Month: November 2023

Taliban authorities in Afghanistan arrested four local employees of Germany’s main government-owned aid agency, according to the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“I can confirm that the local employees of GIZ are in custody although we have not received any official information on why they are detained,” a ministry spokesperson told the Associated Press in a statement late Saturday.

“We are taking this situation very seriously and are working through all channels available to us to ensure that our colleagues are released,” she added.

The German Agency for International Cooperation, or GIZ, is owned by the German government. It operates in around 120 countries worldwide, offering projects and services in the areas of “economic development, employment promotion, energy and the environment, and peace and security,” according to the agency’s website.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, after the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country. Many foreign missions, including the German embassy in Kabul, closed their offices.

The Taliban initially promised a more moderate approach than during their previous rule from 1996 to 2001 but gradually reimposed their harsh interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia.

Girls were banned from education beyond the sixth grade and women were barred from working, studying, traveling without a male companion, and even going to parks or bathhouses and were forced to cover up from head to toe.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in September that human rights are in a state of collapse in Afghanistan more than two years following the Taliban’s return to power and stripped back institutional protections at all levels.
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Russia launched its largest drone strike to date on Ukraine over the weekend. Kyiv says it destroyed all but one, but falling debris caused several injuries and damaged buildings. A top U.N. official called for continued solidarity with Ukraine. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has more.
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Ten of thousands of people participated in a march against antisemitism in London on Sunday protesting a rise in hate crimes against Jews since the October 7 attack by Hamas militants on Israel and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was among the estimated 60,000 demonstrators in the first march of its kind since the Israel-Hamas war began and the largest gathering against antisemitism in London for decades according to organizers. Johnson marched along the U.K.’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and other senior government officials.

Protestors carried placards with the message “Shoulder to shoulder with British Jews” “Never Again Is Now,” and “Zero tolerance for anti-Semites.” Others showed the faces of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militant group Hamas in a show of solidarity with the Jewish communities which have recently suffered a spate of hate crimes, especially in the nation’s capital.

Some people sang in Hebrew while others chanted “Bring them home” in reference to the hostages.

London’s Metropolitan Police received reports of 554 antisemitic offences between Oct. 1 and Nov. 1, up from 44 a year earlier, a more than 10-fold increase. Reports of Islamophobic offences almost tripled to 220 during the same period.

Police arrested a far-right activist, Tommy Robinson, at the start of Sunday’s march after he refused to leave the area at the request of police officers.

Organizers of the demonstration had asked Robinson not to attend because of the distress his presence was likely to cause.

Sunday’s march took place a day after a latest demonstration in the British capital by pro-Palestinian protestors calling for a permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.  
…

The Ukrainian military destroyed eight of nine attack drones launched overnight by Russia, the air force said Sunday, a day after what Ukrainian officials said had been Russia’s largest drone attack of the war.

There were no immediate reports of damage or about where the remaining drone had struck.

Kyiv was rocked Saturday by Russia’s largest drone attack since its invasion of Ukraine in February of last year. Ukraine said it shot down 74 of the 75 Iranian-designed Shahed drones launched by Russia in a six-hour air raid.

Five people, including a child, were wounded in the attack, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s Telegram post. Sixty-six of the drones were downed over Kyiv, Ukraine’s air force said. The damage caused power outages for 17,000 people, a city official said.

Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will target critical infrastructure in a winter aerial campaign, as it did last year.

“It looks like tonight we heard the overture. The prelude to the winter season,” Serhiy Fursa, a prominent Ukrainian economist, wrote on Facebook.

The Russian defense ministry said Sunday it intercepted at least 24 drones and shot down two Ukrainian S-200 surface-to-air missiles over Moscow, Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk and Bryansk.

“A mass drone attack was attempted overnight,” said Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, adding that Ukrainian drones were shot down in several areas of the Moscow region.

The missiles were shot down over the Sea of Azov, the ministry said.

One person was injured in Tula when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, the region’s governor, Alexei Dyumin, said.

The Kommersant newspaper said that flights were delayed or canceled at Moscow’s main airports because of the drone attack.

