Zelensky: Iranian drones used in Russia’s attacks on Ukraine

Update Zelensky: Iranian drones used in Russia’s attacks on Ukraine
Photograph of smoke rising after an explosion in Kyiv, where several explosions had rocked the city early that day. (File/AFP)
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Updated 11 October 2022

Zelensky: Iranian drones used in Russia’s attacks on Ukraine

Zelensky: Iranian drones used in Russia’s attacks on Ukraine
  • Zelensky on Facebook: We are dealing with terrorists. Dozens of missiles, Iranian ‘Shaheds’

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Iranian-made drones and missiles were used by Russian forces on Monday in heavy shelling that targeted energy infrastructure across several cities this morning.

In a video message posted on his Facebook account, Zelensky said, “The morning is tough. We are dealing with terrorists. Dozens of missiles, Iranian “Shaheds”.

He accused Russia of targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure during strikes, saying “they want panic and chaos, they want to destroy our energy system. They are incorrigible.”

He added, “The second target is people. Such a time and such goals were specially chosen to cause as much damage as possible.”

Russia bombed cities across Ukraine during rush hour on Monday morning, killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in apparent revenge strikes after President Vladimir Putin declared an explosion on the bridge to Crimea to be a terrorist attack.
Missiles tore into Kyiv, the most intense strikes on the capital since Russia abandoned an attempt to captured it in the early weeks of the war. Explosions were also reported in Lviv, Ternopil and Zhytomyr in Ukraine’s west, Dnipro and Kremenchuk in central Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia in the south and Kharkiv in the east. A witness in Russia’s Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border also heard a blast from the border area.
In Kyiv, attacks struck in the heart of the busy city center. The body of a man in jeans lay in a street at a major intersection, surrounded by flaming cars. In a park, a soldier cut through the clothes of a woman who lay in the grass to try to treat her wounds. Another woman was bleeding nearby.
City police said at least five people had been killed and 12 wounded.
A huge crater gaped next to a children’s playground in a central Kyiv park. The remains of an apparent missile were buried, smoking in the mud.
More volleys of missiles struck the capital again later in the morning. Pedestrians huddled for shelter at the entrance of Metro stations and inside parking garages.
“They are trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on the Telegram messaging app. “The air raid sirens do not subside throughout Ukraine. There are missiles hitting. Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded.”

The American Embassy in Kyiv issued a warning that urged citizens to find shelter amid the heavy Russian strikes, which  “pose a direct threat to civilians and civilian infrastructure.”

The embassy also urged US citizens to immediately depart Ukraine via privately available ground transportation options when it is safe enough.

 

 


TALKS WITH MISSILES


Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted: “Putin’s only tactic is terror on peaceful Ukrainian cities, but he will not break Ukraine down. This is also his response to all appeasers who want to talk with him about peace: Putin is a terrorist who talks with missiles.”
At one of Kyiv’s busiest road junctions, a massive crater had been blown in the intersection. Cars were destroyed, buildings were damaged and emergency workers were on the scene. Two cars and a van near the crater were completely wrecked, blacked and pitted from shrapnel.
Windows had been blown out of buildings at Kyiv’s main Taras Shevchenko University. National Guard troops in full combat gear and carrying assault rifles were lined up outside an education union building.
“The capital is under attack from Russian terrorists! The missiles hit objects in the city center (in the Shevchenkivskyi district) and in the Solomyanskyi district. The air raids sirens are going off, and therefore the threat, continues,” mayor Vitali Klitschko posted on social media.
“The central streets of Kyiv have been blocked by law enforcement officers, rescue services are working.”
He later said important infrastructure had been hit.
The strikes came two days after an explosion damaged the only bridge over the Kerch Strait to the Crimea peninsula, which Putin on Sunday called “an act of terrorism aimed at destroying critically important civilian infrastructure.”
“This was devised, carried out and ordered by the Ukrainian special services,” he said in a video on the Kremlin’s Telegram channel.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the blast on the bridge but has celebrated it. Senior Russian officials demanded a swift response from the Kremlin ahead of a meeting of Putin’s security council on Monday.


