Category World News

Bogota, Colombia – The United States Department of State has designated Colombia’s largest criminal group, the Gaitanist Army of Colombia (EGC), a “terrorist organisation”.

The EGC, also referred to as the Clan del Golfo, has a presence across Colombia and is known for its involvement in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and extortion.

“Today, the Department of State is designating Clan del Golfo as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT),” read a statement by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio released on Tuesday morning.

“Based in Colombia, Clan del Golfo is a violent and powerful criminal organisation with thousands of members … responsible for terrorist attacks against public officials, law enforcement and military personnel, and civilians in Colombia,” continued the communique.

Last year, the Biden administration imposed financial sanctions on top members of the EGC but stopped short of classifying it as a terrorist organisation.

Washington previously designated other active Colombian armed groups as FTOs, including the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissident factions of the defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Under the FTO designation, US courts can sanction any individual or organisation considered to be providing assistance to, or linked to, the EGC.

The move will increase opportunities to sever links between the group and private enterprise, according to analysts.

“This is an organisation that has deep tentacles in the business world,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at International Crisis Group, adding, “it does open some interesting lines of investigation, for example, in money laundering and facilitating and logistics.”

But experts also warn that Washington’s move could undermine ongoing peace negotiations between the EGC and the Colombian state, mediated by the Qatari government. On December 5, Colombia signed a deal in Doha with the EGC to initiate a peace process aimed at the EGC’s disarmament.

“The designation of the EGC and its command structure as terrorists makes it almost impossible to continue these talks outside the country with security guarantees,”  said Gerson Arias, conflict and security investigator at the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian think tank.

He added that it complicates discussions on extraditions, a key point of contention in ongoing negotiations. According to Arias, the FTO designation effectively eliminates the possibility of the Colombian state providing guarantees that it will not extradite EGC leaders to a US prison.

Last week, the group’s chief negotiator, Alvaro Jimenez, told Reuters that the group’s commanders would likely face jail time in a potential deal, raising the stakes for non-extradition guarantees.

A breakdown in talks could intensify the conflict between the state and the EGC, according to Crisis Group’s Dickinson: “If peace talks were to end … I do think that that would lead to an escalation in violence across the north of the country, particularly.”

Earlier this year, the EGC killed dozens of state security officials in a targeted campaign.

But Dickinson stressed that the FTO designation does not preclude peace talks, citing the successful 2016 deal with the FARC, which was then a US-designated FTO.

Russia has labelled Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) an “undesirable organisation”, essentially banning its operation in the country.

The designation appeared in a Ministry of Justice register on Tuesday after Vasily Piskarev, head of the Russian parliament’s Commission for the Investigation of Foreign Interference in Russia’s Internal Affairs, said DW was “at the forefront of hostile anti-Russian propaganda”.

He added that the “undesirable” label means any form of cooperation with DW from now on would be prosecuted.

Russia regularly designates entities it says undermine its constitutional order or national security as “undesirable”. The law specifies prison terms of up to five years for funding such activity and six years for organising it.

The broadcaster had already been declared a “foreign agent”, a label used against critics of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s policies.

DW Director General Barbara Massing said in a statement that the broadcaster would not be deterred.

“This latest attempt to silence free media highlights the Russian regime’s blatant disregard for press freedom and exposes its fear of independent information,” she said.

Massing said DW’s Russian-language service, despite censorship and blocking, was reaching a larger audience than ever before.

“We will continue to report independently on the war of aggression against Ukraine and other topics about which little information is available in Russia, so that people can form their own opinions,” she said.

The German government decried the decision. DW quoted government spokesman Stefan Kornelius as saying it demonstrates that “the Russian leadership fears independent information, especially about the war of aggression against Ukraine.”

Germany’s Federal Foreign Office said “freedom of the press is no longer guaranteed” in Russia, DW reported.

The broadcaster said audiences in Russia could still read and watch its coverage through alternative browsers or VPNs.

It said that this year, DW’s Russian-language content has reached 10 million weekly viewers, primarily through video content.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, its Justice Ministry has banned dozens of groups critical of the Kremlin or Russia’s conduct in the war.

Tuesday’s declaration came after Germany on Friday accused Russia of a cyberattack targeting its air traffic control system and of spreading disinformation before February’s general election.

Russia dismissed the claims as “absurd” and “baseless”.

