First Algerian presidential hopeful submits candidacy
Algerian president said he would seek a second term
Updated 18 July 2024
AFP
ALGIERS: The leader of Algeria’s main Islamist party on Thursday kicked off the official candidate submissions for the upcoming presidential election in which the incumbent President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, 78, is the frontrunner.
Abdelaali Hassani, head of the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP) party, was first to submit his candidacy on Thursday morning, an AFP correspondent saw, hours before Tebboune was expected to do the same.
Tebboune, who was elected in 2019 following months of pro-democracy protests and the ousting of longtime president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, said on July 11 he would seek a second term.
In March, he announced that the election would be held on September 7, three months ahead of schedule, but gave no reason for the decision.
Algeria, home to some 45 million people, is Africa’s largest country.
The hydrocarbon-rich nation is the continent’s main natural gas supplier, with neighboring Tunisia, Spain, and Italy heavily reliant on Algerian gas.
The final list of hopefuls for the election will be published on July 27.
To qualify to appear on the ballot, candidates are required to present a list of at least 50,000 individual signatures from registered voters or from 600 members from at least 29 of Algeria’s various provincial assemblies.
Ahmed Sadok, an MSP representative, told AFP that his party had already gathered “more than 90,000 petition signatures” in support of Hassani as well as the backing of “2,200 other elected representatives.”
With the Algerian Workers Party’s leader Louisa Hanoune dropping out of the race last week, only two female candidates — businesswoman Saida Nezgha and lawyer Zoubida Assoul — remain in contention.
But Tebboune is still the favorite, with endorsements from several political parties.
“Given the desire of many parties, political and non-political organizations and the youth, I announce my intention to run for a second term,” he said when announcing his candidacy.
Exploding pagers in attack on Hezbollah were made by a Hungarian company, another firm says
Updated 12 sec ago
“According to the cooperation agreement, we authorize BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in designated regions,” Gold Apollo said BAC Consulting Kft., a limited liability company, was registered in May 2022, according to company records
TAIPEI: A company based in Hungary was responsible for manufacturing the pagers that exploded in an apparent Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah, another firm said Wednesday. The attack marked a new escalation in the conflict between the two foes that has often threatened to escalate into all-out war. Pagers used by the militant group Hezbollah exploded nearly simultaneously a day earlier in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and wounding around 2,800. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel. An American official said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the attack, in which small amounts of explosive hidden in the pagers were detonated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly. The sophisticated apparently remote attack renewed fears that the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza could spill into a wider regional conflict. Hamas’ ally Hezbollah and Israeli forces have exchanged fire nearly daily since Oct. 8, the day after a deadly Hamas-led assault in southern Israel triggered the war. Since then, hundreds have been killed in the strikes in Lebanon and dozens in Israel, while tens of thousands on each side of the border have been displaced. Despite periodic cycles of escalation, Hezbollah and Israel have carefully avoided an all-out war, but Israeli leaders have issued a series of warnings in recent weeks that they might increase operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel began moving more troops to its border with Lebanon on Wednesday as a precautionary measure, according to an official with knowledge of the movements who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. The AR-924 pagers used Tuesday’s attack were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT, based in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, according to a statement released by Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese firm that authorized the use of its brand on the pagers. BAC appeared to be a shell company. “According to the cooperation agreement, we authorize BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in designated regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are solely the responsibility of BAC,” Gold Apollo said in a statement. The company’s chair, Hsu Ching-kuang, told journalists Wednesday that the firm has had a licensing agreement with BAC for the past three years. BAC Consulting Kft., a limited liability company, was registered in May 2022, according to company records. It has 7,840 euros in standing capital, the records showed, and had revenue of $725,768 in 2022 and $593,972 in 2023. At the headquarters in a building in a residential