ATHENS: Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Saturday announced a “robust” arms purchase program and an overhaul of the country’s military amid rising tension with Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean.
What appears to be Greece’s most ambitious military overhaul in nearly two decades was unveiled as it is engaged in a growing stand-off with Turkey over hydrocarbon resources and naval influence in the waters off their coasts.
The bitter row between the NATO allies has roped in other European countries and even sparked fears of more severe conflict.
“The time has come to reinforce the armed forces... these initiatives constitute a robust program that will become a national shield,” Mitsotakis said in a keynote address in the northern city of Thessaloniki.
Mitsotakis said Greece would acquire 18 French-made Rafale warplanes, four multi-purpose frigates and four navy helicopters, while also recruiting 15,000 new troops and pouring resources into the national arms industry and cyber-attack defense.
New anti-tank weapons, navy torpedoes and airforce missiles will be secured, the PM said in what appears to be Greece’s most ambitious military overhaul in nearly two decades.
The initiative, which includes upgrades of another existing four frigates, is also designed to create thousands of jobs, he said.
More details on the cost of the program and origin of the weapons purchases will be announced at a news conference Sunday, a government source told AFP.
Greece’s last equivalent purchase spree was in the early 2000s with deals brokered or explored for German tanks and submarines, American warplanes and Russian defensive missiles and hovercrafts.
But most of these plans were shelved owing to the cost of organizing the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.
Some of the agreements were dogged by corruption and bribery claims that were later investigated by parliament. Two former Greek defense ministers were subsequently jailed as a result of the probes.
Mitsotakis is believed to have hammered out the program announced on Saturday after talks with French President Emmanuel Macron during a southern European leaders summit in Corsica this week.
In contrast to other EU and NATO allies, France has strongly backed Greece in its burgeoning showdown with Turkey, as well as Cyprus.
Macron has told his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan not to cross “red lines” and has sent warships and fighter jets to the region.
Defense Minister Florence Parly welcomed the arms deal, saying it was the first time a European country had bought the Rafale warplanes.
Mitsotakis has previously said NATO’s “hands-off approach” in not taking sides in the dispute was “profoundly unfair.”
Turkey in August sent an exploration ship and a small navy flotilla to conduct seismic research in waters which Greece considers its own under postwar treaties.
Greece responded by shadowing the Turkish flotilla with its own warships, and by staging naval exercises with several EU allies and the United Arab Emirates in its own show of force.
Turkey “threatens” Europe’s eastern border and “undermines” regional security, Mitsotakis said Saturday.
In an article published in The Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Monde this week, Mitsotakis reiterated his desire for dialogue with Turkey, provided it stops acting “like a provocateur.”
“We do need dialogue, but not when held at gunpoint,” Mitsotakis wrote.
“If we cannot agree then we must seek resolution at the (International Court of Justice at the) Hague,” he said.
Last month, Greece ratified a maritime border pact with Egypt seen as a response to a 2019 Turkish-Libyan accord allowing Turkey access to areas in the eastern Mediterranean where large hydrocarbon deposits have been discovered.
Both Greece and Turkey have rejected each other’s respective agreements as null and void.
EU diplomatic chief Josep Borrell has said that unless Turkey can be engaged in talks, the bloc could develop a list of sanctions at a European summit on September 24 and 25.
Greece announces major arms purchase as Turkey tension rises
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Greece announces major arms purchase as Turkey tension rises
- The bitter row between the NATO allies has roped in other European countries and even sparked fears of more severe conflict
- Mitsotakis said Greece would acquire 18 French-made Rafale warplanes, four multi-purpose frigates and four navy helicopters, while also recruiting 15,000 new troops
French ex-PM Fillon given suspended sentence over wife’s fake job
- Francois Fillon, 71, had been found guilty in 2022 on appeal of embezzlement for providing a fake parliamentary assistant job to his wife
- The Paris appeals court also ordered him to pay a fine of $433,000 and barred him from seeking elected office for five years
PARIS: Former French prime minister Francois Fillon was on Tuesday given a four-year suspended prison sentence over a fake jobs scandal that wrecked his 2017 presidential bid.
Fillon, 71, had been found guilty in 2022 on appeal of embezzlement for providing a fake parliamentary assistant job to his wife, Penelope Fillon, that saw her being paid from public funds although the court found that she never did any work in the National Assembly.
The Paris appeals court also ordered him to pay a fine of 375,000 euros ($433,000) and barred him from seeking elected office for five years.
