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LONDON (AP) — Britain’s state-owned health service is operating on holiday-level staffing in England on Wednesday as doctors in the early stages of their careers joined their more senior colleagues in their first-ever joint strike action.

Tens of thousands of so-called junior doctors walked off the job for the sixth time since last December in an escalation of their increasingly bitter pay dispute with the British government. The walkout comes a day after their more senior colleagues, commonly known as consultants in Britain, began their third walkout.

While on strike, hospitals will provide minimal care similar to Christmas Day, when only emergency procedures are available and routine appointments or procedures are postponed or canceled.

National Health Service figures indicate that the strikes have so far affected about 1 million appointments and procedures at a cost of more than 1 billion pounds ($1.2 billion).

Consultants are to return to work on Thursday, while junior doctors are to stay out until Saturday.

It is the first time in the 75-year history of the NHS that both consultants and junior doctors have walked off at the same time. They are due to do so again on Oct. 2-4, which would mark another major escalation in the pay dispute.

The British Medical Association, which represents the approximately 75,000 junior doctors, has been asking for a 35% pay increase to return to 2008 levels after inflation is taken into account. Consultants have been vaguer in their demand.

The government is offering junior doctors an average increase of 8.8% and consultants 6% plus improvements in their pensions. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has insisted there will be no more discussions and that offering much more would stoke inflation, which despite falling in August to 6.7% remains way above the government’s 2% target.

Damian Tolan, a radiology consultant in the northern city of Leeds, urged the government to get back to the negotiating table.

“This is a terrible day. There’s no getting away from it. None of us embrace this. We would be back at work tomorrow if the government would only speak to us,” he said.

Like other nations in Europe, the United Kingdom has faced disruptive strikes as workers, including teachers, train drivers and nurses, have pressed for pay raises that keep pace with a sharp increase in consumer prices.

KIGALI, Rwanda (AP) — Rwanda’s president declared he will run for a fourth term next year, saying that “what the West thinks is not my problem,” after the United States and others criticized the past lifting of term limits to extend his rule.

President Paul Kagame made the announcement in an interview with the French-language publication Jeune Afrique published Tuesday.

The 65-year-old Kagame has been president since 2000 and was declared the winner of the previous election in 2017 with more than 98% of the vote. He has been the de facto leader since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

He is one of a number of African leaders who have prolonged their rule by pursuing changes to term limits. In 2015, Rwandans in a referendum voted to lift the two-term limit. Kagame could stay in power until 2034 if he wins a five-year term next year and then another.

He was re-elected as chair of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front party earlier this year for another five-year term.

Rwanda is “not free,” according to the U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House, whose latest report notes that the ruling party has been in power without interruption since 1994, “banning and repressing any opposition group that could mount a serious challenge to its leadership.”

Kagame and his government have received praise for stabilizing the country and developing public health and the economy since the genocide in which more than 800,000 people were killed. But human rights groups and other critics have long alleged that the government harshly targets opponents, including with extrajudicial killings even far outside the country’s borders.

The government has objected to and dismissed such allegations. But earlier this year, under diplomatic pressure, Rwanda released the opposition exile who had inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda” after tricking Paul Rusesabagina onto a plane to the country and convicting him of terror offenses in a widely criticized trial.

The other candidate who has declared to run for president is lawmaker Frank Habineza with the Green Democratic party, who received 0.45% of votes in 2017.

Habineza told The Associated Press his party was not surprised by Kagame’s announcement, and he said they will continue to fight for democracy.

“As we speak now, there is a high level of poverty and people have no food and youth have no jobs. This is what bothers Rwandans,” he said.

But some Kagame supporters believe he needs more time. William Harerimana, a 53-year-old businessman said that “we need to be patient a bit more and under him, the country will register more economic growth and benefit all Rwandans.”

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NEW DELHI (AP) — India on Wednesday advised its citizens to be careful when traveling to Canada as a rift between the two nations escalates further in the wake of Ottawa’s allegations that India may have been involved in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in suburban Vancouver.

The foreign ministry in New Delhi issued an updated travel advisory, urging its nationals and especially those studying in the North American country to be cautious because of “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate-crimes.”

Indians should also avoid going to venues in Canada where “threats have particularly targeted Indian diplomats and sections of the Indian community who oppose anti-India agenda,” the ministry said.

Ottawa and New Delhi, two key strategic partners on security and trade, are locked in a diplomatic rift after Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, alleged that India was connected to the assassination of Sikh independence advocate on its soil in June.

