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Tag: Military and defense

  • Anthropic refuses to bend to Pentagon on AI safeguards as dispute nears deadline

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    A public showdown between the Trump administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business.

    Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.

    Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.

    If Amodei doesn’t budge, military officials have warned they will not just pull Anthropic’s contract but also “deem them a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.

    And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic risks.

    Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”

    That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, posted on social media that “we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions” and added the company has “until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide” if it would meet the demands or face consequences.

    Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, later lashed out at Amodei, alleging on X that he “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”

    That message hasn’t resonated in much of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand late Thursday in an open letter.

    OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk’s xAI, also have contracts to supply their AI models to the military.

    “The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused,” the open letter says. “They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in.”

    Also raising concerns about the Pentagon’s approach were Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Defense Department’s AI initiatives.

    “Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end,” wrote retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan in a social media post.

    Shanahan faced a different wave of tech worker opposition during the first Trump administration when he led Maven, a project to use AI technology to analyze drone footage and target weapons. So many Google employees protested its participation in Project Maven at the time that the tech giant declined to renew the contract and then pledged not to use AI in weaponry.

    “Since I was square in the middle of Project Maven & Google, it’s reasonable to assume I would take the Pentagon’s side here,” Shanahan wrote Thursday on social media. “Yet I’m sympathetic to Anthropic’s position. More so than I was to Google’s in 2018.”

    He said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.

    “They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote.

    Parnell asserted Thursday that the Pentagon wants to “ use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes” and said opening up use of the technology would prevent the company from “jeopardizing critical military operations,” though neither he nor other officials have detailed how they want to use the technology.

    The military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement,” Parnell wrote.

    When Hegseth and Amodei met Tuesday, military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, cancel its contract or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.

    Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.” He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude’s value to the military, but, if not, Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”

    —-

    AP reporter Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.

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  • US military boards third oil tanker in Indian Ocean after tracking it from Caribbean

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    WASHINGTON — U.S. military forces boarded a third sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

    U.S. Southern Command said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Bertha overnight, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”

    “The vessel was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean and attempted to evade,” the post said. “From the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, we tracked it and stopped it.”

    Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure Venezuela’s then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.

    The Bertha is a vessel flagged to the Cook Islands and is under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

    Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. military helicopters flying toward the tanker.

    Trump’s Republican administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon’s post did not state whether the Bertha was formally seized and placed under U.S. control.

    Maduro was brought to the U.S. to face charges of working with drug cartels to facilitate the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. and has pleaded not guilty.

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  • Indonesia tightens control on nickel as the US and China scramble for minerals

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    HANOI, Vietnam — Indonesia is tightening state control over the world’s largest nickel supply after years of betting the metal would anchor a homegrown electric-vehicle industry, and just as global demand begins shifting away from heavy reliance on nickel.

    The move could still ripple through global EV supply chains as the United States and China compete for critical minerals. Indonesia sits at the center of the nickel market: its share of global supply jumped to about 60% in 2024 from 31.5% in 2020, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, after former President Joko Widodo banned raw ore exports, drawing a surge of Chinese-backed investment into refining.

    Jakarta hoped that control over nickel would underpin a fully domestic EV industry, from mining and batteries to finished cars. Experts say that promise was used to justify forest clearing and mining expansion in the name of the energy transition, even as climate risks deepened.

    In 2025, Indonesia cracked down on what it called illegal exploitation of natural resources, saying many mining and plantation licenses were tainted by bribery or never properly approved. Authorities say they have seized more than 4 million hectares (9.8 million acres) of mines, palm oil plantations and processing sites, levied $1.7 billion in fines, and could seize another 4.5 million hectares this year.

    But analysts warn the crackdown is coming just as nickel’s payoff is starting to fade, with many Chinese EVs shifting to battery chemistries that use far less of the metal, relying instead on iron-based designs.

    “The forests have been exploited to the brim,” said Putra Adhiguna of the Jakarta-based Energy Shift Institute. “But you never got the electric-vehicle value chain.”

    China plays the leading role in Indonesia’s nickel sector, using the metal to underpin its stainless steel and clean-energy industries.

    The world’s largest nickel reserves are concentrated on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, which accounts for more than half of global nickel mine production, according to the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis or IEEFA.

    China has sourced nickel from Indonesia for decades, but the relationship deepened after Jakarta banned raw ore exports in 2020, drawing a surge of Chinese investment into smelters.

    Nickel shipments to China jumped, with imports of nickel matte — a semiprocessed material used in battery chemicals and alloys — rising nearly 28-fold between 2020 and 2023, more than 90% of it from Indonesia, according to trade data. Over the same period, North and South America’s combined share of global nickel output fell from 16% to 7%, while Europe’s share dropped from 35% to 10%, according to the International Nickel Study Group, a Lisbon-based intergovernmental organization.

    Meanwhile, mining drove the loss of about 370,000 hectares (roughly 914,000 acres) of Indonesian forests between 2001 and 2020 — more than in any other country — according to an analysis by the World Resources Institute. More than a third of that loss was old-growth rainforests which hold vast carbon stocks and are crucial for limiting climate change.

    The heavy use of coal to run Indonesia’s nickel smelters has also slowed the country’s energy transition, adding new fossil-fuel demand even as it tries to cut emissions. A 2024 analysis by the IEEFA found that major nickel producers emitted about 15 million metric tons (16.5 million U.S. tons) of greenhouse gases in 2023, largely because of coal reliance.

    In one of the most public nickel-related seizures last year, Indonesian soldiers accompanied by a local television crew, took control of part of the world’s largest nickel mine.

    Mostly owned by Chinese metals giant Tsingshan Holding Group, the mine has caused deforestation, air and water pollution and increased coal-fired emissions, while displacing communities, harming livelihoods and exposing residents to health risks, according to a 2024 report by the nonprofit group Climate Rights International.

    The move wasn’t aimed at environmental protection or restoring forestry safeguards, said Bhima Yudhistira, with the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies or CELIOS.

    “There is no guarantee things will get better,” he said. They could get “even worse.”

    Indonesia’s effort to turn its nickel reserves into the backbone of a domestic EV industry drew early interest from investors in South Korea and China but has fallen short of expectations.

    In July 2024, South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution opened Indonesia’s first EV battery-cell plant, with annual capacity to supply more than 150,000 electric vehicles. But in April 2025, LG Energy Solution withdrew from a larger $8.4 billion battery investment, citing market and investment conditions.

    An EV plant is still being built by Chinese automaker BYD. China’s CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker is constructing a battery factory with Indonesian state firms.

