Puerto de la Estaca, Spain — Rescue teams on Sunday resumed searching for at least 48 migrants who went messing the day before when their boat overturned just as it was being rescued off Spain’s Canary Islands, killing at least nine people.

Hopes of finding survivors were slim as sea rescue teams searched the waters off El Hierro, an island in the Atlantic archipelago.

It is the latest in a series of such disasters off the coast of Africa.

“The search operation is resuming,” Spain’s maritime rescue organisation told AFP.

The 48 are “presumed dead,” Canaries regional president Fernando Clavijo told journalists on Saturday night.

More bodies will likely appear “over the next two, three days,” washed up by the current, he added.

Twenty-seven migrants were rescued and nine bodies recovered after the boat, which had set out from Nouadhibou in Mauritania, some 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) away, overturned off El Hierro.

The tragedy hit when rescuers arrived to assist the migrants after they themselves called emergency services, Spanish officials said.

Migrants rushed to one side of the precarious boat, causing it to tip.

The migrants “had gone two days without food or water”, which may have fueled their panic, Anselmo Pestana, head of the Canary Islands prefecture, told journalists in the port of La Estaca.

Spanish government sources said the boat may have been carrying up to 90 people, instead of 84 as originally announced, which could put the number of missing at more than 50.

This disaster follows the death of 39 migrants in early September when their boat sank off Senegal while attempting a similar crossing to the Canaries, from where migrants hope to reach mainland Europe.

Thousands of migrants have died in recent years setting off from west Africa to reach Europe via the Atlantic aboard overcrowded and often dilapidated boats.

 
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KYIV — More than 100 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russia Sunday, officials said, sparking a wildfire and setting an apartment block alight in one of the largest barrages seen over Russian skies since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that it had shot down 125 drones overnight across seven regions. The southwestern region of Volgograd came under particularly heavy fire, with 67 Ukrainian drones reportedly downed by Russian air defenses.

Seventeen drones were also seen over Russia’s Voronezh region, where falling debris damaged an apartment block and a private home, said local governor Aleksandr Gusev. Images on social media showed flames rising from the windows of the top floor of a high-rise building. No casualties were reported.

A further 18 drones were reported over Russia’s Rostov region, where falling debris sparked a wildfire, said Gov. Vasily Golubev.

He said that the fire did not pose a threat to populated areas, but that emergency services were fighting to extinguish the blaze, which had engulfed 20 hectares (49.4 acres) of forest.

Meanwhile, 13 civilians were injured in an overnight barrage on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia Sunday after Ukrainian military leaders warned that Moscow could be preparing for a new military offensive in the country’s south.

The city was targeted by Russian guide bombs in 10 separate attacks that damaged a high-rise building and several residential homes, regional governor Ivan Fedorov wrote on his official Telegram channel. More people could still be trapped beneath the rubble, he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said that the Zaporizhzhia attack had damaged the city’s transport links. “Today, Russia struck Zaporizhzhia with aerial bombs. Ordinary residential buildings were damaged and the entrance of one building was destroyed. The city’s infrastructure and railway were also damaged,” Zelenskyy said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“In total, 13 people were injured, and two were rescued from under the rubble. I thank all the emergency services for their rapid response and providing necessary assistance. The rubble clearing is still ongoing.”

The attacks come after the Ukrainian military warned Saturday that Russian forces may be preparing for offensive operations in the wider Zaporizhzhia region. Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command, said that Russia was amassing personnel in this direction.

Ukraine’s air force also reported that 22 Russian drones were launched over the country overnight. It said that 15 were shot down in Ukraine’s Sumy, Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv, and Odesa regions, and that five more were destroyed using electronic defenses. The fate of the remaining two drones was not specified.
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VIENNA — Austrians began voting on Sunday in a general election that could see the far-right narrowly beat the conservatives for a historic win in the Alpine EU nation.

The Freedom Party (FPOe), which topped several pre-election opinion polls, has been in government several times but has never topped a national vote, though even if it wins, it is uncertain whether it would be able to form a government.

