For the last 30 years, countries have been talking about climate change at the UN’s Conference of the Parties – or COP. As world leaders gather near Brazil’s Amazon rainforest for COP30, Al Jazeera’s Ruby Zaman looks at what’s been achieved in the last three decades.
Russia has called on Serbia to clarify public remarks made by right-wing populist ally President Aleksandar Vucic on the potential sale of mortar shells to the European Union amid concerns exports could wind up in Ukraine as Moscow’s war rages on.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday that Vucic’s comments required an explanation, noting that Serbia had promised Russia many times that its ammunition would not end up in Ukrainian hands.
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Vucic spoke of selling his country’s large stocks of ammunition to Europe in a televised interview with broadcaster Euronews that aired this week, confirming his readiness to start shipments even if they found their way to Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia in 2022.
“We need to sell it to someone, and we’ll sell it to whomever we can in order to earn some money, but we’ll try to take care and not see that ammunition end up in a war zone. But it happens from time to time,” he said on The Europe Conversation show.
“At the end [of the day], we’ll have to pay our workers,” he added. “Tell me, is there something that is not rational?”
Last week, Vucic also told Germany’s Cicero magazine that he had offered his “friends” in the EU the opportunity to sign a purchase agreement for the large stockpiles of ammunition – in particular, mortar shells – produced in his country.
Asked directly whether he would sell to Ukraine, Vucic said: “The buyers can do what they want with it.”
Back in May, Russia said it had evidence that Serbian defence companies were supplying Ukraine with ammunition, in a rare rebuke of a country traditionally seen as an ally.
The Kremlin spoke out after media outlets reported that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Serbian ammunition had indirectly reached Kyiv via contracts with third countries.
Vucic’s recent comments appeared to signal a readiness to engage further with the EU in terms of security – albeit in a commercial capacity.
His country has been pursuing EU membership since 2009, but has simultaneously maintained strong ties with Russia.
On Tuesday, the European Commission presented its annual progress report on EU aspirants, giving Serbia a rap on the knuckles over high levels of “polarisation” in the country, which has been rocked by successive protests over the deadly collapse of a railway station roof that killed 16 people.
On Saturday, about 100,000 protesters marked the first anniversary of the tragedy at Novi Sad railway station, which had been undergoing renovation work. The event acted as a lightning rod for widespread frustrations over high-level corruption, with protesters calling on Vucic to step down.
On Wednesday night, government protesters called a counterprotest outside Serbia’s parliament in Belgrade, attended by senior government ministers. Supporters arrived from outside the city on buses, reportedly organised by Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party.
The European Commission report also called out “Serbian media outlets” and “political office holders” for promoting “an anti-EU narrative”, even as the country eyes accession.
Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Serbia to “get concrete” about its proclaimed goal of joining the bloc.
“We live in a fractured world with a widening gap between democracies and autocracies,” von der Leyen said at a joint news conference with Vucic. “And you know very well where the European Union stands.”
Serbia remains the only country in Europe that has not imposed sanctions on Moscow over its war in Ukraine.
Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as United States President Donald Trump, has been a reluctant and often divisive force within the EU as it pushes for punitive measures against Russia.
Mass cancellations of flights in the United States are causing havoc for travellers after the government ordered a reduction in the flight schedule due to a lack of air traffic controllers.
The reduced flight schedule, set to begin on Friday, comes as the US continues with its longest-ever government shutdown, which began on October 1, after Congress was unable to agree on a federal funding bill.
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On Thursday night, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced a phased-in reduction plan, which sets out that airlines must cut 4 percent of domestic flights from 6am EST (11:00 GMT) on Friday and gradually increase to 10 percent by November 14.
So far, no international flights have been affected by the planned cancellations.
According to an estimate by the aviation analytics firm Cirium, about 1,800 flights are being cancelled – a reduction of 268,000 seats.
Here’s what we know about the cancellations:
Since the October 1 government shutdown, now the longest in history, there has been no sign of the Republicans and Democrats ending their standoff over healthcare funding and agreeing on a new funding bill. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers, including air traffic controllers, have been furloughed or are working unpaid.
While federal workers have received back pay following the end of previous government shutdowns, President Donald Trump has threatened to sack many of them altogether if the Democrats do not agree to sign off on the funding bill.
