World

KABUL — The Taliban have offered a brief ceasefire to the US, two insurgent sources said on Thursday, a move which could allow the resumption of talks seeking a deal for Washington to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

Washington has for weeks been calling on the militants to reduce violence, posing it as a condition for resuming formal negotiations on an agreement that would see US troops begin to leave the country in return for security guarantees from the insurgents.

"It is an offer for a ceasefire either for seven or 10 days," a senior Taliban official who requested anonymity told AFP, adding that the offer was made to US negotiators in Doha. 

"It has been finalised and given to the Americans. It is going to pave the way for an agreement." 

A second insurgent source, based in Pakistan, confirmed that the offer had been handed to the US.

The Taliban have yet to release an official statement, and Washington has not said whether it has received any offer from the insurgents or what its response will be. 

The Taliban and the US had been negotiating the deal for a year, and were on the brink of an announcement in September 2019 when President Donald Trump abruptly declared the process "dead", citing Taliban violence.

Talks were later restarted between the two sides in December in Qatar, but were paused again following an attack near the Bagram military base in Afghanistan, which is run by the US.

The insurgents' offer, if accepted by the Americans, could see the negotiations begin again.

The confirmation from the insurgents comes hours after Pakistan's foreign minister said the Taliban has shown "a willingness" to reduce violence. 

"Today, positive progress has been made, the Taliban have shown their willingness to reduce the violence, which was a demand... it's a step towards the peace agreement," said Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in a video statement.

He gave no further details.

Islamabad has helped facilitate the talks between the militants and Washington in Qatar.

Pakistan was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban regime, and its shadowy military establishment — particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) — is widely believed to back the bloody insurgency in Afghanistan.

Islamabad denies the accusation.

Any agreement with the Taliban is expected to have two main pillars — an American withdrawal from Afghanistan and a commitment by the insurgents not to offer sanctuary to extremist militants. 

The Taliban's relationship with Al Qaeda was the main reason cited for the US invasion nearly 18 years ago.

The Taliban have until now refused to negotiate with the Afghan government, which they consider an illegitimate regime, raising fears that fighting will continue regardless of any deal ironed out with the Americans.

WASHINGTON — After nearly two years of conflict between the world's two dominant economic powers, the United States and China signed a trade truce on Wednesday, letting businesses around the globe breathe a sigh of relief.

US President Donald Trump, who currently faces an impeachment trial and then a tough reelection bid later this year, called the agreement "momentous".

But tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in imports remain in place, leaving American consumers and businesses to foot the bill.

The "phase one" agreement includes pledges from China to beef up purchases of American crops and other exports, provides protections for US technology, and new enforcement mechanisms.

"Today, we take a momentous step, one that's never taken before with China," that will ensure "fair and reciprocal trade", Trump said at the White House signing ceremony.

"Together, we are righting the wrongs of the past."

As Trump ambled through a lengthy commentary on the deal, punctuated byintroductions of many officials involved in the negotiations, major networks switched away from the White House to the Congress to show the presentation of articles of impeachment in the Senate as the first step towards a trial.

The easing of US-China trade frictions has boosted stock markets worldwide in recent weeks, as it takes the threat of new tariffs off the table for now.

Trump signed the deal with China’s Vice Premier Liu He, who has led Beijing’s negotiations with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Trump also thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping and said he would visit China in “the not-too-distant future”.

“Negotiations were tough on us,” Trump said, but they led “to this really incredible breakthrough”.

But he said he will only remove tariffs “if we’re able to do phase two”.

“I’m leaving them on. Otherwise we have no cards to negotiate with.”

In a letter to Trump read by Liu, the Chinese leader said the deal is “good for China, for the US and for the whole world”.

However, the most difficult issues remain to be dealt with in “phase two” negotiations, including massive subsidies for state industry.

Whither tariffs? 

Prior to the signing, Mnuchin said the deal puts pressure on Beijing to stay at the negotiating table and make further commitments — including on cyber-security and access for US services firms to the Chinese markets — in order to win relief from the tariffs that remain in place.