In the Russian-controlled Ukrainian region of Donetsk a Russian-installed official said that Ukrainian forces had struck the energy system, leaving some people without heat or power.

Russian soldiers’ morale

As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want to get out of Ukraine, as revealed in secret recordings of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.

Secret recordings of these conversations, obtained by The Associated Press, offer a rare glimpse of the war through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom appears in Western media, mainly because Russia has criminalized any critical conversation about the conflict in Ukraine. The recordings also show the grueling conditions Russian soldiers endure in the battlefield.

There’s no “dying the death of the brave here,” one soldier told his brother. “You just die, like an earthworm,” he said.

The voices in these calls are of men who didn’t or couldn’t flee mobilization. Some had no money, no education and no options. Others believed in patriotic duty.

The AP verified the identities of people in the calls by speaking with relatives and soldiers — some of whom are still at war in Ukraine — and researching open-source material linked to the phone numbers used by the soldiers.

There were also voices of soldiers committed to the fight.

“As long as we are needed here, we will carry out our task,” a soldier named Artyom told AP from eastern Ukraine at the end of May, where he’d been stationed for eight months without break. “Just stop asking me these stupid questions.”

Germany debt

Berlin may not be able to finance responses to growing challenges such as climate change and the Ukraine war as Europe’s largest economy has already dealt with years of chronic under-investment, contributing to its current stagnation, economists say.

German under-investment is already around 300 billion euros over the past decade vis-a-vis other AAA-rating economies, according to Scope Ratings.

Business and political leaders have even started to campaign publicly for fiscal rectitude.

“As I have long been saying, we must fear that the debt brake becomes ever more a brake on the future,” said Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner on social media platform X.

Saturday was Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine, a time when Ukrainians remember the famine that starved several million people to death in the 1930s because of Soviet policies.

The Holodomor — which means “death by starvation” in Ukrainian — was a deliberate policy of Josef Stalin that Ukrainians, along with more than 30 countries, consider genocide but something Moscow denies.

Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia has carried out 911 attacks, killing 19 Ukrainians and wounding 84 across the country in the last week.

“The enemy is intensifying its attacks, trying to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. It was doing so deliberately, “just like 90 years ago, when Russia killed millions of our ancestors.”

Some information for this article was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Pope Francis, suffering from a “lung inflammation,” appeared seated in the chapel of his residence instead of in St. Peter’s Square while an aide read the pontiff’s Sunday message. 

The 86-year-old pope, wearing his traditional white robes and with a bandage on his right hand, remained seated next to the aide during the reading.  

“Dear brothers and sisters. Happy Sunday. Today, I cannot appear at the window because I have this problem of an inflammation in the lungs,” Francis said. 

Francis went to a Rome hospital on Saturday for a scan that the Vatican said had ruled out lung complications after a bout of flu forced him to cancel activities.  

The Vatican provided no explanation for the apparent difference between its statement on Saturday and what the pope said on Sunday. 

One part of one of the pope’s lungs was removed when Francis was a young man in his native Argentina.  

Francis then introduced the priest, Father Paolo Braida, who went on to read the pope’s Sunday message based on the Gospel. Francis coughed several times during the reading. 

The pope delivered a blessing and Braida read the rest of message, including appeals for peace in Ukraine, thanks for the release of some hostages in Gaza and confirmation of the pope’s intention to travel to Dubai on Friday to attend the U.N. climate change conference. 

Francis ended with his traditional closing remarks: “I wish everyone a good Sunday. Please do not forget to pray for me. Have a good lunch and see you next time.” 

Staying in the residence spared the pope from going outside for the short journey to the Apostolic Palace on what was a particularly cold Rome morning for the end of November. 

He would have had to get in a car, be driven to a courtyard and take an elevator to the top floor of the palace to reach the window overlooking St. Peter’s Square. 

The event was broadcast on giant screens to the crowds gathered in the square, as well as on the usual television and internet channels. 

Earlier this month Francis skipped reading a prepared speech for a meeting with European rabbis because he had a cold, but he appeared to be in good health during a meeting with children hours later that day. 

