https://arab.news/zcud9
Helsinki: Finland announced Friday a 400-million-euro military aid package to Ukraine, its largest to date and including heavy artillery as well as munitions but no Leopard tanks.
“Ukraine continues to need support in defending its territory,” Defense Minister Mikko Savola said in a statement.
The ministry did not disclose more detailed information on the contents of the package but said the aid did not include Leopard battle tanks, special adviser Miikka Pynnonen told AFP.
This is the Nordic country’s 12th package of defense materiel to Ukraine. The previous 11 had a combined value of 190 million euros (about $205 million).
The ministry also said Finland would sign a so-called Statement of Intent with Sweden on support for Ukraine, to make sure the aid “would not endanger the national defense of the two countries.”
“Finland supplies defense materiel to Ukraine, and Sweden expresses its readiness to support Finland as necessary,” the statement said.
On Thursday, Sweden pledged to send Ukraine its Archer artillery system, a modern mobile howitzer requested by Kyiv for months, along with armored vehicles and anti-tank missiles.
Pressure has also been mounting on Germany from European allies to authorize exports of its Leopard tank, which are used by several armed forces around the world, including Finland.
“We hope that this decision (to deliver Leopards) will be made real, and Finland is definitely ready to play its part in that support,” Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Tuesday.
LONDON: British police issued Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with a fine on Friday for traveling in the backseat of a car without wearing his seat belt while filming a social media clip.
This comes as a potentially embarrassing blow as he tries to revive his party’s fortunes.
Sunak, who apologized on Thursday for what he called a “brief error of judgment,” filmed a video in the back seat of his car while traveling in the north of England, without wearing a seat belt.
It is the second penalty Sunak has received from police after last year they found him to have broken COVID-19 lockdown rules, along with then-prime minister Boris Johnson.
The fine represents a new challenge for Sunak, whose Conservative Party trails far behind the opposition Labour Party in the opinion polls, ahead of an election due by January 2025 at the latest.
“The prime minister fully accepts this was a mistake and has apologized. He will of course comply with the fixed penalty,” a spokesman from Sunak’s Downing Street office said in a statement.
Police in the northern English county of Lancashire confirmed that they had issued a 42-year-old man from London with a penalty notice.
Sunak becomes the second prime minister after Johnson to have been fined in such a manner.
BARCELONA: A Spanish judge on Friday ordered that Brazil soccer player Dani Alves be jailed on remand without bail over an alleged sexual assault of a woman in a Barcelona nightclub, the regional court system said.
The 39-year-old, who has denied any wrongdoing, was taken to the Brians 1 jail outside Barcelona, said a source with knowledge of the matter.
Earlier on Friday, Alves appeared before a Barcelona judge after local police detained and questioned him. The public prosecutor had requested he be jailed without bail pending trial.
Alves’ representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Mexico’s top-flight soccer division, Liga MX, said it was following the case and Alves’ legal situation alongside club Pumas UNAM, where he currently plays, to determine “what is appropriate regarding his participation in the League.”
Pumas UNAM said it would “take the appropriate actions” and apply sanctions as “stipulated in the employment contract signed with the athlete.”
“The Club will inform as soon as possible what it determines in this case,” it added.
The alleged victim had filed a complaint earlier this month and the case remains open over a crime of sexual assault, Catalonia’s court system said in a statement.
Alves told Antena 3 TV earlier this month that he was at the club with other people but denied any such behavior.
“I was dancing and having a good time without invading anyone’s space,” he said. “I don’t know who this lady is… How could I do that to a woman? No.”
Alves played for Barcelona from 2008-2016 and briefly returned to the LaLiga team for the 2021-22 season.
He has played for the Brazil national team since 2006, making 126 appearances and scoring eight goals.
COLOMBO: When Sri Lankan Naseer Ahamed arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1983 to perform Umrah he had no idea that an article in Arab News was about to change the course of his life.
Now a government minister, Ahamed was just 22 at the time and still considering his career options. His brother, who was working in Jeddah, encouraged him to stay on in the Kingdom as the Hajj season was about to start and he would be able to perform the full pilgrimage.
Around the same time, Ahamed read an article in Arab News about King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals — one of the best educational institutions in Saudi Arabia — and how it was offering scholarships to foreigners.
He applied immediately.
“Since I was good at science subjects, I applied for an electrical engineering degree,” Ahamed said. “I applied from Jeddah and by the time I returned to Colombo, I saw a letter waiting for me from KFUPM. It was the notice of my selection to the electrical engineering course.
“I was asked to prepare my travel documents right away. They even sent my air ticket, and board and lodging were provided.”
Before long he was in Dharan and mixing with some of the best students from across the Kingdom and around the world.
“Those were the golden days of my life,” Ahamed said. “We had fun as youths and worked hard under well-known professors.”
