Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said on Saturday that a planned visit by his Swedish counterpart to Ankara has been canceled after Swedish authorities granted permission for protests in Stockholm.
Protests in Stockholm on Saturday against Turkey and Sweden’s bid to join NATO, including the burning of a copy of the Quran, sharply heightened tensions with Turkey at a time when the Nordic country needs Ankara’s backing to gain entry to the military alliance.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the vile attack on our holy book … Permitting this anti-Islam act, which targets Muslims and insults our sacred values, under the guise of freedom of expression is completely unacceptable,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.
Its statement was issued after an anti-immigrant politician from the far-right fringe burned a copy of the Quran near the Turkish Embassy. The Turkish ministry urged Sweden to take necessary actions against the perpetrators and invited all countries to take concrete steps against Islamophobia.
A separate protest took place in the city supporting Kurds and against Sweden’s bid to join NATO. A group of pro-Turkish demonstrators also held a rally outside the embassy. All three events had police permits.
Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said that Islamophobic provocations were appalling.
“Sweden has a far-reaching freedom of expression, but it does not imply that the Swedish Government, or myself, support the opinions expressed,” Billstrom said on Twitter.
The Quran-burning was carried out by Rasmus Paludan, leader of Danish far-right political party Hard Line. Paludan, who also has Swedish citizenship, has held a number of demonstrations in the past where he has burned the Quran.
Paludan could not immediately be reached by email for a comment. In the permit he obtained from police, it says his protest was held against Islam and what it called Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s attempt to influence freedom of expression in Sweden.
Several Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait denounced the Koran-burning. “Saudi Arabia calls for spreading the values of dialogue, tolerance, and coexistence, and rejects hatred and extremism,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Sweden and Finland applied last year to join NATO following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but all 30 member states must approve their bids. Turkey has said Sweden in particular must first take a clearer stance against what it sees as terrorists, mainly Kurdish militants and a group it blames for a 2016 coup attempt.
At the demonstration to protest Sweden’s NATO bid and to show support for Kurds, speakers stood in front of a large red banner reading “We are all PKK”, referring to the Kurdistan Workers Party that is outlawed in Turkey, Sweden, and the United States among other countries, and addressed several hundred pro-Kurdish and left-wing supporters.
“We will continue our opposition to the Swedish NATO application,” Thomas Pettersson, spokesperson for Alliance Against NATO and one of organizers of the demonstration, told Reuters.
Police said the situation was calm at all three demonstrations.
Earlier on Saturday, Turkey said that due to lack of measures to restrict protests, it had canceled a planned visit to Ankara by the Swedish defence minister.
“At this point, the visit of Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson to Turkey on January 27 has become meaningless. So we canceled the visit,” Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said.
The past 12 months has forced European leaders to seriously rethink their approach to national security.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has confirmed one thing, it’s that peace on the continent cannot be taken for granted. The status quo – decades of low spending and defense not being a policy priority – cannot continue.
This is especially true in Germany, which has for years has spent far less on its military than many of its Western allies but is now reconsidering its approach to defense at home and abroad.
Days after the invasion began last February, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a head-turning speech to parliament in which he committed to spending €100 billion ($108 billion) to modernize Germany’s military capacity.
He also vowed that Germany would lift its defense spending to 2% of GDP – meeting a target set by NATO that it had missed for years – and end its deep reliance on Russian energy, particularly gas.
However, nearly a year on, critics say Scholz’s vision has failed to become reality. And Germany has been accused of dragging its feet when it comes to sending its more powerful weapons to Ukraine.
The criticism has grown in recent days as US and European leaders have piled pressure on Berlin to send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or at least allow other countries to do so.
Experts estimate there are around 2,000 Leopard tanks in use by 13 countries across Europe, and they are increasingly being seen as vital to Ukraine’s war effort as the conflict grinds into a second year. But Berlin must grant these nations approval to re-export German-made tanks to Ukraine, and it has so far resisted calls to do so.
Scholz has insisted that any such plan would need to be fully coordinated with the whole of the Western alliance, and German officials have indicated they won’t approve the transfer of Leopards unless the US also agrees to send some of its tanks to Kyiv.
On Friday, a key meeting of Western allies in Germany broke up without a wider agreement on sending tanks to Ukraine, after the country’s new defense minister Boris Pistorius said no decision had yet been made by his government.
Pistorius rebuffed claims that Germany has been “standing in the way” of a “united coalition” of countries in favor of the plan. “There are good reasons for the delivery and there are good reasons against it … all the pros and cons have to be weighed very carefully, and that assessment is explicitly shared by many allies,” he added.
Germany’s decision to dig in on sending tanks will likely go down badly with its allies, both in the immediate and long-term.
“It’s like acid eroding through layer after layer of trust,” a senior NATO diplomat told CNN on Friday. The diplomat added that Germany’s hesitance could also have a lasting impact on the rest of Europe and potentially push other members of the alliance closer towards the US, even if Germany is reluctant to do so.
And the divisions in the alliance have only grown more public in recent days – earlier in the week, Poland’s prime minister described Germany as “the least proactive country out of the group, to put it mildly,” and suggested his country might send Leopards to Ukraine without Berlin’s approval.
For all of the criticism of Germany’s hesitance on tanks, Berlin has played a crucial role in supporting Ukraine over the past year. The US and the UK are the only two countries to have delivered more military aid to Kyiv than Germany since the invasion began, according to the Kiel Institute.
Germany’s military support for Ukraine has evolved over time. It ditched its longstanding policy of not delivering lethal weapons to conflict zones and recently has stepped up deliveries of heavier equipment to Ukraine, including armored infantry fighting vehicles and Patriot missile defense systems.
The government, however, sees tanks as a massive step up from the weaponry it’s delivered to Ukraine so far, and fears that authorizing German tanks to be used against Russia would be seen by Moscow as a significant escalation.
Experts say the reticence is partly borne of Berlin’s pragmatic approach to conflict in general, and a relatively timid military posture going back decades, informed by what Scholz himself has described as “the dramatic consequences of two world wars that originated in Germany.”
“Germany has been on a peace-time footing for years. We don’t have the expertise in procedure or procurement to do anything at speed right now. The truth is that for decades, we have seen our defense budget as a gift to our allies because they thought it was important,” said Christian Mölling, deputy director at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Whatever happens in Ukraine, Germany will have to ask itself some big questions about security in the coming years. The appetite to improve Germany’s armed forces has grown significantly since the start of the war.
Last week, Christine Lambrecht resigned as defense minister amid criticism of her efforts to modernize the military. Lambrecht had struggled to do anything of note with the €100bn that Scholz made available to her last year. The head of the Christian Democrats, the main opposition party in Germany, has accused the Chancellor of not taking his own speech last year seriously.
The person who now gets to spend that money is Pistorius, who German officials see as a safe pair of hands and up to the job. The question that he and Scholz must answer is how far Germany is willing to go in being a serious military presence in Europe.
In December, Germany admitted that it would not meet Scholz’s pledge to meet the NATO requirement on defense spending in 2022, and said it would likely miss the target again in 2023.
And its military’s combat readiness is inferior to that of some other European powers. According to the Rand cooperation, it would take Germany roughly a month to mobilise a fully-armored brigade, whereas the British army “should be able to sustain at least one armored brigade indefinitely.”
Defense experts say Germany will find it hard to move very far or very fast in its efforts to bolster its military.
“Yes, we have committed to spending more on our security, but without any clear idea of exactly what it should be spent on or how it fits into a broader security strategy,” Mölling said.
Mölling also believes that German’s defense ambitions could be hamstrung by political will: “Careers have been built on the narrative that Germany is a peace-loving nation. The public mood is shifting and possibly at a tipping point, but it would be very hard to be the leader that drove to make Germany a leading player in European security.”
European officials and diplomats are pessimistic and think that the reality of German politics means it will ultimately continue resisting serious reform on defense.
It is often said in diplomatic circles that Germany’s 21st century model for success has been built on three pillars: cheap Chinese labor, cheap Russian energy, and American guarantees of security.
Many believe this well-known preference for diplomatic pragmatism and subsequent reluctance to pick sides will mean any defense reforms will be severely limited.
One German official told CNN that it will be hard for mainstream politicians to break free from old habits: “They have an inherent skepticism against siding overtly with the USA and a subtle hope that the relationship with Russia can be fixed.”
Berlin has also lent its support to Ukraine in other ways, taking action to wean itself off of Russian gas and setting an example for rest of Europe, which has seen its overall consumption of gas go down since the the start of the war. Europe’s relatively warm winter has of course helped, but stopping Putin from weaponizing energy has been an important factor in the Western pushback on Moscow.
But the security map of Europe has been redrawn, as have the dividing lines in the international diplomacy. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of another country has demonstrated more clearly than ever that moral values are not universal.
Germany, Europe’s wealthiest country, has undeniably benefited enormously from its policy of keeping feet in two camps. It is protected by NATO membership while maintaining economic relations with undesirable partners.
That policy has been called out and Germany must now decide exactly what kind of voice it wants to have in the current conversation taking place about global security. The decisions it takes in the next few years could play a crucial role defining the security of the entire European continent for decades to come.
I’m writing this towards midnight, having just finished a set of four 13-hour shifts in my small, coastal hospital’s Accident & Emergency (A&E) department.
It’s hard to describe the helplessness we feel, as doctors, every time we walk through the emergency waiting room, packed with patients, knowing we can only review and treat one person at a time.
Knowing that when we see someone really sick, who needs admission, that they might be waiting on that chair or trolley for over 24 hours before a bed on the ward becomes free.
I’m an internal medicine doctor for the UK’s National Health Service – better known as the NHS. I’m currently on the medical on-call team – the majority of patients who come through the front door at A&E are referred to us.
