Muslim teachers to challenge Indian state’s madrasa ban in top court

MELBOURNE: Australia warned airlines flying between Australian airports and New Zealand to beware of Chinese warships potentially conducting a live-fire exercise in the Tasman Sea, officials said Friday.
Regulator Airservices Australia warned commercial pilots of a potential hazard in airspace between the countries as three Chinese warships conduct exercises off the Australian east coast.
China had given notice that the warships could potentially fire live weapons during an exercise, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.
Australian defense officials were uncertain whether any live fire of weapons had occurred. The risk had since passed, Albanese said.
“There was no imminent risk of danger to any Australian assets or New Zealand assets,” Albanese told reporters, citing information from his Defense Ministry.
Air New Zealand, the country’s national carrier, said in a statement it had “modified flight paths as needed to avoid the area, with no impact on our operations.”
Virgin Australia said it was following Airservices Australia instructions, but did not say whether its New Zealand services had been diverted.
Pilots of Virgin, Qantas and Emirates flights from Sydney to New Zealand diverted their courses after hearing one of the warships broadcast a warning of an imminent live-fire exercise, Nine Network television reported.
Australian and New Zealand military ships and P-8 Poseidon surveillance planes have been monitoring the Chinese warships – frigate Hengyang, cruiser Zunyi and replenishment vessel Weishanhu – for days.
Chinese warships rarely venture so far south in a deployment regarded as a demonstration of the Chinese navy’s growing size and capabilities.
Australian and International Pilots Association Vice President Captain Steve Cornell, who represents pilots from Australia’s largest airline Qantas, was critical of where the Chinese choose to hold their exercise.
“Whilst it was unusual to have Chinese warships in this part of the world, pilots often have to contend with obstacles to safe navigation, whether that be from military exercises such as this or other events like rocket launches, space debris or volcanic eruptions,” Cornell said.
“That being said, it’s a big bit of ocean and you would think that they could have parked somewhere less inconvenient whilst they flexed their muscles,” he added.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong will discuss the deployment when she meets her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi at a G20 ministers meeting underway in South Africa, Albanese said.
The Chinese exercise was legal and took place in international waters outside Australia’s exclusive economic zone, Albanese said.

BRUSSELS:Germans head to the polls on Sunday in an election that has been impatiently awaited in Brussels, where many hope Berlin can swiftly return to play a driving role in EU affairs as the bloc faces a string of crises.
Already suffering from lacklustre economic growth and competitiveness, the EU has been rocked by US President Donald Trump threatening a trade war and reaching out over European leaders’ heads to Russia to settle the Ukraine war.
“We are sometimes afraid of German leadership,” said a European diplomat. “But it is difficult to live without it.”
Incertitude in Germany has added to months of political turmoil in France, where a weakened President Emmanuel Macron in December appointed his fourth prime minister within a year.
The Franco-German engine normally credited with driving the European Union “has not been able to work” and take “major decisions” at a time where “it is more necessary than ever,” said Yann Wernert, an analyst at the Jacques Delors Institute.
“We don’t see much German commitment in current EU legislation,” lamented another diplomat.
The vacuum has been partially filled by others.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, has been pushing for Brussels to do more to confront Russia, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has taken the lead on migration issues.
But the absence has been felt.
“Can the EU act without Germany and France? In case of an emergency this would be possible, but it is better to act with France and Germany,” said a third diplomat.


Sunday’s vote will not immediately solve the problem, as Germany may not have a new government until the spring.
The confident frontrunner Friedrich Merz has said he’s aiming for an Easter deadline. But arduous coalition negotiations tend to drag on for weeks if not months in the country, spelling long stretches of political paralysis.
Questions about the shape of a future coalition government are likely to slow down key legislative projects also at the European level, on anything from migration to defense funding and climate change, said Wernert.
“All Europe is watching this election,” said Daniel Freund, a European lawmaker with the Greens, lamenting the current “lack of movement.”
Some of his colleagues worry about the ripple effect the vote could have on political balances at the European Parliament.
Merz’s conservative CDU-CSU alliance belongs to the largest parliamentary group, the EPP, which currently shapes the chamber’s agenda with support from a loose alliance of centrists, social democrats and greens.
But led by Manfred Weber, a German, the EPP has occasionally sided with the far right over the past year.
The same tactic was used by the CDU/CSU, which last month passed a motion calling for an immigration crackdown with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a taboo-breaking maneuver.
“For me, the real question is to what extent what happened in Germany will have an impact on the outcome of the elections and what lessons EPP representatives will draw from it,” said Valerie Hayer, head of the centrist Renew group.
“Will they say... it was a losing strategy or, on the contrary, a winning one?“
If the so-called “firewall” barring cooperation with the extreme right “breaks down” in Germany “it will be very unfeasible to have it implemented here,” added Dane Anders Vistisen, a European lawmaker with the far-right Patriots group.