World

WASHINGTON — A panel of US appeals court judges appeared sceptical on Tuesday of Donald Trump’s claim that as a former president he should be immune from prosecution on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election.

The 77-year-old Trump attended the appeals court hearing held under tight security in a federal courthouse just blocks away from the US Capitol stormed by his supporters on January 6, 2021.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is scheduled to go on trial in Washington on March 4 on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump’s attorney John Sauer told a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit that a president can only be prosecuted for actions taken while in the White House if they have first been impeached and convicted by Congress.

“To authorise the prosecution of a president for his official acts would open a Pandora’s Box from which this nation may never recover,” Sauer said.

“The notion that criminal immunity for a president doesn’t exist is a shocking holding,” he said. “It would authorise, for example, the indictment of President Biden in the Western District of Texas after he leaves office for mismanaging the border.”

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is to preside over Trump’s election interference trial, rejected his immunity claim last month and the judges who heard his appeal on Tuesday also appeared to be unconvinced by the argument.

“I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty ‘to take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ allows him to violate criminal laws,” said Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of former Republican president George H.W. Bush.

Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, asked whether a president who ordered the assassination of a political rival by the Navy SEAL special forces could be criminally prosecuted even if they had not been impeached and convicted first by Congress.

“My answer is a qualified yes,” Sauer said. “There’s a political process that would have to occur.”

“So therefore he’s not completely and absolutely immune because under the procedure that you concede he can be prosecuted if there’s an impeachment and conviction by the Senate,” Pan said.

James Pearce, an attorney for the Justice Department, pushed back against the immunity claim and said the circumstances surrounding Trump’s conduct were unique.

“Never before has there been allegations that a sitting president has with private individuals and using the levers of power sought to fundamentally subvert the democratic republic and the electoral system,” Pearce said.

‘Ripe for indictment’ 

Trump was not actually required to attend the hearing.

His presence — just days before the Republican presidential primary contests kick off in Iowa — underlined his goal of making his fight against multiple criminal prosecutions part of his political campaign.

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform ahead of the hearing, warned that a rejection of his immunity defence could lead to indictments of Biden.

“If I don’t get Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get Immunity,” Trump said, claiming his 81-year-old Democratic opponent “would be ripe for Indictment”.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the election conspiracy case against Trump, had asked the US Supreme Court to take up the immunity claim on an expedited basis, bypassing the federal court of appeals.

The special counsel has been trying to keep the March start date for Trump’s trial on track while lawyers for the former president have sought repeatedly to delay it until after the November 2024 election, widely expected to be a rematch between Trump and Biden.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices nominated by Trump, denied Smith’s request to immediately hear the case but the appeals court decision — wherever it lands — is likely to wind up with the nation’s highest court eventually.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump’s appeal of a ruling by Colorado’s highest court that would keep him off the presidential primary ballot in the western state.

Trump also faces election-related charges in Georgia — where he has also claimed immunity — and has been indicted in Florida on charges of illegally taking large quantities of top-secret documents with him on leaving the White House.

Trump was impeached by the Democratic-majority House of Representatives following the attack on the Capitol for “incitement of insurrection” but was acquitted, with Republican support, in the Senate.

YEONPYEONG, South Korea — On South Korea’s remote border island of Yeonpyeong, heavily armed soldiers locked up the beaches at dusk on Monday — a reminder of the picturesque spot’s proximity to the nuclear-armed North.

Pyongyang has conducted live-fire artillery drills for three days near Yeonpyeong and another border island, Seoul’s military said, prompting counter-drills, heightened security, and evacuation orders for residents.

The island is just three kilometres from North Korean territory, and on Monday visibility was clear enough to see multiple North Korean islands just across the contested maritime border.

AFP watched two soldiers carrying automatic weapons close giant metal gates topped with razor wire, as the sun set over Yeonpyeong’s western beach.

“The gates are usually closed for security reasons but it was open today for a coastline exploration mission,” a South Korean Marine official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Contingents of South Korean soldiers are permanently based on the island, which has long been on the frontline of the Cold War-era conflict that ended in 1953 with an armistice that was never replaced by a peace treaty, so both sides remain technically at war.

