
Nearly three years after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, many medical facilities in war-battered eastern Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed, while those left untouched are overcrowded.
For Oleksandr, the army doctor overseeing the evacuation, there are clear benefits to rail: many people can be moved at once and it is safer than transporting wounded soldiers by helicopter, given Russian superiority in Ukraine’s airspace.
But there are risks too.
“Our adversary in the war does not distinguish between what’s medical and military, so we take certain security measures,” the 46-year-old said.
AFP was recently granted rare media access to the train, whose points of departure and arrival are not being disclosed for security reasons.
Inside the secret train
Ambulances arrived at the station carrying dozens of wounded troops who were then hauled onto the train on stretchers and settled on beds with floral-patterned sheets.
Ukrainian flags and hand-drawn pictures by children annotated with patriotic messages lined the walls inside the train.
The carriages resemble a hospital until the train rolls away from the platform and gently rocks patients and staff — and everything else inside — as it crawls farther from the front.
“We do everything on the move, everything. Starting from the usual intravenous injections, ending with incubations,” said Viktorya, a nurse dressed in khaki and wearing blue medical gloves.
“We get dizzy afterwards,” the 25-year-old said, standing in front of a window, the sweeping Ukrainian landscape rolling by.
The journeys to and from the front, where Ukraine is coming under increasing pressure, have given Viktorya a painful insight into the cost of the conflict grinding through its third year.
“I understand the number of wounded now. It’s very hard to see it every day,” she said.
Kyiv — like Moscow — is tight-lipped about its soldier casualty count.
President Volodymyr Zelensky in February said the number of Ukrainian servicemen confirmed killed was around 31,000 — a figure observers say is likely an underestimate — but the number of missing and wounded has never been disclosed.
Severe injuries
Most of those wounded were struck in artillery or drone attacks, staff explained, and many have had arms or legs amputated or were unconscious.
One carriage is designated for patients who have been in intensive care and doctors can even operate on patients in case of “force majeure,” doctor Oleksandr said.
Things can go wrong and mass bleeding — an unpredictable and rapid killer — is a major concern for staff.
“Staff are always near the patient,” Oleksandr explained, adding that they take turns using the toilet or eating.
Despite the logistical issues around caregiving on moving trains, the wounded soldiers’ preoccupations lie elsewhere.
“Their psychological state is not good,” Olena, a medical staff worker, told AFP.
“They’re not worried about losing a limb or whatever else. What depresses them is how their comrades are and how their family is,” Olena added.
Tales of war
One Ukrainian serviceman on the train was being treated for a gunshot wound after being caught in a Russian ambush that also killed one of his fellow soldiers.
“Four of us left but not all of us returned,” the 28-year-old who identified himself as Murchyk said.
But he was already gauging when he might be able to make his way back to the front, where Ukraine’s outnumbered forces have been ceding ground to determined Russian advances.
Whether Murchyk can return to combat will be decided by a medical commission, but he said he was clear-eyed about his wish.
“I’d like to go back,” he told AFP.
The train evacuations in Ukraine began when the war did, in February 2022.
It revives a process used in World War II, with several refitted trains now taking wounded troops from the front.
When Oleksandr’s train arrives at its destination, ambulances are already waiting for the patients to be loaded off and taken onwards to hospital.
“It is of course very stressful and yes, you breathe a sigh of relief when you arrive and unload,” he said, “when you see that all the ambulances have left, when the platform is empty and the train is empty.”
Climate change-worsened floods wreak havoc in Africa
- Africa is bearing the brunt of climate change, even though it only contributes around four percent of global greenhouse gas emissions
- Flooding is almost inevitable around Lokoja in Nigeria’s Kogi state, where Africa’s third-longest river meets its main tributary, the Benue
LOKOJA: Every rainy season for the past 12 years, floods have swept through 67-year-old Idris Egbunu’s house in central Nigeria.
It is always the same story — the Niger River bursts its banks and the waters claim his home for weeks on end, until he can return and take stock of the damage.
The house then needs cleaning, repairs, fumigation and repainting, until the next rainy season.
Flooding is almost inevitable around Lokoja in Nigeria’s Kogi state, where Africa’s third-longest river meets its main tributary, the Benue.
But across vast areas of Africa, climate change has thrown weather patterns into disarray and made flooding much more severe, especially this year.
Devastating inundations are threatening the survival of millions of residents on the continent. Homes have been wrecked and crops ruined, jeopardizing regional food security.
