Ireland, Norway, and Spain have announced they will formally recognise a Palestinian state from 28 May.

Spain and Ireland said the decision was not against Israel nor in favour of Hamas, but rather in support of peace.

Israel reacted angrily, warning the move would mean more instability in the region and recalling its ambassadors to all three countries.

Both Hamas and its rival, the Palestinian Authority, have welcomed the recognition.

The post Ireland, Norway and Spain to recognise Palestinian state first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

“The 15 intelligence officers have been engaging in activities that are not compatible with their diplomatic status,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Anniken Huitfeldt said in a statement.

According to Norway’s Foreign Affairs ministry, the government decision is a response to “the changed security situation in Europe, which has led to an increased intelligence threat from Russia.”

The 15 intelligence officers have been declared persona non grata and will leave Norway soon.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2023/04/13/Norway-Russian-intelligence-officers-expelled/8771681389413/

__________________________________________________________________

[Disclaimer]

The post Norway expels 15 Russian spies working under diplomatic cover first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Norway has discovered what it calls “substantial” levels of metals and minerals on the floor of its extended continental shelf – including rare earth metals, officials have revealed.

The discovery of these elements could help produce parts for wind turbines and electric car batteries, which require things like neodymium and dysprosium to be manufactured.

Officials also found there is 38 million tonnes of copper on the seabed, which equates to twice what is mined globally every year, and around 45 million tonnes of zinc in polymetallic sulphides.

Magnesium, niobium and cobalt, which are on the European list of critical minerals, were also discovered.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/norway-discovers-substantial-levels-of-metals-and-minerals-on-its-seabed-12796586?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

__________________________________________________________________

[Disclaimer]

The post Norway discovers ‘substantial’ levels of metals and minerals on its seabed first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

AFTER TROOPS WITHDRAWAL, ASYLUM-SEEKER BOATS ARE LIKELY TO SET SAIL… FOR EUROPEAN SHORES -© Provided by Crikey

That period, of course, was the so-called refugee crisis. Now, Europe is facing a new refugee crisis as a result of President Joe Biden’s decision to pull US forces out of Afghanistan. Washington’s international allies have no choice but to pull out too.

“In together, out together” has been the mantra because the war was built around US manpower and equipment. Although Biden claims to have ended the Afghanistan War, nobody — especially not Afghans — is fooled, and Washington’s best friends are being left to pick up the pieces. That task will affect ordinary Europeans, who will face the political fallout of an inevitable new refugee crisis, and it could force European governments to send their troops back.

© Provided by Crikey

“We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build. And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country,” Biden said on July 8, announcing the US military is on track to meet its target of completing the withdrawal by August 31.

America’s allies didn’t go to Afghanistan to nation-build either. Indeed, it was unclear to many citizens of EU and NATO member states and partners why, precisely, their troops were being sent there.

© Provided by Crikey

‘Moral obligation’: John Howard intervenes to prick Payne and ScoMo’s conscience on Afghans who risked everything for us  Read More

But for nearly two decades, allies as different in size as Germany and Estonia have loyally been providing troops to a war that is called a multinational effort but is really Washington’s war. One year ago, for example, Germany provided 1300 of Resolute Support Mission’s 15,937 troops, making it Afghanistan’s second-largest troop provider after the US. The United Kingdom was third at 950 troops, followed by Italy at 895 troops. Virtually every US ally has lost soldiers in this war.

Precisely because it has been America’s war, it was perhaps unsurprising that Biden could simply decide it was over. Now, allied troops are pulling out alongside their US colleagues. On June 30, the last Bundeswehr soldiers to leave Afghanistan arrived in Germany. In his July 8 statement, Biden said he’d “made the decision to end the war”. He also promised that the US “will continue to provide civilian and humanitarian assistance, including speaking out for the rights of women and girls”.

But what matters isn’t whether Biden believes he’s ended the war: it’s whether Afghans feel he’s done so. Many seem to have made up their minds, and their decision could have a major impact on US allies in Europe.

Afghans are already fleeing to neighbouring countries; they include more than 1000 Afghan soldiers who have escaped to Tajikistan, causing that country to mobilize reservists to patrol the border. “The brunt will be felt in the neighbouring countries: Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan,” noted Stefano Stefanini, a former ambassador of Italy to NATO and former national security adviser to the Italian president.