Since sharp-tongued Herbert Kickl took over the graft-tainted party in 2021, it has seen its popularity rebound on voter anger over migration, inflation and COVID restrictions, in line with far-right parties elsewhere in Europe.

“I want to vote for Kickl from the bottom of my heart. He needs to solve the problem of migration,” Angela Erstic, 69, a doctor, told AFP at a final FPOe rally in central Vienna late Friday.

Cementing the FPOe’s image as an anti-establishment party, Kickl, 55, has campaigned on slogans, such as “Courageously try something new.” The party now stands at 27% of support in opinion polls.

The ruling conservative People’s Party (OevP) has been lagging behind, but its leader, Chancellor Karl Nehammer, 51, has managed to narrow the gap in recent weeks.

Promising “stability instead of chaos,” the OeVP is at 25% support in the latest polls.

‘Different this time’

Polling booths began opening at 7 a.m. and the last ones are due to close at 7 p.m. Projections based on postal voting and vote counts from stations that close earlier should be announced shortly after that.

More than 6.3 million people of Austria’s nine million inhabitants are eligible to vote.

“It is a decisive election,” Rachel Schwarzboeck, 74, an Austrian retiree with Jewish and Polish roots, told AFP, adding that she would not vote for the FPOe — a party formed by former Nazis.

“I don’t want a Nazi regime in power in Austria,” she said.

Long a political force in Austria, the FPOe’s first government involvement in 2000 under the conservatives set off widespread protests and sanctions from Brussels.

Since then, far-right parties have been on the rise throughout Europe, with outgoing governments largely on the defense after a series of crises, including the corona pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“This time it will be different, this time, we’re going to come out on top in this election. This time, we will succeed,” Kickl told a throng of cheering supporters in front of Vienna’s main cathedral on Friday.

In his speech, he once again slammed EU sanctions against Russia, espoused the far-right concept of “remigration” that calls for expelling people of non-European ethnic backgrounds deemed to have failed to integrate, and raged against the outgoing government.

The conservative OeVP’s support has plunged from more than 37% in the last national election in 2019.

Their junior coalition partner, the Greens, now stand at 8% in opinion polls, or almost half that which they received in 2019.

No ‘people’s chancellor’

But analysts widely predict even if the FPOe wins the most seats, it will not have enough seats or partners to form a government.

Nehammer has repeatedly reiterated his refusal to work under Kickl, who has called himself the future “Volkskanzler,” the people’s chancellor, as Adolf Hitler was termed in the 1930s.

Thwarting a Kickl chancellorship could be an unprecedented three-party coalition headed by the OeVP with the Social Democrats, who are polling at just above 20%, and a third party, probably the liberal NEOS.

If the OeVP — which has been part of every government since 1987 — wins the most seats or performs almost as strongly as the FPOe, analysts see a possibility of a coalition with the far-right as a junior partner.

The two parties’ views converge “on many subjects”, and “creative solutions” could be found to deal with Kickl, Andreas Eisl, researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute, told AFP.

Both past OeVP-FPOe governments have been short-lived.

The last one, headed by charismatic then-OeVP leader Sebastian Kurz, collapsed over a spectacular FPOe corruption scandal in 2019, after just a year and a half in power.
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UNITED NATIONS — European, Arab and Islamic nations have launched an initiative to strengthen support for a Palestinian state and prepare for a future after the war in Gaza and escalating conflict in Lebanon, Norway’s foreign minister said Friday.

Espen Barth Eide told The Associated Press that “there is a growing consensus in the international community from Western countries, from Arab countries, from the Global South, that we need to establish a Palestinian Authority, a Palestinian government, a Palestinian state — and the Palestinian state has to be recognized.”

Eide said many issues need to be addressed, including the security interests of Israel and the Palestinians, recognition and normalization of relations after decades of conflict and the demobilization of Hamas as a military group.

“These are pieces of a bigger puzzle,” Norway’s chief diplomat said. “And you can’t just come in there with one of these pieces, because it only works if all the pieces are laid in place.”

