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World Monthly Headline News July 2022
By Kevin Liptak, Niamh Kennedy and Sharon Braithwaite, CNN

Madrid (CNN)NATO has formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance, according to a statement from NATO heads of state and government on Wednesday.
"The accession of Finland and Sweden will make them safer, NATO stronger, and the Euro-Atlantic area more secure. The security of Finland and Sweden is of direct importance to the Alliance, including during the accession process," the statement added. The governments of all 30 countries in NATO now need to ratify the inclusions. The leaders entered Wednesday's talks propelled by a diplomatic victory after Turkey dropped its objections to the two nations joining NATO, setting the stage for the two longtime neutral countries to enter the defensive bloc. The announcement, paired with the unveiling of an enhanced American military presence in Eastern Europe, is exactly the outcome Russian President Vladimir Putin was hoping to fend off when he invaded Ukraine more than four months ago. "I said Putin's looking for the Finlandization of Europe. He's going to get the NATOization of Europe. And that is exactly what he didn't want, but exactly what needs to be done to guarantee security for Europe. And I think it's necessary," US President Joe Biden said when he arrived at the summit site in Madrid.
Holly Ellyatt

The NATO summit continues in Spain on Wednesday, with a historic deal already under its belt after the alliance reached a deal with Turkey to accept membership bids from Sweden and Finland. The two nations moved to join NATO after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised fears about Russian aggression elsewhere. The summit is arguably the most important meeting of the alliance in recent months, and years. NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced earlier in the week that the Western military organization would increase the number of troops within its rapid response force — which comprises land, air, sea and special forces units that are capable of being deployed quickly — to 300,000 from about 40,000 personnel. In Ukraine, the search and rescue operation following the Russian strike on a shopping mall in central Ukraine continued Tuesday. Twenty people are now confirmed to have died in the strike and at least 59 were injured in the attack.
Holly Ellyatt

The NATO summit continues in Spain on Wednesday, with a historic deal already under its belt after the alliance reached a deal with Turkey to accept membership bids from Sweden and Finland. The two nations moved to join NATO after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised fears about Russian aggression elsewhere. The summit is arguably the most important meeting of the alliance in recent months, and years. NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced earlier in the week that the Western military organization would increase the number of troops within its rapid response force — which comprises land, air, sea and special forces units that are capable of being deployed quickly — to 300,000 from about 40,000 personnel. In Ukraine, the search and rescue operation following the Russian strike on a shopping mall in central Ukraine continued Tuesday. Twenty people are now confirmed to have died in the strike and at least 59 were injured in the attack.
Silvia Amaro

BRUSSELS — European leaders are growing increasingly concerned about the possibility of a full shutdown of gas supplies from Russia, with Italy asking for a new meeting to debate the matter. Gazprom, Russia’s state-backed energy supplier, has reduced its gas flows to Europe by about 60% over the past few weeks, prompting Germany, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands to all indicate they could turn back to coal once again. It comes as Europe — which receives roughly 40% of its gas via Russian pipelines — tries to rapidly reduce its reliance on Russian hydrocarbons in response to the Kremlin’s nearly four-month-long onslaught in Ukraine. “Russia is diminishing the supply of gas little by little — to some countries [by] almost 100%; to others, cutting 10, 15%,” Josep Borrel, the EU’s top diplomat, told CNBC Friday.
By SAMUEL PETREQUIN and MIKE CORDER

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union agreed Thursday to put Ukraine on a path toward EU membership, acting with uncharacteristic speed and unity to pull the embattled country further away from Russia’s influence and bind it more closely to the West. Meeting at a summit in Brussels, leaders of the EU’s 27 nations mustered the required unanimous approval to grant Ukraine candidate status. That sets in motion a membership process that could take years or even decades. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted his gratitude and declared: “Ukraine’s future is within the EU.” “It’s a victory. We have been waiting for 120 days and 30 years,” he said on Instagram, referring to the duration of the war and the decades since Ukraine became independent upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. “And now we will defeat the enemy.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pronounced it a “good day for Europe.”