The sentence was milder than the one handed down in 2022, when he had been ordered to spend one year behind bars without any suspension.
But France’s highest appeals court, the Court of Cassation, overruled that decision and ordered a new sentencing trial.
No change was made to the punishment for Penelope Fillon, who is British, and who was handed a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay the same fine as her husband.
The couple has always insisted that Penelope Fillon had done genuine constituency work.
Neither was present in court for the sentencing.
Fillon, a conservative, earlier this year called the ban on seeking public office a “moral wound.”
The scandal, dubbed “PenelopeGate” by the French press, hurt Fillon’s popularity and contributed to his first-round elimination in France’s 2017 presidential election that was won by current President Emmanuel Macron.
“The treatment I received was somewhat unusual and nobody will convince me otherwise,” Fillon said. “Perhaps there was a link with me being a candidate in the presidential election.”
Sarkozy and Le Pen
Fillon claimed that fake parliamentary jobs were common between 1981 and 2021, saying that “a large majority” of lawmakers had been in a “perfectly similar situation” to his during that time.
His wife’s fake contract ran from 2012 to 2013.
“It is the appreciation of the court that there is no proof of any salaried work in the case,” the court said in its ruling.
Fillon’s lawyer, Antonin Levy, welcomed the decision to spare his client time in prison.
“Francois Fillon is a free man,” he said.
In another recent high-profile case involving French politicians, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, also a conservative, was stripped of his Legion d’Honneur distinction following his conviction for graft.
Sarkozy, 70, had been wearing an electronic ankle tag until last month after France’s highest appeals court upheld his conviction last December of trying to illegally secure favors from a judge.
Sarkozy is currently on trial in a separate case on charges of accepting illegal campaign financing in an alleged pact with late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
Another case involves far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who was convicted in an embezzlement trial over fake European Parliament jobs, and is appealing the verdict.
As well as being given a partly suspended jail term and a fine, she was banned from taking part in elections for five years, which would — if confirmed — scupper her ambition of standing for the presidency in 2027.
Which countries currently have nuclear weapons?
- Russia, US, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan and North Korea possess nuclear weapons
- Israel has never acknowledged having nuclear weapons but is widely believed to have them
Nine countries currently either say they have nuclear weapons or are believed to possess them.
The first to have nuclear arms were the five original nuclear weapons states — the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom.
All five are signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits countries that don’t have nuclear arms not to build or obtain them, and those that do to “pursue negotiations in good faith” aimed at nuclear disarmament.
Rivals India and Pakistan, which haven’t signed the NPT, have built up their nuclear arsenals over the years. India was the first to conduct a nuclear test in 1974, followed by another in 1998. Pakistan followed with its own nuclear tests just a few weeks later.
Israel, which also hasn’t signed the NPT, has never acknowledged having nuclear weapons but is widely believed to.
North Korea joined the NPT in 1985 but announced its withdrawal from the treaty in 2003, citing what it called US aggression. Since 2006, it has conducted a string of nuclear tests.
Iran long has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only and US intelligence agencies have assessed that Tehran is not actively pursuing the bomb now. But it has in recent years been enriching uranium to up to 60 percent purity — near weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
In an annual assessment released this week, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that the nine countries had the following stockpiles of military nuclear warheads as of January:
Russia: 4,309
United States: 3,700
China: 600
France: 290
United Kingdom: 225
India: 180
Pakistan: 170
Israel: 90
North Korea: 50
Ukraine appoints new prosecutor general
- Kravchenko, 35, is now head of the state tax administration
- The prosecutor general’s post has remained vacant since October
KYIV: Ukraine’s parliament on Tuesday appointed Ruslan Kravchenko, one of the key investigators of alleged Russian war crimes during the occupation of the Kyiv region in 2022, as prosecutor general.
Kravchenko, 35, is now head of the state tax administration, and before that chaired the Kyiv region military administration.
He was involved in the recording and prosecuting of alleged Russian atrocities in the town of Bucha, which was occupied for 33 days in the early stages of Moscow’s full-scale invasion. Russia denies accusations of numerous executions, rapes and torture during the occupation.
Kravсhenko was also a prosecutor in Ukraine’s ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s treason case.
The prosecutor general’s post has remained vacant since October, after Andriy Kostin resigned following a scandal around officials receiving fake disability status and avoiding military service.
