World

CHISINAU — French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday called for "new in-depth discussions" with Ukraine, without confirming if he would travel this week to Kyiv as several media have reported.

"At the gates of our European Union, an unprecedented geopolitical situation is playing out," Macron said after meeting French troops stationed in Romania.

"The political context and the decisions that the European Union and several nations will have to take justify new in-depth discussions and new progress."

"We, the European Union, need to send clear political signals to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, who have been resisting heroically for several months," said Macron, speaking alongside Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.

He added the discussion should be "of a new nature", including on military equipment, financing and unblocking shipments of Ukraine wheat affected by Russia's invasion of its neighbour, which started in February.

"At some point, when we will have helped the resistance to the maximum, when — I hope — Ukraine will have won, and especially when guns can go quiet, we will have to negotiate," Macron added.

"The Ukrainian president and its leaders will have to negotiate with Russia. We will be — us Europeans — around that table," the French president said.

Macron arrived on Tuesday in NATO member Romania. He had dinner with French soldiers on the Mihail Kogalniceanu base near the Black Sea and decided to spend the night in a tent instead of a hotel, according to his Elysee office.

On Wednesday, he had breakfast with soldiers before meeting Iohannis for more than an hour.

Later Wednesday, Macron travelled to Moldova for talks with President Maia Sandu in the capital Chisinau, where he called for the EU to send a positive signal to the former Soviet republic’s request to join the bloc.

“I would like us to send a positive and clear signal to Moldova. Nevertheless, I want to keep the conditions to build unanimity, consensus” amongst EU member states, Macron added.

Macron — the first French president to visit Moldova since Jacques Chirac in 1998 — has met Sandu three times since February 2021 in Paris and has developed “a relationship of trust” with the pro-European president, according to the Elysee.

“We know that the European integration of Moldova will be a long and complex process, which will require heavy efforts,” Sandu said in response to Macron.

Hundreds of thousands Ukrainians have crossed into Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest countries with a population of 2.6 million. Most have since moved on to other countries.

ATHENS — The appeal trial of dozens of senior Greek neo-Nazis began on Wednesday, nearly two years after their conviction in a landmark case over the murder of an anti-fascist rapper and other crimes.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the courthouse in Athens on Wednesday, calling for harsher prison terms for the nearly fifty members of the Golden Dawn group.

“Do NOT reduce their sentences,” read one of the banners carried by the protesters, many of whom were chanting: “Nazis in prison forever”.

The appeal was filed in October 2020 by a senior Greek prosecutor immediately after the original trial concluded, on the grounds that the sentences handed down were too lenient.

Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos and other senior members of the group — which was once Greece’s third most popular political party — received prison sentences ranging from five to just under 14 years.

They now face a maximum sentence of 15 years behind bars.

The Golden Dawn trial, which lasted more than five years, has been described as one of the most significant in Greek political history.

Prosecuting lawyers had been seeking tougher sentences for the 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and the savage beatings of migrants and political opponents.

Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos and nearly 60 other members were found guilty of participation in a criminal organisation in 2020.

Michaloliakos is currently hospitalised with COVID-19 and is not expected to attend.

Other prominent former Golden Dawn members on trial are European Parliament member Ioannis Lagos and former party spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, who has formed a new nationalist group.

Golden Dawn, a xenophobic and anti-Semitic organisation, existed on the fringes of Greek politics until the country’s 2010 debt crisis.

It capitalised on public anger over immigration and austerity cuts, entering parliament for the first time in 2012 with a total of 18 seats.

Three years later, Golden Dawn emerged as the third most powerful political force in the country.

The appeal trial is expected to last at least a year.

LOS ANGELES — Raging floods, devastating fires, powerful thunderstorms and a dangerous heat wave affecting a third of the population: The United States was being walloped on Tuesday by climate-related catastrophes.

A series of slow motion disasters is gripping the country as it enters summer, with warnings of misery for months to come in some areas.

Around 120 million people were under some sort of advisory as a heat wave scorched the Upper Midwest and the Southeast.

“A dome of high pressure is expected to generate well-above-normal to record-breaking temperatures across the region both today and tomorrow,” with heat indices “well into the triple digits in many locations”, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

Parts of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio were warned to expect the mercury to reach 43ºC.

NWS meteorologist Alex Lamers said the high pressure dome was sparking extreme events around its periphery.

“A lot of times you get a pretty big heatwave and if you look around the edges of that you’ll see thunderstorms and tornadoes, flash flooding, extreme rainfall,” he told AFP.

Storms 

The heat dome’s northern edge, where high temperatures collided with colder air, saw some violent storms on Monday.

Hundreds of thousands of people were without power in the Midwest after thunderstorms tore through the area.

That cold front was expected to bring more unsettled weather, with hail and damaging winds forecast.

