A proposal by Liechtenstein would require the US, France, UK, Russia and China to justify vetoing a UNSC action.
The United Nations is set to debate a provision that would require the five permanent members of the body’s Security Council – the United States, United Kingdom, France, China and Russia – to justify invoking their veto powers.
The reform to the Security Council has been floated for years at the UN but has regained new traction following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Currently, the five permanent members can veto any resolutions put forth by the Security Council. Meanwhile, the rotating 10 other members have no such power.
Moscow has used its veto power to limit actions by the UNSC since invading Ukraine on February 24, immediately blocking a resolution that called for Moscow to remove troops from Ukraine.
“We are particularly concerned by Russia’s shameful pattern of abusing its veto privilege over the past two decades,” said the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, in a statement.
The adoption of the Liechtenstein resolution “will be a significant step toward the accountability, transparency and responsibility of all” the permanent members of the Security Council, she added.
The latest proposal, put forth by Liechtenstein, is co-sponsored by 50 countries including the US. No other permanent members are currently co-sponsors, although France has indicated it will support the move, according to the AFP news agency.
The text of the proposal, obtained by the AFP, calls for the 193 members of the General Assembly to gather “within 10 working days of the casting of a veto by one or more permanent members of the Security Council, to hold a debate on the situation as to which the veto was cast”.
Since the first veto ever used – by the Soviet Union in 1946 – Moscow has it 143 times, far ahead of the United States (86 times), Britain (30 times or China and France (18 times).
In early April, the UN general assembly suspended Russia from the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council. At the time, 93 members voted in support of the suspension, 24 voted against and 58 abstained.
France, which last used the veto in 1989, proposed in 2013 that the permanent members collectively and voluntarily limit their use of the veto in the event of a mass atrocity.
Co-sponsored by Mexico and supported by 100 countries, the proposal has so far stalled.
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Soviet-era apartment blocks at the end of a tram line in this western Ukrainian city show an indifferent face to the world, blank and gray. But behind every lighted window is a story.
There is the couple who lament that they may never live in the house being built for them in bloody Bucha. There is the family that spent hours in their basement shelter in Irpin, trapped between armies. There is the woman who fled Kharkiv, becoming displaced for the second time in a decade.
They all escaped to Lviv, along with some 500,000 others — a small fraction of the 10 million Ukrainians who have been chased by war from their homes and resettled elsewhere in the country.
Many sleep on mats in cultural centers and schools, shelter in crowded rooms with relatives and friends. Some plan to move on, perhaps crossing the border to nearby Poland and beyond. Others have put down the first fragile roots. The rest have little idea what to do.
Most just want to go home, if home still stands.
As many as 50 have found shelter in a nine-story building on Trylovskoho Boulevard. It is quiet; They can look through their windows and see a school, a playground, not a tank or rocket fire. It’s a world away from the danger that sent them running from their homes, though in recent days, Lviv too has been a target of Russian missiles.
The families live footsteps apart. They don’t know each other, but they recognize displaced people like themselves on sight, without exchanging a word. Take the small, clanking elevator, walk down the dim corridors and visit with them in their temporary apartments, and you’ll find limbo.
“It’s not my flat. It’s not my life,” Marta Kopan says. “But now I’m here.”
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Marta is 40 weeks pregnant; The baby, a girl, kicks her vigorously as she goes through bags of children’s clothing in the fourth-floor apartment the family borrowed from a cousin. Her birth plan, like so much else, has been abandoned — the place where she had expected to give birth was bombed.
“On the 24th of February, our happy life stopped,” says Marta, 36. She remembers looking out the window of the family’s Kyiv apartment and watching the lines of cars headed for safety. Within days, the Kopans — Marta, her husband and two sons — joined them.
Now, some 300 miles away, she sometimes feels nothing. Sometimes it is all too much.
“I don’t need to read the news,” she says, and starts to weep. “I just get the news from my friends.” They tell her of homes destroyed and bodies found in pieces. One friend now works to deliver babies in an underground shelter. He sent her photos of nearly 200 pregnant women waiting to give birth.
Marta knows that could have been her.
Kyiv is not all the family left behind. A new home, designed by Marta’s mother, had been waiting for the family in Bucha, just outside the capital. There are woods nearby, with trails for hiking and chances for mushroom and berry picking. Now the Russian occupiers have pulled back, leaving some of the war’s worst horrors in their wake, and the family doesn’t know if their dream home was left intact.
