IN BRIEF

Envoy summoned over Koran burning

SAUDI Arabia has summoned Sweden’s ambassador to denounce a Koran burning outside a Stockholm mosque that sparked a diplomatic backlash across the Muslim world, state media reported early Monday.

The kingdom – home to the holiest sites in Islam, in Mecca and Medina –had already condemned Wednesday’s incident in which an Iraqi citizen living in Sweden, Salwan Momika, 37, stomped on the Muslim holy book and set several pages alight.

The foreign ministry summoned the ambassador on Sunday to urge Sweden “to stop all actions that directly contradict international efforts seeking to spread the values of tolerance, moderation and rejection of extremism, and undermine the necessary mutual respect for relations between peoples and states,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

Momika’s Koran burning coincided with the start of the Eid al-Adha holiday and the end of the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, triggering widespread anger.

Countries including Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco have also summoned Swedish ambassadors in protest.

Iran said on Sunday it was holding off on sending its new ambassador to Sweden because of the incident.

At an extraordinary meeting on Sunday at its Jeddah headquarters, the Saudibased Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called for collective measures to avoid future Koran burnings.AFP

Israeli air strike kills 5 Palestinians

THE Israeli army launched drone strikes in the occupied West Bank area of Jenin Monday as part of an “extensive counterterrorism effort” that the Palestinian health ministry said killed five residents.

The operation comes two weeks after an Israeli army raid in Jenin refugee camp left seven people dead, and saw rare use of helicopter missile fire.

CLIMATE change threatens to deliver a “truly terrifying” dystopian future of hunger and suffering, the United Nations’ human rights chief warned Monday.

Volker Turk slammed world leaders for only thinking of the short term while dealing with the climate crisis.

Turk told a UN Human Rights Council debate on the right to food that extreme weather events were wiping out crops, herds and ecosystems, making it impossible for communities to rebuild and support themselves.

“More than 828 million people faced hunger in 2021. And climate change is projected to place up to 80 million more people at risk of hunger by the middle of this century,” said Turk.

“Our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying,” he said, evoking a “dystopian future.”

“Addressing climate change is a human rights issue... there is still time to act. But that time is now,” he said.

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw countries agree to cap global warming at “well below” two degrees Celsius above average levels measured between 1850 and 1900 – and 1.5C if possible. The global mean temperature in 2022 was 1.15C above the 1850-1900 average.

On current policy trends, the planet will be 2.8C warmer by the end of the century, according to the UN’s IPCC climate science advisory panel.

“We must not deliver this future of hunger and suffering to our children, and their children. And we don’t have to,” Volk said.

“We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the capacity to change it.”

Turk said world leaders “perform the choreography of deciding to act and promising to act and then get stuck in the short term.”

He called for an end to “senseless subsidies” of the fossil fuel industry, and said the Dubai COP28 climate summit in November and December needed to be the “decisive gamechanger that we so badly need.”

Turk urged the world to “shun the green-washers” as well as those who cast doubt on climate science, driven by their own greed.

The Human Rights Council’s 53rd session runs until July 14. AFP

Israel has stepped up operations in the northern West Bank, home to Jenin city and its adjacent refugee camp, which is a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups and where there has been a spate of attacks on Israelis as well as attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian communities.

The Palestinian health ministry said that in Monday’s operation five people were killed and 27 injured.

“There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground,” Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, told AFP.

“Several houses and sites have been bombed... smoke is rising from everywhere.”

The Israeli army said its forces had struck a “joint operations center,” which served as a command post for the “Jenin Brigade,” a local militant group.

The area is nominally under the control of president Mahmud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.AFP

Fire injures four in Tokyo building

FOUR people were injured in a blast and a blaze in a central Tokyo building, the city’s fire department said, with footage showing flames and smoke emerging from a second-floor business.

The fire started in a building in a restaurant area of the bustling Shimbashi district around 3:20 pm (0620 GMT).

“The sound of an explosion was also heard. A total of 32 fire trucks are at the scene,” a fire department spokesman told AFP, declining to be named.

“Four people are injured, three of whom are conscious,” he said, adding no details were yet available on the fourth person.

Officials are investigating the cause of the fire.

“The sound was deafening. It was as if something huge was dropped from the top of the building – it was an incredible bang,” a male eyewitness told public broadcaster NHK.

“Pieces of paper were scattered all over at the nearby intersection. From the way they were scattered, I immediately knew it was an explosion,” he said. AFP