Government-funded and free at the point of care, the NHS is a source of national pride.
And it is in crisis.
There aren’t enough beds for our patients. Trying to include an extra bed on each side of the ward, is akin to trying to make more space in a car park by simply drawing the lines closer together.
And then, there are not enough staff to care for the beds that we do have. When we manage to make a patient well enough to be discharged, we find we cannot, as there is no one in the community to care for them.
No one to help with the non-medical activities of daily living, such as washing and dressing.
We work in hospitals where in the A&E, a consulting room to review and examine a patient is a luxury, and the doctors queue up for them.
I recently had to perform a lumbar puncture – where a needle is inserted into the patient’s spinal canal, to measure and collect cerebrospinal fluid for testing – normally a procedure that you could do at the bedside.
But this patient didn’t have a bed in A&E, even though they clearly needed one, and was just lying down on two chairs pushed together.
I managed to get a consulting room for 30 minutes and did the procedure there, before I was told to leave by the emergency department consultant. It seems I shouldn’t have been allowed to occupy the room for even that long.
My own son came into our A&E not so long ago. He had a dislocated shoulder after falling off his bike, on a day when I happened to be working at a different hospital.
He was treated relatively quickly, with pain relief, his shoulder popped back into place by the emergency department doctor. His X-ray repeated and checked before being discharged.
Still, he was shocked, visibly shocked at the place where I have spent much of my working life.
It’s different when you see your everyday reality though naïve eyes. He saw the elderly patients on the jigsaw of trolleys crammed into the department, pushed against the wall, squeezed in the gap between the bed and nursing stations.
He saw the fluids hanging from rails where we had no stands, lines running into the patient’s forearms. He saw the oxygen fed into their noses from cylinders propped along the bed, the cacophony of beeping machines and alarms.
It doesn’t look like it does on the TV. It doesn’t even look like it does on reality TV.
Sometimes though we can fix a patient’s problem in reasonable time. The patient’s treatment, albeit in an uncomfortable chair, can still be started. And after 24 hours of antibiotics or fluids or other interventions, they can improve enough to be discharged home.
That happened first thing this morning. It was a relief for the patient, their family and me, that I could send him home with oral antibiotics, some two days after he had come into the emergency department.
In this instance, he had not been left in the waiting room the entire time. We had placed him in a small room with five other patients having interventions in their chairs.
In these closeted spaces, informal bonds form. The patients in those rooms look out for each other. If you call out a name, and someone is too hard of hearing to answer, or in the toilet, the others will let you know where they are.
I’m always apologizing to patients. And to their families. I’m humble about the care that we can offer, with the resources and staffing that we have.
I’m always worrying that while we’re managing the medical issues – while I’m monitoring arterial oxygenation by taking regular blood gases from their radial arteries, while our nurses are administering medication, while our radiologists are reporting the imaging – that our patients are suffering socially and psychologically.
I encourage them to call their families when they’re in the emergency department, and plug in their phone.
I urge them to keep up their food and fluid intake, while stuck in the trolley or chair. “Please have a cup of tea, and a snack, and a meal, whenever someone comes round to offer you one,” I say.
“Even if you don’t feel like it now, you might want it a bit later.”
How is this different from the pandemic? In many ways, it’s not. Then, we worked with the understanding that we might walk into a virus, get ill, and maybe even get critically ill. That’s not changed.
Many of the patients I admitted over Christmas, sitting in the same space as other patients, later tested positive for Covid-19 or Influenza A.
When I wrote an account of the first 40 days of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the start of lockdown, I described the unprecedented nature of the situation, the compromise for patients and my health care colleagues.
“Death and deterioration have been impossibly normalized. You’re living in impossible times,” I wrote.
I never thought that almost three years later we would still be working like this. I had hoped to look back at that time with learning and wisdom, knowing that it was extraordinary, that we got through it, and hoping that I had done enough to help.
But now, that egotism, that sense of what we are doing as individual clinicians is in any way significant, seems foolish.
We are caught in a trap of underfunding that means what we can offer patients isn’t enough. In medical terms, this is a chronic condition, like heart failure. We are now suffering an acute exacerbation, so the fluid that should have been pumped around efficiently is now filling our boots and our lungs. We can barely breathe.
The junior doctors, that is any doctor who is not a consultant, have experienced more than a decade’s worth of sub-inflation pay awards, amounting to a 26% decrease in pay since 2008.
From my personal experience, that seems optimistic. No one that I know wishes to remain in the NHS once their training contract finishes. They are talking about taking a year off, agency work, heading abroad where there is better pay and conditions, having more time to see their families.
They want anything other than what they have experienced for the last three years.
Already this winter we’ve had several strikes from ambulance workers and nurses, with more planned this week.
But next year, every day will be like a strike day, if something isn’t done to prevent our clinical staff from giving up and burning out.
And the tragedy is that this feels orchestrated. This chronic disease, this failure of our hearts, has been deliberately mismanaged; with the decade of persistent underfunding, it is as though the medication that we need has been withheld, to a point of crisis.
And then the political leadership essentially say to us, “Look, you just can’t work anymore. You’re not well.” As though it is our fault.
Our treasured NHS. I still find it extraordinary that I can organize expensive tests and start life-saving treatments and procedures, from the emergency room to the intensive care unit, that would cost hundreds or thousands of pounds, and ask nothing more from a patient, for all of this, than their time in the hospital.
I still feel that being a doctor is the best job in the world, providing care for those who need it. And I have been so proud to be an NHS doctor, giving back to the place which looked after my sister through her breast cancer and chemotherapy, and me through the birth of my children.
The NHS will exist as long as there are those who will fight for it.
But we’re all so tired. People clapped for us during the pandemic, and it felt empty, performative at the time.
It means nothing when we are left to fight for the NHS on our own.
Europeisscrambling to buy diesel fuel from Russia before a ban on imports comes into force in early February, but the frantic stockpiling is unlikely to prevent a new price shock for truckers, drivers and businesses.
In the first two weeks of January, European countries snapped up almost 8 million barrels of Russian diesel, according to energy data provider Vortexa, roughly on par with imports this time last year before Russia invaded Ukraine. Imports in the fourth quarter of 2022 were up nearly 19% on the same period the previous year.
Since Russia’s invasion in February last year, the European Union has made a huge effort to wean itself off Moscow’s oil and natural gas supplies. That has included a ban on all Russian seaborne crude oil imports, which came into force in December.
EU countries drastically reduced their imports of crude from Russia ahead of the ban, but that isn’t happening with diesel because it’s much harder to find alternative sources of the fuel.
Russia is the bloc’s biggest supplier, making up 29% of its total dieselimports last year, data from Rystad Energy shows. The fuel is the continent’s “economic workhorse,” Mark Williams, a research director at Wood Mackenzie, told CNN.
It is used to power the “vast majority” of transportation for goods and commodities around Europe, he said, as well as fueling the bloc’s fleet of diesel cars. About 91% of vans and 96% of all trucks run on diesel, as well as roughly 42% of passenger cars, according to the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association.
“The main difference we see is that Europe was, for months, reducing Russian crude imports before the December deadline began,” Jay Maroo, a senior analyst at Vortexa, told CNN.
“On diesel we see the opposite, where imports have picked up — almost a final dash before the finish line,” he added.
In the last three months of 2022, the bloc imported an average of 604,000 barrels per day of Russian diesel via seaborne tankers, compared to the 508,000 barrels per day imported during the same period the year before, Vortexa data shows.
The EU ban will tighten the global market for diesel, Williams said, unless Russia can successfully divert its cargoes to Latin America and Africa, regions which typically import from the United States. That would free up US barrels to be sent to Europe, plugging the gap left by Moscow, he said.
But importing diesel from suppliers further afield, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, will push up freight costs, feeding into higher consumer prices, he said.
“We are expecting diesel prices to rise in Europe. We’re expecting a spike sort of February, March time,” Williams said.
According to Wood Mackenzie’s estimates, the price of a barrel of diesel will average $40 for the first three months of this year. That’s up a whopping 470% from the average price for the whole of 2021, before Russia’s invasion sent prices soaring.
The average EU cost of a liter of diesel at the pumphit €1.77 ($1.92) on January 9, up from €1.50 ($1.63) the same time last year, data from the European Commission shows.
France could be hit especially hard. Europe’s second largest economy is also its biggest buyer of diesel, responsible for 22% of all seaborne imports over the past three years, according to Vortexa data.
But Jorge León, a senior vice president at Rystad Energy, told CNN that the impact of the ban won’t be felt immediately in Europe because of the large amount of diesel in its stocks.
The European Union has also “done its work to find alternative suppliers,” he said, including Kuwait, which opened a massive oil refinery in November capable of producing 600,000 barrels per day of diesel. That could help cushion the impact of losing Russian supplies.
But if Europe sees a strong rebound in demand as the economy picks up, consumers can expect price rises, he added.
“Deliveries are going to be a bit more expensive… filling up [a] car is going to be a bit more expensive,” León said.
The Biden administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve the sale of 40 F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, after weighing a Turkish request for the planes for more than a year, congressional sources familiar with the deliberations told CNN.
If approved, the sale would be among the largest arms sales in years. The administration is also discussing a separate sale of 40 F-35 warplanes to Greece. There are longstanding tensions between Turkey and Greece.
Turkey was removed from the F-35 program in 2019 in response to Ankara’s decision to purchase the Russian-made S-400 missile system.
The sale to Turkey could put pressure on Ankara to approve the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, a process that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been blocking since last year.
Finland and Sweden were officially invited to join the alliance at the NATO summit in June last year, but as a NATO member Turkey could block them from joining.
