World News

LONDON (AP) — London’s Heathrow Airport said Monday it will extend its cap on daily passenger numbers until the end of October as part of its efforts to cope with soaring demand for air travel amid staffing shortages.

The airport, one of Europe’s busiest, said a maximum of 100,000 travelers can depart each day until Oct. 29. The daily cap was initially expected to be lifted on Sept. 11.

Heathrow imposed the temporary limit in July and told airlines to stop selling tickets during the peak summer travel season, saying the expected passenger traffic was more than airport ground staff could handle.

The airport said its temporary cap had resulted in “fewer last-minute cancellations” and “shorter waits for bags.”

It added the capacity limits would be kept under review and “could be lifted earlier should there be a sustained picture of better resilience and a material increase in resourcing levels.”

Scores of summer flights into and departing from Heathrow have already been cancelled in recent months, and passengers have reported long waits at security, lost luggage and lengthy flight delays.

Booming demand for summer travel after two years of COVID-19 travel restrictions have overwhelmed European airlines and airports, which had laid off tens of thousands of pilots, cabin crew, check-in staff, ground crew and baggage handlers as the industry ground to a halt during the pandemic.

source

By Arshad Mohammed and Parisa Hafezi

WASHINGTON/DUBAI (Reuters) – Whether or not Tehran and Washington accept a European Union “final” offer to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, neither is likely to declare the pact dead because keeping it alive serves both sides’ interests, diplomats, analysts and officials said.

Their reasons, however, are radically different.

For U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, there are no obvious or easy ways to rein in Iran’s nuclear program other than the agreement, under which Iran had restrained its atomic program in return for relief from U.S., U.N. and EU economic sanctions.

Using economic pressure to coerce Iran to further limit its atomic program, as Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump attempted after abandoning the deal in 2018, will be difficult when countries such as China and India continue to buy Iranian oil.

The rise in oil prices brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s public support for Tehran have thrown Iran economic and political lifelines that have helped to convince Iranian officials that they can afford to wait.

“Both sides are happy to endure the status quo,” said a European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We are in no rush,” said a senior Iranian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We are selling our oil, we have reasonable trade with many countries, including neighboring countries, we have our friends like Russia and China that both are at odds with Washington … our (nuclear) program is advancing. Why should we retreat?”

When Trump reneged on the deal he argued it was too generous to Iran and he reimposed harsh U.S. sanctions designed to choke off Iran’s oil exports as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign.

After waiting about a year, Iran began violating the deal’s nuclear restrictions, amassing a larger stockpile of enriched uranium, enriching uranium to 60% purity – well above the pact’s 3.67% limit – and using increasingly sophisticated centrifuges.

After 16 months of fitful, indirect U.S.-Iranian talks, with the EU shuttling between the parties, a senior EU official on Aug. 8 said they had laid down a “final” offer and expected a response within “very, very few weeks.”

AUG. 15 DEADLINE?

Regional diplomats said the EU told the parties it expected an answer on Aug. 15, though that has not been confirmed. There are no signs if Iran intends to comply or to accept the draft EU text. The United States has said it is ready to quickly conclude a deal based on the EU proposals, is studying the text and will respond “as asked.”

   “The Ukraine war, high oil prices, the rising tension between Washington and China, have changed the political equilibrium. Therefore, time is not of the essence for Iran,” said a second senior Iranian official.

After months of saying time was running out, U.S. officials have changed tack, saying they will pursue a deal as long as it is in U.S. national security interests, a formulation with no deadline.

Biden, a Democrat, is sure to be criticized by Republicans if he revives the deal before the Nov. 8 midterm elections in which his party could lose control of both houses of Congress.

“If the Iranians tomorrow came in and said, ‘OK, we’ll take the deal that’s on the table,’ we would do it notwithstanding the midterms,” said Dennis Ross, a veteran U.S. diplomat now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“It’s not like the administration is out there touting this as a great arms control deal. Their position is that it’s the least bad of the alternatives that are available,” he added.

