Russian forces continue to attack Ukraine’s energy grid, leaving families without electricity or heat as temperatures plummet to -20° Celsius. Since 2022, the government has established “invincibility points” – located in tents or public buildings such as schools and libraries – where people […]
Originally published at Almouwatin.com
سيتم بناء أكبر مصنع لإنتاج الصوف في أوروبا في رومانيا من قبل الذين أكثر من 182 مليون ليو (36.8 مليون شخص سنويًا). المساعدات العامة، معلومات من وزارة الزراعة. سيتم استخدام المنتجات للمصنع لإنتاج الصوف والأسلاك ومنتجات العزل الحراري من الصوف. بالإضافة إلى ذلك، يتم علاج هذه […]
Originally published at Almouwatin.com
Briefing reporters in New York, Farhan Haq said the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, was able to access the camp on Friday together with Syrian Government officials and establish contact with some residents. Essential supplies have also resumed.
Al Hol is one of the region’s largest displacement sites, housing tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, many with alleged family links to ISIL terrorist fighters.
UN agencies have long warned of dire humanitarian conditions there, including overcrowding, poor access to healthcare, water and sanitation, and persistent protection and security risks, while repeatedly urging durable solutions, including safe returns, reintegration and repatriation in line with international law.
“Trucks carrying bread entered the camp today, facilitated by UNHCR, following a three-day interruption caused by the volatile security situation inside the camp,” Mr. Haq said, adding that water trucks reached the camp on Thursday, helping to partially restore access to basic services for the camp population.
Al Hol camp, located in Syria’s northeast, hosts tens of thousands of people, including internally displaced Syrians and family members of suspected former fighters.
UN agencies have long warned that insecurity, overcrowding and limited services leave residents – many of them women and children – in extremely vulnerable conditions.
UN agencies and aid partners reaffirmed their commitment to supporting the Syrian authorities in delivering humanitarian assistance, while underscoring the critical need to ensure security inside the camp.
They also highlighted the importance of facilitating the movement of personnel and supplies between Al-Hasakeh and Qamishli.
Beyond Al Hol, the situation in Kobani, in Aleppo Governorate, remains concerning.
According to the UN relief coordination office, OCHA, all roads connecting to the city are currently closed, while disruptions to electricity, water and internet services are hampering access to basic needs.
Partners have begun reporting shortages of food, essential items and medicines, although health facilities remain operational, Mr. Haq said.
Despite progress in key areas, the European Union (EU) remains likely off track for most 2030 environmental goals, according to the European Environment Agency’s (EEA) new 8th EAP assessment. Rising climate risks, slow transitions in production and consumption system and weakening enabling conditions highlight the urgent need for stronger, better financed and faster policy implementation. […]
“It’s absolutely critical to unlock the congestion…at crossing points and to reopen critical lifelines like the Jordan corridor,” said Juliette Touma, Director of Communications at UNOPS, the United Nations Office for Project Services.
Briefing journalists, Ms. Touma highlighted that although the 3 October ceasefire agreement had brought some respite to families, “people continue to be killed, day in, day out”.
She said that Gaza’s highly vulnerable people simply “cannot wait” for a reconstruction plan to take shape – one of the stated aims of the US-led Board of Peace. “They need supplies at the same time, it’s not just the services,” she stressed.
Echoing those concerns, the UN agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, underscored its key and longstanding role in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including Gaza. This mission was entrusted to UNRWA by UN Member States at the global body’s General Assembly in December 1949.
“We are the largest United Nations agency operating in the Gaza Strip,” said Jonathan Fowler, UNRWA Senior Communications Manager. “We must be able to continue doing our work; that’s crystal clear.”
While it has yet to be made clear exactly how the UN will support Board of Peace launched by President Trump at Davos on Thursday, last November’s Security Council resolution 2803 that welcomed its creation highlighted the importance of working with “cooperating organizations” including the United Nations.
“We are very strongly committed to do whatever we can to ensure the full implementation of Security Council Resolution 2803,” said Alessandra Vellucci, Director, UN Information Service, Geneva. “There is a role for the UN there about the UN leading on humanitarian aid delivery, which we have been doing for such a long time and we will continue to do the best of our capacities.”
Since Sunday, humanitarian partners providing emergency shelter assistance have reached over 13,000 households in Gaza, distributing hundreds of tents and thousands of tarpaulins, aid coordination office, OCHA, said in its latest update.
The UN office noted that “capacity and funding constraints” have limited support to only around 40 per cent of the existing 970 displacement sites across the Strip.
Healthcare needs remain enormous across Gaza, too, where providers such as UNRWA try to help around 15,000 patients a day, despite numerous challenges.
“We had 22 clinics operating across the Gaza Strip before the start of the war, we’re now down to half a dozen,” said Mr. Fowler. “And we have mobile health teams that operate, but in incredibly complicated circumstances.”
A number of UNRWA facilities are located behind the so-called Yellow Line – a series of concrete blocks installed by the Israeli authorities which separates Gazans from the Israel Defense Forces – envisaged in the three-step Gaza peace plan.
“That makes it incredibly difficult to do our work and so many of our locations have been heavily damaged or indeed completely destroyed,” Mr. Fowler continued. “On top of that, we remain banned by the Israeli authorities from bringing in any of our own supplies.”
Turning to the destruction of UNRWA’s headquarters in East Jerusalem on Tuesday, Mr. Fowler described how visiting diplomats had been caught up in the dramatic events when Israeli forces “stormed and demolished” buildings in the compound and fired tear gas. “This is a United Nations compound, so this is an attack on the United Nations,” he told journalists.