A Finnish official told CNN that Finland has “not been part of any discussions” when it comes to the American F-16s.
“Finland has implemented everything that was agreed in Madrid in June. Now we hope all NATO members help us get our accession process over the finishing line. What comes to American F-16s, we obviously have not been part of any discussions. It is an internal US matter,” the Finnish official said.
It is not clear when the administration plans to make a formal request to Congress, as required by law for foreign military sales. But on Thursday night, the administration sent informal notifications about the prospective sale to the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees, kicking off the committee review process, the sources said.
Most administrations typically give Congress informal notification of proposed sales weeks before taking formal action. The informal notification process is a common practice in which the relevant committees get a heads up on planned sales, allowing committee leadership to raise concerns, give their input, or place holds.
Once the administration formally notifies the full Congress of the intended sale, lawmakers then have 30 days to block the deal, which they can do by passing a joint resolution of disapproval.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez said on Friday that he would not approve any proposed sale of F-16 aircraft to Turkey, continuing his longstanding opposition to providing the weaponry to Ankara.
“As I have repeatedly made clear, I strongly oppose the Biden administration’s proposed sale of new F-16 aircraft to Turkey,” the New Jersey Democrat said. “President Erdogan continues to undermine international law, disregard human rights and democratic norms, and engage in alarming and destabilizing behavior in Turkey and against neighboring NATO allies.”
Menendez has been highly critical of Turkey’s targeting of the Kurds and threatened incursions into northern Syria. He has slammed Ankara’s closeness with Moscow and warned the Turks against purchasing any more S-400 missile systems from Russia. Additionally, Menendez has accused Turkey of repeatedly violating Greek airspace with provocative overflights in the Aegean Sea, calling it “unacceptable behavior from a NATO country” in remarks in Athens last year.
“Until Erdogan ceases his threats, improves his human rights record at home – including by releasing journalists and political opposition – and begins to act like a trusted ally should, I will not approve this sale,” Menendez said.
At the same time, the New Jersey Democrat said he welcomed “the news of the sale of new F-35 fighter aircraft to Greece.”
“This defense capability is not only critical for a trusted NATO ally and enduring partner’s efforts to advance security and stability in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also strengthens our two nations’ abilities to defend shared principles including our collective defense, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law,” he said Friday.
A National Security Council spokesperson referred CNN to the State Department for comment.
“As a matter of policy, the Department is not going to comment on proposed defense sales or transfers until they’ve been formally notified to Congress,” State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said at a briefing Friday.
“But what I would say is that Turkey and Greece both are vital, vital, NATO Allies,” he added, noting that the US has “a history of supporting their security apparatuses.”
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in today’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, CNN’s three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.
New York and Amman CNN
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The Islamic Republic of Iran has long ranked among the world’s top executioners. But with the recent death sentences handed down to protesters, critics say the regime has taken capital punishment to a new level.
Last weekend, Iran executed two more protesters charged with killing security personnel, causing an international outcry. Critics said that the executions were a result of hasty sham trials.
The regime executed 314 people in 2021, 20% more than the previous year, rights group Amnesty International said in a report from May 2022. Many of those had to do with drug-related crimes.
This year, a number of protesters are entangled in Iran’s court system, many of whom face a particularly unjust judicial process, according to activists.
Human rights activists have warned there’s a real risk that many of them could become another number in the growing list of those executed by the Islamic Republic. At least 43 people are currently facing execution in Iran, according to a CNN count, but activist group 1500Tasvir says the number could be as high as 100.
“Defendants are systematically deprived of access to lawyers of their choice during the trial, are subjected to tortured and coerced confessions and then rushed to the gallows,” Tara Sepehri Far, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, told CNN.
United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk on Tuesday accused Iran of “weaponizing” criminal procedures, saying it amounts to “state sanctioned killing”
With this round of protests, critics say, the authorities are using charges that carry the death penalty more liberally than they have before, widening the application of such laws to cover protesters.
According to Iranian state media, dozens of government agents, from security officials to officers of the basij paramilitary force, have been killed in the protests. Activist groups HRANA and Iran Human Rights say that 481 protesters have been killed.
Security personnel have died in previous protests as well, Sepehri Far said, “but it is crucial to point out in this (time) round Iranian authorities are using the death penalty way beyond (the) intentional killing of security officers.”
The regime appears to have capitalized on the executions, using them as a deterrent to people eager to speak out and flood the streets, as was seen after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the nation’s morality police.
“The trials and executions are yet another piece of the repression machine serving to demonstrate power and control and spread fear and publicize (the) government’s narrative about protesters,” Sepehri Far explained.
Iran has used Islamic Sharia law to prosecute protesters with crimes carrying the death penalty, namely “waging war against God” or “moharebeh” and “corruption on earth,” according to the UN Office of Human Rights.
The process has been criticized within the country too.
Mohsen Borhani, a professor at Tehran University and an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, has also challenged the use of such religiously based charges against protesters. In a television debate last month, he argued that the protesters executed were charged with waging war against God when their role in the protests did not in fact merit such a charge.
The brandishing of weapons by protesters, he said, was meant to intimidate, not injure security personnel. “This is fundamentally out of the realm of moharebeh because the person’s opposition is towards the government, not civilians.”
Sepehri Far said that Mohsen Shekari, one of the first protesters to be executed, was accused of injuring an officer. “Others have received the death penalty for extremely vague charges such as destruction and arson of public property or using a weapon to spread terror,” she said.
Activists say Iranian authorities have developed sophisticated methods of spreading disinformation on how, why and when executions will be carried out. Civil rights activist Atena Daemi said in a tweet, for example, that several Iranian news outlets had reported that activists on death row had been released, news that was refuted by the prisoners’ families.
Activists have said that condemning the protests is not enough. The European Union has taken note, and as the bloc continues to discuss imposing a fourth round of sanctions on Iran, some members have supported moves to classify its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.
Saudi Arabia to lift restrictions on pilgrim numbers for 2023 Hajj season
Saudi Arabia aims to host a pre-pandemic number of Muslim pilgrims for the Hajj in 2023, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah said in a tweet on Monday. No age limits will be imposed on Hajj pilgrims this season, which starts on June 26.
Background: The kingdom had limited the number of pilgrims to 1,000 in 2020 and in 2021 increased the quota to almost 60,000, but only for residents of Saudi Arabia. In 2022, the kingdom authorized one million Muslims to perform the rites. The holy sites in the cities of Mecca and Medina normally host over 2 million people during the pilgrimage.
Why it matters: Performing the Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam which all able-bodied Muslims are required to perform at least once in their lives. Saudi Arabia has identified the pilgrimage as a key component of a plan to diversify its economy. According to Mastercard’s latest Global Destination Cities Index, Mecca attracted $20 billion in tourist dollars in 2018.
Egypt commits to IMF to slow projects, increase fuel prices
Egypt committed to a flexible currency, a greater role for the private sector and a range of monetary and fiscal reforms when it agreed to a $3 billion financial support package with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Reuters reported, citing an IMF staff report released on Tuesday. Among its pledges is one to slow investment in public projects, including national projects, so as to reduce inflation and conserve foreign currency, without specifying where cuts might fall. Egypt also said it would allow most fuel product prices to rise until they were in line with the country’s fuel index mechanism to make up for a slowdown in such increases over the last fiscal year.
Background: In a letter of intent to the IMF, Egypt said it sought support after the war in Ukraine increased existing vulnerabilities amid tighter global financial conditions and higher commodity prices. Under the support, the IMF will provide Egypt with about $700 million in the fiscal year that ends in June.
Why it matters: Egypt is already suffering from economic hardship and rising inflation that has caused discontent at home. The 2011 revolution was partly triggered by economic matters and the cost of living.
Saudi Arabia plans to use domestic uranium for nuclear fuel
Saudi Arabia plans to use domestically-sourced uranium to build up its nuclear power industry, Reuters cited Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman as saying on Wednesday. He added that recent exploration had shown a diverse portfolio of uranium.
Background: Saudi Arabia has a nascent nuclear program that it wants to expand to eventually include uranium enrichment, a sensitive area given its role in nuclear weapons. Riyadh has said it wants to use nuclear power to diversify its energy mix.
Why it matters: Atomic reactors need uranium enriched to around 5% purity, but the same technology in this process can also be used to enrich the heavy metal to higher, weapons-grade levels. This issue has been at the heart of Western and regional concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. It is unclear where Saudi Arabia’s ambitions end, since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in 2018 that the kingdom would develop nuclear weapons if Iran did. The neighboring United Arab Emirates has committed not to enrich uranium itself and not to reprocess spent fuel.
German exports to Iran rose by 12.7% last year, Reuters reported. Despite a significant deterioration in political ties between the two countries due to Iran’s brutal crackdown on protesters, trade ties remained intact, with the value of trade climbing to $1.6 billion between January and November. Berlin is currently pushing for a fourth package of European Union sanctions on Iran.
The Gulf nation of Oman become the latest in the small group of countries that are considering a move to a four-day workweek.
The government has said that it is studying the possibility of expanding weekends to three days instead of two, citing other nations’ success in pilots to test the move.
Salem bin Muslim Al Busaidi, an undersecretary at the labor ministry, told local media that the nation’s workforce has already increased flexibility, adopting remote work, part-time work and other initiatives to modernize the work environment.
Several countries have experimented with a four-day work week, including Iceland, Spain and Ireland, and the trials suggest that the move improves productivity.
Oman’s neighbor, the UAE, has seen some of the most dramatic changes to the country’s work environment. Besides shifting the country’s weekend to Saturday and Sunday instead of Friday and Saturday, the country adopted a four-and-a-half-day workweek in 2022.
