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GONDOMAR: Prime Minister Luis Montenegro joined members of Diogo Jota’s family for a private wake on Friday in the Liverpool footballers hometown in northern Portugal following his death alongside his brother Andre Silva in a car crash in Spain.

Jota’s longtime agent Jorge Mendes was also seen joining the family that included wife Rute Cardoso, who had married the footballer just weeks earlier. Montenegro spent almost half an hour with the family before leaving without making a statement.

A convoy of hearses carrying the bodies left for Gondomar near Porto on Thursday evening from the morgue of Puebla de Sanabria, near where the Lamborghini the brothers were traveling in had veered off the road and burst into flames after midnight on Thursday. Police said they suspected a tyre had burst.

A public wake is expected to take place at a chapel in Gondomar from 4:00 p.m. (1500 GMT) and a funeral on Saturday at a church nearby at 10:00 am local time, the office of Gondomar’s mayor said.

The death of forward Jota at the age of 28 has jolted the world of football, with messages of homage pouring in from former team-mates, clubs, national leaders and fans.

Outside Liverpool’s Anfield stadium fans left flowers, scarves and handwritten notes, many from children.

“I never thought there would be something that would frighten me of going back to Liverpool after the (summer) break,” Liverpool team-mate Mohamed Salah said on Instagram. “Team-mates come and go but not like this. Its going to be extremely difficult to accept that Diogo won’t be there when we go back,” he added.

Football clubs including Paris St-Germain, who have several Portugal internationals in their squad, Bayern Munich, Chelsea and Real Madrid observed a moment of silence during training for their matches at the Club World Cup in the United States.

Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca said on Thursday that forward Pedro Neto weighed whether to play in quarter-final against Palmeiras, as the Portuguese international mourns the tragic death of his close friend.In Gondomar, a town of about 160,000 people in the Porto metropolitan area that is known for artisanal gold and filigree jewelry, residents were struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of a local hero.

At the Diogo Jota Academy in Gondomar whose motto is “Its not important where we come from, but where we are going” people placed candles, flowers and scarves and shirts from the various clubs he played for and from the Portuguese national team in tribute to the player.

Jota opened the academy in 2022 for children aged 6-9 at the Gondomar Football Club where he himself played for 10 years as a child.

It was at Gondomar’s high school that he met his wife. They began dating aged 15 when in the same class and she became a pillar in his life.

When they were 19, they moved to Madrid together, when Jota was transferred from the small Portuguese club Pacos de Ferreira to Atletico Madrid.

“Besides being his girlfriend and best friend, I’m his number one fan,” Cardoso told the newspaper ‘A Bola’ at the time.

Jota was making his way back to Liverpool by car after he was told he should avoid plane travel for up to 6 weeks following lung surgery to address a fractured rib, his physiotherapist Miguel Goncalves told broadcaster Now late on Thursday.

Goncalves said Jota was recovering well from the pneumothorax surgery and that he had planned to take a ferry to the UK from Spain.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2025

IF recent developments have demonstrated anything it is that there are few certainties in geopolitics today. The world seems more unstable and unpredictable than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Conflicts have been proliferating. New ones have erupted even as longer-running wars persist.

The Middle East remains in turmoil and the war in Gaza continues. The Ukraine war is still raging. President Donald Trump has contributed much to international volatility by his disruptive policies and upending of the global trade system, but the world was already passing through unsettled times with multilateralism under unprecedented strain. Geopolitical tensions have escalated while the US-China confrontation remains the most significant strategic dynamic in a world in flux.

The global order has been fragmenting with increasing attacks by powerful countries on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of weaker states or those regarded as adversaries. Long-established global norms are being undermined. The threat or the use of force has become all too frequent.

Examples abound of how international law is being flouted with impunity by countries launching military strikes on other nations in what are often disingenuously called pre-emptive wars. This has produced what UN Secretary General António Guterres once described as an “epidemic of impunity”. Israel’s war on Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US bombing of Iran, India’s unprovoked attack on Pakistan and Israeli strikes on Iran all violated international law and the UN Charter. Does this represent what some call a new era of escalation? Is this a dangerous ‘new normal’?

Countries taking such military offensives seem to calculate that there will be minimum or no international consequences or diplomatic costs of their actions. This is encouraging a casual and careless defiance of international law. In some cases, there hasn’t even been global condemnation of military aggression.