Residents still remember a 2010 attack, when North Korea shelled the island directly, killing four people, including two marines.

“Because of the painful memory from the 2010 shelling, residents here became panicked when told to escape to shelters,” Lee Yeon-hwan, who runs a restaurant on Yeonpyeong, told AFP.

He said Friday’s evacuation order — ahead of South Korean military counter drills — was the first issued in six or seven years, and that it had triggered a lot of trauma for older residents.

“Talking about [the 2010 attack] brings sad, painful memory so people here don’t like to talk about it,” the 60-year-old added.

Lee’s restaurant, one of the oldest on the island, relies on the soldiers stationed on the island for its income. And when tensions are high, it’s bad for business.

“When they’re on high alert, they can’t go out to dine here,” he said ruefully.

“And their families are not able to visit them, which is also a downside because they often dine out,” when they have family in town.

‘Home of freedom’ 

Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in decades after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last year enshrined his country’s status as a nuclear power into the constitution and test-fired several advanced ICBMs.

At Pyongyang’s year-end policy meetings, Kim threatened a nuclear attack on South Korea and called for a build-up of his country’s military arsenal ahead of armed conflict that he warned could “break out any time”.

Yeonpyeong felt eerily quiet when AFP visited on Monday, with just soldiers and a handful of visiting Korean media out and about.

Despite the island’s proximity to the North, defections across the maritime border are exceptionally rare — only a couple of cases of North Koreans swimming to the South have ever been reported.

At the beach, however, a sign is posted on a concrete wall to greet any arrivals.

“Welcome to South Korea, home of freedom. Please press the telephone button we will safely escort you,” it says.

AFP saw a telephone line, but no telephone on the beach, and was unable to locate a button.

SHIKA, Japan — The number of people unaccounted for after Japan’s New Year’s Day earthquake more than tripled on Monday to 323 while the death toll rose to 168, according to local authorities.

A heavy dumping of snow meanwhile complicated relief efforts a week after the 7.5-magnitude quake, with more than 2,000 people still cut off and many others lacking power or forced to take shelter in crowded emergency sites.

A new list published by Ishikawa prefecture in central Japan on Monday showed the number of missing people soaring from 31 to 281 in Wajima, one of the worst-hit places where the quake flatted dozens of houses and a major fire devastated a large area.

Days of rain increased the risk of further landslides, while the fresh heavy snow — more than 10 centimetres in places — could cause more buildings to collapse under its weight, the regional government warned.

Around 18,000 households in the Ishikawa region remained without electricity on Monday, while more than 66,100 households were without water on Sunday.

For the 28,800 people packed into government shelters, many were also without sufficient water, electricity and heating, according to media reports.

“Disaster-related deaths must be prevented at all costs. I want to improve the poor environment in shelters,” Ishikawa Governor Hiroshi Hase told broadcaster NHK.

“The first priority has been to rescue people under the rubble, and to reach isolated communities,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told NHK on Sunday.

The government has “deployed various police and fire department helicopters” as well as small groups of troops on foot to reach the isolated communities, he said.

Japan experiences hundreds of earthquakes every year, though most cause no damage because of strict building codes in place for more than four decades.

But many structures are older, especially in rapidly ageing communities in rural areas like Noto.

The country is haunted by the monster quake of 2011 that triggered a tsunami, left around 18,500 people dead or missing and caused a nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima plant.

NEW YORK — Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked three arterial bridges and a tunnel connecting Manhattan with the rest of New York and surrounding areas on Monday, in a coordinated action protesting the Hamas-Israel war.

New York has seen dozens of protests, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel, since October 7.

Protesters locked themselves to tyres, chairs and each other on the Brooklyn Bridge, which links the borough of the same name with the Manhattan financial district.

"It's important because we need a ceasefire. It's important to disrupt day-to-day activity to show how important this is, to end the siege in Gaza," said protester Olivia Levine, 31, an actor and writer.

"Hopefully actions scale up. Day-to-day activity needs to be scaled up to secure a ceasefire and the end of occupation. This is just the start."

Dozens of police, some wielding bolt cutters and white plastic cable ties, encircled a group of detained protesters who were lined up on the bridge for processing.