They want to stay in Ukraine, but they have no long-term plan. Marta and her husband are doctors and want to stay and help. For now, they live day to day. The elder son, 6-year-old Nazar, continues his schooling online.
Though he knows better, sometimes he asks to return home to Kyiv. “I want my normal life,” he says.
Marta does, too. “I want to have my children to have their own rooms with their Legos, with their different pencils,” she says.
The boy curls up and kisses his mother’s belly, a comfort for her and a greeting for his sister. “I hope he’ll like her when she’ll be crying,” Marta says.
Hours later, just after sunset, the air raid siren wails. The family, like many others here, doesn’t go to the shelter. Marta sits in a puffy coat on the swings, alone in the dusk, while Nazar plays.
___
Iryna Sanina, 33, speaks in a stairwell on a concrete landing between floors. She leans on her husband, Volodymyr, and wears the only sweater she took with her when they fled Irpin. She has fuzzy slippers and her ankles are bare, even when she steps outside to smoke in the freezing weather.
Her eyes fill with tears as tells her story. She and her husband were trapped for days between Ukrainian and Russian forces, quickly learning to distinguish between incoming and outgoing fire. The bridge to safety was destroyed by the Ukrainian side to slow the Russian advance. Even though her husband insisted that she leave, she wanted to stay.
They hid in a basement shelter in the yard. Whenever the shelling eased, they climbed out to shout to their neighbors, checking to see whether they were alive.
Volodymyr stayed in Irpin longer than she did, helping with evacuations, but it was a struggle; tires were quickly shredded by shrapnel on the ground. With communications out, Iryna could reach him only by text message. “I could see he received the messages, but he couldn’t answer,” she says. “I didn’t know for days about his fate, and it was terrifying.”
Eventually, elderly neighbors persuaded him to leave for the sake of his 14-year-old son. The boy now shelters three hours away from Lviv with his grandmother, in a safer place with no air raid sirens at all.
Iryna and Volodymyr share their sixth-floor apartment with four other adults from Irpin, all of them colleagues at the drug company where the couple works. It’s very difficult to live with others, Iryna says, but “we know a lot of people lost everything.”
The couple don’t want to let others know they come from Irpin. They don’t want to look like victims. They want to go home, no matter how devastated it is, and rebuild.
More than anything, Iryna says, “I want to go back and wake up on Feb. 24,” before it all began. She is in tears again.
___
The kitchen ceiling is peeling. The bed is an air mattress. The rooms are mostly bare. But Olya Shlapak’s 8-year-old daughter Zlata is pirouetting in her bedroom with a new friend and telling her parents, “Let’s stay in Lviv.”
Olya, 28. and her husband, Sasha, worry there’s little to return to in Kharkiv, and the home they bought just six months ago. On the first day of Russia’s invasion, they left it to seek safety in the subway, along with hundreds of other residents.
Olya recalls the “biggest fear of my life,” awakening her daughter to tell her the war had started. Luckily, she says, Zlata didn’t see much fighting, but “when she hears loud noises, she tries to hide.”
A week later, they drove to Lviv, thinking they would stay a day or two. They live with their cocker spaniel, Letti, in an eighth-floor apartment found by “a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.” Securing a place in crowded Lviv was hard; some landlords objected to the dog, or even to Sasha. “Many people say the husband should be at the front,” fighting, Olya says.
Sasha continues to work in information technology. Olya can’t bring herself to look for a job. That would mean accepting they might be in Lviv forever. “I’m waiting,” she says. “This is not life for me now.”
Years ago, Olya fled the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine amid the fighting there. That experience taught her not to panic. But she has been shaken by the effects of Russia’s war propaganda on the people she loves. She can barely speak with her parents in Donetsk, for years under Russian sway, about the war. It is difficult to convince them that Ukraine isn’t attacking its own people.
Friends in Russia sent similar messages, or worse. “You Ukrainians deserve to die,” one wrote. Olya told her to lay off the drugs and alcohol. It seemed to be the best answer at the time.
For years, she had avoided watching the news. Now she watches it for hours on end. She cooks. She plays with her daughter. She volunteers, helping other displaced people.
