Andy Murray said he had an emotional meeting with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who spent six years in an Iranian jail cell, after inviting her to watch him from the royal box at Wimbledon on Tuesday.

British-Iranian Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Murray became friends after she said in an interview last year that watching the Scot win Wimbledon on television in 2016 helped sustain her during solitary confinement.

She had been accused of spying while in the country visiting her parents and held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison until her release last year.

“She hadn’t been to Wimbledon before,” Murray said.

“After the story she told me about watching my Wimbledon final while she was in a cell, I felt like I wanted to invite her to come along and watch the tennis in totally different circumstances.

“Hopefully, a much more enjoyable experience. It was very emotional talking to her and hearing her story. It was brilliant that she was able to come along and watch.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe said in the interview that prison officials allowed her access to a TV that only had two channels.

One broadcast an Iranian soap opera while the other was a sports channel showing Wimbledon when Murray was winning his second title at the tournament.

“They had no idea what they had given me,” she said.

On Tuesday, she was able to at last see Murray in the flesh on Centre Court and the two-time champion didn’t disappoint his guest as he eased past fellow Briton Ryan Peniston.

Former world number one Murray, who won his first Wimbledon title in 2013, came through to win 6-3, 6-0, 6-1.
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NATO allies are preparing for their annual two-day summit July 11 and 12 in Vilnius, Lithuania — as Ukraine urges the alliance to fast-track its proposed membership. Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed Tuesday that he will extend his term for another year, as the West seeks to maintain unity amid Russia’s aggression. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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London’s expansion of a fiercely debated scheme that charges the most polluting vehicles in the city should be blocked, local authorities bringing a legal challenge over the plan argued on Tuesday.

The British capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) levies a $16 daily charge on drivers of non-compliant vehicles, in order to tackle pollution and improve air quality.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan last year decided to extend the scheme to cover almost all of the Greater London area, encompassing an extra five million people in leafier and less-connected outer boroughs, from the end of next month.

The decision has pitched Khan and health campaigners against those who say they cannot tolerate another economic hit at a time of soaring living costs.

Khan, who is running for a third four-year term in the 2024 London mayoral election, has said he is determined to face down his critics.

But his plan, which echoes hundreds of others in place in traffic-choked cities across Europe, came under challenge at London’s High Court on Tuesday as five local authorities argued the decision to expand ULEZ into their areas was unlawful.

London’s transport authority – Transport for London (TfL) – had launched a public consultation on the plan, which said 91% of vehicles driven in outer London would not be affected.

However, the local authorities’ lawyers argue that TfL provided no detail on how it calculated the 91% figure, which they say was fundamental to justifying the expansion.

The local authorities are also challenging Khan’s decision to not extend a 110 million pound scrappage scheme to those living just outside the expanded ULEZ. The scheme subsidises the cost of buying a replacement vehicle for those affected.

Lawyers representing Khan and TfL argued in court filings that TfL provided sufficient information for the consultation and said that extending the scrappage scheme beyond London was rejected in order to target those directly affected.
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Latest developments:  

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for the extension of an agreement allowing for the export of grain from Ukrainian ports. 





Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sweden has more work to do before Turkey can support a Swedish bid to join NATO.  "Everyone must accept that Turkey’s friendship cannot be won by supporting terrorism or by making space for terrorists," Erdogan said. 

  

Russia said Tuesday it downed five Ukrainian drones that attacked Moscow and the surrounding region.  

The Russian defense ministry said air defenses shot down four of the drones, while the fifth was electronically jammed and crashed. 

The drones temporarily disrupted operations at Vnukovo International Airport on the southwest side of Moscow, causing officials to reroute planes to other airports. 

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the drone attack was an “act of terrorism” by Ukraine. 

There was no immediate comment from Ukrainian officials. 

Ukraine typically does not claim responsibility for attacks on Russian territory. 

Counteroffensive 

Britain’s defense ministry said Tuesday that Russian forces have responded to the Ukrainian counteroffensive launched last month by adjusting tactics, including the heavy use of anti-tank mines. 

“Having slowed the Ukrainian advance, Russia has then attempted to strike Ukrainian armored vehicles with one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicles, attack helicopters and artillery,” the British defense ministry said in a daily assessment. 

Ukraine has cited some progress amid heavy fighting as it tries to reclaim land seized by Russia since Russian forces invaded in February 2022. 

NATO summit 

In his nightly video address Monday,  Zelenskyy touted Ukraine as a significant asset for NATO, stating that his country is an important safeguard in Europe’s security against Russian aggression.  

