World

PATIALA, India — Thousands of Indian farmers riding tractors prepared to resume their push towards New Delhi on Wednesday after failing to reach a deal with the government on their demands for higher crop prices.

The protest hopes to successfully replicate the yearlong siege of highways into the capital that pressured Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government into abandoning its agricultural reform plans in 2021.

Police have kept a miles-long column of farmers atop agricultural machinery at bay since last week near the small village of Shambhu, several hours’ drive north of their intended destination.

Protesters have stared down efforts to disperse them with tear gas barrages and have vowed to push through the fearsome blockade of metal spikes and concrete barricades erected to halt their progress.

“We assure you that we will break the barriers,” farmer Jagmohan Singh, 45, told AFP.

“Once we break it, we will only stop again in Delhi.”

Farm unions are demanding a law to set a minimum price on all crops, expanding a government scheme that already exists for staples including rice and wheat.

They have also demanded other concessions including the waiving of loans and universal pensions for farmers aged 60 and above.

Protesters temporarily paused their procession to Delhi last week to await the outcome of negotiations between government ministers and unions.

But several rounds of talks have failed to reach a breakthrough.

Farm leaer Jagjit Singh Dallewal told the Press Trust of India news agency Monday night that the latest government proposal — to expand price guarantees to some but not all crops — was “not in the interest of farmers”.

Two-thirds of India’s 1.4 billion people draw their livelihood from agriculture, accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP.

But for the past few decades, farm incomes have remained largely stagnant and the sector is in dire need of investment and modernisation.

Thousands of Indian farmers die by suicide every year because of poverty, debt and crops affected by ever-more erratic weather patterns caused by climate change.

Farmers have political influence due to their sheer numbers, and the renewed protests come ahead of national elections likely to begin in April.

A campaign against agricultural reform laws in November 2020 saw tens of thousands of farmers besiege roads into Delhi for more than a year.

The protest forced a rare backdown from Modi’s government when it suspended the laws a year later.

BRASÍLIA — Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's comparison of Israel's military campaign in Gaza to the Holocaust has unleashed a diplomatic firestorm, with Brazil recalling its ambassador on Monday and Israel declaring Lula "persona non grata".

The row erupted the day before when Lula said the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip "isn't a war, it's a genocide", and compared it to "when Hitler decided to kill the Jews".

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Lula had "crossed a red line". His government summoned Brazil's ambassador for a meeting on Monday with Foreign Minister Israel Katz at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem.

"He's persona non grata in the state of Israel so long as he doesn't retract his remarks and apologise," Katz said of Lula.

In a tit-for-tat move, the Brazilian foreign ministry then said it had also summoned the Israeli ambassador to Brazil for a meeting later that same day, and recalled its own ambassador from Tel Aviv for consultations, “given the gravity of the statements this morning by the government of Israel”.

The Brazilian ambassador departed Tel Aviv on Tuesday, it said in a statement.

G20 meeting 

Veteran leftist Lula, 78, is a prominent voice for the Global South whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the G20.

His comments came as Brazil prepares to host a G20 foreign ministers’ meeting on Wednesday and Thursday, when top diplomats including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will gather in Rio de Janeiro, with the divisive Gaza conflict high on the agenda.

Hamas militants also took about 250 hostages — 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 30 presumed dead, according to Israel.

Political divide 

In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, Lula condemned it as a “terrorist” act.

But he has since grown vocally critical of Israel’s response.

He has faced backlash at home for his latest comments on the conflict, which came during a press conference on the sidelines of an African Union summit in Addis Ababa.

The Brazil-Israel Institute called his statements “vulgar”, and warned they risk “fuelling anti-Semitism”.

The Israelite Confederation of Brazil called them a “perverse distortion of reality [that] offends the memory of Holocaust victims and their descendants”.

Hitler’s Germany systematically exterminated 6 million Jews during the Holocaust — an estimated one-third of world Jewry.

After World War II, the newly founded state of Israel took in hundreds of thousands of survivors.

Lula’s conservative opponents also pounced on his remarks, which outraged many in the powerful Evangelical Christian community, which is staunchly pro-Israel.

