标签： Oceania

A high-stakes NATO summit kicked off in Ankara, Turkey on Wednesday, with U.S. President Donald Trump taking center stage for tense negotiations with the alliance’s 31 other member leaders following a ceremonial welcome from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Upon arriving in the Turkish capital, Trump struck a divided tone: he lavished praise on Erdogan, noting the strong personal “chemistry” between the two leaders, while repeating longstanding criticism of the alliance as a whole. “I was very disappointed with NATO,” Trump told reporters, setting a combative backdrop for the main summit opening at 08:15 GMT. His criticism comes amid years of pressure from the Trump administration for NATO members to meet their long-unfulfilled defense spending pledges, as Washington shifts its strategic focus away from European security.

The 77-year-old transatlantic alliance has moved pre-emptively to defuse confrontation with Trump. On the eve of the summit, NATO released new figures showing core European defense spending rose 11% in 2026 to hit $634 billion, up from $571 billion the previous year. Alliance members also unveiled tens of billions of dollars in new arms procurement contracts on Tuesday to demonstrate progress on spending commitments. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stressed that European allies are already delivering on their promises, boosting military budgets and taking greater ownership of continental defense in the face of Russian aggression.

Beyond defense spending, the war in Ukraine is a top agenda item for the gathering. Trump has publicly stated he believes both Moscow and Kyiv are eager to reach a negotiated end to the conflict. Ahead of a scheduled sideline meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a U.S. official confirmed Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin before traveling to Turkey, and plans to hold follow-up talks with the Russian leader after meeting with Zelenskyy. Currently, peace negotiations remain deadlocked, but Europe and Canada have committed to maintaining 70 billion euros ($80 billion) in annual military aid to Ukraine for both 2026 and 2027. Despite the pledged support, Zelenskyy urged a NATO defense forum on Tuesday to accelerate deliveries of air defense interceptors—where Kyiv is facing critical shortages—and reiterated his call for Ukraine to move forward with its NATO accession process.

The summit will also see a historic meeting between Trump and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is working to rebuild Syria’s international standing after decades of civil war. The meeting comes one day after al-Sharaa hosted French President Emmanuel Macron for a landmark visit, which was marred by twin bombings in central Damascus that left 18 people wounded.

In a bilateral breakthrough with Turkey, Trump offered major concessions to Erdogan during talks at the leader’s opulent marble presidential palace. Trump confirmed he would consider lifting existing U.S. sanctions on Turkey and readmitting Ankara to the U.S.-led F-35 stealth fighter jet program. Turkey was expelled from the F-35 project in 2019 after purchasing a Russian air defense system, and U.S. sanctions have since hampered Ankara’s national defense projects and strained bilateral ties. “We’re going to be taking the sanctions off,” Trump said. “We don’t want to sanction friends.” Erdogan, seated beside Trump, expressed confidence that the long-running F-35 and sanctions dispute would finally be resolved.

Britain’s Prince Harry has suffered a major legal setback, after London’s High Court dismissed his joint privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, over allegations of unlawful information gathering. The ruling lands just as the estranged working royal kicked off a tense five-day visit to the UK, deepening the long-running rift between Harry and the rest of the royal family.

The judgment, released this week following an 11-week court hearing held earlier this year, concluded that the group of claimants — which included Harry, music icon Elton John, actor Elizabeth Hurley, and anti-racism campaigner Doreen Lawrence — had failed to prove their 97 pleaded claims against the publisher. All allegations were therefore thrown out by the court.

Associated Newspapers has hailed the ruling as an overwhelming victory and a complete vindication of the Daily Mail’s journalistic practices. In a post-ruling statement, the publisher emphasized that Judge Matthew Nicklin had fully accepted the testimony of its journalists regarding how they sourced their stories. It described the allegations against the outlet — which included claims of bugging devices placed in claimants’ vehicles and private homes, illegal phone call eavesdropping, and unauthorized access to personal bank accounts — as lurid, preposterous claims that were never backed by any credible evidence. “The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated,” the statement added.

Harry pushed back hard against the ruling, however, releasing a scathing joint statement with Lawrence that called the outcome a “complete and obvious whitewash” that was “not altogether unexpected”. As the youngest son of King Charles III, Harry argued that the court’s steps to fully exonerate the Daily Mail were as shocking as they were totally unwarranted. Lawrence joined the case after the paper was accused of unlawful information gathering targeting her family following the 1993 racist murder of her son Stephen.

