World

China and Russia on Thursday vetoed a US-led bid at the United Nations to toughen sanctions on North Korea over its missile launches, laying bare divisions that Western envoys fear would be exploited by Pyongyang. 

The Security Council resolution put forward by the United States would have reduced the amount of oil North Korea could legally import as punishment for a test Wednesday of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The resolution enjoyed the support of the 13 other members of the Security Council, although some US allies quietly wondered whether Washington should have gone ahead with the vote knowing the unflinching opposition from Beijing and Moscow.

China, the closest ally of North Korea, and Russia, whose relations with the West have sunk over its invasion of Ukraine, said they would have preferred a non-binding statement rather than a fresh resolution with teeth against Pyongyang.

The United States “should not place one-sided emphasis on the implementation of sanctions alone. It should also work to promote a political solution,” said China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun.

He warned that sanctions would cause an “escalation” and humanitarian consequences for North Korea, one of the world’s most closed societies, which recently announced a Covid outbreak.

Zhang alleged that the United States wanted the resolution to fail so as to “spread the flames of war” as part of its wider effort to pressure China.

“The crux of the matter,” he said, “is whether they want to use the handling of the Korean peninsula issue on the chessboard of their so-called Indo-Pacific strategy.”

Russia’s ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, accused the United States of ignoring North Korea’s appeals to stop “hostile activity.”

“It seems that our American and other Western colleagues are suffering from the equivalent of writer’s block. They seem to have no response to crisis situations other than introducing new sanctions,” he said.

President Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly said it is willing to speak with North Korea without preconditions.

It has found little interest in working-level talks from North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un held three high-profile meetings with Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump.

– North Korea ’emboldened’ –

In 2017, before Trump’s outreach to Kim, the UN Security Council voted unanimously three times to tighten pressure on North Korea, with China and Russia also exasperated by nuclear and ICBM launches.

While still offering talks, the United States said that North Korea had clearly violated a 2017 resolution that called for further consequences if Pyongyang fires another ICBM.

The United States and South Korea say that the North fired three missiles on Wednesday, including what may have been its largest ICBM, hours after Biden visited the region.

The missile launches — 23 in total this year — pose a “threat to the peace and security of the entire international community,” said the US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

“Council restraint and silence have not eliminated or even reduced the threat. If anything, DPRK has been emboldened by this Council’s inaction,” she said, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

She said the United States would pursue unilateral action against North Korea including additional sanctions.

British, French and South Korean envoys voiced fear that North Korea would go ahead with a nuclear test, which would be its first since 2017.

“Using a veto protects the North Korean regime and gives it carte blanche to launch more weapons,” said the French ambassador, Nicolas de Riviere.

The US-drafted resolution would have reduced the amount of oil that North Korea can legally import each year for civilian purposes from four million to three million barrels (525,000 to 393,750 tons) and similarly cut the level of refined petroleum.

One ambassador at the United Nations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States went ahead in the last days of its May presidency of the Security Council despite knowing the Chinese and Russian opposition, believing inaction was worse.

“Their calculation,” the ambassador said, was “we cannot just allow this constant testing carried out without a reaction.”

Andrew Fletcher, a founding member of the British electronic band Depeche Mode, had died aged 60, the band announced Thursday.

“We are shocked and filled with overwhelming sadness with the untimely passing of our dear friend, family member, and bandmate Andy ‘Fletch’ Fletcher,” it said on Twitter.

“Fletch had a true heart of gold and was always there when you needed support, a lively conversation, a good laugh, or a cold pint.”

Born in 1961 in Nottingham, Fletcher was a keyboardist and one of the founders of electronic pioneers Depeche Mode.

The band have sold more than 100 million albums since they started up in 1980, winning over a global audience with hits like “Personal Jesus” or “Just Can’t Get Enough”.

Depeche Mode triumphed with a string of hits in the 1980s and early 1990s, at first becoming synonymous with danceable synthpop but then gradually adopting a darker sound.

Fletcher was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the other members of Depeche Mode in 2020.

The band’s last studio album “Spirit” came out in 2017.

In an interview with AFP ahead of its release, its members said they were proud to have attracted listeners of other genres, including rock fans who would have rarely stepped into a dance club.

“One of our legacies is to make electronic music popular to the masses,” Fletcher said.

Fellow artists mourned the musician online on Thursday.

Lol Tolhurst, drummer for The Cure, said it was “very sad news”.

“I knew Andy and considered him a friend. We crossed many of the same pathways as younger men. My heart goes out to his family,” he wrote on Twitter.

Fletcher leaves behind a wife and two children.

An Al Jazeera journalist shot dead in the occupied West Bank earlier this month was murdered in a “war crime” by an Israeli soldier, an official Palestinian investigation concluded Thursday.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) and Al Jazeera have accused Israeli forces of killing Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11 when she was covering an Israeli operation in the West Bank city of Jenin. The television network said Thursday it would submit a case to the International Criminal Court.

