The ongoing conflict in Yemen has reshaped migration patterns across the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, creating interconnected stories of displacement, welcome, and unexpected cross-community solidarity that stretch across national borders. For nearly a decade, Yemen’s neighboring Djibouti has stood out as a rare accessible safe haven for Yemenis fleeing violence and economic collapse, offering a stark contrast to wealthy Gulf nations that remain largely closed off to most Yemeni refugees due to prohibitive visa costs and strict entry requirements.
作者： admin
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Judge dismisses Trump lawsuit against Iowa newspaper and pollster over 2024 race
A judge in Iowa has thrown out a high-profile lawsuit brought by former President and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump against The Des Moines Register and its longtime former pollster J. Ann Selzer, centered on a pre-election poll that showed Trump trailing current Vice President Kamala Harris in the critical early nominating state of Iowa ahead of the 2024 general election.
In a detailed 64-page ruling, Judge Scott Beattie found that the published poll fell squarely under the protection of free speech guarantees in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The dismissal rejects Trump’s core argument that Selzer had engaged in deliberate election interference through an inaccurate prediction, which Trump claimed amounted to actionable fraud.
Trump filed the suit after he ultimately won Iowa by a comfortable 14-point margin in the 2024 election. He was joined as co-plaintiff by two Iowa Republican officials: U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks and former Iowa state Senator Brad Zaun. The campaign had framed the poll as a deliberate scam designed to undermine Trump’s lead in the closing days of the race.
In the ruling, Judge Beattie emphasized that Trump’s legal attempt sought to distort both Iowa statutory law and common law to penalize speech that receives the highest level of constitutional protection. “Allowing a legally faulty claim like this to go forward carries a cost that an ordinary case does not, because defending it can discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs,” Beattie wrote.
Following the ruling, a spokesperson for Trump reaffirmed the former president’s commitment to holding accountable what he frames as purveyors of deception and fake news. The BBC has reached out to Trump’s legal team for additional comment on the dismissal, but has not yet received a response.
Selzer, whose polling has long been a staple of Iowa political reporting, has a mixed track record of predictions that spans decades. She successfully called major outcomes including Barack Obama’s landslide victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and the 2014 Iowa U.S. Senate election. However, she also famously missed the mark in 2004, when her poll predicted John Kerry would defeat George W. Bush in the state.
In a post-ruling statement, Selzer pushed back against framing polling as a precise predictive science, noting that “polling is a social science, not clairvoyance.” She added, “What we can guarantee is that we will follow the data wherever it leads, even when the results are uncomfortable or unexpected.” Selzer expressed gratitude that the judge’s ruling reaffirmed the fundamental right of pollsters to collect and publish data without political interference.
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Trump anticipated Xi’s visit for months
For months ahead of the scheduled meeting, former U.S. President Donald Trump had been looking forward to and making careful preparations for the official visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to the United States, according to on-the-ground reporting from the BBC. BBC correspondent Sarah Smith, stationed at the White House during the lead-up to the high-stakes diplomatic engagement, has been sharing detailed insights into the extensive pre-visit planning process unfolding within the Trump administration ahead of Xi’s arrival.
Diplomatic visits between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies carry enormous global significance, and the months-long period of anticipation underscores the weight that the Trump White House placed on this pivotal bilateral engagement. Senior administration officials had been working through logistics, agenda items, and protocol arrangements for weeks ahead of the visit, with Smith’s reporting from the heart of U.S. executive power offering the public a window into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into organizing a head-of-state meeting of this magnitude.
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White House ‘repeatedly violated’ court order to restore press access, say media outlets
A high-stakes clash over press freedom has erupted at the White House, as three major U.S. media outlets filed an emergency motion for a court hearing Thursday, claiming the Trump administration has flagrantly disregarded a federal judge’s ruling to restore press access for their journalists. The standoff, unfolding just hours before President Donald Trump was set to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping for a high-profile state visit at the White House, threatens to cast a shadow over the diplomatic event and has reignited fierce debates about the administration’s commitment to First Amendment protections.