Torrential rains and severe flooding have affected around 6.9 million people in West and Central Africa so far in 2024, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Residents and officials around Lokoja said floods first became more severe in Kogi state in 2012 and have battered the area each year since.
In 2022, Nigeria’s worst floods in a decade killed more than 500 people and displaced 1.4 million.
Sandra Musa, an emergency agency adviser to the Kogi state governor, believes this year’s flooding has not yet reached the level seen in 2022, but warned it was “very, very bad.”
“Usually at this time of year the water level drops, but here it’s rising again,” she told AFP, estimating that the floods have affected around two million people in the state.
Fatima Bilyaminu, a 31-year-old mother and shopkeeper, can only get to her house in the Adankolo district of Lokoja by boat as a result of the waters.
The swollen river rises almost to the windows, while water hyacinths float past the crumbling building.
“I lost everything. My bed, my cushioned chair, my wardrobe, my kitchen equipment,” she told AFP.
With no money to rent a house elsewhere, she has little choice but to keep living in the small concrete building and repair it, flood after flood.
Africa is bearing the brunt of climate change, even though it only contributes around four percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent report by the World Meteorological Organization.
This year is set to overtake 2023 as the world’s hottest on record.
“This year has been unusual in terms of the amount of rainfall, with many extreme events, which is one of the signs of climate change,” said Aida Diongue-Niang from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the Sahel region bordering the Sahara desert, the volume, intensity and duration of rainfall was “unprecedented,” according to Amadou Diakite from the Mali Meteo weather service.
In Niger, some regions recorded up to 200 percent more rain than in previous years, the national meteorological service said. The waters put at risk the historic city center of Agadez, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the desert north.
Over the border in Chad, torrential rains since July have killed at least 576 people and affected 1.9 million, more than 10 percent of the population, according to a report published by the OCHA.
In neighboring Cameroon, the UN body said torrential rains had destroyed more than 56,000 homes and flooded tens of thousands of hectares of crops.
Floodwaters swept through the capital Conakry in Guinea, while floods in Monrovia reignited debates over building another city to serve as Libera’s capital.
Entire districts of Mali’s capital Bamako were submerged, leaving waste and liquid from septic tanks seeping across the streets.
In August, downpours caused the roof of the centuries-old Tomb of Askia in the Malian city of Gao to collapse.
Several countries have postponed the start of the school year as a result of the floods.
“It used to be a decadal cycle of flooding, and we’re now into a yearly cycle,” said Clair Barnes, a researcher at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.
“This is only going to keep getting worse if we keep burning fossil fuels,” she said.
As global temperatures rise, extreme weather events will increase in frequency and intensity, scientists warn.
Experts estimate that by 2030, up to 118 million Africans already living in poverty will be exposed to drought, floods and intense heat.
Building along riverbanks also poses a risk, Youssouf Sane of Senegal’s meteorology agency said, urging governments to think about the relationship between climate change and urbanization.
But the IPCC’s Diongue-Niang said the only way to tackle extreme weather was to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“That doesn’t fall to the region — it falls to the whole of humanity,” she said.
Japan PM vows to stay on despite election debacle
TOKYO: Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba vowed Monday to stay in office despite his gamble of snap elections backfiring, with the ruling party’s worst result in 15 years.
Ishiba, 67, called Sunday’s election days after taking office on October 1, but voters angry at a slush fund scandal punished his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has governed Japan almost non-stop since 1955.
With projections suggesting the LDP-led coalition would lose its ruling majority, Ishiba vowed to stay in office, saying he would not allow a “political vacuum.”
“I want to fulfill my duty by protecting people’s lives, protecting Japan,” Ishiba told reporters.
He said the biggest election factor was “people’s suspicion, mistrust and anger” over a scandal, which saw LDP figures pocket money from fund-raising events and which helped sink his predecessor Fumio Kishida.
“I will enact fundamental reform regarding the issue of money and politics,” Ishiba told reporters, repeating that voters had delivered a “severe judgment” on the party.
The yen hit a three-month low, sliding more than one percent against the dollar, as exit polls and results reported by national broadcaster NHK and other media showed the worst result for the LDP and its junior coalition partner Komeito in 15 years.
They were projected to fall short of Ishiba’s stated goal of winning at least 233 seats — a majority in the 456-member lower house.
The LDP won 191 seats, down from 259 at the last election in 2021, and Komeito 24, according to NHK tallies. Official results were expected later Monday.