But even if the puzzle is completed, it’s unlikely to gain traction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, Eide believes that after decades of failed or stalled negotiations, “we need to take a new approach” to achieving an independent Palestinian state.

To accelerate work on these issues, Eide said almost 90 countries attended a meeting Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly’s current gathering of world leaders. He and Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister co-chaired the session to launch “The Global Alliance for the Implementation of a Palestinian State and a Two-State Solution.”

“We have to see how we can come out of this deadlock and try to use this deep crisis also as an opportunity to move forward,” Eide told a U.N. Security Council meeting on Gaza later Friday.

Norway is the guarantor of the 1993 Oslo Accords, hailed as a breakthrough in the decades-long conflict between Arabs and Jews, which created the Palestinian Authority and set up self-rule areas in the Palestinian Authority. Eide said more than 30 years later, Israel’s “occupation” is continuing, and there are no negotiations leading to a final settlement and an independent Palestinian state, which led to Norway’s decision in May to recognize a Palestinian state.

Eide brought up the alliance again Saturday during his address to the annual meeting of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, stressing that “while cease-fires in Gaza and Lebanon are most urgently needed, ending hostilities must not be confused with lasting solutions.”

He again called on the 44 U.N. member nations that haven’t done so to recognize the state of Palestine and allow it to become a full member of the United Nations.

And he called on “everyone who can, to help to build Palestine’s institutions, and on regional actors to help embed a political settlement in a broader regional framework.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud told the U.N. Security Council on Friday that his country, the joint Islamic-Arab ministerial committee, Norway and the European Union launched the alliance “because we feel responsible to act to change the reality of the conflict without delay.”

He told the assembly Saturday that the coalition aimed “to promote the two-state solution,” calling on all countries to join the group and to recognize the Palestinians as an independent state.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell urged all countries to take practical measures “to bring about the free Palestine next to a secure Israel.”

First meetings will be in Saudi Arabia and Belgium

Eide said this new effort is built on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, “but updated to today’s reality.”

The 2002 initiative, endorsed by the Arab League and the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, offered Israel normalized relations in exchange for a full withdrawal from territories captured in 1967. 
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united nations — Russia’s foreign minister reinforced the Kremlin’s disagreements with the West in his United Nations General Assembly remarks Saturday and showed no interest in a genuine peace with Ukraine. 

“I’m not going to talk here about the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is,” Sergey Lavrov said. 

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin revised his government’s nuclear doctrine, in a clear attempt to discourage the West from lifting its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons to strike inside Russian territory. 

Lavrov dismissed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 10-point peace formula as “doomed,” and said a resolution of the conflict is not possible unless the root causes of the crisis, as Moscow sees them, are addressed. 

The veteran diplomat also took the opportunity to repeat complaints about NATO, Washington, London and the European Union. 

His speech came a few hours after Lebanese Hezbollah acknowledged the death of their leader, Hassan Nasrallah, following a series of targeted Israeli airstrikes in Beirut. 

“We are particularly concerned by the now almost commonplace practice of political killings, as once again, took place yesterday in Beirut,” he told the assembly. 

At a news conference following his speech, Lavrov expressed concerns about a wider regional war. 

“A lot of people say that Israel wants to create the grounds to drag the U.S. directly into this,” he said. “And so, to create these grounds, is trying to provoke Iran and Hezbollah. So the Iran leadership, I think, are behaving extremely responsibly, and this is something that we should take due note of.” 

War in Ukraine 

In February 2022, Russia and China declared a “no limits partnership,” just days before President Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The United States has repeatedly accused China of assisting the Kremlin with its war. 

“China, another permanent member of this council, is the top provider of machine tools, microelectronics, and other items that Russia is using to rebuild, to restock, to ramp up its war machine and sustain its brutal aggression,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday at a high-level U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine that President Zelenskyy attended. 

Beijing denies the charge and has sought to distance itself publicly from Moscow on the war. 

“The top priority is to commit to no expansion of the battlefield, no escalation of fighting, and no provocation by any party, and push for de-escalation of the situation as soon as possible,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the General Assembly on Saturday. 