In the early hours of Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued a ruling that temporarily struck down the Trump administration’s ban on the three outlets, finding the exclusion likely violated the outlets’ constitutional rights to due process. Yet despite the court order, multiple reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW were turned away from the White House complex when they arrived for work Thursday morning. Several had their official press credentials confiscated by security personnel, even as a small number of other staff from the same outlets were granted entry.
Among those barred was Betsy Klein, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, though a CNN producer was allowed to enter the premises. Politico confirmed one of its White House reporters was denied entry and had his press pass seized, while MS NOW reported that both its White House reporter Laura Barrón-López and one on-staff producer were blocked and had their credentials taken. Only a second MS NOW producer was permitted to enter the building.
The original ban on the outlets was first instituted by Trump, who justified the move by criticizing the organizations’ coverage as “fake news.” The White House later walked back that explanation, shifting to cite unspecified national security concerns as the reasoning for the exclusion. As of Thursday midday, it remains unclear whether the denial of access stemmed from administrative delays in implementing the judge’s order, or was a deliberate refusal by the White House to comply with the ruling.
The White House has not issued any public comment on the court ruling or Thursday’s access denials, and legal representatives for the president have not ruled out additional legal action to defend the ban. The disruption is expected to affect live television coverage of Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping, a key diplomatic event that was already scheduled to draw heavy international media attention.
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105-year-old investigated for crimes at Nazi PoW camp in Germany
Eighty years after the end of World War II, German law enforcement continues to pursue accountability for Nazi-era atrocities, with a new investigation targeting a 105-year-old man accused of serving as an accessory to mass murder at one of the Third Reich’s largest prisoner of war camps.
The suspect is alleged to have worked as a guard at Stalag 326 VI K, located in Senne in northwestern Germany, Dortmund chief public prosecutor Sonja Frodermann confirmed in an official statement. Frodermann added that a parallel investigation into a second former guard at the same camp has been closed, after the 99-year-old suspect died several months ago. No identifying details about either suspect have been released to the public, a common practice in ongoing German investigations into historical Nazi crimes.
Stalag 326 stands as one of the most brutal and high-capacity POW camps operated by Nazi Germany. Between 1941 and 1945, roughly one in every three Soviet Red Army soldiers captured by German forces passed through the Senne camp complex, according to records from the site’s official memorial. Most prisoners were forced into hard labor for local German industries, while facing catastrophic living conditions characterized by systematic neglect, violent abuse, and widespread starvation. In total, the camp held between 180,000 and 200,000 Soviet POWs, and tens of thousands of those captives died from mistreatment. Today, 30,000 Russian POWs remain buried in mass graves at the camp site. Along with Soviet prisoners, the camp also held captured service members from France, Poland, Serbia and Belgium. When Allied forces liberated the camp in 1945, just over 9,000 Russian prisoners were still alive.
This latest investigation underscores the growing logistical and demographic challenges facing German prosecutors as they pursue remaining Nazi war crime suspects nearly eight decades after the end of the war. The vast majority of people who participated in Nazi atrocities are already deceased, and the few remaining suspects are extremely elderly.
Germany has eliminated any statute of limitations for murder and accessory to murder stemming from Nazi crimes since 1979, allowing investigations to proceed regardless of how much time has passed. This new probe of the 105-year-old Senne guard is not the only active case: another centenarian former guard at the nearby Hemer Stalag VI A camp is also currently under investigation.
Recent high-profile efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice have illustrated the hurdles of these late-stage investigations. In 2021, a 101-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Josef Schütz, was convicted of complicity in mass murder and sentenced to five years in prison. Schütz, the oldest person ever convicted of Nazi war crimes, died in 2023 while appealing his conviction, before he could begin serving his sentence. In 2022, a 97-year-old former secretary for a Nazi concentration camp commander was convicted of abetting murder and given a suspended sentence; she also died in 2023 at the age of 99 before the case could be finalized.
In Germany, investigations into Nazi war crimes follow a structured process: all potential cases are first reviewed and prepared by the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, based in the southwestern city of Ludwigsburg, before being handed over to local public prosecutors for formal prosecution, in this case Dortmund’s office. As surviving perpetrators age and pass away, these ongoing investigations reflect Germany’s sustained commitment to confronting its historical atrocities, even as the window to secure convictions closes.
