Category: 2. World

Thousands rallied across Indonesia on Monday as the military was deployed in the capital after six people were killed in nationwide protests sparked by anger over lavish perks for lawmakers.

At least 500 protesters gathered outside the nation’s parliament in Jakarta on Monday afternoon as dozens of police officers watched on. Soldiers were present earlier but left after several hours.

Thousands more rallied in Palembang on Sumatra island and hundreds gathered separately in Banjarmasin on Borneo island, Yogyakarta on the main island of Java and Makassar on Sulawesi island, according to AFP journalists around the country.

“Our main goal is to reform the parliament. We hope the parliament will come out and meet us. We want to talk to them directly, they are our representatives,” protester and university student Nafta Keisya Kemalia, 20, told AFP outside parliament.

“Do they want to wait until we have a martial law?”

The deadly protests, which began last week over MP housing allowances nearly 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta, have forced President Prabowo Subianto and parliament leaders to make a U-turn over the measures.

Demonstrations began peacefully, but turned violent against the nation’s elite paramilitary police unit after footage showed one of its teams running over 21-year-old delivery driver Affan Kurniawan late on Thursday.

Protests have since spread from Jakarta to other major cities, in the worst unrest since Prabowo took power.

Police set up checkpoints across the capital today, while officers and the military conducted city-wide patrols and deployed snipers in key locations. While the usually traffic-clogged streets were quieter than usual.

Hundreds of soldiers were camped at the city’s national monument, and some were stationed outside the presidential palace, according to an AFP journalist.

At least one group, the Alliance of Indonesian Women, said late last night that it had cancelled its planned protest because of heightened security.

Schools and universities in Jakarta were holding classes online until at least Tuesday, and civil servants based in the city were asked to work from home.

On Monday, Prabowo paid a visit to the injured police at a hospital where he criticised protesters.

“The law states that if you want to demonstrate, you must ask for permission, and permission must be granted, and it must end at 6pm,” he said.

Looting

Experts said Prabowo’s U-turn in a speech on Sunday and parliament’s gesture to revoke some lawmaker perks may not be enough to dispel the unrest.

“The Indonesian government is a mess. The cabinet and parliament will not listen to the people’s pleas,” 60-year-old snack seller Suwardi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told AFP near parliament.

“We have always been lied to. That’s why people are always angry. Because they never met our demands.”

The Indonesian stock index fell more than three per cent at the open on Monday after the weekend unrest rattled markets.

Deep-rooted anger against police drove protests on Friday after footage of the van hitting Affan went viral. Seven officers were detained for investigation.

On Monday, Agus Wijayanto, head of the accountability bureau at the National Police, told reporters an investigation had found criminal acts committed by two officers — the driver of the van and the officer next to him.

They “could be dishonourably discharged”, said Agus, adding their ethics trial would take place on Wednesday.

The crisis has prompted Prabowo to cancel a trip to China this week for a military parade commemorating the end of World War II.

The finance minister’s house was pillaged overnight on Saturday, and several lawmakers have reportedly had their houses ransacked.

At least three people were killed after a fire on Friday started by protesters at a council building in the eastern city of Makassar, while a fourth was killed by a mob in the city in a case of mistaken identity. Another confirmed victim was a student in Yogyakarta, who died in clashes.

In anticipation of further unrest, TikTok on Saturday suspended its live feature for “a few days” in Indonesia, where it has more than 100 million users.

ASTANA – President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev outlined his vision for the priority areas of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s development at the 25th SCO Heads of State Council meeting in Tianjin, China, on Sept. 1, reported the Akorda press service. His remarks spanned security to trade and logistics, as well as digitalization and environmental issues.

“Kazakhstan fully supports the key objectives of the SCO: an equitable multipolar world order, security and stability, non-interference in the internal affairs of states and recognition of their right to sovereign development, fair international trade, and mutually beneficial investment cooperation,” said Tokayev.

Security

The first priority, according to Tokayev, is to strengthen strategic partnership and mutual support within the organization.

“In this regard, we welcome the initiatives of the Chinese President on global development, global security, global civilization, and global governance. We consider it extremely important to fully implement the ten-year development strategy of the SCO that we are adopting today,” he said.

