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ISTANBUL: Greek Coast Guard ships opened fire on a cargo vessel sailing in international waters in the Aegean Sea, the Turkish Coast Guard said, escalating tensions between the regional rivals that have mounted in recent weeks. There were no casualties in the shooting 11 nautical miles (13 miles) southwest of the Turkish island of Bozcaada on Saturday, the Turkish statement said. It added that after “harassment fire” from two Greek Coast Guard vessels, two Turkish Coast Guard ships went to the area and the Greek boats left. Calls to the Greek Embassy in Ankara went unanswered Sunday, and it wasn’t clear why the gunfire occurred. The neighboring countries have been embroiled in disputes for decades and frictions have ratcheted up in recent weeks, with both sides alleging airspace violations. Greek officials have raised concerns about another outbreak of conflict in Europe, following Russia’s war in Ukraine. Turkey says Greece is breaking international agreements by keeping a military presence on islands close to Turkey’s Aegean coastline. It also has accused Greek air defenses of locking on to Turkish fighter jets during NATO exercises over the eastern Mediterranean. Greece says it needs to defend its eastern islands — including tourist hotspots Rhodes and Kos, which are much closer to Turkey than to the Greek mainland — against its larger and militarily stronger neighbor. Video footage from Saturday purportedly shows a Greek Coast Guard ship alongside the Comoros-flagged ship Anatolian as the sound of about a dozen gunshots are heard. A crew member speaks in Turkish, saying they are being attacked by the Greek Coast Guard. The video, which was released by the Turkish Coast Guard and seems to have been filmed on a cellphone, shows what appears to be a bullet hole in a window and in the ceiling of the cargo ship’s bridge. The Turkish statement said the gunfire was “in disregard of the rules of international law.” The 18 crew of the Anatolian consisted of six Egyptians, four Somalis, five Azerbaijanis and three Turks. A Turkish prosecutor ordered an investigation. The country also has protested to Greek authorities, with Ankara demanding a swift investigation and explanation. The Anatolian was anchored Sunday in the Dardanelles Strait off the Turkish coast, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported. This week, the Greek government wrote letters to NATO, the European Union and the United Nations, asking them to formally condemn increasingly aggressive talk by Turkish officials and suggesting that tensions could escalate into open conflict. Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias said the behavior of Turkey — also a NATO member — risked “a situation similar to that currently unfolding in some other part of our continent,” referring to the war in Ukraine.
NEW YORK: With an estimated 64.3 percent of children globally unable to read and understand simple text, the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed warned journalists that ”in a few years two out of three people wont be able to read your stories.”
The warning came during a UN press briefing on Thursday regarding the upcoming Transforming Education Summit with Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on TES Leonardo Garnier, and UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education Stefania Giannini.
“If this is not called a crisis, frankly, we don’t know what it is,” she said, adding that “the crisis in education does go much deeper, beyond issues of access and inequality, education systems are being tested like never before.”
Today, 222 million young people living in regions affected by wars and disasters — in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America — are without access to uninterrupted or quality education.
According to analysis by Education Cannot Wait, the UN global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, 78.2 million of these crisis-impacted children are out of school and 119.6 million are not achieving minimum-competency levels in reading and mathematics despite attending school.
“This consultation demonstrates a massive awareness that transformation is not a choice,” Giannini stressed, "It’s an imperative.”
With the TES, the UN is aiming to redesign “outdated structures that have lead to wars, economic devastations,” according to Mohammed.
Garnier stressed the economic benefits of investing in education, which has notoriously taken a backseat in terms of funding priorities.
“Nothing has higher returns than investing in education. So what we’re trying to do is to reframe this discussion,” he said.
“This is why the summit is first and foremost a political summit, integrating the demands from the youth, the commitments of all stakeholders, national and international and especially the commitments of all national and old world leaders,” Garnier explained.
The summit, which kicks off on Friday, is split into three distinct days. The Mobilization Day (Sept. 16), the Solutions Day (Sept. 17) and the Leaders Day (Sept. 19).
According to the summit website, the Mobilization Day will be youth-led and youth-organized and will serve to convey the collective recommendations of youth on transforming education to decision and policymakers, informed by the Summit Youth Declaration.
The Solutions Day will provide a platform for partners, including UN agencies, NGOs, civil society organizations and private sector partners, to mobilize collective support to launch or scale up initiatives connected to the five Thematic Action Tracks.
