Category: General

Palestinian death toll from Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip has risen to 21, according to the Health Ministry on Wednesday. A ministry statement said that 64 Palestinians were also injured in the attacks. Three leaders of Islamic Jihad group, their wives and children were among those killed in the attacks. The Israeli army said the airstrikes were part of its Operation Shield and Arrow in response to rocket fire from Gaza following the death of a Palestinian hunger striker in an Israeli prison last week. According to Palestinian figures, at least 130 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the start of this year. Nineteen Israelis have also been killed in separate attacks during the same period. *Writing by Ikram Kouachi

Source: Anadolu Agency

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas urged lawmakers Wednesday to fix the US’ “broken” immigration system as thousands of migrants head to the country’s southern border. “We are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Our immigration laws today are outdated. The solutions we are implementing are the best available within our current legal authority, but they are short-term solutions to a decades-old problem,” Mayorkas told reporters. “We are taking this approach within the constraints of a broken immigration system that Congress has not fixed for more than two decades and without the resources we need personnel, facilities, transportation, and others that we have requested of Congress, and that we were not given,” he added. The comments come as the US experiences a dramatic uptick of migrants coming to the country, largely from Latin America, ahead of the May 11 expiration of Title 42 — pandemic-related authorities that allowed the US to swiftly remove migrants seeking asylum. The expiration of Title 42 has raised concerns among officials that it could worsen the existing humanitarian crisis at the southern border by encouraging a surge of migrants attempting to cross into the US. The Biden administration has been bracing for an expected surge in migrant arrivals at the southern border as Title 42 comes to an end Since Title 42 was enacted by former President Donald Trump in March 2020, the policy has allowed the US to expel migrants nearly 2.7 million times from the southern border, according to government figures. Under US law, any migrant can claim asylum in the US whether or not they come to the country through a legal port of entry. In addition to sending some 1,500 troops to the US-Mexico border for three months to bolster the capacity of the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced last week that the US is establishing migrant processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala to help stymy the expected surge. Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.

Source: Anadolu Agency

“All the liberal people of the world can stand together and support Cyprus to end the illegal occupation that continues on the island.” This was stated by New Hampshire Democratic Congressman, co-chairman of the Hellenic Caucus Chris Pappas in the context of the 38th Congress of PSEKA in Washington. Pappas, awarded by PSEKA president Philip Christopher and emphasized that the Cypriot cause has strong bipartisan support in Congress in order to end the illegal Turkish occupation. “As co-chair of the Hellenic Caucus in the House of Representatives, I will continue to work closely with Gus Bilirakis, Nicole Malliotakis, Dina Titus, John Sarbanis, Robert Menendez Jr. and many Philhellenes in Congress. I think it was Isocrates who said that anyone who can display Greek values in mind and spirit can be Greek. And we certainly have many allies in Congress who are doing that on a bipartisan basis,” Pappas said.