In June he had surgery on an abdominal hernia, spending nine days in hospital. He appears to have recovered fully from that operation. 
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A cargo ship sank off the Greek island of Lesbos in stormy seas early Sunday, leaving 13 crew members missing and one rescued, authorities said.

The Raptor, registered in the Comoros, was on its way to Istanbul from Alexandria, Egypt, carrying 6,000 tons of salt, the coast guard said. It had a crew of 14, including eight Egyptians, four Indians and two Syrians, the coast guard said.

The ship reported a mechanical problem at 7 a.m. Sunday, sent a distress signal and shortly after disappeared about 4 1/2 nautical miles (8 kilometers) southwest of Lesbos, authorities said.

One Egyptian was rescued, a coast guard spokesperson told The Associated Press.

She said that eight merchant ships, two helicopters and one Greek navy frigate were searching for survivors. Three coast guard vessels had difficulty reaching the area because of rough seas, she added. The spokesperson spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing, and she wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.

Northwesterly winds in excess of 80 kph (50 mph) are blowing in the area, the national weather service said.
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Pepe’s meal is so good he licks the plate clean. In any other Rome establishment, slobbering on one’s chicken and mashed potato would be frowned upon — but this is “Fiuto”, Italy’s first dogs’ restaurant.

The lighting is soft, lounge music plays in the background, attentive staff show people and pets to their tables and ask whether furry, four-legged customers might fancy a boiled egg with pureed peas and fontina cheese? Or perhaps a simple fish with ricotta and courgettes?

Thirsty pups can opt for a green apple and watermelon juice, or go wild and have a pear, strawberry or banana one instead.

“We drew up the menu with a veterinary nutritionist with whom I determined the ingredients, taking allergies into account, because dogs have many more allergies than humans,” said head chef Luca Grammatico, who previously worked as a dog trainer.

Pepe, a four-year-old Bichon with a naughty face, licks every last crumb off his elegant black bowl, almost taking the geometric patterns off too.

Pets “are part of our family, so why not treat them like family?” says Sara Nicosanti, as she takes a selfie with Mango, her five-year-old Jack Russell, in the mirror-lined area designed especially for this purpose.

There is not a bark to be heard: guests focus on their designer bowls, sitting on fleece blankets next to their owners’ tables.

Nicosanti, a 36-year-old real estate agent, says she is “very happy” with the choice at the restaurant, which opened just a month ago, because the dogs “can have a balanced diet too”, with “suitable ingredients”.

“No spices, no salt and no oils,” insists Grammatico. Food for canine customers is prepared in a separate kitchen to that of their human owners.

Portions are tailored to the dogs’ size — S (for those weighing two to 10 kilograms), M (11-20 kg), L (21-30 kg) and even XL (over 30 kg).

“Fish is very popular because it is a different flavor to their usual food,” Grammatico said.

Birthday cake

The mood is festive as Romina Lanza, a 40-year-old lawyer, celebrates her dog Rudy’s fourth birthday.

She sees “Fiuto” (Sense of Smell) as “a very welcome initiative” and brushes off questions as to whether it is right to wait hand and paw on pets, serving them freshly prepared, costly dishes, while people in other parts of the world go hungry.

“It’s a personal choice, I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she said.

Neither does Maria Gliottone, a 20-year-old student who discovered the restaurant on TikTok and came with Nala, her two-year-old dog, and Nala’s friend Douglas, a four-month-old Corsican puppy.

“Those who don’t have a dog think that, but those who do (have one) are more than happy to come here with their companion,” she said.

Since it opened, the restaurant has welcomed an average of six to 10 dogs every evening during the week and 10 to 15 at weekends, for a price per head of between eight and 20 euros (around $22), depending on the size of the dog.

“We’ve installed screens (between tables) so that when the dogs eat, they can’t see each other or disturb each other by invading each other’s spaces,” said Marco Turano.

The restaurant’s three co-founders did not expect the establishment in the heart of Rome’s Ponte Milvio district to be so successful.

“We are obviously super happy,” said Turano, 33, as he wrapped up a surprise present — a detangling conditioner — for Rudy.