“In phase two there will be additional roll backs,” Mnuchin said on CNBC early Wednesday. “This gives China a big incentive to get back to the table and agree to the additional issues that are still unresolved.”

Still, elements of the deal the administration has touted as achievements effectively take the relationship between the two powers back to where it was before Trump took office.

“The US-China phase-one deal is essentially a trade truce, with large state-directed purchases attached,” economist Mary Lovely said in an analysis. 

But the trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, cautioned that “we will continue to see the impact of this in slower investment and higher business costs”.

After announcing the deal on December 13, the United States canceled a damaging round of new tariffs that were due to kick in two days later and also promised to slash in half the 15 percent tariffs on $120 billion imposed September 1 on consumer goods like clothing. 

What’s in a deal? 

As part of the accord, Beijing agreed to import an additional $200 billion in US products over two years, above the levels purchased in 2017, before Trump launched his offensive, including an additional $32 billion in agricultural goods.

Trump has repeatedly touted the trade pact as a boon for American farmers, who were hit hard by the tariff war.

Soybeans exports to China plunged to just $3 billion from more than $12 billion in 2017 and the Trump administration paid out $28 billion in aid to farmers in the last two years.

But many economists question whether US farmers have the capacity to meet that demand.

And Lovely raised a question about the wisdom on relying so heavily on the Chinese market.

“It also means Chinese retaliation could be reinstated, dampening farmers’ willingness to invest to meet the very hard export targets in the deal.”

The agreement includes additional protections for intellectual property and addresses financial services and foreign exchange while including a provision for dispute resolution, which Mnuchin said will be binding for the first time.

Trump in August formally accused China of manipulating its currency to gain an advantage in trade and offset the impact of the tariffs.

The label, which had no real practical impact, was removed earlier this week.

The deal also restores a twice-yearly dialogue process that previous administrations conducted regularly but that Trump scrapped.

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan — Search teams found the bodies of 14 people buried by avalanches and heavy snowfall in Pakistani-administered Kashmir on Wednesday, with harsh weather hampering rescuers as they race to find any survivors, officials said. 

The death toll from days of bad weather now stands at 76 in Kashmir and at least 100 across the country, according to a statement from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

Most were killed in Kashmir’s picturesque Neelum Valley, which had been hard hit by avalanches earlier in the week, said operations director of the Kashmiri disaster management authority Saeed ur Rehamn Qureshi. 

He said “scores” of houses had been damaged, and put the death toll slightly higher than the national authorities, at 77 dead with 94 wounded. 

One Neelum Valley resident, Lal Hussain Minhas, said he had pulled his cousin’s wife from under the snow and debris when her house was hit by an avalanche.

Now, he told AFP by telephone, he and other locals are trying to reach two of her children trapped beneath a collapsed roof.

Some 24 people were killed in heavy snowfall in other parts of the country, the NDMA said.

Forecasts suggest more harsh weather is on the way.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday visited some of the injured in a hospital in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Authorities have shuttered schools, while several highways and roads were closed across the country’s northern mountainous areas, according to officials.

GENEVA — The Swiss will in May vote on a proposal that could dramatically limit immigration from the EU, six years after a similar referendum nearly destroyed relations with the bloc.

The Swiss government announced on Wednesday that the so-called “limitation initiative” would be one of the issues on the ballot for the year’s second round of popular votes, on May 17.

The initiative, backed by the populist rightwing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and opposed by the government, calls for the country to revise its constitution to ensure it can autonomously handle its immigration policy.

SVP, Switzerland’s largest party, has built its brand by condemning immigration as well as the influence of the European Union in non-EU-member Switzerland.

If the initiative passes, Swiss authorities would have one year to negotiate an end to its 1999 agreement with Brussels on the free movement of persons between Switzerland and the bloc.