Amid the rise of international terrorism, religious extremism, drug trafficking, illegal migration, and cybercrime, cooperation in the field of security becomes another priority.  Tokayev expressed Kazakhstan’s support for the establishment of four SCO centers to combat security challenges and threats.  

“Such threats to international security, including the ‘three evils,’ [terrorism, extremism, separatism] can only be overcome through joint action,” he said. 

“We consider it important to strengthen business contacts between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia. We call on SCO member states to continue providing humanitarian and technical assistance to Afghanistan for the country’s recovery and its integration into regional and economic processes,” said Tokayev.

Trade and logistics

All participating countries are seeing positive results in trade and logistics, with greater potential ahead, according to the Kazakh President.

“Since the establishment of the SCO, our countries’ contribution to global GDP has doubled, reaching 30%. Intraregional trade is showing impressive growth, with a volume exceeding $650 billion by the end of 2024. Kazakhstan’s trade turnover with SCO countries is also steadily growing, reaching nearly $70 billion last year,” said Tokayev.  

“Kazakhstan supports China’s initiative to establish the SCO Development Bank and is ready to participate in the implementation of this promising project. In addition, we propose establishing an SCO Office for supporting promising investment projects and consolidating the activities of legal, consulting, and financial companies based at the Astana International Financial Centre,” he said.

President Tokayev highlighted the potential of the Belt and Road Initiative in the transit and transport sector, which has been supported by over 150 countries.

He brought up data, indicating that the project could generate up to $1.5 trillion in revenue annually for all participants in trade and logistics operations along the Belt and Road route. 

“The North-South and East-West transport corridors, as well as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also open up great opportunities. The new initiative to establish a Trans-Altai Dialog looks promising. It aims to effectively utilize the potential of the vast Eurasian Altai region, which includes Kazakhstan, Russia, China, and Mongolia, in terms of its territory, population size, and economic power,” said Tokayev.

Digitalization

By 2033, the AI market volume could reach $5 trillion, increasing its share of the global technology industry to 30%. Tokayev emphasized this underscores the need to intensify cooperation in the fields of advanced technologies and digitalization.

“I am convinced that the SCO can become a global leader in the accelerated development of artificial intelligence. Therefore, we support China’s proposal to establish a Global Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization and are ready to make our own contribution to this extremely important endeavor. We advocate for the development of effective cooperation across the entire spectrum of the digital agenda, including the implementation of ‘smart solutions’ in the real sector of the economy, healthcare, transportation and logistics, and city management systems,” Tokayev said.

As a practical step in this direction, he proposed the establishment of an SCO Expert Forum on Artificial Intelligence, with the prospect of convening it on a regular basis across the member states.

With regard to environmental challenges, Tokayev proposed the establishment of a SCO Water Problems Study Center in Kazakhstan.

Thousands of mourners attended a funeral at the largest mosque in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Monday for 12 senior Houthi figures, including their prime minister, who were killed by an Israeli strike. Last Thursday’s attack, the first to kill top officials, struck a large number of people who had gathered to watch a televised speech recorded by top Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi, and it left most members of the group’s cabinet dead.
Mourners chanted the Houthi slogan “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam,” as Mohammed Miftah, now de facto head of the Iran-aligned government in Sanaa, vowed revenge as well as an internal security crackdown against spies.
“We are facing the strongest intelligence empire in the world, the one that targeted the government — the whole Zionist entity (comprising) the US administration, the Zionist entity, the Zionist Arabs and the spies inside Yemen,” Miftah told the crowd of mourners at the Al Saleh mosque.
Miftah became the acting head of the Houthis’ government on Saturday following the death in the Israeli strike of Prime Minister Ahmad Ghaleb Al-Rahwi. Al-Rahwi was largely a figurehead and not part of the inner circle of power.
Miftah had previously been his deputy. A raid on the United Nations offices in Sanaa on Sunday led to the detention of at least 11 UN personnel, the body said. The Houthis have given no reason for the raid but they have held a number of Yemeni employees of the UN and other aid agencies in the past on suspicion of spying.
Israel said on Friday its airstrike had targeted the Houthis’ chief of staff, defense minister and other senior officials and that it was verifying the outcome.
The fate of the Houthis’ powerful defense minister, Mohamed Al-Atifi, who runs the Missiles Brigades Group, remains unclear as he has not made an appearance since the attack.

