World

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.

WASHINGTON — Mass expulsions? Political revenge? World peace? A new golden age? As Donald Trump vies for another term in the White House, America is abuzz with speculation over how life might look with the ex-president back at the helm. 

In a series of interviews and campaign rallies, the Republican has offered some clues. 

Here are Trump’s plans for the United State and the world, as set out by the candidate himself. 

Mass deportations 

President Joe Biden’s rival in November’s election has pledged to launch the biggest deportation operation of illegal migrants in US history on his first day in office. 

“We’re going to get them out as fast as we can,” he has said, accusing undocumented migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”.

The 78-year-old, known for his unfinished border wall project, has said he would be happy to “use the military” as part of the effort and would open detention camps to process targets for expulsion. 

“On day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship,” he said in a campaign video.

He has confirmed he also plans to reinstate his ban on entries from several Muslim-majority countries, as a means of “keeping terrorists the hell out of our country”. 

Ukraine, NATO 

Trump has been saying for months he could end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours”. without explaining how.

Critics suggest his plan would involve pressuring Kyiv to cede territory illegally occupied by Russia in both 2014 and 2022.

“I will have that settled prior to taking the White House,” he told a rally in the midwestern city of Detroit recently. “As president-elect, I will have that settled.”

The ex-president is highly critical of Washington’s shipments of weapons worth billions of dollars to Kyiv, and of the funding requests from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

“It never stops”, he told the Michigan crowd.

Asked in a town hall with Fox News whether he would remain committed to NATO during a second term, he replied: “Depends if they treat us properly.” 

Tariffs v. tax cuts 

Trump envisages tariffs of “more than 10 per cent” on all imports. 

US companies — and eventually their customers — pay for import tariffs, not the companies exporting the goods. 

Trump insists that the revenue collected will finance a “middle class, upper class, lower class, business class big tax cut”.

Having waged a fierce trade war with China during his first term, he also plans to revoke the Asian giant’s “most favored nation” status, granted to promote trade.

Trump claims he will “stop inflation by stopping the invasion”, arguing that his immigration crackdown will reduce housing costs and other expenses.

Abortion ambiguity 

Trump never misses an opportunity to point out that it is partly thanks to him — and his three conservative Supreme Court appointments — that abortion rights have been considerably weakened in the United States. 

But he is more ambiguous about the future of access to reproductive healthcare.

Insisting it should be an issue for the individual states, the Republican has balked at pushing a nationwide abortion ban, a commitment that would win him support from the religious right. 

“You must follow your heart on this issue but remember, you must also win elections,” he said in April. 

‘Drill, baby, drill!’

Trump slammed the door on the 2015 Paris climate accords during his first term. 

If reelected, he said at a rally earlier this month, he “will stop Biden’s wasteful spending and rapidly terminate the green new scam” — a reference to the funding committed by his successor to mitigating climate change. 

“I will repeal crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate and we will ‘drill, baby, drill’,” Trump told supporters in Wisconsin, using an old Republican slogan.

“Energy costs will come down very quickly,” he vowed. “In many cases we’ll be cutting your energy costs in half.”

Going after Biden 

Trump, who was convicted in May of felony business fraud and faces three further indictments, has baselessly and repeatedly claimed his various prosecutions are a political witch hunt by Democrats. 

The Republican has pledged to “appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden”.

No investigation has produced evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden. 

He also said he was “absolutely” ready to pardon all the Trump supporters convicted of storming the US Capitol in Washington to prevent Congress from certifying the Republican’s 2020 presidential election defeat to Biden.

BRUSSELS, Belgium — NATO’s 32 nations on Wednesday appointed outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the alliance’s next chief, handing him the job at a crucial moment with Russia on the march in Ukraine and US elections looming.

Rutte will take over from Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on October 1 after major powers — spearheaded by the United States — agreed on his nomination ahead of a summit of NATO leaders in Washington next month.

“Mark is a true transatlanticist, a strong leader and a consensus-builder,” Stoltenberg said on social media after NATO ambassadors approved the appointment.

“I know I am leaving NATO in good hands,” he said.