In a meeting with new military graduates, the Russian president spoke about Moscow’s newly tested SARMAT RS-28 intercontinental ballistic missile dubbed Satan 2. Putin said: ‘It is planned that the first such complex will be put on combat duty by the end of the year'
The Russia China new world order if you defy us we will attack you.

Zaina Alibhai

Vladimir Putin has issued a thinly-veiled threat to former Soviet Union countries – warning they could share the same fate as Ukraine for defying Russia. The Russian President made clear he would not hesitate to take the same action against them should they turn against the Kremlin, and would no longer ‘be allies’ with the country. Mr Putin’s comments followed those of the president of Kazakhstan, who had described the pro-Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas as ‘quasi-states territories’. As Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sat metres away from him at the St Petersburg Economic Forum, he claimed Kazakhstan – which left the USSR in 1991 – was part of ‘historic Russia’. ‘What is the Soviet Union? This is historic Russia,’ Mr Putin said, before praising Kazakhstan as a brotherly nation.
UK-based group says passenger halls hit in Friday raid were used by Iran, Hezbollah; says Iranian arms depots also struck; Syria says main runway out of use, all flights halted
By TOI staff and Agencies

A Britain-based watchdog said an alleged Israeli strike on Damascus airport Friday hit three arms depots connected to Iran-backed militia. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor of unclear funding, also said Saturday that the northern runway at the airport was damaged, as was the observation tower and lighting systems used for planes to navigate. The group said that disused passenger halls at the airport were hit in the strike. It claimed that the arrival halls had been repurposed as areas for the unobserved arrival of senior figures from the Iranian military and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group.
By Henriette Chacar

MASAFER YATTA, West Bank, June 12 (Reuters) - Some 1,200 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank region of Masafer Yatta face the risk of forced removal to make way for an army firing zone after a decades-long legal battle that ended last month in Israel's highest court. The ruling opened the way for one of the largest displacements since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Middle East war. But residents are refusing to leave, hoping their resilience and international pressure will keep Israel from carrying out the evictions. "They want to take this land from us to build settlements," said Wadha Ayoub Abu Sabha, a resident of al-Fakheit, one of a group of hamlets where Palestinian shepherds and farmers claim a historic connection to the land.
By Haley Ott

London — Boris Johnson survived a no-confidence vote on Monday and remained in office after lawmakers from his Conservative political party held a vote to determine whether he should keep his job. Johnson needed a simple majority of the 359 Conservative members of Parliament to vote in his favor. He won that with 211 supporting him and 148 voting against him, according to The Associated Press.  A vote of no confidence in the Conservative Party is triggered if the party's leaders receive letters of request from at least 15% of sitting Conservative members of Parliament. Conservative Party official Graham Brady said Monday morning that that threshold had been passed.
Isabel Kershner

JERUSALEM — After two decades of research and experimentation, Israeli defense officials now say they have a working prototype of a high-powered laser gun that can intercept rockets, mortar shells, drones and anti-tank missiles in flight. Officials said that the system performed successfully in a recent series of live fire tests in the southern Israeli desert, destroying a rocket, a mortar shell and a drone, and prompting a standing ovation from officials watching the action on screen. The government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the weapon, which Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described this week as a “strategic game changer.” He has pledged “to surround Israel with a laser wall.” Professionals involved in developing the system say it is still several years away from being fully operational in the field, and experts caution that even then, it may initially be of limited use in protecting Israel from heavy incoming rocket fire. Israeli officials have not said whether it would be effective against the precision-guided missiles that Israel says Hezbollah is developing in Lebanon.
Ukraine says President Emmanuel Macron’s comments about not humiliating Russia ‘can only humiliate France’.