While Biden has said he would take military action as a last resort to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Washington is loathe to do so given the risk of sparking a wider regional war or of Iran attacking the United States or its allies elsewhere.

Domestic criticism of the administration is likely to be fiercer after last week’s indictment of an Iranian man on U.S. charges of plotting to kill former White House national security adviser John Bolton and the knife attack on novelist Salman Rushdie. The writer has lived under an Iranian fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill him for his novel “The Satanic Verses,” viewed by some as blasphemous.

DANGLING

The lack of better policy options for Washington, and Tehran’s view that time is on its side, could leave the deal dangling.

“Both the US and Iran have compelling reasons to keep the prospect of a deal alive, even though neither appears willing to make the concessions that would actually facilitate its revival,” said Eurasia Group analyst Henry Rome.

“It is unclear whether Iranian leaders have decided not to revive the deal or have not made a definitive decision, but either way, continuing this limbo period likely serves their interests,” Rome said.

“The fact that the West has long threatened that time was running short has likely undermined its credibility in insisting that the deal on the table is final and non-negotiable,” he said.

(Reporting By Parisa Hafezi in Dubai and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay; Writing by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool)

source

By Nathan Layne

(Reuters) -Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed author who was stabbed repeatedly at a public appearance in New York state on Friday, 33 years after Iran’s then-supreme leader called for him to be killed, is off a ventilator and his health is improving, his agent and a son said on Sunday.

“He’s off the ventilator, so the road to recovery has begun,” his agent, Andrew Wylie, wrote in an email to Reuters. “It will be long; the injuries are severe, but his condition is headed in the right direction.”

Rushdie, 75, was set to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on the importance of the United States as a haven for targeted artists when police say a 24-year-old man rushed the stage and stabbed him.

The Indian-born writer has lived with a bounty on his head following the publication of his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses,” which is viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages. In 1989 Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for his assassination.

Writers and politicians around the world have condemned the attack. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday that Iranian state institutions had incited violence against Rushdie for generations, and state-affiliated media had gloated about the attempt on his life.

“This is despicable,” Blinken said in a statement. “The United States and partners will not waver in our determination to stand up to these threats, using every appropriate tool at our disposal.”

The suspect in the stabbing, Hadi Matar of Fairview, New Jersey, pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault at a court appearance on Saturday, his court-appointed lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, told Reuters.

Neither local nor federal authorities have offered any additional details on the investigation, including a possible motive.

An initial law enforcement review of Matar’s social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi’ite extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to NBC New York. The IRGC is a powerful faction that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign.

Rushdie was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, for treatment after the attack.

Following hours of surgery, he had been put on a ventilator and was unable to speak as of Friday evening, Wylie had said in a prior health update, adding that he would likely lose an eye and had nerve damage in his arm and wounds to his liver.

One of Rushdie’s sons said on Sunday that his father remained in critical condition but was able to say a few words after getting off the ventilator.

“Though his life changing injuries are severe, his usual feisty & defiant sense of humor remains intact,” Zafar Rushdie wrote on Twitter.

Authorities in Iran have made no public comment about the attack, although hardline state media outlets have celebrated it with headlines including “Satan has been blinded” and some Iranians voiced support online for the stabbing.

Many other Iranians expressed their sympathies for Rushdie, however, posting on social media about their anger at the Islamic Republic’s clerical rulers for issuing the 1989 fatwa that told Muslims to kill the author.

BOUNTY WORTH MILLIONS

Iranian organizations, some linked to the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder. Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the edict remained “irrevocable.”

Matar was born in California and recently moved to New Jersey, the NBC New York report said, adding that he had a fake driver’s license on him.

Witnesses said Matar did not speak as he attacked the author. He was arrested at the scene by a state trooper after being wrestled to the ground by audience members.

Rushdie was stabbed 10 times, prosecutors said during Matar’s arraignment, according to the New York Times.