“Lula not only showed his ignorance of history, he showed the world the hatred in his heart against the state of Israel,” lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Political allies meanwhile rushed to Lula’s defence. First Lady Rosangela “Janja” da Silva, a long-time member of his Workers’ Party, said his comments “defended... women and children, who represent the majority of victims” in the conflict.

“His statements referred to the genocidal [Israeli] government, not the Jewish people,” she wrote on X.

REYKJAVIK — Icelandic police said on Monday that residents of a fishing village evacuated due to multiple volcanic eruptions were allowed to return, adding that they believed few would stay overnight due to the state of the town.

The roughly 4,000 residents of Grindavik on the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwest Iceland had to be evacuated on November 11 after hundreds of earthquakes damaged buildings and opened up huge cracks in roads, shrouding the village’s future in doubt.

The quakes were followed by a volcanic fissure on December 18 that spared the village, but a second on January 14 opened right on the town’s edge, sending orange lava flowing into the streets and reducing three homes to ashes.

On February 8 a third eruption near the village started, sending an estimated 15 million cubic metres of lava flowing out in the first seven hours.

Lava from the third eruption crossed over a key water pipe, cutting of hot water — which is also used to heat houses — in the southern part of the peninsula, known as Sudurnes, home to some 28,000 inhabitants.

On Monday, the chief of police of Sudurnes, Ulfar Ludviksson, decided that residents and those working in the village were once again free to return to the town and could stay as long as they wanted.

In a statement, Ludviksson made clear that residents and workers enter the town “at their own risk” and stressed that the town was “not a place for children”.

Police added that the town’s infrastructure is in state of disrepair, the hot water pipe supplying the town is leaking — meaning heating is limited — and there is no cold water and therefore no drinking water.

“The police chief does not expect many... to choose to stay in the town overnight. They are allowed to do so, but the police chief does not recommend it,” the statement said.

The town remains closed to anyone but residents, workers or those that need to help residents.

Iceland is home to 33 active volcano systems, the highest number in Europe.

It straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack in the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.

But until March 2021, the Reykjanes peninsula had not experienced an eruption for eight centuries.

Further eruptions occurred in August 2022 and in July and December 2023, leading volcanologists to say it was probably the start of a new era of seismic activity in the region.

SYDNEY — Australia on Tuesday outlined a decade-long plan to double its fleet of major warships and boost defence spending by an additional $7 billion, in the face of a quickening Asia-Pacific arms race.

Under the plan, Australia will get a navy of 26 major surface combatant ships, up from 11 today.

“It is the largest fleet that we will have since the end of the Second World War,” said Defence Minister Richard Marles.

The announcement comes after a massive build-up of firepower by rivals China and Russia, and amid growing confrontation between nervous US-led allies and increasingly bellicose authoritarian governments.

Australia will get six Hunter class frigates, 11 general-purpose frigates, three air warfare destroyers and six state-of-the-art surface warships that do not need to be crewed.

At least some of the fleet will be armed with Tomahawk missiles capable of long-range strikes on targets deep inside enemy territory — a major deterrent capability.

The plan would see Australia increase its defence spending to 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product, above the 2 per cent target set by its NATO allies.

Some of the ships will be built in Adelaide, ensuring more than 3,000 jobs, but others will be sourced from US designs and a still undecided design to come from Spain, Germany, South Korea or Japan.

Change, or more of the same? 

In 2021, Australia announced plans to buy at least three US-designed nuclear-powered submarines, scrapping a years-long plan to develop non-nuclear subs from France that had already cost billions of dollars.

While the Virginia-class submarines will be nuclear-powered, they will not be armed with atomic weapons and are instead expected to carry long-range cruise missiles. They represent a step-shift for the country’s open water capabilities.

Experts say that taken together, Australia is poised to develop significant naval capability.

But the country’s major defence projects have long been beset by cost overruns, government U-turns, policy changes and project plans that make more sense for local job creation than defence.

Michael Shoebridge, a former senior security official and now independent analyst, said the government must overcome past errors and had “no more time to waste” as competition in the region heats up.

