World

AMSTERDAM — Environmental activist Greta Thunberg joined tens of thousands in a march through Amsterdam Sunday, aimed at pushing climate change up the political agenda 10 days from a crunch national election.

Carrying placards reading: “Our house is on fire”, “In 2050: ‘Daddy, what are trees?’” and “Climate Justice Now”, demonstrators packed into Amsterdam’s central square and set off through the streets.

Organisers said tens of thousands were taking part as a “conservative estimate”. A previous march in Amsterdam attracted 40,000.

The march was organised by a coalition of pressure groups, including Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, Oxfam, and Greenpeace.

“With the crises continuing to stack up and a measly six years to achieve the Dutch climate goals in 2030, the upcoming elections are the most crucial ever,” they said in a joint statement.

Polls show the election is currently a dead heat between the centre-right VVD of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte and a new party, the NSC, led by anti-corruption champion Pieter Omtzigt.

A coalition of the Greens and the leftist PvdA is sitting in third place, according to the polls. This party is led by former European Commission heavyweight Frans Timmermans, the architect of the EU’s Green Deal agenda.

Surveys show the key issues of the election campaign have been the ongoing housing crisis in The Netherlands, living standards, and immigration.

According to the most recent poll by I&O research, climate change came in fifth of the issues on voters’ minds, behind housing, healthcare immigration and poverty.

Climate change is now considered less of a key topic than was the case at the last election in 2021, according to the I&O research poll.

LONDON — UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Saturday condemned far-right protesters and Hamas sympathisers, as hundreds of thousands of pro-Palestinian supporters marched through London calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza.

Nearly 2,000 police were out in force to keep rival groups apart, with the march organised on Armistice Day, the annual event when Britain remembers its war dead with solemn ceremonies at war memorials.

The march went ahead after a week of tensions, which saw the government call for the it to be scrapped, and police said they made scores of arrests.

Some 150 people from the mass protest were detained under public order legislation for wearing face coverings and setting off fireworks, while 82 counterprotesters were held to prevent them infiltrating the main march.

Groups of men, many wearing black with their faces covered and waving England’s St George’s flag and the Union Jack, tried to break through police lines at The Cenotaph war memorial on Whitehall.

Police in riot gear then faced a barrage of bottles in nearby Chinatown, the Metropolitan Police said.

“I condemn the violent, wholly unacceptable scenes we have seen today from the EDL [English Defence League] and associated groups and Hamas sympathisers attending the ‘National March for Palestine’,” said Sunak in a statement.

“The despicable actions of a minority of people undermine those who have chosen to express their views peacefully.”

“All criminality must be met with the full force of the law,” he added.

Scuffles

The march, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, is the biggest yet in London since Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, according to Israel.

The Israeli military campaign in response has left just over 11,000 people in Gaza dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the coastal enclave.

Huge crowds waved black, red, white and green Palestinian flags and held aloft placards proclaiming “Stop Bombing Gaza”, shouting “free Palestine”, “ceasefire now” and “Israel is a terror state”.

Police estimated that 300,000 people had turned out, while organisers put the figure at 800,000, putting it on a par with the huge numbers who marched in the British capital against the Iraq war in 2003.

“Forget the political stance, forget everything else, you can’t stand around while people are getting killed,” Shiraz Bobra, 41, who had travelled from Leicester, central England, told AFP, adding he would come every week until a ceasefire was enforced.

Roman Catholic priest Father John McGowan added: “I feel for the Palestinians because their land is occupied and their occupiers can be cruel” and said he hoped for a two-state solution.

Police said they were prepared for small breakaway groups and expected pockets of violence, with concern about far-right groups, including football hooligans massing to protect landmark memorials.

The founder and former leader of the far-right EDL, Tommy Robinson, was seen among the crowds of counterprotesters.

The Metropolitan Police said it was “actively seeking” two masked men pictured on the march wearing Hamas headbands, promising “proactive action when they are identified”.

About 1,850 police officers, including some from other forces across Britain, have been drafted in to keep the peace.

An exclusion zone was created around central London, including The Cenotaph, where crowds wearing poppies — the symbol of remembrance — gathered to pay their respects in silence, and by laying wreaths.

King Charles III leads a national remembrance event at the war memorial with senior royals, political leaders and veterans on Sunday.