To help fill the time, the family is putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. But the dog has eaten a few of the pieces, and it might never be complete.
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Olha Salivonchuk is not a displaced person, though she has long prepared to be one.
Unlike many Ukrainians, she took seriously the talk in the West about a Russian invasion and packed a “go bag” with clothes, medicine, food and documents in November. On Feb. 24, her husband awakened her: “It’s begun.” Recalling that moment, she is in tears.
Head of the local association of apartment owners, Olha watched the building empty out at the war’s start. “People who lived here, especially with children, they just like disappeared in a moment,” she says. “It was like an empty building. No light in the evening. No cars in the parking. It was very scary.”
But then, realizing that Lviv wasn’t on the front line, people returned. And in the days and weeks that followed, Olha, 41, watched as Ukrainians arrived from places like Chernihiv and Kharkiv, squeezing into apartments with friends, family and co-workers.
Olha herself hosted a dear friend from Kyiv in her ninth-floor apartment for several days before helping her move on. On the eighth floor, a Kyiv family moved in and asked what they could do to help. They pitched in to make the camouflaging nets that cover checkpoints in the city, using spare fabric.
Olha has never leaving, even when a Russian raid considered made their building shake. Her family has lived in the city for generations, and she has been in the apartment for a dozen years.
Every time the air raid siren sounds, she and her husband and 13-year-old daughter Solomiya take their bags to their makeshift shelter in their hallway. She has placed tape on her windows after seeing people who had fled eastern Ukraine do it. “Maybe they know something,” she says.
Olha is aware of the tender nerves of the newly displaced people around her. “I just say ‘You’re new,’” she says. “I don’t want to ask questions. I’m not sure they’re eager to talk about the war. But if they start this conversation, I’m listening.”
Little is needed to make a new home, she says: Tea, blankets, photos and conversation. The newcomers are learning that now.
“They are the same now, they are Ukrainians,” Olha says. They speak with longing about communities left behind, but “they understand that here they have a home, too.”
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
The school in Dasht-e-Barchi – a Hazara Shia neighbor – was hit by three blasts, police say.
A boys’ school in western Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi neighbor has been hit by blasts, causing consequence, police in the Afghan capital have said.
Many residents in the neighborhood belong to the Shia Hazara community, an ethnic and religious minority frequently targeted by ISIL (ISIS) groups in the past.
“Three blasts have taken place … in a high school, there are some consequences to our Shia people,” said Khalid Zadran, the spokesman for Kabul police.
Tuesday’s blasts occurred as students were coming out of their morning classes at the Abdul Rahim Shahid high school, a witness told AFP news agency.
The head of a hospital nursing department, who declined to be named, told Reuters news agency at least four people had been killed and 14 wounded in the blasts.
Al Jazeera however, has not been able to independently confirm the casualty figure.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which followed a lull in violence over the cold winter months and after foreign forces withdrew last year.
The Taliban rulers say they have secured the country since taking power in August, but international officials and analysts say that the risk of an insurgency remains. Many of the attacks in the past several months have been claimed by the ISIL group.
Russia has launched a full-scale ground offensive to take control of Ukraine’s east, according to authorities in Kyiv, with explosions reported all along the front lines and one local official describing the situation as “hell” amid “constant fighting”.
The “Battle for Donbas” began on Monday, according to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a “very large part of the entire Russian army now focused on this offensive”.
The Donbas is Ukraine’s primarily Russian-speaking industrial heartland in the east, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for the past eight years. Pro-Russian leaders there have declared two independent republics, which Russia recognised before launching its invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
In recent weeks, the Kremlin declared the capture of the Donbas its main goal of the war after its attempt to storm Kyiv failed. After withdrawing from the capital, Russia began regrouping and reinforcing its ground troops in the east for an all-out offensive.
Zelenskyy, in a video address, pledged to fight back, saying: “No matter how many Russian troops are driven there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves. We will do it every day.”
The president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, called the offensive “the second phase of the war” and assured Ukrainians their forces could hold off the attack.
“Believe in our army, it is very strong,” he said.
After the offensive got under way, the Ukrainian military reported increased assaults in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions – both of which are part of the Donbas – as well as in the area of Zaporizhzhia.
