Donald Trump downplays the leak of sensitive military information.
How many people describe the Trump administration’s handling of a leak of highly sensitive information as “damage control.”
An online group chat that has gone viral included eighteen senior officials, including the CIA director, the defense secretary, the vice president, and the director of the intelligence service.
Before they happened, an American journalist was also present during that conversation and was informed of US plans to attack Houthi positions in Yemen.
The handling of top-secret information and military intelligence is being questioned by the breach.
Will there also be consequences beyond Washington?
And how will long-time allies in Europe react when criticized in the discussion?
Presenter:
James Bays
Guests:
Former CIA agent and national security expert in the US Glenn Carle
Jamie Gaskarth, Professor of Foreign Policy and International Relations at Open University.
As search efforts for the missing soldiers continue, the United States Army has reported that a vehicle that four of its soldiers used was discovered submerged in water.
The army stated in a statement on Wednesday that the M88 Hercules armored recovery vehicle used to transport four American soldiers who are still unaccounted for had been located in Lithuania.
The army made the remarks after Polish-speaking NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte announced at a press conference that the four soldiers had died from an “incident.”
We do not know the details because this is still in early news. Our thoughts are with the loved ones’ families, Rutte said, “This is really terrible news.”
The military in Lithuania had earlier stated that a search was underway for the four American soldiers and a lost vehicle on Tuesday afternoon.
Later, the military stated on X that it was going to continue an “intensive” rescue operation despite not having confirmed the deaths of US personnel.
The US Army claimed in a statement that the soldiers had been receiving training close to Pabrade, in eastern Lithuania, close to the Belarusian border.
Nuri Aslan, who was imprisoned on corruption charges, has been replaced by Istanbul’s municipal government as its interim mayor.
Aslan, a member of Imamoglu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), was chosen to lead the city while his trial is pending, according to local broadcaster NTV and Turkish news outlet Anadolu on Wednesday.
Aslan received 173 votes in the first round of voting, while Zeynel Abidin Okul, the AK Party candidate for president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, received 123. Aslan received 177 votes in the second round of the election, while Okul received 125.
A third round of voting commenced as both candidates failed to achieve the required two-thirds majority. Aslan received 177 votes in that election, while Okul received 125, ensuring Aslan’s election. Candidates would need a simple majority to win.
Ozgur Ozel, the head of the CHP, claimed that Erdogan’s request to appoint a trustee for the municipality had been thwarted by the interim mayoral election.
One leg will always be in Istanbul and one hand will always be in Sarachane, according to Ozel, adding that public opposition had prevented what the opposition refers to as a “coup attempt” against it. “The struggle will expand to all of Turkiye from now on,” Ozel said.
Aslan reaffirmed that his new position was only temporary while speaking alongside Ozel.
“Our mayor, who was chosen with Istanbul’s support, will return as soon as possible. He said, “We will take care of what he entrusted us with and return it to him” along with our chairman.
Following Imamoglu’s detention a week ago, demonstrations have been occurring all over the country. Despite authorities throttling crowds and arresting hundreds of people, including journalists, his supporters vow to continue protesting.
According to Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, police had detained 1,418 people by Tuesday afternoon. 11 Turkish journalists who were covering the protests, of which seven were detained, were included.
“Street terrorism”
Erdogan claimed on Wednesday that the main opposition had caused his government to not get upset.
Erdogan has remained defiant despite the protests, calling them “street terror” a week later.
“There is nowhere to go for those who spread terrorism in the streets and want to ignite this nation.” He claimed that their decision is a dead end.
Officials in the government have refuted claims that the opposition figure’s legal action is politically motivated and have argued that Turkiye’s courts are independent.
Imamoglu’s arrest in a graft and “terrorism” investigation, which his supporters have described as a “coup,” led to protests that broke out on March 19. The court has currently dropped the “terrorism” charge.
Since then, large crowds have staged street demonstrations in Istanbul, the country’s capital, Ankara, and Izmir, where the unrest has spread.
The main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), announced a possible tactical shift by saying it would not organize another nightly protest on Wednesday outside the Istanbul mayor’s office.
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been ordered to go on trial on suspicion of plotting a coup d’etat after failing to win re-election in 2022.
Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who presided over Brazil from 2019 to 2022, is accused of five crimes, including an alleged attempt to obliterate the democratic rule of law violently. He has called the accusations against him “grave and unfounded” and “grave and unfounded.”