The initiative goes even further than a similar initiative, also backed by SVP that was voted on in February 2014. It demanded that Bern impose quotas on migration from EU countries.

That vote narrowly passed, throwing Swiss-EU relations into disarray, with Brussels warning that any curbs on immigration by EU citizens put in doubt a whole range of bilateral agreements.

SVP condemns compromise as ‘betrayal’ 

Bern struggled for years to find a way to respect the will of the people without permanently alienating the neighbouring EU, its main trading partner.

After lengthy negotiations, the agreement reached in late 2016 stopped far short of an initial plan to impose quotas on resident permits issued to EU citizens, which Brussels had fiercely rejected.

Instead Bern opted to merely require Swiss employers to jump through a few bureaucratic hoops before hiring from the bloc, and to prioritise Swiss job seekers, at least ostensibly.

SVP condemned that compromise as a “betrayal” and a capitulation to the EU.

The upcoming vote in May is part of Switzerland’s direct democracy system, in which voters cast ballots on a wide range of national, regional and local issues every few months.

Any initiative to modify the constitution that gathers 100,000 signatures is put to a popular vote, while 50,000 signatures are enough to call a referendum opposing a law voted by parliament.

Other questions on the May ballot will be whether childcare costs should be tax-deductible, and one on opposition to a recent revision of Switzerland’s federal hunting law, which conservationists say does not go far enough to protect wildlife.

FRANKFURT AM MAIN — Germany's only black MP reported finding bullet holes in the windows of his constituency office on Wednesday, prompting outrage and alarm that the country's politicians are facing increasing levels of intimidation and violence.

Karamba Diaby, a lawmaker for the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), posted about the attack on Twitter, saying police and security services were investigating and attaching a photo showing three impact points on a pane of glass.

"One window with my face on it has several bullet holes," he said.

Foreign Minister and party colleague Heiko Maas tweeted that the suspected attack was "unbelievable, disgusting and cowardly".

"We will continue standing by your side for a free, tolerant and diverse democracy," he added.

The attack comes as German politicians at all levels increasingly become targets of violence, with police statistics suggesting that most suspects were linked to the far-right.

Police figures gathered by weekly Welt am Sonntag this week showed significant increases in such acts in many of Germany's 16 states last year.

Attacks on politicians and officials in Thuringia and Saxony, both neighbouring states to Diaby's home in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubled year-on-year, to 101 and 197 respectively.

Born in Senegal, Diaby moved to then-communist East Germany in the 1980s after winning a scholarship to study there.

In a 2017 interview with AFP, he recalled experiencing racism both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1989-90, suffering a beating from neo-Nazis in 1991.

But he went on to get his doctorate in chemistry, marry a German, and in 2001 obtained German nationality.

He has represented the city of Halle since 2013, defending his seat in 2017 even as far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany entered parliament for the first time.

LA CONONJA, Spain — Rescuers found a body at a chemical plant in north-eastern Spain on Wednesday, raising to two the number of those killed when an explosion ripped through the facility, triggering a massive blaze which raged through the night.

Catalan regional interior minister, Miquel Buch, confirmed the latest death, saying a body had been located under the rubble at the site on an industrial estate in La Canonja, just outside the northeastern port city of Tarragona.

Spain's civil protection authority identified the victim as "an employee at the plant" reported missing on Tuesday.

Hundreds of firefighters battled through the night to try and contain the blaze which erupted just before 7:00pm (18:00 GMT) on Tuesday.

Dramatic footage of the moment of the explosion showed a huge fireball lighting up the horizon, causing the ground to shake.

One person died when a sheet of metal flung into the air by the force of the blast crashed into a house several kilometres away in the Tarragona suburbs, the Catalan government said.

Two others at site were rushed to hospital with severe burns, rescuers and local officials said, while one person sustained less serious burns and five others were lightly injured.

No warning for residents 

Buch said firefighters were still trying to put out the blaze but that the situation had stabilised.

"There is material there that is burning and needs cooling down so we can't say yet that it's over," he told reporters, saying the region had declared two days of mourning for the victims.