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Tigray capital ‘out of cash’ as fighting escalates, resident tells BBC
Escalating hostilities in Ethiopia’s Tigray region have pushed the regional capital Mekelle into a severe cash crisis, a local resident has told the BBC, painting a complex picture of stalled daily life under renewed conflict. While the city itself has not seen active frontline combat in the immediate period following the latest outbreak of fighting, widespread anxiety and uncertainty have gripped the population, the insider source confirms.
The acute cash shortage has left residents unable to access basic necessities, with local businesses struggling to operate and ATMs running dry after weeks of disrupted financial flows linked to the conflict. Though street-level calm currently holds in Mekelle, the underlying tension is palpable: ordinary people are bracing for further escalation, navigating the double stress of economic collapse and the ever-present threat of expanding violence. The renewed outbreak of hostilities in Tigray has derailed fragile peace efforts that had been building over recent months, leaving regional and international observers scrambling to urge both sides to return to negotiations before the crisis deepens into a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe.
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How US blindly ceded its rare earth dominance to China
From the smartphone in your pocket to the car you drive, and from cutting-edge military aircraft to transoceanic communications cables, 17 chemically similar metals collectively labeled rare earth elements power nearly every corner of modern life. Coined in 1794, the term “rare earths” is actually a misnomer: for example, cerium, one of the most widely used members of the group, is just as abundant in the Earth’s crust as copper. What makes these metals rare and strategically critical is not their presence in the ground, but the extraordinary difficulty of separating them from raw ore and refining them into usable materials. This processing challenge has turned control of rare earth supply chains into a major source of geopolitical power, and today, that power is concentrated largely in China.
As a former war game adjudicator for the U.S. Navy, I have seen firsthand how hidden structural constraints can derail even the most carefully crafted strategic plans. Rare earth processing is one such underrecognized constraint that shapes the entire U.S.-China geopolitical relationship. Even critical U.S. military assets, from F-35 fighter jets to Virginia-class submarines, depend on rare earths processed in China. In 2025, China demonstrated the weight of this influence when it implemented sweeping new rare earth export controls, before agreeing to suspend the majority of these measures until November 10, 2026. This temporary suspension itself has become a powerful bargaining chip: the ability to extend the pause or allow restrictions to snap back into effect gives Beijing substantial diplomatic leverage, fitting Theodore Roosevelt’s famous description of geopolitical strategy as “speaking softly and carrying a big stick.”
### How China claimed global rare earth dominance
It was not inevitable that China would come to control the global rare earth market. As recently as the late 1980s, the U.S. led global production out of California’s Mountain Pass mine. But repeated incidents of radioactive wastewater leaking from the mine’s facilities into the Mojave Desert created regulatory and public pressure that made sustained domestic production difficult. When China expanded its own rare earth mining operations and began selling processed materials at lower prices, shifting suppliers became an economically straightforward choice for international buyers. Mountain Pass’s separation plant shut down in 1998, and mining operations ceased entirely in 2002.
While MP Materials restarted mining at Mountain Pass in 2017, amid growing U.S. concerns over rare earth supply security, the U.S. still imported more than two-thirds of its rare earth elements as of 2025. Current data underscores the scale of China’s dominance: in 2024, China mined 60% of the rare earth elements used in global magnet production, and handled 91% of all global rare earth separation and refining. For decades, international buyers accepted this arrangement: Chinese processed rare earths cost less than building domestic capacity, and buyers avoided the environmental costs and public backlash that come with refining. But in exchange for lower short-term costs, they ceded critical strategic leverage to Beijing – a dynamic that was less concerning when China was still seen as a rising, largely cooperative economic power.
### Why the U.S. domestic supply chain rebuild is moving slowly
The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated back in 2010 that rebuilding a full end-to-end domestic rare earth supply chain, from mining to separation to finished magnet manufacturing, could take up to 15 years, and progress has been even slower than projected for three core reasons.
