World

WASHINGTON — With the US government just hours from shutting down on Saturday, Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy pitched a last-gasp stopgap measure to avoid a closure that would throw into doubt everything from access to national parks to Washington's massive support for Ukraine.

The freeze of all but critical government services, set to start after midnight Saturday (04:00 GMT Sunday) if lawmakers fail to reach a deal, would be the first since 2019 — immediately delaying salaries for millions of federal employees and military personnel.

Congress has been unable to break the deadlock, largely due to a small group of hard-line Republicans in the House of Representatives pushing back against temporary funding proposals that would at least keep the lights on.

Speaker McCarthy called a vote Saturday on a fresh measure that would keep the government open for another 45 days at current spending levels, but without any aid for Ukraine — a point of major contention for Democrats.

"I am asking Republicans and Democrats alike. Put your partisanship away," McCarthy said on Saturday.

If the bill receives the significant Democratic support it would need to pass and overcome hardline Republican opposition in the House, the right-wingers have threatened to remove the speaker from his post.

"If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try," McCarthy said, as he also sought to shift any blame for a shutdown on President Joe Biden.

If Biden lobbies against the latest stopgap, "then the shutdown is on him”, McCarthy said.

The White House insists the real negotiation is between McCarthy and the hardliners who scuppered a similar temporary funding measure on Friday, underlying a growing sense of chaos inside the Republican Party ahead of next year's presidential election.

"There are those in Congress right now who are sowing so much division, they're willing to shut down the government tonight," Biden said on Saturday morning on X, formerly known as Twitter. "It's unacceptable."

The Democrat-controlled Senate had been expected to vote on its own stopgap bill later Saturday — one that does include funding for Ukraine.

Big question on Ukraine 

While all critical government services would remain functioning, a shutdown would mean the majority of national parks, for example — from the iconic Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west to Florida's Everglades swamp — would be closed to public access beginning Sunday.

With student loan payments resuming in October, officials also said Friday that key activities at the Federal Student Aid office would continue for a couple of weeks.

But a prolonged shutdown could cause bigger disruptions.

A shutdown "unnecessarily" places the world's largest economy at risk, White House National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard told CNBC.

Risks that could percolate through the wider economy include air travel delays, with air traffic controllers asked to work without pay.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned a closure could also delay infrastructure improvements.

"In the immediate term, a government shutdown will only reduce GDP by 0.2 percentage points each week it lasts," said a report released on Friday by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, adding that a shutdown would "undermine the United States' overall credibility as a commercial partner".

The mess casts a growing shadow over Biden's policy of arming and funding Ukraine in its desperate war against the Russian invasion. For Republican hardliners behind the derailment of a new budget, stopping aid to Ukraine is a key goal.

Most Republican members of Congress continue to support US backing for Ukraine, but the shutdown will at minimum raise questions over the political viability of renewing the multibillion-dollar flow of assistance.

KORNIDZOR, Armenia — The flood of refugees from Nagorno Karabakh dwindled to a trickle on Saturday as Armenia said nearly the entire population of the breakaway territory had already fled after Azerbaijan seized back control.

An AFP journalist at the Kornidzor crossing into Armenia saw only several ambulances arrive as border guards said they were waiting for a final few buses.

In the nearest town of Goris, hundreds of exhausted refugees waited amongst their baggage in the central square for the government to offer accommodation.

Azerbaijan's lightning military takeover of the ethnic Armenian enclave last week sparked a sudden exodus that has rewritten the centuries-old ethnic makeup of the disputed region.

Armenia said Saturday 100,437 people from an estimated population of 120,000 had fled since the breakaway region saw its decades-long fight against Azerbaijani rule end in sudden defeat.

Yerevan said 14 bedridden patients had died during or shortly after having been evacuated along the lone mountain road out of the territory.

Artak Beglaryan, a former separatist official, said "the last groups" of Nagorno Karabakh residents were on their way to Armenia Saturday.

"At most a few hundred persons remain, most of whom are officials, emergency services employees, volunteers, some persons with special needs," he wrote on social media.

Armenia, a country of 2.8 million, faces a major challenge housing the sudden influx of refugees and authorities said 35,000 were now in temporary accommodation.

Yerevan has accused Azerbaijan of conducting a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” to clear Nagorno Karabakh of its Armenian population.