The UAE emirate of Sharjah took that a step further by adopting a four-day work week across all government sectors and allowing private companies to do the same.
The emirate reported a 40% drop in traffic accidents in the first 8 months, a boost in employee productivity, and a drop in gas emissions due to the decrease in commutes, according to local media.
The onset of Covid-19 drastically changed the working environment of the Gulf region as companies were forced to adapt to new ways of working under restrictions.
Pakistan and the United Nations are holding a major conference in Geneva on Monday aimed at marshaling support to rebuild the country after devastating floods in what is expected to be a major test case for who pays for climate disasters.
Record monsoon rains and melting glaciers last September displaced some 8 million people and killed at least 1,700 in a catastrophe blamed on climate change.
Most of the waters have now receded but the reconstruction work, estimated at around $16.3 billion, to rebuild millions of homes and thousands of kilometers of roads and railway is just beginning and millions more people may slide into poverty.
Islamabad, whose delegation is led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, will present a recovery “framework” at the conference where United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and French President Emmanuel Macron are also due to speak.
Guterres, who visited Pakistan in September, has previously described the destruction in the country as “climate carnage.”
“This is a pivotal moment for the global community to stand with Pakistan and to commit to a resilient and inclusive recovery from these devastating floods,” said Knut Ostby, United Nations’ Development Programme’s Pakistan Representative.
Additional funding is crucial to Pakistan amid growing concerns about its ability to pay for imports such as energy and food and to meet sovereign debt obligations abroad.
However, it is far from clear where the reconstruction money will come from, especially given difficulties raising funds for the emergency humanitarian phase of the response which is around half funded, according to UN data.
At the COP27 meeting in Egypt in November, Pakistan was at the forefront of efforts that led to the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund to cover climate-related destruction for countries that have contributed less to global warming than wealthy ones.
However, it is not yet known if Pakistan, with a $350 billion economy, will be eligible to tap into that future funding.
Organizers say around 250 people are expected at the event including high-level government officials, private donors and international financial institutions.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Khalil Hashmi, said Islamabad was willing to pay for about half of the bill but hoped for support from donors for the rest. “We will be mobilizing international support through various means,” he said. “We look forward to working with our partners.”
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation will meet Pakistan’s finance minister on the sidelines of the conference, a spokesperson of the lender said on Sunday, as Pakistan struggles to restart its bailout program.
The IMF is yet to approve the release of $1.1 billion originally due to be disbursed in November last year, leaving Pakistan with only enough foreign exchange reserves to cover one month’s imports.
The United Nations announced Wednesday it has suspended some of its “time-critical” programs in Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s ban on female NGO workers.
In a joint statement released by UN aid chief Martin Griffiths and other humanitarian groups, it warned that further activities will likely need to be paused as it cannot deliver “principled” humanitarian assistance without female aid workers.
“Banning women from humanitarian work has immediate life-threatening consequences for all Afghans. Already, some time-critical programmes have had to stop temporarily due to lack of female staff,” the statement read.
“We will endeavour to continue lifesaving, time-critical activities unless impeded while we better assess the scope, parameters and consequences of this directive for the people we serve.
“But we foresee that many activities will need to be paused as we cannot deliver principled humanitarian assistance without female aid workers.”
It noted that the move comes at a time when over 28 million people in Afghanistan require assistance as the country “grapples with the risk of famine conditions, economic decline, entrenched poverty and a brutal winter.”
The statement reiterated the UN’s condemnation of the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s rights. “We urge the de facto authorities to reconsider and reverse this directive, and all directives banning women from schools, universities and public life.
“No country can afford to exclude half of its population from contributing to society.”
The Taliban last week ordered all local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to stop their female employees from coming to work and suspended university education for all female students in the country. The move drew condemnation from around the world.
In a statement Tuesday, the UNSC expressed its “deep concern” and called for “the full, equal, and meaningful participation of women and girls in Afghanistan.”
The new restrictions are another step in the Taliban’s crackdown on the freedoms of Afghan women, after taking over the country in August 2021.
Although the Taliban repeatedly claimed it would protect the rights of girls and women, the group has done the opposite, stripping away the hard-won freedoms for which women have fought tirelessly over the past two decades.
Some of the Taliban’s most striking restrictions have been around education, with girls also barred from returning to secondary schools in March. The move devastated many students and their families, who described to CNN their dashed dreams of becoming doctors, teachers or engineers.
At least half a dozen major foreign aid groups said they are temporarily suspending their operations in Afghanistan following the ban on female NGO employees.
Protesting Serbs in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo erected new barricades on Tuesday, hours after Serbia said it had put its army on the highest combat alert following weeks of escalating tensions between Belgrade and Pristina.
Serbia’s defense ministry said that given the latest events in the region and Belgrade’s belief that Kosovo was preparing to attack Serbs and forcefully remove the barricades, President Aleksandar Vucic had ordered Serbia’s army and police to be put on the highest alert.
Kosovo’s government called on NATO peacekeepers to remove the barricades, but said it had the capacity and readiness to act.
Kosovo and Serbia intend to join the European Union and have agreed, as part of that membership process, to resolve their outstanding issues and build good neighborly relations.
Here are some facts about the standoff:
Kosovo won independence from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after a guerrilla uprising against Belgrade’s repressive rule.
Serbia, however, still considers Kosovo to be an integral part of its territory and rejects suggestions it is whipping up tensions and conflict within its neighbor’s borders. Belgrade accuses Pristina of trampling on the rights of minority Serbs.
Ethnic Serbs, who do not recognise the Pristina government or Kosovan state institutions, account for 5% of Kosovo’s 1.8 million people, with ethnic Albanians making up about 90%. The Serbs have vented their hostility by refusing to pay Kosovo’s power operator for the electricity they use, for example, and frequently attacking police who try to make arrests.
Fresh ethnic tensions have erupted since December 10 when Serbs erected multiple roadblocks and exchanged fire with police after the arrest of a former Serb policeman for allegedly assaulting serving police officers during a previous protest.
The stand-off comes after months of trouble over the issue of car license plates. Kosovo has for years wanted the approximately 50,000 Serbs in the north to switch their Serbian car license plates to ones issued by Pristina, as part of the government’s desire to assert authority over its territory.
On July 31, Pristina announced a two-month window for the plates to be switched over, triggering protests, but it later agreed to push the implementation date back to next year.
Ethnic Serb mayors in northern municipalities, along with local judges and some 600 police officers, resigned in November in protest at the looming switch.
Serbs in Kosovo want to create an association of majority-Serb municipalities that would operate with greater autonomy. Serbia and Kosovo have made little progress on this and other issues since committing in 2013 to the EU-sponsored dialogue.
NATO has about 3,700 troops stationed in Kosovo to maintain the peace. The alliance said it would intervene in line with its mandate if stability in the area were jeopardized. The European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), which arrived in 2008, still has around 200 special police officers there.
It’s been two years since former Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed his Brexit trade deal and triumphantly declared that Britain would be “prosperous, dynamic and contented” after completing its exit from the European Union.
The Brexit deal would enable UK companies to “do even more business” with the European Union, according to Johnson, and would leave Britain free to strike trade deals around the world while continuing to export seamlessly to the EU market of 450 million consumers.
In reality, Brexit has hobbled the UK economy, which remains the only member of the G7 — the group of advanced economies that also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — with an economy smaller than it was before the pandemic.
Years of uncertainty over the future trading relationship with the European Union, Britain’s largest trading partner, have damaged business investment, which in the third quarter was 8% below pre-pandemic levels despite a UK-EU trade deal being in place for nearly two years.
And the pound has taken a beating, making imports more expensive and stoking inflation while failing to boost exports, even as other parts of the world have enjoyed a post-pandemic trade boom.
Brexit has erected trade barriers for UK businesses and foreign companies that used Britain as a European base. It’s weighing on imports and exports, sapping investment and contributing to labor shortages. All this has exacerbated Britain’s inflation problem, hurting workers and the business community.
“The most plausible reason as to why Britain is doing comparatively worse than comparable countries is Brexit,” according to L. Alan Winters, co-director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy at the University of Sussex.
The sense of gloom hanging over the UK economy is captured by striking workers, who are walking out in ever larger numbers over pay and conditions as the worst inflation in decades eats into their wages. At the same time, the government is cutting spending and hiking taxes to fill the hole in its budget.
While Brexit isn’t the cause of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, it has made the problem more difficult to solve.
“The UK chose Brexit in a referendum, but the government then chose a particularly hard form of Brexit, which maximized the economic cost,” said Michael Saunders, a senior adviser at Oxford Economics and former Bank of England official. “Any hope for economic upside from Brexit is pretty much gone.”
Although Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, its exit from the single market and customs union was finalized only on December 24, 2020, when the two sides finally agreed a free trade deal.
The Brexit deal, known as the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, came into effect on January 1, 2021.
It eliminated tariffs on most goods but introduced a raft of non-tariff barriers, such as border controls, customs checks, import duties and health inspections on plant and animal products.
Before Brexit, a farmer in Kent could ship a truckload of potatoes to Paris just as easily as they might send it to London. Those days are no more.
“We hear stories every single day from small businesses about the nightmare of forms, transportation, couriers, things getting stuck for weeks at a time… the epic length of the problems is just gobsmacking,” said Michelle Ovens, the founder of Small Business Britain, a campaign group.
“The way things have panned out in the last two years has been really bad for small businesses,” Ovens told CNN.
Researchers at the London School of Economics estimate that the variety of UK products exported to the European Union declined by 30% during the first year of Brexit. They said that this was likely because small exporters had exited small EU markets.
