Foreign News
Gaza aid reaches shore in first sea delivery

The first ship towing a barge of humanitarian aid to Gaza has unloaded supplies onto the shore.
The Spanish ship Open Arms left Cyprus on Tuesday with 200 tonnes of food desperately needed for Gaza, which the UN says is on the brink of famine.
Videos posted online show a crane moving crates from the barge to lorries waiting on a purpose-built jetty.
It marks the start of a trial to see if sea deliveries are effective, after air and land deliveries proved difficult.
World Central Kitchen (WCK), which supplied the food, carried out the mission in co-operation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to deliver the barge’s cargo of rice, flour, legumes, canned vegetables and canned proteins
Gaza has no functioning port, so a jetty stemming from the shoreline was built by WCK’s team. How the food will be distributed in Gaza remains unclear.
WCK’s founder, celebrity chef José Andrés wroteon X (formerly Twitter) that all the food aid from the barge had been loaded into 12 lorries. “We did it!” he wrote, adding that this was a test to see if they could bring even more aid in the next shipment – up to “thousands of tons a week”.
In a statement, Israel said the Open Arms vessel and its cargo were inspected in Cyprus, and that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops had been deployed to secure the shoreline.
The Open Arms charity, which operates the ship, shared the crane video late on Friday, as teams worked through the night to get the aid onto dry land. This delivery has been highly anticipated since the ship set off from a port in Larnaca on Tuesday.
If this sea mission is deemed a success, other aid ships will likely follow as part of an international effort to get more aid into Gaza. The ships would use a newly opened sea route to travel directly to the region.
Separately, the US is planning to build its own floating dock off the coast to boost sea deliveries. The White House says it could see two million meals a day enter Gaza, but while a military ship is en route with equipment on board to build the dock, questions remain about the logistics of the plan.
Military operations and the breakdown of social order have severely hampered aid distribution, while Gaza’s own food production has been severely affected, with farms, bakeries and factories destroyed or inaccessible.
The quickest, most effective way to get aid into the territory is by road, but aid agencies say Israeli restrictions mean a fraction of what is needed is getting in.
The World Food Programme had to temporarily pause its land deliveries after convoys came under gunfire and looting. And an air drop turned deadly last week when five people were reportedly killed when a parachute failed and they were hit by the aid package.
The UN has warned that famine is “almost inevitable” in Gaza without urgent action, and the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has accused Israel of creating a man made disaster and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israel has vehemently denied it is to blame for Gaza’s food shortages as it is allowing aid through two crossings in the south. Instead, it has blamed aid agencies of logistical failures.
Negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza are ongoing on Friday, with Israel dismissing the Hamas’ latest ceasefire proposal.
Hamas said it gave mediators a “comprehensive vision” of a truce, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called this “unrealistic”.
The war began when Hamas gunmen attacked southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages. More than 31,400 people have been killed in Gaza since then, the Hamas-run health ministry says.
(BBC)
Foreign News
India ‘engaging with US’ after shackled deportees spark anger

India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has told parliament the government is working with the US to ensure Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.
His statement came a day after a US military flight brought back 104 Indians accused of entering the US illegally.
One of the deportees told the BBC they had been handcuffed throughout the 40-hour flight, sparking criticism.
But Jaishankar said he had been told by the US that women and children were not restrained. Deportation flights to India had been taking place for several years and US procedures allowed for the use of restraints, he added.
Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.
He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.
“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.
However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.
“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.
The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.
President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.
Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.
In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.
Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.
Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.
[BBC]
Foreign News
More than 100 women raped and burned alive in DR Congo jailbreak, UN says