Rutte said it was a “tremendous honour” to take over from Stoltenberg once his decade at the helm of NATO ends.

“The alliance is and will remain the cornerstone of our collective security. Leading this organisation is a responsibility I do not take lightly,” he posted online. 

The seasoned Dutch leader, whose 14-year tenure leading the Netherlands is set to end within weeks, is seen as a safe pair of hands capable of stewarding NATO through perilous times.

His appointment was welcomed by leaders across the 75-year-old alliance, including British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who called it “a good choice for freedom and security”.

The White House said US President Joe Biden believed Rutte “will make an excellent secretary general”. 

While the 57-year-old faces the possibility of a possible return by former US president Donald Trump to the White House, who has long criticised the alliance, Rutte will also have to grapple with the threat posed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

After staking a claim for the NATO post following the collapse of his Dutch coalition government last year, Rutte had to use all his diplomatic skills to win over reluctant allies Turkey and Hungary. 

He finally clinched the race last week when his sole challenger, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, dropped out. 

A staunch supporter of Ukraine, the straight-talking Dutchman has spearheaded a push to give Kyiv F-16 fighter jets to help beat back Russia’s invasion. 

As NATO chief he will play a key role in marshalling allies to keep backing the war-torn country — while treading a fine line over Kyiv’s push to join the alliance.

“We anticipate that our joint work to ensure the protection of people and freedom throughout our entire Euro-Atlantic community will continue at good pace,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media.

The Kremlin’s 2022 assault on Ukraine has reinvigorated an alliance that often struggled for purpose after the end of the Cold War, and pushed European nations to increase their defence spending. 

Rutte will now have to ensure NATO is fighting fit to deal with the threat Moscow could pose for years to come, and also keep a keen eye on the growing might of China.

Most testing, however, could be the challenge of keeping the alliance together if Trump reclaims the presidency. 

Trump reportedly mulled pulling the military superpower out of NATO during his first term, only to be talked down by leaders including Rutte. 

On the campaign trail this time around, the volatile former reality TV star has rattled allies by saying he would encourage Moscow to attack countries not spending enough on defence.

It is not just the United States that is facing political uncertainty, as crunch elections are also coming up in other key countries like France. 

Rutte will look to learn from his predecessor Stoltenberg, who has headed NATO through its most consequential decade since the Cold War ended.

The unflappable former Norwegian prime minister won plaudits for maintaining unity and strengthening NATO through a tumultuous period.

NATO had to extend Stoltenberg’s tenure twice as it struggled for two years to replace him, with many allies initially hoping to name a woman and someone from eastern Europe to take over.

Rutte will be the fourth Dutchman to head the alliance since it was founded upon the ashes of World War II to face off against the Soviet Union.

BANGKOK — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is on his way to face a final US court hearing on Wednesday under a plea deal that is expected to bring his years-long legal drama to a close and allow him to return to his native Australia as a "free man".

Assange was released on Monday from a high-security British prison where he had been held for five years while he fought extradition to the United States, which sought to prosecute him for revealing military secrets.

He flew out of London to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific where he will plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defence information, according to a court document.

A private jet carrying the 52-year-old stopped to refuel in Bangkok on Tuesday, taking off again around 9:25 pm (14:25 GMT) to fly to Saipan, capital of the US territory where Assange is due in court on Wednesday morning.

He is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, with credit for the same amount of time he spent behind bars in Britain.

Assange’s wife Stella said he would be a “free man” after the judge signed off on the plea deal, thanking supporters who have campaigned for his release for years.

“I’m just elated. Frankly, it’s just incredible,” she told BBC radio.

“We weren’t really sure until the last 24 hours that it was actually happening.”

She urged supporters to monitor her husband’s flight on plane-tracking websites and to follow the “AssangeJet” hashtag, saying in a post on social media platform X “we need all eyes on his flight in case something goes wrong”.

The court in the Northern Mariana Islands was chosen because of Assange’s unwillingness to go to the continental United States and because of the territory’s proximity to his native Australia, a court filing said.

Under the deal, Assange is due to return to Australia, where the government said his case had “dragged on for too long” and there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration”.

