World

LONDON — The British army will begin delivering petrol to fuel stations on Monday after fears over tanker driver shortages led to panic buying and forced the government to offer visa waivers to foreign truckers to plug the shortfall.

"Almost 200 military tanker personnel, 100 of which are drivers, will be deployed from Monday to provide temporary support as part of the government's wider action to further relieve pressure on petrol stations and address the shortage of HGV drivers," the government said in a news release issued Friday.

Motorists queued at fuel pumps across Britain at the beginning of the week, draining tanks and fraying tempers.

"Thanks to the immense efforts of industry over the past week, we are seeing continued signs that the situation at the pumps is slowly improving," said business minister Kwasi Kwarteng.

"It's important to stress there is no national shortage of fuel in the UK, and people should continue to buy fuel as normal. The sooner we return to our normal buying habits, the sooner we can return to normal," he added.

The government says a lack of tanker drivers to deliver fuel and unprecedented demand is behind the crisis.

Demand for fuel has stabilised throughout the week and stations are gradually stocking up again, but some parts of the country still face severe shortages.

The Petrol Retailers Association on Thursday said 27 per cent of stations had run dry, down from earlier in the week, but the same as on Wednesday.

“PRA members are reporting that whilst they are continuing to take further deliveries of fuel, this is running out quicker than usual due to unprecedented demand,” association chief Gordon Balmer said.

The military drivers were put on standby at the beginning of the week, and have since received specialised training.

“The government has taken decisive action to tackle the short term disruption to our supply chains, and in particular the flow of fuel to forecourts,” said Minister Steven Barclay.

“We are now seeing the impact of these interventions with more fuel being delivered to forecourts than sold and, if people continue to revert to their normal buying patterns, we will see smaller queues and prevent petrol stations closing,” he added.

The government has already made a U-turn on tighter post-Brexit immigration policy, offering short-term visa waivers to foreign truckers to help plug the shortfall.

Fuel operators, including Shell, BP and Esso, said there was “plenty of fuel at UK refineries” and expected demand to return to normal soon.

But following a week of queues, drivers in many parts of the country are still unable to get fuel, stoking concern about the effects on the wider economy.

Critics blame government inaction on tackling shortages of lorry drivers after Britain’s departure from the European Union in January and the pandemic, which saw many foreign truckers leave the country.

As well as fuel deliveries, the shortage has led to empty supermarket shelves and raised fears about deliveries of food and toys for Christmas.

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden vowed on Friday to get his sweeping domestic agenda over the line as he visited the US Congress to energise Democrats negotiating for a second day on twin make-or-break spending bills that could define his legacy — or spell crippling political failure.

“I’m telling you, we’re going to get this done,” he told reporters after meeting with House Democrats who are deeply divided on a spending spree that Biden says would restore America’s battered middle class.

“It doesn’t matter when. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in six minutes, six days or six weeks, we’re gonna get it done.”

The unusual presidential visit follows weeks of trips by party leaders in the other direction to the White House as Biden tries to get the two ambitious spending plans passed into law.

One would funnel $1.2 trillion into repairing infrastructure and the other would allocate even more for education, child care and promoting clean energy.

“These are his proposals. These are his bold ideas,” Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

“This is his plan that he’s outlined: To not just rebuild our roads, our railways and bridges, and put millions of people back to work, but also to make child care, elder care, [pre-school programmes] more cost effective, to address the climate crisis. And he wants to make the case directly to members.”

Biden’s political legacy is at stake and so probably are the Democrats’ chances of keeping control of Congress in midterm elections next year.

However, on Thursday, a game of chicken between moderate Democrats and more lef-twing members over the bills ended in stalemate.

Their razor-thin majority in Congress means that even a few defections could prevent votes from succeeding.

Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the fractious House Democrats, pulled a vote on infrastructure on Friday for the second night running as congressional leaders arbitrated disputes among the party’s centrist and left groupings.

Trust issue 

The impasse on the Democratic side is rooted in political differences over how much the government should spend, but also on the sheer lack of trust between competing factions.

On one side, moderate senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — popularly dubbed the “Manchinema” duo — refuse to back the proposed $3.5 trillion price tag for the social spending package.

They do, however, support something more modest, with Manchin proposing $1.5 trillion. They also have already voted in favour of the separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.

Over in the House, a younger, fiery generation of more left-wing representatives insists on keeping the $3.5 trillion number for social spending, or at least something close.

And to maintain negotiating leverage, they are refusing to back the popular infrastructure bill, saying this can only come once they know they have a “yes” from the Democratic-controlled Senate for the social spending deal.

