World

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis said the need to reform the United Nations was “more than obvious” after the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war exposed its limits, in an extract of his new book published on Sunday.

The Argentine Pontiff said Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine highlighted the need to ensure the current multilateral structure — especially the UN Security Council — finds “more agile and effective ways of resolving conflicts”.

“In wartime, it is essential to affirm that we need more multilateralism and a better multilateralism,” but the UN is no longer fit for “new realities”, he added in an extract published by La Stampa daily.

The organisation was founded to prevent the horrors of two World Wars from happening again, but although the threat represented by those conflicts was still alive, “today’s world is no longer the same”, said Francis.

“The necessity of these reforms became more than obvious after the pandemic” when the current multilateral system “showed all its limits”, he added.

Francis denounced the unequal distribution of vaccines as a “glaring example” of the law of the strongest prevailing over solidarity.

The 85-year-old advocated “organic reforms” aimed at allowing international organisations to rediscover their essential purpose of “serving the human family” and said international institutions must be the result of the “widest possible consensus”.

The Pope also proposed guaranteeing food, health, economic and social rights on which international institutions would base their decisions.

Francis’s new book, “I ask you in the name of God: Ten prayers for a future of hope”, is due to come out in Italy on Tuesday.

LONDON — Embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss faced fresh woes on Thursday after a prominent Conservative Party insider said some of her own MPs were considering a push to replace her with two former rivals.

"All sorts of different people are talking about all sorts of different things because the Conservative backbenchers are casting around for a possible replacement for [finance minister] Kwasi Kwarteng, even for a possible replacement for Liz Truss," Paul Goodman told the BBC.

Goodman, a former Tory MP who is editor of the influential ConservativeHome blog, said that less than 40 days into her premiership "all sorts of names are being thrown about" to replace the beleaguered leader.

MPs have been alarmed by a YouGov poll two weeks ago that gave the main opposition Labour Party of KeirStarmer a huge overall lead of 33 points.

The poll came after the government's controversial September 23 mini-budget that spooked the financial markets, heaping further pressure on cash-strapped households battling a cost-of-living crisis.

The lead is the biggest the Labour Party has recorded in any published poll since the late 1990s heyday of former leader Tony Blair.

Goodman said that the names being talked about included former finance minister Rishi Sunak — who stood against Truss for the leadership of the Tory party — and "even Boris Johnson", whom she replaced as premier and party leader early last month.

"One idea doing the rounds is that Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak, who, after all, between them got pretty much two-thirds of the votes of MPs [in the leadership contest], come to some kind of arrangement and essentially take over."

Mordaunt, a former defence minister, also stood against Truss, and is currently a member of her government.

Truss has enjoyed the shortest honeymoon period of any British political leader in living memory, so much so that The Economist this week said she had "the shelf-life of a lettuce".

On Wednesday, she appeared in parliament for the first time since the contentious mini-budget and told MPs she was "absolutely" committed to maintain current spending.

But with currency, bond and other markets spooked by the extra borrowing earmarked to pay for the mini-budget's tax cuts, fears have grown that she will slash government department budgets, returning to the unpopular austerity policy of a decade ago.

The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies on Tuesday said the government would have to cut spending by more than £60 billion ($67 billion) just to stabilise debt levels by mid-2027.

Goodman said there were increasing doubts whether they could find the savings required, and if they do, whether they would calm the markets or cause further turmoil.

A small number of individual MPs had in recent days demanded government U-turns on Truss's tax cutting policies, he added.

"I don't really know if they're a majority or not, but if I'm right then we will see the government have great difficulty in getting this package of cuts together."

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on Thursday, however, insisted the government should "absolutely stick" with Kwarteng's mini-budget to help drive economic growth.

"I think changing the leadership would be a disastrously bad idea politically and also economically," he told BBC radio.

Cleverly was speaking a day after a difficult meeting between Truss and members of her party.

MP Robert Halton told Truss at the meeting she had "trashed the last 10 years of workers' Conservatism", referring to initiatives such as apprenticeships, the left-leaning Guardian daily reported.

After the behind-closed-doors meeting, one MP told the paper the atmosphere had been "funereal".

Another was quoted as saying she had "done absolutely nothing to reassure colleagues whatsoever".

Truss is the Conservative Party's fourth leader in seven years.

Johnson was forced to quit in July after dozens of resignations from his government in protest at a series of scandals.

