AFP USA

Colombia’s leftist president ramped up denunciations of Donald Trump’s anti-drug air strikes and swatted aside US threats to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid Thursday.Fueling a spat that threatens to shatter ties between the long-allied nations, Gustavo Petro said, “Mr Trump has slandered me and insulted Colombia.”Petro accused Trump of “carrying out extrajudicial executions” that “violate international law” by striking alleged drug-trafficking boats. The US has destroyed nine vessels and killed at least 37 people in under two months, according to US government accounts. “The deaths keep increasing like a taxi meter,” said Petro.At least one Colombian is among the dead, a fisherman who Petro now admits may have become involved in trafficking “intermittently” to escape poverty.Colombia has publicly demanded that Washington halt the attacks, infuriating Trump, who has branded Petro a “thug” and drug trafficker.  As retribution, Trump has announced an end to hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid to Colombia and threatened tariffs on Colombian goods.If enacted, the cuts would stifle decades of security cooperation to curb the flow of cocaine from the world’s biggest producer, Colombia, to its biggest consumer, the United States.- ‘Seize oil wells’ -Petro dismissed the impact of aid cuts, saying the cash goes to fund US non-governmental groups and to buy US arms. “What happens if they take away the aid? In my opinion, nothing,” he said.The United States provided Colombia with almost $750 million in aid in 2023, according to US figures.There are growing fears among Colombia’s allies that a withdrawal of US funds could harm years-long efforts to stop the country from sliding back into conflict.Despite peace accords a decade ago, pockets of the country are still controlled by guerrillas, cartels, and other armed groups.The United States and other donors provide military aid as well as funding for coca eradication and demobilization projects. Petro — a former guerrilla who will leave office after the May elections — has not shied away from the feud, which plays well with some of his core leftwing supporters.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt noted Petro’s renewed attacks Thursday: “I don’t think we’re seeing a de-escalation from the unhinged leader of Colombia right now.” Petro also lashed out at Trump’s September decision to put Colombia on a list of countries classified as not helping in the drug war.Describing it as “an insult,” he insisted Colombia was successfully countering cartels, despite cocaine production and exports hitting record levels. “We have been the most effective in cocaine seizures in world history,” Petro claimed, adding that Trump was being fed misinformation by his opponents on Colombia’s “far right.”He said they aimed to influence Colombia’s 2026 presidential election, to “strike Colombian progressivism and seize oil wells” in Venezuela.Trump has said he is preparing attacks against traffickers operating on land, claiming maritime routes are being reduced.”Any ground aggression is invasion and a rupture of national sovereignty,” warned Petro.Behind the scenes diplomats from both countries have been working to keep relations form rupturing completely.On Thursday a string of Colombian ministers met with the top US diplomat in Bogota, for what the Colombian foreign ministry called a “frank dialogue.”They announced Colombia’s ambassador to the United States Daniel Garcia-Pena would return to Washington, after being recalled in protest. 

Demolition workers have finished tearing down the White House’s entire East Wing to make way for US President Donald Trump’s giant new $300 million ballroom, satellite pictures showed Thursday.A gray and brown patch of rubble can now be seen in the area that used to be occupied by the iconic building, according to the images shared with AFP by Planet Labs PBC and dated Thursday.Satellite photos taken just under a month earlier show the wing that housed the offices of the US first lady intact.The complete destruction of part of one of the world’s most famous landmarks is a far more extensive demolition than previously announced by Trump — and happened virtually without warning.When he unveiled his plans in July, Trump said that the 90,000-square foot ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building” and said it would be “near it but not touching it.” But after work started this week, Trump said Wednesday that he had decided after consulting architects that “really knocking it down” was preferable to a partial demolition.Trump also said that the new ballroom would cost $300 million, raising the cost from the $250 million quoted by the White House days before, and the $200 million it cited in July.White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told an AFP reporter in a briefing that $300 million was now the definitive number but said that “it’s not going to cost the taxpayers a dime.”Trump says the ballroom, which will be used for hosting state dinners and other large events, will be funded entirely by private donors and by himself.The White House released a list of the donors to AFP on Thursday. They include US tech titans Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, as well as defense giant Lockheed Martin.Individual donors include the family of Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who were made famous as jilted investors in the movie “The Social Network” about the birth of Facebook.