Highlighting concerns that the UNRWA-supported Kalandia Training Centre could be shut down “within days”, Mr. Fowler explained that it principally helped lower-income families to earn the skills they needed to earn a living: “If the centre were to be forcibly closed – and we do fear that this could happen within days – there is no educational alternative for these students.”
The UN agency remains deeply worried about developments in the occupied West Bank, one year since the Israeli forces launched operation Iron Wall.
“This led to the mass displacement of people from three camps in the north of the West Bank,” Mr. Fletcher explained, in reference to Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee settlements.
“The camps are progressively being demolished by the Israeli military. So therefore, changing the facts on the ground, changing the topography and the demography of these large communities,” Mr. Fowler insisted.
In a statement released this week, UNESCO said governments are increasingly cutting off internet access during protests, elections and in times of crisis, despite the central role online connectivity plays in democratic participation and the exercise of fundamental rights. The agency noted that 2024 was […]
Originally published at Almouwatin.com
Last year, a UCLA-led team accomplished something scientists have been trying to do for 50 years. They made Source link
Last year, a UCLA-led team accomplished something scientists have been trying to do for 50 years. They made
بمناسبة القتل الجماعي بمناسبة يد زميل قاصر في مدرسة ابتدائية في بلغراد التي وقعت هذا الصباح، أدلى بطريرك صربيا بورفيري بالبيان التالي: بألم لا يطاق أستمع إلى أخبار كارثة لم يحدث مثلها في شعبنا وفي وطننا، وحدثت اليوم في مدرسة ابتدائية في بلغراد. أصلي إلى المسيح المخلص من أجل الأطفال المصابين والعاملين في المدرسة. […]
Originally published at Almouwatin.com
Extraordinary Brussels summit underscores Europe’s red lines on sovereignty and economic coercion, while raising fresh questions about the future tone of transatlantic ties.
EU leaders used an extraordinary summit in Brussels to send a blunt message to US President Donald Trump: Europe expects “cordial and respectful” dealings, especially after a crisis in which Trump threatened punitive tariffs linked to Greenland. The immediate confrontation eased after a NATO-brokered Arctic security framework was announced, but European officials signalled they are ready to defend sovereignty and markets—potentially with the EU’s powerful Anti-Coercion Instrument.
Speaking after the emergency meeting, European Council President António Costa framed the issue as one of principle and method. “We believe that relationships between partners and allies should be managed in a cordial and respectful way,” he said, warning the EU would defend its interests “against any form of coercion,” according to a report by Euronews.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen struck a similar note, presenting unity as the bloc’s main leverage. She said the EU had been “successful” in pushing back against territorial claims by being “firm, non-escalatory and most importantly very united,” Euronews reported. At the same time, she urged Europeans to strengthen economic resilience, diversify supply chains and reduce vulnerabilities in key sectors.
The episode—described by European diplomats as a near-brink moment—was defused when Trump backtracked and opted for a longer-term arrangement on Arctic security brokered by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet details of that framework have not been released, feeding suspicion in several capitals that the political clash could reappear in another form.
Leaders privately worried that a rapid escalation—tariffs met with countermeasures—could cause wider economic damage and complicate coordination on security priorities, including continued efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The relief in Brussels, however, came with a message: deterrence matters, and so do predictable rules between allies.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen drew the clearest line. Denmark is prepared to discuss matters related to Greenland with Washington, she said, but sovereignty is “off the table”—a “red line”—and “our democratic rules cannot be discussed,” according to Euronews.
Greenland is an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark with self-government established under the Self-Government Act framework. Any discussion about the island’s future also inevitably raises questions of democratic legitimacy and self-determination—especially for Greenlanders themselves, whose political agency can be sidelined when great-power competition dominates the headlines.
For EU officials, that is not a rhetorical point. If territorial questions are even hinted at through economic pressure, it touches core European norms: sovereignty, the rule of law, and the right of peoples to decide their own future without coercion.
Before Trump’s reversal, the Commission began preparing potential responses in case tariff threats moved from rhetoric to action. Among the options discussed was using the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, which entered into force in late 2023 and is designed to deter and—if needed—counter third-country “economic coercion.”
The tool is intentionally broad. It can, in principle, target multiple areas at once—from trade in goods and services to investment flows, public procurement and intellectual property—while still operating within defined EU procedures and a “last resort” logic.
The European Times has previously explored how this mechanism is meant to work in practice and why it matters for Europe’s economic security in an earlier explainer on the Anti-Coercion Instrument. The same debate is now returning in real time: how to remain non-escalatory, but credible, when pressure tactics appear at the edge of allied diplomacy.
At its core, the Brussels summit was less about tariffs alone and more about trust. EU leaders signalled they want to preserve transatlantic cooperation, but not at the cost of normalising threats—territorial or economic—against a member state and its autonomous territory.
The crisis has also revived a longer-running discussion in Europe: strategic resilience. Von der Leyen’s call to diversify supply chains and reinforce “economic power” fits a broader EU shift toward reducing single-point dependencies, alongside debates on industrial policy, defence cooperation, and the balance between openness and protection.
As The European Times has reported in other contexts, Europe’s push to deepen its own capacity—whether in security or industrial policy—has become a recurring theme in Brussels. (See, for example, our coverage on strengthening defence cooperation in European politics.)
