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Japan’s hopes of achieving its first soft touchdown on the Moon by a private company were dashed Friday when the mission was aborted after an assumed crash-landing, the startup said.Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to make history as only the third private firm — and the first outside the United States — to achieve a controlled …

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Pilgrims were set to perform the last major ritual of the hajj — the “stoning of the devil” — on Friday, as Muslims around the globe celebrated the beginning of the Eid al-Adha holiday.Starting at dawn, the more than 1.6 million Muslims taking part in the pilgrimage will throw seven stones at each of three concrete walls symbolising the devil in the Mina valley, on the outskirts of the holy city of Mecca.The ritual commemorates Abraham’s stoning of the devil at the three spots where it is said Satan tried to dissuade him from obeying God’s order to sacrifice his son.This year’s hajj saw authorities implementing a range of heat mitigation efforts alongside a wide-ranging crackdown on illicit pilgrims — resulting in noticeably thinner crowds and a heavy security presence at holy sites in Mecca and surrounding areas.The measures were aimed at preventing a fatal repeat of last year’s hajj that saw 1,301 people die in temperatures that hit 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit).Saudi authorities said a majority of those deaths were among pilgrims who illegally snuck into Mecca and lacked access to accommodation and other services aimed to keep pilgrims safe and protected from the searing desert heat.Hajj permits are allocated to countries on a quota basis and distributed to individuals by a lottery system.But even for those who can secure them, the high costs spur many to attempt the hajj without a permit, even though they risk arrest and deportation if caught.The stoning ritual in the Mina valley was the scene of a fatal stampede in 2015, when 2,300 people were killed in one of the deadliest hajj disasters.Saudi Arabia earns billions of dollars a year from the hajj, and the lesser pilgrimage known as umrah, undertaken at other times of the year.The pilgrimages are also a source of prestige for the Saudi monarch, who is known as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina.The end of the hajj coincides with the beginning of Eid al-Adha — an annual feasting holiday marked by the slaughter of an animal — typically a goat, sheep, cow, bull or camel.

From wanted jihadist to statesman embraced by world leaders, Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has undergone a stunning transformation in just six months since ousting longtime strongman Bashar al-Assad.Born in 1982, Sharaa abandoned his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, trimmed his thick beard and swapped fatigues for a suit and tie since his Islamist coalition of forces seized Damascus on December 8.He was proclaimed interim president the following month, and later tasked with leading his country through a five-year transitional period under a temporary constitution that experts and rights groups said concentrates power in his hands.Appearing calm and soft-spoken, Sharaa has sought to shed many of the attributes that once defined him.Gone is the shadowy persona associated with a single mugshot released at the height of the US-led war in Iraq following his capture there by American forces.Videos posted online in recent weeks have shown him, a tall man, playing basketball in a shirt and tie alongside his foreign minister.Others show him driving his car in Damascus, or eating in a working-class restaurant to cheers from passers-by.”I think he has succeeded in his transformation,” said Jerome Drevon, a specialist in Islamist militancy at the International Crisis Group.In a matter of months, Sharaa has visited Europe and been “accepted on the whole in the (Middle East) region — even by countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that are not at all supporters of Islamists, much less jihadists”, he added.The reception Sharaa has received demonstrates “a real recognition of the new authorities”, he told AFP.- ‘No alternative’ -On Sharaa’s first trip to the West last month, he met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris.Just a week later during a trip to Riyadh, he shook hands with US President Donald Trump who announced Washington would lift sanctions on Syria, a triumph for the new authorities.Trump described Sharaa as a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”Sharaa remains under United Nations sanctions and a travel ban, and must request an exemption for all foreign trips.Drevon said that Arab and Western countries had made a pragmatic choice by supporting the young leader.”There are still security problems, there are tensions inside the country, but I think that most foreign countries recognise that right now, there is no alternative,” he said.Sharaa has set up in what was once Assad’s presidential palace overlooking Damascus, receiving a steady stream of senior foreign officials.During a Muslim holiday around two months ago, he and his wife Latifa al-Droubi, who now appears with him in public on occasion, welcomed Syrian orphans there.While seeking to distance himself from his guerrilla past, he has sought to extract political capital from his rebel roots.Last week, he presided over a cabinet meeting, saying: “We came to power through revolution — we aren’t used to luxurious palaces.””Until two years ago, I didn’t even have an office. We used to meet in the car, on the street, under an olive tree,” he added, referring to his time in the former rebel bastion of Idlib in northwestern Syria.- ‘Pragmatic radical’ -In January, authorities announced the dissolution of all armed groups, including Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad.HTS was known as the Al-Nusra Front before it broke ties with the Al-Qaeda jihadist network in 2016.Sharaa is “a pragmatic radical”, said Thomas Pierret, a specialist in political Islam.Born in Saudi Arabia, Sharaa is from a well-to-do Syrian family and was raised in Damascus’s upscale Mazzeh district. He started studying medicine but then became associated with underground Islamist circles.Following the US-led invasion of neighbouring Iraq in 2003, he and other Syrians crossed the border to join what they saw as a resistance to foreign occupation.He joined Al-Qaeda there, and was subsequently detained for five years.In March 2011, when the revolt against Assad’s rule erupted in Syria, Sharaa returned home and founded the Al-Nusra Front.A realist in his partisans’ eyes, an opportunist to his adversaries, Sharaa said in May 2015 that he had no intention of launching attacks against the West — unlike his adversaries in the Islamic State jihadist group.In 2017, Sharaa imposed a merger with HTS on rival Islamist groups in northwestern Syria, claiming control of swathes of Idlib province.HTS went on to develop a civil administration in the area, amid accusations of brutal abuses against those who dared dissent.

