HomeSeek

By Jake Spring

(Reuters) – The world’s oceans grew to their warmest and most acidic levels on record last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday, as United Nations officials warned that war in Ukraine threatened global climate commitments.

Oceans saw the most striking extremes as the WMO detailed a range of turmoil wrought by climate change in its annual “State of the Global Climate” report. It said melting ice sheets had helped push sea levels to new heights in 2021.

“Our climate is changing before our eyes. The heat trapped by human-induced greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement.

The report follows the latest UN climate assessment, which warned that humanity must drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions or face its catastrophic changes to the world’s climate.

Taalas told reporters there was scant airtime for climate challenges as other crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine, grabbed headlines.

Selwin Hart, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s special adviser on climate action, criticizing countries reneging on climate commitments due to the conflict, which has pushed up energy prices and prompted European nations to seek to replace Russia as an energy supplier.

DANGEROUS INCREASE

“We are … seeing many choices being made by many majors which, quite frankly, have the potential to lock in a high-carbon, high-polluting future and will place our climate goals at risk,” Hart told reporters.

On Tuesday, global equity index giant MSCI warned that the world faces a dangerous increase in greenhouse gases if Russian gas is replaced with coal.

The WMO report said levels of climate-warming carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere in 2021 surpassed previous records.

Globally, the average temperature last year was 1.11 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average – as the world edges closer to the 1.5C threshold beyond which the effects of warming are expected to become drastic.

“It is just a matter of time before we see another warmest year on record,” Taalas said.

Oceans bear much of the brunt of the warming and emissions. The bodies of water absorb around 90% of the Earth’s accumulated heat and 23% of the carbon dioxide emissions from human activity.

The ocean has warmed markedly faster in the last 20 years, hitting a new high in 2021, and is expected to become even warmer, the report said. That change would likely take centuries or millennia to reverse, it noted.

The ocean is also now its most acidic in at least 26,000 years as it absorbs and reacts with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Sea level has risen 4.5 cm (1.8 inches) in the last decade, with the annual increase from 2013 to 2021 more than double what it was from 1993 to 2002.

The WMO also listed individual extreme heatwaves, wildfires, floods and other climate-linked disasters around the world, noting reports of more than $100 billion in damages.

(Reporting by Jake Spring and Rachel More; Editing by Katy Daigle and Janet Lawrence)

Finland and Sweden have formally submitted applications to join NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, in a move that will redraw the geopolitical map of northern Europe.

The decisions by the two historically neutral countries come in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its 84th day.

However, in order for the Nordic countries to join the 30-member alliance, all other NATO members must unanimously agree to admit them.

While Turkey has expressed reservations against their joining, Ankara is not expected to stand in their way.

NATO history and eastward expansion

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949 by 12 member states – Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States – and was established to Soviet curb expansion and encourage political integration in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

The 30-member alliance is meant to guarantee political and military protections, and allow European and North American nations to discuss security concerns.

In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought guarantees from NATO that it would halt its eastern expansion and end military cooperation with Ukraine and Georgia, which are not members.

In February, Putin said Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine was a means to stop NATO’s growth, which he perceives as an encroachment.

NATO military operations

Article 5 of the NATO states the principle of collective defense as being at the core of NATO’s founding patch. This clause means that an attack against one ally is considered an attack against all members.

Some of NATO’s notable military operations include a naval blockade and air campaign during the Bosnia war, which lasted from 1992 to 1995.

In 1999, NATO launched an air campaign to compel Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to pull his forces out of Kosovo and end the conflict there.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time and joined US and UK forces to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Over the 20-year war, 50 NATO and partner nations contributed forces to the missions in Afghanistan. At its peak in 2011, nearly 140,000 US and allied forces were in the country.

Throughout the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnkyy has requested that NATO establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine — an idea the alliance has rejected on the basis of it escalating the conflict into a global one.

NATO and the CSTO

On Monday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko urged the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to unite following Finland and Sweden’s NATO bids.

The CSTO was formed in 1992 with Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan signing the first intermediary. In 1993, Azerbaijan, Belarus and Georgia joined. The treaty came into force in 1994.

Currently, it is formed of six member countries: Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Similar to Article 5 of the NATO pact, Article 4 of the CSTO states that aggression against one state party is seen as aggression against all members.