Further west, dramatic photographs and videos published by the National Park Service showed the devastation wreaked by flooding in Yellowstone, the country’s oldest national park.

The 8,900 square-kilometre park in Wyoming, which is home to the famous Old Faithful geyser, was shuttered on Monday after a flooded river swept away roads and cut off a nearby community.

Rangers warned of “extremely hazardous conditions” and told anyone still in the park to get out.

“Flood levels measured on the Yellowstone River are beyond record levels,” the NPS said on its website.

“Preliminary assessments show multiple sections of roads throughout the park have been either washed out or covered in mud or rocks, and multiple bridges may be affected.”

The small community of Gardiner, which sits just outside the park boundary in the state of Montana, was cut off, with water and power out to several properties, the NPS said.

Furnace 

There were also warnings of excessive heat for parts of California and Arizona, which were blasted by furnace-like conditions at the weekend.

The soaring temperatures, coupled with a lengthy drought are worsening seasonal wildfires.

Two huge blazes, each of more than 120,000 hectares, continued to rage Tuesday in New Mexico.

Firefighters battling the Black Fire and the Hermits Peak fire are working to contain flames that are fuelled by exceedingly dry undergrowth.

New Mexico and much of the Southwest has been gripped by a punishing drought that has left rainfall levels below normal for years.

Dozens of other fires have sprung up throughout the region.

Wildfires are an expected part of the natural cycle, which help to remove dead plants and eliminate disease while promoting new growth.

But their size and ferocity has increased in recent years, firefighters say, as effects of the crippling drought make themselves felt.

“Dry conditions and gusty winds are expected to produce another day of elevated to critical fire weather conditions across portions of the Southwest into the central and southern High Plains,” NWS said on its website.

Fire chiefs are warning that 2022 looks set to be a terrible year for wildfires.

“Given the fuel conditions, the fire conditions that we’re here talking about, I foresee a very tough four, five, six months in front of us,” Orange County, California Fire Chief Brian Fennessy said last week.

Scientists say global warming, which is being driven chiefly by humanity’s unchecked burning of fossil fuels, is making extreme weather events more likely.

Lamer, of the National Weather Service, said while it was difficult to conclude the changing climate was behind an individual episode, global warming was an underlying factor.

“Any weather event that you’re looking, there’s some combination of bad luck, the atmosphere has to be set up in a certain way,” he said.

“But they all happen in the context of climate, and basically climate change loads the dice and makes more extreme outcomes more likely.”

LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — Russia said on Tuesday it would establish a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from a chemical plant in Severodonetsk, as the two sides battled for control of the key city in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Russian forces have stepped up efforts to cut off the Ukrainian troops still in the industrial hub, destroying all three bridges which connect it across a river to Lysychansk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meanwhile once again appealed for heavy weapons from the West, criticising the "restrained behaviour" of some European leaders.

Moscow has for weeks targeted the twin cities as the last areas in the Lugansk region of the Donbas still under Ukrainian control.

Communication with the city was "complicated" with the situation on the ground changing every hour, the head of Severodonetsk's administration, Oleksandr Stryuk, told Ukrainian television.

Around 500 civilians were taking shelter under “heavy fire” in the Azot chemical plant in Severodonetsk, Stryuk said.

The Russian defence ministry said it was “ready to organise a humanitarian operation” on Wednesday to evacuate from the plant to the separatist-controlled part of the Lugansk region.

‘Surrender or die’ 

Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said on Monday Ukraine’s forces had been pushed back from Severodonetsk’s centre with the Russians controlling 70 to 80 per cent of the city in their attempt to “encircle it”.

Capturing Severodonetsk would open the road to Sloviansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in Moscow’s push to conquer Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.

Zelensky, in comments to Danish journalists on Tuesday, insisted that the war could only end once Ukrainians were the only ones left on its territory.

How long that took depended “very much” on international support, and “the personalities of the leaders of European states”.

He regretted what he called, “the restrained behaviour of some leaders” which, he said, had “slowed down arms supplies very much”.

Zelensky has repeatedly urged the West to deliver heavy weapons to Ukraine as quickly as possible.

Deputy Defence Minister Anna Malyar on Tuesday said Kyiv had only received 10 per cent of the arms it had requested from the West.

‘Not safe anywhere’ 

From an elevated position in Lysychansk, an AFP team saw black smoke rising from the Azot factory in Severodonetsk and another area in the city.

The Ukrainian military is using the high ground to exchange fire with Russian forces fighting for control of Severodonetsk, just across the water.

Lysychansk pensioner Valentina sat on the porch of her ground floor apartment, where she lives alone, her two walking sticks to hand.

“I’m having a tough time,” said the 83-year-old former farm worker.

“It’s scary, very scary. Why can’t they agree at last, for God’s sake, just shake hands?”

Along the road from Lysychansk to Kramatorsk, Ukrainian forces were transporting more weapons systems to the front, while specialist vehicles carried tanks for repair.

