MELBOURNE (AFP) – Novak Djokovic has long credited a series of unusual methods for helping him become one of the greatest players ever, not least his 15-year “special relationship” with a Melbourne tree.

The world number one, who swears by a plant-based diet, extols the virtues of meditation and has previously used a spiritual guru, has never been shy of talking about his eccentricities.

As he targets an unprecedented 11th Australian Open title, he said he had been connecting again with his “old friend” – a Melbourne fig tree in the city’s Royal Botanic Gardens that he likes to hug and climb.

“It is true. It is true. There’s one particular tree that I’ve been having a special relationship with, so to say, in the last 15 years,” he said after battling into the third round on Wednesday evening.

“I love every corner of the Botanic Gardens. I think it’s an incredible treasure for Melbourne to have such a park and nature in the middle of the city.

“That particular tree, I cannot reveal which one, I’ll try to keep it discreet for myself when I’m there to have my own time. I like to ground myself and connect with that old friend.”

Djokovic broke through for his first Grand Slam title at the 2008 Australian Open and he has been a regular visitor to Melbourne since, long professing an affinity with its vegetation.

Asked why he was attracted to that particular tree, he replied, “I just liked it. I liked its roots and the trunks and branches and everything. So I started climbing it years ago. That’s it. I just have a connection.”

Earlier in the tournament, he insisted he was not superstitious “but I do obviously like to visit certain places that have brought me luck”.

“Just be by myself in nature, just grounding, hugging trees, climbing trees and stuff,” he said.

“Whether that’s the secret of success here in Australia or not, I don’t know, but it has definitely made me feel good.”

The Serb’s fondness for the unusual has made him stand out from his peers, who enjoy a more straightforward lifestyle. He has previously spoken about using hyperbaric oxygen chambers and healing “pyramids”, while meditating with Spanish guru Pepe Imaz, a former journeyman player who extols a “love and peace” philosophy.

SEOUL (AFP) – The number of North Korean defectors making it to the South tripled last year to 196 after a run of pandemic-linked lows, Seoul said yesterday, with more elite diplomats and students seeking to escape.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans have fled to South Korea since the peninsula was divided by war in the 1950s, with most going overland to neighbouring China first, then entering a third country such as Thailand before finally making it to the South.

The number of successful escapes dropped significantly from 2020 after the North sealed its borders – purportedly with shoot-on-sight orders along the land frontier with China – to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

In 2021 only 63 people made it to the South, a more than 90 per cent decrease from 2019, when 1,047 defectors arrived. Just 67 people arrived in 2022. Last year, 196 defectors made it to South Korea, the country’s Unification Ministry said in a statement, a figure that remains below the pre-pandemic average.

Women accounted for more than 80 per cent of people who escaped the repressive nuclear-armed regime last year, and most defectors travelled via a third country, the ministry said.

There was also an upward trend in the defections of North Korean elites such as diplomats and students studying abroad, according to the ministry.

“We have confirmed last year’s defections by the elite class were the highest in recent years,” it said.

Around 10 people from North Korea’s elite class fled to the South last year, the most since 2017, according to the Yonhap news agency.

Defecting by sea directly to the South is extremely rare and seen as far more dangerous than land routes, with only a handful of people making it across the de facto maritime border, the Northern Limit line.

In 2023, 13 defectors fled to the South by sea, the Unification Ministry said, noting it was indicative of “worsening situations in North Korea”.

All escapees who crossed the maritime border cited food shortages as driving their decision to flee, it said.

PARIS (AP) – France announced more planned deliveries of its Caesar artillery system to Ukraine on Thursday and accelerating weapons manufacturing as it seeks to avoid depleting its own military stocks. “The logic of ceding materiel taken from the armies’ stocks is reaching its end,” the French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said in an interview with Le Parisien. “From now on, the solution is to directly connect French defence industries with the Ukrainian army.”

France also launched a drive to fund the delivery of 78 Caesar self-propelled 155 millimetres (mm) howitzers to Ukraine this year. Ukraine has already paid for six of the guns itself and France will provide EUR50 million (USD54 million) to deliver 12 more, Lecornu said separately in a speech.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, speaking by video link, said Russian forces are firing five times more artillery shells, even 10 times more in some places, than Ukrainian forces along the front lines and that stronger artillery “is one of our key needs to win this war”.

“Shortage of ammunition, shell hunger, is a very real and pressing problem,” he said.

Lecornu said increased supplies of shells for Ukraine are on their way. From this month, France will supply 3,000 shells for 155mm guns per month at the start of the war and 2,000 per month since last April, Lecornu said.

Caesars are among an array of Western-supplied artillery systems that have given Ukrainian gun crews an edge, especially when paired with high-precision munitions, against Russian artillery batteries using older Soviet-designed systems.

Following Russia’s February 24, 2022, attack on Ukraine, France was among countries that quickly released weapons from its own armouries to help shore up Ukrainian defences.

As well as Caesars, France has supplied light tanks, long-range cruise missiles, air defence systems and other hardware, support and military training. Combined, French aid is estimated to be worth billions of euros.

Lecornu said 49 previously delivered Caesars are in operation in Ukraine. Based on battlefield feedback, the system is being improved to enable Ukrainian gunners to better target Russian tanks, the minister said.

More deliveries are promised. French President Emmanuel Macron this week announced plans to supply about 40 additional long-range Storm Shadow missiles and “several hundred bombs”.

