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Egypt MPs Demand Expulsion of Libya’s GNA Ambassador

A member of the GNA carries a weapon in Ain Zara, Tripoli, Libya October 14, 2019. (Reuters)
A member of the GNA carries a weapon in Ain Zara, Tripoli, Libya October 14, 2019. (Reuters)
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Egypt MPs Demand Expulsion of Libya’s GNA Ambassador

A member of the GNA carries a weapon in Ain Zara, Tripoli, Libya October 14, 2019. (Reuters)
A member of the GNA carries a weapon in Ain Zara, Tripoli, Libya October 14, 2019. (Reuters)

The United Nations on Tuesday urged Libyan authorities in the west of the country to probe allegations that forces allied with the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) have detained and abused a group of Egyptian laborers.

"UNSMIL is concerned about the arrest, detention and ill-treatment of a large number of Egyptian nationals" in the city of Tarhuna, the UN mission said on Twitter.

It called on local authorities in Tripoli to "conduct a prompt investigation" into the acts which were potentially in "violation... (of) Libya's international human rights law obligations on the prohibition of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment."

A video widely circulated on social media apparently showed the Egyptian workers forced to stand on one leg with their bare feet on the sand as they raised their hands.

They were accused of allegedly supporting the Libyan National Army (LNA), reported Egyptian media.

The video drew the ire of Egyptian officials.

It "will not pass lightly and the Egyptian state does not allow assault on its citizens abroad," Egypt's immigration minister Nabila Makram was quoted as saying in local media.

The Egyptian parliament held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss a request submitted by MP Mostafa Bakri to the Foreign Ministry over “why the GNA ambassador was still in Cairo.”

The GNA is “illegitimate” and has “flagrantly” violated human rights when its militias abducted 200 Egyptian residents in Libya and went on to torture them and force them to insult the Egyptian nation and president, as well as the LNA and its commander Khalifa Haftar, he said.

“The least we can do is expel the GNA ambassador and appoint one recommended by Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul Hadi Al-Hweij, who is a member of the legitimate government that has received the vote of confidence from the legitimate Libyan parliament,” continued the MP.

Parliament Speaker Dr. Ali Abdelaal vowed that Egypt will not abandon the rights of its people and “it will determine the time and place of its response.”

On Sunday, the GNA said an investigation would be launched into the video's authenticity.

In a Tuesday statement, the Arab League "condemned the detention and mistreatment" of the Egyptian nationals.

The bloc also welcomed the GNA "interior ministry's statement on efforts to determine the Egyptian detainees' fate and to identify the perpetrators."

LNA spokesman Ahmed al-Mismari told a private Egyptian TV channel that the workers were being held by a militia aligned with the GNA.

"We have yet to determine their exact number but those who appeared in the video are between 19-22," he said, adding that it was not clear whether others were held.

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Sports

Head of Palestinian Football Not Granted US Visa to Attend World Cup

Demonstrators place missing person flyers on the trailer of a mounted police truck during a protest outside Azteca Stadium ahead of the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, Mexico, June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
Demonstrators place missing person flyers on the trailer of a mounted police truck during a protest outside Azteca Stadium ahead of the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, Mexico, June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
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Head of Palestinian Football Not Granted US Visa to Attend World Cup

Demonstrators place missing person flyers on the trailer of a mounted police truck during a protest outside Azteca Stadium ahead of the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, Mexico, June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
Demonstrators place missing person flyers on the trailer of a mounted police truck during a protest outside Azteca Stadium ahead of the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, Mexico, June 11, 2026. (Reuters)

The head of the Palestinian Football Association is waiting in Mexico City for permission to enter the United States with other federation heads attending the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Jibril Rajoub went to the opening match between Mexico and South Africa on Thursday. But he is among several people accredited to attend the World Cup who have been denied visas or have yet to receive them from the United States.

“I don’t believe that it’s fair to use or to abuse and deny the right of all footballers all over the world to attend,” the veteran Palestinian political figure said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Palestinian team did not qualify for the World Cup, but FIFA typically invites the heads of football associations from around the world to the event every four years, which it frames as a celebration of global unity.

“Everyone will be welcome in Canada, Mexico and the United States for the FIFA World Cup next year. We are working exactly for that,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said last year.

The United States, however, has refused entry to delegates from a raft of countries, including a referee from Somalia and a photographer traveling with Iraq’s team.

Infantino said this week that FIFA had been trying to resolve visa issues but could not overrule the US government.

“We need to respect that we are not the kings of the world who can rule over governments and police forces,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

The US State Department had no immediate comment on Rajoub’s visa, but last year implemented new restrictions on Palestinian passport holders, including on anyone who had been employed by the Palestinian Authority.

It revoked a visa to allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to travel to the United Nations General Assembly last September.

Rajoub and other Palestinian football officials have long argued that Israel violates statutes by allowing teams from settlements in the occupied West Bank play in Israel’s national league. They have pushed FIFA to sanction Israel, also decrying restrictions on the movement of Palestinian players and how war in the Gaza Strip has destroyed 80% of sports facilities there.

Last month, Rajoub refused to shake hands with the head of Israel’s football federation at Infantino’s behest because he said the gesture would not heal wounds but instead whitewash Israel’s actions.

Rajoub pointed out that when Russia hosted the 2018 World Cup, it did not implement comparable visa restrictions for people who were invited to the tournament.