Source: Cyprus News Agency

Pakistan’s 75-year political history has been marred by martial laws, arrests, assassinations, and the hanging of elected leaders amid strained civil-military relations. Unlike India, Pakistan’s political landscape has remained uneven since the two independent nations came into being in 1947, following the end of British Colonial rule. Liaquat Ali Khan, the country’s first Prime Minister and the second towering personality after founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah was assassinated on Oct. 17, 1951, in historic Liaquat Bagh (named after him after his assassination) in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. Several other political leaders were disqualified under a controversial law introduced by the country’s first military ruler Gen. Ayub Khan in 1958. Pakistan’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power through the 1970 general election, was ousted by his army chief, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, on May 5, 1977. He was later arrested in a murder case, and hanged on April 4, 1979, after the Lahore Court found him guilty, and his appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Two-time Premier Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had left the country days before the Lahore High Court sentenced her to three-year in prison in 1998. She returned from exile in London to Pakistan on Oct. 18, 2007, and escaped a massive suicide bombing that killed nearly 150 people in the port city of Karachi. She was assassinated in Liaquat Bagh Rawalpindi on Dec. 27, 2007, minutes after she addressed an election rally. Prior to the assassination, her two governments were also dismissed by the presidents on corruption charges in 1990 and 1996. Three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who could not even complete a single five-year term, was arrested on Oct. 12, 1999, after his elected government was toppled by then-army chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf. He remained in jail for over a year after being handed down a life term for his involvement in a hijacking case. His brother and incumbent Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and former Premier Shahid Khaqan Abbasi also remained in jail with him, although they were exonerated by the court in the hijacking case. In Dec. 2000, the Sharifs left for Saudi Arabia in exile following a deal brokered by the then-Saudi King Shah Abdullah bin Abdelaziz. They returned to Pakistan in 2007, months before Musharraf resigned following an impeachment threat. Nawaz Sharif was imprisoned again after being disqualified by the Supreme Court in a case stemming from the whistleblower Panama Papers scandal in 2017 and later convicted by an anti-corruption court in a corruption case in 2018. He was later allowed to go to London for treatment on “humanitarian grounds’ in 2019 and he has remained there since. His younger brother Shehbaz Sharif was also arrested twice between 2018 and 2020 in various corruption cases, though none of them were proven. Former President Asif Ali Zardari has remained in jail for a collective period of 11 years for his alleged involvement in multiple corruption and murder cases from 1990 to 2004. Most recently, he was arrested on June 10, 2019, in a corruption case and released on bail in December of the same year. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who ruled the South Asian nuclear state from August 2018 to April 2022, is the latest in a string of such events in the country, as the anti-corruption agency arrested him in a corruption case on May 9, 2023.

Source: Anadolu Agency

The Russian Representative Office in Ramallah said Tuesday that a Russian national, his wife and child were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. “His two other children, whom are Russian citizens, became orphans,” the office said in a statement. The Russian national was identified as Jamal Khaswan. The Palestinian Health Ministry also confirmed that Khaswan, a dentist and director of Al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza, was killed in the Israeli attacks. There are no exact estimates of the number of Palestinians holding the Russian citizenship. At least 13 Palestinians were killed, including four children and four women, and 20 others injured in Israeli airstrikes on the blockaded territory early Tuesday, according to the Health Ministry.

