LONDON: Kate, Britain’s Princess of Wales, visited a London hospital on Tuesday where she underwent cancer treatment last year to personally thank medics there for their care and support, her office said.
Kate, 43, underwent a course of preventative chemotherapy after major abdominal surgery a year ago revealed the presence of cancer.
For the treatment, which concluded in September, Kate attended the Royal Marsden Hospital in central London and on Tuesday she paid an official visit there to mark her becoming joint patron of its specialist cancer unit along with her husband Prince William.
On her visit she met patients and staff and spoke of her own treatment. A royal source said Kate had wanted to show her gratitude to the hospital staff and highlight its work.
“We are incredibly fortunate to receive Royal Patronage – it is inspiring for staff and patients and enables us to shine a light on the outstanding work our staff deliver every day for patients and their families,” said Cally Palmer, Chief Executive of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.
Kate’s illness meant she was absent from royal duties for most of last year, although she gave a number of health updates in highly personal video messages.
UK's Princess Kate visits hospital where she had cancer treatment
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UK's Princess Kate visits hospital where she had cancer treatment

- For the treatment, Kate attended the Royal Marsden Hospital in central London
- She paid an official visit there to mark her becoming joint patron
Wife of Scotland’s former first minister says Israel starving her family in Gaza

- Nadia El-Nakla, Humza Yousaf slam the Israeli regime’s actions
- Gaza’s children ‘starved, displaced, bombed’ as ‘world watches’
LONDON: Nadia El-Nakla, the wife of former first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, says Israel is starving her family in the Gaza Strip.
El-Nakla and Yousaf, the former leader of the Scottish National Party, appeared together in a video on Wednesday, addressing their family’s suffering in Gaza, where Israel faces charges of war crimes and genocide.
El-Nakla said the Israeli government was deliberately starving her cousin Sally and her four children, as well as her aunt Hanan, her children, and grandchildren, including a 7-month-old baby.
Her family lives in the town of Deir Al-Balah, where Israeli forces have launched a bombing campaign this week.
Ongoing Israeli attacks and the policy of aid restrictions in Gaza have led to food shortages, impacting the 2 million residents. Over 100 human rights organizations warned this week that “mass starvation” is spreading in Gaza.
She said that “starving people were being forced to run while being shot and bombed.”
Yousaf said children in Gaza were being “starved, displaced, bombed, all while the world watches.”
“Sally is one of millions in Gaza. Her husband goes out all day searching for food, often to come home with nothing,” the former SNP leader said.
“And when I say home, I mean a tent and almost 40-degree heat.”
He said that doctors and journalists have become too weak to treat patients or cover news due to severe starvation.
El-Nakla added that “this is a deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people ... This form of warfare is sickening and the stories and images from my family and millions of others in Gaza are absolutely gut-wrenching.
“Can you imagine not being able to feed your children yet knowing the food you so desperately need is only a few miles away?”
She went on: “Sally’s life matters, Palestinian lives matter, and I am begging those who have the power to open the borders to do so now and let the people of Gaza live.”
El-Nakla’s parents, Maged and Elizabeth, were trapped in Gaza for four weeks after visiting family when the war began following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7. They later left through Egypt along with other British nationals.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported on Wednesday that 10 individuals died from malnutrition in the previous 24 hours.
The UK, along with 28 nations, accused Israel this week of inhumane actions, including the “drip feeding” of aid and the killing of civilians seeking food and water in Gaza.
Indonesia arrests 2 foreigners for smuggling cocaine to Bali

- Indonesia’s last executions, of a citizen and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016
- The Denpasar District Court later Thursday is set to sentence two different groups of foreigners on drug charges
A Brazilian man and a South African woman were arrested separately on July 13 after customs officers at Bali’s international airport saw suspicious items in the man’s luggage and the woman’s underwear on X-ray scans.
Indonesia has extremely strict drug laws, and convicted smugglers are sometimes executed by firing squad.
The 25-year-old Brazilian man, who police identified by his initials as YB, was arrested with 3,086.36 grams (6.8 pounds) of cocaine in the lining of his suitcase and backpack shortly after he arrived at the airport from Dubai, said Made Sinar Subawa, head of the Eradication Division at Bali’s Narcotic Agency.
The same day, customs officers caught a 32-year-old South African woman, identified as LN, and seized 990.83 grams (2.1 pounds) of cocaine she in her underwear, Subawa said.
During interrogation, YB said that he was promised 400 million rupiah ($2,450) to hand the cocaine he obtained in Brasilia to a man he called as Tio Paulo, while LN expected to get 25 million rupiah ($1,500) after deliver the drugs to someone she identified as Cindy, according to Subawa.