Take the example of Little Star, a UK company that makes jewelry for children. Its business took off in the Netherlands and it had plans to expand to France and Germany next. But since Brexit, only two of more than 30 of its Dutch customers are prepared to handle the costs and paperwork to obtain stock from the company.
Products that took two days to ship are now taking three weeks, while import duties and sales taxes have made it much harder to compete with European jewelers, according to Rob Walker, who co-founded the business with his wife, Vicky, in 2017. The company is now looking to the United States for growth opportunities.
“Isn’t it mad that we have to look to the other side of the Atlantic to do business, because it’s so difficult to do business with people 30 miles away?” Walker said.
A British Chambers of Commerce survey of more than 1,168 businesses published this month reported that 77% said Brexit has not helped them increase sales or grow their businesses. More than half said they were finding it difficult to adapt to the new rules for trading goods.
Siteright Construction Supplies, a manufacturer in Dorset, told the Chamber that importing parts from the European Union to fix broken machines has become a costly and “time-consuming nightmare.”
“Brexit has been the biggest-ever imposition of bureaucracy on business,” according to Siteright.
Nova Dog Chews, a producer of snacks for canines, said it would have lost all its EU trade had it not set up a base in the bloc. “This has cost our business a huge amount of money, which could have been invested in the UK had it not been for Brexit,” it added.
A UK government spokesperson told CNN that the government’s export support service has provided exporters with “practical support” on the implementation of the Brexit deal. The deal is “the world’s largest zero tariff, zero quota free trade deal,” the spokesperson added. “It secures the UK market access across key service sectors and opens new opportunities for UK businesses across the globe.”
Britain won’t easily replace what it has lost by forfeiting unfettered access to the world’s largest trading bloc.
The only substantive new trade deals it has struck since exiting the European Union, which did not simply roll over the deals it had as an EU member, have been with Australia and New Zealand. By the government’s own estimate, these will have a negligible impact on the UK economy, increasing GDP in the long run by just 0.1% and 0.03% respectively.
By contrast, the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, which produces economic forecasts for the government, expects Brexit to reduce Britain’s output by 4% over 15 years compared to remaining in the bloc. Exports and imports are projected to be around 15% lower in the long run.
Initial data has borne this out. According to the OBR, in the fourth quarter of 2021, UK goods export volumes to the European Union were 9% below 2019 levels, with imports from the European Union 18% lower. Goods exports to non-EU countries were 18% weaker than in 2019.
The United Kingdom “appears to have become a less trade-intensive economy, with trade as a share of GDP falling 12% since 2019, two and a half times more than in any other G7 country,” the OBR said in the March report.
The decline in exports to non-EU countries could be a sign that UK businesses have become less competitive as they battle higher supply chain costs following Brexit, according to Jun Du, an economics professor at Aston University in Birmingham.
“The UK’s trading ability has been damaged permanently [by Brexit],” Du told CNN. “It doesn’t mean it can’t recover, but it’s been set back for a number of years.”
Research by the Centre for European Reform, a think tank, estimates that over the 18 months to June 2022, UK goods trade is 7% lower than it would have been had Britain remained in the European Union.
Investment is 11% weaker and GDP is 5.5% smaller than it would have been, costing the economy £40 billion ($48.4 billion) in tax revenues annually. That’s enough to pay for three quarters of the spending cuts and tax rises that UK finance minister Jeremy Hunt announced in November.
The United Kingdom is projected to have one of the worst performing economies next year among developed nations.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development expects the UK economy to shrink by 0.4%, ahead only of sanctioned Russia. GDP in Germany is forecast to be 0.3% smaller.
The International Monetary Fund forecasts growth of just 0.3% for UK GDP next year, ahead of only Germany, Italy and Russia, which are expected to contract.
Both institutions say high inflation and rising interest rates will weigh on spending by consumers and businesses in Britain.
According to the Confederation of British Industry, a leading business group, the fall in private sector activity picked up pace in December and has now declined for five consecutive quarters.
The downward trend “looks set to deepen” in 2023, principal economist at the CBI Martin Sartorius said in a statement.
“Businesses continue to face a number of headwinds, with rising costs, labor shortages, and weakening demand contributing to a gloomy outlook for next year. ”
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in today’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, CNN’s three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.
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Egypt has dug itself a massive hole of debt. On Friday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will extend a $3 billion loan to the country, a fourth aid package in six years, as its financial tailspin continues.
The loan, along with billions of dollars in cash inflows from Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, are Band-Aids, experts say, designed to keep the Arab world’s most populous country afloat. Without proper reforms, however, Egypt may never be able to shake off its chronic financial woes and break its growing debt addiction.
In recent months, the Egyptian pound has plummeted, losing 14.5% of its value against the US dollar in October. The prices of vegetables, dairy products and bread skyrocketed. Some families are restricting their diets as their purchasing power shrinks, while others struggle to find imported products once available at their local stores.
In a country with a long history of political tension and a fast-growing population – currently 104 million people – the repercussions of economic pain can be far-reaching. When millions of Egyptian protesters toppled former President Hosni Mubarak during the 2011 Arab Spring, “Bread, freedom and social justice” was among the most popular chants.
Egypt’s main Gulf Arab backers recognize what’s at stake here. Billions of dollars from Abu Dhabi and Riyadh have poured into the Egyptian economy in recent years. Both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia saw giant windfalls on the back of this year’s high oil prices. They’ve used some of that money to bolster the economies of their allies in the Middle East.
In August, Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company (ADQ), one of the emirate’s wealth funds, announced a number of investments in publicly listed companies in Egypt, “building on its long-term commitment to investing in the country’s economic growth through its $20 billion joint strategic investment platform,” it said in a statement.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) also launched the Saudi Egyptian Investment Company (SEIC) in August, a company dedicated to investments in several vital sectors of the Egyptian economy. SEIC has bought $1.3 billion dollars’ worth of shares in four Egyptian businesses.
Still, the Egyptian economy has struggled to shake off its economic woes. Inflation is at a five-year high, making food and other basic goods unaffordable to tens of millions of vulnerable Egyptians.
The North African state now owes more than $52 billion to multilateral institutions, at least 44.7% of which is owed to the IMF alone.
Its foreign debt “has more than tripled between June 2013 and March 2022, raising the external debt-to-GDP ratio from 15% to approximately more than 35%,” writes Stephan Roll, head of the Africa and Middle East Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin.
“And there is no end in sight,” he adds.
But how did Egypt get here? The problem, analysts say, lies in Egypt’s apparent inability to change the way its economy works, including easing the tight control exerted by the military and its many enterprises. This is a problem, the experts say, that stunts private sector competition and drives away investment.
Egypt has been on the path to debt-addiction for several years. In 2016, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi sealed a deal with the IMF granting a $12 billion loan. The bailout was granted on condition of Egypt’s currency floating freely, which ultimately slashed its value by half in a matter of weeks and pushed up inflation. Harsh austerity measures – including cuts to subsidies on fuel and electricity – were enforced to try to restore government finances.
Despite the bailout, Egypt struggled to fully pick itself back up, with analysts attributing the repeated failures to revitalize the economy to loose agreements and the mismanagement of loans.
“Not only are they [loans] temporary Band-Aids, they’re not conditioned in a manner that would actually push for the reforms necessary to ever allow the Egyptian economy to recover,” said Timothy Kaldas, a policy fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
“Recently they [the multilateral lenders] seem to have started to finally notice that, and seem to want to see some of those reforms, but they haven’t successfully gotten the Egyptians to agree to them,” he added.
The cash-strapped country also spends much of its funds on luxury megaprojects that critics call “unnecessary” when other sectors seem to be in dire need of support, including education and health care. Data pertaining to state spending on these projects is not available to the public.
“Loans were not primarily used to improve the economic framework conditions but to protect the revenues and assets of the armed forces, to finance major projects in which the military could earn significant money, and to pursue an expansive military build-up,” Roll told CNN.
Authorities have repeatedly defended the state megaprojects, arguing that they improved infrastructure, transportation and telecommunications.
“These are projects that cannot be put to the side, as they are projects needed by the Egyptian citizen,” said Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly in a May press conference. He blamed the Covid-19 pandemic and the effects of the Ukraine war for exacerbating Egypt’s financial problems.
Close to 30% of Egypt’s population is below the poverty line, authorities say. The World Bank in 2019 estimated that “some 60% of Egypt’s population is either poor or vulnerable,” highlighting a growing disparity between the rich and poor.
Authorities insist they are making progress. Sisi has repeatedly called on military-owned companies to be listed on the stock exchange, but few concrete steps have been taken to liberalize those enterprises.
In September 2019, brief and rare demonstrations broke out across Egypt, despite a strict ban on protests. They were driven primarily by economic grievances. Protesters also decried the military’s alleged influence over finances. Security forces quickly quelled the demonstrations and more than 4,000 people were arrested.
Irish soldier killed in south Lebanon by ‘hostile mob’
An Irish soldier on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon was shot and killed on Wednesday when his UN convoy was attacked by a “hostile mob,” according to Irish Defense Minister Simon Coveney. Seán Rooney, 23, was shot and killed in the incident, and another Irish soldier was seriously injured.
Background: The convoy was conducting a “standard administrative run” between southern Lebanon and Beirut, Coveney said. The group then came under small arms fire, social media footage showed. Lebanon’s Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati has vowed to hold the culprits accountable. According to multiple official statements, the injured troops were taken to Raee Hospital, near the city of Sidon. Rooney was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
Why it matters: The United Nations has maintained a multinational peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon since 1978, to bolster security in the tense border area between Lebanon and Israel. Irish peacekeepers have been in the country since the start of the mandate. According to Coveney, Rooney’s death was the first Irish fatality in the country in two decades. There are long-simmering tensions between the peacekeeping mission, known as UNIFIL, and locals in the region where Iran-backed Hezbollah dominates.