“This morning, almost along the whole front line of the Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, the occupiers attempted to break through our defences,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, was quoted as telling Ukrainian media on Monday.
“Fortunately, our military is holding out. They passed through only two cities. This is Kreminna and another small town.”
He added: “We are not giving up any of our territories.”
‘It’s hell’
A Ukrainian military official reported “constant fighting” in several cities in Luhansk and said street battles had begun in Kreminna, making evacuation impossible.
“It’s hell. The offensive has begun, the one we’ve been talking about for weeks,” Serhiy Hadai, the regional military administrator for Luhansk, wrote on Facebook. “There’s constant fighting in Rubizhne and Popasna, fighting in other peaceful cities.”
In Kreminna, heavy fire set seven residential buildings on fire and targeted the sports complex where the nation’s Olympic team trains, he said, telling Ukrainian television later that Russians took control of the city after “levelling everything to the ground”.
“The Russian army has already entered there, with a huge amount of military hardware … Our defenders have retreated to new positions,” he added.
Ukrainian media also reported a series of explosions, some powerful, along the front line in the Donetsk region, with shelling taking place in Marinka, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Ukrainian local officials and local media said additional explosions were heard in Kharkiv in the northeast of Ukraine, Mykolaiv in the south and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
Al Jazeera was not immediately able to verify the reports.
A senior US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s assessments of the war, said there were now 76 Russian combat units, known as tactical battalion groups, in eastern and southern Ukraine, up from 65 last week.
That could translate to about 50,000 to 60,000 troops, based on what the Pentagon said at the start of the war was the typical unit strength of 700 to 800 soldiers, but the numbers are difficult to pinpoint at this stage in the fighting.
The official also said that four US cargo flights arrived in Europe on Sunday with an initial delivery of weapons and other materials for Ukraine as part of an $800m package announced by Washington last week. Also, training of Ukrainian personnel on US 155 mm howitzers is set to begin in the next few days.
The capture of the besieged southern port city of Mariupol is seen as key to the Russian offensive, the official said, and not just because it would deprive Ukraine of a vital port and complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, seized from Ukraine in 2014.
If Russian forces succeed in taking complete control of Mariupol, that could free up nearly a dozen battalion tactical groups for use elsewhere in the Donbas, the official said.
‘Nowhere safe’
Russia has claimed control of the strategic city, but Ukrainian officials say it is still contested, with hundreds of Ukrainian fighters holed up in the Azovstal steel plant holding out against the invading troops.
Mariupol city council said at least 1,000 civilians were also hiding in underground shelters beneath the vast steelworks.
Denys Prokopenko, commander of the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, said in a video message that Russia had begun dropping bunker-buster bombs on the plant.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russian forces continued shelling and missile attacks, killing at least three in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv and a further seven in the far western city of Lviv.
The attack on Lviv hit three military infrastructure facilities and an auto shop, according to the region’s governor, Maksym Kozytskyy.
He said the wounded included a child.
Lviv, the biggest city and a central transportation hub in western Ukraine, is about 80km (50 miles) from Poland, a NATO member. It has seen only sporadic attacks during almost two months of war and has become a haven for civilians fleeing the fighting in other parts of the country.
It has also become a crucial gateway for NATO-supplied weapons.
Russia has strongly complained about the flow of Western weapons to Ukraine and warned that such aid could have consequences. On Russian state media, some anchors have charged that the supplies amount to direct Western engagement in the fight against Russia.
The attacks on Monday also damaged a Lviv hotel sheltering displaced Ukrainians.
“The nightmare of war has caught up with us even in Lviv,” said Lyudmila Turchak, who fled with two children from Kharkiv.
“There is no longer anywhere in Ukraine where we can feel safe.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Global finance leaders are putting the growing crisis over food insecurity and skyrocketing food prices at center stage as members of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meet in Washington and grapple with the brutal effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Secretary Janet Yellen was convening a Tuesday morning meeting with leaders from the IMF, World Bank, Group of Seven and Group of 20 global organizations to “call on international financial institutions to accelerate and deepen their response” to countries affected by food issues exacerbated by Russia’s aggression, the Treasury Department said.