KILLING ‘TERRORISTS’


Commentators on Russian television have increasingly been calling for massive retaliation against Ukraine, with the military leadership facing public criticism for the first time as Russian forces have been beaten back on the battlefield.
The bridge, which Putin personally opened, is a major supply route for Russian forces in southern Ukraine and a symbol of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it proclaimed annexed after its troops seized it in 2014.
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said ahead of the council meeting that Russia should kill the “terrorists” responsible for the attack.
“Russia can only respond to this crime by directly killing terrorists, as is the custom elsewhere in the world. This is what Russian citizens expect,” he was quoted as saying by state news agency TASS.
Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, said on Sunday a vehicle had exploded on the bridge, having traveled through Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia and Russia’s Krasnodar region.
In southeastern Ukraine, Russian shelling overnight destroyed another apartment building in the city of Zaporizhzhia, regional governor Oleksandr Starukh said early on Monday. At least one person died and five were injured in the attack, a city official said.
The pre-dawn strikes were the third Russian missile attack against apartment buildings in four days in the city, the Ukrainian-held capital of one of four partially occupied regions Russia claims to have annexed this month.
Russia has faced major setbacks on the battlefield since the start of September, with Ukrainian forces bursting through the front lines and recapturing territory in the northeast and the south.
Putin responded to the losses by ordering a mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists, proclaiming the annexation of occupied territory and threatening repeatedly to use nuclear weapons.


Filipinos join hands to support Muslims during Ramadan

Filipinos join hands to support Muslims during Ramadan
Updated 9 sec ago

Filipinos join hands to support Muslims during Ramadan

Filipinos join hands to support Muslims during Ramadan
  • Muslims constitute roughly 5 percent of the predominantly Catholic population of the Philippines
  • Interfaith events during Ramadan are frequently organized by Muslims for non-Muslims and vice versa

MANILA: Throughout Ramadan, representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups in the Philippines are pooling their resources to support the Muslim community in their fast and observance of the holy month.
Muslims constitute roughly 5 percent of the nearly 110 million, predominantly Catholic population of the Southeast Asian nation.
The minority communities live mostly on the island of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago in the country’s south, as well as in the central-western province of Palawan, and the capital, Manila.
As Ramadan began last week, interfaith events, especially iftars to break fasts, have been frequently organized by Muslims for non-Muslims and vice versa.
One such meeting was held in Manila on Thursday evening by Uniharmony Partners, a coalition of churches and faith organizations. Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus celebrated the special time together.
“There are a lot of programs and activities ... for people of different faiths just to come together appreciate one another and enjoy each other’s culture,” Dr. Pablito Baybado, Uniharmony coordinator and theology professor at the University of Santo Tomas, told Arab News.
The programs include mutual support that Muslims extend to Christians and other groups during Christmas and other major holidays, and that is reciprocated when the Islamic fasting month arrives.
“During Ramadan, you have the Catholic Church through the Quiapo Church, and then the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, pulling together resources so that every Sunday we go to some communities or Muslim communities in Metro Manila like Culiat, Taguig and Quiapo and distribute food packs,” Baybado said.
“During this time of Ramadan, we are doing this because it’s a way of showing respect to one another.”
For Alvaro Centuria, a pastor of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, Ramadan, besides inspiring a sense of unity, also has a spiritual dimension.
“It is it is very important because it reminds us, Christians, to also do fasting too ... It’s scientifically as well as religiously necessary,” he said.
“The essence of a meeting like this is that we are able to show that religions can unite for good, religious people can unite and can be in fellowship with one another.”
For Kerem Sadik, a Muslim member of Uniharmony, inter-faith meetings and activities, especially during Ramadan, which is not only the month of fasting but also charity, are a chance to foster a more tolerant and inclusive future generation.
“We try to nurture new generations from the start, without giving them any chance to grow stereotypes from the beginning rather than breaking them later,” he told Arab News, hoping that the examples set would foster mutual understanding and support.
“Now that we are in Ramadan, non-Muslim friends are also helping us in raising donations and they are getting out from their own community to reach our Muslim friends at this time of the year,” Sadik said. “This is what we did by helping the church community during Christmas celebrations.”


