World

VIENNA — Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Sunday announced the formation of a new EU parliamentary alliance with Austria's far-right party and the Czech centrist group of ex-premier Andrej Babis.

Orban — whose country takes on the EU's rotating presidency on Monday — has long railed against the "Brussels elites", most recently accusing Brussels of fuelling the war in Ukraine.

Hungary has vowed to use its EU presidency to push for its "vision of Europe" under the motto "Make Europe Great Again" — echoing the rallying cry of Orban ally former US president Donald Trump.

"A new era begins here, and the first, perhaps decisive moment of this new era is the creation of a new European political faction that will change European politics," Orban told reporters in Vienna at a joint press conference with Austria's Freedom Party (FPOe) leader Herbert Kickl and Czech ANO Party leader Babis.

Vowing to bring a "new era", the three men signed what they termed a patriotic manifesto, promising "peace, security and development" instead of "war, migration and stagnation".

The new alliance, "Patriots for Europe", will need support from parties from at least four other countries to be recognised as a group in the EU parliament.

'New opportunities' 

It is not yet clear who would join them.

Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) announced at its party conference on Sunday that it was officially withdrawing from the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, to which the FPOe also belongs, along with France's National Rally and Italy's League.

The party's MEPs had already been excluded from the ID group in the run up to EU elections in early June after its lead candidate Maximilian Krah was embroiled in a series of scandals, including suspicious links to Russia and China.

Orban's Fidesz Party left the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) — the European Parliament's biggest group — in 2021 amid accusations of Hungary's democratic backsliding

"Even if the AfD cannot yet form a joint parliamentary group with Fidesz at this point, this opens up new opportunities for the AfD to work with other parties, as the party landscape of ECR and ID as a whole is in flux," a spokesman for AfD leader Alice Weidel told AFP.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists is set to be the EU parliament’s third-largest force, following far-right gains at the European elections.

Fidesz, with its partner KDNP, now has 11 MEPs, ANO seven and the FPOe six.

In a first, the FPOe topped the European election in Austria and also looks set to win national elections later this year.

Babis’ ANO announced last week it was leaving Renew Europe, which includes French President Emmanuel Macron’s party.

GENEVA — Ferocious storms and torrential rains that lashed France, Switzerland and Italy this weekend have left at least seven people dead, local authorities said on Sunday.

Three people died after torrential rains triggered a landslide in south-eastern Switzerland, police in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino said on Sunday.

Elsewhere in Switzerland, a man was found dead in a hotel in Saas-Grund in the southwest canton of Valais, police said, adding that he was probably taken by surprise by a sudden rapid rise in floodwater.

Images published in the online publication 20minuten showed parts of the town covered in a thick layer of mud and rocks.

Another man is also missing in Valais, police said.

In France, three people in their 70s and 80s died in the northeastern Aube region on Saturday when a falling tree crushed the car they were travelling in, the local authority told AFP.

A fourth passenger was in critical care, it added.

Switzerland’s civil security services said “several hundred” people were evacuated in the southern canton of Valais and roads closed after the Rhone and its tributaries overflowed in different locations.

The situation in Valais was “under control” Sunday, Frederic Favre, the official responsible for civil security, told a press conference, but he warned that it would remain “fragile” for the next several days.

Emergency services were assessing the best way to evacuate 300 people who had arrived for a football tournament in the mountain town of Peccia, while almost 70 more were being evacuated from a holiday camp in the village of Mogno.

The poor weather was making rescue work particularly difficult, police had said earlier, with several valleys in the southern cantons of Ticino and Valais near the border with Italy, inaccessible and cut off from the electricity network.

In Ticino, some 400 people — including 40 children from a holiday camp — had to be evacuated from risk areas and taken to civil protection centres.

The federal alert system also said part of the canton was without drinking water.

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, who is from Ticino, said the repeated disasters “have touched us deeply”.

It’s the worst flooding experienced in the canton since 2000 when 13 people were killed in a mudslide which destroyed the village of Gondo.

Scientists say climate change driven by human activity is increasing the severity, frequency and length of extreme weather events such as floods and storms.