So far, 13,000 air traffic controllers and 50,000 security screeners have been required to work without pay as they are classified as essential workers, so they will not receive payment until the shutdown is lifted.
However, in an attempt to alleviate pressure on the already overworked industry, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the decision to reduce flights now, before the busy Thanksgiving season at the end of the month.
In a post on X on Thursday night, Duffy said the decision to reduce flights was not about politics but about “assessing the data and alleviating building risk in the system as controllers continue working without pay”.
.@USDOT has many responsibilities, but our number one job is safety.
This isn’t about politics – it’s about assessing the data and alleviating building risk in the system as controllers continue working without pay.
It’s safe to fly today, tomorrow, and the day after because… pic.twitter.com/YRrq5sdy4T
“I’d love to pay them, but I can’t,” he added in a later post.
I don’t have access to money to pay air traffic controllers during this shutdown. Congress has said there is no money. I’d love to pay them, but I can’t.
My message to Democrats is to sit down, figure it out, and not hold the American people hostage- especially when they want to… pic.twitter.com/up2peizyZn
Yes.
“It’s safe to fly today, tomorrow, and the day after because of the proactive actions we are taking,” Duffy wrote in a post accompanying a wider statement.
The statement also cited FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who said the agency would “not hesitate to take further action” to alleviate pressure on workers.
“We are seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people can fly,” Bedford said, adding that they were monitoring the situation.
It remains unclear how long the cancellations will continue.
Forty of the country’s busiest airports have cancelled flights, including:
The last government shutdown in January 2019, during Trump’s first term as president, lasted for 35 days.
On that occasion, travel was temporarily suspended at New York’s LaGuardia airport when several air traffic workers who had been required to work without pay failed to turn up, calling in sick instead. The travel suspension at LaGuardia led to delays at other major airports, including in Philadelphia and Atlanta.
This action, along with other staffing issues, prompted Trump to agree to temporarily end the shutdown. The government shutdown formally ended in February.
International flights will not be cancelled.
It is unclear exactly which domestic flights are affected, however. Katy Nastro, a travel analyst at Going, the flight-finder website, told ABC News that “less full flights to smaller cities, or flights with more limited schedules to begin with, are most likely on the chopping block”.
Alaska Airlines said most cancellations will affect high-frequency routes, to allow travellers to be accommodated with minimal disruption.
The Department of Transportation said airlines would be required to issue full refunds to travellers whose flights had been cancelled, but secondary costs, including food and hotel accommodation, would not be covered unless a delay or cancellation was within the control of the carrier.
The CEO of Frontier Airlines, Barry Biffle, recommended that travellers buy backup tickets with another airline to avoid being stranded or missing an essential trip if the flight gets cancelled.
Todd Curtis, founder of Airsafe, an aviation safety website, told Al Jazeera that the shutdown was having a significant impact on workers.
“If there’s not enough staff, there’s procedures in place. What’s a more important issue, and this was handed out by the secretary of transportation, is fatigue because of staffing issues. Controllers have been asked to work six-day [work]weeks [with] mandatory overtime. Even under the best of circumstances, this is a difficult job,” Curtis explained.
Travellers facing disruption voiced anger about the cancellations.
At Reagan national airport in Arlington, Virginia, Sandy Humes, a passenger, told Al Jazeera that she almost cancelled her trip due to the airline cancellations.
“I don’t even know what’s gonna happen, [but] then I just decided, all right, we’re just gonna go for it and see what happens. But it’s just unexpected. I’m just sick of it. It’s like, what about us?” Humes said.
At the same airport, Vic Seested told Al Jazeera that the lack of information was “disappointing”.
“It means that Valentina, my youngest, my nine-year-old, was looking forward to see[ing] me for our date night, and now I may not see her,” he said.
As well as flight cancellations, the shutdown could also affect more than 42 million Americans who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP), also known as food stamps.
The government had planned to freeze payments altogether for the scheme when its funding ran out at the end of October, but on Monday, a federal judge halted that decision and said the Trump administration must provide the programme with emergency funds, at least partially.
