MOSCOW: Russian forces have advanced further to the west after taking control of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, the defense ministry said on Friday.
It said Russian forces had also destroyed a number of Western-provided Ukrainian weapons in the past week including seven British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, a US Patriot anti-aircraft guided missile and launch vehicle, and 42 HIMARS rockets fired by multiple launch systems.
Reuters could not independently verify battlefield reports.
The frontlines in the war, which started two years ago on Saturday, had not shifted substantially since late 2022 before the taking of Avdiivka, and Russia still controls just under a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
The capture of Avdiivka, following months of fighting with heavy casualties on both sides, was Russia’s first significant gain since taking the city of Bakhmut last May.
After taking Avdiivka, units of the “Center” group of Russian forces “continued advancing in a westerly direction,” the defense ministry statement said.
“In cooperation with aviation and artillery, they defeated accumulations of manpower and equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces” in six nearby settlements, it said.
Russia says its forces push further west after taking Ukraine’s Avdiivka
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Russia says its forces push further west after taking Ukraine’s Avdiivka
- Russian forces had also destroyed a number of Western-provided Ukrainian weapons
- The frontlines in the war had not shifted substantially since late 2022 before the taking of Avdiivka
India’s opposition, written off as too weak, makes a stunning comeback to slow Modi’s juggernaut
- The election also marked a revival for the main opposition Congress party and its allies
It scored a stunning comeback, slowing the Modi juggernaut and pushing his Bharatiya Janata Party well below the majority mark. It’s unchartered territory for the populist prime minister, who needs the help of his allies to stay in power. That could significantly change his governance style after he enjoyed a commanding majority in Parliament for a decade.
The election results released Wednesday also marked a revival for the main opposition Congress party and its allies, who defied predictions of decline and made deep inroads into governing party strongholds, resetting India’s political landscape. The opposition won a total of 232 seats out of 543, doubling its strength from the last election.
“The opposition has proved to be tremendously resilient and shown courage of conviction. In many ways it has saved India’s democracy and shown Modi that he can be challenged — and even humbled by denting his image of electoral invincibility,” said journalist and political analyst Rasheed Kidwai.
The unwieldy grouping of more than two dozen opposition parties, called INDIA, was formed last year. Beset with ideological differences and personality clashes, what glued them together was a shared perceived threat: what they call Modi’s tightening grip on India’s democratic institutions and Parliament, and his strident Hindu nationalism that has targeted the country’s minorities, particularly Muslims.
The election battle is between “Narendra Modi and INDIA, his ideology and INDIA,” the alliance’s campaign face, Rahul Gandhi, said at an opposition meeting last year.
Gandhi, heir to India’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has long been mocked by Modi, his party and his supporters as a beneficiary of dynastic politics. Gandhi’s father, grandmother and great-grandfather were all prime ministers.
Under his leadership, the Congress party was reduced to a paltry 52 seats in 2019 when Modi romped to victory in a landslide win. And last year he was expelled from Parliament due to a defamation case after Modi’s party accused him of mocking the prime minister’s surname. (He was later returned to his seat by India’s top court.)
But ahead of the 2024 election, Gandhi went through a transformation — he embarked on two cross-country marches against what he called Modi’s politics of hate, re-energizing his party’s members and rehabilitating his image.
During the election campaign, he, along with other opposition leaders, sought to galvanize voters on issues such as high unemployment, growing inequality and economic and social injustice, while targeting Modi over his polarizing campaign and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
“They certainly gained significant momentum through the course of the campaign, to the point where the opposition agendas became the agenda points of this election,” said Yamini Aiyar, a public policy scholar.
The election results showed his messaging worked with the voters, as his party made substantial gains in BJP-governed states such as Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Maharashtra by tapping into economic stress. It won 99 seats across India.
“Rahul Gandhi has emerged as a strong national leader and that should worry Modi,” Kidwai said.