Italy flooding 

In northern Italy, Piedmont and the Aosta Valley also suffered flooding and mudslides, though no deaths were reported.

Firefighters in Piedmont announced Sunday morning that they had carried out 80 operations to rescue people in difficulty.

A mudslide temporarily blocked a regional road to the ski resort of Cervinia in the Aosta Valley, a semi-autonomous region located along the border with France and Switzerland.

A river which burst its banks caused significant damage to the centre of the town where several streets were flooded.

A mudslide blocked access to Cogne, a village of 1,300 people in the Aosta Valley, where 90 millimetres of rainfall was recorded in a six-hour period on Saturday.

At the European football championships in Germany, a match between Germany and Denmark Saturday evening was interrupted for almost half an hour because of heavy rain and lighting.

RALEIGH, United States — A fired-up Joe Biden came out swinging on Friday as he tried to make up for a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, insisting he was the right man to win November’s US presidential election.

Biden’s appearance at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina came amid rumblings in his alarmed Democratic Party about replacing the 81-year-old as their nominee — and shortly before the nation’s most influential newspaper urged him to step aside.

“I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden admitted to supporters in unusually confessional remarks.

“But I know how to tell the truth. I know how to do this job,” he said to huge cheers, vowing “when you get knocked down, you get back up.”

Biden’s team was in damage-control mode after Thursday’s debate when he often hesitated, tripped over words and lost his train of thought — exacerbating fears about his ability to serve another term.

He had hoped to allay qualms about his advanced age, and to expose Trump as a habitual liar.

But the president failed to counter his bombastic rival, who offered up a largely unchallenged reel of false or misleading statements about everything from the economy to immigration.

On Friday, Biden delivered the lines Democrats wished they had heard in the televised debate.

“Did you see Trump last night? My guess is he set — and I mean this sincerely — a new record for the most lies told in a single debate,” Biden said.

“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat for everything America stands for.”

Trump also returned to the campaign trail Friday, speaking at a rally in Virginia and launching his familiar attacks on Biden in a rambling speech.

“It’s not his age, it’s his competence,” Trump said.

“The question every voter should be asking themselves today is not whether Joe Biden can survive a 90-minute debate performance, but whether America can survive four more years of crooked Joe Biden.”

A new Democrat?

Trump addressed the chances of Biden being replaced by another candidate, saying, “I don’t really believe that because he does better in polls than any of the [other] Democrats.”

So far, no senior Democratic figure has publicly called on Biden to withdraw, with most toeing a party line about sticking with the existing ticket.

“I will never turn my back on President Biden,” California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has figured prominently on lists of possible replacement candidates, said immediately after the debate.

Forcing a change in the ticket would be politically fraught, and Biden would have to decide himself to withdraw to make way for another nominee before the party convention next month.

Biden overwhelmingly won the primary votes, and the party’s 3,900 delegates heading to the convention in Chicago are beholden to him.

If he exits, the delegates would have to find a replacement.

“Bad debate nights happen,” Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, wrote on X.

But the election is “still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself”.

The show of Democratic loyalty and Biden’s defiance in North Carolina were not enough for The New York Times, however.

The daily newspaper slammed Biden’s campaign as a “reckless gamble” in the face of the threat posed by Trump, with its editorial board — which is separate from the newsroom — calling for the president to stand aside.

The “greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election,” it said.

A logical — but not automatic — candidate to take Biden’s place would be his vice president, Kamala Harris, who loyally defended his debate performance.

As the Democrats scrambled, Trump allies sought to project calm assurance.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson, a senior Republican figure, said it was clear Biden was not “up to the job”.

“Donald Trump is the only man on that stage that’s qualified and capable of serving as the next president,” he said. “The election cannot get here soon enough.”

A second debate is scheduled for September 10.

SEOUL — North Korea successfully tested its multiple-warhead missile capability, state media said on Thursday, as dozens more trash-laden balloons sent by Pyongyang landed in the South.

Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in years, with Pyongyang ramping up weapons testing while bombarding the South with balloons full of trash it says are in retaliation to similar missives sent northwards by activists in the South.