Subawa said a police operation failed to catch the two people named by the suspects, whom police believe are low-level distributors.
Authorities presented the suspects wearing orange prison uniforms and masks, with their hands handcuffed, at a news conference in Denpasar, the capital, along with the cocaine they were found with.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says Indonesia is a major drug-smuggling hub despite having some of the strictest drug laws in the world, in part because international drug syndicates target its young population.
The Denpasar District Court later Thursday is set to sentence two other groups of foreigners on drug charges. Verdicts for an Argentine woman and a British man who were accused of smuggling cocaine onto the island, and for drug offense against a group of three British nationals, including a woman, are expected to be read out separately at the same court.
About 530 people are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, including 96 foreigners, the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections’ data showed. Indonesia’s last executions, of a citizen and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016.
Thai and Cambodian soldiers fire at each other in disputed border area, injuring 3

- Thai and Cambodian soldiers have fired at each other in multiple contested border areas after the nations downgraded their diplomatic relations in a rapidly escalating dispute
BANGKOK: Thai and Cambodian soldiers fired at each other in multiple contested border areas Thursday, injuring three civilians, after the nations downgraded their diplomatic relations in a rapidly escalating dispute.
A livestream video from Thailand’s side showed people running from their homes and hiding in a concrete bunker Thursday morning as explosions sounded periodically. Clashes appeared to be ongoing in several areas.
The first clash Thursday morning happened in an area where the ancient Prasat Ta Moan Thom temple stands along the border of Thailand’s Surin province and Cambodia Oddar Meanchey province. Both Thailand and Cambodia accused each other of opening fire first.
Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet said Thailand attacked Cambodian army positions at Prasat Ta Moan Thom and Prasat Ta Krabey in Oddar Meanchey province and expanded to the area along Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province and Thailand’s Ubon Ratchathani province.
“Cambodia has always maintained a position of peaceful resolution of problems, but in this case, we have no choice but to respond with armed force against armed aggression,” said the Prime Minister.
The Thai army said three civilians in Surin province were injured when Cambodia fired artillery shells into a residential area. It said residents in the area had been evacuated afterward.
Earlier Thursday, Cambodia said it was downgrading diplomatic relations with Thailand to their lowest level, expelling the Thai ambassador and recalling all Cambodian staff from its embassy in Bangkok. That was in response to Thailand closing its northeastern border crossings with Cambodia, withdrawing its ambassador and expelling the Cambodian ambassador Wednesday to protest a land mine blast that wounded five Thai soldiers.
Relations between the Southeast Asian neighbors have deteriorated sharply since May when a Cambodian soldier was killed in an armed confrontation in another of the several small patches of land both countries claim as their own territory.
The Thai army said of Thursday’s initial clash that its forces heard an unmanned aerial vehicle before seeing six armed Cambodian soldiers moving closer to Thailand’s station. It said Thai soldiers tried to shout at them to defuse the situation but the Cambodian side started to open fire.
Cambodia’s Defense Ministry said Thailand started the armed clash and Cambodia “acted strictly within the bounds of self-defense, responding to an unprovoked incursion by Thai troops that violated our territorial integrity.”
Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen posted on his Facebook page, urging people not to panic and have faith in their government and the military.
The Thai embassy in Phnom Penh posted on Facebook that there were clashes at several border areas that could continue to escalate. It urged Thai nationals in Cambodia to leave the country if they could and advised others not to travel to Cambodia unless absolutely necessary.
On Wednesday, a land mine blast near the border wounded five Thai soldiers, one of whom lost a leg. A week earlier, a land mine in a different contested area exploded and wounded three Thai soldiers when one of them stepped on it and lost a foot.
Thai authorities have alleged the mines were newly laid along paths that by mutual agreement were supposed to be safe. They said the mines were Russian-made and not of a type employed by Thailand’s military. Cambodia rejected Thailand’s account as “baseless accusations,” pointing out that many unexploded mines and other ordnance are a legacy of 20th century wars and unrest.
Nationalist passions on both sides have further inflamed the situation, and Thailand’s prime minister was suspended from office on July 1 to be investigated for possible ethics violations over her handling of the border dispute.
Border disputes are longstanding issues that have caused periodic tensions between the countries. The most prominent and violent conflicts have been around the 1,000-year-old Preah Vihear temple.
In 1962, the International Court of Justice awarded sovereignty over the temple area to Cambodia and that became a major irritant in the relations of both countries.
Cambodia went back to the court in 2011, following several clashes between its army and Thai forces which killed about 20 people and displaced thousands. The court reaffirmed the ruling in 2013, a decision that still rattled Thailand.
