Nicosia says an armed individual was arrested after crossing from Turkish-controlled north
Israel has accused Iran of orchestrating an attempted attack against Israelis in Cyprus after police on the Mediterranean island said an armed individual had been arrested.
“This was a terrorist incident directed by Iran against Israeli businesspeople living in Cyprus,” Matan Sidi, spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said in a statement.
Continue reading...A cyclone that made landfall in Oman on Sunday has killed at least 13 people, and others are missing as the storm moved further inland and weakened. Omani state television broadcast images of flooded roadways and valleys as the storm churned deeper into the sultanate, its outer edges reaching the neighbouring United Arab Emirates
Continue reading...Fact-finding mission says migrants and detainees particularly exposed to violations since civil war
War crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, torture, enslavement, extrajudicial killings and rape have been committed in Libya since 2016, a United Nations investigation has found.
The independent fact-finding mission on Libya, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, said migrants and detainees were particularly exposed to violations that have occurred since the country was plunged into a state of instability and civil war.
Continue reading...Tensions rise as Algiers imposes airspace ban in latest response to visa dispute and Macron criticism
The diplomatic discord between Algeria and France has deepened after Algiers banned French military planes from its airspace, its latest response to a row over visas and critical comments from President Emmanuel Macron.
France’s jets regularly fly over the former French colony to reach the Sahel region of western Africa, where its soldiers are helping to battle jihadist insurgents as part of its Operation Barkhane.
Continue reading...President accused of chasing rightwing votes by making sudden, tough gestures on immigration
The Algerian foreign ministry has summoned the French ambassador for talks in “formal protest” against France’s decision to sharply reduce the number of visas granted to Algerian nationals, as opposition parties in Paris accused Emmanuel Macron of using the row to court rightwing voters.
The French government announced this week that it would substantially cut the number of visas granted to people from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, three north African countries which were all part of France’s former colonial empire and where many people have strong family ties in France.
Continue reading...Political unknown to form government with limited powers while president Kais Saied rules by decree
Tunisia’s president named geologist Najla Bouden as the country’s first ever female prime minister-designate on Wednesday, to form a government with limited executive clout after the president seized wide-ranging powers two months ago.
Bouden, a university lecturer and political unknown, will take office after President Kais Saied on 25 July sacked the government of Hichem Mechichi, suspended parliament, lifted MPs’ immunity and took over the judiciary.
Continue reading...Turkey’s president wants to shore up the truce because it has been ruptured repeatedly in the last 18 months
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian president Vladimir Putin have held face-to-face talks for the first time since the pandemic in which they discussed the future of the last pocket of Syria outside regime control.
The leaders met in Russia’s Black Sea resort town of Sochi for Wednesday’s summit, Erdoğan sought to shore up a March 2020 ceasefire deal which ended a bruising assault by Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies on Turkish-backed fighters in north-west Syria. The fighting last year brought Ankara and Moscow close to direct confrontation and threatened Turkey – which is already home to around four million Syrians – with a new wave of refugees.
Continue reading...Parliamentary and presidential votes were due at the end of the year, but there are fears the interim government hopes to stay in power
Libya’s hopes of ending a decade of political chaos with credible elections at the end of this year for a president and new unified parliament have reached a defining moment, with the US insisting the vote should go ahead but some European diplomats fearing divisions are too entrenched for the result ever to be accepted as legitimate.
The elections are due to take place on 24 December, but no agreement has been reached within the country on laws governing the election. There are also signs that the populist interim government, theoretically appointed by the UN to manage services ahead of the elections, might seek to capitalise on the impasse to stay in power indefinitely. Thousands of foreign troops, mainly funded by Turkey and Russia, are still in place.
Continue reading...Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Siraj reveal how refugees are pressured for cash
Early this year, Yousef, a 32-year-old Syrian living in Sweden, found himself faced with an impossible choice: either enlist in the army of the government that made him a refugee, or risk his family losing their home back in Syria.
Military service is mandatory for Syrian men between the ages of 18 and 42, and the stakes rose significantly in February when an army official announced on Facebook that a new regulation would allow authorities to confiscate the property of “service evaders” and their families. Pressure was mounting on Yousef to decide.
Continue reading...As the pandemic deals a death blow to an already struggling sector, former workers see little hope for recovery
The seafront along the town of Hammamet in Tunisia is deserted. Looking out at the bright empty coast from his souvenir shop, Kais Azzabi, 42, describes the crowds that would stroll along the broad boulevards. Today, there is nobody.
“It was very busy here,” he says, gesturing to the street and the Mediterranean Sea beyond. “Since the corona started, everything stopped.”
Continue reading...Hoshyar Ali has cleared more than 750,000 landmines in 104 villages, despite having lost both legs to landmines. Iraqi Kurdistan is one of the most contaminated countries for landmines and explosive remnants of war, according to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
A dust cloud trails behind a metallic grey Kia Sportage as it meanders along a rocky dirt road toward the last town on this thoroughfare before reaching the Iraq-Iran border.
People walk along the road, waving at independent deminer Hoshyar Ali as he drives by, recognising him by the red flag on his antenna, indicating the vehicle is transporting explosives, and by the stickers of various landmines on his vehicle.
