Today’s news: Japan remembers Abe a year after his assassination. Chinese scientists study climate change on Mars. Pablo Virgilio David was re-elected president of the Philippine bishops. Netanyahu accused pro-Iranian militias of kidnapping an Israeli researcher in Iraq. After the Novaja Gazeta journalist, they also attack a pro-pacifist lawyer in Russia.
INDIA-PAKISTAN
The Permanent Court of Arbitration (TPA) in The Hague rejected India’s objections against a dispute initiated by Pakistan over the use of water in the Indus river basin, reopening a procedure blocked for many years. Neighbors in South Asia have been at odds for decades over hydroelectric projects on this river and its tributaries. Pakistan complains that hydroelectric dams India plans to build upstream will reduce the flow of water that feeds 80% of its irrigated agriculture.
JAPAN
Today they have been celebrated all over Japan acts in commemoration of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, just one year after he was assassinated by a gunman in the city of Nara. The faithful brought flowers and offered prayers since morning at the place where he was killed; a memorial ceremony was also held at the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo, in the presence of his widow and Prime Minister Kishida. Meanwhile, Tetsuya Yamagami, the assassin who shot him for holding grudges over the politician’s ties to the Unification Church, is in jail and will not be tried before the beginning of 2024.
CHINA
An international research team led by Chinese scientists revealed that climatic changes were also registered on Mars. Proof of this are the stratigraphic sequences of the area where the Chinese Martian rover Zhurong landed in May 2021. According to the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), the research confirmed that wind processes registered changes in the Martian environment. with its axis of rotation and its glacial period, which will help to understand the ancient climate history of Mars and provide a reference for the evolution of climate on Earth.
PHILIPPINES
The bishop of the diocese of Kalookan, Pablo Virgilio David, 64, he was reelected for a second term at the head of the Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). The decision was made by the country’s 80 bishops who met in a plenary assembly in Kalibo, Aklan province. David will take office for his second and final term of another two years.
ISRAEL-IRAQ-IRAN
The Iraqi government has opened an investigation into the Kidnapping of Russian-Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov, which took place in March but had not been made public until a few days ago. Tsurkov disappeared when he traveled to Iraq to conduct research for Princeton University. “She is still alive and we hold Iraq responsible for her fate and well-being,” Prime Minister Netanyahu declared. According to the Israeli government, Tsurkov is being held by the pro-Iranian Shiite Kataib Hezbollah militia, which is part of the Hashed al-Shaabi forces, former paramilitaries that recently joined the Iraqi security forces.
RUSSIA
Some strangers attacked the Moscow lawyer Elena Ponomareva with violence and threw green paint on her, the “color of shame” used in Chechnya against the journalist from Novaja Gazeta, Elena Milasina. Ponomareva said that she had suffered damage to her sight, and declared that she is convinced that it is an act related to her professional activity, in which she also defends people accused of pacifist actions.
ORTHODOX
The president of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Court, the protoierej Vladislav Tsypin, declared that the Russian Orthodox Church does not recognize its former priests, Russians or from other countries such as Lithuania, who were reduced to the lay state and rehabilitated by the Patriarch of Constantinople. In particular, the reaction is related to the images of the Russian priest Ivan Koval, expelled for his pacifist views, in which he celebrates in a Constantinopolitan church.