World

Queen Elizabeth II has postponed a meeting of her Privy Council advisory group after doctors advised her to rest, Buckingham Palace said Wednesday, the day after she appointed Liz Truss as Britain’s new prime minister.

“After a full day yesterday, Her Majesty has this afternoon accepted doctors’ advice to rest,” the palace said in a statement.

“This means that the Privy Council meeting that had been due to take place this evening will be rearranged.”

The 96-year-old monarch, who is currently on her traditional summer retreat at Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands, has been dogged by problems walking and standing since last year, forcing her to cancel a series of public engagements.

Fears about a flare-up of what royal officials call “episodic mobility problems” prevented her returning to London to accept outgoing leader Boris Johnson’s resignation and to appoint Truss on Tuesday.

The elderly sovereign, looking frail and holding a walking stick for support, was seen in an official photograph of the symbolic ceremony shaking hands with Truss as she invited her to lead a new government.

The constitutional role — the so-called “kissing of the hands” ceremony — usually takes place at Buckingham Palace in London.

It was the first time it had been held outside London since 1952, when Winston Churchill met the new queen at Heathrow Airport after the death of her father, George VI.

The last time the handover of power took place at Balmoral was in 1885 when Victoria was on the throne. 

The current queen also carried out another duty after Tuesday’s prime ministerial handover, Britain’s Press Association reported.

Wednesday evening’s scheduled Privy Council meeting, to be held virtually, would have seen Truss take an oath and new cabinet ministers sworn into their roles, and also admitted new ministers to be privy counsellors if they were not already.

Meetings of the council, a royal advisory body dating back hundreds of years and comprising hundreds of members, including religious and political leaders, usually happen monthly. 

Last week, Britain’s longest-serving monarch skipped the Highland Games event, a traditional highlight of her summer in Scotland.

The latest cancellations will revive concerns about her health.

She has cut back on public engagements since last October after an unscheduled overnight stay in hospital for an undisclosed condition.

She was also hit by a bout of Covid earlier this year, that she said left her “exhausted”.

During her Platinum Jubilee celebrations this summer, the monarch travelled to Buckingham Palace just twice and made only fleeting appearances during the four days of events.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that “almost all” the Ukrainian grain shipped under a UN-backed deal to ease a global food crisis was reaching rich European nations and accused the West of deceiving developing countries.

Data compiled by a joint centre in Istanbul monitoring the July agreement showed slightly more than a third of the grain delivered to European countries and another 20 percent arriving in Turkey.

It also showed 30 percent reaching “low and lower-middle income countries” across the world.

More shipments are expected to start arriving in famine-stricken parts of Africa and the Middle East under the UN World Food Programme whose implementation is just getting underway.

But Moscow has voiced growing frustration with how the agreement was being applied.

An amendment to the deal also allowed Russia to get open access to fertiliser shipments and have some economic sanctions lifted to allow it to export its own grain.

The UN hailed the deal as the world’s best chance to ease an acute global food crisis stoked by the Black Sea grain blockade.

But Putin said its current implementation was helping richer European countries at the expense of the developing world.

“Almost all the grain exported from Ukraine is sent not to the poorest developing countries, but to EU countries,” he told an economic forum in Russia’s Pacific port of Vladivostok. 

Both Ukraine and Russia are two of the biggest exporters of wheat and other grain.

– ‘Colonialists’ –

Putin accused European countries of acting as “colonialists” and said they “once again simply deceived developing countries”.

“With this approach, the scale of food problems in the world will only grow,” Putin said. 

“Maybe we should think about limiting the export of grain and other produce along this route?” Putin asked.

The July agreement brokered with the help of Turkey is valid for 120 days and may be automatically renewed without further negotiations.

But it requires both Moscow and Kyiv to sign off on an extension.

Data compiled as of Wednesday and released to AFP showed Turkey receiving the largest share of the grain — 20 percent — followed by Spain (15 percent) and Egypt (10 percent).

But much of the grain that reaches Turkey and some other destinations is then re-sold under commercial agreements not monitored by the Istanbul centre.

A separate famine relief effort spearheaded by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) is focused on delivering wheat and maize to Africa and other parts of the world suffering shortages.

US officials dismissed Putin’s remarks as untrue and noted that some grain sent to Europe was then processed for poor nations.

“Maybe the deal is working better than expected and Ukrainians are benefiting more from this than he had hoped in terms of the revenues going to Ukraine,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

“I think he may have multiple motives here. He doesn’t want to help Ukrainains, he would love to get a better deal,” she said.

The first UN-chartered vessel docked in Djibouti on August 30 as part of a response to the drought gripping the Horn of Africa.

A second UN ship reached Turkey last week. The wheat is now being milled into flour and will then be loaded onto a new vessel and sent to Yemen at an undisclosed date.