Israeli authorities have countered that Abu Akleh could have been killed by stray fire from a Palestinian gunman or mistakenly by an Israeli soldier.

All “proven facts constitute the elements of the crime of murder… according to national laws, they are a war crime and a violation of international laws,” said PA attorney general Akram Al-Khateeb, who presented the investigation findings.

The Palestinian-American journalist, who was wearing a vest marked “Press” and a helmet, was hit by a bullet just below her helmet.

The report said Abu Akleh was killed with a 5.56 millimetre armour piercing round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 rifle.

It added that bullet holes on a nearby tree indicated the “targeting of the upper parts of the body with the aim of killing.”

“All of these facts: the type of projectile, the weapon, the distance, the fact that there were no obstructions to vision and that she was wearing a press jacket lead us to conclude that Abu Akleh was the target of a murder,” Khateeb concluded.

“The only source of fire was the Israeli occupation forces,” he said.

Senior PA official Hussein al-Sheikh said a copy of the report had been sent to US authorities, and copies would be given to Abu Akleh’s family and Al Jazeera.

The Qatar-based network announced soon after that its legal team and international experts were preparing a case to put the ICC prosecutor in The Hague.

It said the case would also include the destruction of Al Jazeera’s office in Gaza in May 2021 in an Israeli raid, as well as other attacks on its journalists in the Palestinian territories.

Article eight of the ICC charter makes it a war crime to target a journalist in a war zone. The ICC last year launched an investigation into war crimes in the Palestinian territories but Israel is not an ICC member and disputes its jurisdiction. 

A CNN report published this week, disputed by Israel, also pointed to a deliberate killing, citing the impacts on the tree.

Israeli authorities were quick to decry the Palestinian report’s conclusions, with Defence Minister Benny Gantz saying the Israeli army would never target journalists.

“Any claim that the IDF intentionally harms journalists or uninvolved civilians, is a blatant lie,” he said in a statement, referring to the Israeli Defence Forces.

“Despite the Israeli side reaching out repeatedly, the Palestinians refuse to cooperate, which raises the question (of) if they really want to reach the truth,” he said.

Palestinian authorities refuse to hand the bullet over to Israeli authorities for investigation, citing a lack of trust.

“Attempts to charge IDF soldiers with war crimes while promoting false assessments such as the one published by CNN, undermine the ability to achieve peace and stability in the region, while ultimately boosting terrorism,” said Gantz.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Thursday for vigorous competition with China to preserve the existing global order but said the United States did not seek a “Cold War.”

In a long-awaited speech billed as the most comprehensive statement to date on China by President Joe Biden’s administration, Blinken said that Beijing posed “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order” despite months of US focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order — and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it,” Blinken said at George Washington University.

“Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years,” he said.

“President Biden believes this decade will be decisive..”

The Biden administration recently launched a loose new trade framework across Asia and has set up a forum with the European Union to set technological standards, efforts aimed at uniting like-minded nations as China dominates new fields such as artificial intelligence.

Blinken acknowledged a growing consensus that other nations cannot change the trajectory of China, saying that under President Xi Jinping it has become “more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad.”

“There is growing convergence about the need to approach relations with Beijing with more realism,” he said.

But he added: “If it takes concrete action to address the concerns that we and many other countries have voiced, we will respond positively.”

– ‘No Cold War’ –

With no rhetorical bombast or surprises, Blinken drew an implicit contrast to the approach of the previous administration of Donald Trump which spoke in stark terms of an all-out global conflict with China.

On trips to Africa and Latin America, where China has invested billions of dollars on infrastructure, Blinken has downplayed the competition and not asked nations to take sides.

“We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War. To the contrary, we’re determined to avoid both,” Blinken said in his speech.

“We don’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop China — or any other country for that matter – from growing their economy or advancing the interests of their people,” he said.

But he said that defending the global order, including international law and agreements, would “make it possible for all countries — including the United States and China — to coexist and cooperate.”

He pointed to climate change, saying that the United States and China — the world’s two largest emitters — worked together to make progress at last year’s summit in Glasgow and that a healthy competition on clean energy would have global benefits.

His willingness to cooperate comes even as he charged again that Beijing is carrying out genocide against its Uyghur minority and also denounced its “brutal campaign” in Tibet and crackdown in Hong Kong.

– Refocusing on Asia –

Saying that China will “test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before,” Blinken announced the formation of a “China House” inside the State Department to coordinate policy across regions.

Blinken’s speech — delayed from earlier this month after he tested positive for Covid-19 — comes on the heels of a trip by Biden to Japan and South Korea and a first-of-a-kind Washington summit with of Southeast Asian leaders.

Joshua Shifrinson, an expert on great power politics at the Wilson Center, said Biden appeared eager to direct foreign policy 15 months into a term marked by the Ukraine war, Afghanistan withdrawal and Covid pandemic.

“He’s trying to move away from playing whack-a-mole in foreign policy and head back towards the strategic long-term mindset that he wanted to have coming out,” he said.

