Eritrea
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has reiterated his stance that the landlocked country must have access to the sea, a thinly veiled threat against neighboring Eritrea, which lies on the Red Sea, as escalating conflict in Ethiopia threatens to pull in regional nations. Reuters today published a report from one of its correspondents, Giulia Paravicini, who travelled to Eritrea, a secretive country with no independent media that rarely gives foreign journalists access. It’s a valuable insight into the region at a pivotal and dangerous moment.
More from Reuters here.
Pakistan
Supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan have started a long march to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad to demand his release. Thousands of marchers set out from the city of Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which is ruled by Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party and located 275 km from Islamabad. The former cricket superstar fell out with the military, considered by most to be the main arbiter of politics in Pakistan, before he was ousted by parliament in 2022 and then arrested on corruption charges the following year. The government warned that demonstrators would be blocked from entering the city. "We will finish it once for all," Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said.
More from BBC here.
Myanmar
Malaysia has sent almost 1,500 asylum seekers back to Myanmar despite warnings from the U.N. and rights groups that they may not be safe there. Myanmar has been in the grip of civil war since the army toppled a democratically elected government led by veteran campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021. The returnees, the first batch of 5,000 people scheduled for deportation back to Myanmar, were convicted of staying illegally in Malaysia, which is home to more than 100,000 Burmese refugees. It was not immediately clear whether any of the 1,500 were members of the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority, who are persecuted and denied citizenship in Myanmar. Almost a million Rohingya fled into Bangladesh in 2017 during a brutal military crackdown on the community.
More from AP here.