But Baku has denied the claim and has publicly called on the Armenian residents of the territory to stay and “reintegrate” into Azerbaijan.

The United Nations has said it will send a mission to Nagorno Karabakh this weekend, mainly to assess humanitarian needs, the first time the international body has had access to the region in about 30 years.

France lashed out at Azerbaijan for only allowing the mission in after most residents had already fled.

With tensions high between the Caucasus neighbours, Azerbaijan said one of its soldiers was killed by an Armenian sniper on their heavily militarised border.

 Armenia quickly denied the accusation, saying the claim its forces had opened fire on Azerbaijani positions “does not correspond to reality”.

Exchanges of fire along the border between the two Caucasus foes are common.

But so far the two sides have prevented the recent flare-up over Nagorno Karabakh from spilling over into a broader confrontation.

Azerbaijan’s 24-hour offensive to retake the enclave appears to have decisively ended the bloody struggle over the region’s status that has dragged on since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The separatists agreed on Thursday to dissolve their government and become a formal part of Azerbaijan by the end of the year.

The decision marked the end of one of the world’s longest and seemingly most intractable “frozen conflicts” — one that Azerbaijan was able to finally win while longstanding Armenian ally Russia was bogged down in its war on Ukraine.

Azerbaijan is now holding “reintegration” talks with separatist leaders while at the same time detained some senior figures from its former government and military command.

Former separatist foreign minister David Babayan, who announced earlier he would surrender, was the latest arrested by Baku.

Pressure on Pashinyan

Some 3,000 opponents of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan resumed anti-government protests with a rally on Yerevan’s main square Saturday.

Pashinyan’s critics — who had paused demonstrations to focus on helping refugees — accuse him of abandoning the separatist region in the face of Azerbaijan’s aggression.

“We’ve lost Karabakh, now we don’t want to lose Armenia,” 38-year-old linguist Maria Asatryan, told AFP.

“The longer Pashinyan stays in power, the worse the situation will become. People must unite and tell Pashinyan to step down.”

But so far the opposition has failed to muster major crowds to stage a concerted bid to oust him from power.

Pashinyan has tried to deflect the blame on Russia.

Moscow has deployed peacekeepers in the region that were meant to police a truce ending a 2020 war in which Baku clawed back some of the lands it lost to the separatists in the 1990s.

Pashinyan called Yerevan’s current alliances “ineffective” and urged parliament in next week’s session to ratify a document that would make Armenia a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The ICC has issued an international arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin said it would treat Armenia’s ICC membership as an “extremely hostile” step.

HANGZHOU, China — One delivered gas cylinders in government-run Aden for a living and the other cooked meals in rebel-held Sanaa. Now the two athletes from war-torn Yemen find themselves on the same team at the Asian Games.

Yemen has been in the grip of a war since 2014 pitting forces loyal to the internationally recognised government against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The conflict has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Yemeni team at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China is the only sign of the country's unity, according to delegation chief Abdel Sattar Al Hamadani.

"We marched behind a single banner at the opening of the Games," Hamadani told AFP.

"Sport has paid a heavy price for the war," added Hamadani, who heads the Yemeni Basketball Association, pointing out the absence of any material support, apart from that provided by the International Olympic Committee and Asian bodies.

Said Al Khodr, a judo fighter from Aden, worked in the morning and trained in the afternoon to make the Games team.

"The love of sport runs through my veins and I toil from dawn until 3pm carrying gas cylinders on my back to deliver across the city," he said.

“Then I take a shower and go to my judo training session nine or 10 kilometres  from home, said the 19-year-old father-of-one.

‘I couldn’t bear it’

The athlete said he often hitchhikes to training because the transport allowance from his judo club “isn’t enough to cover my costs”.

The Yemeni economy was already in crisis before the Houthis seized Sanaa in September 2014, prompting a Saudi-led military alliance to intervene the following March.

Khodr said at one stage he quit the sport given the difficulties, including a close call when shrapnel from bombing fell around the car in which he was travelling.

“I gave my uniform to someone else because I couldn’t bear to see it hanging up in my house,” he said.

“I lasted five or six months and then one day my feet took me to the club and I had to pay $300 for a new outfit.”