With no access to education beyond the 6th grade, girls in Afghanistan turn to religious schools

- At the age of 13, Nahideh is in the last grade of primary school — the limit of education allowed for girls in Afghanistan
- The country’s Taliban government banned girls from secondary school and university three years ago
KABUL: For six hours every day after school, Nahideh works in a cemetery, collecting water from a nearby shrine to sell to mourners visiting loved ones’ graves. She dreams of becoming a doctor — but knows it is a futile dream.
When the next school year starts, she will be enrolling in a madrassa, a religious school, to learn about the Qur’an and Islam — and little else.
“I prefer to go to school, but I can’t, so I will go to a madrassa,” she said, dark brown eyes peering out from beneath her tightly wrapped black headscarf. “If I could go to school then I could learn and become a doctor. But I can’t.”
At the age of 13, Nahideh is in the last grade of primary school, the limit of education allowed for girls in Afghanistan. The country’s Taliban government banned girls from secondary school and university three years ago — the only country in the world to do so. The ban is part of myriad restrictions on women and girls, dictating everything from what they can wear to where they can go and who they can go with.
With no option for higher education, many girls and women are turning to madrassas instead.
The only learning allowed
“Since the schools are closed to girls, they see this as an opportunity,” said Zahid-ur-Rehman Sahibi, director of the Tasnim Nasrat Islamic Sciences Educational Center in Kabul. “So, they come here to stay engaged in learning and studying religious sciences.”
The center’s roughly 400 students range in ages from about 3 to 60, and 90 percent are female. They study the Qur’an, Islamic jurisprudence, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Arabic, the language of the Qur’an.
Most Afghans, Sahibi noted, are religious. “Even before the schools were closed, many used to attend madrassas,” he said. “But after the closure of schools, the interest has increased significantly, because the doors of the madrassas remain open to them.”
No recent official figures are available on the number of girls enrolled in madrassas, but officials say the popularity of religious schools overall has been growing. Last September, Deputy Minister of Education Karamatullah Akhundzada said at least 1 million students had enrolled in madrassas over the past year alone, bringing the total to over 3 million.
Studying the Qur’an
Sheltered from the heat of an early summer’s day in a basement room at the Tasnim Nasrat center, Sahibi’s students knelt at small plastic tables on the carpeted floor, their pencils tracing lines of Arabic script in their Qur’ans. All 10 young women wore black niqabs, the all-encompassing garment that includes a veil, leaving only the eyes visible.
“It is very good for girls and women to study at a madrassa, because … the Qur’an is the word of Allah, and we are Muslims,” said 25-year-old Faiza, who had enrolled at the center five months earlier. “Therefore, it is our duty to know what is in the book that Allah has revealed to us, to understand its interpretation and translation.”
Given a choice, she would have studied medicine. While she knows that is now impossible, she still harbors hope that if she shows she is a pious student dedicated to her religion, she will be eventually allowed to. The medical profession is one of the very few still open to women in Afghanistan.
“When my family sees that I am learning Qur’anic sciences and that I am practicing all the teachings of the Qur’an in my life, and they are assured of this, they will definitely allow me to continue my studies,” she said.
Her teacher said he’d prefer if women were not strictly limited to religious studies.
“In my opinion, it is very important for a sister or a woman to learn both religious sciences and other subjects, because modern knowledge is also an important part of society,” Sahibi said. “Islam also recommends that modern sciences should be learned because they are necessary, and religious sciences are important alongside them. Both should be learned simultaneously.”
A controversial ban
The female secondary and higher education ban has been controversial in Afghanistan, even within the ranks of the Taliban itself. In a rare sign of open dissent, Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Abbas Stanikzai said in a public speech in January that there was no justification for denying education to girls and women.
His remarks were reportedly not well tolerated by the Taliban leadership; Stanikzai is now officially on leave and is believed to have left the country. But they were a clear indication that many in Afghanistan recognize the long-term impact of denying education to girls.
“If this ban persists until 2030, over four million girls will have been deprived of their right to education beyond primary school,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement at the start of Afghanistan’s new school year in March. “The consequences for these girls — and for Afghanistan — are catastrophic. The ban negatively impacts the health system, the economy, and the future of the nation.”
The importance of religious education
For some in this deeply conservative society, the teachings of Islam are hard to overstate.
“Learning the Holy Qur’an is the foundation of all other sciences, whether it’s medicine, engineering, or other fields of knowledge,” said Mullah Mohammed Jan Mukhtar, 35, who runs a boys’ madrassa north of Kabul. “If someone first learns the Qur’an, they will then be able to learn these other sciences much better.”
