Headline

Netanyahu Vows No Mercy After Deadly Hezbollah Drone Strike

Published

1 year ago

October 15, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday vowed to hit Hezbollah without mercy, a day after the Iran-backed Lebanese group’s deadliest strike on Israel since the start of the war in late September.

Hezbollah’s drone attack on an Israeli base killed four soldiers on Sunday, while volunteer rescuers said another 60 people were injured.

“We will continue to mercilessly strike Hezbollah in all parts of Lebanon –- including Beirut,” Netanyahu said on a visit to the base near Binyamina, south of Haifa.

Hezbollah said it launched the “squadron of attack drones” in response to Israeli attacks, including one last week that Lebanon’s health ministry said killed at least 22 people in central Beirut.

Since Israel on September 23 escalated its bombing against targets in Lebanon the war has killed at least 1,315 people, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely to be higher.

Prior to Netanyahu’s comments, new air strikes had already occurred against targets around Lebanon, including one in a northern Christian-majority village which killed at least 21 people on Monday, according to the health ministry.

Hezbollah said on Monday around midday that it had launched rockets at a naval base near Haifa before a further “big rocket salvo” in the early evening at the northern Israeli town of Safed.

Its fighters were also “engaged in violent clashes” in the Lebanese frontier village of Aita al-Shaab, and were fighting elsewhere as well, it said.

Air raid sirens sounded across central Israel in the early evening, including in the commercial hub of Tel Aviv, the military said, after it earlier reported the interception of two drones approaching from Syria.

– ‘Never-ending’ strikes –

After almost a year of tit-for-tat exchanges between Hezbollah and Israeli forces over the Lebanon border, Israel intensified its strikes against targets in Lebanon late last month before sending ground troops across the frontier.

Israel wants to push back Hezbollah in order to secure its northern boundary and allow tens of thousands of people displaced by rocket fire since last year to return home safely.

Redrawing the map of the world in blood, by Owei Lakemfa
Hezbollah says its strikes are in support of Palestinian militants Hamas who attacked Israel on October 7 last year, triggering the ongoing war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

The International Organization for Migration said last week it had verified 690,000 people displaced by the war in Lebanon.

Israel’s deadly air strike on the village of Aito in northern Lebanon on Monday marked a departure from the usual pattern, being located in a mostly Christian area and far from areas usually bombed.

Israel has focused its firepower mostly on Hezbollah strongholds in Shiite Muslim-majority areas, including in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

An AFP photographer in Aito said the strike levelled a residential building. Body parts were scattered in the rubble.

In the southern border town of Marjayoun, civil defence chief Anis Abla told AFP his rescue teams were exhausted.

“Our rescue missions are becoming more and more difficult, because the strikes are never-ending and target us,” he said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross’s regional director, Nicolas Von Arx, appealed for the protection of ambulances and other health facilities and personnel.

“Attacks on health facilities are deeply worrying,” he said.

Israel faced new criticism over injuries and damage sustained by the UN peacekeeping force which has been deployed in Lebanon since 1978 after a previous Israeli invasion.

Netanyahu on Monday said Israel’s military “is doing its utmost to prevent such incidents” and repeated his request that the peacekeepers “get out of harm’s way.”

UNIFIL has refused.

– Anti-missile defence –

Prime Minister Simon Harris of Ireland, which has troops in the UNIFIL mission, on Monday told Israeli President Isaac Herzog in a phone call that UNIFIL has “a clear mandate from the Security Council, and that it must be allowed to carry out its functions unimpeded,” Harris’s office said.

The Hamas attack on Israel last year which triggered war in Gaza resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

The number includes hostages killed in captivity.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, 42,289 people, the majority civilians. The UN has described the figures as reliable.

Since the Gaza war began hundreds of Palestinians have also been killed in the occupied West Bank. On Monday Palestinian officials said Israeli forces killed two more during a raid. Israel said it was “looking into the reports.”

In Gaza, despite escalating Israeli military operations in central and northern areas, the second round of a polio vaccination campaign for hundreds of thousands of children began on Monday.

With the war there, and in Lebanon, showing no sign of abating, fears of even wider regional conflict have seen Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas, engage in diplomatic efforts with allies and other powers.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met a senior official from Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi movement in Oman, his latest stop on a regional diplomatic tour.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned of “a regional war that will be costly for everyone,” during a meeting with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Monday.

Israel is still weighing its response to an October 1 missile attack by Iran, the latest of two it has carried out against Israel this year.

Headline

UK Police Hunt Asylum Seeker Mistakenly Freed For Sex Offence

Published

17 hours ago

October 25, 2025

Editor

UK police were still hunting Saturday for an Ethiopian asylum seeker and convicted sex offender whose crimes sparked a wave of anti-immigration protests and who was accidentally released from prison.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “appalled” by Friday’s “totally unacceptable” error that saw 38-year-old Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu freed rather than sent to an immigration detention centre.

“This man must be caught and deported for his crimes,” the UK leader added.

Kebatu had served the first month of a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and a woman, but was reportedly due to be deported when the Prison Service mistake occurred.

Kebatu’s high-profile case earlier this year in Epping, northeast of London, sparked demonstrations in various English towns and cities where asylum seekers were believed to be housed, as well as counter-protests.

Justice Secretary David Lammy said late Friday night that Kebatu was “at large in London” after he was seen boarding a train to the capital in Chelmsford, eastern England.

Essex Police, which is leading the search with the help of London’s Metropolitan Police, said Saturday that “inquiries are continuing at pace this morning to locate and arrest” him.

“Officers worked throughout the night to track his movements, including scouring hours of CCTV footage,” the force added, noting “it is not lost on us that this situation is concerning to people”.

The Telegraph reported he was wrongly categorised as a prisoner due to be released on licence and handed a £76 ($101) discharge grant.

The father of Kebatu’s anonymous teenage victim told Sky News that “the justice system has let us down”.

Police arrested the asylum seeker in July after he repeatedly tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl and touch her legs, and made sexually explicit comments to her.

He also sexually assaulted an adult woman, placing a hand on her thigh, when she intervened to stop his interactions with the girl.

At the time, Kebatu was staying at Epping’s Bell Hotel, where scores of other asylum seekers have been accommodated, and which became the target of repeated protests.

Headline

UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

Published

3 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”

Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.

In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.

“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.

Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.

NDLEA intercepts drugs hidden in snails, others meant for UK, US, DRC
Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.

“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”

In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.

“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”

Headline

King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

Published

3 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.

The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.

It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.

The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.

The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.

Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.

Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.

Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.

It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.

– Schism –

The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.

In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.

The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.

The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.

This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.

Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.

– Royal Confrater –

Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.

The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.

Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.

The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.

The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.

It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.

AFP