A five-judge panel on Wednesday unanimously decided to trial Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro could receive a lengthy prison sentence, further isolating him, if he is found guilty in the court proceedings, which are anticipated later this year. A political heir has not been named by him.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is in charge of the case, clipped dramatic footage of Bolsonaro’s supporters storming government buildings in violent scenes just one week after the president’s inauguration in January 2023.
In part to try to sabotage the electronic voting machines in Brazil, Bolsonaro added, as part of his campaign against the election he lost.
Teresa Bo, a journalist from Buenos Aires, recalls the obscene and bloody scenes from Bolsonaro’s supporters’ inauguration in the capital Brasilia in January 2023.
Around 1,500 people were detained in the capital, according to her, “a week after Lula was sworn in, we saw thousands of supporters of President Bolsonaro storming buildings in Brazil.”
Bolsonaro voluntarily sat silently in the first row of the Supreme Court’s hearing on Tuesday, an echo of his ally, US President Donald Trump, who was at trial for the same thing last year, in a session at which the pair were charged with a charge against him and seven of his closest allies.
In order to stifle Lula’s declining popularity and pressure Congress to pass an amnesty bill in favor of him and his jailed supporters, Bolsonaro organized a beachfront rally in Rio de Janeiro in the days leading up to the landmark court hearing.
After two independent polling companies discovered that only between 20 and 30 000 people turned up, some allies speculated that the demonstration would attract more than a million backers.
Despite a ruling from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court forbidding him from running for public office until 2030 for his efforts to discredit the country’s voting system, Bolsonaro has vowed to run for president once more next year.
Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis as president has drawn in-depth legal scrutiny.
Since the revelation on March 5, Mexican media has collected numerous testimony from those who claim to have escaped Rancho Izaguirre or survived.
Many of those who spoke out made the decision to remain anonymous. They described how they were lured to the ranch from Guadalajara by false job promises in online advertisements or simply kidnapped.
One young man claimed that the ranch had been “hitman school.” Those who criticized, questioned, or failed to pass the harsh tests were put to death.
One survivor referred to it as “a little school of terror,” according to Indira Navarro, the leader of the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, in a radio interview.
[Jared Olson/Al Jazeera] A protester lights a candle next to a pair of missing shoes on March 15.
Other documents have emerged that suggest that the town’s local authorities may have been unaware of the site’s existence but ignored it.
A report released on March 12 by the advocacy group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity revealed that National Guard personnel had burned bodies in the same area in August 2019.
Additionally, it discovered that a regional police commissioner had attempted to bribe the National Guard by sending them a message in March 2020.
An anonymous female caller claimed that National Guard personnel would receive money in exchange “for reducing the intensity of the operations” in the area.
The highest official number of forced disappearances in Mexico is found in Jalisco. More than 15, 000 people have been reported missing in the state alone since the government began collecting data on disappearances in the 1950s.
The Teuchitlán site has been heavily inspected, but the state attorney general, Salvador Gonzalez de los Santos, claimed the area is too large to search in its entirety because of the recent uproar.
The federal government has since pointed the finger at local authorities for failing to conduct thorough investigations.
At a press conference on March 19th, Mexico Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero stated that “they failed to locate the evidence or identify anything that was discovered abandoned there.” No fingerprints or a full examination of the site were taken.
A protester in Mexico City poses a sign denouncing “mass graves, extermination centers, and slavery” [Jared Olson/Al Jazeera]
Federal and state authorities conducted a tour of the site for journalists, officials, and search team members on March 20. More than 12 buses, some with social media influencers, arrived.
However, the visit received a lot of negative reviews, not the least of which were for allowing the public to enter a persistent crime scene.
The disappearing family members also questioned why the influencers allegedly had access to the ranch before they were. Later, some of the influencers wrote online accounts disputing the existence of crematoriums on the site.
Meanwhile, President Sheinbaum has ordered federal prosecutors to begin the investigation under the leadership of Gertz Manero.
“The first thing we need to do is investigate, because the images are painful, and what happened there, before anything else,” she said.
However, some critics worry that the investigation’s leadership can be attributed to the federal authorities. After all, Sheinbaum’s mentor, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was the man who founded the National Guard in 2019.
Federal authorities announced progress in their investigation on Monday, though.
They confirmed that a recruiter for the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación was being detained in a low-income neighborhood of Mexico City and that he had allegedly arranged for youths to be transported to the “extermination site.”
In addition to the ranch, two former police officers from a nearby village were detained.
However, reports from academics and investigative journalists suggest that the Teuchitlán ranch is a large network of training facilities in the mountains west of Guadalajara.