    Indonesia’s EV market, is growing quickly but remains small.

    The country sold more than 43,000 electric vehicles in 2024, accounting for about 5% of total car sales, according to the Indonesian Business Council. Public charging infrastructure is limited, with around 1,500 stations nationwide in 2024.

    Even if Indonesia produced 1 million EVs a year — equal to total annual auto sales — and favored nickel-rich batteries, that would still consume less than 1% of its national nickel output, according to the Energy Shift Institute.

    EV makers are shifting to lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries, reducing the need for nickel and cobalt. LFP batteries are cheaper, more stable and longer lasting. They’re used in nearly half of all EVs, the International Energy Agency found.

    Analysts say Indonesia’s nationalization drive could loosen Beijing’s grip on parts of the supply chain, potentially giving Jakarta more leverage to court U.S. buyers and investors.

    One potential concession by Indonesia in long drawn-out trade negotiations with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, expected to wrap up soon, would be to lift the ban on raw nickel exports to the U.S.

    Indonesia already has invited the U.S. to invest in its critical minerals sector as part of ongoing tariff negotiations between the two countries, though it’s caught in a tricky position.

    “How does Indonesia straddle between the two superpowers who both want to gain control of the national resource that Indonesia has?” said Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub.

    Other Southeast Asian countries similarly “sandwiched” between the U.S. and China are watching Indonesia closely, Li said.

    “Make no mistake, it’s going to be very difficult,” he said.

    Indonesia’s land seizures risks further destabilizing its nickel industry, added Yudhistira with CELIOS. Foreign investors monitoring the situation are likely to hesitate before committing new capital to Indonesia-based mining and processing projects, he said.

    “This is making the future of nickel, both mining and downstream processing, unknown,” Yudhistira said. “Uncertainty is very costly for investors.”

    ___

    Delgado reported from Bangkok, Thailand. Associated Press writer Edna Tarigan in Jakarta contributed to this report.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

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    LONDON — In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system. Soldiers in Austria are using open source office software to write reports after the military dropped Microsoft Office. Bureaucrats in a German state have also turned to free software for their administrative work.

    Around Europe, governments and institutions are seeking to reduce their use of digital services from U.S. Big Tech companies and turning to domestic or free alternatives. The push for “digital sovereignty” is gaining attention as the Trump administration strikes an increasingly belligerent posture toward the continent, highlighted by recent tensions over Greenland that intensified fears that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access.

    Concerns about data privacy and worries that Europe is not doing enough to keep up with the United States and Chinese tech leadership are also fueling the drive.

    The French government referenced some of these concerns when it announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.

    The objective is “to put an end to the use of non-European solutions, to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool,” the announcement said.

    “We cannot risk having our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data, and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors,” David Amiel, a civil service minister, said in a press release.

    Microsoft said it continues to “partner closely with the government in France and respect the importance of security, privacy, and digital trust for public institutions.”

    The company said it is “focused on providing customers with greater choice, stronger data protection, and resilient cloud services — ensuring data stays in Europe, under European law, with robust security and privacy protections.”

    Zoom, Webex and GoTo Meeting did not respond to requests for comment.

    French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing digital sovereignty for years. But there’s now a lot more “political momentum behind this idea now that we need to de-risk from U.S. tech,” Nick Reiners, at the Eurasia Group.

    “It feels kind of like there’s a real zeitgeist shift,” Reiners said

    It was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of global political and business elites last month in Davos, Switzerland. The European Commission’s official for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told an audience that Europe’s reliance on others “can be weaponized against us.”

    “That’s why it’s so important that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to very critical fields of our economy or society,” she said, without naming countries or companies.

    A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.

    The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.

    Microsoft maintains it kept in touch with the ICC “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services. At no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”

    Microsoft President Brad Smith has repeatedly sought to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties, the company’s press office said, and pointed to an interview he did last month with CNN in Davos in which he said that jobs, trade and investment. as well as security, would be affected by a rift over Greenland.

    “Europe is the American tech sector’s biggest market after the United States itself. It all depends on trust. Trust requires dialogue,” Smith said.

    Other incidents have added to the movement. There’s a growing sense that repeated EU efforts to rein in tech giants such as Google with blockbuster antitrust fines and sweeping digital rule books haven’t done much to curb their dominance.

    Billionaire Elon Musk is also a factor. Officials worry about relying on his Starlink satellite internet system for communications in Ukraine.

    Washington and Brussels wrangled for years over data transfer agreements, triggered by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. cyber-snooping.

    With online services now mainly hosted in the cloud through data centers, Europeans fear that their data is vulnerable.

    U.S. cloud providers have responded by setting up so-called “sovereign cloud” operations, with data centers located in European countries, owned by European entities and with physical and remote access only for staff who are European Union residents.

    The idea is that “only Europeans can take decisions so that they can’t be coerced by the U.S.,” Reiners said.

    The German state of Schleswig-Holstein last year migrated 44,000 employee inboxes from Microsoft to an open source email program. It also switched from Microsoft’s SharePoint file sharing system to Nextcloud, an open source platform, and is even considering replacing Windows with Linux and telephones and videoconferencing with open source systems.

    “We want to become independent of large tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty,” Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter said in an October announcement.

    The French city of Lyon said last year that it’s deploying free office software to replace Microsoft. Denmark’s government and the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus have also been trying out open-source software.

    “We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely,” Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen wrote on LinkedIn last year. “Too much public digital infrastructure is currently tied up with very few foreign suppliers.”

    The Austrian military said it has also switched to LibreOffice, a software package with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs that mirrors Microsoft 365’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

    The Document Foundation, a nonprofit based in Germany that’s behind LibreOffice, said the military’s switch “reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors.” Reports also said the military was concerned that Microsoft was moving file storage online to the cloud — the standard version of LibreOffice is not cloud-based.

    Some Italian cities and regions adopted the software years ago, said Italo Vignoli, a spokesman for The Document Foundation. Back then, the appeal was not needing to pay for software licenses. Now, it’s the main reason is to avoid being locked into a proprietary system.

    “At first, it was: we will save money and by the way, we will get freedom,” Vignoli said. “Today it is: we will be free and by the way, we will also save some money.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Molly Hague in The Hague, Netherlands contributed to this report.

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  • Images show abandoned belongings and mock police stations at former scam center

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    O’SMACH, Cambodia — In the town of O’Smach, along Cambodia’s northern border with Thailand, stands a compound of abandoned buildings that were battered by shelling during recent weeks of armed clashes.

    The site, now occupied by Thai troops, had served as one of Cambodia’s notorious scam centers, according to Thai officials.