First, China has built its industry over decades with a workforce of thousands of specialized, experienced engineers, while the U.S. retains a tiny fraction of that expertise. All modern cutting-edge industrial rare earth processing technology was developed in China, and Beijing banned exports of this separation technology in December 2023, cutting off a key path for U.S. capacity building. Second, while the U.S. holds substantial domestic rare earth deposits, permitting and developing new mining projects remains a slow, fraught process. Third, despite billions in federal investment, supply chain rebuilding faces persistent headwinds from Chinese export restrictions.
To date, the U.S. government has committed more than $7 billion since April 2025 to rebuilding domestic rare earth production capacity. In 2025, the Pentagon purchased $400 million in preferred stock from MP Materials, giving the U.S. government a 15% ownership stake in the company. MP Materials currently projects that its new commercial magnet plant will not begin equipment testing until 2028. In 2026, the U.S. Commerce Department signed a letter of intent to provide rare earth magnet maker USA Rare Earth with $277 million in direct funding and a $1.3 billion loan to develop new facilities in Texas and Oklahoma. Even with this support, however, Chinese trade barriers continue to slow progress.
### The November 10, 2026 expiration deadline
In October 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced six broad export control measures for rare earths. One of the most far-reaching, Announcement No. 61, requires even third-country factories in Germany or Japan to obtain a Chinese export license to ship products that contain 0.1% or more Chinese-origin rare earths, or that were manufactured using Chinese rare earth processing technology.
Shortly after the announcement, then-President Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and Beijing agreed to suspend the six main export control measures until November 10, 2026. In exchange, Washington paused its controversial “affiliates rule,” which imposes restrictions on companies majority-owned by blacklisted Chinese firms, for a one-year period. Both sets of restrictions will automatically snap back into effect on November 10 unless both governments agree to extend the temporary truce.
It is important to note that not all Chinese export restrictions were suspended. Licensing requirements for exports of seven heavier rare earth elements, implemented in April 2025, remain in full force. The impact of these controls on U.S. industry was already visible in 2025, when automaker Ford was forced to idle its Chicago assembly plant for a full week due to a shortage of rare earth magnets critical for vehicle speakers and electric motors. Ford CEO Jim Farley later described the company’s rare earth supply as “day to day,” noting the firm had no alternative domestic source, and production only resumed after Beijing granted a special export approval.
In June 2026, Beijing expanded restrictions further by adding 10 U.S. companies to its export control list, banning both Chinese and foreign firms from selling any dual-use (civilian and military) goods to the targeted firms. Notably, two of the blacklisted companies are MP Materials and USA Rare Earth – the two federally backed U.S. firms that have made the farthest progress in building a full domestic mine-to-magnet supply chain. Beijing framed the move as a reciprocal response to a similar blacklisting action by the U.S. Pentagon, but a clear strategic logic is at play: targeting the two leading U.S. rare earth developers slows America’s efforts to reduce dependence on Chinese processing.
If the truce is extended on November 10, the temporary pause on the six main export controls will remain in place, but the heavy rare earth licensing requirements and the June 2026 blacklisting of U.S. rare earth firms will stay in effect. This truce allows both sides to maintain a facade of cooperation, but it does not resolve the underlying strategic competition.
### Three possible paths forward for the U.S.
The U.S. currently faces three clear strategic options for managing its rare earth dependency, each with distinct tradeoffs:
First, the U.S. could choose to leave the majority of rare earth processing in Chinese hands. This is the fastest and lowest-cost option in the short term, but it leaves the U.S. permanently exposed to sudden supply disruptions and ongoing Chinese geopolitical leverage across a wide range of diplomatic and military issues.
Second, the U.S. could accelerate efforts to rebuild a full end-to-end domestic rare earth supply chain. This would eliminate most U.S. dependence on Chinese processing and the associated geopolitical leverage, but it will take more time to complete, require billions more in upfront investment, and force the U.S. to confront the environmental challenges of rare earth refining, which produces acidic and sometimes radioactive processing residues.
Third, the U.S. could build a collaborative allied supply chain with partner nations such as Australia and Japan, both of which have already begun developing their own rare earth processing capacity. This approach would reduce the risk of unilateral Chinese supply cuts, and Japan has already seen limited success with this model. However, it remains vulnerable to China’s existing rules that restrict the use of Chinese rare earth technology in third countries.
