TORONTO: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will speak to the Canadian Parliament on Friday as part of his campaign to bolster support from Western allies for Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion.
Zelensky flew into Canada’s capital late Thursday after meetings with US President Joe Biden and lawmakers in Washington. He spoke at the United Nations’ annual meeting Wednesday.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who also planned to speak to Parliament on Friday, gave Zelensky a warm welcome on the tarmac at Ottawa’s airport.
It is Zelensky’s first visit to Canada since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He previously addressed the Canadian Parliament virtually after the war started.
After their speeches, Zelensky and Trudeau are scheduled to go to Toronto to meet with the local Ukrainian community. Canada is home to about 1.4 million people of Ukrainian descent, close to 4 percent of the population.
Canada’s UN ambassador, Bob Rae, said it is important for Zelensky to see the extent to which Canada supports Ukraine in the war.
“We have done a lot to help him and we need to do more,” Rae said. “We’re going to continue to do everything we can to support the Ukrainian people.”
Canada has provided more than $8.9 billion Canadian ($6.6 billion) in support to Ukraine in what Trudeau’s government calls the highest per-capita direct financial support to Ukraine in the Group of 7 industrial nations.
More than 175,000 Ukrainians have come to Canada since the war started and an additional 700,000 have received approval to come as part of an initiative that supports temporary relocation of those fleeing the war. The initiative allows for an open work permit for three years with pathways to permeant residency and citizenship.
Trudeau’s office said Canada has provided $1.8 billion Canadian ($1.3 billion) in military aid, including tanks, artillery, armored vehicles and ammunition.
Zelensky is facing questions in Washington about the flow of American dollars that for 19 months has helped keep his troops in the fight against Russian forces.
Ukrainian troops are struggling to take back territory that Russia gained over the past year. Their progress in the next month or so before the rains come and the ground turns to mud could be critical in rousing additional global support over the winter.
Zelensky made his first official visit to Canada in 2019.
Zelensky to speak before Canadian Parliament in his campaign to shore up support for Ukraine
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Zelensky to speak before Canadian Parliament in his campaign to shore up support for Ukraine
- After their speeches, Zelensky and Trudeau are scheduled to go to Toronto to meet with the local Ukrainian community
- Canada’s UN ambassador, Bob Rae, said it is important for Zelensky to see the extent to which Canada supports Ukraine in the war.
Son of Somalia president flees Turkiye after crash
- The republic’s prosecutor issued an international arrest warrant on Friday after police went to the suspect’s home only to find “he had been gone since Dec. 2,” the channel said
ISTANBUL: The son of Somalia’s president, alleged to have knocked over and killed a delivery rider in Istanbul, has fled Turkiye despite an international arrest warrant, media reported.
Police had released Mohammed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud without any bail conditions after preliminary investigations into the accident, said daily newspaper Cumhuriyet.
“The suspect left Turkiye freely,” said Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The mayor — a leading opponent of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — accused the authorities of “allowing this escape” and being “incapable of defending citizens’ rights in their own country.”
The son of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had collided with a motorbike delivery man on Nov. 30, according to a police report quoted by A Haber television.
Father of two children, Yunus Emre Gocer, died in hospital six days later.
The republic’s prosecutor issued an international arrest warrant on Friday after police went to the suspect’s home only to find “he had been gone since Dec. 2,” the channel said.
The dead man’s lawyer told Cumhuriyet that a first traffic police report into the crash had blamed the victim for “negligence.”
A second expert’s report with video recordings showed that the Somali suspect was “100 percent responsible,” the lawyer said, but it added doubts he would “ever be caught.”
Turkiye has had close relations with Somalia for the last 10 years and is the Horn of Africa nation’s leading economic partner, notably in the construction, education and health sectors and in military cooperation.
Tens of thousands march in London calling for Gaza ceasefire
- Organizers vow to continue protests over attacks on Palestinian civilians as death toll climbs to 17,700
LONDON: Tens of thousands of people joined a pro-Palestinian march on Saturday in the British capital to demand a full ceasefire in Gaza, organizers said.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign said that marchers were voicing opposition “to the indiscriminate attacks on civilians which have claimed the lives of at least 17,000 Palestinians, including more than 7,000 children.”
People from across the UK gathered in central London for the ninth Saturday in a row after Israel launched its assault on Gaza.