“A third WFP-chartered vessel is today anchored at Istanbul planning to head to Ukraine and collect a further shipment of wheat,” the Istanbul centre said.

Putin said he hoped “the situation will improve somehow”.

“We will continue insisting that this whole affair with the export of grain and our food be directed primarily to developing markets,” he said. 

Israel Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Wednesday pushed back against suggestions of prosecuting a soldier who likely shot dead Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during an army operation this year.

The veteran Al Jazeera reporter was wearing a bulletproof vest marked “Press” and a helmet when she was shot in the head during the army operation in Jenin refugee camp, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The Israeli army conceded Monday for the first time that one of its soldiers had likely shot Abu Akleh, after having mistaken her for a militant.

“There is a high possibility that Ms Abu Akleh was accidentally hit by IDF (army) gunfire that was fired toward suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen,” said the army’s final report into her May 11 death.

The acknowledgement comes after months in which the army had insisted it was impossible to determine the source of the deadly shot that killed the celebrated Al Jazeera journalist, saying it could have been militant fire.

“I will not allow an IDF (army) soldier that was protecting himself from terrorist fire to be prosecuted just to receive applause from abroad,” Lapid told a military ceremony.

“No one will dictate our rules of engagement to us,” he said.

“Our soldiers have the full backing of the government of Israel and the people of Israel.”

US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel had told a press briefing Tuesday: “We’re going to continue to press our Israeli partners to closely review its policies and practices on rules of engagement and consider additional steps to mitigate the risk of civilian harm”.

A United Nations investigation concluded in June that there was “no evidence of activity by armed Palestinians close by” when Abu Akleh was shot.

Israel’s military advocate said Monday that the circumstances of the incident “do not raise the suspicion of a crime having been committed which would justify the opening of a criminal investigation”.

The Abu Akleh family said that Israel had “refused to take responsibility for the murder” of the journalist.

Al Jazeera has denounced the findings of the Israeli investigation and demanded a probe by an “independent international body”.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price on Monday had underscored “the importance of accountability in this case… to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”

France’s top judicial  court on Wednesday confirmed the conviction of Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in an “ill-gotten gains” case over wealth estimated at 90 million euros ($89 million).

Rifaat al-Assad, 85, is the younger brother of Bashar’s father and former Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, and himself held the office of vice president but fled the country in 1984 after a failed coup.

He had made a final appeal to France’s Court of Cassation after a lower court last year confirmed his four-year jail sentence for conspiracy to launder Syrian public funds between 1996 and 2016.

In the same judgement, he was convicted of concealing serious tax fraud and employing servants off the books, with authorities confiscating a slew of his properties.

Rifaat, who has not attended hearings due to ill health, insists his property empire stretching across Spain, France and Britain stems from gifts from Saudi crown prince and later king Abdullah, who died in 2015.

The case is the second in France under a law passed last year targeting fortunes fraudulently amassed by foreign leaders.

Teodorin Obiang, the eldest son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, last year had his conviction to a three-year suspended sentence and 30 million euros in fines confirmed at appeal.

– War crimes case –

In Syria, Rifaat al-Assad was the head of the elite Defence Brigades, internal security forces that violently quashed a 1982 Islamist uprising in the city of Hama.

Having stayed away for three decades following his failed attempt to seize power, pro-government media reported that he returned to Syria last autumn.

In 1984, he fled first to Switzerland then France, where he received the Legion of Honour — the country’s top award — in 1986 for “services rendered”.

French investigators opened a probe into his property holdings in 2014 after complaints from watchdogs Transparency International and Sherpa.

They seized two Paris townhouses, dozens of apartments in chic neighbourhoods of the French capital and office spaces.

Since then, around 80 of his former employees living at an estate outside Paris have been mostly without water and electricity as no one was paying the bills.

– Aid to populations –

While Rifaat’s age and poor health mean he is unlikely ever to serve jail time in France, Wednesday’s ruling confirms the confiscation of the properties for good.

That could set up Syria as one of the first countries to potentially benefit from a scheme to return funds recovered under the ill-gotten gains law.

“The confiscation… is the first necessary condition to be able to plan for restitution of the ill-gotten gains,” Transparency International France chief Patrick Lefas said in a statement welcoming the court ruling.

But he added that it would be vital to get the resources to ordinary Syrians rather than simply returning them to the Assad regime — which Transparency says could be achieved using another French law passed last year.

“Restoring ill-gotten gains requires guarantees, without which it would be naive to hope to give them back to the populations of their countries of origin,” Lefas said.

Rifaat al-Assad also faces a court case in Spain over far larger suspicions of ill-gotten gains covering 500 properties, as well as a prosecution in Switzerland for war crimes dating back to the 1980s.