KYIV — Ukraine said on Wednesday it reclaimed more territory from Russia in the south and welcomed the delivery of Western air defence systems that Kyiv said would usher in a "new era" after mass strikes from Moscow.

Russia for two days pummelled Ukraine with missiles, damaging energy facilities nationwide, in attacks that President Vladimir Putin said were retaliation for a deadly explosion at the Crimea bridge.

Russia's FSB security service said Wednesday it detained eight suspects over the blast that ripped through the road and rail bridge connecting Crimea to the rest of the country.

But it also claimed to have foiled two more attacks that Ukrainian special services allegedly planned to carry out on Russian territory.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday after Russia's missile barrage that Ukraine's Western backers were looking to provide Kyiv with more air defences to protect against Russia's "indiscriminate" attacks across the country.

"We will address how to ramp up support for Ukraine and the top priority will be more air defence for Ukraine," Stoltenberg said at the start of a meeting by Ukraine's allies on arms supplies to Kyiv.

Putin has vowed a "severe" response to any further attack on Russia and what Moscow considers to be its territory, including the Crimea Peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Despite warnings from the Kremlin, Kyiv has vowed to retake the peninsula as well as four regions in Ukraine's east and south that Moscow says are now part of Russia.

Kyiv said on Wednesday that it had retaken five more settlements in the southern region of Kherson — one of the four territories Moscow said it annexed in late September — in the latest setback for Russia’s campaign.

Putin ‘miscalculated’ 

The presidency added, however, that Russian forces were striking back and had continued shelling Ukraine’s positions “along the entire contact line”.

The Russian military meanwhile said it had fended off Ukrainian attacks in the eastern Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv regions.

And Russian strikes on the frontline town of Avdiivka killed at least eight people at a market, the Ukraine-appointed chief of the region said.

“There is no military logic to this kind of shelling, only the unbridled desire to kill as many of our people as possible and intimidate others,” the Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on social media.

The Ukrainian army announced its counter-offensive in the south in late August.

After regaining almost full control of the north-eastern region of Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces recently claimed more gains on the eastern and southern fronts.

Faced with mounting setbacks since September, the Russian president announced the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists to join the fighting in Ukraine.

With the Crimea bridge blast, Russia also lost a vital transport link for moving military equipment for Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he believes his Russian counterpart had “miscalculated” the situation in Ukraine and underestimated the ferocity of Ukrainian defiance.

“He thought he was going to be welcomed with open arms, that this was the home of Mother Russia in Kyiv,” Biden told CNN in a rare televised interview.

“I think he just totally miscalculated.”

Mass graves discovered 

After two days of nationwide Russian strikes that especially targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leaving villages and towns without power and hot water, Ukraine said it had started receiving anti-aircraft defence systems from its Western allies.

“A new era of air defence has begun in Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Twitter, announcing the arrival of Germany’s Iris-Ts and the upcoming delivery of NASAMS from Washington.

He said he had met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley and discussed the “strengthening of the combat potential of the Ukrainian army”, according to a tweet.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the G-7 club of wealthy nations to help Kyiv create an “air shield”, warning that Russia “still has room for further escalation”.

Ukrainian officials announced on Tuesday the recovery of the remains of dozens of civilians found at mass burial sites in two towns in the eastern Donetsk region recently recaptured from Moscow’s forces.

In Lyman, a railway hub retaken by Ukraine in early October, a forensic team dressed in protective gear was exhuming dozens of bodies, an AFP journalist saw.

“We have already found more than 50 bodies of both soldiers and civilians. We have one long trench — a mass grave — where we discovered bodies and body parts,” regional Governor Kyrylenko said.

Russian forces have been accused of numerous abuses — torture, rape, extrajudicial executions — in Ukraine, claims Moscow has repeatedly denied.

PARIS — Iranian security forces fired tear gas Wednesday at a lawyers' protest over Mahsa Amini's death, said a rights group, which also raised the death toll to at least 108 from the crackdown on the nearly month-long movement.

"Woman, life, freedom," the lawyers in Tehran chanted in their first solidarity rally with the women-led demonstrations that have swept Iran since the 22-year-old's death, said Oslo-based Iran Human Rights.

Soon after, they were seen running from under a cloud of tear gas, in footage distributed online by IHR despite a major Internet outage, and one lawyer later said three of the demonstrators were arrested.

Amini, an Iranian of Kurdish origin, died on September 16 after falling into a coma following her arrest in the capital by the morality police for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women.