    A six-story building, shown to journalists and international observers on Monday during a trip organized by the Thai military, is scattered with documents, equipment and personal belongings, likely abandoned in haste.

    “They are well-organized. They have good infrastructure and systems, and also the workflow and many, many tactics and techniques to do the scams,” said Lt. Gen. Teeranan Nandhakwang, director of the Thai army’s intelligence unit.

    Experts say such scam operations in Cambodia and elsewhere have cheated people around the world out of billions of dollars and tricked people from many countries to work in them under slave-like conditions.

    The Thai military said the compound was secured during the December clashes because Cambodian forces had used it as a military base.

    A ceasefire reached in December stipulated that the warring sides would de-escalate tensions and hold their forces at the positions they occupied prior to the agreement. That includes the compound on Cambodian soil now occupied by Thai troops.

    Dozens of rooms have wooden booths lined with foam for soundproofing, scripts written in multiple languages, lists of names and phone numbers, computer monitors and empty brackets for hard drives.

    There are also mock-up sets resembling police stations and uniforms of law enforcement of at least seven countries: China, Australia, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore and Brazil.

    One room has a replica of what appears to be a Vietnamese bank branch, complete with service counters, banners and a waiting area.

    The set-ups served as essential to a scam where people are targeted by scam operators pretending to be officials or other authority figures. Scripted approaches were meant to threaten arrest or other legal action unless instructions were followed.

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  • What to know about Greenland’s role in nuclear defense and Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’

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    PARIS — In a hypothetical nuclear war involving Russia, China and the United States, the island of Greenland would be in the middle of Armageddon.

    The strategic importance of the Arctic territory — under the flight paths that nuclear-armed missiles from China and Russia could take on their way to incinerating targets in the United States, and vice versa — is one of the reasons U.S. President Donald Trump has cited in his disruptive campaign to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark, alarming Greenlanders and longtime allies in Europe alike.

    Trump has argued that U.S. ownership of Greenland is vital for his “Golden Dome” — a multibillion dollar missile defense system that he says will be operational before his term ends in 2029.

    “Because of The Golden Dome, and Modern Day Weapons Systems, both Offensive and Defensive, the need to ACQUIRE is especially important,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday.

    That ushered in another roller-coaster week involving the semiautonomous Danish territory, where Trump again pushed for U.S. ownership before seemingly backing off, announcing Wednesday the “framework of a future deal” on Arctic security that’s unlikely to be the final word.

    Here’s a closer look at Greenland’s position at a crossroads for nuclear defense.

    Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, that nuclear adversaries would fire at each other — if it ever came to that — tend to take the shortest direct route, on a ballistic trajectory into space and down again, from their silos or launchers to targets. The shortest flight paths from China or Russia to the United States — and the other way — would take many of them over the Arctic region.

    Russian Topol-M missiles fired, for example, from the Tatishchevo silo complex southeast of Moscow would fly high over Greenland, if targeted at the U.S. ICBM force of 400 Minuteman III missiles, housed at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and the Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

    Chinese Dong Feng-31 missiles, if fired from new silo fields that the U.S. Defense Department says have been built in China, also could overfly Greenland should they be targeted at the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

    “If there is a war, much of the action will take place on that piece of ice. Think of it: those missiles would be flying right over the center,” Trump said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    An array of farseeing early warning radars act as the Pentagon’s eyes against any missile attack. The northernmost of them is in Greenland, at the Pituffik Space Base. Pronounced “bee-doo-FEEK,” it used to be called Thule Air Base, but was renamed in 2023 using the remote location’s Greenlandic name, recognizing the Indigenous community that was forcibly displaced by the U.S. outpost’s construction in 1951.

    Its location above the Arctic Circle, and roughly halfway between Washington and Moscow, enables it to peer with its radar over the Arctic region, into Russia and at potential flight paths of U.S.-targeted Chinese missiles.

    “That gives the United States more time to think about what to do,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst who specializes in Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “Greenland is a good location for that.”

    The two-sided, solid-state AN/FPS-132 radar is designed to quickly detect and track ballistic missile launches, including from submarines, to help inform the U.S. commander in chief’s response and provide data for interceptors to try and destroy warheads.

    The radar beams out for nearly 5,550 kilometers (3,450 miles) in a 240-degree arc and, even at its furthest range, can detect objects no larger than a small car, the U.S. Air Force says.

    Pitching the “Golden Dome” in Davos, Trump said that the U.S. needs ownership of Greenland to defend it.

    “You can’t defend it on a lease,” he said.

    But defense specialists struggle to comprehend that logic given that the U.S. has operated at Pituffik for decades without owning Greenland.

    French nuclear defense specialist Etienne Marcuz points out that Trump has never spoken of also needing to take control of the United Kingdom — even though it, like Greenland, also plays an important role in U.S. missile defense.

    An early warning radar operated by the U.K.’s Royal Air Force at Fylingdales, in northern England, serves both the U.K. and U.S governments, scanning for missiles from Russia and elsewhere and northward to the polar region. The unit’s motto is “Vigilamus” — Latin for “We are watching.”

    Trump’s envisioned multilayered “Golden Dome” could include space-based sensors to detect missiles. They could reduce the U.S. need for its Greenland-based radar station, said Marcuz, a former nuclear defense worker for France’s Defense Ministry, now with the Foundation for Strategic Research think tank in Paris.

    “Trump’s argument that Greenland is vital for the Golden Dome — and therefore that it has to be invaded, well, acquired — is false for several reasons,” Marcuz said.

    “One of them is that there is, for example, a radar in the United Kingdom, and to my knowledge there is no question of invading the U.K. And, above all, there are new sensors that are already being tested, in the process of being deployed, which will in fact reduce Greenland’s importance.”

    Because of its location, Greenland could be a useful place to station “Golden Dome” interceptors to try to destroy warheads before they reach the continental U.S.

    The “highly complex system can only work at its maximum potential and efficiency … if this Land is included in it,” Trump wrote in his post last weekend.

    But the U.S. already has access to Greenland under a 1951 defense agreement. Before Trump ratcheted up the heat on the territory and Denmark, its owner, their governments likely would have readily accepted any American military request for an expanded footprint there, experts say. It used to have multiple bases and installations, but later abandoned them, leaving just Pituffik.

    “Denmark was the most compliant ally of the United States,” Marcuz said. “Now, it’s very different. I don’t know whether authorization would be granted, but in any case, before, the answer was ‘Yes.’”