Russia and Ukraine produce 14% of the world’s wheat supply, according to the United Nations, and the loss of commodities due to the war has resulted in soaring food prices and uncertainty about the future of food security globally, especially in impoverished countries.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index has made its biggest jump since its inception in 1990, reflecting an all-time high in the cost of vegetable oils, cereals and meat, according to the organization.
A late March report from the organization stated that the global number of undernourished people could increase by 8 million to 13 million people into 2023, “with the most pronounced increases taking place in Asia-Pacific, followed by sub-Saharan Africa, and the Near East and North Africa. If the war lasts, impacts will go well beyond 2022/23.”
Anna Nagurney, a crisis management specialist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Tuesday’s meeting of global leaders was significant and “speaks to the growing fear and the increasing understanding that the world may be on the verge of a hunger catastrophe.”
Nagurney predicted that countries that have not yet provided clear support for Ukraine — such as China and India — will come to realize that the food insecurity from a prolonged war in Ukraine will affect their own national stability and the welfare of their citizens.
“This may help to further isolate Russia both morally and economically,” she said.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said Monday that the international coalition of countries imposing sanctions on Russia and its allies takes the food security threat seriously.
“One of the things we have to do is take practical steps to demonstrate that this system is helping the people who need it the most” he said, which includes a “focus on those countries that are struggling to pay for things like bread for their people in light of the increase in commodities prices.”
Russia is a member of the G-20, which is made up of representatives of industrial and emerging-market nations, but Treasury said that Russians would not be participating in the session on food security.
Decorated glazed bricks almost 3,000 years old are on display at Iran’s National Museum after a four-decade search disrupted by war and an international legal battle.
Lions and winged cows with human heads, horses and bulls with a goat’s horn, kneeling men and women and other mythological figures decorate the work, created by the Mannaeans who lived in northwestern Iran in the first millennium BC.
The 51 square bricks are painted with a glazed coating on a black, brown, light blue, yellow or white background.
Their discovery and repatriation “is a series of incredible adventures,” Youssef Hassanzadeh, an archaeologist with the museum, told AFP.
It is also the latest example of Middle Eastern and African countries recovering stolen antiquities which have ended up in Western countries.
According to Hassanzadeh, the story began after the 1979 Islamic revolution when a farmer, Mirza Ali, discovered painted ceramic bricks while cultivating his field. They had been used to decorate a temple near his village in West Azerbaijan province.
“People were looting and selling glazed bricks, taking advantage of the absence of government control,” said Hassanzadeh, who organised the exhibition at the museum, where visitors peer at the bricks through glass cabinets.
– ‘A unique collection’
A few years later in 1985, during war with Iraq, Iranian authorities sent a group of archaeologists, protected by soldiers, to the village. They started to dig and seized some bricks but it was too late for the others.
Smugglers had already shipped some of them overseas, where a number entered private collections and museums, the archaeologist said.
The story took a new turn when the British Museum learned that an Iranian family had offered to sell a set of glazed bricks in Chiasso, on the Italian-Swiss border. In 1991, the museum sent its curator John Curtis to purchase the collection.
But Curtis realised the bricks came from the West Azerbaijan site “and advised the British Museum and other European museums not to buy it, because it is a unique collection which must not be divided and must be returned to its country of origin,” Hassanzadeh said .
The Iranian owner of the collection had a different view. He was not prepared to return the artifacts from Switzerland.
“In 2008, the Swiss police seized the objects. The case went to court. French archaeologist Remy Boucharlat, who led excavations in Iran, confirmed the collection’s “identity”, the Tehran-based museum said in a statement.
Legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade, with a lawsuit by the National Museum in 2015, and pressure from Iranian diplomats.
“Finally on December 20, 2020, the collection returned to us,” said Jebrael Nokandeh, curator of the National Museum which is exhibiting the bricks until Tuesday.
A separate drawn-out legal saga concluded in October, 2019 when the National Museum opened an exhibition of around 300 cuneiform clay tablets returned from the United States.
Other artifacts have also come back, but with far fewer complications.
Nokandeh, who is also an archaeologist, said a descendant of a Frenchman who lived in Iran during World War II approached Iran’s cultural advisor in Paris last year to say “that he had a collection of Iranian antiquities.”
Those 29 pieces, from the Bronze Age to the Islamic period, are now also on display at the museum, while the quest to recover other stolen and lost artifacts from the country’s rich history continues.
