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KYIV: Russia launched a drone attack overnight on Kyiv, with air defense units engaged in repelling the strikes, Ukrainian military officials said on Monday on the Telegram messaging app.
Reuters’ witnesses reported a series of loud explosions in what sounded like air defense systems in operation.
KUALA LUMPUR: The Muslim World League and the Malaysian prime minister hosted a conference of religious leaders in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday to urge them to rise up and act for peace in the face of the genocide in Gaza.
The Second International Summit of Religious Leaders, which gathered global authorities representing all major religions, was organized by the Malaysian Prime Minister’s Office and the MWL.
Themed “The Role of Religious Leaders in Resolving Conflicts,” it was opened by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and MWL Secretary-General Dr. Mohammed bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa.
During the summit, speakers representing Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist communities, discussed the role of religious leaders in standing up to violence and conflict, religious diplomacy and a special session on Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
“This summit comes to place religious leaders before a historic responsibility regarding the values of their respective faiths, values that have been declared and must be actively applied in order to contribute to building global peace and harmony,” Al-Issa said in his opening speech.
“What is happening today in the Gaza Strip — genocide and heartbreaking famine witnessed by the entire international community — is a dangerous precedent in the principles of human rights.
“Since the issuance of the Universal Charter of the UN, our world has never seen anything like it. Sadly, this casts doubt on the credibility of international commitments.”
Israel has killed at least 62,895 Palestinians in its attacks on Gaza since October 2023.
The true death toll is feared to be much higher, as many people have died due to injury and lack of access to health care and food. This has been caused by the Israeli military’s destruction of most of Gaza’s infrastructure, the blocking of medical aid, and deliberate strategy of starvation that has pushed Gaza to famine.
Al-Issa called on the conference’s participants to focus not only on “abstract preaching,” but also to be “active in shaping peace,” and guiding their followers toward a joint commitment to human dignity.
Anwar also appealed to representatives of world religions to “take up the task” and act.
“Every day you see babies being killed, houses and people being bombed ... What on earth is happening in this world?” he said.
“Where is the voice of conscience that stands for our faith and moral values ... We have to rise up and religious leaders have to be more asserting in their views.”
About 1,500 guests attended the conference, including 150 foreign delegates from 54 countries.
The 2025 summit was the second international event held by the MWL in the Malaysian capital this week. It was preceded by the inaugural forum for scholars of Islamic jurisprudence held in the Malaysian capital by the MWL’s Islamic Fiqh Council.
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s anti-graft agency said on Thursday that its detention facilities have run out of space to hold corruption suspects, following a series of high-profile sting operations this year.
Graft is a longstanding problem in Southeast Asia’s largest economy, with Indonesia ranked 99 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index.
The Corruption Eradication Commission has conducted at least five sting operations in 2025, including last week’s arrest of Deputy Manpower Minister Immanuel Ebenezer, making him the first member of President Prabowo Subianto’s cabinet to be arrested for graft.
“The ideal capacity for KPK’s detention center … is 51 people. Right now, we have 57 people in custody,” KPK spokesperson Budi Prasetyo said.
“Even though it is full now, it does not hinder the eradication of corruption that KPK is doing.”
Prabowo, who took office last October, has pledged to step up efforts to eradicate corruption, which he says drained government finances.
“(Indonesia has) extraordinary wealth, but there are too many thieves stealing money that belongs to the people. And for that, I am determined to put things in order,” he said during an event in Jakarta in June.
But the recent string of arrests is “not comparable to the number of alleged corruption cases” in Indonesia, said political analyst and anti-corruption activist Ray Rangkuti.
“We’re probably looking at one-tenth or even less than that, in terms of the actual number of corruption allegations that are widespread in Indonesia,” he told Arab News.
“Why didn’t KPK make a bigger detention center from the start? People know that here in Indonesia, anything is corruptible.”
Rangkuti viewed KPK’s recent arrests as “small fish,” highlighting Ebenezer’s case.
“They just arrested the deputy minister. But is it just him doing graft? There are 11 people arrested in connection to that case, but it’s a trivial one,” he said.
Anti-graft investigators said Ebenezer and other defendants benefited from illegal fees for the processing of safety permits needed by construction, mining or manufacturing employees to get work.
They are accused of charging 6 million rupiah, or $367.59, for the documents, far higher than the official rate of 250,000 rupiah, the proceeds of which were later distributed to ministry officials.
“My impression is that they are racing for quantity, not quality,” Rangkuti said. “So they’re sending a lot of people to jail, even though the cases are relatively small.”
NEW YORK: People from all over the world are expected to pay tribute to Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge who found online fame as an empathetic jurist and host of ” Caught in Providence,” at memorial services beginning Thursday in his home state of Rhode Island.
Caprio, who won hearts with the folksy humor and compassion he brought to his courtroom, had pancreatic cancer and died on Aug. 20 at 88.
His family said they had been moved by the outpouring of support since Caprio’s passing and the “thousands of requests from people around the world” who wanted to pray with the family at Caprio’s service.
Caprio’s son, David Caprio, welcomed members of the public to attend his father’s visitation on Thursday and his Friday funeral Mass at Providence’s Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul, which will also be livestreamed on the former judge’s social media pages. In a phone interview with The Associated Press, he said supporters of his father were traveling to Rhode Island from as far as the Philippines to attend his services.
“Your love is really helping us through this difficult time,” David Caprio said in a video posted on social media.
