Category: 2. World

We want to have an understanding of the security guarantees architecture within 7-10 days, Zelensky said.

MOSCOW:

Russia said on Wednesday attempts to resolve security issues relating to Ukraine without Moscow’s participation were a “road to nowhere,” sounding a warning to the West as it scrambles to work out guarantees for Kyiv’s future protection.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov particularly criticised the role of European leaders who met U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the White House on Monday to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine that could help end the three-and-a-half-year-old war.

“We cannot agree with the fact that now it is proposed to resolve questions of security, collective security, without the Russian Federation. This will not work,” Lavrov told a joint press conference after meeting Jordan’s foreign minister.

U.S. and European military planners have begun exploring post-conflict security guarantees for Ukraine, U.S. officials and sources told Reuters on Tuesday. Lavrov said such discussions without Russia were pointless.

“I am sure that in the West and above all in the United States they understand perfectly well that seriously discussing security issues without the Russian Federation is a utopia, it’s a road to nowhere.”

NATO military leaders holding a video conference on Wednesday had a “great, candid discussion” on the results of recent talks on Ukraine, the chair of the alliance’s military committee said.

“Priority continues to be a just, credible and durable peace,” Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone wrote in a post on X.

A Western official told Reuters that a small group of military leaders continued discussions in Washington on security guarantees shortly after the bigger virtual meeting.

After Polish officials said that an object that crashed in a cornfield in eastern Poland overnight was likely a Russian drone, Poland accused Russia of provoking NATO countries just as efforts to find an end to the war were intensifying.

“Once again, we are dealing with a provocation by the Russian Federation, with a Russian drone. We are dealing in a crucial moment, when discussions about peace (in Ukraine) are under way,” Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said.

Lavrov’s comments highlighted Moscow’s demand for Western governments to directly engage with it on questions of security concerning Ukraine and Europe, something it says they have so far refused to do.

Moscow this week also restated its rejection of “any scenarios involving the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine.”

Lavrov accused the European leaders who met Trump and Zelenskiy of carrying out “a fairly aggressive escalation of the situation, rather clumsy and, in general, unethical attempts to change the position of the Trump administration and the president of the United States personally … We did not hear any constructive ideas from the Europeans there.”

Trump said on Monday the United States would help guarantee Ukraine’s security in any deal to end Russia’s war there. He subsequently said he had ruled out putting U.S. troops in Ukraine, but the U.S. might provide air support as part of a deal to end the hostilities.

Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, speaking after a meeting of national security advisers from Western countries and NATO, said work was proceeding on the military component of the guarantees.

“Our teams, above all the military, have already begun active work on the military component of security guarantees,” chief of staff Andriy Yermak wrote on social media.

Yermak said Ukraine was also working on a plan with its allies on how to proceed “in case the Russian side continues to prolong the war and disrupt agreements on bilateral and trilateral formats of leaders’ meetings.”

Lavrov said Russia was in favour of “truly reliable” guarantees for Ukraine and suggested these could be modelled on a draft accord that was discussed between the warring parties in Istanbul in 2022, in the early weeks of the war.

Under the draft discussed then, Ukraine would have received security guarantees from a group of countries including the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – China, Russia, the United States, Britain, and France.

At the time, Kyiv rejected that proposal on the grounds that Moscow would have held effective veto power over any military response to come to its aid.

Israeli leader claims Australian prime minister’s legacy ‘tarnished’ by decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up his government’s bitter diplomatic dispute with Australia, claiming that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s legacy has been irrevocably blackened by his “weakness” towards Hamas.

In an interview with Sky News Australia scheduled to air on Thursday night, Netanyahu said Albanese’s record would “forever be tarnished” by his decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

“When the worst terrorist organisation on earth, these savages who murdered women, raped them, beheaded men, burnt babies alive in front of their parents, took hundreds of hostages, when these people congratulate the Prime Minister of Australia, you know something is wrong,” Netanyahu said in the interview, portions of which were posted online by Sky News before the broadcast.

Netanyahu’s accusation appeared to refer to a disputed statement that appeared last week in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which Hamas cofounder Sheikh Hassan Yousef was quoted praising Albanese for his “political courage”.