The opposition proved even more successful in a Modi party bastion where it flipped the largest number of seats: Uttar Pradesh, which sends the most lawmakers of any state — 80 — to Parliament.
Long considered the biggest prize in Indian elections, the opposition clinched a staggering 44 parliamentary seats in the state, with the regional Samajwadi Party winning a whopping 37, leaving Modi’s party with less than half of the seats. In the 2019 election, the BJP won 62 seats in the state.
The opposition also managed to wrest away BJP’s seat in Ayodhya city, a deeply symbolic loss for Modi’s party after the prime minister opened a controversial grand Hindu temple on the site of a razed mosque there in January. The opening of the temple dedicated to Lord Ram, at which Modi performed rituals, marked the unofficial start of his election campaign, with his party hoping it would resonate with the Hindu majority and bring more voters into its fold.
“The BJP lost because its leadership did not have its ears to the ground. They believed that the issue of the Ram Temple would secure their victory, but they overlooked important issues like jobs and inflation,” said political analyst Amarnath Agarwal.
A strong showing by the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party in Tamil Nadu further boosted the opposition’s numbers, denying Modi the supermajority he hoped for after exhibiting confidence his alliance would take 400 seats.
It also meant that the regional parties, once relegated to the margins after Modi’s dominating wins in 2014 and 2019, will acquire a greater political space in Indian politics.
“It also gives a lot of power back to the states,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We’ve seen a lot of centralization in the hands of the executive, in the hands of the Prime Minister’s Office specifically.”
The opposition’s surprise gains came against the backdrop of what it calls Modi’s intensified political crackdown against them.
Modi and his government have increasingly wielded strong-arm tactics to subdue political opponents. In the run-up to the election, opposition leaders and parties faced a slew of legal and financial challenges. The chief ministers of two opposition-controlled states were thrown in jail and the bank accounts of the Congress party were temporarily frozen.
Aiyar, the public policy scholar, said the opposition was able to “palpably catch on to signs of discontentment” even as it faced “fairly significant constraints of their own.”
“This was certainly not a level playing field at the start of the election,” she said.
As election results showed the opposition doing better than expected on Tuesday, a beaming Gandhi pulled out a red-jacketed copy of India’s Constitution that he had displayed on the campaign trail and said his alliance’s performance was the “first step in its fight” to save the charter.
“India’s poorest stood up to save the Constitution,” he said.
Migrants rattled and unsure as deportations begin under new rule halting asylum
- Homeland Security Department officials say the first deportations occurred Wednesday under the rule, which is triggered when border arrests top 2,500 a day
DULZURA: Abigail Castillo was about to cross the US border illegally when she heard President Joe Biden was halting asylum. She continued anyway, walking hours through the mountains east of San Diego with her toddler son, hoping it wasn’t too late.
“I heard that they were going to do it or were about to do it,” Castillo, 35, said Wednesday as she and her son were escorted to a Border Patrol van with about two dozen others from Brazil, Ecuador and her village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, which she said she left because it was gripped by violence.
They had missed the deadline, and were now subject to the new deportation rule.
Her sense of uncertainty prevailed among many migrants after Biden invoked presidential powers to stop asylum processing when arrests for illegal crossings top 2,500 in a day. The measure took effect at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Wednesday because that threshold was met.
Two senior Homeland Security Department officials confirmed the first deportations under the new rule took place Wednesday, though they did not say how many were deported. The officials briefed reporters on condition their names not be used in keeping with regulations.
Sergio Franco, who clutched his baby girl after a nearly two-month journey from Ecuador with his family, walking through the perilous Darien jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama, said he was confident that he would prevail in his plea to find a safe haven in the United States.
“If we have evidence, there shouldn’t be a problem,” he said as he got into the van with Castillo and the others.
As the group was driven away, several migrants from India walked up to the same dusty area near a gun shop in the town of Dulzura, one of several that have popped up over the last year in the remote rural outskirts of San Diego for migrants to surrender to Border Patrol agents. There was no water or restrooms and little shade.
