Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan in Jeddah on Tuesday to express appreciation for his chairmanship of the 21st Extraordinary Session of the Organisation Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Council of Foreign Ministers.
The two parties reaffirmed firm solidarity with the Palestinian people. Dar also stressed on “strengthening our [Pakistan and Turkey’s] multifaceted cooperation”.
Pleased to meet my brother, FM of Türkiye, H.E. Hakan Fidan @HakanFidan, today on sidelines of 21st extraordinary session of #OIC CFM.
I expressed my deep appreciation to Türkiye for its leadership role in the capacity of the Chair of the 51st OIC Council of Foreign Ministers.… pic.twitter.com/43CUVX778E
Read: Pursuit of ‘Greater Israel’ threatens region: Dar
Earlier, Dar also held meetings with other officials, including Bangladeshi Advisor for Foreign Affairs Mohammad Touhid Hossain, Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohammad Haji Hasan, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, and Saudi officials.
The meetings were conducted on the sidelines of the 21st Extraordinary Session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers being held in Jeddah.
During the session, Dar called for unified action from the Muslim world and upheld Pakistan’s principled stance on the issue. He urged an end to Israeli occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Read More: Dar lands in Jeddah with Palestine high on agenda
“The high-level meeting will bring together foreign ministers and senior officials from OIC member states to deliberate upon coordinated responses to the escalating developments in Palestine, resulting from ongoing Israeli military aggression, its proposed plans for full military control over Gaza and the continued egregious violations of Palestinians’ rights,” the Foreign Office spokesperson said in a statement.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a family photo ceremony prior to the BRICS Summit plenary session in Kazan, Russia, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. — Reuters
China will seek to demonstrate Global South solidarity at SCO.
Xi-Modi meeting will be one key event on summit sidelines.
Putin to stay for World War Two military parade in Beijing.
BEIJING: President Xi Jinping will gather more than 20 world leaders at a regional security forum in China next week in a powerful show of Global South solidarity in the age of Donald Trump while also helping sanctions-hit Russia pull off another a diplomatic coup.
Aside from Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaders from Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia have been invited to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, to be held in the northern port city of Tianjin from August 31 to September 1.
The summit will feature Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years as the two neighbours work on further defusing tensions roiled by deadly border clashes in 2020.
Modi last shared the same stage with Xi and Putin at last year’s BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, even as Western leaders turned their backs on the Russian leader amid the war in Ukraine. Russian embassy officials in New Delhi last week said Moscow hopes trilateral talks with China and India will take place soon.
“Xi will want to use the summit as an opportunity to showcase what a post-American-led international order begins to look like and that all White House efforts since January to counter China, Iran, Russia, and now India have not had the intended effect,” said Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of The China-Global South Project, a research agency.
“Just look at how much BRICS has rattled (US President) Donald Trump, which is precisely what these groups are designed to do.”
This year’s summit will be the largest since the SCO was founded in 2001, a Chinese foreign ministry official said last week, calling the bloc an “important force in building a new type of international relations”.
The security-focused bloc, which began as a group of six Eurasian nations, has expanded to 10 permanent members and 16 dialogue and observer countries in recent years. Its remit has also enlarged from security and counter-terrorism to economic and military cooperation.
‘Fuzzy’ implementation
Analysts say expansion is high on the agenda for many countries attending, but agree the bloc has not delivered substantial cooperation outcomes over the years and that China values the optics of Global South solidarity against the United States at a time of erratic policymaking and geopolitical flux.
“What is the precise vision that the SCO represents and its practical implementation are rather fuzzy. It is a platform that has increasing convening power, which helps in narrative projection,” said Manoj Kewalramani, chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Research Programme at the Takshashila Institution thinktank in Bangalore.
“But the SCO’s effectiveness in addressing substantial security issues remains very limited.”
Frictions remain between core members Pakistan and India. The June SCO defence ministers’ meeting was unable to adopt a joint statement after India raised objections, saying it omitted reference to the deadly April 22 attack on Hindu tourists in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) which led to the worst fighting in decades between Pakistan and India.
New Delhi also refused to join the SCO’s condemnation of Israeli attacks on Iran, a member state, earlier in June.
But the recent detente between India and China after five years of heightened border frictions, as well as renewed tariff pressure on New Delhi from the Trump administration, are driving expectations for a positive meeting between Xi and Modi on the sidelines of the summit.
“It’s likely (New Delhi) will swallow their pride and put this year’s SCO problems behind them in a bid to maintain momentum in the détente with China, which is a key Modi priority right now,” said Olander.
Analysts expect both sides to announce further incremental border measures such as troop withdrawals, the easing of trade and visa restrictions, cooperation in new fields including climate, and broader government and people-to-people engagement.
