Costs of Houthi Red Sea attacks becoming ‘deeply engrained’, says Maersk
The coming months are set to be challenging for businesses and shipping companies due to ongoing Houthi attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea, according to Danish shipping company Maersk MAERSKb.CO.
“The longer that this lasts, the more our costs will get deeply ingrained,” Maersk said in a statement, citing comments made by CEO Vincent Clerc. “We don’t know yet exactly how much of these costs we will recover and for how long. The higher rates we are seeing right now are of a temporary nature.”
Maersk and other shipping companies have chosen to divert vessels around southern Africa since December to avoid Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, causing significantly longer shipping times and rising costs.
The Iran-backed group says it has been carrying out the attacks to protest Israel’s war on Gaza.
Smoke rises after an explosion on the Greek-owned MV Tutor, that the Houthis say was the target of their attack in the Red Sea on June 12
Israel appoints new judge to ICJ who slammed court as ‘intellectually dishonest’
Israel has chosen to appoint a law professor – who has publicly accused the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of bias – as its new appointee, as an ad hoc judge, to the ICJ for South Africa’s genocide case at the UN court.
Ron Shapira, who is the rector of the Peres Academic Center in Israel’s Rehovot city and a law lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University, said in January that the ICJ court “falsely poses as neutral”.
“The consensus in Israel is that this entity embodies and takes to the extreme all the flaws of legal discourse in existence: intellectual dishonesty, manipulative use of ambiguous definitions, overly cumbersome tools for fact-checking and lie-debunking, and concealment of ulterior motives of the judges themselves via wording that falsely poses as neutral,” he wrote.
Shapira is set to replace Aharon Barak, a more experienced former Israeli chief justice who stepped down as a member of the UN court’s 15-judge panel last month, citing “personal family reasons”.
UN rapporteur praises Spain for joining ICJ genocide case against Israel
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, has welcomed Spain’s decision to join South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.
Albanese said she hoped the move by Spain was the beginning of more Western countries “taking similar actions” to “stand on the right side of history”.
“Words of condemnation are meaningless without action. In fact, decades of mere words have allowed Israel to escalate its lawlessness towards the Palestinians into #genocide,” she wrote on social media.
Kudos to #Spain for joining #SouthAfrica's genocide case against Israel at the @CIJ_ICJ. I hope this marks the beginning of more Western countries taking similar actions. It’s not too late to stand on the right side of history.
Words of condemnation are meaningless without…
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 1, 2024
Malaysia PM say country ready to join Indonesia in UN peacekeeping force for Palestine: Report
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has conveyed Malaysia’s willingness to cooperate with Indonesia in deploying UN peacekeepers to Palestine, should the UN mandate such an operation, Malaysia’s Bernama national news agency reports.
The topic of Malaysian and Indonesian participation in a UN peacekeeping force for Palestine was a key point of discussion during a telephone call between Anwar and Indonesia’s president-elect and Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto on Monday, Bernama reports.
Anwar also spoke of the potential for the Palestine peacekeeping collaboration “to be extended to the ASEAN region”, the news agency said.