As a result, participating states can support the aggressed state with provisions such as military aid.

NATO’s military expenditure

In 2020, the US spent $778bn on its military – the largest military spender in the world – according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), accounting for 3.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Among NATO members, the UK is the second-highest military spender, with $59.2bn spent on its military in 2020, accounting for 2.2 percent of its GDP.

Iceland does not have a military of its own and so its military expenditure is zero.

In 2020, Finland spent $4.1bn on its military, accounting for 1.5 percent of its GDP, while Sweden spent $6.5bn, 1.2 percent of its GDP.

NATO’s budget

For 2022, NATO’s military budget is set at 1.56 billion euros ($1.64bn). Member countries contribute to the budget based upon a cost-sharing formula derived from the gross national income of each country.

The US and Germany equally contribute the highest percentage, totaling more than 30 percent of the military budget.

What would NATO look like once Sweden and Finland join?

The application process for Finland and Sweden to join NATO could take up to a year. However, once they are members, it would mean that NATO forces could be right next to the Finnish-Russian 1,340km (833-mile) border, in turn extending the NATO-Russia borderlines along the northwest of Russia.

Putin believes the move is an escalation in military tensions. During a televised CSTO meeting, he said the “expansion of military infrastructure” would “provoke our response”.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine have previously stated their wishes to join NATO. However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zelenskyy conceded in March that it was unlikely Ukraine would be able to join NATO.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s executive arm moved Wednesday to jump-start plans for the 27-nation bloc to abandon Russian energy amid the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, proposing a nearly 300 billion-euro ($315 billion) package that includes a more efficient use of fuels and faster rollout of renewable power.

The European Commission’s investment initiative is meant to help the 27 EU countries start weaning themselves off Russian fossil fuels this year. The goal is to deprive Russia, the EU’s main supplier of oil, natural gas and coal, of tens of billions in revenue and strengthen EU climate policies.

“We are taking our ambition to yet another level to make sure that we become independent from Russian fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Brussels when announcing the package, dubbed REPowerEU.

With no end in sight to Russia’s war in Ukraine and European security shaken, the EU is rushing to align its geopolitical and climate interests for the coming decades. It comes amid troubling signs that have raised concerns about energy supplies that the EU relies on and have no quick replacements, including Russia cutting off member nations Poland and Bulgaria after they refused a demand to pay for natural gas in rubles.

The bloc’s dash to ditch Russian energy stems from a combination of voluntary and mandatory actions. Both reflect the political of helping fund Russia’s military campaign in a country that neighbors discomfort the EU and wants to join the bloc.

An EU ban on coal from Russia is due to start in August, and the bloc has pledged to try to reduce demand for Russian gas by two-thirds by year’s end. Meanwhile, a proposed EU oil embargo has hit a roadblock from Hungary and other landlocked countries that worry about the cost of switching to alternative sources.

In a bid to swing Hungary behind the oil phaseout, the REPowerEU package expects oil-investment funding of around 2 billion euros for member nations highly dependent on Russian oil.

Story continues

Energy savings and renewables form the cornerstones of the package, which would be funded mainly by an economic stimulus program put in place to help member countries overcome the slump triggered by the coronavirus.

Von der Leyen said the price tag includes about 72 billion euros in grants and 225 billion euros for loans. There is a push to fund energy efficiency and renewables.

The European Commission also proposed ways to streamline the approval processes in EU countries for renewable projects, which can take up to a decade to get through red tape. The commission said approval times need to fall to as little as a year or less.

It put forward a specific plan on solar energy, seeking double photovoltaic capacity by 2025. The commission proposed a phased-in obligations to install solar panels on new buildings.

The European Commission’s recommendations on short-term national actions to cut demand for Russian energy coincide with deliberations underway in the bloc since last year on setting more ambitious EU energy-efficiency and renewable targets for 2030.

These targets are part of the bloc’s commitments to a 55% cut in greenhouse gases by decade-end compared with 1990 emissions and to climate neutrality by 2050.

In that context, the commission urged EU lawmakers in European Parliament and national governments to advance their own proposals for 2030 energy-savings and renewables objectives.