“We are in talks with the United States as well as with Australia to return objects,” Nokandeh said.
The second and final round of presidential elections in East Timor – officially known as Timor-Leste – is under way, with the region’s newest nation facing a generational crossroads.
Since independence in 2002, after a brutal 25-year occupation by Indonesia, the country of 1.3 million people has seen years of political upheaval and hotly-contested elections involving a small cohort of familiar faces.
In the current campaign, political veteran and Nobel laureate Jose Ramos-Horta – running as an independent candidate – needs to improve on his first-round performance by only 30,000 votes to secure the presidency.
The 72-year-old former president and prime minister fell just short of the 50 percent share of the vote required to avoid a runoff in the initial voting that took place in March.
His opponent is incumbent President Francisco ‘Lu Olo’ Guterres, who leads the longstanding resistance-era political party FRETILIN (the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor).
The 67-year-old Guterres, a former rebel fighter against the occupation, finished the first round with just more than 20 percent of the vote.
Lurking in the wings, meanwhile, is the charismatic independence hero Xanana Gusmao, who leads the CNRT (National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction) party and was the country’s first president as well as its fourth prime minister.
Veterans of Timor Leste’s fight for independence from Indonesia continue to dominate the country’s politics 20 years after it officially won its freedom [File: Lirio da Fonseca/Reuters]
With one eye on elections due to take place next year and a hoped-for return to office, the 75-year-old has thrown his backing behind Ramos-Horta.
“The senior position positions in Timor-Leste are still dominated by the 1975 era of politicians,” Michael Leach, a professor of politics and international relations at Swinburne University in Australia, told Al Jazeera.
“There is a sense that this is a legacy election for that generation. This is the election where they set their legacies and so there’s a lot at stake. The question then is how they bring through the next generation of leaders.”
Economic challenges
East Timor has one of the youngest populations in the region, with an average age of 20 years, who face rising unemployment and a reluctance from political leaders to diversify the economy away from gas and oil and into education, agriculture and tourism.
At least 20 percent of eligible voters are just 17 years old and participating in their first election.
“The current candidates in the runoff election are old faces in Timor-Leste’s politics,” researcher Abrao Pereira, 35, told Al Jazeera. “I would have liked to have a new face bring a new colour, a new hope into the politics.
“It’s good for the young people to be involved in politics. Because this is the way to influence big changes in the country in terms of the big decisions that need to be made at the top level.”
Pereira adds that he would like to see the future of East Timor be the primary focus of the election, not old rivalries.
“For me the future of [Timor Leste’s] children greatly depends on the actions of today’s politics. A power struggle has been at the center stage and if this is the political situation moving forward I don’t see a better future for the children of this country.”
“The key political leaders need to understand that what they are doing is not only impacting what is happening at the moment but will have long term impacts on the generations to come.”
Ramos-Horta has campaigned on bringing stability to the government and hinted that he could call early parliamentary elections if he wins.
Guterres’s campaign has been banned in part by in-fighting in his party, but he told reporters in Dili he was confident of winning.
“I am confident that I will win the election again,” Guterres was quoted as saying.
“I call on people to accept whatever the result, and I am ready to work with whoever wins this election.”
Supporters of East Timor’s former leader and Nobel laureate Jose Ramos-Horta show their support for the veteran politician at a rally in March [Lirio da Fonseca/Reuters]
The political rivalry between the presidency and the presidency has also fueled instability in the current incarnation of government.
In 2018, Guterres refused to swear in seven of the CNRT ministers, citing corruption allegations or poor moral standing.
“This highlighted tensions between Fretilin and CNRT, and the potential problem is of ‘cohabitation’ when the president and prime minister come from different parties,” Leach said.
Having been in opposition for two years, Gusmao hopes that by backing Ramos-Horta as president, he can engineer a path back to power despite his advancing years.
Should Ramos-Horta win, Gusmao is likely to push for the resumption of the controversial Tasi Mane oil and gas project, an initiative that was put on hold under the current FRETILIN government.
The project entails investing the majority of the small nations’ funds into an oil and gas project on the south coast of the island. Opponents of the project say gambling the nation’s wealth on a finite resource is a risk too big to take.
Yet it is also considered to be Gusmao’s legacy project, hence the veteran politician’s backing of Ramos-Horta.