Ahead of the election, Japanese media had speculated that if this happened, Ishiba could potentially quit, becoming the nation’s shortest-serving prime minister in the post-war period.
On Monday the LDP’s election committee chief, former premier Junichiro Koizumi’s son Shinjiro Koizumi, resigned.
The most likely next step is that Ishiba will now seek to head a minority government, with the divided opposition seen as probably incapable of forming a coalition of their own, analysts said.
Ishiba said Monday he was not considering a broader coalition “at this point.”
“Lawmakers aligned with (former prime minister Shinzo) Abe were cold-shouldered under Ishiba, so they could potentially pounce on the opportunity to take their revenge,” Yu Uchiyama, political science professor at the University of Tokyo, told AFP.
“But at the same time, with the number of LDP seats reduced so much, they might take the high road and support Ishiba for now, thinking it’s not the time for infighting,” he said.
A big winner was former premier Yoshihiko Noda’s opposition Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) which increased its projected seat tally to 148 from 96 at the last election.
Ishiba had promised to not actively support LDP politicians caught up in the funding scandal.
But the opposition jumped on media reports that the party has provided 20 million yen ($132,000) each to district offices headed by these figures, who were still standing in the election.
“Voters chose which party would be the best fit to push for political reforms,” Noda said late Sunday, adding that the “LDP-Komeito administration cannot continue.”
Mirroring elections elsewhere, fringe parties did well, with Reiwa Shinsengumi, founded by a former actor, tripling its seats to nine after promising to abolish sales tax and boost pensions.
The anti-immigration and traditionalist Conservative Party of Japan, established in 2023 by nationalist writer Naoki Hyakuta, won its first three seats.
The number of women lawmakers meanwhile reached a record high at 73, according to NHK, but still representing less than 16 percent of the legislature.
“As long as our own lives don’t improve, I think everyone has given up on the idea that we can expect anything from politicians,” restaurant worker Masakazu Ikeuchi, 44, told AFP on Monday in rainy Tokyo.
“I think the outcome was a result of people across Japan wanting to change the current situation,” said fellow voter Takako Sasaki, 44.
France’s president is visiting Morocco after his Western Sahara change brings a ‘new honeymoon’
- Macron is scheduled to meet with King Mohammed VI and Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch and address Morocco’s Parliament
- Morocco is the top destination for French investment in Africa and France is Morocco’s top trade partner
RABAT: French President Emmanuel Macron arrives Monday in Morocco, where he is expected to meet with the North African kingdom’s leaders and discuss partnerships regarding trade, climate change and immigration.
During the president’s three-day visit to Rabat, he is scheduled to meet with King Mohammed VI and Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch and address Morocco’s Parliament.
It comes months after Macron changed France’s longstanding public position and backed Morocco’s autonomy plan for the disputed Western Sahara. The move endeared the country to Morocco and alienated it from Algeria, which hosts refugee camps governed by the pro-independence Polisario Front and has long pushed for a UN-organized referendum to solve the conflict.
In the days leading up to the visit, Moroccan publications lauded the “warm reunion” and a “new honeymoon” between the two countries while French flags were hung throughout Rabat.
France and Morocco have historically partnered on issues ranging from counterterrorism to Western Sahara. Morocco is the top destination for French investment in Africa and France is Morocco’s top trade partner. Morocco imports French cereals, renewable energy infrastructure like turbines and weapons. Morocco exports goods to France including tomatoes, cars and airplane parts.
Moroccans are among the largest foreign-born communities in France, where North African immigrants are a key political constituency and a focal point of debates about the roles of Islam and immigration in French society. In recent months, France’s new Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has pushed for the country to take a hard-line approach toward immigration and seek deals with countries like Morocco to better prevent would-be migrants from crossing into Europe.
On Macron’s last visit to Morocco, he and King Mohammed VI inaugurated Al Boraq, Africa’s first high-speed rail line, made possible by French financing and trains manufactured by the French firm Alstrom.
Despite close ties, relations have at times been fragile between France and Morocco, which was a French protectorate from 1912 to 1956. In 2021, Morocco suspended consular relations France momentarily reduced the number of visas offered to Moroccans in protest of its refusal to provide documents needed to deport people who migrated to France without authorization.
Relations between the two countries soured further that year when a 2021 report revealed Morocco’s security services had used Israeli spyware to infiltrate the devices of activists and politicians, including Macron. Morocco denied and sued over the allegations.
