Foreign News
Pacific Islands leaders to meet as region faces ‘polycrisis’ of threats
The last time UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres held a summit with the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum, he made international news as he stood thigh-deep, dressed in a suit and tie, in the sea off the coast of Tuvalu.
“Our Sinking Planet”, read the headline on the cover of TIME magazine, as Guterres looked mournfully into the camera, warning of the existential threat facing the Pacific countries due to climate change.
Five years on, as the UN chief returns to the region for the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting, the annual gathering of the region’s main political and economic grouping, there’s a growing sense of urgency as existential threats intensify on several fronts.
In June, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka described the Pacific region as facing a “polycrisis”, saying climate change, human security, transnational drug trafficking, and geopolitical competition were reinforcing and exacerbating one another.
Pacific leaders will be expected to take action on these long-running issues at next week’s Leaders Meeting, as well as acute issues like the ongoing crisis in French overseas territory New Caledonia, when more than 1,000 international dignitaries descend on Nuku’alofa, Tonga’s tiny capital of 23,000, from August 26-30.
In April, Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni cautioned against inaction at the upcoming meeting, announcing that its theme would be “Build Better Now”. He also called for “tangible results and outcomes”, as well as for leaders to “move beyond policy deliberation to implementation”.
Sandra Tarte, an academic at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji who specialises in regional politics, said there were “a lot of ambitious things on the agenda” at the meeting.
“There’s a greater urgency around climate change, we also have a much deeper concern with the potential for escalating tensions between the US, China and other powers. Economically, countries are still recovering from COVID. There’s international drug trafficking too,” she told Al Jazeera.
If the region is to survive, it really needs something to drive their collective agenda and identity,” she added
That something, Pacific leaders wager, is the far-reaching 2050 Strategy for a Blue Pacific Continent
Endorsed by PIF members in 2022, the document, which tackles seven themes – including justice and equality, climate change, economic development, and geopolitical and security trends – has been touted as a master plan for the region. But it has also been questioned over its broad nature.
“It’s seen as the Pacific’s priorities that they want the rest of the world to recognise and engage with the region on,” Tarte said. “But, obviously, there are dangers with strategies like this that they become a bit of everything, and in the end mean nothing.”
With Prime Minister Sovaleni’s comments setting the tone, PIF leaders will be aiming to make tangible progress on implementing the Pacific 2050 strategy when they meet in Tonga.
The group’s 18 member states, mostly low-lying islands and atolls, sometimes just a few feet above sea level, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Predicted rises in water levels are set to leave much of the region uninhabitable by the middle of this century.
Among their most ambitious mitigation efforts is the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which aims to provide financial support to communities often overlooked by international donors. The “Pacific-owned and led” financial institution is scheduled to commence operations in 2025 and will help communities become more resilient to climate change and natural disasters.
The leaders will probably endorse an earlier recommendation to host the facility in Tonga at next week’s meeting, but raising the funding for the facility remains a major hurdle.
Pacific nations aim to raise $500m for the PRF by 2026 but have so far only secured $116m – $100m of which has been pledged by Australia, with the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey committing a total of $16m.
Guterres’s presence at PIF could help boost the fundraising campaign, according to Kerryn Baker, a research fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University.
“It’s a new approach to climate finance. It’s a Pacific-led approach, but it has been hampered by the fact that it hasn’t got the external funding it needs. The presence of Guterres will be important in drawing attention to that gap between ambition and capacity at the moment,” she told Al Jazeera.
Meg Keen, a senior fellow in the Pacific Islands programme at the Lowy Institute, also described Guterres’s attendance as “significant” in terms of drawing attention to the PRF on the international stage, saying “he has leverage”.
“The Pacific island countries have consistently said climate change is their biggest security issue. They’re now saying they want the PRF up and running,” Keen told Al Jazeera. “If you’ve got the UN secretary-general backing you up, that does build pressure for countries to put their money behind climate action.”
Also high on the summit agenda is drug trafficking. For decades, the vast and porous Pacific Islands have served as a stop on transnational narcotics smuggling routes from Asia and the Americas, the world’s largest producers of methamphetamine and cocaine, to Australia and New Zealand, the world’s highest-paying markets.
But excess supply and the development over time of lower-grade, cheaper drugs have fuelled local consumption. Countries such as Fiji have been especially badly hit, but it is an issue affecting the whole region, according to Keen.
“It’s on everybody’s mind, every country we go to is worried about drug trafficking. Police forces are really struggling to manage it,” she said.
“The Pacific is a transit place because it’s easy to move the drugs through. But it’s more than that now, because youth and local people are suffering from drug addiction. There’s an overflow from this drug trade and it takes a lot of collaboration. That’s where the Pacific Policing Initiative [PPI] could come in,” Keen added.
The PPI is a proposed Australian initiative to provide training and capacity-building to the Pacific island police forces. Its flagship programme would be the creation of a large training facility in Brisbane for Pacific officers who could then be deployed to regional crime hotspots.