“Hands off!” chanted hundreds of New Yorkers furious over a roundup of street vendors by federal agents as part of US President Donald Trump’s escalating campaign against undocumented migrants.Masked federal officers are often found in the halls of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where immigrants attempting to remain in the United States attend court hearings. But on Tuesday, agents hit Canal Street in Chinatown, picking up nine African men suspected of being in the country illegally during an operation Homeland Security said focused on counterfeit goods.Four people who sought to interrupt the arrests were also detained, but later released without charge. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Todd Lyons subsequently announced that arrests in New York would increase as it is a sanctuary city — meaning local police do not cooperate with federal enforcement. Lyons added that his agency’s operations were not “random” but “intelligence driven.” – ‘Get out of New York’ – Several dozen New Yorkers took to the streets on Tuesday night to protest the arrests, followed by hundreds more on Wednesday.Protester Lorelei Crean, 18, warned that immigration officers had “been taking over all over the country.” “Now it’s coming to New York, and this is New York showing and saying that ICE has to get out of New York,” Crean said. Political and religious leaders spoke out during a briefing Thursday, alongside City Council speaker Adrienne Adams. “We have gathered in unison to send a clear message to the Trump administration: Hands off New York City. Stop threatening our public safety and our economy,” Adams said. Since Trump’s return to the White House in January, National Guard troops have deployed in several major Democratic cities including Los Angeles, Washington and Memphis.”New York City does not want or need a military or federal occupation,” Adams added. New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Trump foe who has been indicted on charges she says are politically motivated, is seeking digital evidence of immigration raids in the city. – ‘Declare war’ – Migrant roundups topped the agenda at Wednesday’s final debate among candidates for New York City’s mayoral election on November 4. All three leading candidates oppose the deployment of federal immigration officers in the city.The frontrunner, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, called ICE “a reckless entity that cares little for the law and even less for the people that they’re supposed to serve.”Mamdani has accused Trump of “looking to declare war” on New Yorkers and insisted he would only cooperate with the Republican president on bringing down the city’s soaring cost of living.Mamdani’s closest rival, former state governor Andrew Cuomo, said that as mayor, he would “have to confront President Trump,” while Republican Curtis Sliwa said “negotiation” would be the only solution.

At least one US B-1B bomber flew over the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela Thursday, flight tracking data showed, the second such show of force by US military aircraft in a week.The bomber flight — which President Donald Trump later falsely claimed did not occur — comes as Washington carries out a military campaign against alleged drug traffickers in the region, deploying forces that have sparked fears in Caracas that regime change is the ultimate goal.Data from tracking website Flightradar24 showed a B-1B flying toward the Venezuelan coast on Thursday afternoon before making a U-turn and heading north, after which it disappeared from view.Asked during a White House event about reporting that the United States had sent B-1Bs near Venezuela, Trump responded that “it’s false,” while adding the United States is “not happy with Venezuela for a lot of reasons.”The latest flight came about a week after US-based B-52 bombers circled off Venezuela’s coast for several hours.The US military described that mission as a demonstration of Washington’s commitment “to proactively deter adversary threats, enhance crew training, and ensure the global force readiness necessary to respond to any contingency or challenge.”The United States has deployed stealth warplanes and Navy ships as part of what it calls counter-narcotics efforts, but has yet to release evidence that its targets — eight boats and a semi-submersible — were smuggling drugs.The US strikes, which began on September 2, have killed at least 37 people, according to an AFP tally based on US figures.Regional tensions have flared as a result of the campaign, with Venezuela accusing the United States of plotting to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro, who said Wednesday that his country has 5,000 Russian man-portable surface-to-air missiles to counter US forces.

Brazilian senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, on Thursday urged the United States to bomb boats in Rio de Janeiro to fight drug trafficking, as it has done in the Caribbean and Pacific.Washington has deployed stealth warplanes and Navy ships in the Caribbean as part of what it calls counter-narcotics efforts, destroying nine vessels and killing at least 37 people, according to US figures. President Donald Trump’s government alleges the boats were involved in drug trafficking, although it has not shared evidence to back that assertion and some family members of those killed say they were innocent fishermen.Flavio Bolsonaro said he was “envious” in a post on the X social media platform responding to one by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, featuring a video of the moment a boat sailing at sea is hit by a missile and set ablaze.”I heard there are boats like this here in Rio de Janeiro, in Guanabara Bay, flooding Brazil with drugs. Wouldn’t you like to spend a few months here helping us fight these terrorist organizations?”Trump last week said he had authorized covert CIA action against Venezuela and was considering strikes against alleged drug cartels on land.The US actions — which killed at least one Colombian — have also enraged that country’s leftist President Gustavo Petro and shattered ties between Washington and Bogota.Petro said Trump was “carrying out extrajudicial executions” that “violate international law” by striking alleged drug-trafficking boats. Washington has not released evidence to support its assertion that the targets of its strikes are drug smugglers, and experts say the summary killings are illegal even if they hit confirmed narcotics traffickers.The Bolsonaro family has close ties to Trump.The former president was sentenced last month to 27 years in prison over a botched coup attempt in what Trump said was a “witch hunt” against his ally.Another son of the former president, Eduardo, lobbied hard for Washington to impose punitive tariffs on Brazil and sanctions against top officials.However, tensions between Brasilia and Washington have thawed in recent weeks with a potential meeting on the cards between Trump and leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at a summit starting this weekend in Malaysia.