The balloons briefly forced Incheon Airport, Seoul's major hub, to close on Wednesday and, in response to the successive launches, South Korea has fully suspended a tension-reducing military treaty and restarted propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts and live-fire drills near the border.

North Korea claimed it had "successfully conducted the separation and guidance control test of individual mobile warheads", the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Thursday.

The "separated mobile warheads were guided correctly to the three coordinate targets" during the test carried out on Wednesday, it said.

"The test is aimed at securing the MIRV capability," KCNA added, referring to multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle technology — the ability to fire multiple warheads on a single ballistic missile.

South Korea's military had said the North's test on Wednesday appeared to be of a hypersonic missile, but that the launch ended in a mid-air explosion.

More smoke than usual appeared to emanate from the missile, raising the possibility of combustion issues, a South Korean military official said, adding it may have been powered by solid propellants.

According to KCNA, the test "was carried out by use of the first-stage engine of an intermediate-range solid-fuel ballistic missile within a 170-200 kilometre radius".

"The effectiveness of a decoy separated from the missile was also verified by anti-air radar," it said.

Acquiring multiple-warhead missile technology is an ultimate goal for nations seeking ICBM-level missiles to carry nuclear warheads, said Hong Min, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

It appears the North is “testing such technology step by step over the long haul”, he told AFP.

“They appear to be making technological advancements in the early development stages of multiple-warhead missiles.”

The United States and Seoul have repeatedly accused North Korea of providing ammunition and missiles to Russia for its war in Ukraine.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was in Pyongyang last week for a high-profile state visit that underscored his growing ties with leader Kim Jong-un.

The pair signed a “breakthrough” agreement that included a pledge to come to each other’s aid if attacked.

South Korea, which said last week it would “reconsider” a longstanding policy that bars it from supplying arms directly to Ukraine, announced on Thursday it will impose unilateral sanctions against four Russian ships and eight North Korean individuals over arms shipments and oil transfers between the two countries.

Balloon blitz

North Korea has floated hundreds of trash-carrying balloons southward for three consecutive days in a tit-for-tat propaganda campaign.

Seoul’s military said around 70 balloons had landed by Thursday morning, mainly in northern Gyeonggi province and the Seoul area, with the contents found not to be hazardous.

“The payload is about 10 kilogrammes, so there is a risk if the balloons descend rapidly,” it said, adding the military was ready to respond.

South Korea’s Marine Corps resumed live-fire exercises on islands near the western inter-Korean border on Wednesday, the first such exercises since the 2018 tension-reducing military deal with the North was fully suspended this month.

South Korea and the United States also staged joint air drills Wednesday involving around 30 aircraft, including Washington’s advanced stealth fighter jet the F-22 Raptor.

President Yoon Suk Yeol visited a US aircraft carrier on Tuesday that arrived in South Korea for joint trilateral military drills this week aimed at countering North Korean threats.

The drills, which run from Thursday to Saturday, involve Washington’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Tokyo’s guided-missile destroyer JS Atago, and Seoul’s KF-16 fighter jets, among other assets.

Pyongyang has routinely criticised such exercises as rehearsals for an invasion.

CANBERRA — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned home to Australia to start life as a free man on Wednesday after admitting he revealed US defence secrets in a deal that unlocked the door to his London prison cell.

Assange landed on a chilly Canberra evening in a private jet, the final act of an international drama that led him from a five-year stretch in the high-security Belmarsh prison in Britain to a courtroom in a US Pacific island territory and, finally, home.

His white hair swept back, the Australian raised a fist as he emerged from the plane door, striding across the tarmac to give a hug to his wife Stella that lifted her off the ground, and then to embrace his father.

Dozens of television journalists, photographers and reporters peered through the airport fencing to see Assange, who wore a dark suit, white shirt and brown tie.

WikiLeaks said on X that it would hold a press conference in the Australian capital at 9:15pm (11:15 GMT) on Wednesday, but did not say if Assange would be present.

"He will be able to spend quality time with his wife Stella, and his two children, be able to walk up and down on the beach and feel the sand through his toes in winter — that lovely chill," said Assange's father, John Shipton.