Iran expelled from UN women’s rights body
In an unprecedented move, UN member states on Wednesday voted to remove Iran from a UN women’s rights body for violating the rights of women and girls amid ongoing protests across the country.
Background: Twenty-nine members of the UN’s Economic and Social Council voted in favor of the resolution to remove Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women, which was proposed by the United States. Eight member states voted against the resolution with 16 abstentions. Iran condemned the move, calling it an “illegal request” that weakens the rule of law in the UN.
Why it matters: Iran had just started a four-year term on the 45-member Commission on the Status of Women, which aims to promote gender equality worldwide. Women in Iran have played a vital role in nationwide demonstrations that erupted in September, but have also allegedly been a target of state violence. Last month, CNN revealed covert testimonies by protesters documenting sexual assault and rape in Iranian detention centers.
Istanbul’s mayor sentenced to jail and faces possible political ban
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu – the most popular rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – was sentenced to nearly three years in jail on Wednesday for insulting public officials. He could face a political ban if the conviction is upheld by an appeals court.
Background: After the court convicted Imamoglu to two years, 7 months and 15 days in prison, his first response to the ruling was defiant. “A handful of people cannot take away the authority given by the will of the people,” the mayor said. “With God’s will, our struggle begins even stronger.” Imamoglu won a rerun election for Istanbul mayor in June 2019 after the first election was canceled due to irregularities.
Why it matters: The decision could bar him from running in the 2023 presidential elections, where he would compete with Turkey’s long-time president. Thousands protested the ruling on Thursday, chanting slogans against Erdogan and his AK party, Reuters reported.
Defending champion France ended Morocco’s 2022 World Cup dream on Wednesday after a 2-0 victory at the Al Bayt Stadium.
Theo Hernández scored on five minutes with an acrobatic finish, with substitute Randal Kolo Muani tapping home late on as France reached its fourth World Cup final just four years after winning in Russia.
But Morocco, the first African team to reach the semifinal stage of the World Cup, can go home with its head held high after running France close before Kolo Muani’s decisive strike.
Having captured the hearts and minds of the footballing world, it was a sad end to Morocco’s aspirations. But it gave reigning champion France a run for its money. Morocco leaves the competition knowing it has achieved more than just success on the pitch.
Read more:
A Kenyan security guard who reportedly fell while on duty at Qatar’s Lusail Stadium has died in hospital, his family and officials have confirmed to CNN. His employer had notified the migrant worker’s family on Saturday that 24-year-old John Njau Kibue had fallen from the 8th floor of the stadium while on duty. His sister Ann Wanjiru told CNN: “We don’t have the money to get justice for him, but we want to know what happened.”
United Nations member states have removed Iran from a key UN women’s rights group just months after it joined. The unusual reversal comes as Iran is rattled by an ongoing protest movement sparked by the death of a young woman in the custody of the country’s so-called “morality police”
Twenty-nine members of the UN’s Economic and Social Council voted Wednesday in favor of a resolution proposed by the United States to “remove with immediate effect the Islamic Republic of Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women for the remainder of its 2022-2026 term.”
Eight member states voted against the resolution, and 16 abstained.
Addressing the council on Wednesday, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that “women and activists have appealed to us, the United Nations, for support.”
“They made their request to us loud and clear: remove Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women.”
“The reason why is straightforward. The Commission is the premier UN body for promoting gender equality and empowering women. It cannot do its important work if it is being undermined from within. Iran’s membership at this moment is an ugly stain on the Commission’s credibility,” Thomas-Greenfield added.
Iran condemned the US resolution, calling it an “illegal request” and said it weakens the rule of law in the United Nations.
Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, Amir Saeed Irvani, said the resolution to remove Iran was built on “baseless claims and fabricated arguments using fake narratives,” according to state news agency IRNA on Wednesday.
Iran had only just begun its four-year term on the 45-member Commission on the Status of Women – which was created to advocate for gender equality globally – after being elected to the body in April.
In recent months, the country has been gripped by mass protests sparked by the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after being detained in Tehran by a police unit that enforces strict dress codes for women, such as wearing the compulsory headscarf.
Iran’s demonstrations, often led by women, have since coalesced around a range of grievances with the regime. Authorities have unleashed a deadly crackdown on demonstrators, with reports of forced detentions and physical abuse being used to target the country’s Kurdish minority group.
Another representative from Iran’s delegation to the UN responded to the vote, saying, “My delegation condemns any politicization of women’s rights and rejects all accusations made in particular by the US and certain EU members.”
She also described Iran’s “efforts to promote and protect women’s rights” driven by the country’s “rich culture and well-established constitution.”
Iran is “a progressive society that takes into consideration the needs and listens to the voices of its women and girls eagerly and strives toward a better future for and with its women and girls,” she said.
A UN report released in March 2021 described Iranian women and girls as treated like “second class citizens.” The report cited widespread child marriage involving girls between the ages of 10 and 14, weak protections against domestic violence, and lack of legal autonomy for women, among other issues.
“Blatant discrimination exists in Iranian law and practice that must change. In several areas of their lives, including in marriage, divorce, employment, and culture, Iranian women are either restricted or need permission from their husbands or paternal guardians, depriving them of their autonomy and human dignity. These constructs are completely unacceptable and must be reformed now,” said the report’s author Javaid Rehman at the time.
Following months of protests, Iran’s Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said in early December that the country’s parliament and judiciary were reviewing the law that requires women to wear a hijab in public, according to pro-reform outlet Entekhab.
But there is no evidence of what, if any, changes could be forthcoming to the law, which came into effect after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Reacting to news of Iran’s removal from the body, Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch said it was a “welcome step,” but remained a “far cry” from true accountability.
In a statement to CNN, Charbonneau added, “What’s needed is urgent coordinated pressure on Iran to end its campaign of violence, credible prosecutions of individuals who are directly responsible for these appalling violations of human rights, and an end to the severe discrimination against women.”
China has challenged a move by the United States to block sales of advanced computer chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese companies by launching a trade dispute at the World Trade Organization, calling the measures “trade protectionism.”
The country’s commerce ministry filed a formal complaint against the United States with the WTO on Monday, according to a statement. The two countries are both members of the trade body, which has a mechanism for resolving disputes.
“China’s filing of a lawsuit at the WTO is to resolve China’s concerns through legal means and is a necessary way to defend its legitimate rights and interests,” the ministry said.
On October 7, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that ban Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The rules also restrict the ability of US citizens or green card holders to support the “development or production” of chips at certain manufacturing facilities in China.
The commerce ministry blasted the US move as threatening global supply chain stability and called it “a typical practice of trade protectionism.” The complaint is the first action China has taken at the global trade body against the US chip sanctions.
US officials say the export controls were intended to protect national security interests.
Analysts widely consider the measures to bea major threat to China’s tech ambitions, as the global semiconductor industry is heavily dependent on the United States and countries aligned with it for chip design, the tools that make them, and fabrication. It also comes as the United States is looking to bolster its domestic chip manufacturing abilities, after chip shortages earlier in the pandemic highlighted the country’s dependence on imports from abroad.
Washington has also pressured its security partners to comply with chip-related curbs on China. Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said on Monday that Washington had spoken with its partners including Japan and the Netherlands to tighten chip-related exports to China, according to Reuters.
Beijing has tried to push back against the sanctions. Last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with leaders from South Korea and the Netherlands, both key to the global chip-making supply chain, at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. He called for both countries to boost cooperation in high-tech manufacturing and avoid “the politicization of economic and trade issues.”
Chips are a growing source of tension between the United States and China. In recent years, Washington has turned up the pressure on China’s tech sector by limiting access to cutting-edge chip components and machinery.
To secure its own chip supplies, Beijing has stepped up efforts to boost domestic semiconductor production in recent years.
In November 2018, just months after Washington hit Chinese telecoms giant ZTE Corp with an export ban, the Chinese government set up an industry alliance of companies and research institutes as part of efforts to design advanced chips. The group’s focus is on developing Risc-V, an open-source chip design architecture that has increasingly become a rival to Softbank
(SFTBF)’s Arm, the current global leader. Members of the consortium include the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba
(BABA), Tencent
(TCEHY), and Baidu
(BIDU).
Eva Kaili, one of the European Parliament’s vice presidents, has been expelled by her political party in Greece amid a corruption probe.
The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), one of Greece’s main opposition parties, said in a statement Friday: “Following the latest developments and the investigation by Belgian authorities into corruption of European officials, MEP Eva Kaili is expelled from PASOK-Movement of change by decision of President Nikos Androulakis.”
Kaili’s political group within the European Parliament, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, also announced on Friday they were suspending Kaili from the group with immediate effect “in response to the ongoing investigations.”
This comes as Belgium’s federal prosecutor confirmed to Belgian public service broadcaster RTBF on Friday that one of the parliament’s 14 vice presidents had been taken in for questioning as part of a probe into corruption involving the European Parliament and a country from the Persian Gulf.
In a statement, the prosecutor said that for two years, Belgian federal police inspectors “suspected a country from the Persian Gulf of influencing economic and political decisions of the European parliament,” according to RTBF.
The Belgian police suspect that the country transferred “consequential sums of money” or “important gifts” to significant actors within the European Parliament, according to RTBF.
The federal prosecutor did not identify the vice president but said they were one of four individuals taken in for questioning.
“Among the arrested persons (is) an elderly European parliamentarian,” the prosecutor said.
Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all surround the Persian Gulf.
Searches carried out as part of the inquiry resulted in the seizure of roughly 600,000 Euros ($632,000) in cash, according to RTBF. Computer materials and phones were also seized as part of the sixteen searches which took place in the Belgian areas of Ixelles, Schaerbeek, Crainhem, Forest and Brussels.