His madrassa first opened five years ago with 35 students. Now it has 160 boys aged 5-21, half of whom are boarders. Beyond religious studies, it offers a limited number of other classes such as English and math. There is also an affiliated girls’ madrassa, which currently has 90 students, he said.
“In my opinion, there should be more madrassas for women,” said Mukhtar, who has been a mullah for 14 years. He stressed the importance of religious education for women. “When they are aware of religious verdicts, they better understand the rights of their husbands, in-laws and other family members.”
Trump’s trip to Scotland highlights his complex relationship with his mother’s homeland

- He’s likely to get a mixed reception on the trip, which includes visits to his two Scottish golf resorts
- He has faced opposition from environmental campaigners and some neighbors over his Trump International Scotland course in northeast Scotland
LONDON: US President Donald Trump ‘s trip to Scotland this week will be a homecoming of sorts, but he’s likely to get a mixed reception.
Trump has had a long and at times rocky relationship with the country where his mother grew up in a humble house on a windswept isle.
He will be met by both political leaders and protesters during the visit, which begins Friday and takes in his two Scottish golf resorts. It comes two months before King Charles III is due to welcome him on a formal state visit to the UK
A daughter of Scotland
Trump’s mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in 1912 near the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off Scotland’s northwest coast.
“My mother was born in Scotland — Stornoway, which is serious Scotland,” Trump said in 2017.
She was raised in a large Scots Gaelic-speaking family and left for New York in 1930, one of thousands of people from the islands to emigrate in the hardscrabble years after World War I.
MacLeod married the president’s father, Fred C. Trump, the son of German immigrants, in New York in 1936. She died in August 2000 at the age of 88.
Trump still has relatives on Lewis, and visited in 2008, spending a few minutes in the plain gray house where his mother grew up.
A long golf course battle
Trump’s ties and troubles in Scotland are intertwined with golf.
He first proposed building a course on a wild and beautiful stretch of the North Sea coast north of Aberdeen in 2006.
The Trump International Scotland development was backed by the Scottish government. But it was fiercely opposed by some local residents and conservationists, who said the stretch of coastal sand dunes was home to some of the country’s rarest wildlife, including skylarks, kittiwakes, badgers and otters.
Local fisherman Michael Forbes became an international cause célèbre after he refused the Trump Organization’s offer of 350,000 pounds ($690,000 at the time) to sell his family’s rundown farm in the center of the estate. Forbes still lives on his property, which Trump once called “a slum and a pigsty.”
“If it weren’t for my mother, would I have walked away from this site? I think probably I would have, yes,” Trump said in 2008 amid the planning battle over the course. “Possibly, had my mother not been born in Scotland, I probably wouldn’t have started it.”
The golf course was eventually approved and opened in 2012. Some of the grander aspects of the planned development, including 500 houses and a 450-room hotel, have not been realized, and the course has never made a profit.
A second 18-hole course at the resort is scheduled to open this summer. It’s named the MacLeod Course in honor of Trump’s mother.
There has been less controversy about Trump’s other Scottish golf site, the long-established Turnberry resort in southwest Scotland, which he bought in 2014. He has pushed for the British Open to be held at the course for the first time since 2009.
Turnberry is one of 10 courses on the rotation to host the Open. But organizers say there are logistical issues about “road, rail and accommodation infrastructure” that must be resolved before it can return.
Protests and politicians
Trump has had a rollercoaster relationship with Scottish and UK politicians.
More than a decade ago, the Scottish government enlisted Trump as an unpaid business adviser with the GlobalScot network, a group of business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives with a connection to Scotland. It dumped him in 2015 after he called for Muslims to be banned from the US The remarks also prompted Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to revoke an honorary doctorate in business administration it had awarded Trump in 2010.
This week Trump will meet left-leaning Scottish First Minister John Swinney, an erstwhile Trump critic who endorsed Kamala Harris before last year’s election — a move branded an “insult” by a spokesperson for Trump’s Scottish businesses.
Swinney said it’s “in Scotland’s interest” for him to meet the president.
Some Scots disagree, and a major police operation is being mounted during the visit in anticipation of protests. The Stop Trump Scotland group has encouraged demonstrators to come to Aberdeen and “show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.”
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also expected to travel to Scotland for talks with Trump. The British leader has forged a warm relationship with Trump, who said this month “I really like the prime minister a lot, even though he’s a liberal.” They are likely to talk trade, as Starmer seeks to nail down an exemption for UK steel from Trump’s tariffs.
There is no word on whether Trump and Starmer — not a golfer — will play a round at one of the courses.