Britain has expelled all remaining staff at the Libyan embassy in London and recognized the country’s rebel council as its sole legitimate government, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said yesterday.
The National Transitional Council (NTC) is also being invited to take over the Libyan embassy in London, which has until now been occupied by diplomats loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, Hague told a news conference in London.
“The prime minister and I have decided that the United Kingdom recognizes and will deal with the National Transitional Council as the sole governmental authority in Libya,” Hague said at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
“This decision reflects the National Transitional Council’s increasing legitimacy, competence and success in reaching out to Libyans across the country,” he told reporters.
“In line with that decision we summoned the Libyan charge d’affaires to the Foreign Office today and informed him that he and the other regime diplomats from the Qaddafi regime must leave the UK,” Hague said.
“We no longer recognize them as the representatives of the Libyan government,” he said.
Britain is one of the lead nations in a Western alliance that has been carrying out an aerial campaign against Qaddafi’s regime since March.
On Monday Hague reiterated Britain’s demands for Qaddafi to step down, but said the Libyan leader might be allowed to remain in the country in an apparent shift in London’s position.
Britain expelled the Libyan ambassador in May following attacks on the British embassy in Tripoli and has also already kicked out several Libyan diplomats, including the country’s military attache.
It has no diplomatic representation in Tripoli, but a Foreign Office special representative is based in the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi, where the NTC is based.
“We will deal with the NTC on the same basis as other governments around the world,” Hague said. “We are inviting the National Transitional Council to appoint a new Libyan diplomatic envoy to take over the Libyan embassy in London.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of