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  • Army puts 1,500 soldiers on standby for possible Minnesota deployment, AP sources say

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    WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active duty soldiers to be ready in case of a possible deployment to Minnesota, where federal authorities have been conducting a massive immigration enforcement operation, two defense officials said Sunday.

    The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans, said two infantry battalions of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division have been given prepare-to-deploy orders. The unit is based in Alaska and specializes in operating in arctic conditions.

    One defense official said the troops are standing by to deploy to Minnesota should President Donald Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used 19th century law that would allow him to employ active duty troops as law enforcement.

    The move comes just days after Trump threatened to do just that to quell protests against his administration’s immigration crackdown.

    In an emailed statement, Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell did not deny the orders were issued and said the military “is always prepared to execute the orders of the Commander-in-Chief if called upon.”

    ABC News was the first to report the development.

    On Thursday, Trump said in a social media post that he would invoke the 1807 law “if the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job.”

    He appeared to walk back the threat a day later, telling reporters at the White House that there wasn’t a reason to use it “right now.”

    “If I needed it, I’d use it,” Trump said. “It’s very powerful.”

    Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act throughout both of his terms. In 2020 he threatened to use it to quell protests after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, and in recent months he threatened to use it for immigration protests.

    The law was most recently invoked by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 to end unrest in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King.

    Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat and frequent target of Trump, has urged the president to refrain from sending in more troops.

    “I’m making a direct appeal to the President: Let’s turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are,” Walz said last week on social media.

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  • Trump threatens to use Insurrection Act to end protests

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    MINNEAPOLIS — President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to invoke an 1807 law and deploy troops to quell persistent protests against the federal officers sent to enforce his administration’s massive immigration crackdown.

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    Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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    By STEVE KARNOWSKI, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, HALLIE GOLDEN and AAMER MADHANI – Associated Press

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  • European troops arrive in Greenland; US talks highlight ‘disagreement’

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    NUUK, Greenland — Troops from several European countries continued to arrive Thursday in a show of support for Denmark as talks among representatives of Denmark, Greenland and the U.S. highlighted “fundamental disagreement” over the future of the Arctic island.

    The disagreement came into starker focus Thursday, with the White House describing plans for more talks with officials from Denmark and Greenland as “technical talks on the acquisition agreement” for the U.S. to acquire Greenland.

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    By EMMA BURROWS, CLAUDIA CIOBANU and DANIEL NIEMANN – Associated Press

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  • Lawmakers propose $2.5B agency to boost production of rare earths

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    WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of lawmakers have proposed creating a new agency with $2.5 billion to spur production of rare earths and the other critical minerals, while the Trump administration has already taken aggressive actions to break China’s grip on the market for these materials that are crucial to high-tech products, including cellphones, electric vehicles, jet fighters and missiles.

    It’s too early to tell how the bill, if passed, could align with the White House’s policy, but whatever the approach, the U.S. is in a crunch to drastically reduce its reliance on China, after Beijing used its dominance of the critical minerals market to gain leverage in the trade war with Washington. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a one-year truce in October, by which Beijing would continue to export critical minerals while the U.S. would ease its export controls of U.S. technology on China.

    The Pentagon has shelled out nearly $5 billion over the past year to help ensure its access to the materials after the trade war laid bare just how beholden the U.S. is to China, which processes more than 90% of the world’s critical minerals. To break Beijing’s chokehold, the U.S. government is taking equity stakes in a handful of critical mineral companies and in some cases guaranteeing the price of some commodities using an approach that seems more likely to come out of China’s playbook instead of a Republican administration.

    The bill that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., introduced Thursday would favor a more market-based approach by setting up the independent body charged with building a stockpile of critical minerals and related products, stabilizing prices, and encouraging domestic and allied production to help ensure stable supply not only for the military but also the broader economy and manufacturers.

    Shaheen called the legislation “a historic investment” to make the U.S. economy more resilient against China’s dominance that she said has left the U.S. vulnerable to economic coercion. Young said creating the new reserve is “a much-needed, aggressive step to protect our national and economic security.”

    When Trump imposed widespread tariffs last spring, Beijing fought back not only with tit-for-tat tariffs but severe restrictions on the export of critical minerals, forcing Washington to back down and eventually agree to the truce when the leaders met in South Korea.

    On Monday, in his speech at SpaceX, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that the Pentagon has in the past five months alone “deployed over $4.5 billion in capital commitments” to close six critical minerals deals that will “help free the United States from market manipulation.”

    One of the deals involves a $150 million of preferred equity by the Pentagon in Atlantic Alumina Co. to save the country’s last alumina refinery and build its first large-scale gallium production facility in Louisiana.

    Last year, the Pentagon announced it would buy $400 million of preferred stock in MP Materials, which owns the country’s only operational rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, California, and entered into a $1.4-billion joint partnership with ReElement Technologies Corp. to build up a domestic supply chain for rare earth magnets.

    The drastic move by the U.S. government to take equity stakes has prompted some analysts to observe that Washington is pivoting to some form of state capitalism to compete with Beijing.

    “Despite the dangers of political interference, the strategic logic is compelling,” wrote Elly Rostoum, a senior fellow at the Washington-based research institute Center for European Policy Analysis. She suggested that the new model could be “a prudent way for the U.S. to ensure strategic autonomy and industrial sovereignty.”

    But companies across the industry are welcoming the intervention from Trump’s administration.

    “He is playing three-dimensional chess on critical minerals like no previous president has done. It’s about time too, given the military and strategic vulnerability we face by having to import so many of these fundamental building blocks of technology and national defense,” NioCorp’s Chief Communications Officer Jim Sims said. That company is trying to finish raising the money it needs to build a mine in southeast Nebraska.

    In addition to trying to boost domestic production, the Trump administration has sought to secure some of these crucial elements through allies. In October, Trump signed an $8.5 billion agreement with Australia to invest in mining there, and the president is now aggressively trying to take over Greenland in the hope of being able to one day extract rare earths from there.

    On Monday, finance ministers from the G7 nations huddled in Washington over their vulnerability in the critical mineral supply chains.

    U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has led several rounds of trade negotiations with Beijing, urged attendees to increase their supply chain resiliency and thanked them for their willingness to work together “toward decisive action and lasting solutions,” according to a Treasury statement.

    The bill introduced on Thursday by Shaheen and Young would encourage production with both domestic and allied producers.

    Congress in the past several years has pushed for legislation to protect the U.S. military and civilian industry from Beijing’s chokehold. The issue became a pressing concern every time China turned to its proven tactics of either restricting the supply or turned to dumping extra critical minerals on the market to depress prices and drive any potential competitors out of business.

