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Lebanon top prosecutor, judges charged over Beirut blast: official

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Lebanon top prosecutor, judges charged over Beirut blast: official

The Lebanese judge probing the devastating Beirut port blast has charged Prosecutor General Ghassan Oueidat and three judges, a first in the country’s history, a judicial official told AFP on Tuesday.

Judge Tarek Bitar decided Monday to resume his probe into the deadly August 2020 mega-explosion despite strong political pressure that had led to a suspension of his work for more than a year.

On Tuesday, he charged eight more figures, including Lebanon’s top prosecutor Oueidat and the three judges, with “homicide, arson and sabotage”, said the judicial official who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.

One of history’s biggest non-nuclear explosions destroyed most of Beirut port and surrounding areas on August 4, 2020, killing more than 215 people and injuring over 6,500.

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The blast was caused by a fire in a warehouse where a vast stockpile of the industrial chemical ammonium nitrate had been haphazardly stored for years, authorities said.

According to the judicial official, Oueidat had in 2019 overseen a security services investigation into cracks in the warehouse where the ammonium nitrate was stored.

In total, 13 people are being prosecuted, including five officials whom Bitar indicted earlier, among them former prime minister Hassan Diab and former ministers.

Relatives of the dead have been holding monthly vigils ever since the disaster, seeking justice and accountability.

Many families have placed their hopes in Bitar, who has however faced legal challenges, delays and strong resistance from the powerful Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah and its allies who accuse him of political bias.

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Iran-backed Hezbollah and its ally Amal called for demonstrations to demand his dismissal in October 2021, when a gun battle broke out at a Beirut rally and seven people were killed.

Reopening the case Monday after a 13-month suspension, Bitar charged an initial eight suspects, including General Security head Abbas Ibrahim and State Security agency chief Tony Saliba, and released five others.

In Lebanon, state institutions have been reluctant to cooperate with the domestic probe, which began the same month as the explosion.

In February 2021, Bitar’s predecessor as lead judge was removed from the case after he had charged high-level politicians.

The interior ministry has also failed to execute arrest warrants issued by Bitar, further undermining his quest for accountability.

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Illness, scandal and discord leave UK royal family looking depleted

Illness, scandal and discord leave UK royal family looking depleted

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Illness, scandal and discord leave UK royal family looking depleted

King Charles is due to make his first public appearance at a royal event since his cancer diagnosis on Sunday, but the likely absence of son Prince William and the heir’s wife Kate will spotlight how depleted the monarchy has become.

Buckingham Palace said the 75-year-old monarch would attend the traditional Easter Sunday church service at Windsor Castle alongside his wife Queen Camilla, one of the annual engagements usually attended by all the senior royals.

However, William, Kate, and their children George, 10, Charlotte, 8, and Louis, 5, will not attend after the Princess of Wales revealed last week that she had begun preventative chemotherapy for cancer following abdominal surgery in January.

“King Charles really wanted to have a slimmed-down monarchy when he took on the throne but he never could have anticipated slimming down to where it is now,” said Erin Hill, People magazine’s senior royal editor. “This is going to definitely be a complicated time for the royal family.”

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Charles’ desire for a ‘slimmed-down’ institution was designed to counter accusations it was bloated, with distant relatives living off taxpayer-funded handouts.

But there are now gaping holes in his immediate circle – most dramatically, with the departure of his younger son Prince Harry, 39, and wife Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, to the US three years ago.

Meanwhile, Charles’ younger brother Prince Andrew, 64, was banished from public life in 2019 over his friendship with the late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

NOT A GOOD IDEA
“Well, I think the ‘slimmed-down’ was said in a day when there were a few more people around to make that seem like a justifiable comment,” the king’s younger sister Princess Anne said in an interview last year.

“It doesn’t sound like a good idea from where I’m standing, I have to say. I’m not quite sure what else … we can do.”

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Of the remaining official working royals – those that carry out duties for the king, such as opening new buildings, giving out honours and meeting foreign dignitaries – many are now from the late Queen Elizabeth’s generation.

Princess Alexandra, 87, her cousin and long-time friend, is rarely seen in public nowadays, while Elizabeth’s other cousins Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, and Prince Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, are 88 and 79 respectively.

Princess Anne often tops the list for being the hardest-working royal but she herself will turn 74 this year. Her son Peter Phillips said this week she was probably working a lot harder than she had expected.

“She’s still doing overseas trips and turning around in 24 hours which is pretty hard on most people … but when you’re in your 70s and doing that it’s pretty remarkable,” he told Sky News in Australia.

He said there was “definitely a short-term pressure on certain members of the family to continue to be out and about”. As well as his mother, he noted the amount being done by Camilla and Charles’ younger brother Prince Edward and wife Sophie, now the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.

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Royal biographer Claudia Joseph said while Camilla and William had done a “sterling job” in the absence of Charles, it would not have been easy.

“On a personal level, it’s going to be awful for the royals,” she said. “Obviously, on a practical level, it makes things difficult.”

Although polls show most Britons remain generally supportive of the monarchy, they also suggest that majority is shrinking, with a growing gap between enthusiastic older people and indifferent younger generations.

Apart from William and Kate, the next youngest working royals are Edward, who this month turned 60, and Sophie who will reach that same milestone next year.

It will then be at least a decade until the ranks are swelled by the children of William and Kate.

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Royal author Tina Brown said the monarchy was looking very lean indeed, putting “unmanageable pressure” on William and Kate.

“Catherine is the most popular member of the royal family after William,” she wrote in the New York Times this week. “The future of the monarchy hangs by a thread, and that thread is her.”