For example, no Western country denounced the Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, prohibited by international law, additional protocols of the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council resolutions; instead, some countries applauded the strikes. Then there is the double standard practised by much of Europe towards the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza — condemning Russia and supporting Ukraine but not applying the same principle to Israel, the aggressor, in its genocidal war on Gaza. For many countries of the Global South, this has spelt the denouement of a rules-based order, whose rules were in any case unequally applied and advantaged Western powers.

History is testimony to the fallacy that the use of force can bring peace and security.

The fraught security environment, marked by lawlessness, armed conflicts and mounting geopolitical tensions, has had an obvious impact. It has led to a significant rise in global defence spending, with the world rearming at an alarming pace. According to the annual 2025 report by Sipri (Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute), global defence expenditure has hit a record level.

The most significant spending increases are accounted for by countries either engaged in or anticipating regional conflict. The annual Military Balance report by IISS (International Institute of Strategic Studies) also found global defence spending soaring to a new high. This is having a destabilising impact at both the global and regional levels.

Growing insecurity and rising threat perceptions have also engendered renewed thinking among countries about seeking nuclear weapons. Having witnessed how Iran and Ukraine were attacked by nuclear powers — Iran, an NPT member-nation being bombed by two nuclear weapon states — many countries have been encouraged to see nuclear weapons as the most viable option for their security.

The lesson countries facing security challenges may have drawn from recent events is that without nuclear weapons they are more vulnerable to external aggression and attacks on their sovereignty. This makes a discriminatory global non-proliferation regime, that has been eroding over time, more questionable in the eyes of many states. The Sipri report highlights the potential for more countries to consider developing or hosting nuclear weapons. This at a time when the nuclear arsenals of nuclear-armed states are being “enlarged and upgraded”.

Accompanying these trends is declining faith in diplomacy. This doesn’t of course mean that diplomacy isn’t needed, but when diplomacy fails to produce results or negotiations are used as a smokescreen for military action — as Israel has been doing in talks with Hamas and the US did with Iran — its efficacy comes into doubt. This is consequential as the breakdown of trust makes countries reticent and sceptical about negotiations, as for example Iran is in response to talks offers from the US.

Multilateral institutions, too, are faced today with a crisis of credibility and legitimacy. Guterres has repeatedly said trust in global institutions is at a breaking point with multilateral organisations ailing and in need of urgent reform and revitalisation. The loss of faith in multilateralism, he has said, is because people see “broken promises, unmet commitments, double standards, and vast inequalities”.

Former secretary general Ban Ki-moon has gone even further arguing that “the UN is slipping into dysfunction”. In a recent essay in The Economist, co-authored with Helen Clark, he attributed this to the organisation’s powerful members, who “disregard the rule of law when it suits them”, and to “certain leaders who want to see the UN on its knees”.

What has brought the UN into disrepute is the role of the Security Council whose principal responsibility is to prevent conflicts, end wars and preserve international peace. The Council has failed to live up to this responsibility because of its veto-wielding members and the divisions among them. Not only has the SC failed to prevent genocide in Gaza and end Israel’s war there, some of its permanent members have invaded countries, bombed states and attacked the sovereignty of other nations.

What all this adds up to is growing international disorder in which unilateral actions by big countries and regional powers are posing new risks and magnifying threats to international peace and security. The most dangerous approach adopted by leaders of some countries is based on their belief that the use of force will deliver peace and stability. History bears testimony to the fallacy of such a notion.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2025

• 20 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes
• MSF mourns colleague slain in previous day’s shooting at aid centre
• UN records 613 killings at GHF aid points & convoys

TEL AVIV/CAIRO: Hamas said on Friday it was ready to start talks “immediately” on a proposal for a ceasefire with Israel, after holding consultations with other Palestinian factions.

“The movement is ready to engage immediately and seriously in a cycle of negotiations on the mechanism to put in place” the terms of a draft truce proposal received from mediators, the group said in a statement.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israel accepted the conditions needed to finalise a 60-day ceasefire with Hamas, during which the parties would work towards ending the war.

A source familiar with Hamas’ position said the group was seeking guarantees that talks to end the war would take place during the 60-day truce, and that if no deal was reached by the end of that period, the pause in fighting would be extended till both sides come to terms.