    The Biden administration sought to increase demand for critical minerals domestically by pushing for more electric vehicle and windmill production. But the Trump administration largely eliminated the incentives for those products and instead chose to focus on increasing critical minerals production directly.

    Most of those past efforts were on a much more limited scale than what the government has done in the past year, and they were largely abandoned after China relented and eased access to critical minerals.

    ___

    Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to the report.

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  • Pentagon is embracing Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as it draws global outcry

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    WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok will join Google’s generative AI engine in operating inside the Pentagon network, as part of a broader push to feed as much of the military’s data as possible into the developing technology.

    “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said in a speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas.

    The announcement comes just days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global outcry and scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent.

    Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked Grok, while the U.K.’s independent online safety watchdog announced an investigation Monday. Grok has limited image generation and editing to paying users.

    Hegseth said Grok will go live inside the Defense Department later this month and announced that he would “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation.” He also said data from intelligence databases would be fed into AI systems.

    Hegseth’s aggressive push to embrace the still-developing technology stands in contrast to the Biden administration, which, while pushing federal agencies to come up with policies and uses for AI, was also wary of misuse. Officials said rules were needed to ensure that the technology, which could be harnessed for mass surveillance, cyberattacks or even lethal autonomous devices, was being used responsibly.

    The Biden administration enacted a framework in late 2024 that directed national security agencies to expand their use of the most advanced AI systems but prohibited certain uses, such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons. It is unclear if those prohibitions are still in place under the Trump administration.

    During his speech, Hegseth spoke of the need to streamline and speed up technological innovations within the military, saying, “We need innovation to come from anywhere and evolve with speed and purpose.”

    He noted that the Pentagon possesses “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”

    “AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there,” Hegseth said.

    The defense secretary said he wants AI systems within the Pentagon to be responsible, though he went on to say he was shrugging off any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars.”

    Hegseth said his vision for military AI systems means that they operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke.”

    Musk developed and pitched Grok as an alternative to what he called “woke AI” interactions from rival chatbots like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In July, Grok also caused controversy after it appeared to make antisemitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler and shared several antisemitic posts.

    The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about the issues with Grok.

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  • Trump administration thanks the media for keeping quiet before the strike that captured Maduro

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    In the wake of last weekend’s U.S. military action in Venezuela, the news media got something it has seldom heard from the Trump administration: a “thank you.”

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio credited news organizations that had learned in advance about Saturday’s strike that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with not putting the mission in jeopardy by publicly reporting on it before it happened.

    Rubio’s acknowledgment was particularly noteworthy because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has cited a mistrust of journalists’ ability to responsibly handle sensitive information as one of the chief reasons for imposing restrictive new press rules on Pentagon reporters. Most mainstream news organizations have left posts in the Pentagon rather than agree to Hegseth’s policy.

    Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Rubio said the Republican administration withheld information about the mission from Congress ahead of time because “it will leak. It’s as simple as that.” But the primary reason was operational security, he said.

    “Frankly, a number of media outlets had gotten leaks that this was coming and held it for that very reason,” Rubio said. “And we thank them for doing that or lives could have been lost. American lives.”

    Semafor, citing “people familiar with communications between the administration and news organizations,” reported that The New York Times and The Washington Post had both learned of the raid in advance but held off reporting on it to avoid endangering U.S. military personnel. Representatives for both outlets declined to comment to The Associated Press on Monday.

    Withholding information on a planned mission for that reason is routine for news organizations, said Dana Priest, a longtime national security reporter at the Post who now teaches at the University of Maryland. Even after the fact, the Post has asked government authorities about whether revealing certain details could endanger people, she said.

    When The Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently included in a text chain last spring where Hegseth revealed information about a military attack in Yemen, the journalist did not report on the events until well after U.S. personnel was out of danger and the information had been thoroughly checked out.

    Most Americans learned of the Venezuela attack in the predawn hours of Saturday when President Donald Trump announced it on his Truth Social platform upon completion.

    While The Associated Press did not have advance word that the operation would happen, its journalists in Venezuela heard and observed explosions taking place there, and that was reported on the news wire more than two hours before Trump’s announcement. The U.S. involvement was not made clear until Trump’s post, however.

    Hegseth, in defending rules that restrict reporters’ movements and reporting in the Pentagon, told Fox News last year that “we have expectations that you’re not soliciting classified or sensitive information.” The Times last month filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the rules.

    Decisions on whether to report information that could put lives or a mission in danger often involve high-level discussions between editors and government officials. But Priest stressed that in a country with freedom of the press, the ultimate decision on whether to report the information lies with the news organization.

    Generations ago, President John F. Kennedy persuaded editors at the Times not to report when it learned in advance of a U.S.-backed attack by Cuban exiles on Fidel Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The mission proved a monumental failure, and a Times editor, Bill Keller, later said that Kennedy expressed regret that the newspaper had not reported on what it had known because it could have prevented a fiasco.

    Many mainstream journalists covering the military and national security have extensive experience dealing with sensitive issues, Priest said. But there’s a difference, she said, between reporting information that could put someone in danger and that which could prove embarrassing to an administration.

    “The reporters are not going to be deterred by a ridiculously broad censorship edict by the Trump administration,” Priest said. “They’re going to dig in and work even harder. Their mission is not to curry favor with the Trump administration. It’s to report information to the public.”

    ___

    David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

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  • China and South Korea pledge to bolster ties as regional tensions rise

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    BEIJING — China and South Korea’s leaders pledged to boost trade and safeguard regional stability on Monday during a visit to Beijing by the South Korean president that was overshadowed by North Korea’s recent ballistic missile tests.

    South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met with Chinese President Xi Jinping as part of his four-day trip to China — his first since taking office in June.

    As Xi hosted Lee at the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese president stressed the two countries’ “important responsibilities in maintaining regional peace and promoting global development,” according to a readout of their meeting broadcast by state-run CCTV.

    Lee spoke about opening “a new chapter in the development of Korea-China relations” during “changing times.”

    “The two countries should make joint contributions to promote peace, which is the foundation for prosperity and growth,” Lee said.

    The visit comes as China wants to shore up regional support as tensions rise with Japan. Ties between Beijing and Seoul have fluctuated in recent years over previous conservative South Korean governments’ steps to prioritize the U.S. and Japan over China, and allow the U.S. to install a missile defense system on its soil. Lee, a liberal, has promised to improve ties with Beijing, while also strengthening relations with Washington and Tokyo.