The outcome of the upcoming meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Trump on September 24, 2026, will likely shape whether the temporary export control pause is extended past November 10. But regardless of the short-term outcome, the broader strategic competition over rare earth supply chain dominance – and the geopolitical leverage that comes with it – will continue for the foreseeable future.
This article is based on analysis by Charles Edward Gehrke, Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Ethiopia’s army says it has repelled attacks in first comment on fresh fighting
After two years of a fragile, AU-brokered ceasefire, deadly hostilities have erupted once again across northern Ethiopia, bringing the country to the brink of a resumption of its devastating 2020–2022 civil war. Spiking tensions between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling party in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, boiled over into open combat on Wednesday, with both sides moving quickly to secure strategic territory.
In its first official public statement since fighting began, the Ethiopian National Army announced that it had successfully fended off coordinated assaults from TPLF fighters and their recently formed armed coalition in multiple northern border zones. According to the military’s account, the initial outbreak of hostilities occurred in the Amhara region, along its shared border with Tigray. The military claimed its forces inflicted heavy losses on TPLF combatants and seized a large stockpile of weapons from the attacking group.
Independent verification of the army’s claims remains impossible, as international media including the BBC are barred from entering Tigray and surrounding conflict zones, and the TPLF has not issued any formal response to the military’s statement. Unconfirmed reports from local and humanitarian sources, however, indicate TPLF forces have launched simultaneous offensives into both the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions.
A senior humanitarian source based in Afar told Agence France-Presse Thursday that TPLF fighters have launched intensive artillery barrages targeting the border town of Yallo, as they push to seize full control of the settlement. Speaking to AFP, TPLF vice-president Amanuel Assefa confirmed the collapse of the 2022 peace agreement, stating bluntly: “We are in the situation of full-blown war now.”
The latest escalation caps months of gradual deterioration in relations between the two sides, with both the federal government and Tigrayan authorities repeatedly accusing one another of violating the terms of the African Union-negotiated truce that ended the original 2020–2022 conflict. That war was one of the deadliest of the 21st century: the AU’s lead mediator estimated that roughly 600,000 people died from violence, famine, and lack of access to medical care, as the conflict pushed Tigray to the edge of a catastrophic humanitarian collapse. Just days before the current outbreak of fighting, the TPLF announced a new military alliance with six other armed opposition groups, with the explicit goal of ousting Abiy Ahmed’s federal government.
Since Wednesday, TPLF forces have seized control of three regional airports from federal police forces, including the main airport serving Mekelle, Tigray’s largest capital city. Following the seizure of aviation infrastructure, Ethiopian Airlines has suspended all commercial flights to the region. Multiple residents of Mekelle confirmed to the BBC that TPLF fighters are now visibly deployed across the city’s streets, though direct armed clashes have not yet broken out in the urban center.
Unlike the 2020–2022 war, which saw intense house-to-house fighting in Mekelle, all active combat is currently concentrated in outlying border areas. A Mekelle resident, who asked to be identified only as Fitsum to protect his safety, told the BBC’s *Newsday* program Thursday that the city remains outwardly calm, despite widespread fear among the population. “Mekelle is calm, except the stress from the people,” Fitsum said. He added that the city’s most pressing crisis is already economic, rooted in months of federal budget cuts that have left public sector workers unpaid and drained physical cash from local financial institutions.
“People are in a mood where they are distressed because it’s been so difficult, so tough. The last seven or eight months the government has been denying budgets to the civil servants and all the banks were running out of cash,” Fitsum explained. While residents have relied on mobile banking to access funds in recent months, widespread fears that communications infrastructure will be cut off amid the new fighting have left the population extremely vulnerable. “People are going to be in grave danger because there is almost no cash,” he added. Since fighting broke out, residents have largely stayed indoors and limited non-essential travel, leaving the city unusually quiet. “It’s like a curfew has been placed,” Fitsum said.
Recent drone strikes targeting locations inside Tigray in the days preceding the TPLF’s offensive have further stoked panic across the region, leaving global observers scrambling to de-escalate tensions before the conflict expands across the Horn of Africa.