“It is obvious that Europe can be protected from any aggression only together with Ukraine and only together with Ukraine in NATO. That is why we must achieve security certainty about our future in the Alliance,” he said.    

Zelenskyy made these comments as NATO leaders are preparing for their two-day summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11 and 12.  

The summit arrives at a critical juncture for NATO and European security with the Kyiv counteroffensive and political upheaval in Moscow.  

Ukraine formally applied to join NATO last year, but all member states have now agreed that Ukraine will not join the alliance before the war there ends.  

During a Monday news conference in Brussels, NATO’s top military official, Admiral Rob Bauer, acknowledged that Ukraine’s road to victory will be difficult and lengthy.  

“The counteroffensive, it is difficult,” he said, adding that Ukrainian forces are right to proceed cautiously. “People should never think that this is an easy walkover. It will never be,” he said, noting that the Russian defense lines are sometimes up to 30 kilometers deep, and Ukrainian forces face landmines and other obstacles.  

Bauer drew a comparison between breaking through these obstacles and fighting in Normandy during World War II. “We saw in Normandy in the Second World War that it took seven, eight, nine weeks for the allies to actually break through the defensive lines of the Germans. And so, it is not a surprise that it is not going fast,” he said.  

Satellite images reviewed by Reuters in April showed Russia had built extensive fortifications, trenches, anti-vehicle barriers and other obstacles to slow any Ukrainian advance.  

Bauer also cautioned that Russia’s armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the Ukraine fighting. “They might not be 11 feet tall, but they are certainly not two feet tall,” he told reporters. “So, we should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.”  

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 
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Iran has hanged at least 354 people in the first six months of 2023, a rights group said Monday, adding that the pace of executions was much higher than in 2022. 

Rights groups have accused Tehran of increasing the use of the death penalty to spread fear across society in the wake of the protest movement that erupted last September over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who had been arrested for allegedly violating strict dress rules for women. 

Executions up 36% 

Norway-based Iran Human Rights said the 354 people figure for the first six months up to June 30 was up 36 percent compared to the same period in 2022, when 261 people were executed. 

Emphasizing concerns that non-Persian ethnic groups are disproportionately affected by executions in Iran, it said 20 percent of all executions were of members of the Sunni Baluch minority.  

It said 206 people were executed for drug-related charges; a 126 percent rise compared to the same period last year.

 

 

Six women were among those executed in the period while two men were publicly hanged, it added. 

“The death penalty is used to create societal fear and prevent more protests,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam. 

“The majority of those killed are low-cost victims of the killing machine, drug defendants who are from the most marginalized communities.” 

IHR earlier this year had reported that Iran carried out 582 executions in 2022, the highest figure in the Islamic republic since 2015. 

Iran is the world’s second biggest executioner after China for which no data is available, according to Amnesty International. 

Iranian authorities have executed seven men in cases related to the protests, with rights groups warning at least seven more arrested over the demonstrations are at imminent risk of execution.  
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Ukraine says its forces have retaken 37 square kilometers of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine during the past week, as part of its counteroffensive against Russia launched in June. Analysts say the recent mutiny against Russia’s top commanders may have an impact on the morale of Russian soldiers on the battlefield. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports, with Yulia Savchenko contributing.
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President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.

This year’s event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It’s the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the country’s growing global clout.

The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia’s war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say. 

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.

“This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, “it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders,” Kugelman said. 

India’s relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to China’s growing ambitions.

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies’ summit in September. It’s also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.

“India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where it’s wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time,” said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls “cross-border terrorism” — a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty — a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.

“The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India’s independent foreign policy,” said Madan. 

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.

“For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. … I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding,” said Kugelman. 
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A Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week has died, the freedom of expression group PEN said on Sunday.  

Victoria Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including children, and wounding dozens. 

“With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro,” PEN Ukraine said in a statement on its Facebook page.   

Amelina had been in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, PEN said. 

She was hospitalized with “multiple skull fractures,” according to a surgeon treating the wounded. 

Her novel “Dom’s Dream Kingdom” was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, according to PEN. 

Her poems, prose and essays have been translated into English, German, Polish and other languages.    

Since 2022 she had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion and advocate for accountability, PEN said. 

Ria Pizza in Kramatorsk — one of the largest cities still under Ukrainian control in the east — was popular with soldiers, journalists and aid workers.    