Canberra has characterised the deal as a Pacific island-led operation set up in response to local needs in the face of rising crime. Its unofficial goal, analysts say, is to shore up Australia’s role as a key security partner at a time when Beijing is also developing bilateral law enforcement partnerships, with Chinese police training teams working in countries including the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.
Canberra will be hoping that Pacific leaders will give their political endorsement of the PPI, which carries a hefty price tag of more than 400 million Australian dollars (about $270m), at the Leader’s Meeting. But with concerns that it is covering the same ground as existing agreements, Tarte believes the PPI is “very much for show”.
“There’ll be some buy-in [at the Leaders Meeting], but I also know there’s a lot of tension about it as well,” Tarte said. “The criticism has been that it’s been developed without much consultation with the region, it may not be what the region needs, and it’s duplicating efforts already under way.”
Tarte said the PPI is “another example” of one of the Pacific’s major international partners “pushing something which is going to hugely suck up resources and may not have much benefit on the ground”.
“These projects are often driven by the wrong reasons. It’s about access, it’s about influence and it’s about control,” she said.
The Pacific region, long a place where major foreign powers have vied for influence, has only grown in strategic importance in recent years. Beijing has increased its engagement with Pacific island countries over the past decade, much to the chagrin of traditional security allies the US and Australia, who fear a Chinese military presence in the region.
Lamenting the Pacific’s growing role as a geostrategic arena, warning that the “chances of miscalculation are high” as a multitude of competing interests collide, Fiji’s Prime Minister Rabuka has announced his Oceans of Peace concept.
“An Ocean of Peace must reflect the Pacific way … Humility, quiet leadership, reconciliation and communication,” he said of his initiative. “Whoever enters the Pacific region will be compelled to tone down and tune in to the ways of the Pacific.”
Currently more aspirational idea than a solid plan, Rabuka has said he will bring his proposal for discussion at the summit with the hope it will eventually be adopted by Pacific countries. Baker of the Australian National University said the idea “seems to be getting quite significant traction”, but leaders will want “more clarity around what it means in practice”.
“If there’s any progress on developing this idea, it’ll have to come with specifics about what an Ocean of Peace might mean for the region, what issues are encompassed within that,” she said.
Fiji’s Oceans of Peace concept also speaks to a longstanding, but growing, desire among Pacific nations to escape a lens often imposed on the region, as merely a battleground for the great powers and assert some agency.
Keen said that Pacific leaders have raised concerns that an over-emphasis on geopolitics, particularly from outside parties, is “trumping development priorities”.
“In these forums, it has to be about Pacific Island development first, not about geopolitics,” she said. “They don’t want their region to be just a battlezone.”
One area in which the malign influence of external powers and the struggle for Pacific voices to be heard is still being acutely felt is the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, which has been a full member of the PIF since 2016.
Tensions there erupted in May over Paris’s plan to give the vote to more recent arrivals in a move Indigenous people fear will dilute their influence. The months of violence have resulted in deaths and billions of Euros in damage.
Keen says it is a regional security issue high on the agenda at next week’s meeting, but there are limits to what can actually be done. “They can express their concerns, but they can’t force action”, she says, as France claims it as a sovereign issue.
Pacific leaders won’t be silenced on it, they can really push that they have these concerns about colonisation and the desire for decolonisation sovereignty,” she said. “They want to know that the Pacific people will have a voice.”
(Aljazeera)
A rare pink diamond is going on display in France for the first time since it was stolen almost 100 years ago to the day – the last time it was shown to the public.
The nine-carat, pear-shaped gemstone known as the “Grand Condé” was pilfered in an overnight raid on the Château de Chantilly in October 1926 and concealed in a hollowed-out apple.
The diamond – one of few royal jewels to survive the French Revolution – was recovered a few weeks later when a hungry maid at the hotel in which the thieves were staying took a bite of the apple.
It will once again be on display in the Condé Museum at the Château de Chantilly until 3 January.
The museum’s director Mathieu Deldicque said that while the apple story may sounds far-fetched, it was widely covered by newspapers at the time.
Deldicque has faced questions about whether the exhibition may be tempting fate, especially given the string of heists on European cultural institutions in the past 12 months, including the daring daylight robbery of jewellery from the Louvre museum in Paris.
While he declined to reveal to CNN how much the diamond was insured for, he noted that extensive academic study into the properties of the diamond had taken place to make it uniquely identifiable.
The results of this analysis, as well as previously unseen archive material about the gem’s history and theft, form part of the exhibition, according to the museum.
Naturally occurring pink diamonds are exceptionally rare and often sell for tens of millions of dollars. The highest price ever fetched for one at auction was $71.2m (£53.6m) in 2017, according to Sotheby’s.
The exact origins of the Grand Condé remain a mystery.
It was first mentioned in 1740 in an inventory of Louis Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, drawn up following his death, the Château de Chantilly said.
It then became part of the collection of Queen Marie-Amélie of Bourbon-Sicily, the wife of French King Louis Philippe I, and then her son, Prince Henri of Orléans, the Duke of Aumale.
He bequeathed it to the Institut de France, which now owns the Château de Chantilly, 50km (31 miles) north of Paris, along with thousands of artworks and manuscripts which became the Musée Condé collection.