When I arrived in El Salvador on April 12 – a bit more than two weeks into the national state of emergency imposed by President Nayib Bukele, self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world” – I did not mention my profession to the San Salvador airport immigration official who inquired as to the purpose of my visit. Instead, I announced enthusiastically that I had come to take surfing lessons – which, had it been true, would almost certainly have meant the death of me.

And yet journalism itself is dangerous business these days in El Salvador, at least if you are a journalist concerned with reporting what is actually happening rather than obsequiously regurgitating whatever Bukele says is happening. Armed as I am with a US passport, I obviously have precious little to worry about compared with Salvadoran reporters. But one can never be too careful in the world’s coolest dictatorship.

The state of emergency came about following an abrupt spike in homicides at the end of March – the result of a breakdown in government negotiations with Salvadoran gangs, discussion of which topic is now conveniently criminalised. A supremely ambiguous law enacted on April 5 threatens anyone who shares gang symbols or information alluding to gangs with up to 15 years in prison – bad news, to say the least, for the likes of El Faro, the acclaimed Salvadoran investigative news outlet that initially exposed the negotiations.

Never mind that Bukele himself spends a fair amount of time tweeting images of tattooed suspected gang members, as he did in a May 5 tweet boasting that “more than 25,000 terrorists” had thus far been “captured” in the 41 days that had elapsed since the inauguration of the state of emergency. International and local human rights organizations have already extensively documented that many of these captured “terrorists” have nothing to do with gangs, and are merely collateral or intentional damage of what frequently boils down to a megalomaniacal war on the poor.

And as only befits a dystopia of Orwellian proportions, the official “terrorist” category has also expanded to include consumers and others who undertake to, you know, talk about reality. On April 11, the day before I arrived, Bukele tweeted an excerpt from a televised interview with Salvadoran anthropologist and journalist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson, author of various books on the gang phenomenon in El Salvador.

In response to Martínez d’Aubuisson’s assertion that gangs happen to “fulfil a social function” that is at present “unfortunately necessary” in a country long characterised by wilful government neglect and structural violence, Bukele denounced the anthropologist as “trash” – a vilification that was swiftly followed up in a tweeted response from Osiris Luna, Salvadoran deputy justice minister and director of prisons.

According to Luna – whose track record comprises embezzling more than $1m in pandemic food aid for needy families and being sanctioned by the US treasury department for negotiating with incarcerated gang bosses – Martínez d’Aubuisson is “a terrorist” and nothing more, while the staff of El Faro are “spokespeople for the gangs”.

As I was arriving in the country, then, Martinez d’Aubuisson had decided to temporarily flee in the interest of self-preservation and informed me by email that he was accumulating quite the collection of death threats.

Other Salvadorans have also come under intense fire – such as Bryan Avelar, coauthor of the April 6 New York Times article titled: El Salvador’s New Law on Gangs Raises Censorship Fears. Almost immediately, Bukele’s henchmen set about propagating the notion that Avelar was the sibling of an imprisoned gang leader. On social media, a photograph was viciously circulated of the young Avelar juxtaposed with a photo of his alleged brother – and to hell with the fact that Avelar does not have any brothers. Enlightened Twitter accounts dutifully spread the word that “a terrorist is a terrorist, even if he dresses as a journalist”.

On April 19, president of the Salvadoran Congress Ernesto Castro took the domestic delirium to another level by calling out who consider themselves to be “intellectuals”, inciting them to “leave” if they so desire because “we do not need them here”. As per Castro’s rant, a “new country” is being forged in El Salvador, whether these intellectual terrorists like it or not. Just how “new” the idea of ​​fascism is might be material for another debate.

Curiously, even the US – which traditionally has enthusiastically backed the right-wing evisceration of human rights in El Salvador, not to mention the all-out slaughter during the civil war of 1980-1992 – has felt the need to rebuke Bukele’s “cool” dictatorship. And since Twitter is what “cool” people do, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken dispatched a tweet on April 10 urging the Salvadoran government to “uphold due process and protect civil liberties, including freedoms of press, peaceful assembly, and expression.”

That same day, Bukele tweeted back in English: “I have a journalist friend, he wants access to Gitmo to exercise his ‘freedom of the press’ rights, and check if the detainees have enjoyed their ‘civil liberties’ and a ‘due process’.” ‘”. Bukele continued: “You have terrorists that threaten you, and we have terrorists that threaten us.”