Following the report, Hamas publicly denied that any statement had been issued by Yousef. The Palestinian armed group, which governs Gaza, said Yousef had been in Israeli custody for nearly two years without means of communicating with the outside world.

Netanyahu’s broadside against Albanese follows an extraordinary missive earlier this week in which he claimed the Australian leader would be remembered by history as a “weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”.

On Wednesday, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke hit back at the Israeli leader, saying strength was “not measured by how many people you can blow up or how many children you can leave hungry”, though Albanese attempted to play down the spat by saying he did not take it personally.

Relations between Australia and Israel, traditionally close allies, have sunk to their lowest ebb in decades following Canberra’s decision to recognise Palestine.

On Monday, Australia said it had cancelled a visa for Simcha Rothman, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, amid concerns that a speaking tour he had scheduled in the country aimed to “spread division”.

Hours after that decision, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Saar said he had revoked the visas of Australian diplomats to the Palestinian Authority.

Expressing dismay at the tensions, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said on Wednesday that it had written to both prime ministers to urge them to address their differences “in the usual way through diplomacy rather than public posturing”.

“The sum total of human wisdom would not have been diminished in the slightest if none of these public comments had been made,” the peak body for Jewish Australians said in its letter to Albanese.

“The Australian Jewish community will not be left to deal with the fallout of a spat between two leaders who are playing to their respective domestic audiences.”

Israel has come under mounting international pressure, including from some of its closest allies, over the scale of human suffering being inflicted by its war in Gaza.

More than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since it launched its war on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 people captive during its incursion into southern Israel, according to Israeli authorities.

Good afternoon. Benjamin Netanyahu has ignored pleas from Australian Jewish groups to calm his feud with Anthony Albanese, further criticising the prime minister and escalating an ugly spat between the two leaders.

In a new interview with Sky News, the Israeli prime minister, who is wanted by the international criminal court over allegations of war crimes in Gaza, again labelled Albanese “weak” over the government’s recognition of a Palestinian state.

“I’m sure he has a reputable record as a public servant, but I think his record is forever tarnished by the weakness that he showed in the face of these Hamas terrorist monsters,” Netanyahu said in a clip broadcast by Sky News.

Australia’s peak Jewish group, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, on Wednesday labelled Netanyahu’s attack on Albanese as “inflammatory and provocative”, and a “clumsy intervention” which had affected Australia’s Jewish community.

Meanwhile, world leaders have condemned Israel’s announcement it was calling up an extra 60,000 reservists ahead of an offensive to conquer Gaza City, one of the last places of refuge in northern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are sheltering.

Top news

In video

JD Vance was booed and heckled with chants of “Free DC!” during a photo op with national guard troops in Washington DC on Wednesday afternoon. Handing out burgers to troops deployed last week by Donald Trump alongside the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, the US vice-president told soldiers “we brought some law and order back”, as a crowd of demonstrators protested outside.

What they said …

---

“It was like, ‘OK, guys, you can do that in question time, the rest of us here don’t really get to do that’.” – Sally McManus

The ACTU secretary was in the room as the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and the Coalition frontbencher Ted O’Brien clashed at the government’s economic reform roundtable. During a heated debate about Labor’s spending commitments in the federal budget, Chalmers told O’Brien “this is not question time”. McManus also claimed a “breakthrough” agreement with the Tech Council of Australia to work together on a model for payment for the use of creative content in training artificial intelligence.

Full Story

Can the government keep kids safe in childcare?

After revelations about alleged abuse at childcare centres, Kate Lyons talks to Reged Ahmad about whether the government can restore faith in the sector.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Full Story

Can the government keep kids safe in childcare?

_{Listen to the episode here}

Before bed read

Feeding native wildlife is a divisive topic. While some throw mince to kookaburras with wild abandon, others insist it’s best to let them fend for themselves. So when a sick possum showed up in Phoebe Loomes’ garden, her heart overtook her head. Is it ever OK to feed urban wildlife?

Daily word game

Today’s starter word is: SORB. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.

Sign up

If you would like to receive this Afternoon Update to your email inbox every weekday, sign up here, or start your day with a curated breakdown of the key stories you need to know with our Morning Mail newsletter. You can follow the latest in US politics by signing up for This Week in Trumpland.