Al Jazeera said Tuesday it will submit a case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in the head while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank in May.
“Al Jazeera’s legal team has conducted a full and detailed investigation into the case and unearthed new evidence based on several eyewitness accounts, the examination of multiple items of video footage, and forensic evidence pertaining to the case,” Al Jazeera said in a statement.
The network claims new evidence and video show the Palestinian-American journalist and her colleagues were directly fired at in a “deliberate killing” by what Al Jazeera called Israeli occupation forces, a claim which Israel has repeatedly denied.
Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid Tuesday repeated a long-standing rejection that any outside authority would investigate Israel Defense Forces troops.
“No one will investigate IDF soldiers and no one will preach to us about morals in warfare, certainly not Al Jazeera,” Lapid said.
The IDF referred CNN questions about the ICC case to the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which declined to comment.
In September, the IDF admitted there is a “high possibility” Abu Akleh was “accidentally” shot and killed by Israeli fire aimed at “suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen during an exchange of fire.”
The IDF said at the time the Israeli military did not intend to pursue criminal charges or prosecutions of any of the soldiers involved.
A CNN investigation published two weeks after Abu Akleh was killed suggested that the fatal shot came from a position where IDF troops are known to have been positioned. The pattern of gunfire on a tree behind where she was standing at the time suggested that the gunfire was targeted rather than indiscriminate, an expert told CNN.
The CNN investigation unearthed evidence — including two videos of the scene of the shooting — suggesting that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death.
She was wearing a flak jacket identifying her as press at the time she was killed.
Al Jazeera said Tuesday: “The claim by the Israeli authorities that Shireen was killed by mistake in an exchange of fire is completely unfounded. The evidence presented to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) confirms, without any doubt, that there was no firing in the area where Shireen was, other than the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) shooting directly at her.”
“The IOF inquiry that found there was no suspicion of any crime being committed is entirely undermined by the available evidence which has now been provided to the OTP. The evidence shows that this deliberate killing was part of a wider campaign to target and silence Al Jazeera,” the network added.
Abu Akleh’s family also submitted an official complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) earlier this year to demand justice for her death, Al Jazeera reported.
CNN has contacted the ICC to confirm if they received the case.
A top European Union official warned Twitter owner Elon Musk on Wednesday that the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with EU content moderation laws, and that European officials will be monitoring closely for compliance.
Twitter has “huge work ahead” to meet its obligations under the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new platform regulation, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s digital chief, in a readout of his meeting with Musk.
“Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising,” Breton said in a statement. “All of this requires sufficient AI and human resources, both in volumes and skills. I look forward to progress in all these areas and we will come to assess Twitter’s readiness on site.”
During Wednesday’s meeting, Musk agreed to let EU officials “stress test” the social media platform for compliance with the DSA early next year, Breton added. The testing, which will be performed at Twitter’s headquarters in early 2023, will provide ample opportunity for Twitter to make changes in order to meet any legal deadlines and to prepare for an independent audit of the company’s practices, Breton’s office added.
The DSA, which went into effect this month, lays out new rules on how the tech industry handles misinformation and illegal content on social media, as well as illegal goods and services on online marketplaces. The biggest companies that violate the law could face billions in fines.
The meeting between Breton and Musk follows an earlier discussion the two had in May in which Musk expressed support for the European regulations.
In a blog post Wednesday, Twitter said none of its policies have changed since Musk took over the company, and that its trust and safety team “remains strong and well-resourced, and automated detection plays an increasingly important role in eliminating abuse.” Content that violates Twitter’s rules, it added, will be demoted on the platform.
Since his purchase of Twitter, however, Musk has restored numerous accounts suspended for earlier violations of Twitter’s rules, including that of former President Donald Trump, and relaxed enforcement of Twitter’s terms, including by ending enforcement of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policies.
In addition to EU scrutiny, Musk’s Twitter could also face additional pressure at home. At a conference on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she “misspoke” when she previously said she sees “no basis” to investigate Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which included financing from a Saudi prince. Yellen added that it could be appropriate for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to review Musk’s Twitter takeover.
The extensive Indian diaspora will help the South Asian country reach a special milestone this year.
Asia’s third largest economy is on track to receive more than $100 billion in yearly remittances in 2022, according to a World Bank report published Wednesday. This will be the first time a country will reach that milestone figure, it said.
Remittances, or money transfers from migrant workers to families back home, are an important source of income for households in poorer countries. They not only reduce poverty in developing nations but have also been associated with higher school enrollment rates for children in disadvantaged households.
Over the last few years, the World Bank reportsaid, Indians have moved to high-skilled jobs in high-income countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore — from low-skilled employment in Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar — and sending more money back home as a result.
India had received $89.4 billion in remittances in 2021, according to the World Bank, making it the top recipient globally last year.
“Remittance flows to India were enhanced by the wage hikes and a strong labor market in the United States,” and other rich countries, the bank said.
Despite being poised to reach the record figure, India’s remittance flows are expected to account for only 3% of its GDP in 2022, it said.
Apart from India, the other top recipient countries for remittances in 2022 are expected to be Mexico, China, and the Philippines. The next year may be more challenging for Indian diaspora, however.
2023 will “stand as a test for the resilience of remittances from white-collar South Asian migrants in high-income countries,” because of rising inflation in the United States and slowing global growth, according to the report.
Globally, remittances to low and middle income nations are expected to grow an estimated 5% to $626 billion this year, it added.
Europe is becoming increasingly reliant on China for trade, and many of its top companies are eager to invest in the world’s second biggest economy despite the disruption caused by Covid lockdowns.
But a souring relationship with an increasingly unpredictable Beijing, regret about the price Europe has paid for getting too close to Russia, and rising geopolitical tension has some EU officials considering whether the bloc should start to reduce its exposure.
It’s a calculation EU Council President Charles Michel is weighing up Thursday as he visits Chinese leader Xi Jinping for talks aimed at shoring up diplomatic ties.
A lot has happened since the last time an EU president — appointed by the leaders of the 27 EU member states — met with Xi in person four years ago.
The Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and tit-for-tat sanctions between China and EU lawmakers have strained relations since. The United States, which imposed controls on exports of semiconductors to China in October, is reportedly exerting pressure on Europe to adopt a similarly hard line.
Michel’s spokesperson, Barend Leyts, said in a statement last week that Michel’s visit provides a “timely opportunity” for Europe and China to engage on matters of “common interest.” He did not specify which subjects would be discussed.
But some within Europe are growing wary of close relations with China. The bloc has been badly burned this year by its historic reliance on Russia as its main energy supplier, and diversification has shot up the political agenda.
Those concerns bubbled up last month when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz flew to Beijing with a delegation of top business leaders to meet Xi, a move intended to shore up Germany’s second biggest export market after the US.
The bloc is in a similar bind.
“Any problems you have from a political and strategic level [between the EU and China], they tend to spill over to the economic level,” Ricardo Borges de Castro, associate director at the European Policy Centre, told CNN Business.
Both sides have a lot invested in their partnership. The total value of the goods trade between China and Europe hit €696 billion ($732 billion) last year, up by nearly a quarter from 2019.
China was the third largest destination for EU goods exports, accounting for 10% of the total, according to Eurostat data. China is Europe’s biggest source of imports, accounting for 22% in 2021.
“The European market’s importance as a destination for Chinese exports is around double that of the Chinese market for Europeans,” Jörg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China (ECCC) wrote in a September report.
Overall, the relationship is simply “too big to fail,” according to Borges de Castro. Europe is not seeking to decouple from the lucrative Chinese market, he added.
“I don’t see [the EU’s strategy] as a decoupling strategy. I think the EU strategy, for the moment, is a diversification strategy… the lesson [from Russia] is that you cannot have a single provider,” he said.
Machinery, vehicles, chemicals, and other manufactured goods account for the vast bulk of goods traded between the two powers, according to Eurostat.
“European companies have done extremely well here and the overall long term outlook is very positive,”ECCC Secretary General Adam Dunnett told CNN Business, adding that he expects European company revenues to keep growingin China over the next decade.
There are areas where Europe is dependent on Beijing, namely for the supply of rare earth metals required to make hybrid and electric vehicles, and wind turbines. Europe’s solar panels are also mostly manufactured in China.
But those dependencies shouldn’t be exaggerated, Dunnett said.
“When you look at some of the broader things that China exports to the EU such as furniture and consumer goods, a lot of those things you can get elsewhere,” he said.
Even so, the United States may exert more pressure on Europe to pull away from China, Borges de Castro noted.In early October, Washington banned Chinese firms from buying its advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license.
Benjamin Loh, the head of Dutch chipmaker ASM International, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that the US was “putting a lot of pressure” on the Dutch government to take a similarly tough stance.
Economic ties between Brussels and Beijing, though mutually beneficial, have frayed in other ways in recent years.
Last year, Chinese direct investment into the European Union dropped to its second lowest level since 2013, only behind 2020, according to analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research firm. It has fallen almost 78% since 2016.
“The level of Chinese investment in Europe is now at a decade low,” Agatha Kratz, director at Rhodium Group, told CNN Business, citing Beijing’s strict capital controls and greater scrutiny by EU regulators.
EU investment into China has also become more concentrated. Between 2018 and 2021, the top 10 European investors in China, including those from the United Kingdom, made up almost 80% of the continent’s total investment in the country, Rhodium Group data shows.
And just four German companies — automakers Volkswagen
(VLKAF), BMW, and Daimler
(DDAIF), and chemicals giant BASF
(BASFY) — made up more than one third of all European investment in those four years.