Prosecutors said in court that Matar traveled by bus to the Chautauqua Institution, an educational retreat about 12 miles (19 km) from the shores of Lake Erie, and bought a pass that admitted him to Rushdie’s lecture, the Times reported. Attendees said there were no obvious security checks.

Matar was the son of a man from Yaroun in southern Lebanon, according to Ali Tehfe, the town’s mayor. Matar’s parents emigrated to the United States, where he was born and raised, the mayor said, adding he had no information on their political views.

Tehfe told Reuters on Sunday that Matar’s father had returned to Lebanon several years ago, and after word of Rushdie’s stabbing spread he had locked himself in his Yaroun home and was refusing to speak to anyone.

The Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah holds significant sway in Yaroun, where posters of Khomeini and slain IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020, adorned walls at the weekend.

A Hezbollah official told Reuters on Saturday that the group had no additional information on the attack on Rushdie.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Additional reporting by Maya Gebeily in Beirut and Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

source

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged to never again wage war on the anniversary of Japan’s World War Two surrender, while members of his cabinet marked the date with visits to a controversial shrine, moves set to anger China and South Korea.

With the Yasukuni Shrine seen as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism, Tokyo’s ties with China are already particularly strained this year after Beijing conducted unprecedented military exercises around Taiwan following the visit there by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this month.

During the drills, several missiles fell in waters inside Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

The anniversary commemoration’s links to Yasukuni, a site that honours 14 Japanese wartime leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal, as well as war dead, saw Kishida face a tricky balancing act on Monday.

On the dovish side of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), his task was to avoid irking international neighbours and partners while still keeping the more right-wing members of the party happy – particularly after the killing of former premier Shinzo Abe last month.

Kishida sent an offering to the central Tokyo shrine without visiting, Kyodo news agency reported. He also sent offerings to Yasukuni during festivals last year and this spring.

“We will never again repeat the horrors of war. I will continue to live up to this determined oath,” Kishida told a secular gathering elsewhere in Tokyo, also attended by Emperor Naruhito.

“In a world where conflicts are still unabated, Japan is a proactive leader in peace,” he said.

Footage on broadcaster NHK showed the shrine being visited early on Monday by several cabinet ministers, including Economic Security Minister Sanae Takaichi. Earlier the site was visited by Koichi Hagiuda, the head of the LDP’s policy research council and a key ally of slain former prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“It is natural for any country to pay respect to those who gave their lives for their country,” chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said earlier on Monday. “Japan will continue to strengthen its relations with its neighbours, including China and South Korea.”

A group of lawmakers that normally visit en masse on Aug 15 said last week they would not do so due to a recent surge in coronavirus cases.

Abe was the last prime minister in recent memory to visit Yasukuni while in office, in 2013 – a visit that outraged both China and South Korea and even drew a rebuke from its close ally the United States.

The United States and Japan have become staunch security allies in the decades since the war’s end, but its legacy still haunts East Asia.

Koreans, who mark the date as National Liberation Day, resent Japan’s 1910-1945 colonisation of the peninsula, while China has bitter memories of imperial troops’ invasion and occupation of parts of the country from 1931-1945.

Kishida has pledged to substantially increase Japan’s defence budget, citing the increasingly tense regional security environment, but made no mention in a recent speech of one of Abe’s dreams – revising the country’s pacifist constitution – although he has spoken of it before.

(Additional reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama and Sakura Murakami; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

source

PARIS (Reuters) – Firefighters have managed to halt the spread of a “monster” blaze in southwest France, allowing authorities to reopen a stretch of highway to traffic ahead of a busy travel weekend.

“The fire did not advance overnight thanks to the significant means employed,” the local prefect said in a tweet Saturday.

Reinforcements from across Europe helped local firefighters tackle the blaze which has ravaged forests in France’s Gironde region since Tuesday and forced 10,000 people to evacuate their homes. The fire has been fanned by wind and scorching temperatures of up to 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in recent days.

The southwest of France had already been hit by fires in July that destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of forest and temporarily forced almost 40,000 people from their homes.

