NICOSIA: Cyprus’ defense minister said Wednesday that plans are in motion to build a major naval base on the east Mediterranean island nation’s southern coast capable of hosting large ships from European Union countries and other nations to carry out a variety of missions including humanitarian aid deliveries to the tumultuous Middle East region.
Vasilis Palmas told reporters that Cyprus’ recently elevated geopolitical role as the European Union’s closest member to the Middle East warrants the building of infrastructure that can support policies geared toward the region.
Cyprus has in recent months been the staging ground for the collection and delivery of donated humanitarian aid to war-ravaged Gaza. The aid is being shipped from the Cypriot port of Larnaca to the Palestinian territory after being security screened. Last year, Cyprus served as a waystation for third-country nationals evacuated from Sudan.
Palmas said the construction of the base would “contribute decisively” to policy implementation in the region.
He said Greece is contributing technical know-how to the project, while actual construction will be guided by the findings of an expert study that will be completed in the next few days.
The naval base will be built on an existing naval installation some 25 kilometers (15 miles) east of the coastal town of Limassol, which in 2011 was the site of a huge explosion of 480 tons of seized Iranian gunpowder that killed 13 people, knocked out Cyprus’ main power station and stirred up a political crisis.
Cyprus plans to build a major naval base to play a larger geopolitical role, says defense minister
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Cyprus plans to build a major naval base to play a larger geopolitical role, says defense minister
- Cyprus has in recent months been staging ground for collection and delivery of donated humanitarian aid to Gaza
- Aid is being shipped from the Cypriot port of Larnaca to the Palestinian territory after being security screened
At least 44 civilians killed in extremist attack in Niger, authorities say
- The Interior Ministry says the attack took place on Friday afternoon in the village of Fambita
The attack took place on Friday afternoon in the village of Fambita in the rural commune of Kokorou, near the tri-state border with Mali and Burkina Faso, the ministry said in a statement. It blamed the attack on the Islamic State in the Great Sahara, or EIGS.
The Associated Press was not able to reach out to the EIGS for comment.
“Around 2 p.m., while Muslim worshippers were performing Friday prayers, these heavily armed terrorists surrounded the mosque to carry out their massacre of rare cruelty,” the statement read. The gunmen also set fire to a market and houses before retreating, it added.
The provisional death toll is at least 44 civilians, with 13 severely injured, the ministry said. It declared three days of national mourning
Niger, along with its neighbors Burkina Faso and Mali, has for over a decade battled an insurgency fought by extremist groups, including some allied with Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group.
Following military coups in all three nations in recent years, the ruling juntas have expelled French forces and turned to Russia’s mercenary units for security assistance. The three countries have vowed to strengthen their cooperation by establishing a new security alliance, the Alliance of Sahel States.
But the security situation in the Sahel, a vast region on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, has significantly worsened since the juntas took power, analysts say, with a record number of attacks and civilians killed both by Islamic militants and government forces.
Arrests follow mass protests in defiance of Turkiye’s Erdogan
- Imamoglu was to appear before prosecutors Saturday in graft and terror probes
- The 53-year-old Istanbul mayor was arrested just days before the CHP was to name him their candidate for the 2028 presidential race
ISTANBUL: After his third night in custody, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was to appear before prosecutors Saturday, just hours after hundreds of thousands hit the streets across Turkiye in a massive show of defiance.
It was the third straight night that protesters had rallied against the arrest of Imamoglu — the biggest political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose arrest early Wednesday sparked Turkiye’s biggest street protests in more than a decade.
After an evening of clashes in Istanbul, Ankara and the western city of Izmir between protesters and riot police, who fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to disperse them, the security forces arrested 97 people, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said.
And media reports said police had raided scores of homes overnight, although there was no immediate confirmation of the number detained.
The 53-year-old mayor, who was arrested just days before the CHP was to name him their candidate for the 2028 presidential race, was speaking to police on Saturday morning in connection with the “terror” probe, party sources told AFP.
He was then expected to appear before prosecutors at Caglayan courthouse at 1800 GMT to be questioned in both the graft and the terror probes, they said.
Already named in a growing list of legal probes, Imamoglu — who was resoundingly re-elected last year — has been accused alongside six others of “aiding and abetting a terrorist organization” — namely the banned Kurdish militant group PKK.
He is also under investigation for “bribery, extortion, corruption, aggravated fraud, and illegally obtaining personal data for profit as part of a criminal organization” along with 99 other suspects.
He was questioned by police for six hours Friday about the graft allegations, the party said.
“Mr Imamoglu denies all the charges against him,” one of his lawyers, Mehmet Pehlivan said.
“The detention was aimed at undermining Mr.Imamoglu’s reputation in the eyes of society,” he wrote on X early on Saturday, saying both probes were “based on untrue allegations” and “a violation of the right to a fair trial.”
Demonstrators across the country were due to rally again on Saturday night.