A crowd who gathered in support of those who blocked the bridge's Brooklyn-bound lanes chanted "free, free Palestine", while some filmed police working to cut activists out of the devices used to anchor themselves to the road.

Dozens of protesters were detained for blocking traffic at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, which connects New York to neighbouring New Jersey, an AFP correspondent saw.

Similar actions were staged at the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges that link Manhattan Island to Brooklyn.

The protests came shortly after the morning rush hour and caused backed-up traffic across the city.

Police said the protests lasted just over an hour and had been cleared after 11am (16:00 GMT), but did not confirm the number of arrests.

Three months into the war, at least 23,084 people have been killed in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s presidential candidates held a second debate on Sunday, where they discussed defence, geopolitics and diplomacy.

Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, and former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan will compete in a February 14 election to lead the world’s largest archipelagic nation.

Nearly 205 million people are eligible to cast their ballots in the vote, aiming to determine the successor of President Joko Widodo after his 10-year tenure.

Frontrunner Subianto stated that if elected, he would strive to maintain positive relationships with all global powers in line with Indonesia’s “non-aligned” foreign policy.

“With good relations with all powers, we can secure our national interests,” Subianto said in the debate broadcasted across Indonesian television screens.

“A thousand friends are too few, one adversary is one too many. We will pursue a good neighbour policy.”

The former special forces general emphasised the importance of bolstering military power to defend independence as he expressed concern about situations akin to the challenging circumstances faced by Gaza during the Hamas-Israel conflict.

Indonesia is a staunch supporter of Palestinian independence. It has called for a resolution to the conflict based on internationally agreed parameters set by the United Nations, which include a two-state solution.

South China Sea proposal 

Pranowo outlined a proposal for a temporary agreement on the disputed South China Sea, underlining Indonesia’s status as a non-claimant in the region. 

He said the temporary agreement was necessary in light of China’s ongoing military modernisation, expected to be finalised by 2027.

“[The resolution efforts] have been more than 20 years, and there has been no progress,” he said. 

He also pitched the need to strengthen patrols by the Indonesian navy. 

“We need floating tankers that can be used by our navy to patrol. This makes logistics very cost-effective,” he said.

Soft power 

Baswedan raised the issue of non-traditional threats such as a rise in hacking incidents, pledging the establishment of a cyber defence structure.

“The key doesn’t solely lie in the technology itself. The essence lies in the comprehensive involvement of everyone,” he said.

He also said that he would make Indonesia a decisive leader in the global setting, not “merely a spectator”, through its soft power such as the arts. 

“Through these efforts, we aim to make Indonesia both a gracious host in its own land and a charming guest in other countries.”

Subianto is ahead of his rivals in opinion polls since choosing Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the president’s eldest son, as his vice presidential candidate. 

Pranowo is far behind in second place.

Recent surveys suggest that Baswedan, in third place, might have a chance to beat Pranowo and be in the second-round run-off vote.

LISBON — Nine weeks out from snap elections, Portugal’s ruling Socialist Party (PS) on Sunday formalised Pedro Nuno Santos as their new leader in place of Antonio Costa, who quit as prime minister and party head in November amid a corruption investigation.

Costa led the EU member state for eight years but stepped down on November 7 owing to a probe into his administration’s handling of energy-related contracts. 

He had been reelected in January 2022, with the Socialists also capturing an absolute majority in parliament — a rare feat among Europe’s left-wing parties.

Santos won the support last month of 62 per cent of party members and is now targeting a poll success on March 10.

“The enormous responsibility of writing a new chapter in the book of PS governments and the country’s development falls to us,” Santos said as he wrapped up a speech to a party congress in Lisbon before the watching Costa.

Santos, a 46-year-old economist from the party’s left-wing, had himself resigned from Costa’s government in December 2022 during an earlier scandal involving a 500,000euro ($534,000) severance package paid to an executive at state-owned national airline TAP.

Santos had also served as the secretary of state for parliamentary affairs in Costa’s first government and played a pivotal role in enabling the Socialists to come to power in 2015. He had long been seen as Costa’s successor.