Canada has yet to provide any evidence of Indian involvement in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh leader killed by masked gunmen in Surrey, outside Vancouver.

For years, India has said Nijjar, a Canadian citizen born in India, has links to terrorism, an allegation he denied, saying he was working to organize an unofficial Sikh diaspora referendum on independence from India at the time of his killing.

Trudeau’s announcement was followed by Canada expelling an Indian diplomat in Ottawa. New Delhi responded by rejecting Trudeau’s accusation as “absurd and motivated” and later expelling a Canadian diplomat.

Indian authorities designated Nijjar a terrorist in 2020 and accused him of supporting demands for an independent Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan, that started as an insurgency in India’s Punjab state in 1970s and 1980s and was crushed in an Indian government crackdown.

The movement has since lost much of its political power but still has supporters in Punjab, where Sikhs are in a majority, as well as among the sizable overseas Sikh diaspora.

India’s foreign ministry also said Trudeau’s allegations “seek to shift the focus from Khalistani terrorists and extremists, who have been provided shelter in Canada and continue to threaten India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The ministry regularly issues travel advisories. In September last year, it asked Indian citizens to remain cautious while traveling in Canada because of “sharp increase in incidents of hate crimes, sectarian violence and anti-India activities” there.

The modern Sikh independence movement reaches back to the 1940s but eventually morphed into the 1970s and 1980s insurgency. In 1984, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a raid to capture armed separatists taking refuge in Sikhism’s holiest shrine.

The raid killed hundreds of people, and two of Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her shortly after. In response, anti-Sikh riots took place across India in which members of the minority were dragged out of their homes and killed.

And though the insurgency was suppressed long ago, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has warned repeatedly that Sikh separatists were trying to make a comeback. Modi’s government has been asking several countries – including Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom — to take legal action against Sikh separatists.

India has also for years accused Canada of giving free rein to Sikh separatists, including Nijjar.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Ten years after Pope Francis made a landmark visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa to show solidarity with migrants, he is joining Catholic bishops from the Mediterranean this weekend in France to make the call more united.

The question is whether anyone in European corridors of power will listen, as they scramble to stem a new tide of would-be refugees setting off from Africa.

Francis’ overnight visit Friday to the French port city of Marseille to close out a meeting of Mediterranean bishops was scheduled months ago. But it comes as Europe’s migrant problem is once again making headlines, given the nearly 7,000 migrants who came ashore on Lampedusa within a day last week, briefly outnumbering the resident population.

The drama has sparked another round of hand-wringing and pledges of solidarity from European capitals, with even talk of a naval blockade to prevent departures. It’s a policy Francis has long condemned given that an EU-funded operation to return migrants to Libya lands them in what Francis has called modern-day concentration camps.

For Francis, the shocking scenes of men, women and children packed into a refugee center in Lampedusa have underscored that migration as a phenomenon must be tackled jointly. The future, he said this past weekend about his upcoming trip to Marseille, “will only be prosperous if it is built on fraternity, putting human dignity, real people and especially the most needy, first.”

Francis has long made the plight of migrants a priority of his papacy, starting from that remarkable 2013 visit to Lampedusa his first as pope. There, Francis celebrated Mass on an altar made of shipwrecked wood, tossed flowers in the sea in tribute to migrants who had drowned and decried the “globalization of indifference” that the world shows people who risk their lives to flee poverty, conflict and climate disasters to seek a better life.

Since then, he has made some other high-profile gestures to draw attention to the Gospel-mandated call to welcome strangers, most spectacularly when he brought back a dozen Syrian Muslims aboard his plane following a 2016 visit to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece. His mantra: Welcome, protect, promote and integrate, with the last exhortation an acknowledgment that governments have limits in their abilities to accept newcomers and truly integrate them well.

“The message that he is conveying is that the Mediterranean is our responsibility,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Vatican’s top migration expert and himself a refugee. “In other words, you can’t look at it as each one has a bit of coastline and is responsible for that bit. There’s a collective responsibility which is largely being neglected.”

In Marseille, one of the most multicultural, multi-religious and multiethnic cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, the pontiff will be joined by around 60 bishops from North Africa, the Middle East, Balkans and southern Europe, along with young people from those regions. It’s the third Mediterranean summit of its kind after the first two were held in Italy.

The location is not coincidental. Marseille for centuries has been characterized by a strong presence of migrants living together in a tradition of tolerance, even though today France‘s second city is also known for its high crime and unemployment rates, poverty and lack of social services.