“To some extent, the US is sheltered by distance — though Washington is providing special visas to the many Afghans who translated, drove, and worked for the Americans. But many refugees, at great cost and risk, will try to get to Europe. It might not be the most direct route, but Italy, via Libya, will be the main landing point. Then the new flow from the Hindu Kush will work its way north to Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the UK.”

In 2015, Germany and Sweden were the two most popular countries for asylum-seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Although the recipient countries have since worked hard to integrate the asylum-seekers, the challenge has been made more difficult by the fact that many asylum-seekers arrived alone. In Sweden, more than 35,000 asylum-seekers who arrived in 2015 registered as unaccompanied minors; 92% of them were men and two-thirds were Afghan.

Europe’s proximity — compared to the US — is, of course, another reason so many Afghans have fled there. The same goes for Syrians and Iraqis, who escaped there when the Islamic State conquered their home towns, another outcome of failed US wars. Vietnamese boat people, in turn, made the perilous journey not just to the US but also towards Europe when America lost the war in Vietnam.

Picture yourself as a European policymaker now facing a massive refugee challenge not of your own making. As Stefanini pointed out, “at NATO, European allies were the least enthusiastic about leaving Afghanistan unconditionally — for a reason”.

Pal Jonson, the chairperson of the Swedish parliament’s defense committee, is equally worried about the international pullout’s implications, which was triggered by the United States. Sweden is already struggling to integrate the more than 160,000 asylum-seekers who arrived during the 2015 refugee crisis among others who came in subsequent years. (In 2019, the US, with a population more than 30 times larger than that of Sweden, admitted 29,916 refugees.)

“If the security situation deteriorates further, it could certainly create a very complicated situation for us,” Jonson said. “We already have over 60,000 Afghan nationals living in Sweden, and that number has doubled since 2015. Thousands of Afghans have been living in Sweden illegally since their asylum applications were turned down by the Swedish Migration Agency.”

While the majority of refugees are law-abiding, sadly some of them have started to show up in crime statistics; 58% of people convicted for rape in Sweden between 2013 and 2018 were born in other countries, with Afghans the second most common nationality among perpetrators after Swedes.

The challenge is not just housing and looking after the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who successfully make it to Europe; it’s also handling the ones who don’t qualify for asylum. (There’s general consensus that Afghan military interpreters and their families should be granted asylum by the countries whose soldiers they worked with.)

Over the past few years, various European countries have strengthened their asylum rules, making it harder for people from Afghanistan to be approved. In Denmark, for example, 46% of Afghan asylum-seekers were approved in 2007; by 2017, the figure had fallen to 16%. That’s the lowest acceptance rate in the EU; Italy has the highest at more than 90%. Denmark and the Netherlands are also the only EU member states to return families to Afghanistan, the Norwegian Organisation for Asylum Seekers notes. But with Afghanistan now edging back toward civil war, it may no longer be safe for asylum-seekers to return — if it ever was.

Biden has put his closest allies in a bind. Closing their doors to most Afghans would very possibly be a violation of international human rights law. Even if doing so is legal, it’s almost a moot point: on July 11, the Afghan government announced it will no longer allow Afghans who’ve been denied asylum in the EU back into the country. This will, of course, stop repatriation flights from the EU. But Sweden, Germany, Italy, and others also can’t accommodate large numbers of new arrivals, and even a less-than-dramatic increase would strengthen populist parties’ already strong position against immigration.

© Provided by Crikey

He cleared landmines for Australian troops. Now he’s stuck in Kabul – Read more

I asked Mohammad, a young Syrian who arrived in Sweden in 2014 and asked that I not use his surname because he’s now a public servant, about the prospect of a new wave of Afghans. “It would be difficult,” he said. “Sweden has already received large numbers of refugees, and society hasn’t yet managed to include and integrate these people and get them to stand on their own two feet.” Mohammad would know; he now works as an integration coordinator for a Swedish municipality.