Meanwhile, as US President Donald Trump said he expected Hamas to respond to his “final proposal” for a ceasefire in Gaza in the next 24 hours, at least 20 Palestinians were killed on Friday in an Israeli air strike in Gaza, according to local health officials.

Health officials at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, said the Israeli military had carried out an air strike on a tent encampment west of the city around 2am, killing 15 Palestinians displaced by Israeli attacks.

A Gaza civil defence official said those killed included five who were shot while waiting for aid near a US-run site near Rafah in southern Gaza and several who were waiting for aid near the Wadi Gaza Bridge in the centre of the territory.

They were the latest in a spate of deaths near aid distribution centres in the devastated territory, which UN agencies have warned is on the brink of famine.

At Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, crowds mourned 16 people killed on Thursday by what the civil defence agency said was shooting close to a nearby aid centre.

Medical aid charity Doctors Without Borders said Abdullah Hammad, who recently finished a contract working for it, was among those killed in Thursday’s shooting.

It said he was the 12th colleague the group had lost in the Gaza war.

“We demand an end to this bloodshed,” MSF said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the the UN human rights office said it had recorded at least 613 killings both at aid points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and near humanitarian convoys.

“We have recorded 613 killings, both at GHF points and near humanitarian convoys — this is a figure as of June 27. Since then … there have been further incidents,” Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is yet to comment on Trump’s ceasefire announcement. While some members of his right-wing coalition oppose a deal, others have indicated their support.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2025

KYIV: Russia pummelled Kyiv with the largest drone attack of the war, killing one person, injuring at least 23 and damaging buildings across the capital hours after US President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, officials said on Friday.

As air raid sirens, the whine of kamikaze drones and booming detonations reverberated from early evening until dawn as Russia launched what Ukraine’s Air Force said was a total of 539 drones and 11 missiles, the UN nuclear watchdog said Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant lost all off-site power on Friday.

Acrid smoke hung over the city centre. Kyiv’s military administration chief said a body had been found in the wreckage of one of the strike sites. Outside a high-rise apartment block damaged by a drone, residents stood around surveying the scene as the clean-up job began. Some cried. Others looked on silently.

Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant loses all off-site power

“I woke up to the sound of explosions, first the Shahed drones started buzzing, and then the explosions began,” said 40-year-old resident Maria Hilchenko.

“Then people started screaming outside. The explosions from the Shaheds kept coming.”

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is due to speak to Trump later on Friday about the war and a US pause in some deliveries of air defence missiles, called the attack “deliberately massive and cynical”. “Notably, the first air raid alerts in our cities and regions yesterday began to blare almost simultaneously with media reports discussing a phone call between President Trump and Putin,” Zelenskiy said on X.

“Yet again, Russia is showing it has no intention of ending the war and terror,” he added, calling for increased pressure on Russia and more air defence equipment.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said a Chinese component had been found in one of the Shahed drones attacking Kyiv, adding it had been found shortly after China’s consulate in the southern city of Odesa suffered minor damage in a separate strike.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2025

ATHENS: A fire broke out on Friday near the Greek capital, Athens, as the country was put on high alert for wildfires due to increased temperatures and strong winds.

Thousands of tourists and locals were forced to flee hotels and guesthouses in a resort on the popular island of Crete.

Hot, dry weather _ not unusual for this time of year _ has heightened the risk of summer fires and scientists say human-driven climate change is making them more frequent and more intense.

The latest fire broke out in the municipality of Koropi, some 30 kilometres east of Athens, fanned by strong gusts.

It quickly spread through the area, which includes homes surrounded by dense vegetation and extends to the shores of the Aegean Sea, and residents were ordered by text message to evacuate.

Fire service spokesman Vassilis Vathrakoyannis said some 800 people had left their homes, as the flames “quickly grew to dangerous proportions” because of the wind, with several outbreaks.

Roads on the outskirts of Athens were closed to traffic.

Public television channel ERT broadcast images of fire damage to houses, olive groves and undergrowth.

By late afternoon, a fire department official said the situation appeared “improved”, but added “there remain some scattered clusters”.

“Operations are ongoing, mainly to control small outbreaks,” he told reporters.

In all, 120 firefighters were deployed, with 30 engines, eight planes and the same number of helicopters.­

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2025