Several Guatemalan women arrived later. Among them was Arelis Alonzo Lopez, who said she was nearly five months pregnant and had walked for two nights. A Border Patrol agent asked how she felt.
“I can’t take any more,” she answered.
Asylum remains suspended until average daily arrests fall below 1,500 for a week straight. The last month that crossings were that low for that long was in July 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Migrants who express fear for their safety if they are deported will be screened by US asylum officers but under a higher standard than what’s currently in place. If they pass, they can remain to pursue other forms of humanitarian protection, including those laid out in the UN Convention Against Torture.
There are serious questions about whether the new measure can stop large-scale migrant entries. Mexico has agreed to take back migrants who are not Mexican, but only limited numbers and nationalities. And the Biden administration doesn’t have the money and diplomatic support it needs to deport migrants long distances, including to Ecuador and India.
In Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, Esmeralda Castro of El Salvador worried the asylum halt will drive more people to compete for the 1,450 slots awarded daily to enter legally through US Customs and Border Protection’s heavily oversubscribed online app, known as CBP One. Castro, 40, said she has tried for nine months for an appointment using the app.
“Imagine what’s going to happen with what they’ve done. The system is going to collapse again,” said Castro, speaking at a migrant camp near the banks of the Rio Grande where she has been living with about 10 others. The app has become so overwhelmed at times that users got error messages and experienced other technical failures.
Juan Daniel Medina of the Dominican Republic said he was determined to stick with CBP One, even after eight months of fruitless attempts to get an appointment.
“It’s the correct way because that way you do everything legally. They won’t have to jump the river and risk facing criminal charges,” the 30-year-old Medina said.
Two hours before the sun set Tuesday in San Diego, four busloads of migrants were dropped off by Border Patrol agents at a transit center, many of them to seek asylum in one of 68 immigration courts across the country. Asylum-seekers can generally work while their claims slowly wind through overwhelmed immigration courts.
Jesus Gomez of Medellin, Colombia, said Border Patrol agents told him he was one of the last people to be released to seek asylum and that he should tell friends and family back home that they will be deported if they attempt to enter illegally. He said he didn’t know if it was true.
“It’s a very difficult thing to navigate,” Gomez, 49, said as he waited for his wife to be released by the Border Patrol before they fly to Boston, where their daughter lives.
UN condemns mass public flogging in Afghanistan
- About 63 people were publicly lashed in the northern Saripul province on Tuesday, says UN mission in Afghanistan
KABUL: The United Nations on Wednesday slammed a mass flogging of dozens of people in Afghanistan, and called on the Taliban authorities to end the practice.
About 63 people were publicly lashed in the northern Saripul province on Tuesday, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported.
“UNAMA reiterates its condemnation of corporal punishment and calls for respect for international human rights obligations,” the mission said in a statement posted on X.
Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taliban authorities have reintroduced an extreme interpretation of Islamic law — or sharia.
Crowds have watched public executions and corporal publishments, mainly flogging.
The latter is mostly employed for crimes including theft, adultery and alcohol consumption.
More than 1 in 4 children under age 5 face ‘severe’ food poverty: UNICEF
- Some 440 million children under the age of five living in about 100 low- and middle-income countries are living in food poverty
- Severe child food poverty is concentrated in about 20 countries, with particularly dire situations in Somalia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Afghanistan
UNITED NATIONS: More than one in four children under the age of five globally live in “severe” food poverty, UNICEF has warned — meaning more than 180 million are at risk of experiencing adverse impacts on their growth and development.
“Severe child food poverty describes children who are surviving on severely deprived diets so they’re only consuming two or less food groups,” Harriet Torlesse, a lead writer of a new UNICEF report published late Wednesday, told AFP.
“It is shocking in this day and age where we know what needs to be done.”
UNICEF recommends that young children eat foods daily from five of eight main groups — breast milk; grains, roots, tubers and plantains; pulses, nuts and seeds; dairy; meat, poultry and fish; eggs; vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables; and other fruits and vegetables.