European governments will thus unsurprisingly try to prevent a new Afghan refugee wave. “It’s obviously of strategic interest for the West in general — and countries such as Sweden and Germany in particular — that Afghanistan does not implode,” Jonson said. “We need some form of plan B to assure that this does not happen.”

There seems to be only one way out: for America’s allies to deploy a new stability mission to Afghanistan. Realistically, such a mission would have to be led by the UK. I put the question to retired General Richard Barrons, who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflicts before going on to lead the UK’s Joint Forces Command.

It won’t happen, he said: “There’s no public pressure for such a mission. It would be massively expensive, very difficult to do without Pakistan’s full cooperation with logistics, and Europe doesn’t even have the equipment or enablers ready for such an act at sufficient scale and endurance. There is not even a secure point of entry now that Bagram and Kandahar [air bases] have gone.”

Instead of fighting to keep refugees in Afghanistan, Barrons predicted, European countries will try to keep them out of Europe. “Europe’s only martial role will be to use specialist resources to bear down on sources of terrorism arising in Afghanistan that could threaten European homelands and interests. That is classic intelligence/special forces/Afghan partner work,” he explained.

Under such a scheme, European special forces and intelligence officers could, if invited by Kabul, apply Band-Aids to help stem terrorism. As it happens, a number of European countries have excellent special forces. Small numbers of Europeans without military muscle trying to stave off the worst in Afghanistan may seem a feeble hope — but countries facing not just refugee waves but voter unease are likely to leap at even the feeblest options.

“It’s time to end America’s longest war,” Biden said on April 14. For ordinary Americans, it may feel like the war is over when the last US troops leave Afghanistan on August 31. But it won’t feel like it for ordinary Swedes, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and other Europeans, especially with their countries and public finances already weakened by COVID-19.

Should their budgets become overstretched, integration programs fail, and populist parties sail to victory, Biden may have to extend a helping hand to America’s friends just as they did to the US 20 years ago.

Elisabeth Braw is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on defence against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and grey-zone threats. She is also a member of the UK National Preparedness Commission. She tweets at @elisabethbraw

The post By withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden could spark the world’s next refugee crisis appeared first on Crikey.

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/by-withdrawing-from-afghanistan-biden-could-spark-the-worlds-next-refugee-crisis/ar-AAMatpb

The post By withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden could spark the world’s next refugee crisis first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Countries are taking extraordinary measures to slow the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these measures limit individual freedom and may also violate rights guaranteed by national constitutions. Italy’s complete lockdown, enforced by criminal penalties, probably violates its constitution. Norwegian lawmakers have proposed an emergency law that temporarily gives the government unprecedented power to override the constitution and national laws to thwart the virus. Meanwhile, without consulting the Israeli Parliament, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enacted emergency regulations allowing for stunning surveillance power to combat the virus. Never one to waste a good crisis, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán will likely be able to rule by decree for the foreseeable future.

The United States now faces this same dilemma: To what extent should the Constitution be violated to fight the coronavirus? Lockdowns, especially ones that apply to people who haven’t tested positive for the virus, are constitutionally questionable. The threat by the leaders of Newark, New Jersey, to prosecute residents who spread false information about the virus—if carried out—could violate the First Amendment. Some people in California have challenged the city of San Jose’s authority to force a gun shop to close, citing their right to arm themselves. Perhaps most alarming, the U.S. Department of Justice “has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.”

To assess how Americans weigh the trade-off between preserving civil liberties and halting the spread of the coronavirus, we conducted a survey last week, just as state and local governments were beginning to implement their most restrictive policies yet. The survey reveals a remarkable willingness to tolerate civil-rights violations in order to confront the pandemic, regardless of party affiliation.

We presented a nationally representative sample of 3,000 U.S. residents with eight possible policy responses to the outbreak, all of which may be unconstitutional, including forced quarantine in a government facility, criminal penalties for spreading misinformation, bans against certain people entering the country, and conscription of health-care workers. We also asked our sample to imagine that public-health officials had reviewed the policies and estimated that each would likely save some number of lives, hypothetical figures that we provided.