And while there won’t be candles, he will get a birthday cake of sorts: “a cheese biscuit with ricotta cheese and an end note of green apple”.
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The British Defense Ministry said in its daily intelligence update on Ukraine that Russia’s recent transport movements indicate that Russia has “likely moved” its strategic air defense systems from its Baltic coast enclave of Kaliningrad.

This move from Kaliningrad which is surrounded on three sides by NATO member states highlights “the overstretch the war has caused for some of Russia’s key, modern capabilities.”

Saturday was Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine, a time when Ukrainians remember the famine that starved several million people to death in the 1930s because of Soviet policies.

The Holodomor — which means “death by starvation” in Ukrainian — was a deliberate policy of Josef Stalin that Ukrainians, along with more than 30 countries, consider genocide but something Moscow denies.

On Holodomor Saturday, Kyiv was rocked by Russia’s largest drone attack since its invasion of Ukraine in February of last year. Ukraine said it shot down 74 of the 75 Iranian-designed Shahed drones launched by Russia in a six-hour air raid.

Five people, including a child, were wounded in the attack, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s Telegram post. Sixty-six of the drones were downed over Kyiv, Ukraine’s air force said. The damage caused power outages for 17,000 people, a city official said.

“It looks like tonight we heard the overture. The prelude to the winter season,” Serhiy Fursa, a prominent Ukrainian economist, wrote on Facebook.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia has carried out 911 attacks, killing 19 Ukrainians and wounding 84 across the country in the last week.

“The enemy is intensifying its attacks, trying to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. It was doing so deliberately, “just like 90 years ago, when Russia killed millions of our ancestors.”
…

Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Sunday he would push for the return of the Parthenon Marbles when he meets UK leader Rishi Sunak in Britain this week.

The sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, were taken from the Parthenon temple at the Acropolis in Athens in the early 19th century by British diplomat Thomas Bruce, the earl of Elgin.

Greece maintains the marbles were stolen, which Britain denies, and the issue has been a source of contention between the countries for decades.

Mitsotakis, who is due to see Sunak on Monday, likened the collection being held at the British Museum in London to the Mona Lisa painting being cut in half.

“They do look better in the Acropolis Museum, a state-of-the-art museum that was built for that purpose,” he told the BBC.

“It’s as if I told you that you would cut the Mona Lisa in half, and you will have half of it at the Louvre and half of it at the British Museum, do you think your viewers would appreciate the beauty of the painting in such a way?”

Mitsotakis added that “this is exactly what happened with the Parthenon sculptures”.

“That is why we keep lobbying for a deal that would essentially be a partnership between Greece and the British Museum but would allow us to return the sculptures to Greece and have people appreciate them in their original setting,” he told the Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme.

The 2,500-year-old collection has been on display at the British Museum since 1817.

In January, the UK government ruled out a permanent return after media reported the British Museum was close to signing a loan agreement that would see the marbles back in Athens.

Mitsotakis, who won a second term in June, said his government “had not made as much progress as I would like in the negotiations”.

But added: “I’m a patient man and we’ve waited for hundreds of years, and I will persist in these discussions.”

Mitsotakis said he would also raise the issue with UK opposition leader Keir Starmer, who — if opinion polls are believed — is set to be Britain’s next prime minister after an election expected next year.

The Parthenon temple — built in the 5th century BCE to honor the goddess Athena — was partially destroyed during a Venetian bombardment in 1687, then looted.

Its fragments are scattered throughout many renowned museums.

Earlier this year, three marble fragments of the Parthenon temple that had been held by the Vatican for centuries were returned to Greece.

 
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As he sits in Geneva, Michel Dreifuss does not feel all that far away from the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. The ripples are rolling through Europe and upending assumptions both global and intimate — including those about his personal safety as a Jew.

“Yesterday I bought a tear-gas spray canister at a military-equipment surplus store,” the 64-year-old retired tech sector worker said recently at a rally to mark a month since the Hamas killings. The choice, he says, is a “precaution,” driven by a surge of antisemitism in Europe.

Last month’s slayings of about 1,200 people in Israel by armed Palestinian militants represented the biggest killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The fallout from it, and from Israel’s intense military response that health officials in Hamas-controlled Gaza say has killed at least 13,300 Palestinians, has extended to Europe. In doing so, it has shaken a continent all too familiar with deadly anti-Jewish hatred for centuries.