Culture

David Hockney, the British Artist Who Went in Search of Californian Color, Dies at 88

British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting "Bigger Trees Near Water", the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP)
British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting "Bigger Trees Near Water", the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP)
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David Hockney, the British Artist Who Went in Search of Californian Color, Dies at 88

British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting "Bigger Trees Near Water", the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP)
British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting "Bigger Trees Near Water", the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP)

As a child growing up in gloomy northern England, David Hockney noticed the sharply ‌defined shadows in the Hollywood films of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

"Strong shadows meant a lot of sun," the painter recalled to BBC television in 2009. "So I thought, well, wherever that is, it's always sunny."

Two decades later, Hockney moved to Los Angeles to immerse himself in that dazzling light.

The artist, whose brightly colored renditions of California would go on to make him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, has died, Sky News reported on Friday. He was 88.

No cause of death was given.

'HERE I FELT FREE'

Initially, almost as much as his paintings, Hockney was known for his own image — thick-rimmed spectacles, peroxide hair, shiny gold jacket — which became a symbol of Britain's Swinging Sixties.

As an art student in the northern English city of Bradford — where he was born to an accountancy clerk father and a devout Methodist mother — Hockney rebelled against convention.

To continue his studies, in 1959 he moved to London where he had a meteoric rise in the British pop art movement and rubbed shoulders with stars from dancer ‌Rudolf Nureyev to ‌Mick Jagger.

But Hockney yearned for the excitement he saw in the work of American artists. Using money ‌from ⁠the sale of ⁠his art, he visited New York for the first time in 1961 — where he became a friend of Andy Warhol — and moved to California three years later.

"I thought people who produced such work must live in color, so I went in search of it," he is quoted as saying in a biography written by art critic and friend Peter Adam.

"I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the gothic gloom of the North. Here I felt free."

His pictures of swimming pools became icons of a sun-drenched lifestyle that he documented with luminous acrylic paint before dividing his time between Los Angeles, London and Paris in the late 1960s and 1970s.

He remained unpretentious despite his success.

"I am actually still a ⁠student," he told Adam. "I just happen to have quite a lot of credit cards in my pocket."

In ‌1985, when he was invited to the White House to dine with President Ronald Reagan, ‌Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he was held up for half an hour by security officers because he was the only guest to arrive on foot, ‌his biographer wrote.

'YOU DON'T RETIRE DOING THIS'

Hockney's images of love and material wealth led to claims by some art critics that ‌his work was trivial. But he won greater renown than any other British artist of the 20th century.

One of his most famous paintings, "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" sold for $90.3 million in 2018, the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction at the time.

As he grew older and his life turned more domestic, dogs replaced men in Hockney's work, at a time when many ‌of his friends were dying of AIDS.

He said he cried for two days when Stanley, one of his beloved dachshunds, died in 2001, having been immortalized in scores of paintings and sketches.

In the late ⁠1990s, Hockney began returning more frequently to ⁠visit his mother in the northern English county of Yorkshire, where he had grown up, and a terminally ill friend encouraged him to paint the local landscapes.

Feeling increasingly lonely, he moved from California to the seaside town of Bridlington on England's North Sea coast. For a decade he painted clumps of bare trees in winter, fields full of ripe crops and tracks stretching towards the gentle rolling hills of the Yorkshire Wolds region.

It was the most productive period of his entire career as he rushed to capture scenes that, he said, changed more dramatically with the seasons than did those of California.

"You don't retire doing this," he told the BBC in his broad Yorkshire accent when asked about his unflagging energy. "You just do it until you fall over."

The former enfant terrible of British art, a cigarette almost always in his hand, never stopped trying new techniques. He used faxes to share his work and then iPads to produce it. His Yorkshire paintings led to a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey, in central London.

In 2018, Hockney bought a farmhouse in Normandy, in northern France, and turned his eye to the fields and flowers of his garden there. The 90-meter-long "A Year in Normandie" frieze was inspired by the nearly 1,000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry.

Hockney's work ethic — instilled in him from getting up daily at 6 o'clock to work in hospitals for two years, when he refused to do his military service in the army — barely relented in his later years.

"I tend to think that you should work every day," he said. "And I do."

World

2 Collisions on Hungarian Highway Kill 8 People

A damaged minibus is seen on the M1 motorway near Gyor, Hungary, 12 June 2026. EPA/Csaba Krizsan HUNGARY OUT
A damaged minibus is seen on the M1 motorway near Gyor, Hungary, 12 June 2026. EPA/Csaba Krizsan HUNGARY OUT
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2 Collisions on Hungarian Highway Kill 8 People

A damaged minibus is seen on the M1 motorway near Gyor, Hungary, 12 June 2026. EPA/Csaba Krizsan HUNGARY OUT
A damaged minibus is seen on the M1 motorway near Gyor, Hungary, 12 June 2026. EPA/Csaba Krizsan HUNGARY OUT

Two collisions one after another on a highway in western Hungary early Friday killed eight people, police said.

A truck caught fire after colliding with a construction vehicle near the city of Győr around 4.30 a.m., killing one person and snarling traffic, police said.

About half an hour later, a minibus with Moldovan license plates slammed into a truck that stopped on the highway following the first accident. The second crash killed seven people and seriously injured two, The Associated Press quoted police as saying.

Authorities closed one lane of the M1 highway toward Austria.

Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar expressed condolences to the families of the victims.