Source: Anadolu Agency

LinkedIn announced it will phase out its China-based jobs app, InCareer, and reduce its workforce by 716 employees. “Though InCareer experienced some success in the past year thanks to our strong China-based team, it also encountered fierce competition and a challenging macroeconomic climate,” the US-based business and employment online service provider said Monday in a statement. The company said it will focus its China strategy on assisting companies operating in the country to hire, market and train abroad, which will involve maintaining talent, marketing and learning businesses, while phasing out InCareer in China by Aug. 9. It added that its strategy in China will result in a reduction of 716 employees. The figure makes up around 3.7% of its 19,000 employees around the world. The number of InCareer members in China exceeded 57 million, while there were more 875 million LinkedIn members worldwide as of July 2022, according to the company. LinkedIn had announced in October 2021 that it will close operations in China to launch a new jobs app for the country. Amid tight control by Beijing on the internet, some major US-based tech companies have left China. Google left in 2010, Facebook and Twitter have been blocked for more than a decade.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said that the time has come for a ‘positive decision’ on negotiations for Ukraine’s membership in the EU. ‘Our values, security, prosperity and peace on the continent. All this can be realized for Europe 100% only together with Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said, during a press conference with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who arrived in the capital Kyiv earlier in the day. Zelenskyy said the time has also come for the removal of the ‘artificial political opacity’ in Ukraine-EU relations, further saying that he is counting on the European Commission to present a positive assessment of Ukraine’s progress in European integration. Kyiv officially applied for EU membership on Feb. 28, 2022, four days after the start of the war with Russia that Moscow calls a “special military operation.” The European Commission issued its opinion on the application of Ukraine’s EU membership on June 17 last year, after which the European Council granted Kyiv candidate status. Last December, Ukraine’s parliament adopted several bills recommended by the European Commission to further the country’s EU accession process. Zelenskyy said that Kyiv shows the efficiency of its defense against Russia on a daily basis, further saying that he thanked the EU’s readiness to provide Ukraine with much-needed munitions, which he said amounted to one million artillery rounds. Zelenskyy also said that Ukraine expects the EU to remove all restrictions on the export of agricultural products, adding that he counts on the 11th sanctions package on Russia to also include measures against the country’s nuclear sector. – Kyiv ‘heart of European values’ For her part, von der Leyen said she is honored and privileged to be in Kyiv on the occasion of Europe Day, and also welcomed Ukraine’s decision to name May 9 as such. ‘Kyiv as the capital of Ukraine is the beating heart of today’s European values. Ukraine is at the front line of the defense of everything we Europeans cherish. Our liberty, our democracy, our freedom of thought and speech. Courageously, Ukraine is fighting for the ideals of Europe that we celebrate today,’ she said. Claiming that Russia has destroyed these values in the country, she claimed that Moscow is attempting to do the same in Ukraine, but that it has ‘dramatically failed.’ She further reiterated Europe’s solidarity with Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes,’ adding that further ammunition, financial support and sanctions have been at the agenda of her meeting with Zelenskyy. She added that the European Commission adopted a proposal on the 11th package of sanctions against Russia last Friday, which she said focused on cracking down on sanctions circumvention.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Soldiers in Somalia’s northeastern semiautonomous state of Puntland on Tuesday staged a mutiny over unpaid salaries, an official said. Abdinour Abdi Ahmed, a security official in Puntland’s Bari region, told Anadolu over the phone that soldiers seized a security checkpoint in Garowe, the state’s administrative capital, in the early hours on Tuesday. “The situation is under control right now,” Ahmed said, adding that “but there has been a mutiny staged by some soldiers who claim they haven’t received their salaries.” However, the soldiers who staged the mutiny acted professionally, and they did not harm anyone while closing a key highway connecting Garowe and Bosaso city in the state. Located on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden, Bosaso is also a commercial port city of the semiautonomous state, 1,414 kilometers (878 miles) northeast of the capital Mogadishu. The mutiny occurred on the same day that the region’s President Said Abdullahi Deni was holding a campaign rally in Galkayo town ahead of the disputed local council elections. The planned local elections in Puntland sparked controversy in the state, and Dani’s critics described the election as divisive. Addressing his Kaah party supporters in Galkayo on Tuesday, Deni accused Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mahamud of opposing Puntland’s democratization. This comes hours after Somalia’s Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre criticized Puntland’s leaders for the strained relations with the federal government, accusing him of undermining development projects in the state. Relations between the federal government in Mogadishu and the northern state have soured since Puntland announced it would govern itself as an independent government.

Source: Anadolu Agency

US President Joe Biden will visit Papua New Guinea later this month when he returns from the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Hiroshima and the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Sydney, Australia, the White House said Tuesday. The visit will make Biden the first sitting US president to visit the Pacific islands nation. “While in Papua New Guinea, President Biden will meet with Prime Minister Marape of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island Forum leaders to follow up on the first-ever U.S.-Pacific Island Summit in Washington, DC last fall,” spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. The two leaders will discuss ways to “deepen cooperation” on some critical challenges, such as combating climate change, protecting maritime resources and advancing resilient and inclusive economic growth, according to the White House. “As a Pacific nation, the United States has deep historical and people-to-people ties with the Pacific Islands, and this visit – the first time a sitting U.S. President has visited a Pacific Island country – further reinforces this critical partnership,” it said.

Source: Anadolu Agency

German authorities banned on Tuesday the use of Russian flags and symbols during the Victory Day commemorations. Berlin police enforced strict controls at memorial sites as hundreds of people gathered to mark the 78th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. The commemorations started in the morning at the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in Berlin, and participants laid wreaths and flowers at the monument to pay tribute to fallen soldiers. Hundreds of demonstrators later marched from Berlin’s landmark Brandenburg Gate to the Soviet Memorial in Tiergarten, carrying pictures of Soviet soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany. Members of the infamous pro-Russian motorcycle group the Night Wolves also arrived at the memorial and laid flowers at the monument. A large police presence was deployed to prevent possible tensions between pro-Russia groups and Ukrainian protesters.

Source: Anadolu Agency