The past century is of particular note, of course. Concern about rising antisemitism in Europe is fueled in part by what happened to Jews before and during World War II, and that makes it particularly fearsome for those who may be only one or two generations removed from people who were the victims of riots against Jews and Nazi brutality.

What most chills many Jews interviewed is what they see as the lack of empathy for the Israelis killed during the early morning massacre and for the relatives of the hostages — about 30 of whom are children — suspended in an agonizing limbo.

“What really upsets me,” said Holocaust survivor Herbert Traube said at a Paris event commemorating the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 government-backed pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria, “is to see that there isn’t a massive popular reaction against this.”

Acts of antisemitism — and how that’s defined

Antisemitism is broadly defined as hatred of Jews. But a debate has been raging for years over what actions and words should be labeled antisemitic.

Criticism of Israel’s policies and antisemitism have long been conflated by Israeli leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by some watchdog groups. Critics say that blurring helps undermine opposition to the country’s policies and amps up perceptions that any utterance or incident against Israeli policy is antisemitic.

Some language — whether for or against Israel or the Palestinians – “makes it sound like a football match,” says Susan Neiman of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. “We are perpetuating the idea that you’ve got to be on one side or the other instead of being on the side of human rights and justice,” she said.

Others argue that antisemites often use criticism of Israel as a placeholder for expressing their views.

The list of examples of anti-Jewish sentiment since the Oct. 7 attacks is long and documented by governments and watchdog groups across Europe.

Little more than a month after the attack in Israel, the French Interior Ministry said 1,247 antisemitic incidents had been reported since Oct. 7, nearly three times the total for all of 2022.
Denmark's main Jewish association said cases were up 24 times from the average of the last nine months.
The Community Security Trust, which tracks antisemitic incidents in Britain, reported more than 1,000 such events — the most ever recorded for a 28-day period. 

 

That all comes despite widespread denunciations of anti-Jewish hatred — and support for Israel — from leaders in Europe since the attack.

Some of Europe’s Jews say they see it on the streets and the news. Jewish schoolchildren face bullying on their way to class, or — in one instance — have been asked to explain Israel’s actions, according to Britain’s Community Security Trust. There’s been talk of blending in better: covering skullcaps in public and perhaps hiding mezuzahs, the traditional symbol on doorposts of Jewish homes.

In Russia, a riot broke out at an airport in which there were some antisemitic chants and posters from a crowd of men looking for passengers who had arrived from Israel. A Berlin synagogue was firebombed. An assailant stabbed a Jewish woman twice in the stomach at her home in Lyon, France, according to her lawyer.

In Prague’s Little Quarter last month, staffers at the well-known Hippopotamus bar refused to serve beer to several tourists from Israel and their Czech guides, and some patrons served up insults. Police had to step in. In Berlin, Jews are still reeling from an attempted firebombing of a synagogue last month.

“Some of us are in a state of panic,” said Anna Segal, 37, the manager of the Kahal Adass Jisroel in Berlin, a community of 450 members.

Coming to grips with a feeling of dread

Some community members are changing how they live, Segal said. Students no longer wear uniforms. Kindergarten classes don’t leave the building for field trips or the playground next door. Some members no longer call taxis, or they hesitate to order deliveries to their homes. Hebrew-speaking in public is fading. Some wonder if they should move to Israel.

“I hear more and more from people from the Jewish community who say they feel safer and more comfortable in Israel now than in Germany, despite the war and all the rockets,” Segal said. “Because they don’t have to hide there.”

And in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, some protesters are shouting, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Some say that’s a call for Palestinian freedom and is not anti-Jewish but anti-Israel; the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea includes not only Israel, but also the West Bank and east Jerusalem, where Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation since 1967. Many Jews, though, say the chant is inherently anti-Jewish and calls for the destruction of Israel.

Faced with fears that antisemitism will spread, communities are taking action. A hotline has been set up in France to help provide psychological support for Jews. The Community Security Trust, which aims to protect the Jewish community and foster good relations with others, has joined with the British government to distribute primers on how to address antisemitism in primary and secondary schools.