To be sure, the US should never be pardoned for its egregious violations of human rights and dignity worldwide, which are epitomised by the aforementioned “Gitmo”, the infamous torture-friendly US military base on occupied Cuban soil in Guantánamo Bay. Nor should the country that literally spawned Salvadoran gangs in the first place – the United States – be permitted to reprimand anyone’s methods for dealing with the fallout, as sociopathic as those methods may be.

That said, I have a few basic points for Bukele to contemplate. One, at least there is no spontaneous law rendering it illegal to share information alluding to the existence of Guantánamo Bay. Two, invoking “Gitmo” – the global metaphor for the absolute evisceration of anything good in the world – does not really rack up points in the favor of your administration.

My own country, of course, is to thank not only for guaranteeing the pervasiveness of gangs in El Salvador but also for producing the whole “war on terror” discourse that has inspired countless countries to violate rights as they see fit. And just as the US effectively regards a free press as a threat to imperial domination, Bukele evidently views any deviation from his authorised narrative as an enemy attack.

When I spoke recently via WhatsApp with Zaira Navas, formerly the inspector general of El Salvador’s National Civilian Police and now a lawyer for the human rights organization Cristosal, she emphasized that there are “no precedents with respect to the direct attacks on” committed by the Bukele regime. While previous administrations have certainly “disrespected”, she said – even “kicking them out of press conferences” – the country has never seen the current “level of violence” against reporters at least since the civil war era. “Until now”, she remarked, “we have not had who have had to flee the country on account of government persecution.”

Navas credited a heavily funded “massive media campaign” on the part of the Bukele team for persuading the majority of the Salvadoran population that it is all a question of black and white: “good” guys versus “bad” guys. Accordingly, she has been assailed in government media for “defending gangs” by affirming that they do indeed play an economic role in Salvadoran society – which is sort of the equivalent of criminalising someone for stating that insurance companies or supermarkets or buses are institutionalized features of the US financial landscape.

Now, as Bukele’s forever-emergency morphs into a perennial war on people, human rights, journalism, and reality itself, I suppose I too qualify as a “terrorist”.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

MADRID (AP) — The emir of Qatar says his energy-rich Gulf state is set to boost investments in Spain by 4.7 billion euros ($4.9 billion) in the coming years, Spanish media reported.

Emir Shekih Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani made the announcement at a gala dinner held Tuesday by Spanish King Felipe VI at the Royal Palace in Madrid, according to state news agency EFE. The dinner also drew key business leaders, including some of Spain’s top energy companies.

The emir is set to “sign agreements” when he sits down Wednesday with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Moncloa Palace, the government seat. The meeting takes place on the second day of his first state visit to Spain, with the two leaders also attending the inaugural Spain-Qatar business forum.

The details of the investments have not been made public and didn’t specifically mention energy. But with Europe scrambling to find alternatives to Russian energy, Qatar has been sought out to help fill the gap with exports of liquefied natural gas.

Spain leads Europe with six LNG processing plants at its ports. Beyond aiming to diversify its own energy mix, Spain is pushing to become an energy hub for Europe.

Spain also is launching a series of public investment projects using its share of the EU’s pandemic recovery funds, aiming to modernize its economy. With a heavy focus on sustainability and digitization, the projects are designed to encourage major private-sector investments.

The national emergency service said the explosion in the northern city led to the collapse of a building and the deaths.

Nine people were killed after a gas cylinder explosion led to the collapse of a building close to a popular market in Nigeria’s northern state of Kano, the national emergency service and witnesses said.

The incident happened on Tuesday in the Sabon Gari area of ​​the city, mostly populated by people who moved to Kano from elsewhere.

Mustapha Habib Ahmed, head of the National Emergency Management Agency, said a gas cylinder in a welding shop exploded, killing nine people. Emergency responders pulled bodies from the rubble during a search and rescue operation.

At a nearby school, parents rushed to pick up their children after news of the blast, witnesses said. There were no reported injuries among the school children.

Kano, renowned for centuries as a center for Islamic scholarship and a commercial hotspot in trans-Saharan trade, is the capital of the eponymous Nigerian state in the northwest region of the country.

GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations chief on Wednesday launched a five-point plan to jump-start broader use of renewable energies, hoping to revive world attention on climate change as the UN’s weather agency reported that greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, sea -level rise, and ocean acidification hit new records last year.

“We must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition before we incinerate our only home,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Time is running out.”

His latest stark warning about a possible environmental disaster comes after the World Meteorological Organization issued its State of the Climate Report for 2021, which said the last seven years were the seven hottest on record. The impacts of extreme weather have led to deaths and disease, migration, and economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars — and the fallout is continuing this year, WMO said.

“Today’s State of the Climate report is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption,” Guterres said. “The global energy system is broken and bringing us ever closer to climate catastrophe.”

In his plan, which leans into the next UN climate conference taking place in Egypt in November, Guterres called for fostering technology transfer and lifting of intellectual property protections in renewable technologies, like battery storage.

Such ambitions – as with his call for transfers of technologies aimed to fight COVID-19 – can cause innovators and their financial backers to bristle: They want to reap the benefits of their knowledge, investments and discoveries — not just give them away.

Secondly, Guterres wants to broaden access to supply chains and raw materials that go into renewable technologies, which are now concentrated in a few powerful countries.

The UN chief also wants governments to reform in ways that can promote renewable energies, such as by fast-tracking solar and wind projects.

Story continues

Fourth, he called for a shift away from government subsidies for fossil fuels that now total a half-trillion dollars per year. That’s no easy task: Such subsidies can ease the pinch in many consumers’ pockets – but ultimately help inject cash into corporate coffers too.

“While people suffer from high prices at the pump, the oil and gas industry is raking in billions from a distorted market,” Guterres said. “This scandal must stop.”

Finally, Guterres says private and public investments in renewable energy must triple to at least $4 trillion dollars a year. He noted that government subsides for fossil fuels are today more than three times higher than those for renewables.

Those UN initiatives are built upon a central idea: That human-generated emissions of greenhouse gas in the industrial era have locked in excess heat in the atmosphere, on the Earth’s surface, and in the oceans and seas. The knock-on effect has contributed to more frequent and severe natural disasters like drought, hurricanes, flooding and forest fires.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit focused on environmental data science, says a good way to head toward net-zero emissions is “to make clean energy cheap.”

“While rich countries can afford to spend extra on clean energy, poor and middle income countries may be less willing to accept tradeoffs between reducing emissions and raising millions out of abject poverty,” he said. “If clean energy sources are cheaper than fossil fuels, they become win-win and will be adopted more rapidly.”

The WMO report breaks little new ground in terms of data, but compiles earlier studies into a broader picture of the global climate.

Its secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, pointed to a downward blip in emissions in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic dampened human activity. But he said that doesn’t change the “big picture” because carbon dioxide – a leading greenhouse gas – has a long life and lingers on, and emissions have been growing since then anyway.

“We have seen this steady growth of carbon dioxide concentration, which is related to the fact that we are still using too much fossil fuel,” Taalas said in an interview. “Deforestation in regions like Amazon, Africa and southern Asia still continue.”

Last year’s UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, failed to muster carbon-cutting pledges from the “BRICS” countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — which threaten a key goal of the 2015 Paris accord to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, he said.

“We are rather heading towards 2.5- to 3-degree warming instead of 1.5,” Taalas said.

Climate experts lauded the UN ambitions and lamented the WMO findings, and said some countries are headed in the wrong direction.

“If climate change is death by one thousand cuts, in 2021 we took our thousandth,” said Rob Jackson, professor of Earth System Science at Stanford University, who also chairs the Global Carbon Project that tracks carbon emissions.

“Dirty coal use roared back through economic stimulation incentives for COVID in China and India. We built more new coal plant capacity worldwide than we took offline,” he added. “How is this possible in 2021?”

Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of environmental education at the University of Michigan, noted that fossil fuels have a role in the Russian government’s war in Ukraine. Russia is a key global producer of oil and gas, including through a pipeline that transits Ukraine to supply homes and businesses in Europe.

“The secretary-general has it right in pointing the blame at fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are creating an ever-worsening climate crisis and all that comes with it,” Overpeck said. “The solution for climate change, the deadly air pollution and true national security is to leave fossil fuels behind in favor of clean renewable energy.”