The regional fire service said some 30 fire engines had been working to try and contain the inferno and cool down the propylene oxide tank at the IQOXE facility, which specialises in the production of ethylene oxide, glycol and propylene oxide.

But local residents said they had been left in the dark about the blast, saying the warning sirens had not been activated.

"We didn't know what was happening! We called 112 [the emergency services] and they... said they didn't know anything," Tarragona resident Mabel Martinez told Catalan public television TV3.

"I also thought it was shocking that the sirens never went off."

The deputy head of the region's civil protection division accused IQOXE of dragging its feet in providing details about the incident, which led to delays in warning the public.

"The [emergency] protocols were not followed," Sergi Delgado told Catalan radio RAC1, saying IQOXE had not provided the necessary information for emergency workers to evaluate the situation and about whether there was a toxic cloud.

"This led to delays."

'Close coordination' 

But Jose Luis Morlanes, director general of IQOXE, insisted the company — whose products are used in antifreeze fluids, dehumidifiers, detergents and cosmetics — had done nothing wrong.

"We have been coordinating very closely with the authorities and following all their instructions," he told reporters.

He said it was not immediately clear what caused the explosion which took place inside a storage tank with a capacity for holding 20 tonnes of ethylene oxide that was located in a section of the plant that only began operating in 2017.

Although the substances at the plant were highly flammable, they were not toxic, with firefighters and the civil protection authority saying no toxicity had been detected in the surrounding area.

La Canonja Mayor Roc Munoz confirmed the sirens did not go off, saying it was a crucial system to warn residents that they needed to stay indoors.

WASHINGTON — The US House of Representatives will transmit articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate on Wednesday, setting the stage for the US leader's trial for abuse of power, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced.

"Tomorrow, we will transmit those articles & name impeachment managers. The Senate must choose between the Constitution & a cover-up," she said in a tweeted statement Tuesday.

"The American people deserve the truth, and the Constitution demands a trial," she added.

"The president and the senators will be held accountable."

The formal delivery of the charges against Trump will set the stage for the opening of his trial likely Thursday or Friday.

With that move, Trump will become only the third US president in US history to go on trial for removal from office, for illicitly seeking help from Ukraine to smear a rival and boost his reelection campaign this year.

Trump's conviction in the trial is highly unlikely, given Republicans' 53-47 control of the Senate, and the high two-thirds vote threshold required to find him guilty.

But both parties were girding for a tense two weeks or more of hearings that could bare the US leader’s alleged wrongdoing to the American public on live television.

Pelosi attacked suggestions by Trump and some of his supporters that the Senate, as soon as the trial opens, vote to dismiss the charges. That would only require a majority vote.

She accused Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of supporting the dismissal effort and called for him to agree to Democrat demands to subpoena witnesses and documents for the trial.

McConnell “has signed on to a dismissal resolution. A dismissal is a cover-up”, Pelosi charged.

“The American people will fully understand the Senate’s move to begin the trial without witnesses and documents as a pure political cover-up,” she added.

“Leader McConnell and the president are afraid of more facts coming to light.”

Trump became only the third US president to be impeached on December 18 when the House voted to formally charge him with illicitly seeking help from Ukraine for his reelection campaign this year.

He is charged with abuse of power for holding up aid to Ukraine to pressure them to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, currently the front-runner in the race for the Democratic party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

Trump is also charged with obstruction for holding back witnesses and documents from the House impeachment investigation in defiance of Congressional subpoenas.

Trump “pressured a foreign government to target an American citizen for political gain, and at the same time withheld without justification $391 million in military aid to a vulnerable Ukraine as part of a geopolitical shakedown scheme”, Democratic caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries said.

“That is why Donald Trump has been impeached, because he abused his power. In America no one is above the law, not even the president.”

‘Witch hunt’ 

Trump has branded the case a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” but the White House is girding for a trial that could present damaging evidence against the US leader on national television over two weeks or more.