West in decline, focus shifting in Middle East, and rise of China the major geopolitical changes this decade, FII Priority told

John Chipman, director-general and chief executive at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
John Chipman, director-general and chief executive at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
Updated 31 March 2023

West in decline, focus shifting in Middle East, and rise of China the major geopolitical changes this decade, FII Priority told

John Chipman, director-general and chief executive at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
  • John Chipman speaking at the conference about the major geopolitical shifts the world is facing in the near future

MIAMI: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine carries the same existential threat to Europe and the West’s security order as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 did for the Middle East’s, an international relations expert told the FII Priority conference in Miami on Friday.

John Chipman, director-general and chief executive at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, was speaking at the conference about the major geopolitical shifts the world is facing in the near future.

He highlighted that, while the West recognized that Iraq’s invasion could have begun a domino effect in the region, the “strategically illiterate” response from its key players to the crisis in Ukraine was symptomatic of a slow decline in its geopolitical influence.

According to Chipman, the West should have taken some action in the years preceding the invasion — and definitely once the invasion had started — to put the fear of escalation into the mind of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“What (it) did was talk too much about NATO, and not about UN article 51, and for that (the West) lost the Global South,” he said. “What we should have said from the beginning was that this was a Russian war of recolonization — an imperialist adventure.”

As a result of the Ukraine war, Chipman said, the geopolitical center of gravity in Europe will shift toward its east and north, as signified by Thursday’s admission of Finland into NATO; and more broadly speaking, Russia would become a “hugely reduced power.”

A secondary geopolitical shift underway is the downgrading of the Middle East region on the US’s list of security priorities, Chipman told the conference.

“Maybe 10 years ago, in the US’s strategic calculus, the Middle East was number one on the list of priorities, with Asia number two and Europe a distant third,” he said. “Now it’s been reversed, with Europe number one, Asia co-equal and set to overtake Europe once the (Ukraine) war is over, and the Middle East now a distant third.”

This shift is not necessarily a bad thing, Chipman stated, and has led to what he called more “strategic self-determination,” especially for Gulf states, adding: “Gulf leaders now do not begin their morning meetings with the question ‘What will the US think if we do this?’”

Tensions in the region still exist, in large part due to Iran’s “main asset” of networks of influence and destabilization and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Chipman said should be the main focus of the rest of the world, considering most attention is paid to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and its ballistic-missile program.

Israel sliding toward becoming a “theocaratic state” also threatens regional stability, he said, adding: “Perhaps the signatories of the Abraham Accords will need to play a role, quietly, to persuade Israel to keep its secular qualities.”

In Asia, an increase in Japanese defense spending, which Chipman said makes it a more extrovert power on the global stage, shows its growing distrust of Russia, China and North Korea.

In addition, China’s rise has become so important that “no country in the world, however big or small, can afford not to have a China policy,” he concluded.


At least 9 killed in Pakistan Ramadan donation stampede

At least 9 killed in Pakistan Ramadan donation stampede
Updated 31 March 2023

At least 9 killed in Pakistan Ramadan donation stampede

At least 9 killed in Pakistan Ramadan donation stampede
  • Fida Janwari, a senior police officer, said the stampede happened when needy women with children flocked to a factory distributing alms
  • The bodies of six women and three children were brought to the Abbasi Shaheed state hospital

KARACHI: At least nine people were killed in a crowd crush in Pakistan’s southern city of Karachi Friday as a Ramadan alms donation sparked a stampede in the inflation-hit nation, officials said.
Pakistan has been wracked by economic turmoil for months, with the rupee crumbling and staple food prices shooting up nearly 50 percent as the country battles a balance of payments crisis which has forced it into bail-out talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Fida Janwari, a senior police officer in western Karachi’s Baldia Town neighborhood, said the stampede happened when needy women with children flocked to a factory distributing alms.
“Panic struck and people started running,” he told AFP.
The bodies of six women and three children were brought to the Abbasi Shaheed state hospital, spokesman Muhammad Farraukh said.
An official for the Rescue NGO told AFP an additional two bodies were sent to another hospital in the city.
Asma Ahmed, 30, said her grandmother and niece were among the dead.
“We come every year to the factory for the Zakat,” she said, using the Islamic term for alms.
“They started beating the women with clubs and pushing them,” Ahmed added. “There was chaos everywhere.”
“Why did they call us if they couldn’t manage it?” she asked.
Janwari said three factory employees were arrested after failing to inform police of the donation event in order to organize crowd control.
Last week, on the first day of Ramadan — when Muslims traditionally make donations to the poor — one person was killed and eight others injured in a stampede for flour in northwestern Pakistan.
Pakistan’s finances have been hobbled by decades of financial mismanagement and political chaos. The situation has been exacerbated by the global energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, and crippling monsoon floods last year which submerged a third of the country.
The South Asian nation — home to 220 million — is deep in debt and must enact tough tax reforms and push up utility prices if it hopes to unlock another tranche of a $6.5 billion IMF bail-out and avoid defaulting.