Amelina’s death takes the toll of the strike to 13.  
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Iran will refrain from sending a new ambassador to Sweden in protest over the burning of a Koran outside a mosque in Stockholm, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said Sunday.

A man tore up and burned a Quran outside Stockholm’s central mosque Wednesday, the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holidays.

Swedish police charged the man who burned the holy book with agitation against an ethnic or national group. In a newspaper interview, he described himself as an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban it.

Iran’s foreign ministry summoned Sweden’s charge d’affaires Thursday to condemn what it said was an insult to the most sacred Islamic sanctities.

“Although administrative procedures to appoint a new ambassador to Sweden have ended, the process of dispatching them has been held off due to the Swedish government’s issuing of a permit to desecrate the Holy Quran,” Amirabdollahian said Sunday on Twitter.

He did not specify how long Iran would refrain from sending an ambassador to Sweden.

While Swedish police have rejected several recent applications for anti-Quran demonstrations, courts have overruled those decisions, saying they infringed freedom of speech.

In its permit for Wednesday’s demonstration, Swedish police said that while it “may have foreign policy consequences,” the security risks and consequences linked to a Quran burning were not of such a nature that the application should be rejected.
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A U.S.-based group that tracks how the Catholic hierarchy deals with allegations of sexual abuse by clergy says Pope Francis made a “troubling” choice in appointing an Argentine prelate to a powerful Vatican office that handles such cases.

On Saturday, the Vatican announced the pontiff had picked Monsignor Victor Manuel Fernandez, archbishop of La Plata, Argentina, to head the Holy See’s watchdog office for doctrinal orthodoxy. Its mandate includes handling sex abuse allegations lodged against clergy.

BishopAccountability.org, a 20-year-old Massachusetts organization that maintains an online archive of abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, said in a statement that the prelate in 2019 refused to believe victims who accused a priest in the La Plata archdiocese of sexually abusing boys.

Francis “made a baffling and troubling choice,” the group said in statement emailed late Saturday in the U.S., citing how Fernandez handled the case.

“In his response to allegations, he stoutly supported the accused priest and refused to believe the victims,” BishopAccountability.org said. Fernández “should have been investigated, not promoted to one of the highest posts in the global church.”

Telephone calls to the La Plata archdiocese office went unanswered Sunday. The archdiocese didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment from the archbishop.

As a leader of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the 60-year-old archbishop, who will take up his Vatican post in September, “will have immense power, especially when it comes to judging and punishing priests who abuse children,” BishopAccountability.org said.

A trusted adviser to the pontiff, Fernandez has been nicknamed the “pope’s theologian″ because he is widely believed to have helped author some of Francis’ most important documents. The pope named him to head the La Plata archdiocese in 2018.

BishopAccountablity.org said after a 2008 child abuse complaint against a La Plata parish priest resurfaced in 2019, the archbishop published a letter from the priest on the archdiocese’s website. In it, the clergyman denied the abuse allegation and said he was slandered.

The archbishop later went to the accused priest’s parish and celebrated a Mass with him, according to BishopAccountability.org.

Despite more allegations surfacing, Fernández allowed the priest to continue work. The archbishop eventually removed him, saying the priest requested to leave for “health reasons.” In December 2019, the priest took his own life hours after a judge issued an order for his arrest, according to the watchdog group and Argentine media reports at the time.

“Nothing about his performance suggests that he is fit to lead the pope’s battle against abuse and cover-up,” BishopAccountability.org said of Fernandez.

Francis has pledged that the Catholic Church will adhere to a zero-tolerance policy on clergy sexual abuse.
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An Islamic grouping of 57 states said on Sunday collective measures are needed to prevent acts of desecration to the Quran and international law should be used to stop religious hatred after the holy book was burned in a protest in Sweden.

 

The statement by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, most of whose members have a Muslim-majority population, was issued after an extraordinary meeting in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah called to discuss Wednesday’s incident.

 

“We must send constant reminders to the international community regarding the urgent application of international law, which clearly prohibits any advocacy of religious hatred,” OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha said.

 

 

A man tore up and burned a Koran outside Stockholm’s central mosque on Wednesday, the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holidays. The act angered OIC member Turkey whose backing Sweden needs to gain entry to the NATO military alliance.

 

Swedish police had granted permission for a protest to take place. But after the burning, police charged the man who carried it out with agitation against an ethnic or national group.

 

The incident has triggered large protests in Baghdad in front of the Swedish Embassy. It has also been condemned by the United States.