Caprio billed his courtroom as a place “where people and cases are met with kindness and compassion.” He was known for dismissing tickets or showing kindness even when he handed out justice. The show, produced by his brother, ran for more than two decades on local television until being nationally syndicated in 2018. Caprio retired from the bench in 2023.
Clips from the show have had more than 1 billion views on social media. His most popular videos have been those where he calls children to the bench to help pass judgment on their parents. One shows him listening sympathetically to a woman whose son was killed and then dismissing her tickets and fines of $400.
According to his biography, Caprio came from humble beginnings, the second of three boys in an Italian immigrant family in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. He said learned compassion from his father, who would wake Caprio and his brother up at four in the morning to accompany him on his route delivering milk.
“I saw firsthand how other hardworking people couldn’t afford to pay their bill and I saw how my dad treated them, you know?” Caprio told journalist Adrienne Bankert while promoting his biography, “Compassion in Court: Life-Changing Stories from America’s Nicest Judge,” earlier this year. “His company ordered him to stop delivery if they missed paying for two weeks. He never stopped delivery. Never.”
In a 2017 interview with the AP, Caprio said he knows that his courtroom may be the only interaction with the justice system many people ever have. He wanted it to be a positive one.
“Whether it’s justified or not, I think there is distrust of the institutions of government,” he said. “I think there’s a sense that there’s lacking in understanding and compassion and kindness with the institutions of government ... I’m not trying to change the world, but I’m trying to do my part to dispel those thoughts, those feelings.”
Caprio’s funeral visitation will take place at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence on Thursday from 3 to 7 p.m. and be followed by a funeral Mass at Providence’s Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul on Friday at 10 a.m.
MOSCOW: The Kremlin said on Thursday that it was still interested in pursuing peace talks on Ukraine despite a large and deadly Russian overnight strike on Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials said the attack had killed at least 15 people, including four children, in a strike on the Ukrainian capital that President Volodymyr Zelensky said was Moscow’s answer to diplomatic efforts to end its war.
Asked if there was a contradiction between Moscow’s stated desire to make progress in peace talks and the attack, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that both sides were continuing to attack each other but that Russia was still interested in achieving its goals via diplomacy.
Russian forces were continuing to target Ukrainian military and military-related infrastructure, he said. Peskov has repeatedly said that Russia does not deliberately target civilians.
He said Ukraine was continuing its own strikes against Russian infrastructure too, including against civilian infrastructure.
“The special military operation continues. You can see that strikes on Russian infrastructure, often on Russian civilian infrastructure, by the Kyiv regime are also continuing.
“The Russian armed forces are also carrying out their tasks. As stated, they continue to strike military and military-related infrastructure.
The strikes are successful, the targets are being destroyed, and the special military operation continues. At the same time, Russia remains interested in continuing the negotiation process in order to achieve our goals through political and diplomatic means.”
LAHORE/SRINAGAR: Pakistan’s eastern towns of Chiniot and Hafizabad face a risk of catastrophic floods if an irrigation barrage crumbles on a major river upstream after heavy rains swelled it beyond capacity, officials warned on Thursday.
Nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan are battling torrential monsoon rains that have unleashed flash floods, swelled rivers and filled dams, with 60 deaths this month in Indian Kashmir, and Pakistan’s toll at 805 since late June.
Any flooding blamed on India stands to inflame relations between the archfoes, embroiled in a tense stand-off since a brief conflict in May that was their worst fighting in decades.
The waters of the Chenab river in Pakistan’s sprawling province of Punjab threatened to burst through a 3,300-foot (1,000-m) concrete barrage at Qadirabad that regulates flows, siphoning them into a canal irrigation network.
“It is a crisis situation,” said a technical expert at the National Disaster Management Authority, adding that the collapse of the barrage could wash away the towns, home to more than 2.8 million.
“Under the constant supervision of experts and administration, the water level is receding, but it is still not beyond danger levels,” added the official, who sought anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The threat comes as India’s release of excess water this week from its dams swelled river flows downstream in its neighbor’s breadbasket province of Punjab, home to half the population of 240 million.
Authorities said Pakistan evacuated more than 210,000 villagers near the rivers Ravi, Sutlej and Chenab that flow in from India, where heavy rain battered the northern region of Jammu, killing 60 people this month.
India routinely releases water from its dams when they get too full, with the excess flowing into Pakistan, accompanied by warnings from New Delhi, which calls them a humanitarian measure.
On Thursday, Pakistani officials said India passed on its third flood warning since Sunday, this time for the Sutlej, while the previous two concerned waters heading into Pakistan on the Ravi.
India’s water resources ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the matter.
More than 900,000 cusec of water passed through the Qadirabad distribution structure on the Chenab river, or 100,000 cusec in excess of its capacity, the provincial disaster management authority said.
A cusec is a flow of volume equivalent to one cubic foot, or 28 cubic liters, every second.
On Wednesday, authorities blew up part of the riverbank to release some water before it reached the barrage.
Twelve people had been killed this week in Punjab, said Marriyum Aurangzeb, a senior minister in the provincial government.
“As one nation, we will face this challenge together,” said Aurangzeb, standing on the banks of the swollen Ravi. “There is no need to panic.”
The waters of Pakistan’s eastern rivers join those of northern rivers in Punjab in the giant Indus river, to flow through the province of Sindh before emptying into the sea.
On the other side of the border, Himalayan river levels began to recede after days of heavy rains that triggered landslides and flooding in both countries, with forecasters expecting downpours to subside from Thursday.