Shoebridge said there must be a trimmed-down procurement process, otherwise, it will be a “familiar path that leads to delays, construction troubles, cost blowouts — and at the end, ships that get into service too late with systems that are overtaken by events and technological change”.

Wooing specific electorates with the promise of “continuous naval shipbuilding” cannot be the priority, he said.

“This will just get in the way of the actual priority: reversing the collapse of our Navy’s fleet.”

LONDON — A man who piloted an “unseaworthy” boat across the English Channel was found guilty on Monday of the manslaughter of four migrants who drowned during the crossing.

Ibrahima Bah, from Senegal, took the helm of the poor quality inflatable carrying 43 people, which should have held no more than 20 passengers, in December 2022.

But within 30 minutes of leaving the northern French coast, the boat got into trouble, with water lapping around the knees of the dozens crammed on board, according to evidence heard at Bah’s trial.

Nearly 30,000 migrants crossed the Channel from mainland Europe to Britain in small boats in 2023, according to UK government figures.

The numbers are a political headache for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who last year pledged to “stop the boats”.

Bah, who is over 18 but whose exact age is in dispute, had denied the charges but was found guilty of four counts of manslaughter.

The jury also found him guilty of one charge of facilitating illegal entry to the UK.

Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson had told the trial at Canterbury Crown Court in southeast England that Bah was aware the boat was “overcrowded, lacking in safety equipment and, as it took in water... increasingly unseaworthy”.

A rescue operation plucked 39 people from the water and took them to safety. But the four others were pronounced dead.

The court heard that Bah, who had no training, did not pay for his own journey because he had agreed to pilot the boat.

Giving evidence in his defence, he said he agreed to pilot the boat before he had seen it, in exchange for free travel for himself and a friend.

He claimed he changed his mind on seeing it but that the people smugglers beat him and threatened to kill him if he did not go ahead.

Three of the four men who died have never been identified. The fourth was named as Hajratullah Ahmadi.

A coroner’s inquest was told they may have been from Afghanistan and Senegal.

Bah told police at the time of his arrest he had travelled from Senegal to Mali and then eventually Libya, before going by boat to Italy using smugglers.

He will be sentenced later this week.

French authorities said last month that five migrants — including a 14-year-old Syrian boy — had died and 30 more were rescued after trying to make the journey to England’s southern coast in freezing temperatures.

KABUL — A landslide caused by heavy snowfall has killed 25 people and injured eight others in the eastern Afghan province of Nuristan, a disaster management ministry spokesman said on Monday.

Earth, snow and rubble swept through the village of Nakre in the Tatin valley of Nuristan overnight on Sunday.

“As a result of the landslide, some 25 people have been killed and eight injured,” spokesman Janan Sayeq said in a video clip shared with media.

Sayeq also told AFP the death toll could rise.

Nuristan province, which borders Pakistan, is mostly covered by mountainous forests and hugs the southern end of the Hindu Kush mountain range.

Provincial officials said snow has also hampered rescue efforts.

“Due to clouds and rain, the helicopter cannot land in Nuristan,” said Mohammad Nabi Adel, the head of public works in the province.

Adel said snow had blocked one of the main roads into the province, making “the rescue operation difficult”.

Around 20 houses were destroyed or heavily damaged, the provincial head of information and culture Jamiullah Hashimi told AFP.

Snow continued to fall as rescuers tried to dig people out of the rubble, Hashimi said, noting that the efforts were hampered not only by weather but lack of equipment in the remote area.

“Modern equipment, tools and facilities are not available for the rescue operation,” he said.

Rescuers relied on shovels, axes and other hand tools to dig through the earth and rubble to retrieve the dead.

Large boulders also fell in the landslide and had to be blasted with explosives to make way for the rescuers.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, racked by decades of war, prone to natural disasters and vulnerable to extreme weather events linked to climate change.

Soil erosion risks 

Mountainous areas of Afghanistan have long been prey to landslides and floods, but in recent years risks have increased due to deforestation and drought, worsened by climate change, experts say.