Ukraine has denounced French President Emmanuel Macron after he suggested it is imperative that Russia is not humiliated in its war to keep the door open for good diplomatic relations between the West and Moscow whenever the conflict ends. Macron’s comments raised the ire of Kyiv, which slammed the French president’s position. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said bluntly the comments “can only humiliate France”.
Victoria Scott

Russia's domestic aviation industry continues to struggle intensely in the wake of the country's invasion of Ukraine. First, Russia was cut off from genuine parts supplies for its Western-made commercial planes, as Airbus and Boeing announced that they would stop sales of parts and services to Russian aviation companies. Next, European leasing firms sought to repossess jets leased by Russian carriers by revoking their airworthiness certifications. In an unprecedented move, Vladimir Putin allowed Russian aviation companies to steal those leased aircraft and re-register them in Russia, violating decades-old international standards and causing European companies to lose an estimated $10 billion in airplanes. That theft was too much for an otherwise mostly neutral China to tolerate. The Chinese Civil Aviation Authority announced earlier this week that those stolen planes are no longer allowed in its airspace, closing off even more of the globe to most Russian air traffic.
Beijing’s foreign minister signing bilateral deals with leaders but reporters are blocked, sometimes physically, from asking questions
Kate Lyons

Journalists covering the Chinese foreign minister’s tour of the Pacific say they have been blocked from filming or accessing events, and that not a single question from a Pacific journalist has been allowed to be asked of Wang Yi. The allegations raise serious press freedom concerns and alarm about the ability of Pacific journalists to do their jobs, particularly as the relationship between the region and China becomes closer. Wang is midway through a marathon trip visiting eight countries in 10 days. He has held bilateral meetings in Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Samoa and Fiji to date, with trips to Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste to come. At each stop, Wang has signed bilateral deals but he is yet to take a single question from a Pacific journalist, who are instructed at the beginning of the press conferences that no questions will be permitted. Lice Movono, a Fijian journalist who has written for the Guardian, said that during the Fiji leg of the tour she witnessed multiple attempts by Chinese officials to limit journalists’ ability to cover the event.
‘Sorry if I’ll be saying something that you don’t like’, said Ukraine’s leader to Newsmax
Gino Spocchia

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the suggestion that Donald Trump could have stopped Russia from invading his country in an interview with Newsmax. Speaking on Tuesday with anchor Rob Schmitt, the Ukrainian leader said he “cannot predict” what would have happened if Mr Trump was still US president. Schmitt proposed: “There are many Americans that believe that if somebody like Donald Trump was still in the White House that this invasion would not have happened. What is your position?” “I am sorry if I’ll be saying something that you don’t like but for us as the country in war, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Democrats or Republicans,” Mr Zelensky replied.” It’s the people of the United States that support us”. Mr Zelensky continued by saying that “anybody could become the [US] president”, including those who did not like Ukraine and those who were empathetic towards Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
Brandon Specktor

The Milky Way is home to millions of potentially habitable planets — and approximately four of them may harbor evil alien civilizations that would invade Earth if they could, new research posted to the preprint database arXiv suggests. The new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, poses a peculiar question: What are the odds that humans could one day contact a hostile alien civilization that's capable of invading our planet? To answer this, sole study author Alberto Caballero — a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain — began by looking back at human history before looking out to the stars. "This paper attempts to provide an estimation of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations through an extrapolation of the probability that we, as the human civilization, would attack or invade an inhabited exoplanet," Caballero wrote in the study.
By JOE McDONALD

BEIJING (AP) — China’s support for Russia through oil and gas purchases is irking Washington and raising the risk of U.S. retaliation, foreign observers say, though they see no sign Beijing is helping Moscow evade sanctions over its war on Ukraine. Beijing’s importance as a lifeline to Russian President Vladimir Putin rose Monday after the 27-nation European Union, the main market for fossil fuels that supply most of Moscow’s foreign income, agreed to stop oil purchases. President Xi Jinping’s government declared ahead of Russia’s Feb. 24 attack that it had a “no limits” friendship with Moscow and has kept the West guessing about whether it might bail Putin out. China rejects the sanctions as illegal because the United States, Europe and Japan cut off Russia from their markets and the global banking system without working through the United Nations, where Beijing and Moscow have veto power.
American allies in the Middle East have emerged as magnets for Russia’s wealthy.
Bloomberg News