KHARTOUM: On the streets of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, builders clear rubble from houses pockmarked with bullet holes, haul away fallen trees and repair broken power lines, in the city’s first reconstruction effort since war began over two years ago.

Fighting between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which broke out in April 2023, has left the capital battered and hollowed out.

But reconstruction — led by government agencies and youth-led volunteer groups — has finally begun to repair hospitals, schools and water and power networks.

“We are working to restore the state’s infrastructure,” volunteer Mostafa Awad said.

Once a thriving metropolis of nine million people, Khartoum’s skyline is now a jagged silhouette of collapsed buildings.

Electrical poles lean precariously or lie snapped on the ground in the streets. Cars, stripped for parts, sit burnt-out and abandoned, their tires melted into the asphalt.

AFP correspondents saw entire residential blocks standing with their exterior walls ripped away in the fighting.

Danger remains within the soot-stained buildings as authorities slowly work to clear tens of thousands of unexploded bombs left behind by fighters.

The UN warns Khartoum is “heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance,” and this month said land mines have been discovered across the capital.

Sudan’s war has killed tens of thousands, displaced 13 million and plunged the nation into the world’s worst hunger and displacement crisis.

Until the army pushed the RSF out of Khartoum in March, the capital — where four million alone were displaced by fighting — was a battlefield.

Before they left, paramilitary fighters stripped infrastructure bare, looting everything from medical equipment and water pumps to copper wiring.

“Normally in a war zone, you see massive destruction… but you hardly ever see what happened in Khartoum,” the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator Luca Renda said.

“All the cables have been taken away from homes, all the pipes have been destroyed,” he told AFP, describing systematic looting of both small and large-scale items.

Today, power and water systems remain among the city’s greatest challenges.

The head of east Khartoum’s electricity department, Mohamed Al-Bashir, described “massive damage” in the capital’s main transformer stations.

“Some power stations were completely destroyed,” he told AFP, explaining the RSF had “specifically targeted transformer oil and copper cables.”

Vast swathes of Khartoum are without electricity, and with no reliable water supply, a cholera outbreak gripped the city this summer.

Health officials reported up to 1,500 new cases a day in June, according to the UN.

On his first visit to Khartoum last month, Sudan’s prime minister pledged a wide-scale recovery effort.

“Khartoum will return as a proud national capital,” Kamil Idris said.

Even as war rages on elsewhere in the country, the government has begun planning its return from its wartime capital Port Sudan.

On Tuesday, it announced central Khartoum — the devastated business and government district where some of the fiercest battles took place — would be evacuated and redesigned.

The UN estimates the rehabilitation of the capital’s essential facilities to cost around $350 million, while the full rebuilding of Khartoum “will take years and several billion dollars,” Renda told AFP.

Hundreds have rolled up their sleeves to start the long and arduous rebuilding work, but obstacles remain.

“We faced challenges such as the lack of raw materials, especially infrastructure tools, sanitation (supplies) and iron,” said Mohamed El Ser, a construction worker.

“Still, the market is relatively starting to recover,” he told AFP.

In downtown Khartoum, a worker, his hands coated in mud, stacks bricks beside a crumbling building.

AFP correspondents accompanied workers carefully refitting pipes into what once was a family home, while nearby others lifted slabs of concrete and mangled metal into wheelbarrows.

On one road that had been a front line, a man repaired a downed streetlight while others dragged a felled tree onto a flatbed truck.

The UN expects up to two million people to make their way back to Khartoum by the end of the year.

Those who have already returned, estimated to be in the tens of thousands, say life is still difficult, but there’s reason for hope.

“Honestly, there is an improvement in living conditions,” said Ali Mohamed, who recently returned.

“There is more stability now, and real services are beginning to come back, like water, electricity and even basic medical care.”

Wia dis foto come from, Getty Images

Article Information

For di Instagram statement to im 3.4 million followers, Judge Caprio dey remembered for di “countless acts of kindness e inspire”.

“Im warmth, humour, and kindness don leave ogbonge mark on everybody wey know am,” di statement tok.

Judge Caprio bin preside ova thousands of cases for im hometown of Providence, Rhode Island bifor e start im TV career.