Also Sunday, the main centre-right opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD), was to sign a coalition agreement in the second city of Porto with two small right-wing parties, including the CDS-PP, with which it governed between 2011 and 2015.

Since then, the conservative landscape has been disrupted by the emergence of far-right Chega and the right of centre Liberal Initiative (IL) who in the 2022 elections managed to net 20 seats between them.

Most recent opinion polls have the PSD and the PS neck and neck but the right could return to power with support from IL and Chega.

If Chega’s party led by Andre Ventura is cast in the role of kingmaker after the elections that would represent a major rupture for Portuguese democracy, 50 years on from the revolution which ended 48 years of fascist dictatorship and 13 years of colonial wars.

Influence peddling 

Crisis hit Portugal in early November after a series of arrests and searches led to the indictment of Costa’s chief of staff and infrastructure minister, Joao Galamba on allegations of influence peddling.

The Prosecutor’s Office then said Costa himself was the subject of a separate judicial investigation.

Costa immediately announced his resignation. 

The Observador newspaper on Friday reported Costa notably faced accusations of having participated in drawing up a land planning law benefitting a company which planned to build a mega-data centre near the southern port of Sines.

In November, Costa said that the duties of prime minister were “not compatible with any suspicion of my integrity”.

On Sunday, Santos said that “it is very important to separate politics from justice. We must respect the work of the judicial authorities”.

SUZU, Japan — A woman in her 90s trapped for five days under rubble caused by a huge earthquake in central Japan was rescued against the odds, but snow and storms were further complicating relief efforts on Sunday.

At least 128 people died in the magnitude-7.5 tremor on New Year’s Day and its aftershocks — a toll that is sure to rise, with 195 others reported missing, according to local authorities.

The shockwaves toppled buildings, sparked a major fire and triggered tsunami waves over a metre high on the Sea of Japan side of the main island of Honshu.

The hope of finding survivors usually fades three days after a destructive quake.

But an elderly woman spent five days under the wreckage of a collapsed house in the city of Suzu on the hard-hit Noto Peninsula before being saved on Saturday.

She was taken to hospital and was able to hold a conversation, according to public broadcaster NHK.

“Hang in there!” rescuers were heard calling to the woman in police footage from the rainy scene published by local media.

“You’re gonna be OK!” they shouted. “Stay positive!”

A Tokyo police spokesman confirmed to AFP that the rescue had been carried out by officers from Tokyo and Fukuoka, but could not give further details.

Not all were so lucky. In the town of Anamizu, a 52-year-old man who lost his 21-year-old son and his parents-in-law waited to hear news of his wife, his other three children and more family members.

“I want them to be alive. It’s unthinkable that I could be left alone,” he told NHK.

Sleet and snow 

On Sunday, cold rain, sleet and snow made the recovery efforts of thousands of police, troops and other rescuers even more challenging.

The bad weather could also worsen conditions for more than 30,000 people in 366 government shelters as of Saturday.

Many communities on the remote peninsula have been cut off by damaged roads, with some of an estimated 1,000 landslides also blocking aid vehicles.

That means relief materials have been slow to reach areas suffering water and power outages.

Around 20,000 households in the wider Ishikawa region remained without electricity on Sunday. More than 66,400 households were without water as of Saturday.

“The first priority has been to rescue people under the rubble, and to reach isolated communities,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in an interview with NHK on Sunday.

The military has sent small groups of troops to each of the isolated communities on foot, he said.

The government has also “deployed various police and fire department helicopters” to reach them, Kishida added.

“In parallel with these efforts, we need to improve the conditions in shelters, and the health of those suffering in the disaster,” because they may have to stay in place for extended periods, he warned.

In Anamizu, rescuers in heavy-duty orange or blue waterproof suits were seen carrying the body of a landslide victim covered in a blue tarp under a toppled pylon.

And among the widespread destruction in the city of Wajima, the traditional red gate of one shrine remained standing, but the view through it was a now-familiar mess of splintered wood and toppled beams.

However, in a coastal village called Akasaki, visited by AFP, no houses had collapsed — thanks to their unusual design.

To withstand the rough environment at the tip of a headland, the houses have few glass windows, and the exterior walls are made from wooden slats layered horizontally.