Pelosi had delayed delivering the articles of impeachment to pressure the Senate to agree to subpoena witnesses with direct knowledge of Trump’s Ukraine actions, including his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security advisor John Bolton.

But with McConnell refusing to agree up front on the witness issue, Pelosi decided to move ahead.

The trial could open as early as Thursday, beginning with the swearing in of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as presiding judge.

Then Roberts will swear in the 100 senators to act as jurors in the case.

Unlike jurors, however, the senators will also have the power to decide for themselves the rules of the trial.

It is expected to last at least two weeks, depending on how the witness issue is ultimately decided.

In 1999, the Senate trial that followed president Bill Clinton’s impeachment over the Lewinsky affair lasted five weeks. He was acquitted.

That trial included ten days of testimony from witnesses.

FRANKFURT AM MAIN — German police carried out raids on suspected Islamist militants across the country early on Tuesday over allegations they were plotting a violent attack, Berlin officials said.

German authorities are on high alert for Islamist threats to Europe's most populous country, which has in recent years suffered several attacks.

"On suspicion of planning a serious violent act endangering the state, search warrants are being executed in Berlin, Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia," the Berlin attorney general's office said via Twitter.

The alleged militants of Chechen origin are aged between 23 and 28 and "suspected of having scouted locations for a possible terror attack", Berlin police said in a statement.

The suspicions were prompted by pictures found on the mobile phone of one of the suspects during a routine police check, it added.

Some 180 officers took part in the raids, during which they confiscated cash, hard drives and knives.

"Based on the current information, there was not yet any concrete danger of an attack," police said.

Germany's deadliest attack was a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

The attacker, Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, hijacked a truck and murdered its Polish driver before running over another 11 people.

He was shot dead by Italian police in Milan four days later while on the run.

Since then, German authorities have thwarted nine attacks believed to have radical Islamist motives.

Most recently, police in the western city of Offenbach arrested three men in November for allegedly planning a bomb attack in the name of Daesh.

That same month, a Syrian was arrested in Berlin accused of having procured key components for an explosive device and discussing bombmaking tips with other suspected Islamists in an online chat group.

Germany's security services estimate there are around 11,000 Islamic radicals in Germany, some 680 who are deemed particularly dangerous and capable of using violence — a five-fold increase since 2013.

Around 150 of these potentially dangerous individuals have been detained for various offences.

PARIS — The world's oceans were the hottest in recorded history in 2019, scientists said on Tuesday, as manmade emissions warmed seas at an ever-increasing rate with potentially disastrous impacts on Earth's climate.

Oceans absorb more than 90 per cent of excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions and quantifying how much they have warmed up in recent years gives scientists an accurate read on the rate of global warming.

A team of experts from around the world looked at data compiled by China's Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) to gain a clear picture of ocean warmth to a depth of 2,000 metres over several decades.

They found that oceans last year were by far the hottest ever recorded and said that the effects of ocean warming were already being felt in the form of more extreme weather, rising sea levels and damage to marine life.

The study, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, said that last year the ocean was 0.075ºC hotter than the historical average between 1981-2010.

That means the world's oceans have absorbed 228 Zetta Joules (228 billion trillion Joules) of energy in recent decades.

"That's a lot of zeros," said Cheng Lijing, lead paper author and associate professor at the International Centre for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the IAP.

"The amount of heat we have put in the world's oceans in the past 25 years equals 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom bomb explosions."

The past five years are the five hottest years for the ocean, the study found.

As well as the mid-term warming trend, the data showed that the ocean had absorbed 25 Zetta Joules of additional energy in 2019 compared with 2018's figure.

"That's roughly equivalent to everyone on the planet running a hundred hairdryers or a hundred microwaves continuously for the entire year," Michael Mann, director of Penn State's Earth System Sciences Centre, told AFP.

Centuries of warming 

The 2015 Paris accord aims to limit global temperature rises to "well below" 2ºC, and to 1.5ºC if at all possible.