Fresh ideas
In return, Gusmao’s public support of Ramos-Horta has given the independent candidate the necessary vote boost to give him a serious chance at the presidency.
Fretilin party supporters shouting slogans and wave flags during a campaign rally for incumbent president Francisco Guterres, known as Lu Olo, during his re-election campaign in Dili, East Timor [Valentino Dariel/AFP]
However, younger voters say that instead of such political deal-making, it is time for new ideas.
“The old generation should give a chance to the young to be involved in politics,” said Tina Quintas, a 33-year-old school teacher. “It’s not as though they are old and less able to manage the country, it’s just good to let the young ones in with new, fresh ideas about the better governance of this nation.
“If women are involved it is important in terms of gender equality. All people have the right to participate in a democratic government. If women are involved more, things could get better in a better way. It is the attitude. If there were more women there could be more changes.”
The East Timor Electoral Law of 2006 requires that women make up one-third of listed party candidates. Such mandatory quotas mean that approximately a third ofarians are women.
The current deputy prime minister is a woman; Armanda Berta dos Santos is one of two deputy prime ministers and is the leader of Enrich the National Unity of the Sons of Timor (KHUNTO).
Her party seeks to represent the disenfranchised youth of East Timor and won nearly nine percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election.
East Timor has a strong history of commitment to voting in the democratic political system, despite the instability and violence that has at times accompanied the process.
Turnout was 77 percent in the first round of the presidential election last March, higher than in the previous poll in 2017.
About 98 percent of the eligible population voted in the 1999 referendum for brutal independence from Indonesia even amid fighting and attacks from the Indonesian military and armed groups that forced thousands to flee.
There was violence too in the 2006 elections, and in 2008, Ramos-Horta was shot in an assassination attempt.
Given the ructions of the past, Quintas says she hopes things will remain calm no matter the outcome.
“I just hope that the election will go peacefully, that there’s no dramas, nothing going on. And I also hope that whoever is going to win that people will not react to that and just accept the outcome of the election.
“Hopefully whoever wins this time they will go with the plan and whatever they have promised to the people of Timor-Leste and whoever wins leads this nation for a better future.”
The incoming president will be installed on May 20, the 20th anniversary of Timor-Leste’s freedom from Indonesia.
A mental hospital in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, after it was shelled by Russian forces. Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, there have been at least 136 attacks on health care facilities across Ukraine, leaving at least 73 people dead and 52 injured, the United Nations said Monday.
Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, said those strikes account for more than 68 percent of all attacks on health care facilities worldwide this year, CNN reports. The World Health Organization reported the numbers.
Roughly 12 million people in Ukraine — more than 1 out of 4 — have been displaced because of the war, Dujarric said, with about 7.1 million internally displaced and 4.9 million refugees. Guterres is “deeply concerned” about the high civilian death toll in Ukraine, Dujarric added, and the damage to critical infrastructure.
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Israeli army says missile fired from besieged Gaza Strip was intercepted as tensions soar over Israeli raids on a holy site in occupied East Jerusalem.
A missile fired from the besieged Gaza Strip into southern Israel has been intercepted, Israel’s army has said, in the first such attack in months amid soaring tensions over a flashpoint site in occupied East Jerusalem.
There were no immediate reports of damage or damage on Monday and no Palestinian group claimed for the rocket, which Israel said was shot down by its Iron Dome interceptor.
Hamas, the Palestinian group that administers the coastal enclave, had warned that any incidents at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound would be a “red line” after Israeli forces raided the site in East Jerusalem several times in recent days, arresting hundreds of Palestinians and leaving dozens injured.
Palestinians Israel of encroaching at Al-Aqsa during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Israel says Palestinian protesters seek to Muslim prayer for political ends and to prevent visits by Jews, who are disruptive celebrating Passover.
The site is revered by Muslims and Jews. Israeli police have said they were committed to ensuring that members of all faiths could celebrate the holidays safely.
Prior to the rocket attack, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett accused Hamas of waging a “wild harassment campaign” against Israel.
Egypt and Jordan, which inked peace agreements with Israel decades ago and coordinate with it on security matters, have condemned the actions of Israeli forces at the site.