He also announced his intention to travel again to Ukraine next month, saying, “We cannot let Russia win”.

BEIRUT (AFP) – At least nine civilians, including two children, were killed yesterday in air strikes on Syria likely to have been carried out by Jordan against drug-traffickers, a monitor and media outlet reported.

The kingdom has tightened controls along its frontier with Syria in recent years and its armed forces occasionally announce operations to foil drug and weapon smuggling attempts from its war-torn neighbour.

“Jordanian warplanes carried out air strikes targeting residential areas and a warehouse in southeastern province of Sweida, killing at least nine people, including two girls and four women,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, describing it as a “massacre”.

The first strike on a house in the village of Urman killed a man, his wife and their two daughters, along with his brother and his wife, said the Britain-based group.

The Suwayda24 news website reported that air strikes “likely to have been carried out by the Jordanian air force” killed at least 10 people in Urman.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said Jordan’s armed forces often carry out deadly strikes on civilian homes “on the pretext of fighting drug trafficking”.

Rayan Maarouf of Suwayda24 said however that the men who were killed, along with family members, were believed to have been drug traffickers.

On January 5, Jordan’s official Al Mamlaka television station said the country’s air force had carried out two raids in Syria “as part of the pursuit of drug-traffickers”.

One of the main drugs being smuggled out of Syria is the amphetamine-like stimulant captagon, for which there is huge demand in the oil-rich Gulf.

WARSAW (AP) – A deputy foreign minister in Poland’s previous right-wing government appeared before prosecutors on Wednesday to hear charges connected to the alleged sale of visas and work permits to migrants for thousands of dollars, anti-corruption officials said.

The cash-for-visas scandal emerged last summer and undermined the tough-on-immigration stance of the ruling Law and Justice party, which went on to lose power in October parliamentary elections. An investigation was launched earlier last year.

The Central Anti-Corruption Bureau said in a statement on Wednesday that it had detained the former deputy foreign minister, who had been in charge of consular affairs and who was identified only as Piotr W because of Polish privacy laws.

He was brought to the city of Lubin where prosecutors presented him with charges of having exceeded his authority in handling ministry documents, influencing the issuing of Polish visas and sharing classified information with an unauthorised person in 2022-23.

BRUSSELS (AP) – Customs seized 116 tonnes of cocaine in the port of Antwerp in 2023, setting a record for the second year in a row, Belgian authorities said on Wednesday.

Demand for cocaine is growing rapidly across the European Union, and governments blame the drug trade for outbreaks of violence in major port cities like Antwerp, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Marseille in France.

The port of Antwerp has become the main gateway for Latin American cocaine cartels into the continent.

The quantity of cocaine seized in Europe’s second largest seaport rose from 110 tonnes in 2022, Belgian authorities said, adding that Colombia, Ecuador and Panama remain the top origin countries. State Secretary Aukje de Vries, the minister in charge of the customs authorities said the fight against cocaine smuggling “continues to require constant attention and investment”.

In Belgium, federal authorities say drug trafficking is penetrating society rapidly as foreign criminal organisations have built deep roots in the country, bringing along their violent and ruthless operations.

In the past four years, Antwerp has seen dozens of grenade attacks, fires and small bombs, many linked to gangs trying to carve up the thriving cocaine trade.

ZAGREB (AFP) – Croatian journalists on Thursday condemned proposed legislation that would effectively outlaw the leaking of information from criminal proceedings, saying it was an attempt to silence their sources.

Anyone disclosing the contents of “an investigative or evidentiary action” could be jailed for up to three years, according to new amendments to the country’s penal code.

Parliament began reviewing them on Thursday. The amendments do not explicitly mention journalists but rather focuses on judicial officials, police, lawyers and witnesses.

But Hrvoje Zovko, the head of Croatia’s journalists’ association (HND), told AFP: “These amendments are a brutal aggression against the journalistic profession and public interests.”

The bill would likely reduce information provided by whistleblowers, making reporting on corruption cases and public affairs issues increasingly difficult, he added.

The government has rejected such accusations. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said the bill “addresses the problem of the leaking of information in the non-public phase of criminal proceedings”.

AP – A man in United States convicted of murder in the 2021 death of a Black man after a racist road rage encounter was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

Dean Kapsalis, of Hudson, was convicted by a jury last year of second-degree murder, violation of constitutional rights and other offenses in the killing of Henry Tapia.

Kapsalis and Tapia got into an argument on January 19, 2021. Investigators found that as the argument wound down, Kapsalis shouted a racial slur and then hit Tapia with his pickup as he drove off. Tapia died at a hospital, prosecutors said.

“The murder of Henry Tapia is a senseless tragedy fuelled by hate and anger,” District Attorney Marian Ryan said last year after the conviction.

“The fact that some of the last words Henry Tapia heard were a horrific racial insult meant to intimidate and threaten him based on the colour of his skin is something we cannot tolerate.”

Judge David A Deakin, according to The Boston Globe, called the sentence on Wednesday proportional to the crime. While he took into account the support Kasalis received from friends and family, he noted that “your record reflects essentially a lifelong tendency toward violence”.

Deakin also addressed relatives of Tapia, who left behind a fiancee and children.

“I am well aware that no sentence can give them what they most want, which is to have Mr Tapia back,” Deakin said. “If I could, I wouldn’t do anything other than that”.

Kapsalis argued at trial that Tapia’s death was an accident. His sentencing was delayed by his unsuccessful attempt to reduce his conviction to manslaughter.