Trinidadian Rishi Samaroo’s relatives are adamant: he was a fisherman, not a drug trafficker as the United States claimed after it destroyed his boat in Caribbean waters.Samaroo, 41, was one of six people killed in the attack announced last week by US President Donald Trump himself.Rehabilitated after a criminal youth, “Rishi was a loving, kind, caring, sharing person… He would do anything for anybody that asked him,” his sister Sunita Korasingh told AFP Thursday after his funeral in a suburb of Port of Spain, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The United States has deployed a military fleet in the Caribbean in what it has called an anti-drug operation but Venezuela says it really aims to unseat President Nicolas Maduro.The Pentagon has announced nine attacks on alleged drug boats in recent weeks in the Caribbean and now the Pacific, claiming close to 40 lives. The victims’ governments and families say most were civilians — many of them fishermen. The US has made public no evidence to back up its claims of drug trafficking involving the vessels.In a question addressed to Trump, 38-year-old Korasingh said: “If he was 100 percent (sure) that this boat… had drugs in it, why didn’t he stop this vessel and search it and all the rest of vessels instead of blowing up people… like dogs?” If drugs are found on these boats, she continued, “you could lock them up… within the law… but you can’t just be going around blowing up” boats.- “We all make mistakes” About 30 people gathered Wednesday night for Samaroo’s wake in a tent in a poor neighborhood.Neighbors say shootings are frequent in the area, host to several drug gangs and a significant community of Venezuelan migrants. Few people wanted to speak to AFP. A scholar known as a pandit led the Hindu ceremony, one of the most practiced religions in Trinidad and Tobago. Korasingh made a banner featuring Samaroo with angel wings standing on clouds with a blue sky in the background and the words: “Gone but never forgotten.”His family said he had served a 15-year sentence for homicide committed as a teenager, then moved to Venezuela. “As human beings, we make mistakes at a young age… We learn from our mistakes and grow,” said Korasingh of her brother’s criminal past.When he got out, he became a fisherman and a goat farmer and sold cheese.Drugs? Never. “He never even smoked a cigarette in his whole life,” she insisted. “He never even drank a beer in his life.”His family says Samaroo was on his way home from Venezuela when he was killed.- Last call -Attendees at the wake played cards, drank alcohol and coffee, and talked about Samaroo. Another sister, Sallycar Korasingh, said she received a video call from him minutes before he set out by boat on that fateful night of October 12.”We spoke and he showed me he was going on the boat. This was just before midnight… I took a picture of him,” the 31-year-old told AFP.She said did not know what Samaroo’s relationship was with 26-year-old Chad Joseph, also killed in the strike.According to Trinidadian press, Joseph had been accused of drug trafficking in the past but never convicted. But his family and neighbors insisted to AFP last week Joseph had no links to drug trafficking, and was also a fisherman and farmer.Samaroo had three children in Venezuela with three different women, according to family members.Trinidadian police are investigating the strike.