Peggy Hicks, a director at the U.N. human rights office, says the actions of governments and political movements are fair game for criticism but warned against discrimination, which the Geneva-based office has long battled. In the chaos of the past weeks, she sees reason to hope.

“I’ve been amazed in the course of my working in human rights about the amount of compassion and the resilience of human beings,” Hicks said. “People who have lost children and come together on both sides of a conflict, who have shared a loss — but from opposing sides — and who have found a way to get past the fact that they should actually be enemies.”

She added: “I don’t think everybody has the ability to show that kind of courage. But the fact that it exists, I think, gives us all something to aspire to.”
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A Ukrainian soldier who was posthumously awarded a medal after a widely shared video showed him declaring “Glory to Ukraine” before apparently being shot dead, was commemorated with a statue in his northern hometown Saturday. 

The video shared in March showed a man the military later named as Oleksandr Matsievskiy, a sniper with a unit from the region of Chernihiv, saying “Slava Ukraini,” a phrase more than a century old that has become a popular expression of resistance to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. 

Standing smoking a cigarette in a wooded area, carrying no visible weaponry, Matsievskiy is then seen slumping to the ground, apparently struck repeatedly by unseen shooters. 

Kyiv blamed “brutal and brazen” Russians for his death, as did his mother Paraska Demchuk, 68. 

“He would have taken all of them with him if he had a grenade,” she said, as she proudly showed the medal President Volodymyr Zelenskiy bestowed on her son representing the “Hero of Ukraine” honor. 

“He would say to me, ‘Mum, I will never let them capture me,'” she said through tears. “He wouldn’t just bandy words about. It was on the inside, it was like a core inside him,” she said. 

Kyiv has opened a criminal investigation into the death of Matsievskiy, who was quickly talked of as a hero on social media, where many supporters posted the words “Heroyam Slava,” or “Glory to the Heroes,” the traditional response to Slava Ukraini.  
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One of the world’s largest icebergs is drifting beyond Antarctic waters after being grounded for more than three decades, according to the British Antarctic Survey. 

The iceberg, known as A23a, split from the Antarctic’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986. But it became stuck to the ocean floor and had remained for many years in the Weddell Sea. 

The iceberg is about three times the size of New York City and more than twice the size of Greater London, measuring around 4,000 square kilometers. 

Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey, told the BBC on Friday that the iceberg has been drifting for the past year and now appears to be picking up speed and moving past the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, helped by wind and ocean currents. 

“I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come,” Fleming told the BBC. 

“It was grounded since 1986, but eventually it was going to decrease (in size) sufficiently was to lose grip and start moving,” he added. 

Fleming said he first spotted movement from the iceberg in 2020. The British Antarctic Survey said it has now ungrounded and is moving along ocean currents to sub-Antarctic South Georgia. 
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Tens of thousands of people turned out on central London’s streets on Saturday for a pro-Palestinian march calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. 

At least five people were arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred, police said. 

The National March for Palestine was the latest of several huge protests staged in the British capital and many European cities every weekend since the Israel-Hamas war began last month. 

Saturday’s protests came on the second day of a four-day cease-fire that has allowed critical humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and given civilians their first respite after seven weeks of war. 

The Metropolitan Police said officers arrested a man on suspicion of inciting racial hatred “near the start of the protest.” The man was spotted carrying a placard with Nazi symbols on it, police said. 

Later Saturday, police said they arrested four more people who distributed “literature featuring a swastika inside a Star of David.” 

Officers handed out leaflets at the march that sought to clarify what would be deemed a criminal offense, after the force faced pressure from senior government officials to be tougher on alleged displays of antisemitism at the protests. 

“Anyone who is racist or incites hatred against any group should expect to be arrested. As should anyone who supports Hamas or any other banned organization,” said Deputy Assistant Police Commissioner Ade Adelekan. “We will not tolerate anyone who celebrates or promotes acts of terrorism – such as the killing or kidnap of innocent people – or who spreads hate speech.”

The force said 1,500 officers were deployed to police the march. 

Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Islamist group, also protested Saturday outside the Egyptian Embassy in London. Police said two women who were seen holding offensive placards were arrested for a racially aggravated public order offense. 

In Paris, a march staged for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women drew both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists as well as other groups. 

Some protesters, waving Palestinian flags and posters reading “Free Palestine,” walked in a show of solidarity with “Gaza and Palestine’s women who are being murdered.” 

A group of Jewish women also joined the march to denounce crimes committed by Hamas, including rapes and killings, chanting, “We are women, we are proud, we are Jewish and we are angry.” 

Meanwhile, some pro-Palestinian protests were organized over the weekend in France’s major cities including Strasbourg, Lyon and Marseille. 

In Vienna, many marched amid the first snow in the city, waving Palestinian flags at a “Peace for Palestine” rally. Organizers called on the Austrian government to back a cease-fire in Gaza, the release of all Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and the lifting of the Gaza blockade. 

Organizers warned potential participants ahead of Saturday’s demonstration that any antisemitic or far-right actions would be “stopped immediately” and offenders would be asked to leave the event. 

Tens of thousands of people are also expected to take part in a march organized by the Campaign Against Antisemitism charity on Sunday to show solidarity with the Jewish community in the U.K. 
…

British troops are patrolling the Kosovo-Serbia border as part of a NATO peacekeeping presence being bolstered amid concern that the former wartime foes could return to open conflict following a series of violent incidents in recent months.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization sent hundreds of additional forces to Kosovo from Britain and Romania after a battle between the authorities and armed Serbs holed up in a monastery turned a quiet village in northern Kosovo into a war zone on Sept. 24.

One police officer and three gunmen were killed in the village of Banjska in what was seen as the worst violence since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Kosovo accused Serbia of providing financial and practical support for the gunmen, which Belgrade denies.

NATO has sent 1,000 extra troops to the region, bringing its presence there to 4,500 peacekeepers from 27 countries. British soldiers are now being deployed in 18-hour shifts in freezing conditions to make sure no weapons or armed groups enter Kosovo.

“Currently we are here on a routine patrol, which consists of understanding patterns of life, gaining intelligence on any illegal or suspicious activity that then gets fed back to KFOR (NATO mission) and higher,” Lieutenant Joss Gaddie from the British Army told Reuters at the border with Serbia.

During a visit on Monday to the western Balkans, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the organization is reviewing whether a more permanent increase of forces was needed “to ensure that this doesn’t spiral out of control and creates a new violent conflict in Kosovo or in the wider region.”

Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority, declared independence from Serbia in 2008 after a guerrilla uprising and a 1999 NATO intervention.

Around 5% of the population in Kosovo are ethnic Serbs, of which half live in the north and refuse to recognize Kosovo independence and see Belgrade as their capital. They have often clashed with Kosovo police and international peacekeepers.

For more than two decades many ethnic Serbs have refused to register vehicles with Kosovo car plates, using their own system instead which is seen as illegal by Pristina.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s government has set a December 1 deadline for around 10,000 motorists to register their cars with Kosovo numbers or face heavy penalties. A similar request sparked violence last year.
…

Kyiv was rocked by a massive drone attack early Saturday, using Iranian-designed Shahed drones.

Five people, including a child, were wounded in the attack, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s Telegram post.

Ukraine’s air force said the attack was the largest drone attack since the beginning of Russia’s invasion.

The British Defense Ministry said Saturday in its daily report on the invasion that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet’s ability to reload vessels with cruise missiles at its Novorossiysk base will likely be “a significant factor” in the effectiveness of the fleet.

The fleet has traditionally reloaded its cruise missiles at Sevastopol, but the Crimean facility is facing increasing risk of being hit by Ukrainian long-range strikes.

The British intelligence update said Novorossiysk would be a better alternative site, but that move would require relocating and reloading the missiles and would also require new delivery, storage, handling and loading processes.

Last month, Ukraine said Russia was having logistical problems with firing cruise missiles from Novorossiysk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that his country was looking for “three victories” from its Western allies, including the passage of two military aid packages — by the United States and the European Union — and the formal start of talks to join the European bloc.