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Biden declines to comment on Trump indictment

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Updated 31 March 2023

Biden declines to comment on Trump indictment

Biden declines to comment on Trump indictment
  • Biden deliberately did not answer several questions on the subject from journalists
  • The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, confirmed that it had contacted Trump's lawyers Thursday to "coordinate his surrender"

WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden declined on Friday to comment on the indictment a day earlier of his predecessor Donald Trump, who became the first former US leader to face criminal charges.
Biden, who was traveling to Mississippi for the day, deliberately did not answer several questions on the subject from journalists gathered to witness his departure from the White House.
The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, confirmed that it had contacted Trump’s lawyers Thursday to “coordinate his surrender” — with the felony charges against him to be revealed at that point.
Trump, who is seen to be the Republican frontrunner in the 2024 election, slammed the indictment as “political persecution and election interference,” raging against prosecutors and his Democratic opponents.
He also vowed that it would backfire on Biden — who is set to run again to stay in the White House.
The impact of an indictment on Trump’s election chances is unpredictable, with critics and adversaries alike voicing concerns about the legal merits of the New York hush-money case.
Detractors worry that if Trump were cleared, it could make it easier to dismiss as a “witch hunt” any future indictment in arguably more serious affairs — such as Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
The Manhattan charges will also likely juice turnout among Trump’s base, boosting his chances in the party primary.


Pope Francis set to leave hospital, attend Easter service, Vatican says

Pope Francis set to leave hospital, attend Easter service, Vatican says
Updated 31 March 2023

Pope Francis set to leave hospital, attend Easter service, Vatican says

Pope Francis set to leave hospital, attend Easter service, Vatican says
  • The pope, 86, was taken to Rome's Gemelli hospital two days ago after complaining of breathing difficulties
  • He was diagnosed with bronchitis and has responded well to an infusion of antibiotics

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis is expected to leave hospital on Saturday pending the results of his latest medical tests and is scheduled to take part in a Palm Sunday service the following day, the Vatican said on Friday.
The pope, 86, was taken to Rome’s Gemelli hospital two days ago after complaining of breathing difficulties. He was diagnosed with bronchitis and has responded well to an infusion of antibiotics, the medical team has said.
“His Holiness is expected to return to Santa Marta tomorrow, once the results of the latest tests from this morning are known,” the Vatican said, referring to a residence next to St. Peter’s Basilica where the pope lives.
Highlighting the pope’s improved health, the Vatican said he had pizza on Thursday night in hospital with his doctors, nurses, assistants and security personnel.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed that if Francis does indeed return home on April 1, he would take part the following day in a service for Palm Sunday — a major event in the Church calendar that kicks off Easter week celebrations.
Holy Week, as it is known, includes a busy schedule of rituals and ceremonies that can be physically exhausting, including a Good Friday nighttime procession by Rome’s Colosseum.
The dean of the college of cardinals, Giovanni Battista Re, has said a cardinal would help the pope during the week’s celebrations and take care of altar duties.
A similar arrangement was put in place last year, when the pope sat to one side during some Easter events due to persistent knee pain, leaving it to senior cardinals to lead the Masses.
The pope, who marked the 10th anniversary of his pontificate earlier this month, has suffered a number of ailments in recent years. Francis was last hospitalized in July 2021 when he had part of his colon removed in an operation aimed at addressing a painful bowel condition called diverticulitis.
“When experienced with faith, the trials and difficulties of life serve to purify our hearts, making them humbler and thus more and more open to God,” the pope tweeted on Friday.