(BBC)
A nursery owner and five members of her staff have been jailed after they were found to have poisoned more than 200 children with lead-tainted food.
Li Huifang, who operated the Heshi Peixin Kindergarten in Tianshui, in the Gansu province, was sentenced to life in prison for producing and selling toxic and harmful food, according to Chinese state media.
In July 2025, 247 pupils and staff at the nursery were found to have abnormally high blood lead levels after children began falling ill.
A report into the incident found that chefs at Heshi Peixin had used inedible paint to “enhance the look” of its meals to attract more students – despite the paint being being clearly marked as such.
In addition to the sentence, the Lanzhou Intermediate People’s Court also ordered the confiscation of 500,000 yuan (£56,200; $74,700) of Li’s personal assets, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Nursery executive principal Zhi Jinglin was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined 300,000 yuan.
Four other members of staff who worked in the nursery’s kitchen received sentences of between six to eight years, according to state media.
The court found the four had been instructed by Li and Zhi to add toxic and harmful ingredients to food served to children and staff.
Food samples were later found to contain lead 2,000 times in excess of China’s national safety limit.
The investigation into the poisoning began after 235 children from Heshi Peixin nursery had to be treated for lead poisoning after eating steamed red date cakes and sausage corn buns.
Investigators found that the red date cake and the corn sausage rolls had lead levels of 1052mg/kg and 1340mg/kg respectively, both of which far exceed the national food safety standard limit of 0.5mg/kg.
Lead poisoning is “particularly harmful to young children” and can “severely damage the brain and central nervous system”, according to the World Health Organization.
Officials later found that dozens of provincial officials and hospital staff attempted to cover up the incident by tampering with blood tests and accepting bribes from a nursery investor.
China has since published a set of national guidelines for the provision of meals on campuses. Among the measures is the requirement for every new batch of food to be tested, and for flour, rice and cooking oil to be purchased from centralised procurement points only.
(BBC)
Five people have been killed and 16 injured in a Houthi missile attack targeting the presidential palace in the port city of Aden in southern Yemen, which is the seat of the internationally-recognised government, officials say.
Information Minister Moammar al-Eryani told the BBC that the prime minister and other ministers were unhurt when five ballistic missiles hit al-Maashiq Palace.
The Houthis’ military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said they struck “the Saudi enemy’s military operations headquarters in Aden”.
A coalition led by Saudi Arabia backs the government and is providing air support for an offensive by pro-government forces against the Iran-backed Houthis.
Yemeni health minister Qasim Buhaibeh said the casualties included “those working to guard the site and civilian employees”.
The country’s Prime Minister Shaya Zindani condemned the Houthis’ attack on Aden, calling it “cowardly” and a “continuation of their criminal behaviour”.
He said the government continued to carry out its duties and vowed that it would not weaken the resolve of its forces to continue operations against the Houthis on Yemen’s south-western Red Sea coast and other front lines.
Earlier, the Houthis denied that they had attacked Saudi Arabia on Thursday, after the coalition said its forces had intercepted a cruise missile in the Medina region, home to one of Islam’s holiest shrines.
The Houthis have been launching missiles and drones at airports, oil and gas facilities, and military bases in Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the strikes on the territory that they control in western Yemen, including the capital Sanaa.
On Saturday, a Houthi missile strike killed 13 people at Riyadh’s international airport, which was the deadliest attack in Saudi Arabia in more than a decade.
Saudi Arabia’s deputy foreign minister accused Iran of encouraging the Houthis to escalate their conflict with the kingdom.
“Iran continues to arm, train and support the Houthi militia in violation of UN Security Council resolutions,” Rayed Krimly told reporters, according to AFP news agency.
“We think that the escalation by the Houthis at this latest stage of the conflict is encouraged by Iran,” he added.
There was no immediate response from Iran’s government. However, it has previously denied supplying weapons to the Houthis and said it only supports them politically.
Iran’s foreign minister has also said it is ready to provide “any assistance necessary to facilitate the start of talks” between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis.
Yemen has been devastated by a civil war that began in 2014, when the Houthis ousted the internationally-recognised government from Sanaa. The conflict escalated in 2015, after the Saudi-led coalition of Arab states intervened in an attempt to restore the government’s rule.
A four-year-old informal ceasefire began to unravel in July, when the Houthis announced a “maritime embargo” against Saudi Arabia and began missile and drone attacks on Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers in the Red Sea.
The Houthis said they were retaliating for what they call a Saudi blockade of their territory, as well as an air strike on Sanaa airport that they blamed on the kingdom.
The conflict escalated in September after the Houthis seized part of Yemen’s south-western Red Sea coast near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint for global shipping. Their advance contributed to a rise in oil prices following six months of war between the US, Israel and Iran.
Last week, pro-government forces said they had regained control of territory overlooking Bab al-Mandab after launching a major counter-offensive with the support of Saudi air strikes.
At least 1,282 people have been killed and 5,890 injured in the fighting in Yemen since 6 August, according to the government’s health ministry.
The UN says another 201,000 people have been displaced and that there has been an alarming surge in suspected cholera cases.
(BBC)
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