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Venezuela‘s interim president promises election after Maduro ousted
Developments at the 2026 United Nations General Assembly have thrust Venezuela’s shifting political landscape into the global spotlight, just nine months after a controversial U.S. military raid on Caracas that ousted long-time ruler Nicolás Maduro and left approximately 100 civilians dead. Maduro is now detained in New York, where he faces federal drug trafficking charges brought by U.S. authorities.
Days after Maduro’s removal from power, his former vice president and close ally Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president, with immediate backing from the Trump administration despite her deep history with the ousted regime. Addressing the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Rodríguez announced that the country would move toward a transition to full democratic rule through national elections — but notably declined to name any tentative or fixed timeline for the vote.
In her remarks, Rodríguez did not make a single reference to the jailed former president Maduro. Instead, she focused on building new ties with Washington, extending public gratitude to U.S. President Donald Trump for opening the door to diplomatic cooperation. She claimed that her interim government and the Trump administration are engaged in serious dialogue to resolve long-standing disagreements, and are laying groundwork for expanded energy collaboration, cross-border security cooperation, a joint campaign against transnational organized crime, and mutual economic growth that would benefit both nations and the broader South American continent.
Trump, who spoke shortly after Rodríguez at the assembly, took a far more direct approach to Maduro, repeatedly labeling the former leader an “outlaw dictator” and “real criminal.” The U.S. president used his address to celebrate a newly struck energy deal with Rodríguez’s government, which he described as the largest oil contract in history, granting U.S. firms access to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude oil. In remarks that drew swift criticism from global observers, Trump declared “To the victor belong the spoils,” and added that the U.S. would not hesitate to deploy its “unmatched military might” to defend what it calls vital national interests in the region. Notably, Trump did not mention Venezuela’s promised transition to elections in his UN speech — and earlier this month, he told the Los Angeles Times that he does not believe Venezuela is yet prepared to hold free votes.
Rodríguez’s failure to set an election date has drawn sharp condemnation from Venezuelan opposition groups, who argue that the interim administration is delaying democratic transition to hold onto power. A brief sideline meeting between Trump and Rodríguez on the UN’s margins touched on election planning, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who attended the talks. Rubio urged opposition leaders to show patience, arguing that a full political transition and institutional rebuilding must take place before free and fair elections can be held. “What we don’t want to see is that someone is elected, and they inherit a complete catastrophe, economic and social,” Rubio explained, pointing to ongoing negotiations between Rodríguez’s government and a faction of the opposition as evidence of incremental progress.
Critics of those talks, however, highlight a glaring exclusion: Venezuela’s most high-profile opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has been locked out of the negotiations entirely. Machado left Venezuela in December 2025 to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, and has been barred from reentering the country ever since. One of her senior advisors confirmed that she made three separate attempts to return to Venezuela this week, all of which were blocked by interim government authorities. The ban on her reentry extends to a long-standing restriction, first imposed under Maduro, that bars Machado from running for public office. Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello has previously warned that if Machado attempts to return, authorities have “a surprise” waiting for her. Ahead of Rodríguez’s UN address, dozens of her critics held public protests in New York to denounce the interim government’s anti-democratic actions and exclusion of opposition voices.
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Poland says fire at Starlink station is sabotage as Denmark warns of rising Russian threat
Tensions between Russia and Western-backed NATO have escalated sharply this week, following a suspected act of sabotage at a key Starlink satellite internet station in central Poland, new warnings of rising hybrid warfare risks, and a wave of deadly Russian airstrikes across Ukraine that spilled into neighboring EU states.
Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski has publicly labeled Wednesday night’s fire at the facility in Wola Krobowska, Masovian Voivodeship, as a deliberate sabotage attack targeting internet connectivity supplied to Ukraine’s military. Speaking to public broadcaster TVP Info, Gawkowski said the incident was designed to disable the station, which routes Starlink internet traffic provided by SpaceX through Polish territory to Ukrainian forces and other institutions. While the station remains fully operational despite the damage, Gawkowski noted multiple lines of evidence point to the attack aligning with a new Russian doctrine of asymmetric targeting of critical infrastructure. The Kremlin has not yet issued any response to the accusation.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk struck a more cautious tone during a joint press conference with Bulgaria’s prime minister on Thursday, saying he was reluctant to definitively label the incident as sabotage rather than an accident without conclusive proof, but acknowledged the circumstances looked suspicious. The fire came on the same day Poland confirmed a Russian military helicopter had briefly violated its airspace, prompting the Polish air force to scramble fighter jets to intercept the aircraft.