Despite the lack of substantive policy announcements expected at the summit, experts warn that the bloc’s appeal to Global South countries should not be underestimated.
“This summit is about optics, really powerful optics,” added Olander.
Modi is expected to depart from China after the summit, while Putin will stay on for a World War Two military parade in Beijing later in the week for an unusually long spell outside of Russia.
How much do migrant returns flights actually cost?published at 10:59 British Summer Time
10:59 BST
Lucy Gilder BBC Verify journalist
Image source, PA Media
Reform UK says it’s planning to run five migrant returns flights per day as part of its ambition to deport people who arrive in the UK illegally.
It says this and other measures in the plan will cost £10bn over five years but that money would be saved by not housing asylum seekers in hotels.
There’s not a huge amount of publicly available information about the cost of migrant return flights.
A recent Home Office assessment, external – which looked at the economic impact of the previous government’s Illegal Migration Bill – estimated that it would cost £22,000 per person being returned to a third country.
It said that this cost “includes their removal flight as well as the contract for resource to monitor and transport individuals from detention to any legal court sittings, from detention to the flight for removal, and onboard the flight to the recipient safe third country”.
We haven’t seen the full detail of Reform’s plan yet but the party has indicated people would be returned to their home countries and that third countries would also be considered.
In the first year of the current government, 66 chartered returns flights were recorded by the Home Office, external, up from 63 in the same period the year before.
India’s supreme court has ordered an investigation into allegations of illegal animal imports and financial misconduct at a vast private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest person.
Vantara, which describes itself as the “world’s biggest wild animal rescue centre”, is run by Anant Ambani, a son of Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire head of the conglomerate Reliance Industries.
The site in the western state of Gujarat is home to more than 200 elephants, as well as 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, among other animals, according to India’s Central Zoo Authority.
Wildlife activists have criticised the facility, saying it is housing endangered species on baking flatlands next to a giant oil refinery complex without any plan to return them to the wild.
On Monday, India’s supreme court said it had ordered a panel led by retired judges to investigate alleged unlawful acquisition of animals, particularly elephants, other violations of wildlife regulations, and money laundering.
“We consider it appropriate … to call for an independent factual appraisal,” the court said. It added that the team would also assess whether Gujarat’s harsh climate was unsuitable for the animals, and “complaints regarding creation of a vanity or private collection”.
Anant Ambani on his wedding day in Mumbai in July last year. Photograph: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters
The court said it issued the order after petitions based on media reports and complaints by wildlife organisations.
In March, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Vantara imported roughly 39,000 animals in 2024, including from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
Dozens of the facility’s elephants were transported there in specially adapted trucks thousands of miles from across India, according to the zoo.
Vantara said in a statement on Tuesday that it would extend “full cooperation” to the investigation team and “remains committed to transparency, compassion and full compliance with the law”.
“Our mission and focus continues to be the rescue, rehabilitation and care of animals,” it said.
The zoo was among the many venues for Anant Ambani’s lavish multi-day wedding celebrations in 2024, which set a new benchmark in matrimonial extravagance with private performances by the pop stars Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
French borrowing costs rose to their highest since March and stocks sold off for a second day on Tuesday, as investors reacted to the prospect of a government collapse as soon as next month.
Prime Minister François Bayrou on Monday called a confidence vote for September 8 over his deficit-cutting budget proposals.
Lawmakers have two weeks to “say whether they are on the side of chaos or on the side of responsibility”, Bayrou said as he addressed union members on Tuesday. “The first risk, the one from which we would not recover, is denial.”
Finance minister Éric Lombard said on Tuesday that the government “certainly was not resigned” to losing the confidence vote. But he warned that there was a risk the IMF could step in if the government were to fall next month and subsequent administrations fail to tackle the country’s finances.
“This is the risk that is in front of us . . . [that] the financial situation deteriorates, which we would like to [and] should avoid. But I can’t tell you that this risk doesn’t exist,” he told France Inter radio.
France’s 10-year borrowing costs climbed as high as 3.53 per cent, approaching the post-Eurozone crisis high set in March. They later came back a little to 3.5 per cent. The additional interest rate over Germany’s benchmark Bunds reached almost 0.8 percentage points, close to its peaks during the past year’s political crisis.
The country’s blue-chip stock index, the Cac 40, fell 1.7 per cent, adding to a 1.6 per cent decline on Monday.
“The risk the market sees is that if the government falls again, it’s complete stalemate and there’s no chance of tackling the deficit,” said Peter Schaffrik, chief European macro strategist at RBC Capital Markets.