These five tracks include the following: Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools; Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development; Teachers, teaching and the teaching profession; Digital learning and transformation; and Financing of education.
During the Leaders Day, a limited number of thematic sessions will be held to place a focus on cross-cutting priorities for transforming education.
“I think a lot of the learning that we have from this is to make sure we take cognizance of what the reality is in trying to help those children come back into education, and come back in a way that will be meaningful,” Mohammed said.
“And that will be transformational in in meeting with the world of tomorrow, today.”
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Russian President Vladimir Putin that now was “not a time for war” on Friday on the sidelines of a regional summit. New Delhi and Moscow have longstanding ties dating back to the Cold War, and Russia remains by far India’s biggest arms supplier. But in their first face-to-face meeting since Moscow’s forces invaded Ukraine in February, Modi told Putin: “Excellency, I know today’s time is not a time for war.” India has shied away from explicitly condemning Russia for the invasion, which sent the price of oil and other commodities soaring. But he stressed the importance of “democracy and diplomacy and dialogue” in the meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, footage showed on Indian public service broadcaster Doordashan. They would discuss “how to move forward on the path of peace,” Modi added. The SCO summit comes as Russian forces face major battlefield setbacks in Ukraine, and represented an opportunity for Putin to show his country had not been fully isolated despite Western efforts. “I know your position on the conflict in Ukraine, your concerns... We will do our best to end this as soon as possible,” Putin told Modi. But he added that Ukraine’s leadership had rejected negotiations “and stated that it wants to achieve its goals by military means, on the battlefield.” On Thursday, Putin met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and acknowledged that his key ally Beijing also had “concerns” over the conflict. New Delhi has long walked a tightrope in its relations with the West and Moscow — and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the difficulty of that balancing act. It has urged a cessation of hostilities but repeatedly brushed off calls from Washington to condemn Russia, despite India pursuing greater security ties with the United States. Unusually, India is a member of both the SCO and the so-called Quad, a strategic bloc grouping it, the United States, Japan and Australia, and aimed at providing a more substantive counterweight to China’s rising military and economic power. Former Indian ambassador to Russia Pankaj Saran described Modi’s comments as “quite frank” in saying that the Ukraine crisis “had caught the attention of the whole world and created problems for the developing world.” “This was a fairly strong message to Russia,” he told Doordashan. “As a friend, his recommendation and India’s position is that this needs to be resolved only through dialogue and diplomacy.” Putin visited New Delhi late last year, bear-hugging Modi and hailing India as a “great power” as the two men bolstered military and energy ties. India is the world’s second largest importer of arms and according to the Business Standard, between 2016-20, 49.4 percent of its purchases were from Russia. The Asian giant of 1.4 billion people is also a major consumer of Russian oil, ramping up discounted purchases in the wake of a Western embargo.
BERLIN: Russia has suffered significant troop and equipment losses in Ukraine and the impact of Kyiv’s latest counter-offensive may reveal Moscow’s military reserves to be smaller than assumed, Germany’s defense minister told Reuters. Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to comment publicly on the setback suffered by his forces this month. Ukrainian officials say 9,000 sq km (3,400 sq miles) have been retaken, territory about the size of the island of Cyprus. “Russia’s military has suffered significant losses by now — both in troops and equipment,” Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said in an interview conducted on Wednesday and published on Friday. “The notion that the Russian forces have virtually unlimited military means at their disposal ... is not matched by reality,” she added, noting Russia needed to repair a lot of equipment and was having a hard time recruiting enough new personnel. “It will be very interesting to see how large the remaining reserves of the Russian military actually are. I think it’s significantly less than we probably initially thought,” Lambrecht said. “Nevertheless, one should not be mistaken: Russia is far from defeated and still has various military options.” At the same time, Lambrecht praised the courage of Russians voicing public criticism of Putin, even though, she said, she did not expect the dissent to be sufficient to cause Putin’s fall in the short term. “When you see what a system of intimidation Putin has quite consistently constructed over recent years, it is very impressive when people in Russia voice their criticism so openly,” she said. “But I don’t have the impression that this criticism has reached an extent that would lead to Putin’s imminent downfall,” the minister added. “I can understand the hope but I don’t see it happening yet. Of course, I hope that this criticism will encourage others to speak up as well.” In rare expressions of public dissent at a time when Russians risk heavy prison sentences for “discrediting” the armed forces or spreading “deliberately false information” about them, several local politicians lately have called for Putin to be sacked over the Ukraine war. Lambrecht said Berlin was ready to support Kyiv long-term. Ukraine has been pushing Berlin for months to supply Kyiv with more heavy weapons, and to start delivering modern Western tanks as well, a demand German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has rejected repeatedly. On Thursday, Lambrecht pledged the delivery of additional multiple rocket launchers, rockets and armored personnel carriers to Kyiv, but not the tanks the country has been demanding. Asked whether she expected the German population to continue backing Russian sanctions in the upcoming winter, despite soaring energy prices and a sky-rocketing inflation, Lambrecht said the government needed to make clear that it would address the existential concerns of people in Germany. “Of course, we cannot offset everything,” she said. But “if we can do that (address the existential concerns), then I am sure that the support of the people here in the country for Ukraine will remain strong.”