With just 1ºC of warming since the pre-industrial period, Earth has experienced a cascade of droughts, superstorms, floods and wildfires made more likely by climate change.

The study authors said there was a clear link between climate-related disasters — such as the bushfires that have ravaged south-eastern Australia for months — and warming oceans.

Warmer seas mean more evaporation, said Mann.

"That means more rainfall but also it means more evaporative demand by the atmosphere," he said.

"That in turn leads to drying of the continents, a major factor that is behind the recent wildfires from the Amazon all the way to the Arctic, and including California and Australia."

Hotter oceans also expand, leading to sea level rises.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a landmark oceans report last year warned that tens of millions of people could be displaced from coastal areas by the end of the century because of encroaching seas.

And given that the ocean has a far higher heat absorption capacity than the atmosphere, scientists believe they will continue to warm even if humanity manages to drag down its emissions in line with the Paris goals.

"As long as we continue to warm up the planet with carbon emissions, we expect about 90 per cent of the heating to continue to go into the oceans," said Mann.

"If we stop warming up the planet, heat will continue to diffuse down into the deep ocean for centuries, until eventually stabilising."

DUBLIN — Ireland will go to the polls next month in an early general election, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Tuesday, seeking to capitalise on his part in brokering the Brexit deal.

Varadkar, who was appointed taoiseach in 2017, was a central figure in the process which was marked by wrangling over border arrangements with British-run Northern Ireland.

He was also involved in discussions to break the political deadlock in Northern Ireland, which saw Belfast’s power-sharing government suspended for more than three years.

“The election will be held on Saturday, February 8th,” Varadkar said in a speech in Dublin before asking President Michael D. Higgins to dissolve parliament.

“We have a deal on Brexit and in Northern Ireland,” he said, which created a “window of opportunity” to get a new government in place before the next European Council meeting in March.

Next month’s vote — the first on a Saturday in Ireland’s history — is being called more than a year early.

The last general election in February 2016 produced a hung parliament.

Varadkar’s Fine Gael won 50 seats, while their fellow centre-right rivals Fianna Fail won 44, with leftists Sinn Fein third on 23 in the 158-seat Dail Eireann, the lower house of parliament.

In April 2016, Fine Gael formed a minority government with the support of Fianna Fail and independent members of parliament.

Varadkar, 40, took over from Enda Kenny as party leader and prime minister, or taoiseach, in June 2017.

Opinion polls suggest the election could be a close contest between the two main parties.

Varadkar’s minority government had been under threat because of a vote of no-confidence in his health minister, Simon Harris, but the threat will be averted because of the poll.

The announcement, which had been widely expected, coincided with a new Fine Gael election website, campaign posters and pitches on Varadkar’s Twitter account.

Next step 

Brexit negotiations had stumbled over the thorny question of border arrangements.

A key component of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that largely ended three decades of bloody violence over British rule of Northern Ireland was an effective open land border with the Republic of Ireland.

Johnson and Varadkar met for talks in October, just days from the last deadline to crumble in the protracted Brexit saga.

The British premier eventually agreed a deal for a twin-track customs agreement combining British and EU rules depending on the source or destination of goods passing via Northern Ireland.

“There will be no hard border, citizens’ rights have been protected and the Common Travel Area will remain in place,” Varadkar said.

But he stressed that even though Britain looked set to leave the EU on January 31, Brexit was “not done”.

“The next step is to negotiate a free trade agreement between the EU, including Ireland and the United Kingdom that protects our jobs, our businesses, our rural communities and our economy,” he said.

Work on domestic policy hinges on the outcome of those talks, which must end by December. Having a new government would enable a full focus on the negotiations, he said.

Calling an election for April or May would risk creating a protracted campaign, which would be a distraction and potentially see major decisions being deferred.

The vote will be Varadkar’s first as taoiseach. Other than Brexit, his time in charge of the predominantly Catholic country has been marked by the liberalisation of laws on abortion.