Stella Assange said on X that her husband would have to repay the Australian government the $520,000 cost of the charter flight and urged supporters to donate cash.

End of an ordeal 

Assange was wanted by Washington for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret US documents from 2010 as head of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

Since then he has become a hero to free speech campaigners and a villain to those who thought he had endangered US security and intelligence sources.

US authorities 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 United Nations hailed Assange’s release, saying the case had raised “a series of human rights concerns”.

Assange’s mother Christine Assange said in a statement carried by Australian media that she was “grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end”.

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

Extradition battle 

The announcement of the 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.

Assange had been detained in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London since April 2019.

He was arrested after spending seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced accusations of sexual assault that were eventually dropped.

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.

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

The British government approved his extradition in June 2022 but, in a recent twist, two British judges said in May that he could appeal against the transfer.

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.

LUXEMBOURG — The European Union on Tuesday kicked off accession negotiations with Ukraine, setting the war-torn country on a long path towards membership that Russia has tried to block.

The landmark move signals a vote of confidence in Kyiv's future at a time when Moscow has momentum on the battlefield almost two- and-a-half years into the Kremlin's invasion.

The EU was set a few hours later to begin negotiations on joining the bloc with Ukraine's neighbour Moldova, another ex-Soviet state under pressure from Russia.

"Dear friends, today marks the beginning of a new chapter in the relationship between Ukraine and the European Union," Ukraine's Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said via videolink at the start of the talks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky called it a "historic day" as officials from Kyiv and the EU's 27 member states gathered in Luxembourg.

"We will never be derailed from our path to a united Europe and to our common home of all European nations," the Ukrainian leader wrote on social media.

Ukraine and later Moldova lodged their bids to join the EU in the aftermath of Russia's assault in February 2022.

The opening of the talks marks just the beginning of a protracted process of reforms in Ukraine that is strewn with political obstacles and will likely take many years — and may never lead to membership.

Standing in the way along that journey will be not just Russia's efforts at de-stabilisation but reticence from doubters inside the EU, most notably Hungary.

But European Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen called the opening of talks "very good news for the people of Ukraine, Moldova, and the entire European Union".

"The path ahead will be challenging but full of opportunities," she wrote on X on Tuesday.

So far, Ukraine has won plaudits for kickstarting a raft of reforms on curbing graft and political interference, even as war rages.

Ukraine's lead negotiator, Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishyna, vowed that Kyiv "will be able to complete everything before 2030" to join the bloc.

"Rest assured that Ukraine is very capable to deliver in a fast way," she said.

Complex process 

Russia's war in Ukraine has reinvigorated a push in the EU to take on new members, after years in which countries particularly in the Western Balkans made little progress on their hopes to join.

The EU in December 2023 also granted candidate status to Georgia, another of Russia's former Soviet neighbours.

It likewise approved accession negotiations with Bosnia and has talks ongoing with Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and North Macedonia.

The meetings with Ukraine and Moldova on Tuesday will set off a process of screening of how far laws in the countries already comply with EU standards and how much more work lies ahead.

Once that is done the EU then has to begin laying out conditions for negotiations on 35 subjects, ranging from taxation to environmental policy.

Stefanishyna said the next step should come in early 2025.

EU countries pushed to start the talks now before Hungary — the friendliest country to Russia in the bloc — takes over the EU’s rotating presidency next month.

Budapest has been opposed to pressing ahead with Kyiv’s membership bid, arguing that Ukraine was unfairly moving ahead for political reasons.

“From what I see here as we speak, they are very far from meeting the accession criteria,” Hungary’s Europe minister Janos Boka said Tuesday.

The start of the talks resonates powerfully in Ukraine, as it was a desire for closer ties with the EU that sparked protests back in 2014 that eventually spiralled into the full-blown crisis with Russia.

The talks also come at a tense time in Moldova after the United States, Britain and Canada warned of a Russian “plot” to influence the country’s presidential elections in October.

Wedged between war-torn Ukraine and EU member Romania, Moldova’s pro-Western authorities frequently accuse the Kremlin of interfering in its internal affairs.