THORN IN ISRAEL’S SIDE
Abdul Malik Al-Houthi, who remains alive, has emerged in recent years as one of Iran’s most prominent Arab allies and an enduring thorn in Israel’s side after it weakened many of its enemies in the region, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Since Israel’s war in Gaza against the Palestinian militant group Hamas began in October 2023, the Houthis have attacked vessels in the Red Sea in what they describe as acts of solidarity with the Palestinians.
The Red Sea attacks have drawn US and Israeli strikes. In May, President Donald Trump said the US would stop bombing the Houthis after a brief campaign, saying the group had agreed to halt interrupting important shipping lanes in the Middle East.
But the Houthis, one of Iran’s few allies still standing since the Gaza war spilled across the Middle East, vowed to continue attacking Israel and Israeli-linked shipping. The Houthis said on Monday they had launched a missile toward the Liberia-flagged Israeli-owned tanker ‘Scarlet Ray’ ship near Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port city of Yanbu.

THE HAGUE: The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has passed a resolution saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president said on Monday.

Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution declaring: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).”

There was no immediate response from the Israeli foreign ministry. Israel has in the past strongly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide and says they are justified as self defense. It is fighting a

case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that accuses it of genocide.

Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October, 2023, after fighters from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the territory, attacked Israeli communities, killing 1,200 people and capturing more than 250 hostages.

Since then, Israel’s military action has killed 63,000 people, damaged or destroyed most buildings in the territory and forced nearly all its residents to flee their homes at least once. A global hunger monitor relied on by the United Nations says parts of the territory are now suffering a man-made

famine, which Israel also denies.

In Gaza, Hamas welcomed the resolution: “This prestigious scholarly stance reinforces the documented evidence and facts presented before international courts,” said Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office.

The resolution “places a legal and moral obligation on the international community to take urgent action to stop the crime, protect civilians, and hold the leaders of the occupation accountable,” he said.

Since its founding in 1994, the genocide scholars’ association has passed nine resolutions recognizing historic or ongoing episodes as genocides.

The 1948 UN Genocide Convention, adopted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, defines genocide as crimes committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

It requires all countries to act to prevent and stop genocide.

Criminal acts comprising genocide include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, creating conditions calculated to destroy them, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children to other groups.

The three-page resolution adopted by the scholars calls on Israel to “immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population.”

The resolution also states that the Hamas attack on Israel which precipitated the war constituted international crimes.

“This is a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide,” the association’s president, Melanie O’Brien, a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia who specializes in genocide, told Reuters.

Sergey Vasiliev, a professor of international law at the Open University in the Netherlands who is not a member of the association, told Reuters the resolution showed that “this legal assessment has become mainstream within academia, particularly in the field of genocide studies.”

Several international rights groups and some Israeli NGOs have already accused Israel of committing genocide. Last week hundreds of UN staff at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk wrote to ask him to explicitly describe the Gaza war as an unfolding genocide, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says he reached “understandings” with US President Donald Trump over the end of the Ukraine war, at their meeting in Alaska last month.

But he did not say whether he would agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brokered by Trump, who had apparently given Monday as a deadline for Putin’s response.

Speaking during a summit in China, Putin continued to defend his decision to invade Ukraine, once again blaming the war on the West.

Following the Alaska meeting, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said Putin had agreed to security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a potential future peace deal, though Moscow has yet to confirm this.

Putin was speaking in Tianjin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, where he met Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi.

He thanked the Chinese and Indian leaders for their support and their efforts to “facilitate the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis”.

China and India are the biggest buyers of Russian crude oil, attracting criticism from the West that they are propping up the Russian economy which has been battered by the war effort.

In his speech, Putin also said that the “understandings reached” at his meeting with Trump in Alaska are “I hope, moving in this direction, opening the way to peace in Ukraine”.

At the same time, he reiterated his view that “this crisis wasn’t triggered by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but was a result of a coup in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the West”.

He also attributed the war to “the West’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into Nato”.

The Russian president has consistently opposed the idea of Ukraine joining the Western military alliance.

It was in 2014 that Putin seized Crimea and Russian proxies grabbed part of eastern Ukraine. Years later, in February 2022, Putin then ordered Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s latest comments come days after Russia launched its second biggest aerial attack on Ukraine in the war.

