BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping told Egypt’s prime minister on Thursday that Beijing hoped to work with his country to bring “more stability” to the Middle East, state media reported, as the Israel-Hamas conflict cast a shadow over the region.
“China is willing to enhance cooperation with Egypt... and inject more certainty and stability into the region and the world,” Xi told Mostafa Madbouli at a meeting in Beijing, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
“China and Egypt are good friends who share the same goals and trust each other, and good partners who work hand-in-hand for development and common prosperity,” CCTV reported Xi as saying.
“At present, the international and regional situation is undergoing profound and complex changes, and the world is experiencing rapid changes not seen for a century,” Xi added.
Beijing was also willing to work with Cairo to “jointly safeguard international fairness and justice as well as the common interests of developing countries,” he said.
Since the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas this month, Egypt has mostly kept closed its border with the Gaza Strip, where the humanitarian situation has become increasingly desperate.
But Cairo said Thursday it would allow the “sustainable” passage of humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossing.
Relations between China and Egypt have strengthened in recent months, with Cairo set to become an official member of the BRICS group of emerging economies from next year.
“China congratulates Egypt on joining the BRICS cooperation mechanism and believes that this will inject new impetus into BRICS cooperation,” Xi told Madbouli, according to CCTV.
Xi says will work with Egypt to help stabilize Middle East
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Xi says will work with Egypt to help stabilize Middle East
- China willing to strengthen coordination with Egypt, Arab countries on Gaza war
German FM visits Kyiv, pledges continued support for Ukraine
Wadephul was due to meet with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.
Wadephul said in a statement that Germany will help Ukraine “continue to defend itself successfully — with modern air defense and other weapons, with humanitarian and economic aid.”
Germany has been Ukraine’s second-largest military backer after the United States, whose continuing support is in doubt.
However, Berlin has balked at granting Zelensky’s request to provide Ukraine with powerful German- and Swedish-made Taurus long-range missiles. That’s due to fears that such a move could enrage the Kremlin and end up drawing NATO into Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.
Instead, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged in May to help Ukraine develop its own long-range missile systems that would be free of any Western-imposed limitations on their use and targets.
Wadephul was accompanied on his trip to Kyiv by German defense industry representatives.
Russia’s invasion shows no sign of letting up. Its grinding war of attrition along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line and long-range strikes on civilian areas of Ukraine have killed thousands of troops and civilians.
The Russian effort to capture more Ukrainian territory has been costly in terms of casualties and damaged armor. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has effectively rejected a ceasefire and hasn’t budged from his war goals.
Putin “doesn’t want negotiations, but (Ukrainian) capitulation,” Wadephul said in his statement.
Russia launched its biggest combined aerial attack against Ukraine at the weekend, Ukrainian officials said, in its escalating bombing campaign that has further dashed hopes for a breakthrough in peace efforts.
UN conference seeks boost for aid as US cuts bite
- UN sustainable development goals set for 2030 are slipping from reach just as the world’s wealthiest countries are withdrawing funding for development programs
SEVILLE: A UN conference aiming to rally fresh support for development aid began in Spain on Monday with the sector in crisis as US-led funding cuts jeopardize the fight against poverty.
At least 50 world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Kenya’s William Ruto, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and UN head Antonio Guterres are gathering in the city of Seville for the June 30-July 3 meeting.
Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Angolan leader Joao Lourenco and Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan also joined more than 4,000 delegates from businesses, civil society and financial institutions.
But the United States is snubbing the biggest such talks in a decade, underlining the erosion of international cooperation on combating hunger, disease and climate change.
A blistering heatwave that is scorching southern Europe welcomed the delegates to the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, an example of the extreme weather that scientists say human-driven climate change is fueling.
UN sustainable development goals set for 2030 are slipping from reach just as the world’s wealthiest countries are withdrawing funding for development programs.
US President Donald Trump’s gutting of his country’s development agency USAID is the standout example, but Germany, Britain and France are also making cuts as they boost spending in areas such as defense.