Pope Leo to escape Rome’s summer heat with July stay at Castel Gandolfo
- The pontiff will spend July 6 to 20 about an hour’s drive south in Castel Gandolfo, the Vatican said
- All of Leo’s public and private audiences have been suspended from July 2 through July 23
VATICAN CITY: As temperatures in Rome swelter this month, reaching more than 35 degrees Celsius (95°F) under the hot Mediterranean sun, Pope Leo has decided to leave town.
The pontiff will spend July 6 to 20 about an hour’s drive south in Castel Gandolfo, a small hamlet on Lake Albano, the Vatican said on Tuesday.
Leo, elected pope on May 8 to replace the late Pope Francis, will also return to the lakeshore for at least one weekend in August, it said.
All of Leo’s public and private audiences have been suspended from July 2 through July 23, the Vatican said, as was usual under Francis, to allow the pontiff a period of rest. They will restart on July 30.
By going to Castel Gandolfo, Leo is restarting a summer tradition that was broken by Francis.
Dozens of popes over centuries have spent the summer months at Lake Albano, where temperatures are usually about ten degrees cooler than Rome, but Francis preferred to stay in his air-conditioned Vatican residence.
The Vatican has owned a papal palace and surrounding grounds in Castel Gandolfo since 1596. Spanning 55 hectares, the property includes official apartments, elaborate Renaissance-style gardens, a forest and a working dairy farm.
Francis, who shunned most of the trappings of the papacy, had the official papal palace turned into a museum.
Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni told Reuters the pope would not stay at the palace, which will remain a museum, and will instead stay on another Vatican property.
Leo will return to Castel Gandolfo for the weekend of August 15 to 17.
August 15, a Catholic feast day to celebrate Mary, the Mother of God, is an Italian public holiday. Many Italians spend that day, and much of August, at the beach.
Black boxes from India plane crash under study to ascertain cause of the disaster that killed 270
- A former pilot and an aviation expert said the recovery of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, or black boxes, are crucial to piece together the sequence of events
NEW DELHI: Investigators in India are studying the black boxes of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner after recovering them from the aircraft wreckage to ascertain the cause of last week’s plane crash that left at least 270 people dead.
The black boxes will provide cockpit conversations and data related to the plane’s engine and control settings to investigators and help them in determining the cause of the crash.
The London-bound Air India aircraft, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, crashed on a medical college hostel soon after taking off from the western city of Ahmedabad. Only one passenger survived the crash, while 241 people on board and 29 on the ground were killed in one of India’s worst aviation disaster in decades.
Experts from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau are probing the crash with assistance from the UK, the US and officials from Boeing.
Black box data is crucial
Amit Singh, a former pilot and an aviation expert, said the recovery of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, or black boxes, are crucial to piece together the sequence of events.
The cockpit voice recorder records pilots’ conversation, emergency alarms and any distress signal made before a crash. The plane’s digital flight data recorder stores information related to engine and control settings. Both devices are designed to survive a crash.
“The data will reveal everything,” Singh said, adding that the technical details could be corroborated by the cockpit voice recorder that would help investigators know of any communication between air traffic control and the pilots.
India’s aviation regulatory body has said the aircraft made a mayday call before the crash.
Singh said the investigating authorities will scan CCTV footage of the nearby area and speak with witnesses to get to the root cause of the crash.
Additionally, Singh said, the investigators will also study the pilot training records, total load of the aircraft, thrust issues related to the plane’s engine, as well as its worthiness in terms of past performances and any previously reported issues.
Investigation into the crash could take time
Aurobindo Handa, former director general of India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, said the investigators across the world follow a standard UN-prescribed Manual of Accident Investigation, also called “DOC 9756,” which outlines detailed procedures to arrive at the most probable cause of a crash.
Handa said the investigation into last week’s crash would likely be a long process as the aircraft was badly charred. He added that ascertaining the condition of the black boxes recovered from the crash site was vital as the heat generated from the crash could be possibly higher than the bearable threshold of the device.
The Indian government has set up a separate, high-level committee to examine the causes leading to the crash and formulate procedures to prevent and handle aircraft emergencies in the future. The committee is expected to file a preliminary report within three months.
Authorities have also begun inspecting and carrying out additional maintenance and checks of Air India’s entire fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners to prevent any future incident. Air India has 33 Dreamliners in its fleet.
The plane that crashed was 12 years old. Boeing planes have been plagued by safety issues on other types of aircraft. There are currently around 1,200 of the 787 Dreamliner aircraft worldwide and this was the first deadly crash in 16 years of operation, according to experts.
