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Excerpt:U.S. President Donald Trump called on Thursday for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine and said that both countries will be held accountable for the “sanctity of these direct negotiations.”Trump said in a social media post: “If the ceasefire is not respected, the U.S. and its partners will impose further sanctions.”
03 World
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Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has declared Alternative for Germany (AfD) a “right-wing extremist group” and “opposed to the basic democratic order,” allowing the country’s intelligence apparatus to intensify surveillance efforts against the nation’s second-largest political party.
Late last week BfV delivered its 1,100-page report (which is not publicly available) to the Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, who is leaving office after her party, the Social Democratic Party, finished third in Germany’s February elections.
Allegedly the report states, “Central to our assessment is the ethnically and ancestrally defined concept of the people that shapes the AfD, which devalues entire segments of the population in Germany and violates their human dignity.”
The report claims that AfD, which campaigned on immigration reform and the assimilation of Muslim migrants, seeks to exclude Muslims from society.
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Iran has been significantly expanding its covert nuclear weapons development since 2009, it has emerged. New intelligence uncovered by Iranian opposition group NCRI reveals that the regime’s Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) is running a secret programme to boost nuclear warhead capability, including mounting them on ballistic missiles able to strike targets over 1,900 miles away. The revelations come as Tehran prepares for a fourth round of proposed nuclear talks with the US in Muscat next week, with experts predicting they may derail negotiations.
At the heart of this effort is the Ivanaki (Eyvanekey) facility, a sprawling 2,500-acre site in Semnan Province, northern Iran. Publicly, it is presented as a paint and chemical production site operated by Diba Energy Sina. In reality, it is used for the construction of nuclear weapon components.
Operational since around 2013, Ivanaki is one of several covert facilities established after Iran’s previous nuclear weapons programme, the Amad Plan, was exposed and halted in 2003.
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Despite warnings from European Union officials, Slovakia’s Moscow-friendly prime minister, Robert Fico, shook hands with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin before becoming the only EU leader to attend Russia’s 9 May parade of military forces waging war on Ukraine.
The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, whose country aspires to join the 27-nation bloc, also accepted the Russian president’s invitation to attend the annual Victory Day celebrations marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war.
The pair were the only European leaders to travel to Moscow after strong injunctions from EU officials not to do so. On Thursday, the bloc’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said: “All those who truly support peace cannot stand side-by-side with Putin. Those who truly support peace should be in Ukraine tomorrow, not Moscow.”
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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised tests of short-range ballistic missile systems that simulated nuclear counterstrikes against U.S. and South Korean forces, state media said Friday, as the North continued to blame its rivals for escalating tensions through their joint military exercises.
The report came a day after South Korea’s military detected multiple launches from North Korea’s eastern coast and assessed that the tests could also be related to the country’s weapons exports to Russia during its war in Ukraine.