BEIJING: A fire engulfed a skyscraper Friday in the central Chinese city of Changsha, with authorities saying that no casualties had yet been found. The blaze broke out in a 42-floor building housing an office of state-owned telecommunications company China Telecom, according to state broadcaster CCTV. “Thick smoke billowed from the site, and dozens of floors burned ferociously,” CCTV reported. The provincial fire department said later in a social media post that “at present, the fire has been extinguished, and we have not yet discovered any casualties.” An initial photograph released by CCTV showed orange flames searing through the building in a built-up area of the city as black smoke billowed into the sky. A later image shared on social media appeared to show that the flames had subsided, as emergency personnel sprayed jets of water onto its charred facade. China Telecom said in a statement on social media: “By around 4:30 p.m. today, the fire at our No. 2 Communications Tower in Changsha has been extinguished. “No casualties have yet been discovered and communications have not been cut off.” A video shared on social media appeared to show dozens of people fleeing the building as flaming debris fell from the upper floors. AFP was not immediately able to verify the footage. Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, has a population of about 10 million people. The 218-meter (715-foot) building was completed in 2000 and is located near a major ring road, according to CCTV. Deadly fires are common in China, where lax enforcement of building codes and rampant unauthorized construction can make it difficult for people to flee burning buildings. In July last year, a warehouse fire in northeastern Jilin province killed at least 15 people and injured at least 25, according to state media reports. The month before that, a fire killed 18 people — mostly children — at a martial arts school in central Henan province, causing an uproar over fire safety standards. A further two dozen people died in a pair of blazes in Beijing’s migrant neighborhoods in 2017, while 58 perished when a huge fire swept through a 28-story Shanghai housing block in 2010.
LONDON: Two police officers were stabbed early Friday in central London and hospitalized after encountering “a male with a knife,” the capital’s police said, amid massive security ahead of the queen’s funeral. A suspect who was tasered and arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and assaulting an emergency worker is also in hospital following the incident at around 6:00 am (0500 GMT), the Metropolitan Police added. “Police encountered a male with a knife in the area of Leicester Square,” it said in a statement, referring to a square in the heart of the British capital, less than a mile from where the queen’s coffin is lying in state. “Two officers received stab wounds and are currently being treated in hospital. We await further updates on their conditions.” The Met added officers had deployed a taser and the suspect was taken to an unspecified hospital for treatment, “where he remains at this time.” The force said “enquiries into the circumstances surrounding the incident are ongoing,” but the attack was not terror related. It comes amid a massive security operation in central London as Queen Elizabeth II lies in state in parliament ahead of Monday’s state funeral. The first to be staged in the UK in nearly six decades, it is set to be attended by leaders and royalty from around the world. Thousands of police from across the country have been deployed to London, while 1,500 army personnel are on standby to help manage crowds and security, as tens of thousands of people queue to file past the late monarch’s coffin.
It has been lying in state in parliament’s Westminster Hall since late Wednesday, where it will remain until early Monday. London Mayor Sadiq Khan called the attack on the officers “utterly appalling.” “These brave officers were doing their duty and assisting the public at this momentous time for our country,” he said, noting police “run toward danger to protect others” and “we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.” Khan added he was in close contact with the Met’s new Commissioner Mark Rowley, who only took up the post on Monday.