 Narrow escape

Yussef Iskander, another athlete in the small Yemeni delegation, says he narrowly escaped death when a shell exploded as he left the hall where he was practising the martial art of wushu.

One piece of shrapnel pierced his foot, another killed one of his teammates and a third caused the amputation of another’s foot.

The explosion happened in Taez, a city in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula country.

“Because of the injury I stopped training from 2015 to 2021, but eventually resumed to raise the Yemeni flag in China,” he said.

A silver medallist at the Arab Games in Beirut in 2014, Iskander, who is expecting his second child, trains for about an hour a day.

“China has been preparing for the Games for a year and a half and we’ve been preparing for just one month here,” he said in Hangzhou.

Iskander rejects the idea of emigrating, but judoka Abdalla Faye, 29, wants to escape his war-ravaged homeland.

“I want to go to France, where judo is practised, where I can flourish, but I have no money,” he said.

The Sanaa resident has two jobs, alternating between delivering ready-made meals and working as a security guard in the rebel-held capital.

“I go to training exhausted, which doesn’t help me prepare for big tournaments,” said Faye, who came 17th in the -73kg category at the Games.

Yemen’s medal tally in Hangzhou is zero with the multisport event halfway through.

But Hamadani hopes his country can take part in the 2024 Paris Olympics, saying he has already received invitations for athletics, boxing and swimming.

He intends to lead an official delegation to France, if he can get out of Yemen, where airports are few and numerous checks are carried out by the warring factions for movement between areas.

WASHINGTON — US Republicans began impeachment inquiry hearings into Joe Biden on Thursday, escalating an eight-month corruption investigation that has failed to uncover evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

The party says the information it has amassed warrants streamlining its multiple probes into an official inquiry empowered to unleash investigators from three House committees to subpoena Biden's bank records.

Republicans have accused Biden of trading on the power of his office when he was vice president to help his son Hunter Biden secure lucrative foreign business deals, and of benefiting personally from the "corruption".

"Since assuming our Republican majority in January, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has uncovered a mountain of evidence, revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family's financial gain," said James Comer, one of three senior Republican congressmen spearheading the probe.

"For years, President Biden has lied to the American people about his knowledge of and participation in his family's corrupt business schemes."

Democrats have dismissed the effort as a “stunt”, accusing Republicans of trying to distract voters, days ahead of a looming government shutdown sparked by far-right lawmakers.

“If the Republicans had a smoking gun, or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today,” said Jamie Raskin, the oversight committee’s top Democrat.

“But they’ve got nothing on Joe Biden.”

Open-ended inquiry 

The Constitution provides that Congress may remove a president for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.

Impeachment by the House, the political equivalent of a criminal indictment, would spark a “trial” by the Senate, with the president losing his job if he is convicted.

The oversight committee touted its first hearing as a “refresher course” on the panel’s work so far.

But opponents say the idea is simply to have a damaging open-ended inquiry going into an election year, and that an impeachment would never have sufficient support in the House, where the Republicans have a razor-thin majority.

The probe has already obtained more than 12,000 pages of subpoenaed bank records from Biden family members and hours of testimony from Hunter’s business associates and federal investigators.

Republicans advanced various conspiracy theories implicating Biden in corruption scandals involving his son and Ukrainian energy company Burisma that have been undercut by US diplomats or investigated and dropped by Republican former president Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

No evidence 

They have presented a former business partner of Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, as a star witness who would offer damning evidence that the president made money from his son’s contacts.

Pressed repeatedly at a previous hearing, he testified that he had never seen or heard the younger Biden discuss business with his father.

Republicans seized on Archer’s testimony that the president had greeted his son’s associates during numerous family telephone calls, claiming that Joe Biden had helped Hunter create the impression that his contacts had access to the White House.

But they have presented no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden himself.

There were no fact witnesses at the hearing, but Republicans called two contributors of conservative network Fox News, including legal scholar Jonathan Turley, and a member of Trump’s transition team to explain why they thought the inquiry was justified.

Turley and accounting expert Bruce Dubinsky testified that there was no evidence of corruption by Biden.

Both said however that they supported the inquiry, which was launched, in a break from protocol, without a vote of the full House.

The Democrats’ sole witness, University of North Carolina law expert Michael Gerhardt, said there was no precedent in US history for starting a presidential impeachment inquiry without evidence of wrongdoing.

