Author: AFP
Israel has no excuse for hampering the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, a top German diplomat said on Sunday ahead of a conference in Cairo on the subject next week. The country must “at last keep its promises to fluidify humanitarian aid into Gaza and to allow sufficient humanitarian access at any moment”, said Tobias Lindner, the deputy foreign affairs minister, in a statement published ahead of his trip to Egypt. “There is no excuse for that. Israel’s right to legitimate self-defence finds its limits in international humanitarian rights.” Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said something similar…
The White House is working on a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza but is “not there yet,” the US National Security Advisor told NBC on Sunday, with fighting in the conflict raging on as Arab leaders meet in Cairo to discuss the crisis. “We are working actively to try to make it happen. We are engaged deeply with the key players in the region, and there is activity even today,” said Jake Sullivan, according to a transcript released by the broadcaster. “There will be further conversations and consultations, and our hope is that we can generate a ceasefire…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that his country needed security guarantees from NATO and more weapons to defend itself before any talks with Russia. “Only when we have all these items and we are strong, after that, we have to make the very important… agenda of meeting with one or another of the killers,” Zelensky said after talks with EU chiefs in Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that an invitation to join the NATO military alliance was needed for his country’s survival as it struggles to fight Russian forces. “An invitation for Ukraine to join NATO is a necessary thing for our survival,” Zelensky said after talks with EU leaders in Kyiv.
The UN nuclear agency has confirmed that Iran plans to install around 6,000 new centrifuges to enrich uranium, according to a report seen by AFP on Friday. “Iran informed the Agency that it intended to feed” around 6,000 centrifuges at its sites in Fordo and Natanz to enrich uranium to up to five percent, higher than the 3.67 percent limit Tehran had agreed to in 2015.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Thursday ruled out a trade war with the United States after speaking with President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened stiff tariffs to halt illegal immigration. “There will not be a potential tariff war,” Sheinbaum, who has been scrambling to head off threatened tariffs of 25 percent on Mexican goods, told a daily news conference. She was speaking a day after a telephone call with Trump, who has threatened to slap tariffs on Canada and China in addition to Mexico over illegal immigration and drug trafficking. After their call, Sheinbaum and Trump offered differing accounts of…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed he was prepared to do “everything” to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons in an interview broadcast on Thursday. “I will do everything to prevent it from becoming a nuclear (power), I will use all the resources that can be used,” Netanyahu told Israeli broadcaster Channel 14.
The WHO warned Thursday of dire shortages of medicines, food, shelter and fuel in Gaza, especially in the north, demanding that Israel allow in more aid and facilitate humanitarian operations. The World Health Organization described a “catastrophic” situation on the ground. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that when the war in Gaza erupted more than a year ago following Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack inside Israel, almost all of those displaced by the conflict sheltered in public buildings or with family members. “Now, 90 percent are living in tents,” he told a press conference at the WHO’s headquarters in…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday called on allies to give a tough response to Russia’s “blackmail”, hours after President Vladimir Putin threatened to strike Kyiv with a new ballistic missile. “Any blackmail by Russia must be met with a firm response,” said Zelensky in his daily address broadcast on social networks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised to former German chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday, saying he did not mean to scare her when he brought his pet Labrador to a meeting with her in 2007. Merkel, who has a well-documented fear of the animals, recalled the tense encounter in her memoir released Tuesday, accusing Putin of inviting the pet as a “demonstration of power” and taking glee in her discomfort. “I did not know that she was afraid of dogs,” the Kremlin chief said Thursday at a press conference in the Kazakh capital Astana. “I once again appeal to her via…