Beijing says it is committed to playing “a constructive role” in ending the conflict. 

China and ‘multipolar world’ 

On the margins of the annual U.N. meetings, China and Brazil launched what they are calling the group of friends for peace for Ukraine, which includes several other countries from the global south. 

In a sign of China’s desire to be recognized as a global economic and political power, Wang said international relations should be “more democratic.” 

“Gone are the days when one or two major powers call the shots on everything,” he said. “We should advocate an equal and orderly multipolar world and see that all countries, regardless of their size, have their own place and role in the multipolar system.” 

Wang also called for full U.N. membership for the Palestinians and urged implementation of a two-state solution. 

“There must not be any delay in reaching a comprehensive cease-fire, and the fundamental way out lies in the two-state solution,” he said. 

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi asked the assembly how the international community could believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim on Friday that “Israel yearns for peace.”   

“Yesterday, while he was here, Israel conducted an unprecedented, massive air attack on Beirut. Prime Minister Netanyahu wants the war to continue. We must stop that! I repeat, we must stop that! We must pressure Israel to come back to a political solution for a two-state solution,” she said to much applause. 

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister also expressed concern about regional stability following the escalation in Lebanon. 

“We call on all parties to show wisdom and to show restraint in order to avoid a true war breaking out in the region,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud said. 
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brussels — Pope Francis’ burdensome trip through Belgium reached new lows Saturday when defiant Catholic university women demanded to his face a “paradigm change” on women’s issues in the church and then expressed deep disappointment when Francis dug in. 

The Catholic University of Louvain, the Francophone campus of Belgium’s storied Catholic university, issued a scathing statement after Francis visited and repeated his view that women are the “fertile” nurturers of the church, inducing grimaces in his audience. 

“UC Louvain expresses its incomprehension and disapproval of the position expressed by Pope Francis regarding the role of women in the church and society,” the statement said, calling the pope’s views “deterministic and reductive.” 

Francis’ trip to Belgium, ostensibly to celebrate the university’s 600th anniversary, was always going to be difficult, given Belgium’s legacy of clerical sexual abuse and secular trends that have emptied churches in the once staunchly Catholic country. 

Francis got an earful Friday about the abuse crisis starting with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander Croos and continuing on down to the victims themselves. 

But it’s one thing for the pope to be lambasted by the liberal prime minister for the church’s mishandling of priests who raped children. It’s quite another to be openly criticized by the Catholic university that invited him and long was the Vatican’s intellectual fiefdom in Belgium. 

Church needs ‘paradigm shift,’ say students

The students made an impassioned plea to Francis for the church to change its view of women. It is an issue Francis knows well: He has made some changes during his 11-year pontificate, allowing women to serve as acolytes, appointing several women to high-ranking positions in the Vatican, and saying women must have greater decision-making roles in the church. 

But he has ruled out ordaining women as priests and has refused so far to budge on demands to allow women to serve as deacons, who perform many of the same tasks as priests. He has taken the women’s issue off the table for debate at the Vatican’s upcoming three-week synod, or meeting, because it’s too thorny to be dealt with in such a short time. He has punted it to theologians and canonists to chew over into next year. 

In a letter read aloud on stage with the pope listening attentively, the students noted that Francis’ landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no women theologians and “exalts their maternal role and forbids them access to ordained ministries.” 

“Women have been made invisible. Invisible in their lives, women have also been invisible in their intellectual contributions,” the students said. 

“What, then, is the place of women in the church?” they asked. “We need a paradigm shift, which can and must draw on the treasures of spirituality as much as on the development of the various disciplines of science.” 

Francis said he liked what they said, but repeated his frequent refrain that “the church is woman,” only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus, and that men and women were complementary. 

“Woman is fertile welcome. Care. Vital devotion,” Francis said. “Let us be more attentive to the many daily expressions of this love, from friendship to the workplace, from studies to the exercise of responsibility in the church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to the service of others and the building up of the kingdom of God.” 

Louvain said such terminology had no place in a university or society today. It emphasized the point with the entertainment for the event featuring a jazz rendition of Lady Gaga’s LGBTQ+ anthem “Born This Way.” 