“If there’s something else that’s short of a vote, that somebody can offer me that gives me those same assurances, I want to listen to that,” Pramila Jayapal, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters, in a hint that the left might be willing to compromise.

“But right now I’m still saying we need a vote.”

Psaki said the administration’s outreach to congressional Democrats and their staff had included at least 300 phone calls or meetings since September 1.

During the 2020 campaign Biden repeatedly touted his dealmaking chops — established during his four decades as a senator — but he has made the journey up to Capitol Hill only rarely as president.

His in-person visit was a welcome development to rank-and-file Democrats who have been voicing hope he would get more deeply involved.

On Friday Pelosi decided against trying again straight away for a vote on the infrastructure bill, amid assurances from the progressives that they would kill it.

She now has the option of putting everything on ice to buy time for crafting an overall agreement on the two bills.

There is no hard timeline for action on either bill, and Biden will not see the lack of progress as a defeat unless it starts dragging into the election year.

With a threatened government shutdown averted until December, the next urgent deadline is to raise the national debt limit ahead of the default date of October 18 — and there is still no plan on how to accomplish it.

Usually this is not a complicated issue. This year, though, Republicans are refusing to join Democrats in granting authorisation, while Democrats argue they should not have to bear responsibility alone.

The standoff leaves the United States close to the cliff edge of a default on its $28 trillion debt, with the lack of progress expected to soon start raising pulses in the financial markets.

STOCKHOLM -- Swedish police said on Thursday they were pursuing a suspect over an explosion that injured 16 people in the city of Gothenburg, but there did not seem to be a link to gang crime as first suspected.

Police said they had identified a suspect and an arrest warrant had been issued for the person believed to be behind the explosion that tore through an apartment building early Wednesday.

"Given what is now known in the investigation, we can also say that there is no connection to gang crime," regional police chief Klas Johansson told a press conference.

Sweden has suffered dozens of actual or attempted bombings linked to violent criminal gangs in recent years, and many were quick to speculate that the Wednesday blast followed the same pattern.

"Throughout we've worked from the assumption that someone deliberately placed something to cause a fire or a large amount of destruction, but we don't know what caused the explosion," police strategic commander Anders Borjesson told reporters.

Police said they were still looking for the suspect, which local media reported was a 55-year-old man.

Newspaper Aftonbladet reported that the man was described as a "disgruntled" and had made threats of other bombings.

Local newspaper Goteborgs Posten reported that police had surrounded a building on Thursday near where the blast occurred and that the suspect had been due to be evicted on the day of the blast.

On Wednesday, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg's largest, took in 16 people with injuries related to the blast and subsequent fire, four of them serious.

JARINJE, Kosovo - Serbia and Kosovo reached an agreement on Thursday to end a tense standoff at their border, EU envoy Miroslav Lajcak said.

The two neighbours were at loggerheads for more than 10 days after Kosovo banned vehicles with Serbian registration plates from entering its territory -- mirroring a years-long Serbian practice against vehicles travelling the other way.

After Kosovo dispatched special police units to oversee the ban's implementation, local Serbs rebelled and blocked the roads leading to the border. Serbia then responded by deploying armoured vehicles close to the frontier.

According to a European Union-brokered deal struck in Brussels, Kosovo agreed to remove the special police units on Saturday and the local Serbs agreed to dismantle the barricades at the same time.

"We have a deal! After two days of intense negotiations, an agreement on de-escalation and the way forward has just been reached," Lajcak said on Twitter.

NATO-led peacekeepers from the KFOR mission would also be deployed at the border for two weeks to maintain a "safe and secure environment".

Both sides also agreed to a provisional solution for the number plates -- using a never-implemented past agreement to put stickers over national symbols -- until a permanent compromise is reached in further talks.

'Scared of the weekend'

The latest outbreak of tension between Kosovo and Serbia -- the worst in a decade -- involves the sensitive issue of Kosovo's 120,000 Serb minority.

Most of the remaining Serbs refuse to pledge allegiance to the authorities in Pristina and remain loyal to Serbia.

These ties are particularly strong among the 40,000 Serbs in northern Kosovo, which Belgrade funds heavily.

The situation on the barricades is calm, an AFP correspondent saw, but local Serbs insist that they will only leave once the Kosovar special units go.

"It's good that the Kosovo special police will retreat, when they do, we will too," a 33-year-old Serb demonstrator who gave his name as Ivan told AFP.