“When vegetation cover or the forests are cut down, or if green coverage doesn’t exist in the area, soil erosion occurs,” said Rohullah Amin, head of climate change for the National Environmental Protection Agency.

“With soil erosion, when it rains or snows and the vegetation cover... doesn’t exist anymore it causes such landslides.”

The arrival of snow this season was delayed across much of Afghanistan, which is accustomed to harsh winters but in its third year of drought.

Officials said there has been less snowfall in Nuristan compared to previous years, though Amin said the province was not less hard-hit by drought than other parts of the country.

“This year we had little snow and it doesn’t last for long,” said Adel.

The exceptionally low level of rain in a country that relies heavily on agriculture forced many farmers to delay planting.

The South Asian country was once flush with humanitarian aid following the US-led occupation but funding to Afghanistan has plummeted since the Taliban returned to power in mid-2021, in part because of the many restrictions it imposed on women.

WASHINGTON — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken next week pays his first official visits to Brazil and Argentina, the State Department said, as he looks for common ground with the Latin American powers’ independent-minded leaders.

Blinken will hold talks in the capitals Brasilia and Buenos Aires and also take part in a Group of 20 meeting of foreign ministers in Rio de Janeiro where he could have rare in-person interaction with his Russian counterpart.

For the globe-trotting top US diplomat, it has been a striking absence to go more than three years into his tenure without visiting Brazil, the Western Hemisphere’s most populous country after the United States.

But Brazil was led until early 2023 by far-right Jair Bolsonaro, one of the closest international allies of Donald Trump.

Leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to power last year and shortly afterward headed to Washington for talks with President Joe Biden, with the two veteran politicians prioritising action on climate change, labor rights and democratic values at home.

Blinken, in the Brazilian-led G-20 meetings, will discuss “increasing peace and stability, promoting social inclusion, reducing inequality” as well as efforts to support violence-wracked Haiti, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in announcing the trip.

But Lula, previously present from 2003 through 2010, has a strong independent streak and has distanced himself from Biden’s push to isolate Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Bruna Santos, director of the Wilson Centre’s Brazil Institute, said the Biden team has come to understand from Lula’s first year that “they can be good friends, allies sometimes, but not allies at other times”.

She said that while the United States has come to understand Brazil’s stance on Ukraine, Lula has been strikingly silent on Venezuela, where leftist leader Nicolas Maduro’s refusal to allow opposition election candidates has triggered a snapback of some US sanctions.

Beyond the past with Bolsonaro, Brazilians feel the Biden administration has less interest in Latin America, especially with its focus on Ukraine and the Middle East, she said.

“There is the sense that the relationship doesn’t live up to its potential and it’s not being treated as a priority,” she said.

Forum for US-Russia? 

Lula has previously said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Western powers bore some responsibility for the war with Russia.

Lula earlier also promised Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, that he would be safe if he visited Rio for the G-20 summit in November, although he later backtracked and said it would be up to Brazil’s judiciary.

Putin did not visit last year’s G-20 summit in New Delhi, even though India, unlike Brazil, is not part of the Hague-based court.

At the last G-20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi in March 2023, Blinken held his only one-on-one in-person meeting, albeit briefly, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov since the Ukraine invasion.

The United States has argued that Russia is not serious about negotiations but Biden’s support for Ukraine has been weakened by a deadlock in Congress on approving new war funding, with Trump, seeking a comeback, musing that Russia is destined to win.

Bolsonaro, in a parallel to Trump, is facing serious legal problems with police investigating whether he and his inner circle orchestrated a coup attempt when rioters swarmed government buildings in Brasilia after Lula’s inauguration.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who took office in December, has also drawn parallels to Trump with his abrasive style, anti-establishment comments and calls for a war on socialism, and the former US president congratulated him on his win.

The Biden administration has nonetheless had less reluctance to work with Milei than Bolsonaro, seeing the Argentine leader as idiosyncratic but not anti-democratic.

Blinken, who has made five trips to the Middle East since the Hamas-Israel war, will also find a rare enthusiastic backer of Israel in the Argentine leader.

Milei visited Israel this month on his first state visit and has promised to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, a step taken only by the United States and four small countries.