A separate search team announced on March 12 that it had discovered another “extermination site,” this time in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
As protests take place on March 15 [Jared Olson/Al Jazeera] in Mexico City, police patrol the National Palace.
As the evening dipped, tensions started to escalate at the most recent protest at the Zócalo. In front of the National Palace, some demonstrators fought with police who were holding riot shields, breaking through barricades.
“Mercenaries! ” Killers”! They yelled at the president of Mexico’s palace, which is its official residence.
Sebastián Arenas, a journalist at the National Autonomous University of México, claimed that many of his fellow protesters believed Teuchitlán to be a sign of a nationwide mass murder plot.
According to him, “in the press, it’s said that things have changed in Mexico, that there aren’t disappearances, or that they’re going down, that the judicial reform is going to bring justice.”
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of not being serious about peace talks as they traded blame for attacks on infrastructure.
The renewed accusations on Wednesday came a day after the United States said Ukraine and Russia had agreed to halt military strikes on vessels in the Black Sea following separate negotiations in Saudi Arabia.
The Ukrainian air force said 117 drones were launched from Russia during an overnight attack. At least 56 of the drones were downed, 48 were lost due to electronic warfare and no damage was caused, it added.
However, the mayor of Mykolaiv said there were power outages due to the drones.
In the city of Kryvyi Rih, a Russian attack caused fires and damaged buildings, but no casualties were reported. Buildings were also reportedly damaged in the border region of Sumy, which has come under heavy attack in recent days.
The head of the military administration in Kryvyi Rih, Oleksandr Vilkul, described the drone attack as the most significant on the city, adding, “Apparently, this is how the occupiers ‘want peace’”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the overnight barrage of attacks and said it was a “clear signal to the whole world that Moscow is not going to pursue real peace”.
“Since March 11, there has been a US proposal for a total ceasefire, a complete halt to strikes. And literally every night, through its attacks, Russia keeps saying ‘no’ to our partners’ peace proposal,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.
Last night, there were another 117 proofs in our skies of how Russia continues to drag out this war – 117 strike drones, most of them Shaheds. A significant number were shot down by our air defenders.
Dnipro, Sumy, Cherkasy, and other regions came under Russian attack. There… pic.twitter.com/q4WTj87IHG
For its part, the Russian Ministry of Defence said Ukraine carried out a drone attack on a gas storage facility on the Crimean Peninsula and a power installation in the Bryansk region, which sits on the border with Ukraine and its Sumy region.
“The Kyiv regime, while continuing to damage Russia’s civilian energy infrastructure, is actually doing everything it can to disrupt the Russian-American agreements,” it wrote.
Ukraine denied that it had targeted Russian energy infrastructure in the two regions.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari said further negotiations will be “difficult” as both sides continue to trade allegations.
“Accusations back and forth illustrate how difficult and fragile the situation is between both sides in this conflict and how difficult the task the American officials have ahead of them,” Jabbari explained.
On Tuesday, the US reached separate truce agreements with Ukraine and Russia in talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. US negotiators met separately with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, both of which agreed to cease their attacks at sea.
The two sides also agreed “to develop measures” for implementing an agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities, the White House said.
The US also agreed to push for lifting some Western sanctions on Russian food, fertiliser and shipping in the Black Sea.
The Kremlin said “a number of conditions” must be met before the Black Sea deal can be implemented, including restoring links between some Russian banks and the international financial system.
However, a spokesperson for the European Union said on Wednesday that one of the main conditions to lift or amend Russian sanctions would be “the end of the Russian unprovoked and unjustified aggression in Ukraine and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian military forces”.
On Wednesday evening, Zelenskyy met French President Emmanuel Macron before a gathering of world leaders on Thursday that has been billed as a “coalition of the willing”, which plans to set out security guarantees for Ukraine in any peace deal.
During a press conference, Macron said it was “too early” to lift Russian sanctions.
“Ultimately, sanctions depend solely on Russia’s choice of aggression, and therefore, their lifting depends solely on Russia’s choice to comply with international law,” he said.
Macron also announced “two billion euros ($2.15bn) in extra military support to Ukraine”, adding that the support would include anti-tank missiles, surface-to-air missiles, armoured vehicles and drones.
In the meantime, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned in Warsaw on Wednesday that the Western defence alliance would respond with a “devastating” blow to any attack by Russia on Poland or another ally.
Separately on Wednesday, a court in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don convicted 23 Ukrainians on “terrorism” charges in a trial that Kyiv denounced as a sham and a violation of international law.