A majority of respondents supported all eight of these policies, most by considerable margins. The proposals with the lowest support were seizing businesses and banning all citizens and noncitizens outside the country from entering, but these policies still had 58 and 63 percent support, respectively. The proposals with the highest levels of support were banning non-citizens from entering the country (85 percent) and conscripting health-care professionals to work despite risks to their own health (78 percent). Both policies burden a defined minority of the population, so it’s not surprising that large majorities support them. But criminalizing speech based on its content, an idea antithetical to modern American constitutionalism, was also very popular: About 70 percent of respondents supported restricting people’s ability to say things that may qualify as misinformation. Likewise, 77 percent of respondents support suspending all religious services and gatherings, thereby restricting religious freedom. And even when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution, the majority supported all eight of them—even the speech restrictions.

Perhaps the most striking feature of our results is the broad bipartisan endorsement of these liberty-restricting policies. Like other surveys, ours reflected a huge gap between Democrats and Republicans in approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic: 34 percent of Democrats expressed approval, while 88 percent of Republicans did. One might have reasonably concluded that different policy preferences were driving these responses: that Democrats want aggressive government intervention, which they feel the president has failed to deliver, while Republicans—encouraged by Trump’s early dismissal of the outbreak—prefer a wait-and-see or laissez-faire approach.

The post Red and Blue America Agree That Now Is the Time to Violate the Constitution first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden released a joint statement asserting it’s of “the utmost importance to the preservation and full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) on Iran’s nuclear program by all parties involved.”

“In light of the continuous European support for the agreement and the ongoing efforts to implement the economic part of it and to facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran, we are now in the process of becoming shareholders of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) subject to completion of national procedures,” the statement reads.

The Foreign Minister of Finland Pekka Haavisto alongside Foreign Minister of Iran Mohammed Javad Zarif. AP Photo

Instex is an initiative set up by France, Germany and the UK in January 2019 to provide humanitarian and sanctions relief to Iran after in November 2018 the SWIFT network suspended Iranian banks under Washington pressure, months after Trump pulled the US out of the nuclear deal.

Though the new alternative financial device had shaky beginnings amid further aggressive threats from the US administration, it continued through a trial phase even though Tehran officials had complained it appeared ‘too little, too late’.

But now as this latest six-country statement announces, it will serve as the European vehicle to “facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran,” while also providing incentive for Tehran to return to its commitments under the JCPOA, specifically to recently breached uranium enrichment limits. Upon the announcement, US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell lambasted the move, saying:

Terrible timing – why fund the Iranian regime while its killing the Iranian people and shutting off the internet? You should be standing for human rights not funding the abusers.

The post US Enraged After 6 More EU Nations Join INSTEX To Bypass Iran Sanctions first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

A woman holds a poster during the funeral prayers in absentia for Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed last month in the Saudi Arabia consulate, in Istanbul, November 16, 2018. (AP/Emrah Gurel)

Denmark is the latest nation to suspend arms exports to Saudi Arabia, in light of the brutal killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives and the kingdom’s role in the war in Yemen, the Reuters news agency reported Thursday.

The move, announced by the Danish foreign minister, also covers so-called dual-use materials that can be applied to military purposes.

Germany and Norway have also stopped supplying arms to Saudi Arabia, and earlier this month, Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau said he would weigh doing so.

Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen gives a press conference in Copenhagen, on October 30, 2018. (Martin Sylvest/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP)

Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in early October by agents of the Saudi government. His body has not yet been found.

US President Donald Trump, however, said Tuesday that Khashoggi’s murder would not derail the US-Saudi relationship, in a move the American leader suggested also benefited Israel.

“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said in a statement.

“They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region,” the US president added.

10-year-old Ghazi Saleh, who weighs just 10 kilograms, lies on a bed at Al-Mudhafar hospital in Taez, Yemen, on November 19, 2018. (Marzooq AL-JABIRY / AFP)

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition against Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels in a war that is estimated by Save the Children to have caused
the death by extreme hunger or disease of at least 85,000 children aged under the age of 5.

After nearly four years, since the conflict began, up to 14 million people are at risk of famine, according to the United Nations.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced that peace talks to end the conflict would begin in Sweden next month.

Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/denmark-joins-germany-norway-in-suspending-arms-sales-to-saudis/

The post Denmark joins Germany, Norway in suspending arms sales to Saudis first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.