Young women, university students and even school girls have since defiantly removed their hijabs and faced off with security forces in the biggest wave of social unrest to grip Iran in almost three years.

At least 28 children have been killed in the protests, and hundreds more detained and held mostly in prisons for adults, rights groups inside and outside the country said.

Deadly unrest has rocked especially Sanandaj in Amini's western home province of Kurdistan — but also Zahedan in Iran's far southeast, where demonstrations erupted on September 30 over the reported rape of a teenage girl by a police commander.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a televised appearance on Wednesday, again accused Iran's "enemies" of stoking "these street riots".

"The actions of the enemy, such as propaganda, trying to influence minds, creating excitement, encouraging and even teaching the manufacture of incendiary materials, are now completely clear," he said.

'Impending bloody crackdown' 

Activists in Tehran called for protesters to turn out "in solidarity with the people of Sanandaj and the heroic people of Zahedan".

“We don’t want spectators. Come and join us,” sang a group of mainly young women as they clapped at a roundabout in Tehran’s Azad University, in other footage posted on Twitter by IHR.

The protest slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” was spray-painted on the wall of the former US embassy — abandoned in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis — but later painted over, an image obtained by AFP showed.

Shops were shuttered in Sanandaj, and people rallied on the streets chanting slogans and waving hijabs in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad, in other online footage.

Iran Human Rights said the crackdown has killed at least 108 people, and that at least another 93 people died in Zahedan.

The Norway-based group indicated its investigation into the “repression” in Kurdistan had been hampered by internet restrictions and warned of an “impending bloody crackdown” there.

IHR also said workers had joined protest strikes this week at the Asalouyeh petrochemical plant in the southwest, Abadan in the west and Bushehr in the south.

Analysts say the multifaceted nature of the protests has complicated state attempts to quell them, which could spell an even bigger challenge to the authorities than the 2019 unrest.

In its widening crackdown, Iran has blocked access to social media, including Instagram and WhatsApp, and launched a campaign of mass arrests.

Online monitor NetBlocks on Twitter reported a “major disruption to internet traffic in #Iran” from around 9:30am (06:00 GMT) which was “likely to further limit the free flow of information amid protests over the death of #MahsaAmini”.

Children in adult prisons 

The Tehran-based Children’s Rights Protection Society, which reported a death toll of 28 for minors, condemned security forces for violence against children.

It criticised “families being kept in the dark on their children’s whereabouts, cases proceeding without lawyers and a lack of children’s judges and police”, and said the government must be held accountable.

Revolutionary Guard deputy commander Ali Fadavi told Iranian media on October 5 that the “average age of the detainees from many of the recent protests was 15”.

Human rights lawyer Hassan Raisi said around 300 people between the ages of 12 and 19 are in police custody, some of them in detention centres for adult drug offenders.

In addition, Iran’s judiciary said more than 100 people had been charged over the Amini protests in Tehran and Hormozgan provinces alone.

Iran said an investigation found Amini had died of a longstanding illness rather than reported beatings.

Her bereaved parents have denied this and filed a complaint against the officers involved. One of her cousins, living in Iraq, has told AFP she died of “a violent blow to the head”.

GENEVA — Finland violated the rights of Finnish children left to languish for years in life-threatening conditions in Syrian camps for family members of suspected jihadists, a UN watchdog said on Wednesday.

"Finland has the responsibility and power to protect the Finnish children in the Syrian camps against an imminent risk to their lives by taking action to repatriate them," the UN child rights committee said in a statement.

In the findings, which echoed a previous ruling concerning France's responsibility towards French children stuck in the camps, the committee said "prolonged detention of child victims in life-threatening conditions amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment".

The committee, whose 18 independent experts are tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, issued the findings after considering a case filed on behalf of six Finnish children currently held at the Al Hol camp in Syria's northeast.

Since their relatives brought the case to the committee in 2019, three of the children have been able to leave the camp on their own initiative with their mother, and eventually arrived back in Finland.

“The remaining three child victims, currently between five and six years old, are still detained in closed camps in a war-like zone,” the committee said.

The petition from their relatives also mentioned 33 other Finnish children held at the camp without access to legal assistance.

Housing around 56,000 people, Al Hol is the largest of a number of camps in the region holding relatives of suspected extremists, mostly women and children.

Most are Syrians or Iraqis, but an estimated 10,000 are wives and children of Daesh fighters from other countries, many of whom are still thought to be highly radicalised.

