You are here

  • Home
  • Pro-Palestinian protesters, police clash in Basel during Eurovision
War on Gaza

Pro-Palestinian protesters, police clash in Basel during Eurovision

Pro-Palestinian protesters, police clash in Basel during Eurovision
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators waves Palestinian flags and burn flares during a demonstration against Israel outside the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest’s grand final in Basel on May 17, 2025. (AFP)
Short Url

https://arab.news/66665

Updated 17 May 2025
AFP
Follow

Pro-Palestinian protesters, police clash in Basel during Eurovision

Pro-Palestinian protesters, police clash in Basel during Eurovision
  • Blows were exchanged and police used tear gas and rolled in a water cannon truck as they strived to block demonstrators
  • Israel’s National Security Council issued a warning to Israelis in Basel about the demonstration
Updated 17 May 2025
AFP
Follow

BASEL, Switzerland: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators clashed with riot police in Basel as the Swiss city hosted the Eurovision Song Contest Saturday, AFP journalists at the scene witnessed.

Protesters demonstrating against Israel’s participation in the contest while it ramps up its war in Gaza clashed briefly with police in the center of the city shortly before Israel’s Eurovision entrant Yuval Raphael took to the stage at the St. Jakobshalle venue across town.

Blows were exchanged and police used tear gas and rolled in a water cannon truck as they strived to block demonstrators from marching through the center of the northern Swiss city, thronging with Eurovision fans.

According to Swiss news agency Keystone-ATS, the confrontation began when police intervened to stop an altercation after two men rushed toward the protesters waving Israeli flags.

Israel’s National Security Council issued a warning to Israelis in Basel about the demonstration, advising them to “avoid confrontations with demonstrators and to keep Israeli identifiers low-profile in public spaces.”

Amid a sea of Palestinian flags, hundreds of demonstrators, many wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, carried signs stating: “No Music for Murder,” “Stop Genocide,” and “Singing while Gaza Burns.”

Some of the protesters burned giant Israeli and US flags, while others set off red and green smoke in the air.

One woman, her face smeared with red, cradled a seemingly bloody bundle representing the children dying in the war raging in the Gaza Strip as police in riot gear looked on.

At a time when Israel is dramatically ramping up the brutal war in Gaza, the protesters were demonstrating against the participation of the Israeli act, which is among the favorites in Saturday’s final.

Raphael survived the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, hiding beneath dead bodies as Hamas gunmen attacked a music festival, killing hundreds.

During her performance of her song “New Day Will Rise” on Saturday, loud whistles could be heard in the arena, according to an AFP photographer in the hall.

There have been a number of smaller protests against Israel throughout Eurovision week in Basel, and demonstrators interrupted Raphael’s act during a dress rehearsal for one of the semifinals.

Earlier this week, Israel’s public broadcaster Kan said it had filed a police complaint after filming a protester apparently making a “throat-slitting gesture” at the country’s delegation during the Eurovision opening ceremony parade on Sunday.

Israel launched an intensified offensive in Gaza on Saturday aimed at “the defeat of Hamas,” the Islamist militant group that launched a deadly attack on Israel in October 2023.

The stepped-up campaign in the war that has already left tens of thousands dead came amid growing international concern over worsening humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where an Israeli aid blockade continues to restrict aid.

Topics: War on Gaza Eurovision Pro-Palestinian demonstrators Israel

Related

Israel’s presence still roils Eurovision a year after major protests over the war in Gaza
Media
Israel’s presence still roils Eurovision a year after major protests over the war in Gaza
Ireland’s RTE urges talks on Israel’s Eurovision participation amid growing pressure
Media
Ireland’s RTE urges talks on Israel’s Eurovision participation amid growing pressure

Record floods devastate eastern Australia

Record floods devastate eastern Australia
Updated 57 min 13 sec ago
AFP
Follow

Record floods devastate eastern Australia

Record floods devastate eastern Australia
  • State Emergency Service said more than 2,000 workers had been deployed on rescue and recovery missions
Updated 57 min 13 sec ago
AFP