One of the things that really brought the students together was that they were required to live on campus in dormitories, regardless of their background or status, he said.
“No student was allowed to stay out, even if they came from a royal family.”
After graduating, many of his contemporaries went on to successful careers in business and politics.
Ahamed returned home and in the 1990s entered politics as a member of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. He served as an adviser to President Mahinda Rajapaksa from 2005-09 and as chief minister of Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province from 2015-17.
In April last year, Ahamed was appointed Minister of Environment and head of Middle Eastern affairs.
Forty years on from that fateful visit, he said we was still grateful to KFUPM and Arab News for opening the door to his professional life.
“I am thankful to KFUPM for what I am today,” he said. “Even at the time Arab News was my favorite newspaper … (it) gave me an opportunity to apply for the course, and I gratefully remember this experience.”
JAKARTA: Ahead of Lunar New Year, Lili Sumiati is constantly busy cleaning her family home to sweep away ill fortune and open space for good luck.
The routine she follows is the same as that of the rest of her family: chores, shopping, cooking. Only, unlike them, she is Muslim.
It is estimated that Chinese-descended citizens make up about 3 percent of Indonesia’s Muslim-majority population of over 270 million. Most are either Buddhists or Christians, while a small minority professes Islam.
Every year, Sumiati’s family gathers at her mother’s home in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, to celebrate the new year together — to give children pocket money in red envelopes, light firecrackers, and feast.
Widely observed across Asia, the Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year festival is believed to date back to the 14th century B.C., to the times of the Shang Dynasty, China’s earliest ruling dynasty, when people celebrated good harvests.
“I feel happy during Lunar New Year celebrations. It’s a form of gratitude, so as an ethnic Chinese, I am equally excited about the festivities,” Sumiati, a 48-year-old mother of four, told Arab News.
“Lunar New Year is cultural, and Muslims are respectful of non-Muslim traditions.”
Sumiati became Muslim right after high school. Initially, dining at home posed a problem as some dishes on the table would not be halal. Eventually, her mother began cooking only halal food for everyone to enjoy.
But for others, such as Qisha K., navigating between two identities can be a more complex affair.
“Being Chinese Muslim is a bit awkward,” she told Arab News. “It’s like we’re a minority within a minority.”
Most Indonesians have the idea that Chinese culture is one where pork is a staple food and so clashes with Islam, Qisha said.
“They forget that each of those things is just a sliver of the culture and religion. And, honestly, it’s very easy to eat halal Chinese food in Indonesia.”
On the other hand, her unfamiliarity with the Chinese language is also a source of insecurity.
Many Indonesian Chinese are unfamiliar with the speech of their great-grandfathers, which was banned for decades under former President Suharto, who put in place restrictive policies of forced assimilation, some of which were only lifted years after his regime fell in the late 1990s.
Those, such as 29-year-old Qisha, or her parents, had no chance to learn Chinese at school.
Growing up in Jakarta as both Muslim and Chinese, she often felt that she did not belong. But during the Lunar New Year festival that feeling disappears.
“It’s like the time I can embrace and go all out to show my appreciation of my heritage,” she said.
“Lunar New Year makes me feel like I actually do belong.”
In 2023, Chinese New Year falls on Jan. 22 and will be celebrated for another two weeks.
For Jodi Baskoro, 37, from Jakarta, the festival is a way to reconnect with his ancestry.
Baskoro realized only recently how little he knows about the Chinese side of his mixed family. “As I’m getting older, I’m starting to embrace my Chinese heritage,” he told Arab News.
His curiosity was piqued as he learned more about Indonesia’s discriminatory treatment of ethnic Chinese, whose role in society has always been complex.
“I feel like we, as Chinese Indonesians, never had a chance to just live. We are forced to adapt and yet get shunned at the same time,” he said.
“Celebrated Chinese Indonesians are often athletes, businessmen, or some kind of clerics — we need to be worth something just to be accepted.”
In his personal celebration of Lunar New Year, Baskoro looks for traditional food items, such as mooncakes and mandarin oranges. This year, he also bought some traditional knick-knacks for good luck.
“I don’t know much about my heritage,” he said. “This cultural event is the least I can do for now.”
DAVOS, Switzerland: Inspections of ships carrying Ukrainian grain and other food exports have slowed to half their peak rate under a UN-brokered wartime agreement, creating backlogs in vessels meant to carry supplies to developing nations where people are going hungry, United Nations and Ukrainian officials say.
Some US and Ukrainian officials accuse Russia of deliberately slowing down inspections, which a Russian official denied.
As the grain initiative got rolling in August, only 4.1 inspections of ships — both heading to and leaving Ukraine — took place each day on average, according to data the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul provided to The Associated Press. Inspection teams from Russia, Ukraine, the UN and Turkiye ensure ships carry only food and other agricultural products and no weapons.