US President Donald Trump’s administration sounded the alarm Thursday over potential turmoil at airports as the government shutdown threatens to drag into November, warning of ruined holiday plans for millions of Americans. With the standoff in Congress over health care spending now in its fourth week, Trump’s Republicans and the opposition Democrats are facing increasing pressure to end a crisis that has crippled public services.More than 60,000 air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers are working without pay, and the White House warned that increasing absenteeism could mean chaos at check-in lines.  Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters the shutdown was already causing “severe impacts” at airports nationwide.”If the Democrats continue to keep the government closed, we fear there will be significant flight delays, disruptions and cancelations in major airports across the country this holiday season,” she said.Airport workers calling in sick rather than working without pay — leading to significant delays — was a major factor in Trump bringing an end to the 2019 shutdown, the longest in history at 35 days.In Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson told a news conference that airport staffing shortages were now the reason for more than 50 percent of delays, a huge increase on the normal statistic of five percent.Some 19,000 flights were held up from Saturday to Monday, he said, warning that this rate was “only going to increase,” with airport workers taking on second jobs as Uber drivers or delivering food.”The longer the shutdown goes on, and as fewer air traffic controllers show up to work, the safety of the American people is thrown further into jeopardy,” he said.- Politically toxic -Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, appearing alongside Johnson, said staff in control towers were voicing deepening anger over the shutdown, which has led to an estimated 1.4 million federal workers going without pay.”I want them coming to their facilities and controlling the airspace, but they’re having to make decisions about how they spend their time, to make sure they put food on their table, feed their kids and support their family members,” he said.With no end to the shutdown in sight, the gridlock is beginning to take a personal toll on lawmakers, who fly out of Washington most weekends to return to their home districts. During an earnings call with analysts on Thursday American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, five miles from the capital, had suffered “operating delays and issues with air traffic control.”After weeks of failed daily votes on a House-passed resolution to reopen the government, the Senate also rejected a bill Thursday to guarantee pay for troops and some federal employees who have been working for nothing. Republicans had hoped that a blockade on troop pay would be seen by some Democrats as politically toxic and might be a catalyst to finally break the party’s united stance on the shutdown. All but three Democrats voted against the bill, however, arguing that it would have given Trump too much sway over who gets paid and who doesn’t, while offering no help for 750,000 workers placed on enforced leave without pay. Democrats say the only path to reopening the government is a Trump-led negotiation over their demands to extend subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans — the key sticking point in the standoff.But Trump has insisted he won’t negotiate with Democrats until the shutdown is over.

US President Donald Trump said Thursday he was postponing a “surge” of federal forces into San Francisco, after repeatedly musing about sending troops into a city Republicans routinely paint as a crime-ridden hellhole.Trump said he had been readying to order action at the weekend but had been persuaded to step back after speaking to “friends of mine who live in the area” and to Mayor Daniel Lurie.Lurie “asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around. I told him I think he is making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.”Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”Lurie, a Democrat who this week warned that masked immigration agents were using tactics designed to create a backlash, said Thursday he had told Trump San Francisco was on the up, and had been assured the federal government was stepping back.”The president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco,” Lurie said.”Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning.”San Francisco serves as a shorthand in Republican circles for everything that is wrong with American cities.The tech hub features regularly on right-wing cable news as a place of spiraling criminality and consequence-free drug use among a rampaging population of homeless people.The reality is more nuanced: unlike a lot of American cities whose down-at-heel districts might be easily avoided, many of San Francisco’s problems are concentrated in an area next to the business district and near places popular with tourists.While this makes the behavior more visible, statistics reveal the city’s crime rates are plunging.Figures from the San Francisco Police Department and the California Department of Justice show the number of murders is at a seven-decade low, while robberies are down to levels not seen in 40 years.Along with an aggressive campaign to arrest and deport migrants using masked agents, Trump has angered Democratic Party-controlled cities like Los Angeles and Washington by sending in National Guard troops.His supporters say this is necessary to stem rising crime and should spread to other cities, but opponents say it is an authoritarian move intended to inflame tensions.