The judgment was handed down as Harry attended a London event for the Invictus Games, the wounded veteran sporting event he founded in 2014. The appearance comes one day after he arrived in the UK for what was supposed to be his first family visit back to the country in four years, marking the one-year countdown to the 2026 Invictus Games. In a striking parallel, Harry’s older brother William, the heir to the British throne, was also in London the same day, carrying out an official royal engagement at the London Welsh School to promote next month’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

The legal defeat leaves Harry facing further consequences: on July 29 and 30, a separate hearing will determine whether he and the six other co-claimants must pay the substantial legal fees Associated Newspapers incurred defending the case. The publisher said it spent £50 million (equivalent to roughly $66 million) defending itself against what it called “this egregious litigation”, and confirmed it would seek to recover all incurred costs.

This case marked the third and final lawsuit Harry has brought against British tabloid publishers in his years-long, acrimonious battle against the UK press. The ongoing legal conflict has only further strained his already frayed relationship with the royal family, which has been fractured since Harry and his wife Meghan Markle stepped down from frontline royal duties and relocated to California in 2020.

The rift deepened dramatically following the 2023 release of Harry’s explosive tell-all memoir *Spare*, which contained a series of damaging revelations about the royal family. Now, 41-year-old Harry is also entangled in a separate long-running legal dispute over his police security detail when visiting the UK, a fight he first launched after losing his automatic right to public police protection when he stepped down as a working royal six years ago.

In a major disappointment for Harry, what was planned as a family trip back to the UK fell apart before he even arrived, after authorities refused to grant his family a police security detail. A source close to the Duke of Sussex confirmed to AFP that Meghan, the couple’s 5-year-old son Archie, and 3-year-old daughter Lilibet will not join Harry for the London leg of his visit, and arrangements for the remainder of the five-day trip are still under consideration. It remains unclear whether the family will join Harry outside of London, and there has been no confirmation of whether Harry will meet with his father King Charles during the visit.

The last confirmed meeting between Harry and Charles, who is currently undergoing treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer, was at Clarence House in September 2025. Harry has repeatedly stated he hopes to reconcile with his father and the rest of the royal family, but has also said he is unable to bring his family to the UK safely after previous court rulings went against him in his fight to restore his personal security. For decades, Harry has held the British tabloid press responsible for the 1997 death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a Paris car crash while her driver was trying to escape pursuing paparazzi.

Colombia is facing a rapidly escalating political crisis just weeks before the scheduled August 7 presidential inauguration, after hard-right president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella made explosive unsubstantiated claims that outgoing left-wing president Gustavo Petro is plotting a coup to seize power. The accusation has prompted De la Espriella to immediately halt all transition cooperation with Petro’s administration, throwing the upcoming transfer of power into chaos.

De la Espriella, a millionaire libertarian lawyer who secured a narrow victory in last month’s presidential runoff, has positioned himself as a staunch opponent of Colombia’s first-ever left-wing government. His campaign, which drew open vocal support from former U.S. President Donald Trump, centered on rolling back Petro’s progressive policies: he has pledged to abandon ongoing peace talks with left-wing guerrilla groups and drug cartels in favor of full-scale military confrontation, and to cut the size of Colombia’s state bureaucracy by 40% to attract increased private sector investment, echoing the radical libertarian agenda of Argentine President Javier Milei.

In a public statement Tuesday, De la Espriella claimed that Petro and his ally, defeated presidential candidate Ivan Cepeda, had activated a so-called “Plan B” to hold onto power through unconstitutional means. “Petro and Cepeda have initiated their Plan B to remain in power at all costs. And they want to do it through a coup d’etat,” the president-elect declared. He also repeated longstanding unproven claims that Petro’s administration is riddled with corruption, alleging that a preliminary audit uncovered irregularities in the government’s anti-drug trafficking efforts, public contracting processes, and national healthcare system. Despite the serious nature of both the coup allegation and corruption claims, De la Espriella has not released any tangible evidence to support either accusation.

Cepeda, who lost the runoff to De la Espriella by a slim margin, publicly accepted the election results despite the close outcome. Petro, however, has refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the June vote, even though independent international election observers and Colombia’s national electoral authorities have formally certified the election as free, fair, and free of widespread fraud.

Political tensions have been building steadily since the runoff, and the latest escalation has stoked fears of widespread unrest. Petro has already called for mass anti-De la Espriella protests to coincide with his scheduled national farewell address on July 20. De la Espriella’s supporters warn that the demonstrations could spiral into the kind of large-scale violent unrest that followed Petro’s protests against right-wing former president Ivan Duque between 2019 and 2021, a period of unrest that left dozens of people dead across the country.