On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that Putin faced a Monday deadline set by Trump to agree to peace talks with Zelensky.

If the Russian leader does not agree, “it will show again President Putin has played President Trump”, said Macron.

But in an interview with CNN, on 22 August, Trump himself again gave Putin “a couple of weeks” to give a response before the US takes action, in the latest of a series of ultimatums and deadlines he has issued to the Russian leader.

Trump had previously said he could solve the Ukraine war in one day.

Following his meeting with Putin last month, Trump dropped a demand for a ceasefire and called instead for a permanent peace deal.

He also met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky along with top European leaders who paid an urgent visit to Washington DC.

Trump insisted there would be “no going into Nato by Ukraine” as part of a peace deal.

But he also hinted there would be security guarantees, saying Europe was the “first line of defence” and that the US would be involved.

“We’ll give them good protection,” he said, though he clarified it would not mean sending US troops to Ukraine.

The president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff also told CNN that Putin had agreed to security guarantees.

He said this would see the US and Europe “effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee”, referring to the Nato clause which states that member states should defend another member that has come under attack.

Zelensky said he expected a framework for security guarantees to be set out on paper as soon as this week.

But last Friday Russia criticised Western proposals as “one-sided and clearly designed to contain Russia”, adding that it turned Kyiv into a “strategic provocateur”.

Russian attacks have also continued. Last Thursday Moscow fired 629 drones and missiles at Kyiv, killing 23 people in one of the biggest aerial assaults of the war so far that prompted outrage from European leaders.

Germany and France have since pledged to put pressure on Russia to agree to a deal.

Meanwhile, Zelensky has rejected proposals for a buffer zone with Russia as part of a peace deal.

He has accused Russia of not being ready for diplomacy and seeking ways to postpone the end of the war.

---

Chinese leader pledges $280m in aid to members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation at summit in Tianjin.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged regional leaders to oppose “Cold War mentality” at a gathering of a security bloc that Beijing has touted as an alternative to the Western-led international order.

In a speech to attendees of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on Monday, Xi said that member states are facing increasingly complicated security and development challenges as the world becomes “chaotic and intertwined”.

“Looking back, despite tumultuous times, we have achieved success by practising the Shanghai spirit,” Xi said.

“Looking to the future, with the world undergoing turbulence and transformation, we must continue to follow the Shanghai spirit, keep our feet on the ground, forge ahead, and better perform the functions of the organisation.”

Calling for an “equal and orderly multipolarisation” of the world, Xi said the bloc should work towards the creation of a “more just and equitable global governance system”.

The Chinese leader said Beijing would provide 2 billion yuan ($280m) in aid to member states this year and a further 10 billion yuan ($1.4bn) of loans to an SCO banking consortium.

“We must take advantage of the mega-scale market… to improve the level of trade and investment facilitation,” Xi said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko are among the more than 20 world readers attending the two-day SCO summit, which opened on Sunday in China’s northern city of Tianjin.

Established in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation began as a grouping of six Eurasian nations – China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – but has since expanded to comprise 10 permanent members and 16 dialogue and observer countries.

Analysts say that China intends to use the gathering to promote an alternative to the United States-led global order and repair ties with India amid a shifting geopolitical environment under US President Donald Trump.

KIRUNA: Deep in the Swedish forest, where reindeer roam and scientists ski in winter, lies one of Europe’s hopes for a spaceport that can ultimately compete with the United States, China and Russia.

For decades, Europe has relied upon the US for its security among the stars. But the Trump administration’s “America First” policies, plus a commercial market that’s growing exponentially, has prompted Europeans to rethink their approach.

The state-owned Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden, is among the sites building out orbital rocket programs to allow Europe to advance in the global space race and launch satellites from the continent’s mainland.

“The gap is significant,” said Hermann Ludwig Moeller, director of the European Space Policy Institute. “I would argue that Europe, to be anywhere relevant in the next five to 10 years, needs to at least double its investment in space. And saying that it would double doesn’t mean that it would catch up by the same factor, because you can expect that other regions will also continue to step up.”

A European spaceport near the equator

Currently, Europe’s only space base capable of launching rockets and satellites into orbit is in sparsely populated French Guiana, an overseas department of France in South America that’s roughly 500 kilometers (310 miles) north of the equator. Otherwise, Europe borrows NASA’s Cape Canaveral in Florida.