In the town of Novodruzhesk, close to Lysychansk, there was still a smell of burning and smoke from a group of houses that had been destroyed by fire from shelling at the weekend, with just chimneys left.

“It’s not safe anywhere, it just depends on the time of day, that’s all,” said a soldier standing at the local fire station with a skull logo on his sleeve.

“There are tons of people [still] here,” he added.

Further away in Sloviansk, Nataliya, 41, a now unemployed cleaner said she was trying to decide whether to evacuate.

“People will leave again if they start bombing the town heavily,” she told AFP.

“If it’s like Mariupol, they’ll give us buses. We’ll leave if the Russians enter Sloviansk.”

‘Positive signal’ 

The European Union needs to “give a positive signal” to Ukraine and be “open” to granting it candidate status, France’s Europe minister, Clement Beaune, said on Tuesday.

Ukraine has applied to become a member of the bloc, with the European Commission due to give its recommendation in the coming days. But some member states are sceptical about potentially fast-tracking Ukraine’s accession.

The process would “take time”, Beaune said, adding that the first priority was to “stop the war”.

“Ukraine is fighting and defending our shared European values, it must at least be a candidate for EU,” President Zelensky said on Tuesday.

Russian energy giant Gazprom said on Tuesday it would reduce gas deliveries to the EU via the Nord Stream pipeline by 40 per cent, due to the delayed return of compressor units from German company Siemens.

Several European countries, including Germany, where the underwater pipeline makes land, are highly reliant on supplies of Russian gas for their energy needs.

The Kremlin meanwhile said it had not received a request from London to intervene in the case of two Britons sentenced to death by pro-Moscow separatist authorities in eastern Ukraine.

Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, along with Moroccan Brahim Saadun, were convicted of acting as mercenaries for Ukraine by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.

Russia also announced it was blacklisting 49 UK citizens, including defence officials and prominent journalists from the BBC, The Financial Times and The Guardian.

MADRID — Spain was grappling on Tuesday with a second unusually early heatwave in less than a month as temperatures hit levels normally seen in July and August, while France began preparing for similar conditions.

Temperatures passed 40ºC in large parts of Spain, significantly higher than normal for this time of year.

Officials advised people to drink plenty of fluids and stay indoors or in the shade as much as possible.

"This early, record-breaking heatwave, coming on top of another heatwave less than a month ago... is extraordinarily worrying," said Spain's minister for ecological transition, Teresa Ribera.

Temperatures were expected to hit 43ºC in Cordoba in the south, 41ºC in Badajoz in the west and 40ºC in Toledo in the centre, according to meteorological agency AEMET.

On Monday the highest temperature recorded was 42.9ºC in the southern town of Montoro, near Cordoba.

AEMET described the risk of wildfires as "extreme" across Spain except for the northern region of Asturias and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic.

The heatwave began at the weekend and is expected to persist until at least Saturday, with temperatures between 7ºC and 12ºC higher than the average for this time of the year, said AEMET.

"It is not normal to have such an extreme heatwave at this time of the year," AEMET spokesman Ruben del Campo said.

The extreme weather, which arrived on a wave of hot air from north Africa, is headed for southwest France.

National forecaster Meteo France has warned of peak temperatures of more than 40ºC in the south-west between Thursday and Saturday, with the whole country set to experience a hotter-than-usual spell.

French government spokesperson Olivia Gregoire called for vigilance, warning that the elderly, people living alone and the homeless were particularly at risk.

Spain grappled with a heatwave at the end of May, with temperatures up to 15ºC above the seasonal average.

Last month was Spain’s hottest May since the beginning of the century.

Heatwaves have become more likely due to climate change, scientists say, and are predicted to become more intense and widespread as global temperatures rise.

LONDON — Britain on Tuesday marks 40 years since Argentine forces surrendered after 74 days of conflict on the Falkland Islands, with many veterans still paying the physical and mental price of the gruelling South Atlantic war.

The Royal British Legion is to host a remembrance ceremony at the National Memorial Arboretum in central England for veterans, bereaved family members and civilian support staff.

The Act of Remembrance will include a live link to a similar event at the 1982 Cemetery in the Falklands’ capital, Port Stanley, from where Argentine forces capitulated on June 14, 1982.

Britain’s prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, announced the surrender to parliament on the same day, vindicating for many her high-risk decision to send nearly 30,000 troops half-way round the world to retake the islands.

The task force returned from the self-governing British overseas territory to a sea of Union Jacks, giving a declining Britain a patriotic boost — and ensuring Thatcher a landslide reelection in 1983.

Argentine forces invaded on April 2, beginning a war which claimed the lives of 255 British servicemen and three female civilians, along with 649 Argentinians.

Many of those killed on both sides were never given a proper burial.