The United States economy lost 41,000 jobs in October and November, and the unemployment rate has ticked up to its highest level since 2021 as the labour market cools amid ongoing economic uncertainty driven by tariffs and immigration policies.

In November, the US economy added 64,000 jobs after shedding 105,000 in October, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.6 percent, up from 4.4 percent in September. Because of the government shutdown in October and November, the US government was unable to gather key data used to gauge the state of the economy, including the unemployment rate for October.

October’s job losses reflected the 162,000 federal workers who lost their posts, a result of deferred buyouts of their contracts,  which expired at the end of September.

In November, there was a loss of another 6,000 government jobs. Gains were seen in the healthcare, social assistance and construction sectors. Healthcare added 46,000 jobs – higher than the 39,000 jobs gained in the sector on average each month over the past 12 months.

Construction added 28,000, consistent with average gains over the past year. The social assistance sector added 18,000 jobs.

Transportation and warehousing lost 18,000. Manufacturing jobs are also on the decline. The sector shed 5,000 jobs in November after cutting 9,000 jobs in October following a 5,000-job loss in September.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told reporters on Tuesday to expect to see more manufacturing jobs in the next six months.

His assessment was driven by growth in construction jobs and manufacturing investments, which signal job growth is on the way.

People working part time for economic reasons also rose to 5.5 million, which is up 909,000 from September.

“Today’s long-awaited jobs report confirms what we already suspected: [President Donald] Trump’s economy is stalling out and American workers are paying the price,” Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement.

“Far from sparking a manufacturing renaissance, Trump’s reckless trade agenda is bleeding working-class jobs, forcing layoffs, and raising prices for businesses and consumers alike.”

The data was released after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to 3.5-3.75 percent as labour conditions cool.

“The labour market has continued to cool gradually, … a touch more gradually than we thought,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said after the rate cut decision last week.

The Sudanese paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have carried out a systematic, weeks-long campaign to erase evidence of mass killings in the city of el-Fasher, according to a recent report released by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL).

“RSF’s mass killing campaign targeted civilians attempting to flee the city and those seeking refuge in the Daraja Oula neighborhood,” the report, released on Tuesday, said, referring to a neighbourhood in el-Fasher where massacres occurred. “RSF subsequently engaged in a systematic multi-week campaign to destroy evidence of its mass killings through burial, burning, and removal of human remains on a mass scale. This pattern of body disposal and destruction is ongoing.”

El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was formerly the Sudanese Armed Forces’s last stronghold in the region and had been besieged by the RSF for more than 18 months before falling on October 26. At least 1,500 people were killed in 48 hours after the RSF took control of el-Fasher, according to monitoring groups.

In Sudan, a civil war has been raging between the SAF and the RSF since April 15, 2023. The country has become home to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, according to the UN and humanitarian groups. Tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed in the war, while more than 13 million are displaced, and at least another 30 million are in need of vital humanitarian aid.

The Yale report, titled the “RSF’s Systematic Mass Killings and Body Disposal in el-Fasher, North Darfur between October 26 and November 28, 2025, relied on satellite imagery, open source data, local news reporting, and remote sensing data. Yale researchers, who have spent years tracking the war in Sudan, also found that the RSF engaged in certain patterns of killings, including the murder of people as they fled attacks, mass killings including door-to-door and execution-style killings, mass killings at sites affiliated with detention, and mass killings at military installations.

The researchers identified clusters of what they termed objects consistent with human remains in and around the vicinity of el-Fasher.

HRL found that in 72 percent of the incidents it observed by November 28, the size of these clusters had gotten smaller, while 38 percent were no longer visible at all, indicating an effort to conceal the killing of people.

It also recorded “at least 20 instances of burning objects and 8 instances of disturbed earth”.

The RSF paramilitary force grew out of a notorious government-linked militia called the Janjaweed. The Janjaweed were accused of carrying out a genocide during the Darfur conflict in the 2000s, and the RSF has been accused by the United States and others of committing genocide in the current war.

Earlier this month, a prominent Sudanese doctor’s group accused the RSF of raping at least 19 women as they overtook el-Fasher. As el-Fasher fell to the RSF in late October, the paramilitary group simultaneously launched an offensive against the Kordofan region, potentially further expanding the territory under its control.

Some experts have said they fear more massacres could occur in the fight for Kordofan. More than 116 people, including children, were killed in a recent attack on a pre-school and other sites in South Kordofan’s Kalogi.