More than 100 female prisoners were raped and then burned alive during a jailbreak in the Congolese city of Goma, according to the UN.
Hundreds of prisoners broke out of Munzenze prison last Monday, after fighters from the M23 rebel group began to take over the city.
Between 165 and 167 women were assaulted by male inmates during the jailbreak, an internal UN document seen by the BBC says.
The report states that most of the women were killed after the inmates set fire to the prison.
The BBC has not been able to verify the reports.
Goma, a major city of more than a million people, was captured after the Rwanda-backed M23 executed a rapid advance through eastern DR Congo.
The city was plunged into chaos, with bodies lying in the streets and missiles reportedly flying over residential homes.
Footage from last week’s jailbreak showed people fleeing from the building as smoke rose in the background. Heavy gunfire could also be heard.
[BBC]
Foreign News
Philippines feud escalates as lawmakers vote to impeach vice-president

The Philippines’ parliament has voted to impeach Vice-President Sara Duterte following complaints about alleged corruption.
Duterte has been accused of misusing millions of dollars in public funds and threatening to have President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr assassinated.
She has denied the charges and alleged she is the victim of a political vendetta.
The shock move is widely seen as an escalation of the bitter feud between Duterte and Marcos which has kept the nation on edge for months. Both are scions of Philippine political dynasties: she is the daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, while he is the son of the late strongman leader Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
A total of 215 out of 306 members of the House of Representatives voted for impeachment, well above the one-third threshold needed for the bill to pass. The bill will now be heard by the 24-member Senate, which will convene as an impeachment court.
If found guilty, Duterte faces removal from her post and would be the first vice-president in Philippine history to be impeached. She is expected to stay in office until the Senate delivers its judgement. A trial date has not been set yet.
Duterte is widely perceived as a potential successor to Marcos, who is ineligible to run again in 2028 as the constitution limits presidents to a single six-year term.
An impeachment would effectively bar her from the presidency, as she would be permanently banned from holding public office.
The move comes ahead of the mid-term elections in May, which will be seen as a referendum for Marcos halfway into his term as well a barometer of public support for Duterte.
Duterte has not commented on the impeachment vote. But her elder brother who represents their hometown of Davao in parliament, Paolo Duterte, said the administration was “treading on dangerous ground” with what he described as a “clear act of political persecution”.
Marcos has also not commented on Duterte’s impeachment. In November, he had said it would be a “waste of time” for lawmakers to impeach her when it has more important work to do.
Since the end of Ferdinand Marcos Sr’s dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1986, only one sitting president has been impeached – Joseph Estrada in 2000, for alleged corruption.
But his trial ended without a judgement after a popular revolt forced him from power in January 2001.
Only one impeachment trial made it to a verdict, that of former Supreme Court chief justice Renato Corona, who was convicted of corruption in 2012.
Both the Estrada and Corona impeachment trials were highly politicised and divisive affairs and dragged on for months.
What’s behind the Marcos and Duterte feud?
Duterte and Marcos had presented a picture of unity when they ran for the 2022 elections, calling themselves the “UniTeam”.
But cracks began to appear even before they assumed office, when Duterte asked to handle the defence portfolio in Marcos’ cabinet but instead was made education minister.
Their alliance unravelled further soon after they took power, as they pursued their separate political agendas while differing on crucial fronts such as diplomacy.
Their differences on the Philippines’ relationship to the US and China became more pronounced, as encounters between Philippine and Chinese ships in disputed waters became more frequent.
Marcos has pivoted the Philippines back to the US, reversing the pro-China stance of Duterte’s father.
He has also promised a less violent approach against illegal drug rings, dialling back the elder Duterte’s “war on drugs” that left over 6,000 suspects killed, according to a government count.
The lower house of parliament, where Marcos’s allies hold power, then started scrutinising Duterte’s budget requests, particularly her confidential funds which are not covered by state audits.
In July last year, she resigned from the cabinet.
The feud took a dramatic turn a few months later when, in a late-night livestreamed press conference, Duterte said she “talked to a person” to “go kill” Marcos if she were assassinated.
She later said that she was not plotting to assassinate the President and Marcos had dismissed the threat as a “storm in a teacup”.

[BBC]
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