In a message on X sent via his lawyers, Imamoglu said he was “honored and proud” of the demonstrators who hit the streets in more than 50 of Turkiye’s 81 provinces, saying they were “protecting our republic, our democracy, the future of a just Turkiye, and the will of our nation.”
Addressing the crowds outside City Hall in Istanbul on Friday night, Ozgur Ozel, who heads the main opposition CHP, said 300,000 people had joined the demonstration in defiance of a protest ban and a sharp warning from Erdogan that Turkiye would not tolerate “street terror.”
As he spoke, the crowd cheered and applauded, waving flags and banners and chanting slogans like: “Don’t stay silent or it will be you next.”
The move against Imamoglu has hurt the Turkish lira and financial markets, with the stock exchange’s BIST 100 index closing down nearly eight percent on Friday.
Last of six foreign hikers missing in Philippines rescued
- Four foreign hikers who had been missing for days in a mountainous area of the central Philippines were rescued Saturday, local authorities said, a day after their two companions were found safe
MANILA: Four foreign hikers who had been missing for days in a mountainous area of the central Philippines were rescued Saturday, local authorities said, a day after their two companions were found safe.
The six-man group, which included German, British, Russian and Canadian nationals, had set out on Wednesday for what was to be a four-hour excursion in an area of Negros Oriental province officials said was hit by a downpour.
“The army rescuers found them in the vicinity of the Silab hydropower plant,” said Jose Lawrence Silorio, a rescue official in the municipality of Amlan, near the province’s Balinsasayao Twin Lakes Natural Park.
Police identified the men as Germans Aldwin Fink, 60, and Wolfgang Schlenker, 67; Russian Anton Chernov, 38; and 50-year-old Canadian Terry De Gunten.
Philippine Army personnel found the hikers in a mountainous area thick with vegetation, said investigator Leo Gil Villafranca.
“They told the army they got lost due to the fog,” he said, adding all the hikers were residents of the province.
The four were discovered at 9:44 am (0144 GMT), according to local authorities.
“Overall, they are OK, but they had minor abrasions. We wrapped one of them in a blanket because he was feeling cold. But he was eventually able to stand up on his own,” Silorio said.
“They told us they survived by eating edible plants in the forest,” he added.
Silorio said the group was found about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from where fellow hikers Torsten Martin Groschupp, 58, and Alexander Radvanyi, 63, were discovered Friday morning.
An image posted to a police Facebook page showed De Gunten, his legs bloodied, talking to rescuers inside an ambulance while Chernov lay on a stretcher wrapped in a blanket.
Police said Friday that the weather had likely played a role in the group’s becoming lost on what they said was a “difficult” trail in a mountainous area the men were tackling without a guide.
“It was rainy at the time and that led to zero visibility,” said Valencia police officer Henry Japay, adding there was no cell phone reception in the area.
“There’s a big possibility that they stopped and took shelter when it started raining.”
US revokes legal status for 500,000 immigrants
- Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations
WASHINGTON: The United States said Friday it was terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, giving them weeks to leave the country.
President Donald Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations.
The order affects around 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came to the United States under a scheme launched in October 2022 by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden and expanded in January the following year.
They will lose their legal protection 30 days after the Department of Homeland Security’s order is published in the Federal Register, which is scheduled Tuesday.
That means immigrants sponsored by the program “must depart the United States” by April 24 unless they have secured another immigration status allowing them to remain in the country, the order says.
Welcome.US, which supports people seeking refuge in the United States, urged those affected by the move to “immediately” seek advice from an immigration lawyer.
The Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) program, announced in January 2023, allowed entry to the United States for two years for up to 30,000 migrants per month from the four countries, which have grim human rights records.
Biden touted the plan as a “safe and humane” way to ease pressure on the crowded US-Mexico border.
But the Department of Homeland Security stressed Friday that the scheme was “temporary.”
“Parole is inherently temporary, and parole alone is not an underlying basis for obtaining any immigration status, nor does it constitute an admission to the United States,” it said in the order.
Nicolette Glazer, an immigration lawyer in California, said the order would affect the “vast majority” of the half a million immigrants who entered the United States under the CHNV scheme.
“Only 75,000 affirmative asylum applications were filed, so the vast majority of the CHNV parolees will find themselves without status, work permits, and subject to removal,” she posted on X.
“The chaos will be unreal.”
Trump last weekend invoked rare wartime legislation to fly more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador, which has offered to imprison migrants and even US citizens at a discount.
More than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country over the last decade as the oil-rich country’s economy implodes under leftist leader Nicolas Maduro, a bugbear of Washington who has faced major sanctions.
Heathrow resumes operations as global airlines scramble after shutdown
- Flights began to resume late on Friday
- British Airways warns of ‘huge impact’ in coming days
LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
The travel industry was scrambling to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Some flights had resumed on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Teams were working across the airport to support passengers affected by the outage, a Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“We have hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport,” the spokesperson said.
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Heathrow Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said he expected the airport to be back “in full operation” on Saturday.
Asked who would pay for the disruption, he said there were “procedures in place,” adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways chief executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancelations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
They warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.