Andrey Melnichenko was in a bind. Squeezed by European sanctions targeting Russian billionaires, one of Russia’s richest men needed a safe jurisdiction to protect the businesses he’d built. He found it in the United Arab Emirates. Moscow-based coal producer SUEK and Zug, Switzerland-based fertilizer firm EuroChem, both founded by Melnichenko, are opening local trading units in the Gulf oil exporter, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. The 50-year-old resigned from the boards of both companies ahead of EU sanctions imposed over his alleged ties to the Kremlin. Swiss authorities said in May they’d unfrozen EuroChem’s accounts after Melnichenko transferred ownership to his wife.
Reuters

BEIJING, June 1 (Reuters) - The Chinese military said on Wednesday it had conducted a combat "readiness patrol" in the seas and airspace around Taiwan in recent days, saying it was a necessary action to respond to "collusion" between Washington and Taipei. China, which claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has stepped up its military manoeuvres around the island over the past two years or so, as it seeks to pressure Taipei to accept its sovereignty claims. China has been particularly unhappy with U.S. support for Taiwan.
Sam Meredith

Some members of the energy alliance OPEC+ are considering whether to suspend Russia from an oil production deal, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed OPEC delegates. The news, reported Tuesday, comes at a time when non-OPEC leader Russia, a major player in global energy markets, faces a barrage of Western sanctions and a partial oil ban from the European Union in the wake of the onslaught in Ukraine. OPEC delegates are reportedly concerned about the growing economic pressure on Russia and its ability to pump more crude to cool soaring prices.
Story by Reuters and Susanne Gargiulo

Danes vote on Wednesday to decide whether to join the European Union’s defense policy, potentially becoming the final hold-out in the bloc to sign up as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forces countries to radically reassess their security. Denmark is the only member of the 27 nation bloc that is not a part of its Common Security and Defense Policy. The Scandinavian nation of nearly 6 million secured exemptions to that policy in a 1993 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the groundwork for the modern EU. If the notoriously EU-critical Danes vote to abolish the opt-out, as polls suggest will be the case, it would mark another important symbolic shift in defense policy for Europen states after Russia launched the invasion in February. After decades of holding out, Finland and Sweden finally applied to join NATO in May, each citing the war in Ukraine as a motivating factor.
Some Europeans are already paying more than twice as much for gas as Americans and now they've agreed to new sanctions on Russian oil, their biggest source of fossil fuel, that is likely to drive prices even higher.
By Nectar Gan, CNN

Hong Kong CNN  — The skyscrapers lit up, roads filled with traffic, and young people drank and danced in the streets as fireworks boomed overhead. Shanghai celebrated Wednesday with a long-awaited burst of life, as the government lifted its city-wide lockdown. But the process of reopening is likely to be slow and painful, as residents in the financial hub contend with the trauma of the past two months. For Henry Shi, a 30-year-old photographer who ventured out of his community on Tuesday afternoon, the first thing that struck him was the ambient noise of the city. “The city has gone really quiet as everyone stayed home. Now, the noises are back, from cars roaring on the streets and people bustling about – it feels as if I’ve woken from a long slumber.”
Shippers and refiners hide origin of Russian oil, and some is getting into the U.S.
By Anna Hirtenstein and Benoit Faucon

Europe just targeted Russian crude with its toughest sanctions yet, but shippers and refiners are getting the oil to market by obscuring its origins. Some fuels believed to be partially made from Russian crude landed in New York and New Jersey last month. The cargoes were brought through the Suez Canal and across the Atlantic from Indian refineries, which have been big buyers of Russian oil, according to shipping records, Refinitiv data and analysis by Helsinki-based think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
Sam Meredith

U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to send Ukraine more advanced rocket systems and munitions to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield. The White House had been hesitant to send the weapons, which have long been requested by Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Russian bombing in the front-line eastern city of Sievierodonetsk as “insanity” given the presence of a large-scale chemical plant. Residents of Sievierodonetsk have been warned not to leave bomb shelters due to the risk posed by toxic fumes.
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