International charity Oxfam says the cuts to development aid are the largest since 1960 and the United Nations puts the growing gap in annual development finance at $4 trillion.
More than 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, according to the World Bank, with rising extreme poverty affecting sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
Disruption to global trade from Trump’s tariffs and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have dealt further blows to the diplomatic cohesion necessary for concentrating efforts on helping countries escape poverty.
Among the key topics up for discussion is reforming international finance to help poorer countries shrug off a growing debt burden that inhibits their capacity to achieve progress in health and education.
The total external debt of the group of least developed countries has more than tripled in 15 years, according to UN data.
Critics have singled out US-based bulwarks of the post-World War II international financial system, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for reform to improve their representation of the Global South.
Painstaking talks in New York in June produced a common declaration to be adopted in Seville that only went ahead after the United States walked out.
The document reaffirms commitment to the UN development goals such as eliminating poverty and hunger, promoting gender equality, reforming tax systems and international financial institutions.
The text also calls on development banks to triple their lending capacity, urges lenders to ensure predictable finance for essential social spending and for more cooperation against tax evasion.
Coalitions of countries will seek to spearhead initiatives in addition to the so-called “Seville Commitment,” which is not legally binding.
But campaigners have criticized the text for lacking ambition and have rung alarm bells about rising global inequality.
“Global development is desperately failing because... the interests of a very wealthy few are put over those of everyone else,” said Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International.
Hundreds of demonstrators braved the sizzling heat in Seville on Sunday to demand change in international tax, debt and aid policies.
“Global south countries will never be able to decide how they want to do development if they are bound to the new colonial debt,” protester Ilan Henzler, 28, told AFP.
“We are here to fight for the abolition of this illegitimate debt.”
China defends diplomats after Taiwan VP car ramming claims
BEIJING: China defended its diplomats on Monday after Taiwan accused Beijing’s embassy staff of planning to ram its vice president’s car during an official visit to Europe.
“Chinese diplomats overseas always respect their host country’s laws and regulations,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said.
Taiwan’s top China policy body, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), said on Friday that Hsiao Bi-khim’s motorcade was surveilled and followed in a ploy to be rammed during a visit to the Czech Republic in March 2024.
Czech military intelligence spokesman Jan Pejsek told AFP on Sunday that Hsiao was targeted by “persons legalized in diplomatic positions at the Chinese Embassy in Prague.”
He said they tailed her and sought information about Hsiao’s program and meetings with Czech officials.
China claims Taiwan as its territory and has ramped up the deployment of fighter jets and warships around the self-ruled island in recent years.
In response to the Czech claims, Beijing insisted on Monday that “Taiwan is a part of China and has no so-called vice president.”
“No matter how the DPP authorities try to change things up and seek independence from the outside, and drive a wedge in China’s diplomatic relationships, they will not be able to cover up their sinister plot and their attempt will not succeed,” Mao said, referring to Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
’We have nothing’: Afghans driven out of Iran return to uncertain future
- Since January, more than 690,000 Afghans have left Iran
- Tehran ordered Afghans without the right to remain to leave by July 6
The 19-year-old and her three siblings are among tens of thousands of Afghans who have crossed the Islam Qala border point in recent days, the majority forced to leave, according to the United Nations and Taliban authorities.
Despite being born in Iran after her parents fled war 40 years ago, Shademani said the country “never accepted us.” When police came to her family’s home in Shiraz city and ordered them to leave, they had no choice.
But Afghanistan is also alien to her.
“We don’t have anything here,” she told AFP in English.
Between Iranian universities that would not accept her and the Taliban government, which has banned education for women, Shademani’s studies are indefinitely on hold.
“I really love studying... I wanted to continue but in Afghanistan, I think I cannot.”
At Herat province’s Islam Qala crossing, the checkpoint is usually busy handling the cycle of smuggling to deportation as young men seek work in Iran.