Officials will use $4.65bn from the Department of Agriculture’s contingency fund to support roughly half of SNAP participants’ “current allotments”. Despite this, some families may not receive benefits for several weeks, US media reported this week.
When the Republican and Democratic members of Congress approve the bill and funding is released for government services.
Tom Davis, a Republican South Carolina state senator, told Al Jazeera that while the Republicans and the Democrats have got into standoffs before, “somebody always blinks”.
“Traditionally, you pass what’s called a clean contingency resolution. You continue last year’s funding levels until the new levels are agreed to. Democrats have done this 12 times under President [Joe] Biden, but they refuse to do it under President Trump. So [that’s] where we are at this point, and Republicans are not going to swallow the spending increase,” he said, referring to the extension of healthcare benefits that Democrats are insisting on.
A European naval force is en route to help a ship that was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia, as another vessel narrowly escaped a similar attack, with piracy surging again in the region.
The European Union’s Operation Atalanta said on Friday that its assets were “close” to the Hellas Aphrodite, a Malta-flagged tanker which was seized by pirates the previous day.
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The attackers used machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) to board the vessel.
In its statement on Friday, Operation Atalanta said it was “ready to take the appropriate action and to respond respectively to this event”.
The rescue attempt comes amid fears for the safety of the 24 mariners on board the Hellas Aphrodite, which was carrying gasoline from India to South Africa when it came under attack.
Tracking data showed that the ship was more than 1,000km (620 miles) off the Somali coast, according to The Associated Press news agency.
The private security firm Ambrey said Thursday’s assault appeared to have been carried out by the same group of Somali pirates who recently captured an Iranian fishing boat, which they have subsequently been using as a base for their operations.
As the EU naval force neared the Hellas Aphrodite on Friday, the British military’s UK Maritime Trade Operations centre (UKMTO) said another vessel had been unsuccessfully targeted by pirates on Friday.
In an alert published on X, UKMTO, which urged ships in the area to “transit with caution”, said the captain of a liquified natural gas tanker reported a boat approaching its stern, 528 nautical miles (equivalent to about 980km) southeast of Eyl, Somalia.
“The small craft fired small arms and RPGs towards the vessel,” it said, noting that the larger ship escaped by increasing its speed.
After piracy off the Somali coast peaked in 2011 with 237 attacks, the threat receded as a result of international naval patrols and the strengthening of the Somali government.
When Liberia announced late last month that it would temporarily host Salvadoran national Kilmar Armando Abrego García on “humanitarian grounds” if he were deported by the Trump administration for a second time, the West African country was broadcasting its unique history as a haven for Black migrants fleeing racism and economic servitude in the United States.
According to the Liberian government, the decision to welcome Abrego García, who was unlawfully deported from the United States in March only to return under a court injunction in June, follows its “longstanding tradition of offering refuge to those in need”.
Liberia was once a semi-autonomous territory funded in part by the Washington, DC-based American Colonisation Society (ACS) comprising powerful white men who viewed free Blacks as a threat to slavery and saw emigration (deportation) as the only solution to dispose of them. Its founders – repatriates from the US and Caribbean who joined recaptives (Africans rescued aboard illegal slave ships) from the Congo River basin – rebuffed ACS largesse and declared the country independent in 1847.
The free and formerly enslaved Blacks who founded Liberia were not unlike Abrego García, who has become an international symbol of the dangers of presidential overreach. They, too, were pawns in white America’s bid to “make America white again” – as if it ever were just white – through the framing of Black and brown bodies as undesirable, threatening and therefore disposable.
But the similarities end there. America once deported migrants of colour to Liberia, but not like this.
Although Trump’s impetus for mass expulsions – anti-migrant racism – aligns with the anti-Black bigotry of ACS agents who had deportationist sensibilities, Black people who opted to settle in Liberia did so primarily of their own volition. In fact, many paid for their emigration to West Africa in the 19th century.
America’s proposed deportation of Abrego García to Liberia in the 21st century would be neither voluntary nor defensible, especially since he has explicitly requested relocation to Costa Rica instead. His high-profile case represents a litmus test for upholding due process and respecting human rights under Trump-era MAGA mania. By agreeing to host Abrego García, Liberia has not only subjected itself to legal wrangling but also compromised its humanitarian credibility despite making vague assurances about consulting “relevant national and international stakeholders”.