Assange's long battle with US prosecutors came to an unexpected end in the Northern Mariana Islands where a judge accepted his guilty plea on a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defence information.

The remote courtroom was chosen because of the 52-year-old's unwillingness to go to the continental United States and because of its proximity to Australia.

 'A free man' 

As part of a behind-the-scenes legal negotiation with the US Justice Department he was sentenced to the time he had already served in London — five years and two months — and given his liberty.

“You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” the judge told him.

Assange had published hundreds of thousands of confidential US documents on the whistleblowing website from 2010.

He became a hero to free speech campaigners but a villain to those who thought he endangered US security and intelligence sources.

“Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide material that was said to be classified,” Assange told the court.

Assange’s lawyer Jen Robinson told reporters it was a “historic day” that “brings to an end 14 years of legal battles”.

“It also brings to an end a case which has been recognised as the greatest threat to the First Amendment in the 21st century,” she said.

 ‘Too long’ 

Australian Prime Minster Anthony Albanese said he was “very pleased” by the outcome.

“Regardless of your views about his activities, and they will be varied, Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long,” he told parliament in Canberra.

The United Nations also hailed Assange’s release, saying the case had raised human rights concerns.

But former US vice president Mike Pence slammed the plea deal on social media platform X as a “miscarriage of justice” that “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces”.

The US justice department said after the hearing that Assange was banned from returning there without permission.

US authorities had wanted to put Assange on trial for divulging military secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He was indicted by a US federal grand jury in 2019 on 18 counts stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of national security documents.

The material he released through WikiLeaks included video showing civilians being killed by fire from a US helicopter gunship in Iraq in 2007. The victims included a photographer and a driver from Reuters.

 ‘Can’t stop crying’ 

In 2019 he was arrested and held in Belmarsh prison while fighting extradition to the United States.

He had spent seven years in Ecuador’s embassy in London to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he faced accusations of sexual assault that were eventually dropped.

He met his wife Stella Assange while holed up in the embassy, and the pair married in a ceremony in London’s Belmarsh prison. They have two young children.

“I can’t stop crying,” Stella, who was waiting for him in Australia, said on X.

“I am beyond excited,” she later told reporters as she left a Canberra hotel together with Assange’s father to see her husband at the airport.

The announcement of the plea deal came two weeks before Assange was scheduled to appear in court in Britain to appeal against a ruling that approved his extradition to the United States.

Washington had accused Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act and supporters warned he risked being sentenced to 175 years in prison.

The plea deal was not entirely unexpected. US President Joe Biden had been under growing pressure to drop the long-running case against Assange.

The Australian government made an official request to that effect in February and Biden said he would consider it, raising hopes among Assange supporters that his ordeal might end.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AFP) — The German government on Wednesday agreed measures making it easier to deport foreigners who glorify acts of terror after a surge in online hate posts during the Gaza war.

Under the new rules, foreigners could face deportation for social media comments that glorify or condone a single terrorist act, according to a draft law agreed by the Cabinet.

At the moment, it is necessary to express support for several acts. 

After Hamas's October 7 surprise attack on Israel, which triggered the Gaza war, there was a surge in hate posts on social media in Germany with officials saying Islamists in particular were responsible. 

The fatal stabbing last month of a police officer by an Afghan asylum seeker in Mannheim also triggered a surge of such posts, fuelling the debate on deportations.

“It is very clear to us that Islamist agitators who are mentally living in the Stone Age have no place in our country,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told the Funke media group, ahead of Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting. 

“Anyone who does not have a German passport and glorifies terrorist acts here must — wherever possible — be expelled”.

Glorifying acts of terror online fuels a climate of violence that can encourage extremists and violent criminals, according to the draft law, which still needs to be passed by parliament.

Convictions have already been made over some social media posts. An imam in Munich was this month fined 4,500 euros ($4,800) for posting on Facebook that “everyone has their own way of celebrating the month of October”, on the day of the Hamas attack.

In parliament following the Mannheim attack, Chancellor Olaf Scholz also called for those who celebrate acts of terror to face deportation.

Glorifying terrorist offences amounted to a “slap in the face for the victims, their families and our democratic order”, he said.