But since Tehran ordered Afghans without the right to remain to leave by July 6, the number of returnees — especially families — has surged. More than 230,000 departed in June alone, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
Since January, more than 690,000 Afghans have left Iran, “70 percent of whom were forcibly sent back,” IOM spokesperson Avand Azeez Agha told AFP.
Of the more than a dozen returnees AFP spoke to on Saturday, none said they had fled the recent Iran-Israel conflict, though it may have ramped up pressure. Arrests, however, had helped spur their departures.
Yadullah Alizada had only the clothes on his back and a cracked phone to call his family when he stepped off one of the many buses unloading people at the IOM-run reception center.
The 37-year-old said he was arrested while working as a day laborer and held at a detention camp before being deported to Afghanistan.
Forced to leave without his family or belongings, he slept on a bit of cardboard at the border, determined to stay until his family could join him.
“My three kids are back there, they’re all sick right now, and they don’t know how to get here.”
He hopes to find work in his home province of Daikundi, but in a country wracked by entrenched poverty and unemployment, he faces an uphill climb.
The UN mission for Afghanistan, UNAMA, has warned that the influx of deportees — many arriving with “no assets, limited access to services, and no job prospects” — risks further destabilising the crisis-wracked country.
Long lines snaked into tents encircling the reception center where returnees accessed UN, NGO and government services.
Gusty wind whipped women’s Iranian-style hijabs and young men’s trendy outfits, clothing that stood out against the shalwar kameez that has become ubiquitous in Afghanistan since the Taliban swept to power in 2021, imposing their strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Salam Hanafi inspected the site on Saturday, striding through the crowd surrounded by a heavily armed entourage and pledging to ensure “that no Afghan citizen is denied their rights in Iran” and that seized or abandoned assets would be returned.
Taliban authorities have consistently called for “dignified” treatment of the migrants and refugees hosted in Iran and Pakistan, the latter having also ousted hundreds of thousands of Afghans since the latest decades-long war ended.
Over one million Afghans have already returned to Afghanistan this year from both neighboring countries. The numbers are only expected to rise, even as foreign aid is slashed and the Taliban government struggles for cash and international recognition.
The IOM says it can only serve a fraction of the returnees, with four million Afghans potentially impacted by Iran’s deadline.
Some of the most vulnerable pass through the agency’s transit center in Herat city, where they can get a hot meal, a night’s rest and assistance on their way.
But at the clean and shaded compound, Bahara Rashidi was still worried about what would become of her and her eight sisters back in Afghanistan. They had smuggled themselves into Iran to make a living after their father died.
“There is no man in our family who can work here, and we don’t have a home or money,” the 19-year-old told AFP.
“We have nothing.”
Russian forces advance and take first village in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, state media say
MOSCOW: Russian forces have taken control of the first village in the east-central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk, Russian state media and war bloggers said on Monday, after Russia took 950 square km of territory in two months.
There was no immediate confirmation from Ukrainian sources or from the Russian Defense Ministry.
As Moscow and Kyiv talk of possible peace, the war has intensified with Russian forces carving out a 200 square kilometer (77.22 square miles) chunk of Ukraine’s Sumy region and entering the Dnipropetrovsk region last month.
The authoritative Ukrainian Deep State map shows that Russia now controls 113,588 square km of Ukrainian territory, up 943 square km over the two months to June 28.
Russia’s state RIA news agency quoted a pro-Russian official, Vladimir Rogov, as saying that Russian forces had taken control of the village of Dachnoye just inside the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Russia has said it is willing to make peace but that Ukraine must withdraw from the entirety of four regions which Russia mostly controls and which President Vladimir Putin says are now legally part of Russia.
Ukraine and its European backers say those terms are tantamount to capitulation and that Russia is not interested in peace and that they will never accept Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine.
The areas under Russian control include Crimea, more than 99 percent of the Luhansk region, over 70 percent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, all in the east or southeast, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