Repeated calls for Western countries to repatriate their nationals have largely fallen on deaf ears.

“The situation of children in the camps has been widely reported as inhuman, lacking basic necessities including water, food and health care, and facing an imminent risk of death,” committee member Ann Skelton warned.

Two children die every week on average in Al Hol due to the dismal conditions, the Save the Children campaign group warned in a report last year, while the UN has reported more than 100 murders at the camp in just 18 months.

The committee, whose opinions and recommendations are non-binding, said that Finland had not given due consideration to children’s best interests when assessing their relatives’ requests for repatriation.

“We call on Finland to take immediate and decisive action to preserve the lives of these children, and to bring them home to their families,” Skelton said.

KYIV — Russia said on Tuesday it launched "mass" strikes on Ukraine hours ahead of a G-7 meeting expected to condemn an earlier missile blitz that Kyiv's allies said was a mark of Moscow's desperation.

Officials in Ukraine's western region of Lviv said at least three Russian missiles targeted energy infrastructure and the mayor of the region's main city, also called Lviv, said about one-third of the city was without power.

Russia's defence ministry confirmed the attacks saying it had carried out massive strikes using long-range and high-precision weapons and that "all assigned targets were hit".

The G-7 meeting comes a day after Russian missiles rocked the Ukrainian capital for the first time in months. President Volodymyr Zelensky was defiant, warning his country "cannot be intimidated".

Moscow's forces rained down more than 80 missiles on cities across Ukraine on Monday, according to Kyiv.

Ukraine's emergency services said on Tuesday that the overall toll had risen to 19 dead and more than 100 people wounded.

The United Nations said on Tuesday the wave of attacks may have violated the laws of war and would amount to war crimes if civilians were deliberately targeted.

Monday's mass barrage came in apparent retaliation for an explosion on Saturday that damaged a key bridge linking Russia to Crimea, a peninsula Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine for the bridge blast and warned of "severe" responses to any further attacks.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the strikes on Monday showed Moscow was “desperate” after a spate of embarrassing military setbacks.

Turkey on Tuesday called for a viable ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine “as soon as possible”, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expected to meet Putin this week.

Speaking in a televised interview, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also called for a “just peace” based on Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

At an urgent meeting of the UN General Assembly on Monday Ukrainian ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya branded Russia a “terrorist state”, noting his own immediate family had come under attack on Monday.

The meeting was called to debate Moscow’s declared annexation of four partly occupied Ukrainian regions.

‘Stay the course’ 

Residents across Ukraine expressed shock and rage after Monday’s barrage.

In Dnipro, Ukrainian serviceman Maxim was on leave from the front lines for the first time in six months to celebrate his wife’s birthday when Russian missiles slammed into the central Ukrainian city, damaging their home.

“We are fighting on the front exactly to protect these places” far from enemy lines, he said. “But they still manage to hit them.”

The strike, he said, had made him more determined than ever to repel the Russian forces in north-eastern Ukraine.

Zelensky and G-7 leaders were set to convene via video link at 12:00 GMT on Tuesday to discuss the latest Russian attacks.

‘A profound change’ 

The office of UK Prime Minister Liz Truss said she would use the gathering “to urge fellow leaders to stay the course”.

“Nobody wants peace more than Ukraine. And for our part, we must not waver one iota in our resolve to help them win it.”

German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters on Monday that Chancellor Olaf Scholz had spoken with Zelensky and assured him “of the solidarity of Germany and the other G-7 states”.

French President Emmanuel Macron convened his defence and foreign affairs ministers over the strikes, which he said signalled “a profound change in the nature of this war”.

US President Joe Biden condemned Monday’s attacks in stark terms, saying they demonstrated “the utter brutality” of Putin’s “illegal war”.

In a statement, the White House said Biden had spoken to Zelensky and had pledged to furnish Ukraine with “advanced air defence systems”.

Though Russia’s UN representative Vasily Nebenzya did not directly address the missile strikes at the session, he defended his country’s annexation of Ukrainian regions, saying the aim was “to protect our brothers and sisters in eastern Ukraine”.

Putin meanwhile was due to meet the head of the UN’s nuclear energy watchdog, Rafael Grossi, in Saint Petersburg on Tuesday to discuss the Russian-controlled nuclear plant in the Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia.

Fighting around the facility for months has raised fears of a nuclear accident.