"I hope there won't be incidents when we start to leave. I'm scared of the weekend, because I don't trust Kosovo special forces," a 51-year-old man who identified himself as Dragan added.

Some of the protesters told AFP that they were employed by institutions financed by Serbia, and that they were asked to change shifts manning the barricades.

"We have lists and they told us that we should come ... If I didn't come, I don't know what would happen", a woman that wanted to remain anonymous told AFP on the roadblocks.

"I expect -- that if I listen -- they will find a job for my son somewhere," she added.

Both sides claim victory

Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic called the deal "a great victory", adding that he expects a permanent arrangement to be reached within the next six months.

"We have secured the free flow of people and goods, kept the peace and stability", Vucic told reporters.

Newly-elected Kosovar prime minister Albin Kurti -- whose policy is to build relations with Serbia on grounds of reciprocity -- also claims Kosovo got the deal they desired.

"Reciprocity of vehicle license plates is established", Kurti wrote on Facebook.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen -- who was visiting Serbia when the deal was struck -- welcomed the compromise, labelling it a "positive development".

"It's good for the whole region. The dialogue now needs to continue," von der Leyen tweeted.

Gabriel Escobar, US envoy for the region, also applauded the deal but underlined that there is "still an awful lot on the agenda" between two sides that needs adressing.

The late 1990s war between independence-seeking ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Serbian forces claimed 13,000 lives, mainly Kosovo Albanians.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and has since been formally recognised by roughly 100 countries, but not by Belgrade and its powerful allies China and Russia.

The EU has been mediating the talks on resolving one of Europe's most intractable territorial disputes for a decade, but the dialogue has so far failed to achieve normalisation of their ties.

BERLIN — Olaf Scholz's hopes of forming Germany's next coalition government were given a boost Wednesday with congratulations from outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel and his main rival after his weekend election win.

Merkel's CDU-CSU conservative bloc slumped to its worst ever result in Sunday's general election with 24.1 per cent of the vote, behind Scholz's centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) at 25.7 per cent.

The poll drubbing has left the conservatives in chaos, with senior figures distancing themselves from CDU leader Armin Laschet, who campaigned to replace Merkel and has insisted on trying to build a coalition despite coming second.

Merkel, who is bowing out after 16 years at the helm of Europe’s top economy, had stayed out of the fray but broke her silence in a statement to reveal that she had congratulated Scholz “on his election success” on Monday.

Scholz is the finance minister and vice-chancellor in Merkel’s right-left coalition government.

Laschet had come under fire in recent days for failing to publicly congratulate his opponent as Germany eyes the prospect of weeks, if not months of coalition wrangling likely to dim its engagement on the international scene.

But Scholz did in fact receive a letter of congratulations from Laschet on Wednesday, party sources in the SPD and CDU-CSU told AFP.

The SPD was also buoyed by a selfie posted on Instagram late Tuesday that showed four leading members of the Greens and the pro-business FDP Party smiling after their first — and secret — preliminary talks eyeing up a possible coalition.

‘Bridges’ 

The parties, which came third and fourth in the election, have emerged as the joint kingmakers of the first post-Merkel government, either under the SPD or the conservatives.

With the Social Democrats and the conservatives ruling out a repeat of their unhappy “grand coalition”, each would need to team up with the two smaller parties to achieve a parliamentary majority.

But the centre-left Greens and the liberal FDP are historically wary of each other, diverging on key issues like tax hikes, climate protection and public spending.

The Greens have signalled they are most comfortable governing with the SPD, while the FDP has been the junior coalition partner in a conservative-led government before.

The caption to the selfie, which went viral, said the Greens and the FDP “were exploring common ground and bridges over divisions. And even finding some”.

Both parties are eager to avoid a re-run of the 2017 election fallout, when the FDP dramatically walked out of talks to cobble together a coalition with the Greens and the conservatives, citing irreconcilable differences.

Laschet lifeline 

The kingmaker parties plan to meet again in a more formal setting on Friday.

SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Muetzenich said his party “is ready anytime for talks about a future coalition of progress”, adding that “many people in Germany” want Scholz to become the next chancellor.

Scholz himself has tweeted that he is “optimistic” about an alliance with the Greens and the FDP, which has been dubbed a “traffic light” coalition after the parties’ colours.

A conservative-Green-FDP alliance has been nicknamed “Jamaica” because their colours match those of that country’s flag.

Greens co-leader Annalena Baerbock said the first meeting with the SPD would take place on Sunday.