“It’s getting scary,” he added. “The climate crisis and the European war are a call to action, and to rid the planet of fossil fuels as fast as we can.”

___

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report. ___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is responsible for all content.

Humaira Asghar posts a clip of herself walking playfully in a silver ball gown in front of a burning hillside with the caption: ‘Fire erupts wherever I am’.

A Pakistani social media star with millions of followers is facing criticism after posing for a TikTok video by a forest fire, as a devastating heatwave causes widespread misery in the country.

Humaira Asghar posted a clip of herself walking playfully in a silver ball gown in front of a burning hillside with the caption: “Fire erupts wherever I am.”

It comes after police arrested a man earlier this month in the northwestern city of Abbottabad for intentionally starting a forest fire as a background for a video.

Temperatures have peaked at 51 degrees Celsius (124 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of Pakistan in recent days, leaving the poor and vulnerable struggling to beat the heat in the impoverished country.

Asghar, who has more than 11 million followers on TikTok, said in a statement released by an assistant that she did not start the fire and there was “no harm in making videos”.

The clip has since been taken down.

“She should have been holding a bucket of water to extinguish the fire instead of glamorising it,” said Rina Saeed Khan Satti, an environmental activist and chairperson of the Islamabad Wildlife Management Board.

The group said at least one other blaze this week in the hills surrounding the Pakistani capital was started for a social media video.

“The message these videos is sending is too risky and it needs to be contained,” Satti said.

One comment under Asghar’s video on TikTok said her actions were “sheer ignorance and madness”.

Pakistan is the eighth most vulnerable country to extreme weather caused by climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index compiled by NGO Germanwatch.

But experts say there is a lack of awareness among the population about environmental issues.

Forest fires are common from mid-April through to the end of July, caused by searing temperatures and lightning as well as slash-and-burn farming.

TikTok is widely used by young people in Pakistan and videos often garner hundreds of thousands of likes.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Coming from around the globe, aircraft carrying world leaders have landed in the capital of the United Arab Emirates to offer for the death of the country’s president — and acknowledge the influence of the man now fully in charge.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan rarely speaks publicly. The new president shies away from the United Nations’ annual summit in New York. And his thoughts on the world around him come filtered through a tight-knit coterie and leaders who interact with him rather than from his pronouncements.

But MbZ as he’s known has become a major influence in the wider Middle East, whether through his longtime relationship with the US military, his opposition to Islamists or his autocratic country’s new ties with Israel.

Following the death of his half-brother, President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Sheikh Mohammed’s new reign comes with the opportunity to cement the rapid advance from villages to skyscrapers made by the UAE since its founding just over 50 years ago.

But it also comes as tough decisions loom for a nation mired in a deadlocked, bloody war in Yemen, facing choices on whether to embrace an America suspicious of its ties to China and Russia and concerned about an Iran whose nuclear program now races toward weapons -grade levels.

Even before becoming president, Sheikh Mohammed was believed to have been the country’s de facto leader since a 2014 stroke saw Sheikh Khalifa disappear from public view. His mystique and his younger age compared to other regional leaders — today he’s 61 — set him apart.

He’s also a symbol in this young country that is home to Dubai, where his silhouette in aviator glasses remains a popular car window sticker.

“MbZ is a leader not just in the UAE, but more broadly in the Middle East, where he is seen as a particularly dynamic member of the generation succeeding the geriatric cases who have dominated the region for decades,” a 2009 US diplomatic cable by WikiLeaks said.

Story continues

Trained at England’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and a fluent English speaker, Sheikh Mohammed’s style also found favor with allied militaries. Today, some 3,500 US troops remain stationed in the UAE. Dubai’s Jebel Ali port is the busiest port of call for the US Navy outside of America.

Abu Dhabi’s Al-Dhafra Air Base hosts American drones and fighter jets that bombed the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. American Patriot missile batteries there defended the capital this year against attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

As part of the relationship with America, the UAE forces to fight in Afghanistan. MbZ also fully backed the US after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaida. Two of the 19 hijackers had come from the Emirates.

That also marked the hardening of Sheikh Mohammed’s opinions toward pan-Arab Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Brotherhood members taught in Emirati schools in the 1980s, formative years for a young Sheikh Mohammed.