“This has been one of the largest, sustained political campaigns in British history,” PSC, one of the six organizers of the march, said.
It added that on Nov. 25 more than 300,000 people marched in London, while last Saturday there were more than 100 events across the UK in a third “day of action.”
Speakers at Saturday’s rally included MPs, trade union leaders, and representatives from a wide range of civil society organizations.
Ben Jamal, PSC director, said: “We are witnessing unrelenting horror in Gaza. Palestinians have been bombed, displaced, and deprived of food, water, fuel, electricity and health services for 62 days and counting.
“The amount of destruction has been compared to that of German cities in the Second World War, except it’s happened in a far shorter time.”
He said a permanent ceasefire must be the starting point to address the underlying causes of the situation, including “decades of Israeli military occupation, and a system of oppression against the Palestinian people that is considered internationally to meet the legal definition of apartheid.”
Jamal called on the British government to end its “complicity in Israel’s crimes,” and work to stop the killing of civilians.
He condemned UK political leaders who have failed to call for a ceasefire.
“We will continue to march, demonstrate, and organize to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and justice for the Palestinian people,” he said.
Bangladeshis remember Kissinger as ‘accomplice in genocide’
- Up to 3m people were killed in US-supported Pakistani crackdown in Bangladesh
- Kissinger ‘turned a blind eye’ to it, former Bangladeshi foreign secretary says
DHAKA: Most obituaries that on Nov. 29 bid farewell to Henry Kissinger have omitted reference to his role in the war of independence of Bangladesh, where the prominent US secretary of state will remain seen as an enabler of massacres of civilians.
In 1971, Kissinger advised then President Richard Nixon to side with the Pakistani military dictator Gen. Yahya Khan in his war with Bangladesh, then East Pakistan.
According to the Bangladesh government, the war that eventually led to the nation’s independence came at a cost of 3 million lives, most of them civilians, including intellectuals, whom historians say were deliberately targeted.
The nine-month war also displaced 10 million people, a seventh of Bangladesh’s population at the time, forcing them to flee to neighboring India.
“Bangladesh will remember him as an accomplice and, to some extent, an instigator of the genocide that was committed against Bangladesh in 1971. He was an enemy of Bangladesh,” Touhid Hossain, former foreign secretary of Bangladesh, told Arab News.
Kissinger and the US administration turned a “blind eye to the genocide going on in Bangladesh. It was largely influenced by Kissinger,” Hossain added.
At the time, the state of Pakistan existed as a two-winged artificial entity — West Pakistan, which is today’s Pakistan, and East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh — split in between by India.
After the 1970 elections yielded a democratic victory for ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan and their leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was expected to become the prime minister of the whole country, the army generals ruling West Pakistan launched a military crackdown that turned into a mass slaughter of his supporters and of Bengali civilians.
The American support for Pakistan came because of Islamabad’s role as a mediator in the normalization of relations between the US and China.
“They could have done it without supporting the genocide,” Hossain said.
“It’s said that since Pakistan was trying to mediate the US-China relations during that period against the Soviet Union, that’s why from a geopolitical consideration, he turned a blind eye to the other things and went all for Pakistan.”
Kissinger and Nixon repeatedly ignored reports from Archer Blood, the US consul in Dhaka, as Pakistani forces, using US-made weapons, massacred thousands of people in the city.
“Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, both of them were complicit,” Dr. Imtiaz Ahmed, professor of international relations at Dhaka University, told Arab News.
“Blood sent the information about the ongoing genocide here. But he (Kissinger) didn’t pay much attention to that … Their point was not to disturb Yahya Khan as Khan was involved in his negotiating and bringing China into the global arena.”
Bangladesh has yet to hear an apology from the US over the role it played in enabling the killing of its civilians. Ahmed hoped that it would finally at least recognize the historical facts.
“The US didn’t recognize the genocide till today, as Kissinger was alive. Now, that he is no longer there, I think it opens up the possibility of the US recognizing the 1971 genocide as genocide,” he said.
“Kissinger played a complicit role in the genocide that took place in Bangladesh in 1971. There is no doubt about this.”