Support for Palestinians is a long-standing policy of the British political left.

There were other pro-Palestinian rallies elsewhere in Europe. with several thousands turning out in Paris and more than 20,000 in Brussels.#.

Some of the marchers in the Belgian capital cried out “EU, shame on you” for perceived bias towards Israel at the expense of Palestinian lives and rights.

MOSCOW — Russia on Thursday criticised "absolutely unacceptable" comments made by Israel's Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu on the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza.

Eliyahu's remarks, from which which he later backtracked, prompted outrage and led to his suspension.

"We find these statements to be provocative, totally unacceptable," foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

"Such statements imply that the entire population of the Gaza Strip is being threatened with nuclear weapons... Is that a threat of genocide?"

Eliyahu had told Israel's Kol Barama radio that he was not entirely satisfied with the scale of Israel's retaliation.

He responded to a question by saying dropping some kind of atomic bomb would be "one option" but later said his statement was "metaphorical".

Israel is widely known to have nuclear weapons but has never admitted so.

"These statements not only clearly confirm the country's possession of such weapons but also demonstrate its readiness to seriously consider their use in completely inappropriate scenarios," Zakharova said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticised the West for allegedly stoking tensions in the region and Israel for its conduct in the conflict.

The war started over a month ago when Hamas fighters surprisingly  crossed into Israel , according to Israeli officials.

Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel assaulted with a relentless bombardment and ground invasion which the Hamas-run health ministry says has killed more than 10,800 people, many of them children.

LONDON — British police came under mounting government pressure on Wednesday to ban a pro-Palestinian rally scheduled to take place in London on the day the country commemorates its war dead.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would hold the Metropolitan Police commissioner "accountable" for his decision to allow the demonstration against the Hamas-Israel war to go ahead this Saturday.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to take to the streets of Britain's capital to demand a ceasefire in the month-old conflict.

The Conservative leader says a march on Armistice Day would be "provocative and disrespectful" but organisers have resisted his pleas and those from the Met Police to postpone the demonstration.

Met Police chief Mark Rowley has said the rally, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, does not meet the threshold for requesting a government order to stop it going ahead.

Rowley said such a ban was “incredibly rare” and a “last resort” where there is a serious threat of disorder.

“The events taking place this weekend are of great significance and importance to our nation,” he said in a statement.

“We will do everything in our power to ensure they pass without disruption.”

Sunak was due to meet Rowley on Wednesday and government ministers suggested that the commissioner should think again.

“There is a legal threshold and the commissioner is of the view that that legal threshold has not been met,” Health Secretary Steve Barclay told Sky News.

“Obviously, the Home Office and colleagues will discuss that over the course of the day.”

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer said in a radio interview that police should keep the protest “under review”.

November 11 commemorates the end of fighting in World War I, and the sacrifice of armed forces in all conflicts since 1914.

Protest groups have not indicated they plan to march on Remembrance Sunday, when solemn ceremonies and two minutes’ silence are held at war memorials up and down the country.

But some fear their Saturday protest will disrupt Sunday’s commemorations.

‘Robust’ 

Organisers have vowed to avoid the Whitehall area of central London where the Cenotaph — the focal point of Remembrance on Sunday — is located.

A spokesman for Sunak said the prime minister will seek from Rowley during their meeting “further assurances” that the police’s handling of the protest will be “robust and sufficient”.

He denied that the UK leader was trying to put pressure on the Met chief by saying he would hold him “accountable” for green-lighting the march.

“The Met are operationally independent. It’s the job of the prime minister and the government to hold them to account for their approach,” the spokesman told reporters.

London has seen large demonstrations on four successive weekends since the Hamas’ surprise attack in southern Israel on October 7.

Since then, Israel has relentlessly bombarded the Palestinian territory and sent in ground troops, with the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza saying more than 10,550 people have been killed.

ISLAM QALA, Afghanistan — The number of Afghans coming home from Iran has doubled in the past month, a top border official said Wednesday, with returnees reporting growing pressure to leave.

At least 14,480 Afghans have crossed at Islam Qala in four days since the weekend, said Abdullah Qayomi, head of refugee affairs at the busy crossing near the western Afghan city of Herat.