Continue reading...Two Israeli soldiers were also seriously wounded after violence erupted when troops tried to arrest suspected Hamas militants
Five Palestinians have been killed after gun battles erupted when Israeli troops conducted a series of raids against suspected Hamas militants across the occupied West Bank.
The fighting on Sunday was the deadliest violence between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants in the West Bank in several weeks. Two Israeli soldiers were seriously wounded.
Continue reading...After 10 years of bloodshed, foreign allies are seeking to rehabilitate the Syrian leader
For almost a decade he was a pariah who struggled to get a meeting abroad or even to assert himself on his visitors. Largely alone in his palace, save for trusted aides, Bashar al-Assad presided over a broken state whose few friends demanded a humiliating price for their protection, and weren’t afraid to show it.
During regular trips to Syria, Vladimir Putin arranged meetings at Russian bases, forcing Assad to trail behind him at functions. Iran too readily imposed its will, often dictating military terms, or sidelining the Syrian leader on decisions that shaped the course of his country.
Continue reading...Serious themes are undercut by the flippant tone of this story about a Syrian refugee who becomes a conceptual art object
Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Syria is undermined by a silly and unconvincing ending that leaves a strange taste in the mouth. It is inspired by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his human artwork called Tim: in 2008, Delvoye tattooed an elaborate punk-crucifixion scene on the back of a Zurich tattoo parlour owner named Tim Steiner, who in return for a cash payment agreed to sit still with his tattooed back on show in galleries for a certain number of times a year and have his tattooed skin surgically removed and put on display after his death. And of course it is this macabre destiny that lends fascination to the ongoing live events.
This movie from writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania imagines a Syrian man, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) in love with a well-born woman Abeer (Dea Liane). But when he is wrongfully arrested by the tyrannical Assad government, Abeer’s family pressures her into marrying a smooth diplomat, Ziad (Saad Lostan), who takes her to live with him in Brussels where he is an embassy attache. Sam Ali manages to escape from police custody (the least of the film’s implausibilities) and get over the border into Lebanon where, hungry and hard up, he gatecrashes art exhibitions and gobbles the free canapes. And this is where he is approached by a preeningly arrogant artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who looks like Roger De Bris, the theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. If Sam will agree to the humiliation of having a massive “Schengen visa” tattooed on his back, then Jeffrey will be legally able to transport him to Brussels as a conceptual art object rather than a human being, as part of a show about the commodification of humanity, and Sam will be able to see Abeer.
Continue reading...Petrofac made admission as part of deal to end four-year corruption investigation by Serious Fraud Office
A multinational oil firm, which was led by a major Conservative donor, has admitted that its employees paid bribes to land contracts, as it struck a deal to end a corruption investigation into the company.
The admission was announced by the firm, Petrofac, on Friday to settle a four-year corruption and money laundering investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.
Continue reading...A childhood encounter with a hyena inspired Hawa Jama Abdi’s first verse. Now she is part of an arts project designed to encourage women storytellers - and unite all Somalis
When Hawa Jama Abdi was eight years old, she got lost in a forest and found herself in the path of a hyena. In her place, many would have run, some would have frozen – but Jama Abdi, the blind daughter of Somali pastoralists, kept her cool, and composed her first poem. The verse ran:
I lived in fear of you, day and night
It is a miracle world if I am standing in front of you, tonight
Since I am blind and cannot see anything
Come to my rescue and let your voice be my company
UK meeting with Iranian foreign secretary coincides with 2,000th day of detention for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Britain should repay its four decade-old £400m debt to Iran and take serious steps to lift sanctions, Iran has told the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, in the first meeting between the two countries at foreign secretary level since 2018.
Truss’s meeting with Hossein Amir-Abdollahian came in the week that the British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe marked her 2,000th day in detention in Iran. She is now staying with her mother in Iran, pending an appeal on her additional sentence of one year.
Continue reading...Aid worker describes ‘horrific’ scenes in one hospital where starving and malnourished children ‘look like skeletons’
At least 5 million people in Yemen are on the brink of famine and a further 16 million are “marching toward starvation”, as the country’s humanitarian crisis spirals out of control.
The situation in Yemen, which has been torn apart by civil war, has been described as “rapidly deteriorating” by experts.
Continue reading...Kais Saied says he is preparing to change the political system, prompting opposition from rivals
Tunisia’s president Kais Saied has declared that he will rule by decree and ignore parts of the constitution as he prepares to change the political system, prompting immediate opposition from rivals.
Saied has held nearly total power since 25 July when he sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and assumed executive authority, citing a national emergency in a move his foes called a coup.
Continue reading...Ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisi uses debut on international stage to deliver sustained attack on Washington
Iran’s new ultra-conservative president has used his debut on the international stage to deliver a sustained assault on US, denouncing sanctions as “crimes against humanity” and hailing what he called the end of Washington’s hegemony.
“Sanctions are the US new way of war with the nations of the world,” President Ebrahim Raisi told the UN general assembly in a pre-recorded address from Tehran.
Continue reading...