President Maia Sandu has accused Moscow, which has troops stationed in a breakaway region of the country, of aiming to destabilise Moldova ahead of the vote.

“Our future is within the European family,” Sandu wrote on X. “We are stronger together.”

PARIS — The world is unprepared for the increasing ferocity of wildfires turbocharged by climate change, scientists say, as blazes from North America to Europe greet the northern hemisphere summer in the hottest year on record.

Wildfires have already burned swathes through Turkey, Canada, Greece and the United States early this season as extreme heatwaves push temperatures to scorching highs.

While extra resources have been poured into improving firefighting in recent years, experts said the same was not true for planning and preparing for such disasters.

"We are still actually catching up with the situation," said Stefan Doerr, director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at the UK's Swansea University.

Predicting how bad any one blaze will be — or where and when it will strike — can be challenging, with many factors including local weather conditions playing into calculations.

But overall, wildfires are getting larger and burning more severely, said Doerr, who co-authored a recent paper examining the frequency and intensity of such extreme events.

A separate study published in June found the frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires appeared to have doubled over the past 20 years.

By the end of the century, the number of extreme wildfires around the globe is tipped to rise 50 per cent, according to a 2022 report by the UN Environment Programme.

Doerr said humanity had not yet faced up to this reality.

"We're clearly not well enough prepared for the situation that we're facing now," he said.

Climate change is a major driver, though other factors such as land use and the location of housing developments play a big part.

 'We cannot fight the fires' 

Fires do not respect borders so responses have evolved between governments to jointly confront these disasters, said Jesus San-Miguel, an expert for the European Commission Joint Research Centre.

The EU has a strong model of resource sharing, and even countries outside the bloc along the Mediterranean have benefitted from firefighting equipment or financial help in times of need, San-Miguel said.

But as wildfires become increasingly extreme, firefighting simply won't be a fix.

“We get feedback from our colleagues in civil protection who say, ‘We cannot fight the fires. The water evaporates before it reaches the ground,’” San-Miguel said.

“Prevention is something we need to work on more,” he added.

Controlled burns, grazing livestock, or mechanised vegetation removal are all effective ways to limit the amount of burnable fuel covering the forest floor, said Rory Hadden from the University of Edinburgh.

Campfire bans and establishing roads as firebreaks can all be effective in reducing starts and minimising spread, said Hadden, an expert on fire safety and engineering.

But such efforts require funding and planning from governments that may have other priorities and cash-strapped budgets, and the return is not always immediately evident.

“Whatever method or technique you’re using to manage a landscape... the result of that investment is nothing happens, so it’s a very weird psychological thing. The success is: well, nothing happened,” said Hadden.

 ‘Short memories’ 

Local organisations and residents often take the lead in removing vegetation in the area immediately around their homes and communities.

But not everyone is prepared to accept their neighbourhood might be at risk.

“People don’t think that it will happen to them, but it eventually will,” San-Miguel said, pointing to historically cold or wet climates like the US Pacific Northwest that have witnessed major fires in recent years.

Canada has adapted to a new normal of high latitude wildfires, while some countries in Scandinavia are preparing for ever-greater fire risk.

But how best to address the threat remains an open question, said Guillermo Rein from Imperial College London, even in places where fire has long been part of the landscape.

Even in locations freshly scarred by fire, the clearest lessons are sometimes not carried forward.

“People have very short memories for wildfires,” said Rein, a fire science expert.

In July 2022, London witnessed its worst single day of wildfires since the bombings of World War II, yet by year’s end only academics were still talking about how to best prepare for the future.

“While the wildfires are happening, everybody’s asking questions... When they disappear, within a year, people forget about it,” he said.

PARIS — French far-right leader Jordan Bardella said Monday his National Rally Party was ready to take power, six days before the start of voting in France’s most divisive election in decades.

“The National Rally is today the only movement capable of implementing the aspirations clearly expressed by the French people in a reasonable manner,” Bardella, 28, told a press conference as he set out the party’s programme for government.

“In three words: we are ready,” he added.

President Emmanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections following his trouncing by the RN in European elections.