The suspect in a Molotov cocktail attack on a Jewish protest march in Colorado appeared in court Thursday facing more than 100 charges over an incident that injured 15 people.Mohamed Sabry Soliman is alleged to have thrown firebombs and sprayed burning gasoline at a group of people who had gathered Sunday in support of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.Prosecutors now say 15 people — eight women and seven men — were hurt in the attack in the city of Boulder. Three are still hospitalized.The oldest victim was 88 years old.Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian who federal authorities said was in the country illegally after overstaying a tourist visa, faces 28 attempted murder charges, as well as a bevvy of other counts relating to his alleged use of violence.He also faces a count of animal cruelty for a dog that was hurt, bringing to 118 the total number of criminal counts.Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty told reporters that he could face a centuries-long prison term if convicted.”The defendant is charged with attempted murder in the first degree as to 14 different victims,” he said.”If the defendant is convicted and those sentences run consecutively, that would be 48 years in state prison for each of the 14 victims, which comes to 672 years.”Two of the Soliman’s alleged victims — along with the dog — were at the court on Thursday.Soliman is also expected to be charged with federal hate crime offenses.Soliman’s immigration status has been at the center of President Donald Trump’s administration’s response to the attack.This week his wife and five children were detained by immigration agents as the White House took to social media to taunt them about an impending deportation.”Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids,” the official account posted on X.”Final Boarding Call Coming Soon.” But on Wednesday a judge imposed a temporary restraining order that bars any attempt to remove them from the country.Police who rushed to the scene of Sunday’s attack found 16 unused Molotov cocktails and a backpack weed sprayer containing gasoline that investigators say Soliman had intended to use as a makeshift flamethrower.In bystander videos, the attacker can be heard screaming “End Zionists!” and “Killers!” Sunday’s incident came less than two weeks after the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, where a 31-year-old suspect, who shouted “Free Palestine,” was arrested.

Israeli farmers whose dream of producing tequila was cut short by Hamas’s October 7 attack have returned to work along the Gaza border, ploughing fields and sowing seeds to bring their land back to life.With artillery fire and explosions booming in the distance, businessman Aviel Leitner and farmer Eran Braverman inspected their field of blue agave, hoping they would one day soon produce the country’s first-ever batch of tequila.Planted prior to the war sparked by the unprecedented October 2023 attack on communities in southern Israel, Leitner said the violence and subsequent chaos meant waiting until now to unveil their unique project.”We wanted to very much show that Israeli farmers had returned to the fields, that this war wasn’t going to stop them, that there were new crops growing in the Negev and that there is nothing sexier than tequila and mezcal and agave spirits,” he told AFP.Leitner said he was inspired to bring the plants to Israel following a family trip to Mexico.For him and Braverman, the survival of the exotic plants -– just like their complex transportation from Mexico to Israel — is nothing short of a miracle.- Taste of tequila -On October 7, 2023 militants attacked Kibbutz Alumim and other communities around it, burning down barns and greenhouses and destroying irrigation equipment. “We are about four kilometres from the (Gaza) fence and everything from the fence to Alumim was destroyed,” recalled Braverman, who said that 22 farm workers from Nepal and Thailand were murdered there, as were three soldiers who died defending the site.”When we heard what happened, we were very scared for the farmers and their families because we had grown close to them. It was very, very traumatic,” said Leitner.He was also concerned for his plants.The dry desert conditions and the drip irrigation technology meant the blue agave could survive without much care and somehow, the field was unaffected by the fighting.Now, the two men are counting down the days until the plants are ripe, as Leitner looks for a place to build his tequila distillery.”We’re hoping to start manufacturing in early winter 2025 and this will be the first agave spirit manufactured in the land of Israel,” Leitner said.- New crops -Danielle Abraham, executive director of the NGO Volcani International Partnerships, which assists Israeli farmers through its “Regrow” project, said communities in southern Israel were “determined to get back on their feet and grow back stronger.””They are trying to bring new crops, introduce new innovation and think about the future,” she said, adding that “they stood up after a disaster with such resolve.”Citing statistics from the kibbutz movement, Abraham said that farms in southern Israel were now back at close to 100 percent of their pre-October 2023 capacity, but were still undergoing challenges.”The ongoing war and the uncertainty is still taking a big toll mentally on the farmers,” she said.Sheila Gerber, who has run a botanical garden and cactus farm with her husband Yaakov for the past 30 years in the nearby Moshav Talmei Yosef cooperative, said visitors were still staying away.The fighting is on the other side of the border but the community still live in fear, said Gerber, who described how a recent explosion caused all the glass in one of their greenhouses to shatter.”It was horrifying. It was scary,” she said.  Hamas militants did not reach Talmei Yosef on October 7, after being repelled just outside the gates by members of a civilian security team.Gerber and her family were evacuated, and returned a few weeks later.”We came back because farmers come back — you can’t just leave everything to die,” she said, adding  that “almost all the farmers came back.”Gerber recalled how, until the Second Palestinian Intifada or uprising against Israel began in 2000, she and her family could visit Gaza.”When it was peaceful, it was very nice and we could go to the markets, we could go to the beach, we could take the kids, it was no problem,” she said. “But of course now we can’t and it’s very sad for everybody,” she added. “What will be the future, we really don’t know.” 