New US aid for Ukraine by year-end seems increasingly of out reach as GOP ties it to border security
New US aid for Ukraine by year-end seems increasingly of out reach as GOP ties it to border security
- Biden is facing the prospect of a cornerstone of his foreign policy — repelling Russian President Vladimir Putin from overtaking Ukraine
- The new Republican proposal dug in on policy changes that had led Democrats to step back from the negotiations
WASHINGTON: A deal to provide further US assistance to Ukraine by year-end appears to be increasingly out of reach for President Joe Biden.
The impasse is deepening in Congress despite dire warnings from the White House about the consequences of inaction as Republicans insist on pairing the aid with changes to America’s immigration and border policies.
After the Democratic president said this past week he was willing to “make significant compromises on the border,” Republicans quickly revived demands that they had earlier set aside, hardening their positions and attempting to shift the negotiations to the right, according to a person familiar with the talks who was not authorized to publicly discuss them and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The latest proposal, from the lead GOP negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, came during a meeting with a core group of senators before they left Washington on Thursday afternoon. It could force the White House to consider ideas that many Democrats will seriously oppose, throwing new obstacles in the difficult negotiations.
Biden is facing the prospect of a cornerstone of his foreign policy — repelling Russian President Vladimir Putin from overtaking Ukraine — crumbling as US support for funding the war wanes, especially among Republicans. The White House says a failure to approve more aid by year’s end could have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine and its ability to fight.
To preserve US backing, the Biden administration has quietly engaged in Senate talks on border policy in recent weeks, providing assistance to the small group of senators trying to reach a deal and communicating what policy changes it would find acceptable.
The president is trying to satisfy GOP demands to reduce the historic number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border while alleviating Democrats’ fears that legal immigration will be choked off with drastic measures.
As talks sputtered to a restart this past week, Democrats warned Republicans that time for a deal was running short. Congress is scheduled to depart Washington in mid-December for a holiday break.
“Republicans need to show they are serious about reaching a compromise, not just throwing on the floor basically Donald Trump’s border policies,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Thursday before Republicans made their counteroffer.
But the new Republican proposal dug in on policy changes that had led Democrats to step back from the negotiations, according to the person familiar with the talks. The GOP offer calls for ending the humanitarian parole program that’s now in place for existing classes of migrants — Ukrainians, Afghans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. That idea had been all but dashed before.
Additionally, those groups of migrants would not be allowed to be paroled again if the terms of their stay expire before their cases are adjudicated in immigration proceedings.
GOP senators proposed monitoring systems such as ankle bracelets for people, including children, who are detained at the border and are awaiting parole. Republicans want to ban people from applying for asylum if they have transited through a different country where they could have sought asylum instead. GOP lawmakers also want to revive executive powers that would allow a president to shut down entries for wide-ranging reasons.
Further, after migrant encounters at the border recently hit historic numbers, the GOP proposal would set new guidelines requiring the border to be essentially shut down if illegal crossings reach a certain limit.
Lankford declined to discuss specifics after the Thursday meeting, but said he was trying to “negotiate in good faith.” He said the historic number of migrants at the border could not be ignored. The sheer number of people arriving at the border has swamped the asylum system, he said, making it impossible for authorities to adequately screen the people they allow in.
“Do you want large numbers of undocumented individuals and unscreened individuals without work permits, without access to the rest of the economy?” Lankford said.
The lead Democratic negotiator, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, did not quickly respond to the GOP proposal.
Senators had made some progress in the talks before Thursday, finding general agreement on raising the initial standard for migrants to enter the asylum system — part of what’s called the credible fear system. The administration has communicated that it is amenable to that change and that it could agree to expand expedited removal to deport immigrants before they have a hearing with an immigration judge, according to two people briefed on the private negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Immigration advocates and progressives in Congress have been alarmed by the direction of the talks, especially because they have not featured changes aimed at expanding legal immigration.
Robyn Barnard, director of refugee advocacy with Human Rights First, called the current state of negotiations an “absolute crisis moment.” She warned that broadening the fast-track deportation authority could lead to a mass rounding up of immigrants around the country and compared it to the situation during the Trump administration. “Communities across the country would be living in fear,” she said.
But Republican senators, sensing that Biden, who is campaigning for a second term, wants to address the historic number of people coming to the border, have taken an aggressive stance and tried to draw the president directly into negotiations.
“The White House is going to have to engage particularly if Senate Democrats are unwilling to do what we are suggesting be done,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., at a news conference Thursday.