    Just hours before Lee’s arrival in China, North Korea launched several ballistic missiles into the sea, including, it said, hypersonic missiles, which are designed to travel at more than five times the speed of sound and are very difficult to detect and intercept. Foreign experts doubt that North Korea has developed such a functioning hypersonic weapon.

    During the summit, the two countries agreed to continue to explore creative ways to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and confirmed the Chinese resolve to play “a constructive role” in efforts to promote peace, South Korea’s national security adviser Wi Sung-lac told a briefing.

    China is a major ally of North Korea and provides it with an economic lifeline. In past years, China, together with Russia, has repeatedly blocked the U.S. and others’ bids to toughen U.N. sanctions on North Korea.

    The missile tests came as Pyongyang criticized a U.S. attack on Venezuela that included the removal of President Nicolás Maduro.

    North Korea, which has long feared the U.S. might seek a change of government in Pyongyang, criticized the attack as a wild violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and an example of the “rogue and brutal nature of the U.S.”

    China had also condemned the U.S. attack, which it said violated international law and threatened peace in Latin America.

    Lee’s visit also coincided, more broadly, with rising tensions between China and Japan over recent comments by Japan’s new leader that Tokyo could intervene in a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan, the island democracy China claims as its own.

    Last week, China staged large-scale military drills around the island for two days to warn against separatist and “external interference” forces.

    In his meeting with Lee, Xi mentioned China’s and South Korea’s historical rivalry against Japan, calling on the two countries to “join hands to defend the fruits of victory in World War II and safeguard peace and stability in northeast Asia.”

    Regarding South Korea’s military cooperation with the U.S., Lee said during an interview with CCTV ahead of his trip that it shouldn’t mean that South Korea-China relations should move toward confrontation.

    He added that his visit to China aimed to “minimize or eliminate past misunderstandings or contradictions (and) elevate and develop South Korea-China relations to a new stage.”

    China and South Korea maintain robust trade ties, with bilateral trade reaching about $273 billion in 2024.

    During their meeting, Xi and Lee oversaw the signing of 15 cooperation agreements in areas such as technology, trade, transportation and environmental protection, CCTV reported.

    Earlier on Monday, Lee had attended a business forum in Beijing with representatives of major South Korean and Chinese companies, including Samsung, Hyundai, LG and Alibaba Group.

    At that meeting, Lee and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng oversaw the signing of agreements in areas such as consumer goods, agriculture, biotechnology and entertainment.

    ___

    Hyung-jin Kim contributed to this report from Seoul, South Korea.

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  • Guinea’s junta leader is confirmed president-elect after first vote since a 2021 coup

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    CONAKRY, Guinea — The Supreme Court in Guinea on Sunday upheld the election victory of Gen. Mamadi Doumbouya, cementing the junta leader’s transition to a democratically elected president four years after staging a coup in the West African nation.

    Doumbouya won the country’s first election since the 2021 coup after polling 86.7% of the votes, according to the General Directorate of Elections. His victory, which had been predicted by analysts, was confirmed by the Supreme Court in the capital Conakry.

    “Today, there are neither winners nor losers. There is only one Guinea, united and indivisible,” Doumbouya said in a broadcast late Sunday, calling on citizens to “build a new Guinea, a Guinea of ​​peace, justice, shared prosperity, and fully assumed political and economic sovereignty.”

    Yero Baldé, the runner-up who won 6.59% of the vote, had filed a petition accusing the electoral body of manipulating the results in Doumbouya’s favor. But authorities said he withdrew the petition a day before the Supreme Court verdict.

    The Dec. 28 election was held under a new constitution that revoked a ban on military leaders running for office and extended the presidential mandate from five years to seven years.

    Critics say Doumbouya has clamped down on political opponents and dissent since the 2021 coup, leaving him with no major opposition among the eight other candidates in the race.

    The weakened opposition “focused attention on Mamadi Doumbouya as the only key figure capable of ensuring the continuity of the state,” said N’Faly Guilavogui, a Guinean political analyst. “Guineans are waiting to see what efforts he will make to ensure political stability and reconciliation,” Guilavogui added.

    Despite the country’s rich mineral resources including the world’s biggest exporter of bauxite, which is used to make aluminum, more than half of its 15 million people are experiencing record levels of poverty and food insecurity, according to the World Food Program.

    The junta’s most important initiative has been a mega-mining project at Simandou, the world’s largest iron ore deposit. The 75% Chinese-owned project began production in December after decades of delays.

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  • National Guard to patrol New Orleans for New Year’s a year after deadly attack

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    NEW ORLEANS, La. — A National Guard deployment in New Orleans authorized by President Donald Trump will begin Tuesday as part of a heavy security presence for New Year’s celebrations a year after an attack on revelers on Bourbon Street killed 14 people, officials said Monday.

    The deployment in New Orleans follows high-profile National Guard missions the Trump administration launched in other cities this year, including in Washington and Memphis, Tennessee. But the sight of National Guard troops is not unusual in New Orleans, where troops earlier this year also helped bolster security for the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.

    “It’s no different than what we’ve seen in the past,” New Orleans police spokesperson Reese Harper said. “They’re not here for immigration purposes. They’re here for that added layer of visibility. This is for visibility and just really to keep our citizens safe. It’s just another tool in the toolbox and another layer of security.”

    The Guard is expected be confined to the French Quarter area popular with tourists and won’t be engaging in assisting in immigration enforcement, Harper said. Guardsmen will operate similar to earlier this year when they patrolled the area around Bourbon Street following the vehicle-ramming attack on Jan. 1.

    The 350 Guard members will stay through Carnival season, when residents and tourists descend on the Big Easy to partake in costumed celebrations and massive parades before ending with Mardi Gras in mid-February.

    Louisiana National Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Noel Collins said in a written statement that the Guard will support local, state, and federal law enforcement “to enhance capabilities, stabilize the environment, assist in reducing crime, and restoring public trust.”

    In total, more than 800 local, state and federal law enforcement officials will be deployed in New Orleans to close off Bourbon Street to vehicular traffic, patrol the area, conduct bag searches and redirect traffic, city officials said during a news conference Monday.

    The increased law enforcement presence comes a year after Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove around a police blockade in the early hours of Jan. 1 and raced down Bourbon Street, plowing into people celebrating New Year’s Day. The attacker, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran who had proclaimed his support for the Islamic State militant group on social media, was fatally shot by police after crashing. After an expansive search, law enforcement located multiple bombs in coolers placed around the French Quarter. None of the explosive devices detonated.

    In the immediate aftermath of the attack, 100 National Guard members were sent to the city.