De la Espriella has framed the ongoing conflict as a legal standoff, claiming that Petro’s accusation of a coup stems from fear of facing legal accountability for alleged misconduct during his tenure. “He knows I will make him pay for all his crimes within the framework of the law, and that’s why he’s panicked and terrified,” he said Tuesday. The president-elect, who has long aligned himself with U.S. political interests and repeatedly clashed with Petro over his critical stance toward Trump during his presidency, has already vowed to bring Petro and his left-wing allies before U.S. courts to face charges, though he has not detailed what specific offenses the legal action would address.

When US President Donald Trump touched down in Turkey’s capital Ankara for a critical NATO summit this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rolled out the most extravagant red carpet possible — a welcome tailored specifically to the 80-year-old American leader’s well-documented love of grandeur and pageantry.

Diplomatic observers have long noted that world leaders hoping to win favor with the notoriously unpredictable Trump have found few tools more effective than hosting him with ceremonies and settings fit for a monarch. Erdogan, it turns out, executed this strategy perfectly, leaning into shared tendencies that have connected the two leaders for years: a mutual affinity for opulent presidential architecture and a top-down, authoritative governing style.

Erdogan went so far as to greet Trump personally on the tarmac after he exited his newly retrofitted Air Force One. On multiple occasions, the 72-year-old Turkish leader guided Trump by the arm as the pair walked off the plane. That aircraft itself offers a subtle backdrop to how world leaders have already shaped Trump’s views: the retrofitted jet was a controversial gift to the US from Qatar’s royal family in 2024, gifted after Trump publicly complained that the older presidential transport plane was unacceptably outdated and embarrassing.

After the airport greeting, Trump’s motorcade processed through central Ankara to the sprawling Bestepe Presidential Compound, popularly known as the “White Palace.” Mounted Turkish riders flanked the presidential limousine along nearly empty city streets, where a full honor guard in crisp red and blue uniforms waited to receive him. As the US national anthem *The Star-Spangled Banner* played, Trump stood at attention, and even attempted to deliver a short greeting in Turkish — a small gesture that fit the festive tone of the day. The ceremony concluded with a dramatic flyover by Turkish fighter jets, which left trails of red, white, and blue smoke trailing across the Ankara sky. Adding a theatrical historical flourish, two dozen soldiers clad in replica Ottoman-era armor, pointed helmets, and stylized false facial hair stood at attention outside the palace entrance.

Completed in 2014 at a total cost of roughly $615 million, the massive White Palace complex draws architectural inspiration from Turkey’s ancient Seljuk and Ottoman imperial histories. Critics have long slammed the project as a symbol of Erdogan’s alleged authoritarian excess, pointing to its huge price tag as evidence of his increasingly autocratic leanings. But for Trump, the opulent complex was the perfect setting to leave an impression: the palace features soaring atriums lined with rare onyx and polished green marble, a level of grandeur that aligns perfectly with Trump’s long-admired fascination with the lavish residences of foreign leaders.

As he pursues his second term in office, the former real estate billionaire has made no secret of his goal to reshape Washington D.C. into an imperial capital matching his personal vision. He has already demolished an entire wing of the White House to construct a $400 million grand ballroom, drawn up plans for a massive triumphal arch he has named the “Arc de Trump,” and launched a sweeping, multi-million dollar initiative to renovate the nation’s capital’s iconic monuments.

This strategically opulent welcome from Erdogan fits into a clear pattern that has emerged across Trump’s second term: foreign leaders have learned to leverage the US president’s well-known obsession with palatial splendor to win goodwill. Just last month, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Trump for a private state dinner at the Palace of Versailles following a G7 summit, where Trump praised the former residence of King Louis XIV as “the real deal.” Earlier in 2025, Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed Trump with a full ceremonial welcome at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, followed by a visit to the Temple of Heaven and private tea at the exclusive Zhongnanhai leadership compound. In September 2025, Britain’s King Charles III hosted Trump for a full state visit at Windsor Castle, complete with a ceremonial flyover and extensive pageantry — and Trump was still talking about the castle earlier this week, incorrectly describing it as “the longest building I’ve ever seen.” During a May 2025 visit to the Middle East, Trump openly expressed envy for his Arab hosts’ accommodations, praising the marble in Qatar’s royal palace as “perfecto” and marveling at the scale of Saudi Arabia’s modern architectural projects.

In Turkey, one small personal gesture seemed to leave a particularly strong impression on Trump: he told reporters that Ankara’s airport had named a building after him, a tribute that left him “very happy.” The good mood came even as a US court recently blocked Trump’s own plan to add his name to Washington D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center. After the arrival ceremony, Trump praised Erdogan to reporters, calling him “a great leader” and emphasizing that the relationship between the two leaders and their nations has been “very special.”