Opposition parties in parliament, including crucial swing blocs such as the Socialists and the far-right Rassemblement National, have said they will not support the government, making it all but inevitable that Bayou’s administration will fall.
Bayrou’s proposed package of €44bn in tax rises and spending cuts for 2026, including a one-year freeze on state spending and cutting two days of national holiday, has been rejected by opposition lawmakers. Lombard said that while there was room to negotiate on some measures in the plan, the government would not compromise on its €44bn target.
No party has held a clear majority in France’s fragile parliament since President Emmanuel Macron called and lost snap elections a year ago. The government of Bayrou’s predecessor collapsed in December after a few months in power.
Emmanuel Cau, head of European equity strategy at Barclays, said the falling market was pricing in two risks on Tuesday morning: “political instability and more fiscal indiscipline”.
“The equity market was complacent,” Cau said, noting that the stock market had been rising in recent months despite signs of stress in the bond market. “A lot of this was about investors buying the European revival story,” he said.
However, “there is a limit to how much bond market stress [equities] can ignore”, Cau said. “Now we are seeing a bit of convergence between stocks and bonds.”
Domestic-facing stocks were hit particularly hard. Shares in the country’s biggest banks, seen as proxies for the wider economy, were the most affected. BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole were all down 4 per cent or more.
France’s slow-rolling political crisis has seen its borrowing costs converge with Italy’s in recent months, for the first time since the global financial crisis. Lombard said France’s borrowing costs would exceed Italy’s “within 15 days” if the government lost the vote.
On Tuesday, the gap closed further, with the yield on 10-year French government bonds less than 0.1 percentage point below Italy’s.
Nicolas Trindade, a senior portfolio manager at Axa Investment Managers, said he expected French government bonds to underperform because the “likelihood of a government collapse has sharply risen, since main opposition parties have signalled they’ll vote against the Bayrou government”.
He said installing a new prime minister “would not change parliamentary arithmetics”, so any meaningful fiscal consolidation “would still be very difficult to implement”. He said a snap election “would run the risk of the far right getting an outright majority this time around”.
Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, said the firm’s base case was that the prime minister would be unseated on September 8.
The euro rallied slightly against the dollar on Tuesday, paring losses from Monday when the currency fell 0.8 per cent.
“The broader question for the euro is whether recent French news destabilises appetite for the euro more broadly, or whether this is an isolated French issue,” said Chris Turner, global head of markets research at ING.
Analysts at Barclays forecast a “virtually unchanged” French deficit over the next two years, equal to 5.6 per cent of GDP in 2025 and 5.4 per cent in 2026, after 5.8 per cent last year. The government is targeting 5.4 per cent this year and 4.6 per cent in 2026, in a four-year plan announced last month aimed at bringing France’s deficit in line with the EU’s 3 per cent limit.
The death toll from Typhoon Kajiki in Vietnam has risen to three as rescue workers battled uprooted trees and downed power lines, while widespread flooding brought chaos to the streets of the capital Hanoi.
The typhoon struck central Vietnam on Monday with winds of up to 130 kilometres per hour (80 miles per hour), tearing roofs off thousands of homes and knocking out power to more than 1.6 million people.
Authorities on Tuesday said three people had been killed and 13 injured, and warned of possible flash floods and landslides in eight provinces, as Kajiki’s torrential rains continued to wreak havoc.
Vietnam has long been affected by seasonal typhoons, but human-caused climate change is driving more intense and unpredictable weather patterns.
Flooding has cut off 27 villages in mountainous inland areas, while more than 44,000 people were evacuated as the storm approached.
Further north in Hanoi, the heavy rain flooded many streets, bringing traffic chaos on Tuesday morning.
After hitting Vietnam and weakening to a tropical depression, Kajiki swept westwards over northern Laos, bringing intense rain.
In Vietnam, more than 100 people have been killed or reported missing as a result of natural disasters in the first seven months of 2025, according to the agriculture ministry.
In September last year, Typhoon Yagi battered northern Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, triggering floods and landslides that killed more than 700 people and caused billions of dollars’ worth of economic losses.
Watch: Iran orchestrated ‘dangerous acts of aggression’ in Australia, says Albanese
Australia has given Iran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country after alleging the country’s government directed antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne.
Intelligence services linked Iran to an arson attack on a cafe in Sydney in October last year, and another on a synagogue in Melbourne in December, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told a press conference on Tuesday.
Albanese added the two incidents were “attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community”.
Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi and three other officials have been ordered to leave Australia, which has withdrawn its own diplomats from Tehran. Iran has “absolutely rejected” the allegations.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman added the decision to expel their envoy was “driven by Australia’s domestic policies”.
However, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) chief Mike Burgess said his teams had uncovered links “between the alleged crimes and the commanders in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC”, following a “painstaking”, months-long investigation.
“They’re just using cut-outs, including people who are criminals and members of organised crime gangs to do their bidding or direct their bidding,” Mr Burgess told reporters.
He added that IRGC had “used a complex web of proxies to hide its involvement” in the attacks on the Lewis Continental Kitchen in Sydney on 20 October, and Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue on 6 December.
Australia’s intelligence services had also found evidence Iran was likely to be behind other antisemitic incidents in Australia, which has seen attacks on Jewish schools, homes, vehicles and synagogues since the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, Iran’s ally, and the ensuing war in Gaza.
In the same period of time, civil society group the Islamophobic Register has also recorded a rise in Islamophobic incidents.
Police first indicated they were looking into the possibility that attacks on Jewish-linked property were being directed by “overseas actors or individuals” back in January.
The findings revealed on Tuesday were “deeply disturbing”, Albanese said, describing the two incidents as “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression”.
In the second incident, a number of worshippers were forced to flee as the fire took hold of the synagogue, which was built by Holocaust survivors in the 1960s.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong said it was the first time since World War Two that Australia had expelled an ambassador.
The ambassador was not found to have any links to the attacks, Mr Burgess stressed.
Wong said Australia would continue to maintain some diplomatic lines with Tehran but had suspended operations at its embassy in Iran for the safety of staff.
She also urged Australians not to travel to Iran and called for any citizens in the country to leave now if it is safe to do so.
Albanese said his government would also designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.
Israel’s embassy in Canberra has welcomed the moves against Iran, which Israel fought a 12-day war with in June.
“Iran’s regime is not only a threat to Jews or Israel, it endangers the entire free world, including Australia,” it said in a statement on X.
Australia has announced that it will list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group, after the country’s intelligence agency determined that it had directed at least two attacks against Australia’s Jewish community.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said Australia’s domestic spy agency had “credible intelligence” that attacks against a synagogue in Melbourne and Jewish restaurant in Sydney were “directed by the IRGC.”
The Iranian ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, will be expelled and Australia’s embassy in Tehran will suspend operations.
Who are the IRGC?
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are one of the most feared and powerful organisations in Iran, whose influence stretches beyond military and intelligence to politics, education and the economy.
Established after the 1979 Islamic revolution, the IRGC operates separate to – and often contrary to – Iran’s traditional military. It is an elite force, loyal to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has grown in size and power over the decades.
With ground troops numbering more than 150,000, the IRGC also runs its own navy and air force, separate from Iran’s regular armed forces. It oversees the country’s ballistic missile programme, once regarded as the largest in the Middle East but which was widely incapacitated during Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites in June.
Have other countries sanctioned the IRGC?
The US designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organisation in 2019, during Donald Trump’s first administration. Canada followed in 2024. The EU and UK have indicated that they plan to list the IRGC but have yet to do so.
The US state department has accused the IRGC of being directly involved in terrorist plotting. In 2024, Argentina’s highest criminal court blamed the IRGC and Hezbollah for a 1994 attack against a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people. Iran has said it was not involved.
In 2020, an IRGC missile operator shot down a Ukraine Airlines flight moment after it took off from Tehran airport, killing 176 people. An IRGC official said the plane had been misidentified as a cruise missile.
In 2024, an IRGC official was among three men charged in the US over an attempted plot to kidnap and assassinate an Iranian-American journalist in New York. All three men were based in Iran and remain at large.
How influential are the IRGC in Iran’s domestic politics?
Former IRGC officers have held key positions in Iran’s politics and the group’s mandate to protect “revolutionary values” has seen it become a powerful force in policing social and cultural issues in the country.
Overseen by the supreme leader, the IRGC is often seen as more powerful than the country’s president and are thought to have more sway on foreign policy.
The group oversees some educational institutions and has pushed research into aerospace and drone technology to advance its military capabilities. It has economic interests that span construction and telecommunications to oil and gas projects – and it’s thought the IRGC is behind the vast network of shadow tankers that has seen Iran circumvent western sanctions on its oil exports.
What role does it play internationally?
The Quds Force is responsible for the IRGC’s overseas operations. It has sponsored and armed groups across the Middle East, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
Known in Tehran as the Axis of Resistance, these groups helped to push Iran’s influence abroad, but have been dismantled and degraded to varying degrees over the course of almost two years of conflict with Israel, after the 7 October attacks and the start of the war in Gaza.
The Quds force itself has also suffered major blows, with many of its most senior commanders killed in Israel’s attacks on Iran in June. Qassem Suleimani, the feared and renowned commander of the Quds force, was killed by a US drone strike in 2020.