Successive heatwaves have sparked wildfires across Europe this summer, throwing the spotlight on the risks of climate change to industry and livelihoods.

Storms are expected to sweep through France on Saturday night, bringing down temperatures and prompting severe weather warnings.

Over a thousand French firefighters were supported by hundreds of firefighters from across Europe, as well as trucks and waterbombing aircrafts, which continued to arrive Saturday.

Hundreds of firemen are also fighting fires further north in Brittany, where a blaze has burned 400 hectares, as well as in the Jura region in the east, where more than 500 hectares have burned.

More than 60,000 hectares (230 square miles) have gone up in flames so far in France this year, six times the full-year average for 2006-2021, data from the European Forest Fire Information System shows.

(Reporting by Mimosa Spencer; Editing by Christina Fincher)

source

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea’s foreign ministry on Sunday criticised the United Nations Secretary-General’s recent comment on his supports for the North’s complete denuclearisation, calling the remarks lack impartiality and fairness.

North Korea’s state news agency KCNA released a statement from the foreign ministry after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres on Friday said he fully supports efforts to completely denuclearise North Korea when he met with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.

“I cannot but express deep regret over the said remarks of the UN secretary-general that grossly lack impartiality and fairness and go against the obligations of his duty, specified in the UN Charter, as regards the issue of the Korean peninsula,” Kim Son Gyong, vice minister for international organizations of North Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

Kim added that the U.N. secretary-general should not request or accept orders from the government of a specific country but refrain from doing any act that may impair his or her position as an international official who is liable only to the UN.

Kim said the North’s “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation” (CVID) was “an infringement upon the sovereignty of the DPRK,” referring to North Korea by the initials of its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“It demands the unilateral disarmament, and Secretary-General Guterres perhaps knows well that the DPRK has totally rejected it without any toleration,” said Kim, adding that Guterres should be careful when uttering “dangerous words” amid the extremely acute situation on the Korean peninsula.

North Korea has test fired a record number of missiles this year, and officials in Seoul and Washington say that it appears to be preparing to test a nuclear weapon for the first time since 2017, amid stalled denuclearisation talks.

(Reporting by Heekyong Yang; Editing by Sandra Maler)

source

JERUSALEM (AP) — A gunman opened fire at a bus near Jerusalem’s Old City early Sunday, wounding eight Israelis in a suspected Palestinian attack that came a week after violence flared up between Israel and militants in Gaza, police and medics said.

Two of the victims were in serious condition, including a pregnant woman with abdominal injuries and a man with gunshot wounds to the head and neck, according to Israeli hospitals treating them.

The shooting occurred as the bus waited in a parking lot near the Western Wall, which is considered the holiest site where Jews can pray.

Israeli police said forces were dispatched to the scene to investigate. Israeli security forces also pushed into the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan pursuing the suspected attacker.

The attack in Jerusalem followed a tense week between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Last weekend, Israeli aircraft unleashed an offensive in the Gaza Strip targeting the militant group Islamic Jihad and setting off three days of fierce cross-border fighting. Islamic Jihad fired hundreds of rockets during the flare-up to avenge the airstrikes, which killed two of its commanders and other militants. Israel said the attack was meant to thwart threats from the group to respond to the arrest of one of its officials in the occupied West Bank.

Forty-nine Palestinians, including 17 children and 14 militants, were killed, and several hundred were injured in the fighting, which ended with an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire. No Israeli was killed or seriously injured.

The Islamic militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, stayed on the sidelines.

A day after the cease-fire halted the worst round of Gaza fighting in more than a year, Israeli troops killed three Palestinian militants and wounded dozens in a shootout that erupted during an arrest raid in the West Bank city of Nablus.

source

By Kanishka Singh and Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday and airlifted to a hospital, police said.

After hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak on Friday evening after an attack condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on the freedom of expression.

“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, his book agent, wrote in an email. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

Rushdie, 75, was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York’s Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head since the late 1980s.

Stunned attendees helped wrest the man from Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor. A New York State Police trooper providing security at the event arrested the attacker. Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a pass to the event.