neighborhood of Budapest, Associated Press journalists saw the names of multiple companies, including BAC Consulting, posted on pieces of paper on a window. A woman who emerged from the building and declined to give her name said the site provides headquarter addresses to various companies. BAC is registered to Cristiana Rosaria Bársony-Arcidiacono, whose describes herself on her LinkedIn page as a strategic adviser and business developer. Among other positions, Bársony-Arcidiacono says on the page that she has served on the board of directors of the Earth Child Institute, a sustainability group. The group does not list Bársony-Arcidiacono as among its board members on its website. The AP has attempted to reach Bársony-Arcidiacono via the LinkedIn page and has been unable to establish a connection between her or BAC and the exploding pagers. The attack in Lebanon started Tuesday afternoon, when pagers in their owners’ hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders. It appeared that most of those hit were members or linked to members of Hezbollah — whether fighters or civilians — but it was not immediately clear if people with no ties to Hezbollah were also hit. The Health Ministry said health care workers and two children were among those killed. In the village of Nadi Sheet in the Bekaa Valley, dozens gathered to mourn the death of one of the children, 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah. The Health Ministry had previously given her age as 8. Her mother, wearing black and donning a yellow Hezbollah scarf, wept alongside other women and children as they gathered around the little girl’s coffin before her burial. Hezbollah said in a statement Wednesday morning that it would continue its normal strikes against Israel as part of what it describes as a support front for its ally, Hamas, and Palestinians in Gaza. “This path is continuous and separate from the difficult reckoning that the criminal enemy must await for its massacre on Tuesday,” it said. “This is another reckoning that will come, God willing.” At hospitals in Beirut on Wednesday, the chaos of the night before had largely subsided, but relatives of the wounded continued to wait. Lebanon Health Minister Firas Abiad told journalists during a tour on hospitals Wednesday morning that many of the wounded had severe injuries to the eyes, and others had limbs amputated. Journalists were not allowed to enter hospital rooms or film patients. Abiad said that the wounded had been sent to various area hospitals to avoid any single facility being overloaded and added that Turkiye, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt offered to help treat the patients. Earlier Wednesday, an Iraqi military plane landed in Beirut carrying 15 tons of medicine and medical equipment, he said. Experts believe explosive material was put into the pagers prior to their delivery. The AR-924 pager, advertised as being “rugged,” contains a rechargeable lithium battery, according to specifications advertised on Gold Apollo’s website before they were removed after the attack. It claimed to have up to 85 days of battery life. That would be crucial in Lebanon, where electricity outages have been common after years of economic collapse. Pagers also run on a different wireless network than mobile phones, making them more resilient in emergencies — one of the reasons why many hospitals worldwide still rely on them. For Hezbollah, the pagers also provided a means to sidestep what’s believed to be intensive Israeli electronic surveillance on mobile phone networks in Lebanon. “The phone that we have in our hands — I do not have a phone in my hand — is a listening device,” warned Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in a February speech. Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said from the beginning of 2022 until August 2024, Gold Apollo has exported 260,000 sets of pagers, including more than 40,000 sets between January and August of this year. The ministry said that it had no records of direct exports of Gold Apollo pagers to Lebanon.
Iran’s president names first Sunni governor in 45 years
Arash Zerehtan was appointed head of the western state
He is the first Sunni to be made a regional governor in the predominantly Shiite country
Updated 4 min 55 sec ago
AFP
TEHRAN: Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, on Wednesday nominated a member of the Sunni Muslim minority to be governor of Kurdistan province, official media reported.
Arash Zerehtan was appointed head of the western state, IRNA news agency said, citing government spokesman Fatemeh MoHajjerani.
He is the first Sunni to be made a regional governor in the predominantly Shiite country since the earliest days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Zerehtan, 48, served as a member of parliament for the city of Paveh between 2020 and this year.
Sunnis account for about 10 percent of Iran’s population, where the vast majority are Shiites and Shiite Islam is the official state religion.
They have very rarely held key positions of power since the revolution.
Pezeshkian, 69, took office in July after an early election following the death of ultraconservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash.