But 440 million children under the age of five living in about 100 low- and middle-income countries are living in food poverty, meaning they do not have access to five food groups each day.
Of those, 181 million are experiencing severe food poverty, eating from at most two food groups.
“Children who consume just two food groups per day — for example, rice and some milk — are up to 50 percent more likely to experience severe forms of malnutrition,” UNICEF chief Catherine Russell said in a statement accompanying the report.
That malnutrition can lead to emaciation, a state of being abnormally thin that can be fatal.
And even if these children survive and grow up, “they certainly don’t thrive. So they do less well at school,” Torlesse explained.
“When they’re adults, they find it harder to earn a decent income, and that turns the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next,” the nutrition expert said.
“If you think of what a brain looks like and the heart and the immune system, all these important systems of the body that are so important for development, for protection against disease — they all depend on vitamins and minerals and protein.”
Severe child food poverty is concentrated in about 20 countries, with particularly dire situations in: Somalia, where 63 percent of young children are affected; Guinea (54 percent); Guinea-Bissau (53 percent) and Afghanistan (49 percent).
While data is not available for wealthy countries, children in low-income households there also suffer from nutritional gaps.
The report from the UN Children’s Fund notes the current circumstances in the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s military offensive in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas militants “have brought the food and health systems to collapse.”
From December to April this year, the agency collected five rounds of data by text message from families receiving financial aid in the besieged Palestinian territory.
It showed that about nine in 10 children were living in severe food poverty.
While the data is not necessarily representative, it indicates what UNICEF called an “appalling escalation in nutrition deprivation since 2020, when only 13 percent of children in the Gaza Strip were living in severe child food poverty.”
Worldwide, the agency noted “slow progress over the past decade” in addressing the crisis, and called for better social services and humanitarian aid for the most vulnerable children.
It also called for a rethink of the global food processing system, saying that sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods were being “aggressively marketed to parents and families and are the new normal for feeding children.”
Torlesse explained: “These foods are cheap but they’re also very high in calories. They’re high-energy, high salt, high fat. So they’ll fill stomachs and they’ll remove hunger, but they won’t provide the vitamins and minerals that children need.”
Sugary and salty foods — which children quickly develop a taste for, a habit they can take into adulthood — also contribute to the development of obesity.
WHO confirms first fatal human case of H5N2 bird flu
GENEVA: A person died of bird flu in Mexico in the first confirmed case of a human infected with the H5N2 variant, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
The 59-year old, who died on April 24 after developing fever, shortness of breath, diarrhea and nausea, had “no history of exposure to poultry or other animals” and “multiple underlying medical conditions,” the WHO said in a statement.
The resident of the State of Mexico was hospitalized in Mexico City and died the same day, the statement said.
It was the “first laboratory-confirmed human case of infection with an influenza A(H5N2) virus reported globally,” the WHO added.
Mexican health authorities reported the confirmed case to the UN health body on May 23 after conducting laboratory tests.
The source of exposure to the virus was unknown, the WHO said, although cases of H5N2 have been reported in poultry in Mexico.
H5N2 cases were detected in a backyard poultry farm in Michoacan state in March, with other outbreaks identified in the State of Mexico, according to the UN health body.
But it said establishing a link between the human case and the poultry infections was so far impossible, estimating the risk to people as “low.”
Mexico’s health ministry said in a statement that the person who died was “a 59-year-old man with a history of chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, (and) long-standing systemic arterial hypertension.”
“There is no risk of contagion for the population,” the statement said, adding that “all samples from identified contacts (of the patient) have been negative.”
Authorities are monitoring farms near the victim’s home and have established a permanent monitoring system to detect other cases in wildlife in the area, the statement added.
A different variant of bird flu, H5N1, has been spreading for weeks among dairy cow herds in the United States, with a small number of cases reported among humans.
But none of the cases are human-to-human infections, with the disease instead jumping from cattle to people, authorities have said.