“We have a clear mandate for renewal in our country,” she told reporters when asked whether the Greens would consider partnering with the conservatives as well.

The FDP, however, threw beleaguered Laschet a lifeline, with general secretary Volker Wissing announcing that his party plans to hold talks with the CDU-CSU on Saturday, a day before meeting with the SPD.

Wissing said it was “too soon” to say which constellation would eventually emerge.

Policy positions and “the willingness to work together” would be decisive, he added.

Gaffe-prone Laschet is deeply unpopular in Germany and a recent survey found that 71 per cent of Germans thought it was wrong for him to try to claim the chancellery.

Merkel will stay on in a caretaker capacity throughout the coalition wrangling.

MOSCOW — Russia on Wednesday threatened to block YouTube and take other retaliatory measures, after the US video-sharing platform blocked the German-language channels of state broadcaster RT.

Moscow has recently been ramping up pressure on foreign tech giants as it seeks greater control over content available online to its domestic audience.

At the same time, it has launched a series of efforts to broaden its influence abroad, especially with RT — formerly known as Russia Today — which operates broadcasters and websites in multiple languages.

YouTube on Tuesday told German media that it had issued a warning to RT for violating its coronavirus disinformation guidelines and then shuttered two channels for breaching user terms.

On Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry accused YouTube of an “unprecedented act of media aggression” which it said was likely aided by German authorities — a claim Berlin denied.

The Russian ministry said the adoption of retaliatory measures against German media “seems not only appropriate but also necessary”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, responded by saying the German government had “nothing to do with” YouTube’s move and warned Moscow against potential retaliation against German media in Russia.

YouTube ‘censorship’

Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor for its part threatened to restrict access to YouTube in Russia, accusing the company of “censorship”.

Roskomnadzor said it had sent a letter to YouTube’s owner Google “demanding that all restrictions be lifted” from the two channels — RT DE and Der Fehlende Part — “as soon as possible”.

The regulator said YouTube could be issued with a warning and “the law provides for measures of full or partial restriction of access” if such warnings are ignored.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later accused YouTube of “censorship” and said Russian laws had been “grossly violated”.

“There must be zero tolerance for such violations,” he said.

“This of course is not the case,” she said in a video on RT’s Russian Telegram channel.

On Tuesday, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said on Twitter that Germany had declared a “media war” on Russia.

She called on Moscow to ban Deutsche Welle and other German media working in the country — “without delay”.

The Kremlin has repeatedly accused foreign-owned social media of interfering in Russian politics, including by hosting content supportive of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Ahead of parliamentary elections this month, Roskomnadzor blocked dozens of websites linked to Navalny, whose organisations were banned in Russia under “extremism” legislation.

Google fined 

Courts have punished non-compliant platforms, including Twitter, Google and Facebook, with a series of fines and in March started reducing the speed of Twitter’s services.

On Wednesday, a Moscow district court slapped Google with two more fines totalling 6.5 million rubles ($89,000) for failing to remove banned content.

Google has already been hit with several fines for the same charges. It has also been penalised for breaching a controversial law passed in 2014 that requires the personal data of Russian users to be stored inside the country.

Launched in 2005 as “Russia Today”, state-funded RT has expanded with broadcasters and websites in languages including English, French, Spanish and Arabic.

It has generated controversy in many countries, including the United States, where it was required to register as a “foreign agent”, and in Britain, where authorities have threatened to revoke its broadcasting licence.

The channel has been banned in several countries, including the ex-Soviet republics of Lithuania and Latvia.

RT offers videos online in German, but has been unable so far to obtain a license to broadcast in Germany using terrestrial or satellite signals.

Luxembourg last month refused to grant a licence for RT to broadcast a German-language channel from the country because its operations were largely based in Germany.

BRIGHTON, United Kingdom — Ridiculing both his own party’s left-wing and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, British Labour leader Keir Starmer vowed on Wednesday to “clear up this mess” of Conservative government in his first in-person conference speech.

In the highly personalised address to Labour’s rank-and-file, the former prosecutor sought to shed his reputation for lawyerly caution and build a case for Britain to take his party seriously again after its worst election loss since 1935.

In one impromptu moment as left-wing supporters of former leader Jeremy Corbyn tried to drown him out, Starmer demanded to know if they were more interested in “shouting slogans, or changing lives?”

The riposte drew one of the many standing ovations that punctuated the 90-minute speech from the vast majority of Labour members gathered in a cavernous hall on the English south coast.