The rise comes as Afghanistan’s eastern border points with Pakistan have been inundated with returnees after Islamabad ordered 1.7 million Afghans it said were living illegally in the country to leave or face deportation.

“When Pakistan made the decision to deport our countrymen from their own land, the figures started to rise here,” Qayomi said. 

“The figures have doubled now as compared to one month ago,” he told AFP this week, saying numbers leapt from 1,500-2,000 per day to 3,000-4,500.

“Iran has not announced it (that they are deporting Afghans) but continuously there is no decline in our figures, they are only increasing day by day,” Qayomi said.

Afghans arriving at Islam Qala report being detained and deported, even if some of them had documents allowing them to be in Iran. 

Abdul Rahim Ahmadi said he had been living in Iran for 11 years with proper documents but was arrested with his nephew and taken to a military base before being deported through Islam Qala on Monday.

“No questioning happened, they just brought us to the military base... and just like that I was deported,” the 47-year-old told AFP.

“My wife and son are there in Iran, I have rented a house there. I don’t know what to do.”

Iran, which shares a 900-kilometre border with Afghanistan, hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world, made up mostly of well-integrated Afghans who arrived over the past 40 years after fleeing conflict.

An estimated 4.5 million Afghans currently live in Iran, according to the International Organisation for Migration, though Tehran estimates there are more than five million.

The agency said in a 2023 report the number of Afghans leaving Iran outstrips those entering, “mainly due to the systematic pushbacks” by the Iranian government.

Iranian officials did not respond immediately to requests for comment on the uptick in Afghan returnees in recent weeks.

But Iran’s official IRNA news agency quoted a police official this month as saying more than 15,000 “illegal” Afghan citizens had returned over just four days, and some 328,000 were deported this year.

An Afghan delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Akhund visited Tehran last week.

A statement from Afghan authorities said Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian pledged to resolve “refugee-related issues” during discussions on boosting trade ties. 

PARIS — The last remaining Northern Greenland ice shelves bracing the region’s vast ice sheet have lost a third of their volume in the last four decades, researchers said on Tuesday, warning of the risk of “dramatic” sea level rise. 

The floating shelves play a crucial role in regulating the flow of ice into the ocean from glaciers hosting enough ice to ultimately raise sea levels by 2.1 metres. 

These ice shelves have lost more than 35 per cent of their total volume since 1978, with three of them collapsing completely, the study found. 

With continued global warming driven by fossil fuel pollution expected to further heat ocean waters, the ice shelves are “extremely vulnerable” to further retreat and even collapse, according to the study published in Nature Communications.

“This could have dramatic consequences in terms of SLR [sea level rise],” the authors said. 

They added that this is the area of Greenland with the greatest potential to raise ocean levels, possibly over centuries.

The melting of the ice shelves themselves does not contribute to sea level rise but they exist as “dams” regulating the discharge of ice into the ocean from the ice sheet.

If these natural barriers disintegrate, it may cause the glaciers to dump more ice into the oceans, the study found.

‘Significant’ 

rise in melting

Glaciers in this region had previously been considered stable by scientists, unlike other parts of Greenland’s ice sheet that began to weaken in the mid-1980s.

But the authors found that the glaciers have started to discharge ice in response to weakening ice shelves, which have been melting from below by warming oceans. 

“We have identified a very significant increase in melting since the 2000s which clearly corresponds to a rise in ocean temperatures in this area during that time,” lead author Romain Millan, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, told AFP. 

The researchers based in Denmark, France and the United States used thousands of satellite images combined with field measurements and climate models to reconstruct the nature of these buoyant glacier extensions.

Greenland’s northern glaciers have only started to destabilise in the last 20 years, meaning more ice has been lost than gained.

“The glacier Zachariae Isstrom, for example, which broke loose in 2003 almost doubled the amount of ice it discharged into the ocean,” said Millan. 

The Greenland ice sheet is a major contributor to global sea level rise, accounting for some 17 per cent of the observed rise in water levels between 2006 and 2018.

“What happens to the poles and sea levels in the future depends on the decisions taken by politicians to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Millan. 

World leaders and climate negotiators will gather in Dubai from November 30 for the latest United Nations summit as record-shattering temperatures, rising wildfires and worsening natural disasters heighten alarm about the fate of the planet.