The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions on four judges at the International Criminal Court including over an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as it ramped up pressure to neuter the court of last resort.The four judges in The Hague, all women, will be barred entry to the United States and any property or other interests in the world’s largest economy will be blocked — measures more often taken against policymakers from US adversaries than against judicial officials.”The United States will take whatever actions we deem necessary to protect our sovereignty, that of Israel, and any other US ally from illegitimate actions by the ICC,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.”I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices, to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel,” Rubio said.The court swiftly hit back, saying in a statement: “These measures are a clear attempt to undermine the independence of an international judicial institution which operates under the mandate from 125 States Parties from all corners of the globe.”Israel’s Netanyahu welcomed the move, thanking US President Donald Trump’s administration in a social media post.”Thank you President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio for imposing sanctions against the politicised judges of the ICC. You have justly stood up for the right of Israel,” he wrote on Friday.- War crimes -Human Rights Watch urged other nations to speak out and reaffirm the independence of the ICC, set up in 2002 to prosecute individuals responsible for the world’s gravest crimes when countries are unwilling or unable to do so themselves.The sanctions “aim to deter the ICC from seeking accountability amid grave crimes committed in Israel and Palestine and as Israeli atrocities mount in Gaza, including with US complicity,” said the rights group’s international justice director, Liz Evenson.Two of the targeted judges, Beti Hohler of Slovenia and Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, took part in proceedings that led to an arrest warrant issued last November for Netanyahu.The court found “reasonable grounds” of criminal responsibility by Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant for actions that include the war crime of starvation as a method of war in the massive offensive in Gaza following Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.Israel, alleging bias, has angrily rejected charges of war crimes as well as a separate allegation of genocide led by South Africa before the International Court of Justice.The two other judges, Luz del Carmen Ibanez Carranza of Peru and Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, were part of the court proceedings that led to the authorization of an investigation into allegations that US forces committed war crimes during the war in Afghanistan.- Return to hard line -Neither the United States nor Israel is party to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. But almost all Western allies of the United States as well as Japan and South Korea, the vast majority of Latin America and much of Africa are parties to the statute and in theory are required to arrest suspects when they land on their soil.Trump in his first term already imposed sanctions on the then ICC chief prosecutor over the Afghanistan investigation. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, then president Joe Biden took a more conciliatory approach to the court with case-by-case cooperation. Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken rescinded the sanctions and, while critical of its stance on Israel, worked with the court in its investigation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ICC judges in 2023 issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the alleged mass abduction of Ukrainian children during the war. Both Putin and Netanyahu have voiced defiance over the ICC pressure but have also looked to minimize time in countries that are party to the court. The ICC arrest warrants have been especially sensitive in Britain, a close US ally whose Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a former human rights lawyer. Downing Street has said that Britain will fulfil its “legal obligations” without explicitly saying if Netanyahu would be arrested if he visits.Hungary, led by Trump ally Viktor Orban, has parted ways with the rest of the European Union by moving to exit the international court. Orban thumbed his nose at the court by welcoming Netanyahu to visit in April.