The move stunned the country and put the far right in pole position to win power for the first time in France’s post-war history.

Weekend polls showed the RN garnering 35-36 per cent of voting intentions in the first round, ahead of a left-wing alliance on 27-29.5 per cent and Macron’s centrists in third on 19.5-22 per cent.

Bardella, the telegenic party president credited with helping the RN clean up its extremist image, has urged voters to give the eurosceptic party an outright majority to allow it implement its anti-immigration, law-and-order programme.

“Seven long years of Macronism has weakened the country,” Bardella said, vowing to boost purchasing power, restore order and change the law to make it easier to deport foreigners convicted of crimes.

The election is shaping up as a clash between the RN and the left, led by the hard left France Unbowed of veteran firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Bardella claimed his party, which mainstream parties have in the past united to try to block, was the “patriotic and republican” choice faced with what he alleged the anti-Semitism of the left.

The left denies the charges of anti-Semitism.

MOSCOW — Gunmen in Russia’s North Caucasus region of Dagestan on Sunday launched attacks on religious buildings, killing at least seven police officers, a national guard officer and a priest, officials said.

The attacks took place in Dagestan’s largest city of Makhachkala and in the coastal city of Derbent, where gunfights were ongoing Sunday evening.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said it had opened criminal probes over “acts of terror” in Dagestan, a largely Muslim region of Russia neighbouring Chechnya.

Dagestan’s interior ministry said police had killed four of the gunmen in Makhachkala.

“This evening in the cities of Derbent and Makhachkala armed attacks were carried out on two Orthodox churches, a synagogue and a police checkpoint,” the National Antiterrorism Committee said in a statement to RIA Novosti news agency.

“As a result of the terrorist attacks, according to preliminary information, a priest from the Russian Orthodox Church and police officers were killed.”

In all, six officers were killed and another 12 wounded in the attacks, the spokeswoman for Dagestan’s interior ministry, Gayana Gariyeva, told RIA Novosti.

The ministry later said a local police chief had died from his wounds.

Russia’s National Guard meanwhile said one of its officers had been killed in Derbent and several others wounded.

In what appeared to be a new attack, the Dagestan interior ministry later said that in a village 65 kilometres from Makhachkala, called Sergokal, attackers had shot at a police car, wounding one officer.

The ministry spokesman also said a 66-year-old Orthodox priest was killed in Derbent.

Synagogues on fire 

Dagestan’s RGVK broadcaster named the priest as Nikolai Kotelnikov, saying he had served more than 40 years in Derbent.

Sunday is a religious holiday, Pentecost Sunday, in the Russian Orthodox Church.

“The synagogue in Derbent is on fire,” the chairman of the public council of Russia’s Federation of Jewish Communities, Boruch Gorin, wrote on Telegram.

“It has not been possible to extinguish the fire. Two are killed: a policeman and a security guard.”

“The synagogue in Makhachkala has also been set on fire and burnt down,” he said, adding that in Derbent, firefighters had been told to leave the burning synagogue over the risk that “terrorists remained inside”.

“There is shooting in the streets around the synagogue,”he said.

The leader of Dagestan, Sergei Melikov, wrote on Telegram: “This evening in Derbent and Makhachkala unknown [attackers] made attempts to destabilise the situation in society.

“They were confronted by Dagestani police officers.”

State news agency TASS cited a law enforcement source as saying the “gunmen who carried out attacks in Makhachkala and Derbent are supporters of an international terrorist organisation”, without naming it.

Russia’s FSB security service in April said it had arrested four people in Dagestan on suspicion of plotting the deadly attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall concert venue in March, which was claimed by the Islamic State group.

Militants from Dagestan are known to have travelled to join Daesh in Syria, and in 2015, the group declared it had established a “franchise” in the North Caucasus.

Dagestan lies east of Chechnya, where Russian authorities battled separatists in two brutal wars, first in 1994-1996 and then in 1999-2000.

Since the defeat of Chechen insurgents, Russian authorities have been locked in a simmering conflict with Islamist militants from across the North Caucasus that has killed scores of civilians and police.