Jordan — which serves as custodian of the site — summoned Israel’s deputy charge d’affaires to Amman on Monday in protest.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II said on Monday that Israel’s “unilateral” moves against Muslim worshipers at Al-Aqsa Mosque seriously generald the prospects for peace in the region, according to state media.
The monarch was speaking with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he made remarks blaming Israel for “provocative acts” in the mosque compound that violated “the legal and historic status quo” of the holy shrines.
On Friday, at least 152 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli police inside the mosque compound, the latest outbreak in an upsurge of violence that has raised fears of a slide back to wider conflict.
Crackdowns by Israeli forces on the protesters who were demonstrating against attempts to forcibly expel Palestinians from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah last year were a trigger for an escalation in violence between Israel and Hamas fighters in Gaza.
Jordanian Prime Minister Bisher al-Khasawneh on Monday offered praise for members of the Islamic Waqf, the trust that oversees the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, “who stands tall and those who throw rocks at the pro-Zionists who are defiling Al-Aqsa Mosque while under the security of the Israeli occupation government.”
In response to al-Khasawneh’s remarks, Bennett said: “This is unacceptable to us. This is a reward for the inciters, especially Hamas, which are trying to ignite violence in Jerusalem.”
Israel has sought to improve relations with Jordan over the past year and has recently normalized relations with other Arab states over their shared concerns about Iran.
But a recent wave of violence that left 25 Palestinians and 14 Israelis dead has brought renewed attention to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which it has sought to sideline in recent years.
Ruling suspends mask-wearing rule on public transit nationwide as judge says federal agencies exceeded their authority.
A federal judge in the US state of Florida has ruled a United States government order requiring people to wear masks on public transportation is illegal, overturning a Biden administration effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
Last week, US health officials had extended by 15 days the mandate requiring travelers to wear masks on airplanes, trains, and in taxis, ride-share vehicles or transit hubs, saying they needed time to assess the effect of a recent rise in COVID- 19 cases.
But a ruling on Monday by US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had exceeded its authority with the mandate, had not sought public comment, and did not adequately explain the decision.
Mizelle’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed last year in Tampa, Florida, by a group called the Health Freedom Defense Fund, which has challenged state and federal vaccine and mask mandates in courts across the country.
Masked travelers queue to pass through a security checkpoint at Denver International Airport [File: David Zalubowski/AP Photo]
The CDC first issued a public health order requiring masks on interstate transportation in February 2021. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issued a security directive to enforce the CDC order.
In her 59-page ruling, Mizelle said the only remedy was to vacate the rule entirely across the country because it would be impossible to end it for the limited group of people who objected in the lawsuit.
The judge said “a limited remedy would be no remedy at all” and that the courts have full authority to make a decision such as this — even if the goals of the CDC in fighting the virus are laudable.
“Because our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends, the court declares unlawful and vacates the mask mandate,” she wrote.
The judge sent the issue back to the CDC. It was not clear whether the judge’s order would take immediate effect and the TSA’s order for the mask mandate appeared to still be in effect.
“What we announced last week was just a two-week extension in order to have time to assess what we’ve all seen as rising cases and make an assessment, a recommendation with that in mind,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a news briefing on Monday afternoon.
“So of course it’s disappointing,” said Psaki, of Judge Mizelle’s ruling.
Industry groups and Republican lawmakers had wanted the Biden administration to immediately end the 14-month-old mask mandate last week. But the CDC said it wanted more time to study the BA.2 Omicron subvariant now spreading rapidly in the US.
The City of Philadelphia on Monday re-imposed a local mandate requiring people to wear masks in all indoor public spaces such as restaurants due to rising infections.
A sign requiring masks as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus on a store front in Philadelphia [File: Matt Rourke/AP Photo]
Monday’s ruling in Florida could create confusion on planes, where the mask mandate has caused a surge in incidents and altercations between airline officials enforcing the mandate and passengers rejecting the demand they cover their faces.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that since January 2021, there have been a record 7,060 unruly passenger incidents reported – and 70 percent involved masking rules.
Airlines for America, for example, had urged the Biden administration “to lean into science and research, which clearly support lifting the mask mandate”.
“It makes no sense to require masks on a plane when masks are not recommended in places like restaurants, bars or crowded sports facilities,” the group, which represents major US passenger airlines, said. It did not have an immediate comment on Monday’s ruling.