“UC Louvain can only express its disagreement with this deterministic and reductive position,” the statement said. “It reaffirms its desire for everyone to flourish within it and in society, whatever their origins, gender or sexual orientation. It calls on the church to follow the same path, without any form of discrimination.” 

The comment followed a speech Friday by the rector of the Dutch campus of the university in which he ventured that the church would be a much more welcoming place if women could be priests. 

The university’s back-to-back criticism was especially significant as Francis was long held up in Europe as a beacon of progressive hope following the conservative papacies of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. 

Pope prays at king’s tomb

Yet Francis toed the conservative line earlier in the day too. 

He went to the royal crypt in the Church of Our Lady to pray at the tomb of King Baudouin, best known for having refused to give royal assent, one of his constitutional duties, to a parliament-approved bill legalizing abortion. 

Baudouin stepped down for one day in 1990 to allow the government to pass the law, which he would otherwise have been required to sign, before he was reinstated as king. 

Francis praised Baudouin’s courage when he decided to “leave his position as king to not sign a homicidal law,” according to the Vatican summary of the private encounter, which was attended by Baudouin’s nephew, King Philippe, and Queen Mathilde. 

The pope then referred to a new legislative proposal to extend the legal limit for an abortion in Belgium, from 12 weeks to 18 weeks after conception. The bill failed at the last minute because parties in government negotiations considered the timing inopportune. 

Francis urged Belgians to look to Baudouin’s example in preventing such a law and added that he hoped the former king’s beatification cause would move ahead. 
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paris — Hundreds of people came out Saturday in Paris, marching in support of the right to abortion for women across the world, just six months after France became the first country to guarantee in its constitution a woman’s right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy. 

The protest, organized by civil society groups to mark International Safe Abortion Day, also called for greater and easier access to abortion in France, denouncing budget cuts, staff reductions and the closure of abortion centers and maternity wards, which organizers say all contribute to penalizing women. 

Sarah Durocher, president of France’s not-for-profit family planning services, said French women sometimes must travel to another region to access the medical services needed to abort, denouncing the “obstacle course” they sometimes face. 

Thibault Thomas, 28, said the ongoing trial of a man who has confessed to drugging his wife so that dozens of men could rape her while she was unconscious, was one of the reasons that motivated him to attend the protest Saturday. 

“There’s a mood in France, a particular context with the Mazan trial,” he said, referring to the name of the small Provence town where the couple had bought their retirement home, and where the repeated rapes occurred. 

“This sweeps away all the excuses, or all the mitigating circumstances that we thought could have existed before,” Thomas said. “In fact, it is something broader, generalized.” 

Earlier this year, France became the only country to explicitly guarantee a woman’s right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, when lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a bill to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution. 

Abortion in France has been legal since 1975 and enjoys wide support across most of the political spectrum. 

Enshrining the right in the Constitution sought to prevent the kind of rollback seen in the United States in recent years. 

Still, many in the protest Saturday said the right to abort could never be taken for granted, especially at a time when far-right nationalist parties are gaining influence in France and other European countries. 

“Every time the far right comes to power, sexual and reproductive rights are threatened. I don’t see why there would be a French exception,” said Durocher, stressing that every nine minutes, a woman dies somewhere in the world for not having been able to access safe abortion. “So obviously these rights are threatened.” 

Also in the Saturday march was a small organization representing Colombian women in Paris, carrying a large purple banner with a feminist sign. 

“In France, fortunately, it is enshrined in the constitution. But we know that when we exert pressure in France or in Latin America, we also help all women to say, ‘We are not alone,'” said 49-year-old Talula Rodriguez. “We’re all going to fight for rights, rights over our bodies.” 
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WARSAW, Poland — The death toll in Poland from recent floods rose to nine after two more bodies were found, the national police chief said Saturday. 

One person is still missing, police chief Marek Boron said during a government meeting on the effects of the floods that hit southwestern Poland earlier this month. 

