Pyongyang fails to launch a military satellite

Today's news: Closed-door meeting at the UN Security Council on the massacre in the Rafah tent city; An impending motion of no confidence in Premier Marape overshadows news of the giant landslide in Papua New Guinea; Hong Kong renounces plan to contain waste; In Chechnya Kadyrov chooses Daudov as the new premier.

NORTH KOREA

Pyongyang's announced rocket launch that was supposed to put a military satellite into orbit exploded in the air minutes after its launch. The launch took place last night from the Sohae base on the north-west coast of the country. The failure was attributed by the North Korean authorities to problems with the propellant. The launch came just hours after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese Premier Li Qiang held a trilateral summit in Seoul, reaffirming their commitment to promoting peace on the Korean peninsula.

GAZA-ISRAEL

At the request of Algeria, the UN Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting behind closed doors this afternoon on the situation in Rafah after the massacre caused by a tent city fire triggered by an Israeli air raid last night, in which at least 45 civilians died. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deadly attack a ‘tragic incident’ that his government is ‘investigating’. UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths replied that ‘calling it “a mistake” is a message that means nothing to those who were killed, to those who are grieving and to those trying to save lives’.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape is set to face a no-confidence motion in parliament after the opposition party appointed Rainbo Paita, a former finance minister who quit the government along with a group of MPs, as alternative premier. Newspapers in Port Moresby are dominated by this political clash, which overshadows the devastating landslide that buried an estimated 2,000 people in remote villages in Enga province on 24 May.

INDIA

At least 14 people died in the Indian state of Mizoram in the collapse of a quarry caused this morning by heavy rains caused by Cyclone Remal, which has been battering large parts of Bangladesh and India since Sunday with showers and wind gusts of 110 kilometres per hour. Nearly one million people have been evacuated from their homes.

HONG KONG

The Hong Kong government decided to postpone the entry into force of a new taxation system that was supposed to optimise waste collection. The plan (which has been discussed for 20 years) has failed in the trial phase and will therefore not come into effect in August as planned. According to the Environmental Protection Department, the municipal solid waste disposal rate in Hong Kong in 2022 was 1.51 kilograms per person per day. About 30% was food waste.

RUSSIA

In the rebalancing of the leadership in Chechnya, President Ramzan Kadyrov proposed his trusted Magomed Daudov, who had resigned as speaker of the Groznyj parliament, as the new head of the local government, in place of the less close Muslim Khučiev, without explaining the reasons for the changes. The premier by law replaces the president in the event of his sudden death, which is feared to happen to Kadyrov due to illness.

ARMENIA

After the tragedy of Iranian President Raisi, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pašinyan also risked crashing his state helicopter with which he was flying over the disputed border areas with Azerbaijan, but managed to make an emergency landing in the city of Vanadzor, and Pašinyan himself reassured everyone by saying that ‘everything is fine’.

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