“In fact, I would just point out that with Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton,  and President Trump in 2019, the full House authorised those impeachment inquiries,” he said.

MOSCOW — Russia said Thursday that it plans to raise defence spending by almost 70 percent next year, funnelling massive resources into its Ukraine offensive to fight what it calls a "hybrid war" unleashed by the West.

With Moscow's "special military operation" now dragging through its twentieth month, both sides have been digging deep and procuring weapons from allies in preparation for a protracted conflict.

The announcement came as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg and the defence ministers of Britain and France visited Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelensky lobbied for more air defence systems.

"We need to get through this winter together, to protect our energy infrastructure and people's lives," Zelensky told Stoltenberg, warning of a fresh campaign of Russian strikes after last year's strikes left millions short of water and heating.

Ukraine's newly appointed defence minister Rustem Umerov, after meeting with his British counterpart Grant Shapps, said "Winter is coming but we are ready".

Ukraine has repeatedly asked for more Western weapons, including longer-range missiles, to help break through Russian positions and launch strikes deep within Russian-controlled territory.

It began its counter-offensive in June but has acknowledged slow progress as its forces encounter lines of heavily fortified Russian defences.

‘Hybrid war’ 

Stoltenberg acknowledged that Ukraine’s army was facing “fierce fighting” as it slowly claws back territory from Russian forces, but said Kyiv was gaining ground.

“Every metre that Ukrainian forces regain is a metre that Russia loses. Moscow is fighting for imperialist delusions,” he said.

The speed of Ukraine’s advances has raised concerns in some Western countries over Kyiv’s military strategy, but Stoltenberg again vowed that the US-led defence bloc was unwavering in its support.

“NATO will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” he told Zelensky during his unannounced visit to Kyiv. Zelensky meanwhile said it was a “matter of time” before Ukraine joins the alliance.

When the Kremlin launched its large-scale military operation in Ukraine last year it had hoped to quickly capture territory and to topple the Ukrainian government within days.

But the conflict has dragged on and Russia has ramped up arms manufacturing and pumped massive funds into its military machine, despite persistently high inflation and a weaker ruble.

According to a finance ministry document published Thursday, defence spending is set to jump by over 68 per cent year-on-year to almost 10.8 trillion rubles ($111.15 billion), more than spending allocated for social policy.

“It is obvious that such an increase is necessary, absolutely necessary, because we are in a state of hybrid war, we are continuing the special military operation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

“I’m referring to the hybrid war that has been unleashed against us,” he said.

Defence spending in 2024 is set to total around three times more than education, environmental protection and healthcare spending combined, figures calculated by AFP showed.

“The focus of economic policy is shifting from an anti-crisis agenda to the promotion of national development goals,” the finance ministry said in the document.

It said this included “strengthening the country’s defence capacity” and “integrating” four Ukrainian regions Moscow claims to have annexed last year, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

President Vladimir Putin and other officials have largely shrugged off the economic effects of the Ukraine offensive, arguing that Russia has weathered the storm of Western sanctions.

But Russia’s central bank warned this month that economic growth was set to slow in the second half of 2023, while ordinary Russians feel the pinch from rising prices.

Drones and 

cruise missiles 

Russia’s spending plans were announced as Stoltenberg and the British and French defence ministers visited Kyiv to discuss additional military aid for Ukraine.

The visits came ahead of Kyiv’s first Defence Industries Forum, where Ukrainian officials were to meet representatives from over 160 defence firms and 26 countries.

“Ukraine is now closer to NATO than ever before,” Stoltenberg said at the press conference, listing measures the bloc had taken to support Ukraine.

While neither side has been able to boast significant gains on the frontline in recent weeks, both Moscow and Kyiv have launched systematic aerial attacks on strategic facilities with drones and cruise missiles.

Ukraine said earlier Thursday that Russia had deployed a “massive” drone attack overnight, adding that it had destroyed 31 of the 39 aircraft.

Russian unmanned aerial vehicles were intercepted over Black Sea coastal regions and further inland, said Nataliya Gumenyuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian southern military command.

Russia “is not letting up pressure and searching for new tactics: namely, with the use of mass attacks”, Gumenyuk said.