The floods following torrential rains inundated houses and damaged bridges and roads in the towns of Stronie Slaskie, Nysa and many villages in the area. More than 20 people have died in Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe from the floods. 

A German citizen is among the dead in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said earlier this week. 

In the wake of the floods, Poland’s 2025 draft budget will set aside $836 million as a reserve for dealing with natural disasters, the government said Saturday. 

The worst floods in at least two decades left many towns in southwestern Poland submerged, and the government plans to free up millions of dollars from the budget and European Union funds to deal with the aftermath. 

The deluge has also compounded the financial worries of a government facing the prospect of EU budget discipline measures. 

In a statement published after the government adopted the 2025 budget with changes due to the floods, it said that the reserve for counteracting and removing the effects of natural disasters would be increased. 

It said that around $5 million in EU funds would be allocated to helping regions affected by the floods. 

Finance Minister Andrzej Domanski said that no decision has been made on whether changes to the 2024 budget would be necessary. 
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Islamabad — Taliban leaders in Afghanistan have defended their Islamist rule amid intensified accusations of “gender-based” discrimination against women and girls at this week’s U.N. General Assembly.

“The situation is not as it is portrayed and propagated abroad,” Maulavi Abdul Kabir, the Taliban deputy prime minister for political affairs, asserted in an interview with an Afghan television channel aired Friday.

Kabir’s comments came a day after nearly two dozen countries jointly supported Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia in their initiative to hold the Taliban accountable for their alleged campaign to systematically exclude women from public life since the Taliban regained power in 2021.

The de facto Afghan rulers have imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law, known as Sharia. The enforcement includes banning girls’ secondary school education, prohibiting Afghan women from most workplaces, and requiring them not to speak aloud and to cover their faces and bodies in public.

Kabir, while speaking to the local Ariana News station on Friday, asserted that Western allegations of the Taliban driving women out of public spaces were misplaced, insisting that the human rights of all Afghans are protected under Islamic principles.

“Education for girls beyond the sixth grade and at universities is currently suspended,” he responded when asked when secondary schools would reopen for girls. “The Islamic Emirate has not decided to keep them closed indefinitely, nor has the cabinet approved any such policy,” Kabir reiterated, using the official title of their government in Kabul.

However, the Taliban deputy prime minister said that women are allowed to pursue education in religious seminaries, known as madrassas, across Afghanistan, including in the capital.

“There are female teachers. It is a single-sex Islamic educational system that requires hijab under the prevailing societal norms. It also permits women to pursue medical education,” Kabir stated.

He said that the Taliban government employs 85,000 women in health, immigration, education, passport and other departments. “There are hospitals in Kabul being run by female directors,” Kabir said.

Nations urge Taliban to address concerns

Countries such as Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Finland, Honduras, Ireland, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malawi, Morocco, Moldova and Romania are supporting the four-nation push to start proceedings against the Taliban at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The United States in not a member of the ICJ.

In their joint statement issued in New York on Thursday, these countries urged the Taliban to respect international treaties on eliminating discrimination against women, to which Afghanistan is a party.

They hailed the initiative spearheaded by Germany, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands to push proceedings against the Taliban, urging the de facto Taliban authorities to address international concerns or face the legal challenge.

“This action is without prejudice to our firm position that we do not politically recognize the Taliban de facto authorities as the legitimate representation of the Afghan population,” the statement stressed. “Afghanistan’s failure to fulfill its human rights treaty obligations is a key obstacle to normalization of relations.”

The Taliban government is not formally recognized by any country, nor is it allowed to represent Afghanistan at the United Nations, mainly over human rights concerns.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on the sidelines of this week’s General Assembly that the Taliban’s treatment of women can be compared to “some of the most egregious systems of oppression in recent history.”

“We will continue to amplify the voices of Afghan women and call for them to play a full role in the country’s life, both inside its borders and on the global stage,” he said.

Kabir criticized the U.N. for not granting the Afghanistan seat at the world body to the Taliban.

“We have met our obligations,” he said. “The Islamic Emirate controls the entire geographical territory of the country. People are satisfied with us, and we are governing with the help of the people.”
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