MAITLAND: Record floods cut a destructive path through eastern Australia on Friday, caking houses in silt, washing out roads and separating 50,000 people from help.
Four bodies have been pulled from vast tides of floodwater engulfing parts of northern New South Wales, a fertile region of rivers and valleys some 400 kilometers (250 miles) up the coast from Sydney.
Salvage crews were preparing to launch a major clean-up operation as waters started receding Friday morning, surveying the damage from half a year’s worth of rain dumped in just three days.
“So many businesses have had water through and it’s going to be a massive cleanup,” said Kinne Ring, mayor of the flood-stricken farming town of Kempsey.
“Houses have been inundated,” she told national broadcaster ABC.
“There’s water coming through the bottom of houses, it’s really awful to see and the water is going to take a bit of time to recede.”
State Emergency Service boss Dallas Burnes said more than 2,000 workers had been deployed on rescue and recovery missions.
“A real focus for us at the moment will be resupplying the isolated communities,” he said, adding that 50,000 people were still stranded.
Burnes said rescue crews had plucked more than 600 people to safety since waters started rising earlier this week.
People clambered atop cars, houses and highway bridges before helicopters winched them away.
Although the floods were easing, Burnes said the stagnant lakes of muddy water still posed a threat — including from snakes that may have slithered into homes in search of shelter.
“Floodwaters have contaminants. There can be vermin, snakes. You need to assess those risks.
“Electricity can also pose a danger as well.”
The storms have dumped more than six months’ worth of rain over three days, the government weather bureau has said, smashing flood-height records in some areas.
“These are horrific circumstances,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday as he traveled into the disaster zone.
“The Australian Defense Force will be made available. There’s going to be a big recovery effort required,” he told local radio.
“There’s been massive damage to infrastructure and we’re going to have to all really pitch in.”
In the town of Taree, business owner Jeremy Thornton said the “gut-wrenching” flood was among the worst he had seen.
“It is pretty tough, we’ve had a few moments but you have to suck it up and push on,” he told AFP on Thursday.
“We are reliving it every second — hearing the rain, hearing the helicopters, hearing the siren.”
Locals spotted dead cows washing up on beaches after swollen rivers swept them from their pastures inland.
The government has declared a natural disaster, unlocking greater resources for affected areas.

From the arid outback to the tropical coast, swaths of Australia have recently been pummelled by wild weather.
The oceans surrounding Australia have been “abnormally warm” in recent months, according to Australia’s government weather bureau.
Warmer seas evaporate more moisture into the atmosphere, which can eventually lead to more intense rains.
Although difficult to link to specific disasters, climate change is already fueling more extreme weather patterns, scientists warn.
Flood modelling expert Mahdi Sedighkia said this week’s emergency offered “compelling evidence” of how climate change could affect regional weather patterns.

Topics: Australia flooding

Related

Azad Kashmir warns of flooding in river Jhelum as India releases water amid tensions
Pakistan
Azad Kashmir warns of flooding in river Jhelum as India releases water amid tensions
Update Thailand flooding kills nine, displaces thousands video
World
Thailand flooding kills nine, displaces thousands

Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout

Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout
Updated 23 May 2025
AFP
Follow

Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout

Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout
  • The allies last year signed a new five-year agreement on sharing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea.
Updated 23 May 2025
AFP

SEOUL: South Korea’s defense ministry said Friday there have been no talks with Washington on pulling US troops from the South, after a Wall Street Journal report claimed Washington was considering a partial withdrawal.
Citing US defense officials, the WSJ report said Washington is considering whether to move around 4,500 troops out of South Korea and deploy them to other locations, including Guam.
Washington, South Korea’s long-time key security ally, stations around 28,500 troops in the South to help protect it against the nuclear-armed North Korea.
But US President Donald Trump said last year — before winning the election — that if he returned to the White House, Seoul would pay billions more annually to host American troops.
When asked about the WSJ report, Seoul’s defense ministry said: “There has been no discussion whatsoever between South Korea and the United States regarding the withdrawal of the United States Forces Korea.”
The allies last year signed a new five-year agreement on sharing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea, with Seoul agreeing to raise its contribution by 8.3 percent to 1.52 trillion won ($1.1 billion) for 2026.
“US Forces Korea have served as a key component of the South Korea-US alliance, maintaining a strong combined defense posture with our military to deter North Korean aggression and provocations,” Seoul’s defense ministry said, adding this contributed to “peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the region.”
“We will continue close cooperation with the US to further strengthen this role going forward.”
United States Forces Korea declined to comment when contacted by AFP, saying any remarks on the matter should come from Washington.

Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections

Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections
Updated 23 May 2025
AP
Follow

Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections

Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections
  • Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters
Updated 23 May 2025
AP

NEW YORK: Detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time Thursday after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass barrier.
The visit came ahead of a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained in a Louisiana jail since March 8.
Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters and is one of the few who has remained in custody as his case winds its way through both immigration and federal court.
Federal authorities have not accused Khalil of a crime, but they have sought to deport him on the basis that his prominent role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza may have undermined US foreign policy interests.
His request to attend his son’s April 21 birth was denied last month by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The question of whether Khalil would be permitted to hold his newborn child or forced to meet him through a barrier had sparked days of legal fighting, triggering claims by Khalil’s attorneys that he is being subject to political retaliation by the government.
On Wednesday night, a federal judge in New Jersey, Michael Farbiarz, intervened, allowing the meeting to go forward Thursday morning, according to Khalil’s attorneys.
The judge’s order came after federal officials said this week they would oppose his attorney’s effort to secure what’s known as a “contact visit” between Khalil, his wife, Noor Abdalla, and their son Deen.
Instead, they said Khalil could be allowed a “non-contact” visit, meaning he would be separated from his wife and son by a plastic divider and not allowed to touch them.
“Granting Khalil this relief of family visitation would effectively grant him a privilege that no other detainee receives,” Justice Department officials wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. “Allowing Dr. Abdalla and a newborn to attend a legal meeting would turn a legal visitation into a family one.”
Brian Acuna, acting director of the ICE field office in New Orleans, said in an accompanying affidavit that it would be “unsafe to allow Mr. Khalil’s wife and newborn child into a secured part of the facility.”
In their own legal filings, Khalil’s attorneys described the government’s refusal to grant the visit as “further evidence of the retaliatory motive behind Mr. Khalil’s arrest and faraway detention,” adding that his wife and son were “the farthest thing from a security risk.”
They noted that Abdalla had traveled nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to the remote detention center in hopes of introducing their son to his father.
“This is not just heartless,” Abdalla said of the government’s position. “It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse. And I cannot ignore the echoes of this pain in the stories of Palestinian families, torn apart by Israeli military prisons and bombs, denied dignity, denied life.”
Farbiarz is currently considering Khalil’s petition for release as he appeals a Louisiana immigration judge’s ruling that he can be deported from the country.
On Thursday, Khalil appeared before that immigration judge, Jamee Comans, as his attorneys presented testimony about the risks he would face if he were to be deported to Syria, where he grew up in a refugee camp, or Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative.
His attorneys submitted testimony from Columbia University faculty and students attesting to Khalil’s character.
In one declaration, Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, said he had first introduced Khalil to a university administrator to serve as a spokesperson on behalf of campus protesters, describing him as a “upstanding, principled, and well-respected member of our community.’
“I have never known Mahmoud to espouse any anti-Jewish sentiments or prejudices, and have heard him forcefully reject antisemitism on multiple occasions,” Howley wrote.
No ruling regarding the appeal was made on Thursday. Comans gave lawyers in the case until 5 p.m. June 2 to submit written closing arguments.
Columbia’s interim president, Claire Shipman, acknowledged Mahmoud’s absence from Wednesday’s commencement ceremony and said many students were “mourning” that he couldn’t be present. Her speech drew loud boos from some graduates, along with chants of “free Mahmoud.”

Topics: War on Gaza

Related

Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil detained by US misses son’s birth
World
Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil detained by US misses son’s birth
What to know about Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia protester arrested by ICE and facing deportation
World
What to know about Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia protester arrested by ICE and facing deportation

US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell

US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell
Updated 23 May 2025
Reuters
Follow

US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell

US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell
  • Supreme Court opinion says decision would not necessarily apply to Fed
Updated 23 May 2025
Reuters

