- The Guardian
- Issue #2060
PAKISTAN: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has agreed to provide $3 billion in a long-awaited bailout of the country’s impoverished economy. The nine-month agreement must be approved by the fund’s executive board, which is expected to make a final decision in mid-July, IMF official Nathan Porter said in a statement.
SOUTH AFRICA: President Cyril Ramaphosa has been cleared of any wrongdoing over a scandal involving the theft of more than $500,000 in US currency that had been stashed in a sofa at his game farm. Acting Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka said that Ramaphosa had not violated the ethics code for members of South Africa’s executive over the incident, which happened in 2020.
GERMANY: Leaders of the main opposition centre-right Union bloc last week called for voters to back them in two major state elections this autumn, claiming to be the best bet for stability and that backing the burgeoning far-right Alternative for Germany would bring no change. The 8th October elections in the southern state of Bavaria and neighbouring Hesse come halfway through centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s term.
FINLAND: The economic affairs minister in the new four-party centre-right coalition government resigned today after just ten days in the job over his alleged ties to the far-right. Vilhelm Junnila, a member of the populist anti-immigration Finns Party, stepped down in part for a speech related to a far-right memorial in the western city of Turku in 2019.
RWANDA: A court in France has convicted Philippe Hategekimana, a former Rwandan police officer, to life imprisonment after finding him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. Hategekimana’s crimes took place during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when Hutu militias killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutus. The prosecutors had described him as having played a central part in carrying out the killings.
UNESCO: The 193 members of UNESCO have voted to support the return of the United States to the UN cultural and scientific agency after a decade-long dispute sparked by the organisation’s move to include Palestine as a member. The US had announced that it wanted to return, five years after it withdrew from the agency during the presidency of Donald Trump.
GREECE: Opposition leader Alexis Tsipras announced his decision to step down after a crushing election defeat last month. Tsipras served as Greece’s prime minister from 2015 to 2019. In the general election, Tsipras’s Syriza party received just below 18 per cent of the vote while the winning New Democracy party topped 40 per cent.
POLAND: Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki insisted last week that his country would not be forced to accept European Union rules on migration, and he vowed to veto any plan that might force countries to take in refugees. “An attack on Europe is underway. Europe’s borders are not secure. The safety of the inhabitants of our continent is at stake,” Morawiecki said. He said that he would propose “a plan for secure borders” to EU leaders at a summit in Brussels.