An investment deal between Beijing and Brussels was shelved last year after EU lawmakers slapped sanctions on Chinese officials over alleged human rights abuses, prompting China to retaliate with its own penalties.
The deal, agreed in principle in 2020 after years of talks, was designed to level the playing field for European companies operating in China, who have long complained that Beijing’s subsidies have put them at a disadvantage.
EU diplomats said in April that a “growing number of irritants” were hurting relations, including China’s tacit acceptance of Russia’s war in Ukraine. They have described China as “a partner for cooperation and negotiation, an economic competitor and a systemic rival.”
The most pressing issue for European businesses in China, according to Dunnett, is its stringent zero-Covid policy.
“For the last year, it’s been the Covid carousel, [the] Covid rollercoaster,” he said. “Every time you think [it was] about to open up, something pulls us back,” he added.
Over the weekend, thousands of protestors took to streets across China in a rare series of demonstrations against the country’s strict Covid controls. Some restrictions have since been lifted in Shanghai and other major cities.
Beijing’s uncompromising approach is helping to further dampen foreign investment in the country, especially among smaller companies, Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a security research group, told CNN Business.
“The general business environment in China is perceived as becoming harder to navigate, and while companies still feel they have to engage given its size and potential, increasingly small to medium sized companies are giving up,” he said.
The Great Barrier Reef should be added to the list of world heritage sites that are “in danger”, a team of scientists concluded after conducting a mission to the world’s largest coral reef system.
In a new UN-backed report released on Monday, the scientists said that the reef is facing major threats due to the climate crisis and that action to save it needs to be taken “with upmost urgency.”
“The mission team concludes that the property is faced with major threats that could have deleterious effects on its inherent characteristics, and therefore meets the criteria for inscription on the list of World Heritage in danger,” the report said.
The 10-day monitoring mission by UNESCO scientists in March came months after the World Heritage Committee made an initial recommendation to list Australia’s Great Barrier Reef as “in danger” due to the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change.
At the time, the agency called on Australia to “urgently” address the worsening threats of the climate crisis, but received immediate pushback from the Australian government.
The long-anticipated final mission report lays out key steps that the scientists say need to be taken urgently, though the report itself was published after a six-month delay. Originally scheduled to be released in May before UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee meeting in Russia, the report was postponed due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The recommendations include slashing greenhouse gas emissions, reassessing proposed projects and credit schemes, and scaling up financial resources to ultimately protect the reefs.
Jumbo Aerial Photography/Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority/AP
Spanning nearly 133,000 square miles and home to more than 1,500 species of fish and over 400 species of hard corals, the Great Barrier Reef is an extremely critical marine ecosystem on the Earth.
It also contributes $4.8 billion annually to Australia’s economy and supports 64,000 jobs in tourism, fishing and research, according to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
But as the planet continues to warm, because of the growing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the reef’s long-term survival has come into question. Warming oceans and acidification caused by the climate crisis have led to widespread coral bleaching. Last year, scientists found the global extent of living coral has declined by half since 1950 due to climate change, overfishing and pollution.
The outlook is similarly grim, with scientists predicting that about 70% to 90% of all living coral around the worldwill disappear in the next 20 years. The Great Barrier Reef, in particular, has suffered many devastating mass bleaching events since 2015, caused by extremely warm ocean temperatures brought by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.
During the UNESCO monitoring missions, reef managers found that the Great Barrier Reef is suffering its sixth mass bleaching event due to heat stress caused by climate change. Aerial surveys of around 750 reefs show widespread bleaching across the reef, with the most severe bleaching observed in northern and central areas.
Bleaching happens when stressed coral is deprived of its food source. With worsening conditions, the corals can starve and die, turning white as its carbonate skeleton is exposed.
“Even the most robust corals require nearly a decade to recover,” Jodie Rummer, associate professor of Marine Biology at James Cook University in Townsville, previously told CNN. “So we’re really losing that window of recovery. We’re getting back-to-back bleaching events, back-to-back heat waves. And, and the corals just aren’t adapting to these new conditions.”
Weeks before the mission, global scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an alarming report concluding that with every extreme warming event, the planet’s vital ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef are being pushed more toward tipping points beyond which irreversible changes can happen.
As researchers on the mission assessed the dire state of one of the world’s seven natural wonders, they witnessed how the climate crisis has drastically changed the coral reef system.
A decision on whether the reef should be officially labeled as “in danger” will be made by the World Heritage Committee next year, once UNESCO compiles a more thorough report that will include responses from the Australian federal and state governments.
Editor’s Note: Adjoa Adjei-Twum. She is the Founder & CEO of the Africa-focused and UK-based advisory firm Emerging Business Intelligence and Innovation (EBII) Group for global investors interested in Africa and emerging markets. The opinions expressed in this article are solely hers.
CNN
—
The recently-concluded COP27 was dubbed the “African COP” – with the continent center stage in the global effort to fight the causes and effects of climate change.
As negotiations in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh spilled over into the weekend, there was a significant breakthrough on one of the most fractious elements – creating a fund to help the most vulnerable developing nations hit by climate disasters.
The backdrop for COP27 was a series of catastrophic global weather events including record-breaking floods in Pakistan and Nigeria, the worst droughts in four decades in the Horn of Africa, and severe European heatwaves and hurricanes in the US.
The loss and damage fund – to pay for the sudden impacts of climate change which are not avoided by mitigation and adaptation – has been a major obstacle in COP talks.
The richest, most polluting nations have been reluctant to agree to a deal, worried that it could put them on the hook for costly legal claims for climate disasters.
I welcome progress here, as African nations are bearing the brunt of climate change. The continent contributes around 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN Environment Programme and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Climate change is estimated to cost the continent between $7bn and $15bn a year in lost economic output or GDP, rising to $50bn a year by 2030, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).
But my joy is muted – the devil is in the detail, as ever. As an African diaspora entrepreneur whose work focuses significantly on the impact of climate change on the risk profile of African financial institutions and nations, I am concerned about the lack of detail about how the fund would work, when it will be implemented, and the timescale. I fear these could take years.
During a recent visit to the US, I discussed reparation money with US Democrat Congresswoman Rep. Ilhan Omar. She said it was important for the US and other countries to make heavy investments, which could come in the form of reparations.
She spoke about the importance of consulting impacted communities in Africa to avoid exploitation and the need for countries such as the US and China to end fossil fuel expansion and phase out existing oil, gas, and coal in a way that is “fair and equitable.”
Adaptation is Africa’s big challenge – the AFDB estimates that the continent needs between $1.3 to $1.6 trillion by 2030 to adapt to climate change.
The bank’s Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program, in partnership with the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), aims to mobilize $25bn in finance for Africa, for projects such as weather forecasting apps for farmers and drought-resistant crops.
It is now time for African nations to levy a climate export tax on commodities, such as cocoa and rubber, to help pay for climate adaptation. But it still falls short of the money Africa needs.
Adaptation is all about building resilience and capacity, and I believe our governments, banks, and businesses must also adapt.
I am calling on our governments, institutions, and companies to boost efforts to attract green finance and make Africa more resilient by improving governance, tax systems, anti-corruption efforts, and legal compliance.
Sustainability is not a business tax, it is essential for business survival. Only companies focused on the changing world around us – from regulation to consumer and investor attitudes – will survive the climate crisis.
Businesses that ignore this can expect fines, boycotts, and limited access to funding. Banks will suffer too. So the financial sector must be better prepared and more agile.
This message will be reinforced when I meet CEOs, banking executives, and Nigeria’s central bank at the 13th Annual Bankers’ Committee Retreat, organized by the Nigerian Bankers Committee, in Lagos next month. The aim is to support the country’s biggest banks as they navigate new international sustainability rules.
Increasingly, investment funds must conform to green taxonomies – a system that highlights which investments are sustainable and which are not. In other words, banks will only support investments by institutions in G20 countries if they conform to national or supranational rules, such as the European Union’s Green Taxonomy.
This will not only help tackle greenwashing but also help companies and investors make more informed green choices. Additionally, G20 countries are asking their banks to forecast how risky their loans are due to climate change.
African nations must implement robust systems to mobilize private capital and foreign direct investment in key sectors. Governments must ensure they have an enabling environment for increased green investments.
Regulators must strengthen their capacity to develop and effectively enforce climate-related rules. Companies, especially banks, should strengthen climate risk management teams, regulatory compliance expertise, and preparation of bankable projects for international climate finance. This is the foundation for a successful transition to a low–carbon economy.
Looking ahead, there are other actions we can take. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) – the world’s largest free trade area and single market of almost 1.3bn people – could protect Africa from the adverse impacts of climate change, such as food insecurity, conflict, and economic vulnerability.
It could lead to the development of regional and continental value chains, inter-Africa trade deals, job creation, security, and peace. A single market could drive less energy-intensive economic growth while keeping emissions low, for example by developing regional energy markets and manufacturing hubs.
But we need much better pan-Africa coordination, like the European Union, to accelerate the AfCFTA. I urge our governments to work together and take swift and concrete actions to ensure the full and effective implementation of the AfCFTA. There is no time to waste.
This will not be popular with some African regimes because they will be forced to be more transparent and accountable with their public finances.
This year’s COP may have been marred by chaos, rows between rich and poorer nations, and broken multi-billion-dollar pledges by developed countries who created the climate crisis.
Many observers point out the final deal did not include commitments to phase down or reduce the use of fossil fuels.
But, the deal to create a pooled fund for countries most affected by climate change is significant, and as UN secretary general António Guterres warned, it was no time for finger-pointing.
It is also no time for the blame game. It is a wake-up call for African governments, banks, institutions, and companies to unite, step up, and adapt to a new climate reality.