“I felt so encouraged, because the village was still there standing,” said Masaki Sato, who maintains one of the homes remotely.

Japan experiences hundreds of earthquakes every year, though most cause no damage with strict building codes in place for more than four decades.

But many structures are older, especially in rapidly ageing communities in rural areas like Noto.

The country is haunted by the monster quake of 2011 that triggered a tsunami, left around 18,500 people dead or missing and caused a nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima plant.

Japan’s last earthquake disaster to cause more than 100 deaths was in 2016 in the southern city of Kumamoto, where 276 people died.

SEOUL — North Korea fired an artillery barrage near two South Korean border islands on Friday, Seoul’s defence ministry said, prompting a live-fire drill by the South’s military.

Residents of the two islands were ordered to evacuate to shelters and ferries were suspended amid one of the most serious military escalations on the peninsula since Pyongyang fired shells at one of the islands in 2010.

North Korea’s military said it had conducted a naval live-fire drill as a “natural countermeasure” against South Korean threats, according to a statement on the official Korean Central News Agency.

Seoul’s defence ministry said the rival military fired more than 200 rounds of artillery shells near Yeonpyeong and Baengnyeong, two sparsely populated islands situated just south of a defacto maritime border between the two sides.

It said the shells landed in a buffer zone created under a 2018 tension-reducing deal, which fell apart in November after the North launched a spy satellite.

Resuming artillery fire in the buffer zone “is a provocative act that threatens peace on the Korean Peninsula and escalates tensions”, Seoul’s defence minister Shin Won-sik said.

In response, Seoul’s military will take “immediate, strong, and final retaliation — we must back peace with overwhelming force”, he added.

North Korea’s military warned Seoul should not commit “a provocation under the pretext of so-called counteraction”, according to KCNA. It threatened the North would “show tough counteraction on an unprecedented level”.

It said the shells fired did not even have “an indirect effect” on Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong.

Pyongyang’s major ally and benefactor China called for “restraint” from all sides.

Evacuation orders 

Yeonpyeong, which has around 2,000 residents, is about 115 kilometres west of Seoul. Baengnyeong, with a population of 4,900, is about 210 kilometres west of Seoul.

Local officials said residents had been told to evacuate to shelters as a “preventative measure” ahead of the South Korean military drill. The order was lifted hours later, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

One resident of the island said they were “shaking in fear” at the barrage.

“At first I thought it was the shells fired by our own military... but was told later it was by North Korea,” Kim Jin-soo, a Baengnyeong resident told local broadcaster YTN.

In November, Seoul partially suspended the 2018 military accord to protest Pyongyang’s putting a spy satellite into orbit. The North then scrapped the deal completely.

“The nullification of the [accord] increases the possibility of military clashes in the border areas,” Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.

He added that “the evacuation of our residents raises

psychological and security concerns, which can ultimately de-stabilise the economy of South Korea”.

2010 clash 

In 2010, in response to a South Korean live-fire drill near the sea border, the North bombarded Yeonpyeong Island killing four South Koreans — two soldiers and two civilians.

That was the first attack on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War.

South Korea returned fire an exchange which lastedmore than an hour, as the two sides traded more than 200 shells, sparking brief fears of a full-fledged war.

Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in decades, after the North’s leader Kim Jong-Un enshrined the country’s status as a nuclear power into the constitution while test-firing several advanced inter-continental ballistic missiles.

At year-end policy meetings, Kim warned of a nuclear attack on the South and called for a build-up of the country’s military arsenal, warning that conflict could “break out any time”.

To deter Pyongyang, the United States deployed a nuclear-powered submarine in the South Korean port city of Busan and flew long-range bombers in drills with the South and Japan.

North Korea described the deployments as “intentional nuclear war provocative moves”.

On Friday, KCNA said Kim called for the ramping-up of missile launcher production “given the prevailing grave situation that requires the country to be more firmly prepared for a military showdown with the enemy”.

His comments came after the White House accused North Korea of providing Russia with ballistic missiles and missile launchers that were used in recent attacks on Ukraine. Washingon has called this a escalation of Pyongyang’s support for Moscow.