Unlike many other French cities where foreigners tend to live on the outskirts, in Marseille migrants and their descendants of a variety of backgrounds – Italians, Spaniards and Armenians; people from France’s former colonies in North Africa, West Africa and the Comoros Islands — have settled in the city center, opening shops and restaurants that contribute to the city’s reputation as a melting pot.

“Marseilles is indeed like a city that embodies this diversity of France,” said Camille Le Coz, associate director of Migration Policy Institute’s Europe office, in Paris. “This great tradition of migration, but also a city that is concentrating so many difficulties in terms of access to public services, insecurity, drug trafficking. It’s a very complicated place.”

One of the highlights of Francis’ trip will be an interfaith prayer Friday at a Marseille monument dedicated to sailors who died at sea, in this case honoring the 28,000 migrants estimated by the International Organization of Migration who have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014 trying to reach Europe.

The encounter will bring together leaders of Marseille’s various faith groups — Muslims, Jews, Armenian and Orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics — and will feature testimony of migrants, rescue groups and the pope. The speakers’ list suggests a united voice to call for a culture of tolerance towards migrants, and lament that the Mediterranean has become, in Francis’ words, “the world’s biggest cemetery.”

The question is whether anyone in power will listen. President Emmanuel Macron, whose government has shifted rightward on migration and security issues, will join Francis on Saturday and is slated to attend his big Mass at the Velodrome. The centrist president has taken a firm stance on migration after coming under criticism from conservatives and the far right. He is pushing to strengthen the EU’s external borders and wants the bloc to be more efficient in deporting those refused entry.

As a result, France’s current political climate and its tradition of “laicite” or secularism, suggests neither Macron nor other European leaders will necessarily heed Francis’ call.

“I think given our complicated relationship with the church and with religion, we don’t expect this to have so much impact, to be honest,” Le Coz said.

Jeffery Crisp, a research fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, said Francis does have a moral authority and has been wielding it to speak out on the issue of migration, calling especially on governments to respect international human rights principles.

“Does that translate into any kind of political pressure? I simply don’t know,” Crisp asked in a telephone interview. “But I think you could probably argue that it could only have been worse without his interventions.”

Young men who arrived in Italy amid the recent wave of migrants hope someone will listen. On a recent day, a group from South Sudan stopped in Rome en route from Lampedusa to the French border. One particularly tall man said he wanted to go to France to play basketball, another said he wanted to go to Britain to be a doctor. Their only belongings were the clothes on their backs; volunteers gave them shoes.

After spending a few nights sleeping on the ground below a noisy highway overpass near Rome’s main bus station, a non-profit association bought them cheap bus tickets north. That evening, 16 boys left on a bus bound for Marseille.

They were planning to get off before the French border, where police checks have increased amid Italy’s new migrant influx, and to try to cross on foot. One of them, a 16-year-old named Dot, was wearing new yellow Converse sneakers provided by volunteers.

“We walked from South Sudan,” Dot said before boarding the bus. “We can walk to France.”

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Corbet reported from Paris.

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Ukraine’s international allies filed into the United Nations’ top court on Wednesday to support Kyiv’s case against Russia that alleges Moscow twisted the genocide convention to manufacture a pretext for its invasion last year.

The hearing came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the U.N. General Assembly in New York that Russia is “weaponizing” everything from food and energy to abducted children in its war against Ukraine — and warned world leaders that the same could happen to them.

An unprecedented 32 states were making brief legal arguments Wednesday to the 16-judge panel at the International Court of Justice, which is holding hearings into Moscow’s assertions that the World Court does not have jurisdiction and should throw out Ukraine‘s case.

Kyiv filed its case two days after Russia invaded Ukraine. It argues that the attack was based on false claims by Russia of acts of genocide in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine insists the court has jurisdiction. Kyiv’s allies supported that stance Wednesday.

Legal representatives including Australian Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue told judges that the case is about a dispute between Ukraine and Russia over the 1948 Genocide Convention that should be settled by the court.

While most of the national presentations in the court’s ornate Great Hall of Justice were dry legal arguments, Canada’s representative, Alan Kessel, underscored what was at stake.

“Canada and the Netherlands recall the profound consequences of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in immense human suffering,” Kessel said. “It is against this backdrop that we intervene as part of our commitment to the protection and promotion of the rules-based international order and the peaceful settlement of disputes in which this court plays a vital role.”