In September, inspections jumped to 10.4 per day, then a peak rate of 10.6 in October. Since then, it’s been downhill: 7.3 in November, 6.5 in December and 5.3 so far in January.
“The hope had been that going into 2023, you would see every month the daily rate of inspection going up, not that you would see it halved,” USAID Administrator Samantha Power said in an interview Thursday at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
The slowdown in inspections “has a material effect … in terms of the number of ships that can get out,” said the head of the US Agency for International Development. “That, in turn, inevitably has a knock-on effect on global supply.”
More than 100 vessels are waiting in the waters off Turkiye either for inspection or for their applications to participate to clear, with the waiting time of vessels between application and inspection averaging 21 days in the last two weeks, according to the UN
Despite fewer average daily inspections, UN figures showed that more grain actually got through last month, up 3.7 million metric tons from 2.6 million in November. The coordination center explained that that was due to use of larger vessels in December.
Officials fear what comes next. The UN’s deputy spokesman in New York linked the slowdown in inspections to the backlogs in ships, saying the rate needs to pick up but did not pin blame on Russia.
“We, as the UN, are urging all the parties to work to remove obstacles for the reduction of the backlog and improve our efficiencies,” Farhan Haq told journalists Wednesday.
“We’ve have been pushing to get more inspections. We’ve been pushing to make sure that the inspections proceed quickly and thoroughly,” he said. “We’re trying to do everything we can to move it faster.”
The number of inspections of ships to and from Ukraine is a crucial measure of the throughput of Ukrainian grain to world markets, but not the only one: Other factors include port activity, harvest and agricultural supply, silo stockpiles, weather, ship availability and the capacity of vessels.
The Black Sea Grain Initiative was designed to free up Ukrainian wheat, barley and other food critical to nations in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, where shortages of affordable supplies sent food prices surging and helped throw more people into poverty.
Proponents hoped a November extension of the deal would spur an acceleration of inspections — and thus help ship millions of tons of food out of three Ukrainian ports disrupted by Russia’s invasion 11 months ago.
But Power said the US was “very concerned” that Moscow might be deliberately dragging its heels on inspections.
“Costs of actually exporting and shipping are now up 20 percent because you have these crews that are just idling for the extra time it takes because the Russian Federation has cut down on the number of inspections it will participate in,” she said.
“It seems to be a deliberate slow-rolling of the mechanism,” Power added, echoing similar comments that US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave to the Security Council on Jan. 13. She blamed “Russia’s deliberate slowdown of inspections.”
Asked whether Russia was deliberately slowing the inspections, Alexander Pchelyakov, a spokesman for the Russian diplomatic mission to UN institutions in Geneva, said: “That’s simply not true.”
“The Russian side adheres to the number of daily inspections in accordance to the reached agreements,” he said by text message.
In a Facebook post Thursday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure said ship backlogs began in November.
“The average waiting time is from 2 to 5 weeks, which also leads to millions of losses for cargo owners,” the ministry wrote, adding that Russia had “artificially reduced the number of inspection teams from 5 to 3 without any explanation.”
The time needed for inspections was “artificially increased by checking the performance of vessels,” it added, saying there were cases “when Russians refuse to work for fictitious reasons.”
The ministry accused Russia of “purposeful sabotage,” saying that since October, the ports have been forced to work at half-capacity and inflows of ships have declined.
Turkiye’s Defense Ministry didn’t immediately response to emails seeking comment about the inspection slowdowns.
The grain initiative, brokered by the UN and Turkiye, came with a separate arrangement to help Russia export its food and fertilizer as farmers worldwide face soaring prices for the nutrients needed for their crops.
Russia has complained that Western sanctions have created obstacles to its agricultural exports. While sanctions don’t target Russian food or fertilizer, many shipping and insurance companies have been reluctant to deal with Moscow, either refusing to do so or greatly increasing the price.
Overall under the deal, 17.8 million tons of Ukrainian agricultural products have been exported to 43 countries since Aug. 1, the UN said. China — a key ally of Russia — has been a top recipient, followed by Spain and Turkiye.
Low and lower-middle income countries received 44 percent of the wheat exported under the deal, with nearly two-thirds of that going to developing economies, the world body said. The UN’s World Food Program purchased 8 percent of the total.
The organization says nearly 350 million people worldwide are on the brink of starvation because of conflict, climate change and COVID-19, a rise of 200 million people from before the pandemic.
“I don’t care if you love or hate Russia, you got to have the food and the fertilizer,” WFP Executive Director David Beasley told AP at Davos. “If we’re not careful, we will have a shortage of food by the end of this year, or the food price will be so high that you’ll have destabilization of nations that will result in mass migration.”