LONDON (Middle East Eye) – Half of the UK’s Muslim population will struggle to provide enough food for their families to break their fast during Ramadan, Islamic Relief says. The UK-based charity is urging the British government to increase benefit payments as close as possible to the rate of soaring inflation and to further strengthen the country’s social security systems.
According to the Muslim Council of Britain, an estimated 50 percent of British Muslim households are living in poverty and deprivation, compared to 18 percent of the general UK population. Requests for help from one of the charity’s partners, the National Zakat Foundation (NZF), have soared by 70 percent over the last twelve months. NZF gives out grants to those in need from Zakat (an obligatory religious levy) that has been collected from British Muslims. Islamic Relief says the crisis is being intensified by the situation in Ukraine, with significant food price hikes hitting the UK, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic still affecting families struggling financially. Tufail Hussain, the director of Islamic Relief UK said that “families across the UK will be suffering as a result of record rates of inflation as well as increasing energy prices due to the war in Ukraine”. Islamic Relief’s partners in the UK are also reporting a significant increase in the use of food banks as well as increased requests for support when compared to the last two pandemic lockdowns.

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WASHINGTON (The Hill) – The Pentagon has officially scrapped a test launch of a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to avoid Russian “misinterpretation,” NBC News reported. The test launch of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile was canceled over concerns Russian President Vladimir Putin would view the move as escalatory, Defense Department officials told NBC. “The Department of the Air Force recently cancelled the routinely planned test flight of an LGM-30G Minuteman III missile,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Todd Breasseale said in a statement. “The launch had been previously delayed due to an overabundance of caution to avoid misinterpretation or miscommunication.” In response to aggressive statements by NATO’s leading members, Putin said on February 27 that he had ordered “the deterrence forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty.” Since then, Russia’s nuclear submarines and mobile missile launchers reportedly staged drills and units of Moscow’s Strategic Missile Forces dispersed intercontinental ballistic missile launchers in forests in eastern Siberia to practice secret deployment. The U.S. and its NATO allies have failed to raise their own nuclear alert levels in response to Russia’s action.

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ABUJA (Dispatches) – The United States has announced plans for the construction of a $537 million consulate in Nigeria’s commercial capital city of Lagos, as Washington seeks to strengthen its foothold in Africa’s most populous country. Mary Leonard, U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, said that the new consulate, which is to be built on land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean, would take five years to be completed in 2027. Leonard said the 12.2-acre site in the rapidly developing Eko Atlantic City on Victoria Island would support diplomatic and commercial relations between the U.S. and Nigeria. The move, the U.S. State Department claimed in a statement, is geared at strengthening the enduring U.S.-Nigeria relationship and investing in the partnership for the benefit of the two nations. The U.S. has an embassy in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, and a consulate office in Lagos, a sprawling city of more than 20 million people and Nigeria’s major economic hub. The United States is among the largest foreign investors and donors in Nigeria, with annual trade between the two countries standing at over $10 billion. The pro-American government in Nigeria has on multiple occasions been accused of suppressing anti-Abuja demonstrations, detaining high-profile political activists and pressing baseless charges against minority religious leaders, including Nigeria’s most senior Shia cleric Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky. In December 2015, Nigeria’s military launched a crackdown as part of a deadly state-ordered escalation targeting Zakzaky’s Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) that Abuja has branded as illegal.

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MOGADISHU (Al Jazeera) – A massive fire tore through the main market in the city of Hargeisa in northern Somalia overnight, injuring about two dozen people and destroying hundreds of businesses, officials said on Saturday. Images posted on social media showed flames and huge billowing clouds of smoke in the night sky over the city, the capital of the breakaway region of Somaliland. The cause of the blaze that gutted the sprawling Waheen market – the lifeblood of the city and home to an estimated 2,000 shops and stalls – is not yet known. Officials said it started on Friday evening but was largely brought under control by dawn on Saturday, although some small areas were still burning. “The town has never witnessed such a massive calamity,” Hargeisa’s Mayor Abdikarim Ahmed Moge told reporters at the scene. “This place was the economic centre of Hargeisa and even though the firefighters did their best to contain the fire, the market is destroyed.”

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have discovered the most distant individual star on record, a bright behemoth they nicknamed Earendel - Old English for “morning star” - because it existed during the dawn of the universe. Researchers said the star, very hot and blue in color, was estimated at 50 to 100 times the mass of our sun, while being millions of times brighter. Its light traveled for 12.9 billion years before reaching Earth, meaning that the star existed when the universe was just 7 percent of its current age. Earendel was born roughly 900 million years after the Big Bang event at the outset of the universe. It belonged to among the earliest generations of stars at a time when the universe was quite different than it is today. “This really opens up a new window into those early days of the universe,” said astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Nature. “We’re seeing the star in the time period that is often referred to as Cosmic Dawn - when the first light in the universe was starting to turn on with these first stars and when the first galaxies are starting to form,” Welch added.