Di company behind Caught in Providence, Debmar-Mercury, don pay tribute to Judge Caprio “unique brand of compassion and common sense approach”.

“We go miss am dearly,” co-presidents Mort Marcus and Ira Bernstein tok for inside statement.

During dia operation, Caught in Providence bin dey nominated for three Daytime Emmys, Judge Caprio get two of im own nominations last year.

Im signature courtroom style don produce viral clips wey include wia e invite children to siddon wit am behind di bench during cases, to announce a “mini-judge” plushie of himself.

One TikTok video wey showcase im morning routine – show as e dey brush im teeth, sign im book and watch videos of im own show – di video get more dan 5m views.

For inside one 2019 interview, Judge Caprio tok say im courtroom proceedings “dey show a slice of life of Rhode Island wey dey very interesting, and e dey show di same issues pipo dey experience nationwide”.

Afta dem diagnose am wit pancreatic cancer for 2023, Judge Caprio say “I dey fully prepared to fight as hard I can” and e thank im followers for dia support.

For one of im last social media posts, Judge Caprio bin announce say im don go back to hospital afta e suffer one “setback” for im treatment and e ask im followers for dia prayers.

Judge Caprio dey survived by im wife, Joyce Caprio, of almost 60 years, dia five children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge in Rhode Island who found online fame for his compassionate nature as host of the reality courtroom series Caught in Providence, has died aged 88.

Caprio’s official social media accounts said that he “passed away peacefully” after “a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer”.

The judge billed his courtroom as a place “where people and cases are met with kindness and compassion”. Caprio’s show was filmed in his courtroom and featured his folksy humour and compassion. Clips from the show have attracted more than 1bn views on social media.

During his time on the bench, Caprio developed a persona at odds with many other TV judges – more sympathetic and less confrontational . He also used his fame to address issues such as unequal access to the judicial system.

“The phrase ‘with liberty and justice for all’ represents the idea that justice should be accessible to everyone. However, it is not,” Caprio says in one video. “Almost 90% of low-income Americans are forced to battle civil issues like healthcare, unjust evictions, veterans benefits and, yes, even traffic violations, alone.”

His most popular videos are those in which he calls children to the bench to help pass judgment on their parents. One shows him listening sympathetically to a woman whose son was killed and then dismissing her tickets and fines of $400.

Caprio’s family described him “as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and friend”.

“Beloved for his compassion, humility, and unwavering belief in the goodness of people, Judge Caprio touched the lives of millions through his work in the courtroom and beyond,” the family wrote online. “His warmth, humor, and kindness left an indelible mark on all who knew him.”

State and local politicians mourned his passing. “Judge Caprio not only served the public well, but he connected with them in a meaningful way, and people could not help but respond to his warmth and compassion,” the Rhode Island governor, Dan McKee, said in a statement. “He was more than a jurist – he was a symbol of empathy on the bench, showing us what is possible when justice is tempered with humanity.”

Caprio retired from Providence municipal court in 2023 after nearly four decades on the bench.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

According to his biography, Caprio came from humble beginnings, the second of three boys growing up in the Federal Hill neighbourhood of Providence, Rhode Island.

“I hope that people will take away that the institutions of government can function very well by exercising kindness, fairness, and compassion in their deliberations. We live in a very contentious society,” he said in 2017. “I would hope that people will see that we can dispense justice without being oppressive.”

The US Navy’s efforts to create a fleet of sea drones have hit significant obstacles following a series of unsuccessful tests.

Designed to showcase the Pentagon’s autonomous drone technology, trial runs off the California coast last month concluded with crashes and software malfunctions, raising doubts about the Navy’s ability to deploy this new technology effectively.

In one incident, while officials were working to resolve a software glitch, a drone vessel collided with a stationary support boat, launching over its deck and crashing back into the water.

This event, captured in videos obtained by Reuters, involved two vessels from US defense tech firms Saronic and BlackSea Technologies.

Weeks earlier, during a separate test, a support boat captain was thrown into the water when an autonomous BlackSea drone suddenly accelerated, causing the boat to capsize.
The captain was rescued but declined medical attention. This incident was initially reported by Defense Scoop.

Both incidents were attributed to a combination of software failures and human error, including breakdowns in communication between onboard systems and external autonomous software, according to a source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information.