It is the latest country in Africa – a continent previously described in pejorative terms by Trump – to cave in to the first felon-in-chief’s coercive tactics. The irony is that, as a convict himself, Trump, too, would be deported if he were a migrant of colour.
The vast majority of countries under pressure to receive deportees from America are African. Eight men arrived in South Sudan in July after the majority-conservative US Supreme Court authorised their expulsion. As weeks of court disputes ensued thousands of miles away, nationals of Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan and Vietnam were held under American military guard in a converted shipping container in Djibouti.
Flights carrying other Black and brown deportees to Africa have followed in quick succession. In mid-July, after “months of robust high-level engagements”, five convicts from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen were banished to the small, landlocked kingdom of Eswatini in Southern Africa. Shortly after, in mid-August, seven deportees arrived in the post-genocide central African country of Rwanda, which has in recent years positioned itself as an outpost for migrants expelled from Euro-America.
Deportation to third countries in Africa – or anywhere else for that matter – without due process is clearly a violation of human rights, even if the United States justifies ridding itself of alleged criminals by any means. Before enlisting Liberia’s cooperation most recently, the White House had been aggressively courting countries as diverse as Uganda, Libya, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania to host Abrego García. All of them are in Africa, and heads of state from the latter three countries attended Trump’s US-Africa summit held in July.
It appears the carrot of possibly benefiting from American commercial diplomacy followed the stick of accepting its deportees. But not all countries in Africa have complied when urged to do so. For instance, Nigeria – considered West Africa’s regional powerhouse – refused to kowtow to Trump, citing national security concerns. If a powerful ally can snub Washington’s request, why would its continental neighbours acquiesce?
Although negotiations between the Trump administration and African governments have been largely shrouded in secrecy, countries that opt to take in deportees surely must be leveraging this diplomatically to secure concessions of their own, including the removal of US visa bans, the elimination of punishing tariffs, and the extraction of critical minerals for profit to power American technology ambitions.
Liberia appears to have been rewarded for its compliance. Following bilateral meetings held in October between American Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Liberian Foreign Minister Sara Beysolow Nyanti, Washington announced that, effectively immediately, it would extend the validity of certain non-immigrant visas issued to Liberians from one to three years with multiple entries permitted. This was a privilege Monrovia granted American citizens, but reciprocal arrangements were halted during Liberia’s protracted armed conflict from 1989 to 2003. Since Liberia has one of the highest US visa rejection rates in the world, the new extension policy may have been an allowance for agreeing to host Abrego García.
Washington’s inclusion of Monrovia in the much-touted US-Africa summit held this July may have been prompted by Liberia’s signing of a concession and access agreement with American mineral exploration company Ivanhoe Atlantic. Pending legislative approval, the 1.8 billion-dollar agreement would enable Ivanhoe to export Guinea’s iron ore using Liberia’s rail corridor. US companies have a chequered history in Liberia, though, so the concession has generated worthy speculation about its feasibility.
Despite the faulty assumption that Liberia has a “special relationship” with the United States, America’s contempt for the West African nation knows no bounds. The US was one of the last countries to recognise Liberia’s independence – in 1862. American companies Firestone and LAMCO pillaged Liberia’s rubber and iron ore for decades with the complicity of local elites. US Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen dismissed Liberia as being of “no strategic interest” when war ravaged the country in the 1990s. And Trump asked Liberia’s President Joseph Boakai where he learned to speak “such good English” during a cringeworthy White House exchange in July.
Washington’s recent proposal to deport Abrego García to Monrovia is the latest blunder in US-Liberia relations.
If Trump were alive in the 1800s, he probably would have found affinity with deportationists of the American Colonisation Society. But we’re no longer in the 19th century. As a country that “historically extended protection and goodwill to individuals and communities needing assistance”, Liberia would do well to remember that it is a sovereign nation whose policy decisions must not be shaped by the whims of racist white men.
Amid accusations of genocide, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces say they have agreed to a humanitarian pause in the war with the country’s army. The group took over the city of el-Fasher in Darfur on October 26, after a devastating 19-month siege. Sudan’s army has so far not responded to the truce proposal.