Apple lost a UK lawsuit Thursday which accuses the US tech giant of abusing the dominant position of its App Store, with claimants seeking more than £1.5 billion ($2 billion) in damages.The Competition Appeal Tribunal found that Apple had shut out competition in the app distribution market and charged app developers “excessive and unfair” commissions. Apple said it “strongly disagrees” with the ruling and intended to appeal.This is the second setback in two days for Apple.On Wednesday, the UK’s competition watchdog said it had “strategic market status” in smartphones and tablets alongside Google, due to the two firms’ dominant positions.The Competition and Markets Authority said Apple and Google would face tougher regulation of services on their mobile platforms, which it said risked “limiting innovation and competition”.The new measures are similar to a tech competition law from the European Union, the Digital Markets Act, which carries the potential for hefty financial penalties — and could force the tech giants to open up their platforms. The app store case was brought by King’s College London academic Rachael Kent and the law firm Hausfeld & Co on behalf of millions of UK iPhone and iPad users.Under UK law, in this type of class action all potentially affected persons are included in the procedure by default, and may benefit from possible compensation, unless they voluntarily opt out.- YouTube and Candy Crush -At the hearings, which opened in January, claimants argued that Apple users were overcharged by the company “due to its ban on rival app store platforms.”A 30-percent surcharge that the company “imposes” on apps purchased through Apple’s App Store leads to consumers “paying more”, they said.At the heart of the claimants’ case was that Apple used the App Store to exclude competitors, forcing users to use its system and boosting profits in the process.Apple’s “restrictions cannot sensibly be justified as being necessary or proportionate to deliver the benefits which Apple puts forward as flowing from its objective of an integrated and centralised system,” the Tribunal found.It ruled that in cases where Apple overcharged app developers and passed on the extra costs to consumers, users were entitled to a refund with interest.Law firm Hausfeld hailed the judgement as a “great outcome for UK consumers and businesses”.It “highlights the importance of the collective actions regime for UK consumers and businesses,” the firm said in a statement, adding that the refund could apply to popular apps like Candy Crush and YouTube.Apple, which had denounced the trial as “baseless”, maintained that its App Store “faces vigorous competition from many other platforms” and insisted that 85% of apps on the App Store were free.Regulators around the world have increased scrutiny and investigations of Apple’s practices in recent years, particularly regarding its app store.The American giant is facing another £785 million lawsuit in the United Kingdom over the fees charged to developers. In April, Apple was also fined €500 million (£436 million) in the EU for preventing developers from steering customers outside its App Store to access cheaper deals, in violation of the bloc’s rules. Apple has appealed the fine.

A record-breaking marine heat wave in 2023 left two ecologically vital coral species “functionally extinct” in Florida’s Coral Reef, a study said Thursday, highlighting the growing dangers a warming climate poses for the world’s oceans.Elkhorn and staghorn corals, which take their names from the antler shapes they resemble and belong to the Acropora family, are fast-growing “reef builder” species that long dominated waters off Florida and in the Caribbean.Both species — but particularly elkhorn — created complex branch-like structures akin to the dense canopy of a forest, providing crucial habitats for fish and acting as natural barriers against strong waves and coastal erosion.The pair have been declining since the 1970s from threats including climate change, disease and unsustainable fishing, which combined to leave them critically endangered. But the 2023 heat wave — which persisted for almost three months and brought record-high ocean temperatures off Florida — proved a death knell for the two species in the Florida Coral Reef, the world’s third-largest barrier reef. “The numbers of these species that are left on the reef today are now so low that they’re no longer able to perform their functional role in the ecosystem,” Ross Cunning, a research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and co–first author of the paper that was published in Science, told AFP.”This is something that demonstrates the level of climate pressures on our natural world and something we all need to take extremely seriously,” he added.Research to determine how many remain in the Caribbean is underway, but the picture appears bleak there, too.- Restoration efforts -Coral are made up of tiny individual animals called polyps, which maintain a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae that live within their tissues. When the algae are stressed by heat or pollution, however, they leave, causing the coral to “bleach” and become vulnerable to disease and death.Recovery is sometimes possible. But the new research, which involved diver surveys to track more than 52,000 colonies of staghorn and elkhorn coral across 391 sites, unfortunately confirmed scientists’ worst fears: the two species were nearly totally wiped out, with mortality ranging 98-100 percent in the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas off the state’s south coast.They fared better off southeast Florida, on the northern extent of the reef tract, where mortality rates were around 38 percent thanks to slightly cooler conditions. In a blow to conservation efforts the losses impacted both wild and restored Acropora, grown in nurseries then planted onto the reef as part of restoration projects that have been in place since the 2000s. It’s not yet well understood what made the elkhorn and staghorn coral more sensitive to heat than other coral species that did not experience the same catastrophic losses. Scientists have been safeguarding many of Florida’s remaining Acropora in aquariums and nurseries, and have since added survivors of the 2023 heat wave. The idea is to study the genes that helped them withstand heat, and possibly introduce new genetic diversity from populations outside of Florida that might boost resilience. “Restoration is more critical than ever to preventing a complete extinction,” said Cunning. “But we know that the way that we perform restoration fundamentally needs to change — we can’t continue just planting out as much coral as possible.”Ultimately, efforts to help coral adapt must go hand-in-hand with action to curb climate change and save the reefs — which support a quarter of all ocean life, provide food and income for hundreds of millions of people, protect shorelines from waves and floods and are even responsible for beloved sandy white beaches.”Coral reefs may be some of the first ecosystems on our planet to be feeling impacts at this level from extreme heat waves due to climate change,” said Cunning. “But what does that mean for the next ecosystem?”