“A man jumped up on the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like beating him on the chest, repeated fist strokes into his chest and neck,” said Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience. “People were screaming and crying out and gasping.”

A doctor in the audience helped tend to Rushdie while emergency services arrived, police said. Henry Reese, the event’s moderator, suffered a minor head injury. Police said they were working with federal investigators to determine a motive. They did not describe the weapon used.

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan described the incident as “appalling.” “We’re thankful to good citizens and first responders for helping him so swiftly,” he wrote on Twitter.

Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, before moving to the United Kingdom, has long faced death threats for his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses.”

Some Muslims said the book contained blasphemous passages. It was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication.

A few months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy.

Rushdie, who called his novel “pretty mild,” went into hiding for nearly a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991. The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years.

Iranian organizations, some affiliated with the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder. And Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”

Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency and other news outlets donated money in 2016 to increase the bounty by $600,000. Fars called Rushdie an apostate who “insulted the prophet” in its report on Friday’s attack.

‘NOT A USUAL WRITER’

Rushdie published a memoir in 2012 about his cloistered, secretive life under the fatwa called “Joseph Anton,” the pseudonym he used while in British police protection. His second novel, “Midnight’s Children,” won the Booker Prize. His new novel “Victory City” is due to be published in February.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was appalled that Rushdie was “stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to defend.”

Rushdie was at the institution in western New York for a discussion about the United States giving asylum to artists in exile and “as a home for freedom of creative expression,” according to the institution’s website.

There were no obvious security checks at the Chautauqua Institution, a landmark founded in the 19th century in the small lakeside town of the same name; staff simply checked people’s passes for admission, attendees said.

“I felt like we needed to have more protection there because Salman Rushdie is not a usual writer,” said Anour Rahmani, an Algerian writer and human rights activist who was in the audience. “He’s a writer with a fatwa against him.”

Michael Hill, the institution’s president, said at a news conference they had a practice of working with state and local police to provide event security. He vowed the summer’s program would soon continue.

“Our whole purpose is to help people bridge what has been too divisive of a world,” Hill said. “The worst thing Chautauqua could do is back away from its mission in light of this tragedy, and I don’t think Mr. Rushdie would want that either.”

Rushdie became a U.S. citizen in 2016 and lives in New York City.

A self-described lapsed Muslim and “hard-line atheist,” he has been a fierce critic of religion across the spectrum and outspoken about oppression in his native India, including under the Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

PEN America, an advocacy group for freedom of expression of which Rushdie is a former president, said it was “reeling from shock and horror” at what it called an unprecedented attack on a writer in the United States.

“Salman Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades but has never flinched nor faltered,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief executive, said in the statement. Earlier in the morning, Rushdie had emailed her to help with relocating Ukrainian writers seeking refuge, she said.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington, Jonathan Allen, Randi Love and Tyler Clifford in New York and Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols, Andrew Hay and Costas Pitas; Editing by Alistair Bell, Daniel Wallis and Michael Perry)

source

(Reuters) -Taiwan’s foreign ministry expressed its “sincere gratitude” towards the United States for taking “concrete actions” to maintain security and peace in the Taiwan Strait and the region in a statement on Saturday.

The statement came in response to comments from U.S. Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell, who said on Friday that China “overreacted” to U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

The foreign ministry statement said that China’s “unprovoked military and economy intimidation” had “further strengthened the unity and resilience of the global democratic camp”.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said on Thursday that China’s threat of force is undiminished, even though Beijing’s largest- ever military drills around the island following Pelosi’s visit last week seemed to be scaling down.

(Reporting by David Kirton; Editing by Tom Hogue and Michael Perry)

source

(Reuters) – The United States is concerned by reports that British, Swedish and Croatian nationals were being charged by “illegitimate authorities in eastern Ukraine”, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday.

“Russia and its proxies have an obligation to respect international humanitarian law, including the rights & protections afforded to prisoners of war,” Blinken wrote on Twitter.

(Reporting by Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; Editing by William Mallard)

source