    In September, Gov. Jeff Landry asked Trump to send 1,000 troops to Louisiana cities, citing concerns about crime. Democrats pushed back, specifically leaders in New Orleans who said a deployment was unwarranted. They argued that the city has actually seen a dramatic decrease in violent crime rates in recent years.

    ———

    Cline reported from Baton Rouge.

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  • Myanmar holds first election since military seized power but critics say the vote is a sham

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    YANGON, Myanmar — Voters went to the polls Sunday for the initial phase of Myanmar’s first general election in five years, held under the supervision of its military government while a civil war rages throughout much of the country.

    Final results won’t be known until after two more rounds of voting are completed later in January. It’s widely expected that Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who has governed Myanmar since an army takeover in 2021, will then assume the presidency.

    The military government has presented the vote as a return to democracy, but its bid for legitimacy is marred by the absence of formerly popular opposition parties and reports that soldiers used threats to force voters’ participation.

    While more than 4,800 candidates from 57 parties are competing for seats in national and regional legislatures, only six are competing nationwide with the possibility to gain political clout in parliament. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party is by far the strongest contender.

    Voting is taking place in three phases, with Sunday’s first round being held in 102 of Myanmar’s 330 townships. Subsequent phases will take place on Jan. 11 and Jan. 25, but 65 townships won’t participate in the election because of ongoing armed conflicts.

    Final results are expected to be announced by February. It wasn’t clear if or when the authorities would release aggregate figures of Sunday’s voting, although counts were publicly announced at local polling stations.

    Critics of the current system say that the election is designed to add a facade of legitimacy to the status quo. Military rule began when soldiers ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021. It blocked her National League for Democracy party from serving a second term despite winning a landslide victory in the 2020 election.

    They argue that the results will lack legitimacy because of the exclusion of major parties and government repression.

    The expected victory of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party makes the nominal transition to civilian rule a chimera, say opponents of military rule and independent analysts.

    “An election organized by a junta that continues to bomb civilians, jail political leaders, and criminalize all forms of dissent is not an election — it is a theater of the absurd performed at gunpoint,” Tom Andrews, the U.N.-appointed human rights expert for Myanmar, posted on X.

    However, the election may provide an excuse for neighbors like China, India and Thailand to say that the vote represents progress toward stability. Western nations have maintained sanctions against Myanmar’s ruling generals because of the military’s anti-democratic actions and the brutal war against opponents.

    According to a count carried out at one polling station in Yangon after the polls closed, only 524 of 1,431 registered voters — just under 37% — cast their ballots.

    Of those, 311 voted for the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party, suggesting that opposition calls for a voter boycott may have been heeded.

    Khin Marlar, 51, who cast her ballot in Yangon’s Kyauktada township, said that she felt that she should vote, because she hoped that peace would follow afterward. She explained that she had fled her village in the town of Thaungta in the central Mandalay region because of the fighting.

    “I am voting with the feeling that I will go back to my village when it is peaceful,” she told The Associated Press.

    A resident of southern Mon state, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Khin, for fear of arrest by the military, told the AP that she felt compelled to go to a polling station because of pressure from local authorities.

    “I have to go and vote even though I don’t want to, because soldiers showed up with guns to our village to pressure us yesterday,” Khin said, echoing reports from independent media and rights groups.

    Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s 80-year-old former leader, and her party aren’t participating in the polls. She is serving a 27-year prison term on charges widely viewed as spurious and politically motivated. Her party, the National League for Democracy, was dissolved in 2023 after refusing to register under new military rules.

    Other parties also refused to register or declined to run under conditions they deem unfair, and opposition groups have called for a voter boycott.

    Amael Vier, an analyst for the Asian Network for Free Elections, noted a lack of genuine choice, pointing out that 73% of voters in 2020 cast ballots for parties that no longer exist.

    According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, more than 22,000 people are currently detained for political offenses, and more than 7,600 civilians have been killed by security forces since 2021.

    Armed resistance arose after the army used lethal force to crush nonviolent protests against its 2021 takeover. The ensuing civil war has left more than 3.6 million people displaced, according to the U.N.

    A new Election Protection Law imposes harsh penalties and restrictions for virtually all public criticism of the polls.

    There were no reports of major interference with the polls, though opposition organizations and armed resistance groups had vowed to disrupt the electoral process.

    Both the military and its opponents believe power is likely to remain with Min Aung Hlaing, who led the 2021 seizure of power.

    “I am the commander in chief. I am a civil servant. I cannot say that I want to serve as a president. I am not the leader of a political party,” he told journalists after casting his vote. “There is a process for electing a president from parliament only when it is convened. I think it is appropriate to speak about it only then.”

    ___

    Grant Peck reported from Bangkok.

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  • Colombia declares an economic emergency in a criticized effort to raise more taxes

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    BOGOTA, Colombia — BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia ’s government has declared an economic state of emergency that enables President Gustavo Petro’s administration to issue taxes by decree, as the nation struggles to finance hospitals and the military while paying off record debts.

    Petro issued the decree late Monday. His leftist government recently failed to get congressional approval for a tax bill that would have boosted the government’s budget by $4 billion in 2026, a year featuring presidential and congressional elections.

    Public spending under Petro, elected in 2022, has ballooned to levels that exceed spending during the pandemic. Colombia’s national government has a budget of approximately $134 billion in 2025.

    The decree says the government needs more funds to pay fuel subsidies, cover health insurance payments and invest around $700 million in infrastructure that will enable the military to counter drone attacks from rebel groups.

    The government has yet to publish a law that spells out the taxes it wants to impose under the emergency. Leaked documents reported by local media last week show that the government plans to impose new wealth taxes on businesses and individuals and place a steep sales tax on alcohol, including rum and wine.

    Business associations have been highly critical of the decree, which they have described as authoritarian and designed to circumvent congressional oversight.

    Bruce Mac Master, president of Colombia’s National Association of Industrialists, asserted on social media that the decree was a “flagrant abuse of the rule of law.”

    Many analysts expect the Constitutional Court to overturn the decree. Under Colombian law, a state of economic emergency can be declared only when there is a grave, imminent and unexpected threat to the nation’s economic order.

    Jorge Restrepo, an economics professor at Bogota’s Javeriana University, said it will be difficult for the government to convince Colombia’s highest court that its decree meets legal requirements.

    “This was not an unexpected situation … like a war or natural disaster,” he said of the current budget deficit. “We knew there was a fiscal crisis brewing since the middle of last year.”

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  • US strikes another alleged drug-smuggling boat in eastern Pacific

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    WASHINGTON — The U.S. military said Monday that it had conducted another strike against a boat it said was smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing one person.