“We need three victories. The first one is the victory with U.S. Congress. It’s a challenge, it’s not easy, but Ukraine is doing everything,” Zelenskyy told a news conference in Kyiv.

President Joe Biden has proposed billions of dollars in new assistance for Ukraine, but the funding was not included in a stopgap measure Congress passed this month.

Some Republican lawmakers oppose approving more aid for Ukraine, but a majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress still support the additional aid.

In a statement Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appealed to lawmakers to support Biden’s latest funding request for Ukraine military aid.

“Helping Ukraine defend itself … helps prevent larger conflict in the region and deters future aggression, which makes us all safer,” Blinken said.

Zelenskyy said the second “victory” needed abroad was that “we need the help from the EU on the 50 billion-euro package,” and “the third is to open a dialog about our future membership.”

The European Union recently announced a 50 billion-euro package for Ukraine, but it has not yet been approved and is facing opposition by Hungary. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also said he is opposed to launching EU membership talks with Kyiv.

Zelenskyy made the comments at a joint news conference in Kyiv with Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, who expressed optimism that the EU aid package for Ukraine would eventually pass.

Moldova sanctions

In Moscow, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Friday that it viewed Moldova’s decision to join EU sanctions against it as a hostile step.

“We regard this as yet another hostile step by the Moldovan leadership, which is fully integrated into the anti-Russian campaign of the ‘collective West,'” the ministry said in a statement.

“Its aim is the complete destruction of Russian-Moldovan relations,” it said.

Moldova’s parliament agreed to the sanctions against Russia on Friday, part of the country’s bid to eventually join the European Union.

Russian crackdown

Russia’s Justice Ministry said Friday that former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who later became a critic of the Kremlin, had been added to a registry of foreign agents.

Kasyanov served as prime minister for the first four years of Putin’s administration but was fired in 2004.

He later became a prominent opposition figure, and after leaving the country in 2022, he criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The foreign agent law has been used against opposition figures and independent news media. It requires those designated as foreign agents who publish information to prominently label that the material comes from a foreign agent.

Battlefield

The Russian Defense Ministry said its missile defenses downed 13 Ukrainian drones over Crimea and three more over the Volgograd region early Friday.

Ukrainian officials did not comment on the Russian report.

Also Friday, officials in Ukraine said Russian forces were escalating their attacks on the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka.

Russia has been trying to capture the city since mid-October, in a brutal battle that has drawn parallels to the fight for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which Russia eventually captured after months of intense fighting.

The city sits on the front line five kilometers from Donetsk, the Russian-controlled capital of the region, one of four regions Moscow said it annexed from Ukraine.

The British Defense Ministry said Friday in its daily intelligence update on the war that Russia continued to face “mass casualties from Ukrainian long-range precision strikes well behind the front line.”

The ministry said that on November 10, more than 70 Russian troops were probably killed in a strike on a truck convoy 23 kilometers behind the front line in Hladkivka, a village in Kherson oblast. Then, the ministry said, a November 19 strike on an award ceremony or concert in Kumachove, 60 kilometers behind the lines, probably caused “tens” of casualties.

Ukraine, though, has suffered similar casualties, the update said, adding that a Russian missile killed 19 members of a Ukrainian brigade at a medal ceremony November 3.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Pope Francis canceled his morning audiences on Saturday because of mild flu, the Vatican said in a statement.

The 86-year-old pontiff holds regular meetings with Vatican officials on Saturdays as well as private audiences.

Earlier this month, the pope skipped reading a prepared speech for a meeting with European rabbis as he was suffering from a cold, but he appeared to be in good health during a meeting with children just hours later.

In June, he had surgery on an abdominal hernia. He spent nine days in hospital and appears to have recovered fully from that operation.

The pope’s next public appearance is scheduled for Sunday, when he is expected to address crowds in his weekly Angelus message in St. Peter’s Square.

Francis is also scheduled to attend the COP28 climate conference in Dubai from Dec. 1-3, where he is expected to have nearly an entire day of bilateral meetings with world leaders attending the event. The conference runs from Nov. 30-Dec. 12. 
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