Across the Baltic Sea, Denmark’s intelligence service has published an updated national threat assessment that supports the growing consensus across European capitals that Russia is preparing to escalate its campaign of hybrid warfare against NATO members in the coming months. While the assessment stressed that a full-scale military attack on Denmark remains highly unlikely, officials warned the risk of limited, covert Russian attacks against critical infrastructure is low but growing. This warning echoes recent statements from several other NATO European members, who have publicly warned Russia is carrying out preparatory operations to test the alliance’s collective defense commitment amid its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has consistently denied these accusations.
Just weeks ago, Germany formally blamed Russian actors for an attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport, while French authorities have ordered a national security plan to harden protections for critical infrastructure and domestic defense industry sites against potential attacks. Hybrid warfare, a term used to describe non-conventional, covert attacks designed to destabilize an adversary without triggering a full-scale military conflict, commonly includes tactics such as infrastructure sabotage, cyberattacks, and misinformation campaigns, with attacks often carried out by proxy actors to allow the sponsoring state to deny involvement. Despite mounting evidence pointing to Russian involvement in a string of such attacks across Europe, Moscow has consistently rejected any claims of responsibility.
The rising tensions over hybrid threats coincided with one of the deadliest nights of Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks, with strikes hitting residential and civilian sites in both Kharkiv and Kyiv. In the Kharkiv region village of Stara Hnylytsia, a Russian strike hit a working vegetable farm, killing six agricultural workers – four of them women – and wounding 12 more. In Kyiv, overnight strikes left two civilians dead, injured eight others, and damaged more than 50 civilian facilities, including a maternity hospital. Remarkably, as the attack unfolded, a pregnant woman sheltering in the hospital’s basement gave birth to a healthy baby boy, with the hospital director noting that “even on such a terrible night, life goes on.”
The Russian defense ministry claimed it had exclusively targeted legitimate military objectives, including Ukrainian defense facilities, logistics hubs, and telecommunications centers, as well as military vessels. The wave of Russian drones launched in the attack crossed multiple international borders, with Moldova’s president confirming four Russian drones entered Moldovan airspace, at least one of which detonated inside the country. Romania also confirmed one Russian drone crashed on its territory, marking another instance of Russian strike debris landing on NATO sovereign territory amid the ongoing war.
Russian aerial attacks have grown increasingly deadly and difficult to defend against in recent months, after Russia introduced a new fleet of jet-powered assault drones that fly faster and are far harder to shoot down than older, slower designs. Ukraine’s military is now racing to develop low-cost counter-drone weapons, as existing air defense missiles and fighter jet interceptions are prohibitively expensive to use against the relatively cheap unmanned vehicles.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated his appeal to Western allies, particularly the United States, to provide additional ballistic missile interceptors to protect Ukrainian civilian populations from Russian airstrikes. Zelenskyy argued that Russian leader Vladimir Putin must be stopped from expanding the war beyond Ukraine’s borders, saying “Putin is always looking for someone who can help him kill more, kill more people for every kilometre of land.” He also confirmed Ukraine plans to target Russian energy infrastructure through the coming winter months, a tactic both sides have used in previous years of the conflict.
Zelenskyy’s comments came as a Russian presidential envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, traveled to the United States to hold meetings with former senior officials from Donald Trump’s administration, including ex-special envoy Steve Witkoff and former White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, according to Reuters, which cited two unnamed sources familiar with the trip. On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the UN Security Council that Russia would not agree to any ceasefire or pause in the full-scale invasion it launched in February 2022, when Putin ordered troops across Ukraine’s border. Moscow currently controls approximately 20 percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory, including the Crimean peninsula, which it illegally annexed in 2014.
Russian leaders have repeatedly denied any plans to attack NATO member states, though Lavrov warned this month that if Europe launched an attack on Russia, the resulting conflict would be “completely different” from the war in Ukraine and “very short.”