During his election campaign, Pezeshkian criticized the lack of representation for ethnic and religious minorities, in particular Sunni Kurds, in important positions.
In August, he made another member of the Sunni minority, Abdolkarim Hosseinzadeh, one of his vice presidents.
Two children among 12 dead in Lebanon pager blasts: minister
Israel has yet to comment on the unprecedented attacks
The dead included a girl and a boy as well as four health workers from private hospitals in Beirut’s southern suburbs
Updated 18 September 2024
AFP
BEIRUT: Exploding pagers claimed the lives of 12 people in Lebanon, including two children, the country’s health minister said Wednesday, updating the toll a day after the blasts blamed on Israel.
Hundreds of the wireless devices exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after Israel said it was broadening the aims of the Gaza war to include its fight against Hamas ally Hezbollah.
Israel has yet to comment on the unprecedented attacks.
On Wednesday, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said 12 people were killed and between 2,750 and 2,800 others were wounded, revising the tolls up from nine dead.
“After checking with all the hospitals,” the toll was revised to “12 dead including two children,” Abiad told a news conference.
The dead included a girl and a boy as well as four health workers from private hospitals in Beirut’s southern suburbs, he said.
The pagers went off in the Iran-backed Hezbollah group’s main strongholds of southern Beirut and Lebanon’s east and south.
Some cases in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley were transferred to Syria, while other cases would be evacuated to Iran, he added.
About 750 wounded people were in the south, about 150 were in the Bekaa Valley and some 1,850 were in the Beirut and its southern suburbs, he said.
Iran accuses Israel of ‘mass murder’ after pager explosions
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was among the wounded
Iranian Red Crescent dispatches “rescue teams and eye surgeons” to Lebanon to treat the wounded
Updated 18 September 2024
AFP
TEHRAN: Iran accused Israel on Wednesday of “mass murder” after paging devices belonging to the Tehran-aligned Hezbollah group in Lebanon exploded, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.
Foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said in a statement he “condemned the terrorist act of the Zionist regime... as an example of mass murder.”
Among those wounded in the pager blasts on Tuesday was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani, with Iranian media reporting he suffered injuries “to the hand and the face.”
State television said that Amani was only lightly injured.
The Iranian Red Crescent said on Wednesday it had dispatched “rescue teams and eye surgeons” to Lebanon to treat the wounded.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the wave of explosions that killed nine people, including the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah member, and wounded around 2,800 others.
The blasts came just hours after Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attacks to include its fight against the group’s ally Hezbollah along the country’s border with Lebanon.
In his statement, Kanani expressed solidarity with the families of those killed and wounded in the explosions including the Iranian ambassador.
“Combating the terrorist acts of the (Israeli) regime and the threats arising from them is an obvious necessity,” said Kanani.
“It is necessary for the international community to act quickly in order to counter the impunity of the Zionist criminal authorities.”
Jordan’s King Abdullah swears in new government led by Jaafar Hassan
The reformist government was tasked with accelerating IMF-backed reforms and pushing through political and economic modernisation plans
Under the new government, Ayman Safadi will serve as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs and expatriates
Updated 18 September 2024
Arab News
AMMAN: Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Wednesday swore in a new government led by Jaafar Hassan as prime minister and minister of defense, state news agency PETRA reported.
The reformist government was tasked with accelerating IMF-backed reforms and pushing through political and economic modernisation plans.
Under the new government, Ayman Safadi will serve as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs and expatriates.
Earlier this week, Bisher Khasawneh’s government submitted the resignation of his government to King Abdullah II after parliamentary elections saw some gains for the Islamist opposition.
Hassan, a widely respected technocrat, replaced veteran diplomat and former palace advisor Al-Khasawneh, who is considered the longest-serving prime minister during King Abdullah II's reign.
The new prime minister was Jordan’s former planning minster. He recieved his education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also the head of King Abdullah's office.