 

Turkey in late January suspended talks with Sweden on its NATO application after a Danish far-right politician burned a copy of the Koran near the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.
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PARIS — Young rioters clashed with police late Saturday and early Sunday and targeted a mayor’s home with a burning car as France faced a fifth night of unrest sparked by the police killing of a teenager, but overall violence appeared to lessen compared to previous nights.

Police made 719 arrests nationwide by early Sunday after a mass security deployment aimed at quelling France’s worst social upheaval in years.

The fast-spreading crisis is posing a new challenge to President Emmanuel Macron’s leadership and exposing deep-seated discontent in low-income neighborhoods over discrimination and lack of opportunity.

The 17-year-old whose death Tuesday spawned the anger, identified by his first name, Nahel, was laid to rest Saturday in a Muslim ceremony in his hometown of Nanterre, a Paris suburb where emotion over his loss remains raw.

As night fell over the French capital, a small crowd gathered on the Champs-Elysees for a protest over Nahel’s death and police violence but met hundreds of officers with batons and shields guarding the iconic avenue and its Cartier and Dior boutiques. In a less-chic neighborhood of northern Paris, protesters set off volleys of firecrackers and lit barricades on fire as police shot back with tear gas and stun grenades.

A burning car hit the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of l’Hay-les-Roses overnight. Several schools, police stations, town halls and stores have been targeted by fires or vandalism in recent days but such a personal attack on a mayor’s home is unusual.

Skirmishes erupted in the Mediterranean city of Marseille but appeared less intense than the night before, according to the Interior Ministry. A beefed-up police contingent arrested 55 people there.

Nationwide arrests were somewhat lower than the night before, which Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin attributed to “the resolute action of security forces.”

Some 2,800 people have been detained overall since Nahel’s death on Tuesday. The mass police deployment has been welcomed by some frightened residents of targeted neighborhoods and shopowners whose stores have been ransacked — but it has further frustrated those who see police behavior as the core of France’s current crisis.

The unrest took a toll on Macron’s diplomatic standing. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s office said Macron phoned Saturday to request a postponement of what would have been the first state visit by a French president to Germany in 23 years. Macron had been scheduled to fly to Germany on Sunday.

Hundreds of French police and firefighters have been injured in the violence that erupted after the killing, though authorities haven’t released injury tallies of protesters. In French Guiana, an overseas territory, a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet.

On Saturday, France’s justice minister, Dupond-Moretti, warned that young people who share calls for violence on Snapchat or other apps could face legal prosecution. Macron has blamed social media for fueling violence.

The violence comes just over a year before Paris and other French cities are due to host Olympic athletes and millions of visitors for the summer Olympics, whose organizers were closely monitoring the situation as preparations for the competition continue.

At a hilltop cemetery in Nanterre, hundreds stood along the road Saturday to pay tribute to Nahel as mourners carried his white casket from a mosque to the burial site. His mother, dressed in white, walked inside the cemetery amid applause and headed toward the grave. Many of the men were young and Arab or Black, coming to mourn a boy who could have been them.

This week, Nahel’s mother told France 5 television that she was angry at the officer who shot her son at a traffic stop, but not at the police in general.

“He saw a little Arab-looking kid. He wanted to take his life,” she said. Nahel’s family has roots in Algeria.

Video of the killing showed two officers at the window of the car, one with his gun pointed at the driver. As the teenager pulled forward, the officer fired once through the windshield. The officer accused of killing Nahel was given a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide.

Thirteen people who didn’t comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year, and three this year, prompting demands for more accountability. France also saw protests against police violence and racial injustice after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota.

The reaction to the killing was a potent reminder of the persistent poverty, discrimination and limited job prospects in neighborhoods around France where many residents trace their roots to former French colonies — like where Nahel grew up.

“Nahel’s story is the lighter that ignited the gas. Hopeless young people were waiting for it. We lack housing and jobs, and when we have (jobs), our wages are too low,” said Samba Seck, a 39-year-old transportation worker in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.

Clichy was the birthplace of weeks of riots in 2005 that shook France, prompted by the death of two teenagers electrocuted in a power substation while fleeing from police. One of the boys lived in the same housing project as Seck.

New violence targeted his town this week. As he spoke, the remains of a burned car stood beneath his apartment building, and the town hall entrance was set alight in rioting Friday.

“Young people break everything, but we are already poor, we have nothing,” he said. Still, he said he understood the rioters’ anger, adding that “young people are afraid to die at the hands of police.”
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