The coronavirus pandemic forced both Labour and Johnson’s Conservatives to hold their conferences in virtual format last year, but it has hurt Starmer the most politically, depriving him of a public platform at a time of national crisis.

But rather than attacking the government’s handling of a fuel supply crisis paralysing large parts of the UK economy, Labour has spent much of its five-day conference mired in internal battles.

Starmer bid to rectify that, mocking Johnson’s signature post-Brexit policy of “levelling up” unequal growth across Britain.

“Level up? You can’t even fill up,” the Labour leader said.

“We have a fuel crisis, a pay crisis, a goods crisis, and a cost of living crisis, all at the same time.

“Either get a grip, or get out of the way, let us step up and clear up this mess,” he said, outlining new pledges on climate change, mental health, education, health, and taxation.

PM is ‘trivial’ 

Starmer said Britain had been left “isolated and irrelevant” on the world stage under Johnson, who trounced Labour under Corbyn in 2019 with a vow to “get Brexit done”.

“It’s easy to comfort yourself that your opponents are bad people,” said Starmer, who replaced Corbyn in April 2020 — a fortnight into Britain’s first pandemic lockdown.

“But I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man. I think he is a trivial man. I think he’s a showman with nothing left to show. I think he’s a trickster who has performed his one trick.

“Once he had said the words ‘get Brexit done’, his plan ran out. There is no plan.”

Starmer served up a highly personalised account of his journey into politics, talking about his upbringing by his tool-maker father and nurse mother who suffered a debilitating illness later in life.

He noted he was the first of his family to go to university, at Leeds in northern England, but one current student there found nothing to admire in Starmer’s address.

“One speech won’t change anything. We need unity. We need to consistently hammer the Tories,” George Aylett, a 25-year-old doctorate student in politics at Leeds, told AFP at the conference.

Demanding the suspended Corbyn’s restoration to Labour’s ranks of MPs, Aylett said Starmer had “broken all his promises to unify the party”.

“We need a fresh leadership election.”

But Julie Cattell, 65, a town planner from Brighton and Labour member since 1987, called the speech “electrifying” after the “horrible” Corbyn era.

“He spoke from the heart, from his own life experience, from his family roots,” she said.

“I think this whole conference was a turning point. It’s lovely to be standing proud as a Labour member again.”

‘Never again’ 

Even if the fuel crisis has damaged Johnson in the polls, surveys also show that Britons remained ambivalent about Labour under Starmer, and it remains to be seen if the speech alters that.

Johnson hosts his own party conference in the northern city of Manchester in early October, bidding to build on historic Conservative advances deep into Labour “Red Wall” territory.

Starmer’s team has taken heart from the weekend election win of Labour’s SPD sister party in Germany, but a high-profile resignation from his frontbench team upset the show of unity in Brighton.

Nevertheless, Starmer has strived to bury the recent Corbyn past, ramming through rule changes that will make it harder for Labour to elect such a radical leader again.

He vowed: “The voters that thought we were unpatriotic or irresponsible, or that we looked down on them, I say these simple but powerful words: we will never under my leadership go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government.”

MOSCOW — Russia on Tuesday recorded its highest daily coronavirus death toll yet, following an increase in cases linked to the Delta variant and a lacklustre vaccination drive.

A government tally reported 852 fatalities over the past 24 hours, a record in Russia since the start of the pandemic.

The new figure brings the country's total deaths from COVID-19 to 205,531, the highest in Europe.

Authorities have been accused of downplaying the severity of the outbreak.

Under a broader definition for deaths linked to the coronavirus, statistics agency Rosstat reported in late August that Russia had seen more than 350,000 fatalities.

Russia, the world's fifth worst-hit country with more than seven million infections, has seen cases climb since last month as vaccinations stall.

Moscow, the epicentre of Russia's outbreak, has experienced a spike over the past week, with authorities warning of rising hospital admissions.

Deputy mayor Anastasia Rakova has said that the highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for all of the cases in the Russian capital.

Authorities face a vaccine-sceptic population, with polls showing that a majority of Russians do not plan to get jabbed.

In Moscow, 52-year-old Olga Samarina said she did not plan to get jabbed as she had never had COVID.

"Why get vaccinated against a disease that doesn't bother me," she told AFP.

The Kremlin initially set a goal of fully inoculating 60 per cent of Russia's population by September, but later dropped that target although free jabs have been available since early December.

As of Tuesday, only 28 per cent of the population had been fully vaccinated, according to the Gogov website, which tallies COVID data from the regions.

President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that he was self-isolating after dozens of cases were detected in his inner circle.