Biden on Monday made waves in Tokyo by offering the most explicit pledge in decades that the United States would militarily defend Taiwan in an invasion by Beijing, which claims the self-governing democracy.

Blinken again insisted that the United States was not deviating from its longstanding stance and said it was Beijing that had raised tensions, including with nearly daily military flights near the island.

“While our policy has not changed, what has changed is Beijing’s growing coercion,” Blinken said.

An Al Jazeera journalist shot dead in the occupied West Bank earlier this month was murdered by an Israeli soldier in a “war crime”, the official Palestinian investigation concluded Thursday.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) and Al Jazeera have blamed Israeli forces for Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing on the morning of May 11, when she was covering an Israeli army operation in Jenin camp in the north of the West Bank. 

Israeli authorities have countered that Abu Akleh could have been killed by stray fire from a Palestinian gunman in the area or mistakenly by an Israeli soldier.

All “proven facts constitute the elements of the crime of murder… according to national laws, they are a war crime and a violation of international laws,” said PA attorney general Akram Al-Khateeb, who presented the Palestinian investigation’s findings.

The Palestinian-American journalist, who was wearing a vest marked “Press” and a helmet, was killed after being hit by a bullet just below her helmet.

The report said Abu Akleh was killed with a 5.56 millimetre armour piercing round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 rifle.

The report also said that bullet holes on a nearby tree indicated the “targeting of the upper parts of the body with the aim of killing.”

“All of these facts: the type of projectile, the weapon, the distance, the fact that there were no obstructions to vision and that she was wearing a press jacket lead us to conclude that (Shireen) Abu Akleh was the target of a murder,” Khateeb concluded.

“The only source of fire was the Israeli occupation forces,” he said.

Senior PA official Hussein al-Sheikh said a copy of the report had been sent to US authorities, while copies would also be given to Abu Akleh’s family and Al Jazeera.

A CNN report published this week, disputed by Israel, also pointed to a deliberate killing, citing the impacts on the tree.

“The number of strike marks on the tree where Shireen was standing proves this wasn’t a random shot, she was targeted,”  Chris Cobb-Smith, an explosive weapons expert, told the US news network.

Israeli authorities were quick to decry the Palestinian report’s conclusions, with Defence Minister Benny Gantz saying the Israeli army would never target journalists.

“Any claim that the IDF intentionally harms journalists or uninvolved civilians, is a blatant lie,” he said in a statement, referring to the Israeli Defence Forces.

“Despite the Israeli side reaching out repeatedly, the Palestinians refuse to cooperate, which raises the question (of) if they really want to reach the truth,” he said.

Palestinian authorities had refused to hand the bullet over to Israeli authorities for further investigation, citing a lack of trust.

Gantz also hit out at CNN Thursday. 

“Attempts to charge IDF soldiers with war crimes while promoting false assessments such as the one published by CNN, undermine the ability to achieve peace and stability in the region, while ultimately boosting terrorism,” he said.

Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey is facing sexual assault charges in the UK, police and prosecutors said on Thursday, after a review of allegations against him.

The two-time Oscar winner for “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty” was artistic director of The Old Vic theatre in London between 2004 and 2015.

Allegations against him first emerged in the wake of the #MeToo movement that saw numerous claims of sexual assault and harassment in the movie industry.

That prompted an investigation by London’s Metropolitan Police, and a review by The Old Vic of the 62-year-old Spacey’s time in charge there.

The Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement that it had “authorised criminal charges” against the actor “for four counts of sexual assault against three men”.

“He has also been charged with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent,” said Rosemary Ainslie, from the service.

“The charges follow a review of the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police in its investigation,” added Ainslie, who heads the special crime division.

The Met said separately that the first two counts of sexual assault date from March 2005 in London, and concern the same man, who is now in his 40s.

The third is alleged to have happened in London in August 2008 against a man who is now in his 30s. The same man is alleged to be the victim of the separate charge.

The fourth sexual assault charge is alleged to have occurred in Gloucestershire, western England, in April 2013 against a third man, who is now in his 30s.

None of the alleged victims can be identified under English law.

The CPS, which brings prosecutions in England and Wales, and the police both referred to Spacey by his full name, Kevin Spacey Fowler.

British legal restrictions are in place limiting what the media can report until the case comes before a jury to avoid prejudicing any trial.

The CPS said that when considering whether to approve charges, it makes “fair, independent and objective” assessments about whether a case should go to court.

Claims against Spacey in 2017 led to the end of his involvement in the filming of the final season of the political drama “House of Cards”.

He was also dropped from a Gore Vidal biopic on Netflix and as the industrialist John Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World”.

Christopher Plummer was brought in as a last-minute replacement.

Spacey, considered one of the finest actors of his generation, has previously denied similar charges in the United States.

A criminal case against him for sexual assault there was dropped in 2019.

The actor is currently in New York and facing a civil case arising from the abandoned criminal action, US court documents show.

British media said it was understood he had not been formally charged in the UK because he was not in the country, and there was no immediate word if he would have to be extradited.