Forty years on, the memories for military veterans are strong, as, too, is their conviction that the islands — nearly 13,000 kilometres from London — are British

In Britain and the Falklands, the anniversary of the start of the conflict on April 2 was muted. Islanders in particular see Argentina’s invasion as nothing to celebrate.

But a year-long series of events has been taking place to mark the 40th anniversary, including those on June 14 to mark Liberation Day — a public holiday on the islands.

British veterans of the conflict, the first since World War II to involve all branches of the armed forces, are grouped under the South Atlantic Medal Association.

Carol Betteridge, of veterans’ charity Help for Heroes, recalled that “for many of those who fought so far from home, the physical and mental wounds they received during the conflict affect them every day — not just on anniversaries”.

“The lack of proper support for mental health means that many Falklands veterans buried their issues and ‘soldiered on’ as they were expected to,” said Betteridge, the charity’s head of clinical and medical services.

“This is why, 40 years on, we still have Falklands veteran coming to us for help for psychological wounds that they have struggled with for so long.”

UK government support for the Falklands under Thatcher’s successors has been unwavering, despite Argentina’s steadfast territorial claims to what it calls Las Malvinas.

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump deluged aides with wild voter fraud conspiracy theories after losing the 2020 US election, his top law-enforcement official said in testimony revealed on Monday by a congressional probe which the ex-president branded a “mockery of justice”.

Appearing in a pre-recorded deposition at a congressional hearing into the 2021 assault on the US Capitol, former attorney general Bill Barr described his then-boss as having no interest in the facts that debunked his groundless narrative.

“I was demoralised because I thought, boy... he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr told the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection by supporters of Trump.

“When I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in the actual facts,” said Barr, who likened addressing Trump’s avalanche of false allegations with playing the game “whack-a-mole”.

The panel is holding six hearings throughout June to outline its case that the riot at the seat of US democracy in Washington was the culmination of a seven-step conspiracy by Trump and his inner circle to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden.

Trump ignored repeated warnings from top aides against falsely claiming the November 2020 election was stolen, according to testimony unveiled by the panel.

“We will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost the election — and knew he lost the election — and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy,” the committee’s Democratic Chairman Bennie Thompson said in his opening remarks.

Trump released his first extended reaction to the probe Monday evening, with a rambling 12-page statement in which he called the panel a “mockery of justice” and a “Kangaroo Court hoping to distract the American people from the great pain they are experiencing”.

The second of six planned hearings was shown videotaped accounts from the former president’s advisors, including Barr and campaign manager Bill Stepien, saying they repeatedly counseled him not to declare victory on election night because he hadn’t won — but that Trump went ahead anyway.

“He thought I was wrong, he told me so, and that they were going to go in a different direction,” Stepien said.

‘Far flung conspiracies’ 

Thompson’s deputy on the panel, Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, said Trump chose to listen to the advice of “apparently inebriated” former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani “to just claim he won, and insist that the vote counting stop — to falsely claim everything was fraudulent”.

Trump started pushing what came to be known as his “Big Lie” around 2:30am on November 4, 2020, prematurely declaring victory on the night of an election he ultimately lost to Biden by seven million votes.

Barr said in his testimony that Trump claimed major fraud “right out of the box on election night... before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence”.

Giuliani and associates including the lawyer Sidney Powell would go on to push debunked theories of massive voter fraud that put them at odds with the White House lawyers Stepien referred to as “Team Normal”.

Cheney highlighted “far-flung conspiracies” — dismissed as “nonsense” by Barr — of fraud involving voting machines “with a deceased Venezuelan Communist allegedly pulling the strings”.

Trump repeated a number of unfounded claims in his statement late Monday.

“Democrats created the narrative of January 6th to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen,” he said.

‘Big rip-off’ 

The committee says the initial claim of fraud grew quickly into a conspiracy to cling to power by Trump and his inner circle — and a fundraising campaign that raised $250 million between election night and the Capitol insurrection.

The committee’s senior investigative counsel Amanda Wick said much of the cash was funneled into a political action committee that made donations to pro-Trump organisations.

“As early as April 2020, Mr Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election would be as a result of fraud,” Democratic panel member Zoe Lofgren said.

“The big lie was also a big rip-off,” she said, promising to show how the Trump campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were falsely led to believe their donations would be used for the legal fight over fraud claims.

All but one of the 62 lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign were dismissed — the vast majority by Republican-appointed judges — while the one that was upheld didn’t affect the outcome.

Powell filed four federal lawsuits in staunchly Democratic cities that were all rejected as frivolous and, in Detroit, a judge ordered that she face sanctions for a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process”.

The panel ended the hearing by returning to the Capitol riot, showing footage of mob participants explaining how Trump’s voter fraud claims had motivated their actions.

“I know exactly what’s going on right now. Fake election,” one said.