A US Supreme Court ruling Thursday in a legal battle over President Donald Trump’s firing of two federal labor board members contained a line that eased, for now, worries that the cases could open the door for Trump to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at will. The court’s order allows Trump to keep the two Democratic labor board members sidelined while they challenge the legality of their removal. Lawyers for Gwynne Wilcox, who was removed from the National Labor Relations Board, and for Cathy Harris, who was dismissed from the Merit Systems Protection Board, had argued that a ruling in favor of the Trump administration could undermine legal protections for Fed policymakers long seen as being insulated from presidential dismissal for reasons other than malfeasance or misconduct. “We disagree,” a majority of justices said in the court’s brief, unsigned ruling. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks.”
The two cases have been closely watched as proxies for whether Trump has the authority to fire officials at the Fed. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that created the nation’s third and still existing central bank stipulates that Fed officials may be dismissed only “for cause,” not for political or policy disagreements.
“This view of the Supreme Court really does ease my worries about their inclination to extrapolate from the NLRB cases to the Fed so I breathed a sigh of relief,” said LH Meyer analyst Derek Tang, who has followed the cases closely.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Powell, whom he nominated to the post during his first term and who was renominated to a second term by Democratic President Joe Biden, and said he wants to see him gone from the central bank. Though Trump, who has attacked Powell over the Fed’s decision to not lower interest rates, recently said he has no intention of trying to fire Powell, the possibility has unsettled financial markets that bank on an independent Fed’s ability to do its job without political interference.
Powell has said he believes his firing would not be permitted under the law.
The Fed system’s seven governors, including the system chair, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Powell’s term ends in May 2026, and Trump is expected to nominate a successor in the coming months.
Krishna Guha, a vice chair at Evercore ISI, said the Supreme Court’s opinion was encouraging but not definitive. “It strictly only addresses whether a ruling on Wilcox would ‘necessarily’ implicate the Fed,” he said
A Fed spokeswoman did not have a comment. 

Topics: Trump Returns JEROME POWELL

UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders

UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders
Updated 23 May 2025
AP
Follow

UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders

UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders
Updated 23 May 2025
AP

LONDON: The British government will roll out the use of medication to suppress the sex drive of sex offenders, as part of a package of measures to reduce the risk of reoffending and alleviate the pressures on the prison system, which is running out of space.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Thursday that so-called chemical castration would be used in 20 prisons in two regions and that she was considering making it mandatory.
“Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, like asserting power and control,” she said in a statement to Parliament following the release of an independent sentencing review,
Though the review highlighted the treatment wouldn’t be relevant for some sex offenders such as rapists driven by power and control, rather than sexual preoccupation, Mahmood said that studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60 percent reduction in reoffending.
It’s been used in Germany and Denmark on a voluntary basis, and in Poland as mandatory for some offenders.
The recommendation was part of a wide-ranging review led by former Justice Secretary David Gauke. As well as looking at ways to cut reoffending, Gauke recommended reforms to overhaul the prisons system, which is running at near capacity.
One of the first things Mahmood did as justice minister after Labour returned to power after 14 years last July was sanction an early-release program for prisoners to free up space. She says she inherited a judicial system that had been neglected for years by the previous Conservative government and set up the review as a means to stabilize it.
“If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials,” she said. “The police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country.”
The review recommended that criminals could be released from prison earlier than they are now for good behavior, while judges could be given more flexibility to impose punishments such as driving bans. It also recommended that sentences of less than 12 months would also be scrapped for tougher community sentences. It also called for the immediate deportation for foreign nationals handed a three-year sentence or less.
The review called for higher investment in the probation service to allow officers to spend more time with offenders for their rehabilitation and extra funding for the many more who are monitored with electronic tags in the community.
Mahmood responded by giving a 700 million-pound  a year for probation within years.
“If the government doesn’t put the resources into probation that is necessary, then the risk here is that we won’t make progress on rehabilitation that we need, and there will be a public backlash against it,” Gauke said.
The prison population in England and Wales has doubled over the past three decades or so to nearly 90,000. That’s despite a fall in crime rates and is driven in part by the fact that longer sentences are being handed out amid pressure to be tough on crime.
Robert Jenrick, the justice spokesman for the Conservatives, warned that scrapping short sentences would be effectively “decriminalizing” offenses like burglary, theft and assault. And monitoring tags, he said, are as useful as “smoke alarms putting out bonfires” in stopping reoffending.
In response, Mahmood said that she was clearing up the mess left by the Conservatives and that the government has also embarked on the largest expansion of prisons since Victorian times in the 19th century.

Topics: UK sex offenders

Latest updates

Real Madrid great Luka Modric leaving club after 13 years. Exit to follow Club World Cup
Real Madrid great Luka Modric leaving club after 13 years. Exit to follow Club World Cup
In tune with nature: expert sounds out all of Ireland’s bird species
In tune with nature: expert sounds out all of Ireland’s bird species
Record floods devastate eastern Australia
Record floods devastate eastern Australia
Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout
Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout
US and regional countries team up to resolve the issue of Daesh prisoners in Syria
US and regional countries team up to resolve the issue of Daesh prisoners in Syria

Search form

Print Edition
Read pdf version Subscribe now
© 2025 SAUDI RESEARCH & PUBLISHING COMPANY, All Rights Reserved And subject to Terms of Use Agreement.