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Taiwan’s navy chief to visit US next week, sources say

Taiwan’s navy chief to visit US next week, sources say

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Taiwan's navy chief to visit US next week, sources say

Taiwan’s navy chief, Tang Hua, will visit the United States from next week to attend a military ceremony and discuss how to boost bilateral naval cooperation as China raises threats toward the island, six people briefed on the trip said.

While Taiwan and the United States have a close relationship, it is unofficial, as Washington formally recognises China, not the democratically governed island that Beijing claims as its own territory. Taiwan rejects China’s territorial claims.

The six security sources said Tang would visit Hawaii, home of the US Indo-Pacific Command, for a Pacific Fleet change-of-command ceremony. Three of them said Tang was then expected to attend the April 8-10 Sea-Air-Space conference near Washington and that talks were under way to arrange a meeting with the US chief of naval operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti.

The sources spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity given the trip’s sensitivity.

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Taiwan’s navy and the Pentagon declined to comment.

China’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment. China’s foreign ministry said it firmly opposed “military collusion” between the United States and Taiwan and that Washington should “refrain from sending out any erroneous signal to the forces of secession for the independence of Taiwan”.

Unlike visits to the US by senior officials from allies like Japan and Britain, conducted openly, those of Taiwanese officials, especially military, are kept low key and often not officially confirmed.

Washington and Taipei have had no official diplomatic or military relationship since 1979, when the US switched recognition to Beijing, though the United States is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.

China has not renounced the use of force to take Taiwan, where the defeated Republic of China government fled in 1949 after it lost China’s civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists, who established the People’s Republic of China.

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Taiwan’s navy is dwarfed by that of China, which is adding nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. Under a modernisation effort President Tsai Ing-wen has overseen, Taiwan is developing its own submarines, the first unveiled last year.

Without fanfare Taiwan and the US have expanded their military cooperation since Tsai took office in 2016, especially since China began ramping up military pressure over the past four years. Beijing now regularly sends fighter jets over the median line of the Taiwan Strait that once served as an unofficial barrier.

Previous US trips by senior Taiwan officers to the United States have included then-navy chief Lee Hsi-ming in 2015 and Deputy Defence Minister Hsu Yen-pu, who last year attended a Taiwan-US defence industry conference in Virginia.

Taiwan typically holds annual security talks in the United States, which neither government officially confirms and which last year were attended by Taiwan’s foreign minister and the head of its National Security Council, according to Taiwanese media.

Tang’s visit, two sources said, is part of a US effort, called the Joint Island Defence Concept, to coordinate with Taiwan, Japan and others to counter China’s armed forces within the “first island chain” – a string enclosing China’s coastal seas that connects Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo, an island split between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.

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Taiwan and the US are trying to line up a Tang-Franchetti meeting, which has not been confirmed, said one source, a US official.

Tang on Tuesday accompanied Tsai to a navy base on Taiwan’s east coast for a handover ceremony for two new Tuo Chiang-class corvette warships, which Taiwan’s navy calls “carrier killers” for their high manoeuvrability, stealthiness and anti-ship missiles.

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Ultra-Orthodox Israelis resist push for military service

Ultra-Orthodox Israelis resist push for military service

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Ultra-Orthodox Israelis resist push for military service

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties are resisting pressure to lift exemptions of religious students from military duty, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s struggles to preserve his coalition and spread the wartime burden across society fairly.

With a March 31 deadline looming for the Israeli government to come up with legislation to resolve a decades-long standoff over the issue, Netanyahu filed a last-minute application to the Supreme Court for a 30-day deferment.

If this is not granted, the exemptions to the current National Service Law preventing seminary students from being conscripted will expire from Monday.

The Supreme Court has not responded directly, but on Thursday it issued an interim ruling ordering the government to freeze funding for seminary students who would be liable for conscription from next week.

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WHAT LIES BEHIND THE STANDOFF?
The exemptions offered to the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community date back to the early days of the state of Israel in 1948 when its first prime minister, the socialist David Ben-Gurion, exempted about 400 students from military service so they could devote themselves to religious study. In so doing, Ben-Gurion hoped to keep alive sacred knowledge and traditions almost wiped out in the Holocaust.

Since then, the exemptions have become an increasing headache as the fast-growing community has expanded to make up more than 13% of Israel’s population, a proportion expected to reach around a third within 40 years due to a high birth rate.

The Haredi resistance to joining the military is based around their strong sense of religious identity, which many families fear risks being weakened by army service.

Some Haredi men do serve in the army but most do not, which many secular Israelis feel exacerbates social divisions. Often living in heavily Orthodox neighbourhoods and devoting their lives to religious study, many Haredi men do not work for money but live off donations, state benefits and the often paltry wages of their wives, many of whom do work.

For secular Israelis, whose taxes subsidise the Haredim and who are themselves obliged to serve in the military, the exemptions have long bred resentment and this has grown in the six months since the start of the war in Gaza.

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Many Israelis regard the war against Hamas as an existential battle for the future of the country, and some 300,000 reservists joined up to fight. Opinion polls indicate very broad public support for removing the exemptions on the Haredi draft.

WHAT IS AT STAKE FOR NETANYAHU?
For Netanyahu the stakes are high. While public opinion appears to favour removing the exemptions, his government includes two Haredi parties whose departure could trigger new elections, which opinion polls indicate he would lose.

On Thursday, the two parties, United Torah Judaism and Shas, denounced the latest Supreme Court ruling and vowed to fight it, although they have so far not explicitly threatened to quit the government.

From the other side, allies of Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, including the centrist Benny Gantz, a former army general who is in pole position to become prime minister if elections were held, want more Israelis to serve to share the burden more widely.

Gallant said recently that any new conscription law would need the support of all parties, suggesting he would oppose any new legislation that maintained the exemptions.

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