In March, Isar Aerospace launched the first test flight of its orbital launch vehicle from the Andøya Spaceport, another site that’s part of Europe’s efforts to expand its presence in space, on an island in northern Norway.

While the rocket crashed into the sea 30 seconds after liftoff, the private German aerospace company had largely ruled out the possibility of the rocket reaching orbit on its first complete flight and deemed the short journey a success.

Moeller believes a successful orbital launch from continental Europe could occur within the next year, though he won’t guess where.

Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom also are among the countries seeking to be part of Europe’s spaceport portfolio.

Elsewhere on Earth, India — active in space research since the 1960s — has launched satellites for itself and other countries and successfully put one in orbit around Mars in 2014. After a failed attempt to land on the moon in 2019, India became the first country to land a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole in 2023 in a historic voyage to uncharted territory that scientists believe could hold reserves of frozen water. The mission was dubbed a technological triumph for the world’s most populous nation.

New Zealand also has a growing and active launch industry, and Australia is working to develop its commercial space industry.

Northern Europe’s geography

Esrange and Andøya date back to the 1960s and much of their space-bound appeal stems from their far-north geography on Earth.

Esrange, for example, is owned and operated by the Swedish Space Corporation and based more than 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. The space center’s 30-plus antennas can more easily communicate with satellites orbiting the North Pole compared to infrastructure that’s near the equator.

Most important, perhaps, is its size. The base itself encompasses 6 square kilometers (2.3 square miles), where experts conduct Martian lander parachute tests, suborbital rocket launches and stratospheric balloon experiments.

But its key selling point is Esrange’s rocket landing zone: 5,200 square kilometers (2,000 square miles) of birch, pine and spruce trees spread north across the Swedish tundra, nearly to the Norwegian and Finnish borders.

The territory is uninhabited besides the Sami Indigenous reindeer herders who sometimes pass through, and the space center alerts them before any tests occur. The emptiness of the landscape allows scientists to launch and easily recover material for further study.

“The rocket motor will just fall freely into the ground, which means that you need to see to it that no people are in the area,” Mattias Abrahamsson, business development director for the science division at Esrange, said during a recent tour. “We have to see to it that it’s not more dangerous to be in that area, if you want to pick berries or hunt or fish or anything like that, than if you’re in a street in New York or in Stockholm or anywhere.”

Andøya’s remote location on a Norwegian island, meanwhile, means rockets can safely crash down into the sea without risking harm to humans.

Security and defense

During his first week in office earlier this year, US President Donald Trump announced his $175 billion “Golden Dome” missile defense system to protect America from long-range missiles.

If successful, it would mark the first time the US would place weapons in space that are meant to destroy ground-based missiles within seconds of launch. It follows China’s 2021 groundbreaking launch of a warhead system that went into orbit before reentering Earth’s atmosphere.

Europe currently, however, does not have the same capacities and has for decades banked on the US for its security and defense. But US Vice President JD Vance, during a speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, warned Europe against continuing to rely upon America and urged officials to “step up in a big way” to provide for the defense of the continent.

Vance’s remarks, as well as concerns over former Trump ally and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s politics potentially impacting Ukraine’s dependence on his Starlink satellite system in its war with Russia, alarmed European leaders.

It became increasingly clear to them that the continent must have its own space ecosystem, with its “own capabilities to really be able to react with (its) own means and under (its) own control,” Moeller said.

Space as a commercial industry

Beyond the space race between global superpowers, commercial companies are taking to the skies. Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin, among others, have proven that space isn’t limited to governmental agencies like NASA, and that there’s a lot of money to be made in the solar system.

The number of satellites in space is expected to skyrocket in the next five years. And the Swedish Space Corporation, with its burgeoning orbital launch and rocket test division at Esrange, is among those seeking to capitalize on those dollars.

Ulrika Unell, the division’s president, said satellites in space are crucial to life on Earth. She wants everyone, beyond astronauts and scientists, to consider how they are impacted by what’s orbiting hundreds of kilometers (miles) above the globe.

“I would ask them to think about, when they go around with their mobiles and they use all this data every day: Where does it come from? How is it gathered?” she said. “So space is more and more an asset for the whole society.”