The White House has so far declined to take a leading role in negotiations. “Democrats have said that they want to compromise. Have that conversation,” said White House press secretary Karine-Jean Pierre.
After every GOP senator this past week voted not to move ahead with legislation that would provide tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance for Ukraine, many in the chamber were left in a dour mood. Even those who held out hope for a deal acknowledged it would be difficult to push a package through the Senate at this late stage.
Even if senators reach a deal, the obstacles to passage in the House are considerable. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, has signaled he will fight for sweeping changes to immigration policy that go beyond what is being discussed in the Senate. Also, broad support from House Democrats is far from guaranteed, as progressives and Hispanic lawmakers have raised alarm at curtailing access to asylum.
“Trading Ukrainian lives for the lives of asylum seekers is morally bankrupt and irresponsible,” Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Illinois, posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, as part of a coordinated campaign by Hispanic Democrats.
The unwieldy nature of the issue left even Lankford, who was one of the few senators optimistic that a deal could be reached this year, acknowledging the difficulty of finding an agreement in the coming days.
“There’s just a whole lot of politics that have been bound up in this,” he said as he departed the Capitol for the week. “Thirty years it hasn’t been resolved because it’s incredibly complicated.”
Pro-Israel groups influencing US law enforcement: Leak
- Ex-FBI agent: ‘Having a foreign country’s security services aligned with the beat cop on American streets is concerning’
- Leak raises questions about treatment of pro-Palestinian activists, fails to show training or consultation from Muslim groups
LONDON: Pro-Israel pressure groups are influencing law enforcement agencies in the US through training and consultancy programs, leaked police documents show.
The BlueLeaks collection of data, hacked from US law enforcement agencies in 2020, contains files showing that police received training from Israel Defense Forces programs on dealing with Islamist extremism, The Guardian reported.
And the Anti-Defamation League, a US-based Jewish advocacy group, enjoys a close relationship with law enforcement agencies, with the organization hosting training sessions for officers on the “evolving nature of Islamic extremists.”
BlueLeaks shows intelligence that was distributed by federal law enforcement programs, including fusion centers, which share information between local, state and federal agencies.
ADL staff members are revealed by BlueLeaks to have attended fusion center events as registered visitors, advising law enforcement that “we facilitate workshops … on extremism, hate crime and (in Washington D.C. and Israel) counterterrorism.”
The leak has raised questions about the influence of pro-Israel organizations in US law enforcement, and how those ties have affected the treatment of pro-Palestinian activists.
Former FBI undercover agent Mike German told The Guardian that the relationship is damaging the ability of officers to carry out good law enforcement.
“It’s frustrating that we’ve developed this national law enforcement intelligence-sharing network that basically takes disinformation straight from the right-wing social media fever swamps and puts it out under the imprimatur of law enforcement intelligence, so it becomes an amplifier of disinformation rather than a corrective to that disinformation,” he said.
“At a time where there’s much more public sensitivity to foreign influence in domestic affairs, having a foreign country’s security services aligned with the beat cop on the streets of American neighborhoods is concerning.”
Another group that has advised law enforcement, according to the leaks, is LA Clear, which provided “analytical and case support” to drug investigations in California.
However, the group’s BlueLeaks files show that it recorded information relating to conflicts in the Gaza Strip sourced from the IDF.
One such document is a recreation of an IDF PowerPoint presentation titled “Escalation in the Gaza Strip,” bearing the insignia and name of Israel’s Strategic Division.
The Dado Center, a military studies department of the IDF, authored another presentation that was used by LA Clear.
It offers an analysis of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day invasion of Gaza in 2008, and highlights challenges including “legitimacy (external & internal, strategic narrative)” and “media coverage (a controlled information environment).”
Cast Lead resulted in the IDF targeting civilians and carrying out “indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilian objects,” Amnesty International said in a 2009 report.
BlueLeaks also shows LA Clear’s use of a 2011 report issued by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an Israeli research group founded and staffed by former IDF intelligence personnel.
The intelligence documents related to Israel lack any links to LA Clear’s stated mission of targeting US drug networks, raising questions about the presence of IDF-linked intelligence networks in American policing.
The documents fail to show US law enforcement seeking training or consulting from other community groups, including Muslim organizations.