    In a social media post, U.S. Southern Command said, “Intelligence confirmed the low-profile vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” Southern Command provided no evidence that the vessel was engaged in drug smuggling.

    A video posted by U.S. Southern Command shows splashes of water near one side of the boat. After a second salvo, the rear of the boat catches fire. More splashes engulf the craft and the fire grows. In the final second of the video, the vessel can be seen adrift with a large patch of fire alongside it.

    Earlier videos of U.S. boat strikes showed vessels suddenly exploding, suggesting missile strikes. Some strike videos even had visible rocket-like projectiles coming down on the boats.

    The Trump administration has said the strikes were meant to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S. and increase pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

    At least 105 people have been killed in 29 known strikes since early September. The strikes have faced scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and human rights activists, who say the administration has offered scant evidence that its targets are indeed drug smugglers and say the fatal strikes amount to extrajudicial killings.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard has stepped up efforts to interdict oil tankers in the Caribbean Sea as part of the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against Maduro.

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  • Starlink in the crosshairs: How Russia could attack Elon Musk’s conquering of space

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    Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield.

    Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called “zone-effect” weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems.

    Analysts who haven’t seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs.

    Such repercussions, including risks to its own space systems, could steer Moscow away from deploying or using such a weapon, analysts said.

    “I don’t buy it. Like, I really don’t,” said Victoria Samson, a space-security specialist at the Secure World Foundation who leads the Colorado-based nongovernmental organization’s annual study of anti-satellite systems. “I would be very surprised, frankly, if they were to do something like that.”

    But the commander of the Canadian military’s Space Division, Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, said such Russian work cannot be ruled out in light of previous U.S. allegations that Russia also has been pursuing an indiscriminate nuclear, space-based weapon.

    “I can’t say I’ve been briefed on that type of system. But it’s not implausible,” he said. “If the reporting on the nuclear weapons system is accurate and that they’re willing to develop that and willing to go to that end, well it wouldn’t strike me as shocking that something just short of that, but equally damaging, is within their wheelhouse of development.”

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t respond to messages from the AP seeking comment. Russia has previously called for United Nations efforts to stop the orbital deployment of weapons and President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow has no intention of deploying nuclear space weapons.

    The intelligence findings were shown to the AP on condition that the services involved were not identified and the news organization was not able to independently verify the findings’ conclusions.

    The U.S. Space Force didn’t respond to e-mailed questions. The French military’s Space Command said in a statement to the AP that it could not comment on the findings but said, “We can inform you that Russia has, in recent years, been multiplying irresponsible, dangerous, and even hostile actions in space.”

    Russia views Starlink in particular as a grave threat, the findings indicate. The thousands of low-orbiting satellites have been pivotal for Ukraine’s survival against Russia’s full-scale invasion, now in its fourth year.

    Starlink’s high-speed internet service is used by Ukrainian forces for battlefield communications, weapons targeting and other roles and by civilians and government officials where Russian strikes have affected communications.

    Russian officials repeatedly have warned that commercial satellites serving Ukraine’s military could be legitimate targets. This month, Russia said it has fielded a new ground-based missile system, the S-500, which is capable of hitting low-orbit targets.

    Unlike a missile that Russia tested in 2021 to destroy a defunct Cold War-era satellite, the new weapon in development would target multiple Starlinks at once, with pellets possibly released by yet-to-be launched formations of small satellites, the intelligence findings say.

    Canada’s Horner said it is hard to see how clouds of pellets could be corralled to only strike Starlink and that debris from such an attack could get “out of control in a hurry.”

    “You blow up a box full of BBs,” he said. Doing that would “blanket an entire orbital regime and take out every Starlink satellite and every other satellite that’s in a similar regime. And I think that’s the part that is incredibly troubling.”

    The findings seen by the AP didn’t say when Russia might be capable of deploying such a system nor detail whether it has been tested or how far along research is believed to be.

    The system is in active development and information about the timing of an expected deployment is too sensitive to share, according to an official familiar with the findings and other related intelligence that the AP did not see. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the nonpublic findings.

    Such Russian research could be simply experimental, Samson said.

    “I wouldn’t put it past some scientists … to build out something like this because it’s an interesting thought-experiment and they think, you know, ‘Maybe at some point we can get our government to pay for it,’” she said.

    Samson suggested the specter of a supposed new Russian threat may also be an effort to elicit an international response.

    “Often times people pushing these ideas are doing it because they want the U.S. side to build something like that or … to justify increased spending on counterspace capabilities or using it for a more hawkish approach on Russia,” she said.

    “I’m not saying that this is what’s happening with this,” Samson added. “But it has been known to happen that people take these crazy arguments and use them.”

    The intelligence findings say the pellets would be so small — just millimeters across — that they would evade detection by ground- and space-based systems that scan for space objects, which could make it hard to pin blame for any attack on Moscow.

    Clayton Swope, who specializes in space security and weaponry at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based security and policy think tank, said if “the pellets are not trackable, that complicates things” but “people would figure it out.”

    “If satellites start winking out with damage, I guess you could put two and two together,” he said.

    Exactly how much destruction tiny pellets could do isn’t clear. In November, a suspected impact by a small piece of debris was sufficient to damage a Chinese spacecraft that was meant to bring three astronauts back to the Earth.

    “Most damage would probably be done to the solar panels because they’re probably the most fragile part” of satellites, Swope said. “That’d be enough, though, to damage a satellite and probably bring it offline.”

    After such an attack, pellets and debris would over time fall back toward Earth, possibly damaging other orbiting systems on their way down, analysts say.

    Starlink’s orbits are about 550 kilometers (340 miles) above the planet. China’s Tiangong space station and the International Space Station operate at lower orbits, “so both would face risks,” according to Swope.

    The space chaos that such a weapon could cause might enable Moscow to threaten its adversaries without actually having to use it, Swope said.

    “It definitely feels like a weapon of fear, looking for some kind of deterrence or something,” he said.

    Samson said the drawbacks of an indiscriminate pellet-weapon could steer Russia off such a path.

    “They’ve invested a huge amount of time and money and human power into being, you know, a space power,” she said.

    Using such a weapon “would effectively cut off space for them as well,” Samson said. ”I don’t know that they would be willing to give up that much.”

    ___

    Emma Burrows in London contributed to this report.

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  • US official: Coast Guard pursues another tanker helping Venezuela skirt sanctions

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    The pursuit of the tanker, which was confirmed by a U.S. official briefed on the operation, comes after the U.S. administration announced Saturday it had seized a tanker for the second time in less than two weeks.

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    By AAMER MADHANI – Associated Press

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