“I am an Arab, I am a Muslim and I pray. And in the 1970s and early 1980s I was one of them,” Sheikh Mohammed told US officials in 2007, according to another diplomatic cable. “I believe these guys have an agenda.”

After the 2011 Arab Spring, Sheikh Mohammed led a crackdown on members of Islah, a Brotherhood-associated group in the Emirates. Groups like the Brotherhood challenge the hereditary rule of the UAE’s seven sheikhdoms. Political parties and labor unions remain illegal in the country, which has been accused of employing spyware to monitor and dissidents.

Former President Barack Obama in his recent autobiography described Sheikh Mohammed as “young, sophisticated … and perhaps the savviest leader in the Gulf.”

But MbZ was critical of Washington’s support of the 2011 protests that topped Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak and briefly installed a Brotherhood member as president.

Obama quoted Sheikh Mohammed as saying that the US position “shows that the United States is not a partner we can rely on in the long term.” The UAE backed Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s 2013 coup that brought him into the presidency.

That has grown. Sheikh Mohammed reportedly described himself as surprised by the US secretly negotiating with Iran on what later became Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

The UAE’s diplomatic recognition of Israel, while boosting trade, serves as a hedge against an Iran suspected of attacking shipping in waters just off its shore in 2019. Yet Emirati officials have opened discussions with Iran as well. The country’s foreign minister even offered condolences Monday for Sheikh Khalifa’s passing, the same day as a US delegation led by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Dubai and the wider Emirates remain open to Russians despite Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Ties to China grow ever closer, despite Beijing allegedly running a secret prison in the country and concerns over a possible military dimension to its operation at an Abu Dhabi port.

But while described as a tactician, some of Sheikh Mohammed’s larger bets haven’t paid off. He found himself entangled in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on former US President Donald Trump and Russia.

An indictment appears to link Sheikh Mohammed to Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee chair, who faces charges alleging he secretly conspired to influence US policy to benefit the Emirates. Meanwhile, a yearslong boycott of Qatar as part of a political dispute ended just before President Joe Biden took office.

Then there’s the war in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where Iran-backed rebels still hold its capital. The UAE and Saudi Arabia face international criticism over civilian consequences in the war. The war killed dozens of Emirati soldiers and wounded more.

Though the Emiratis largely pulled out of the conflict, the attacks on Abu Dhabi at the start of this year show the country remains a target.

For Sheikh Mohammed, the responsibility for all this now falls on him.

“Every decision has risks, undoubtedly,” he once said.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Jon Gambrell, the news director for the Gulf and Iran for The Associated Press, has reported from each of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Iran and other locations across the world since joining the AP in 2006. Follow him on Twitter at www .twitter.com/jongambrellAP.

Impoverished North Korea has reported more than 1.7 million cases of ‘fever’ in just a few days amid rising concern over the outbreak’s effect.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has accused government officials of being negligent and lazy as the country’s first confirmed outbreak of COVID-19 sweeps across the largely unvaccinated country.

State media published photos of Kim presiding over a Politburo meeting of the ruling workers’ Party, cigarette in hand, berating the “immaturity in the state capacity for coping with the crisis” as he condemned officials for their “non-positive attitude, slackness and non-activity”.

Only one person at the meeting could be seen wearing a mask.

Since it first acknowledged the COVID-19 outbreak last week, the North has reported more than 1.7 million patients with symptoms of ‘fever’ and the deaths of 62 people. The actual numbers are thought to be much higher, given the country’s limited testing facilities.

Most of the cases have been centerd around Pyongyang, which is now in lockdown, although a COVID tracker from the Stimson Center think tank says there have also been significant outbreaks in Kaesong on the southern border and Rason in the northeast.

The rapid spread of coronavirus in North Korea, which has one of the world’s worst health systems, has raised alarm across the globe with the World Health Organization (WHO), South Korea and China all offering assistance with diagnostics and treatment. Pyongyang has yet to accept their offers of help and has previously rejected donations of coronavirus vaccines.

Even as Kim criticizing officials over the pandemic response, state media said the situation had also taken a “favorable turn,” adding the party meeting discussed “maintaining the good chance in the overall epidemic prevention front.”

The report did not elaborate on how the country came to such a positive assessment.

According to the KCNA state news agency, North Korea has been pushing to better handle “the collection, transport and test of specimen from those persons with fever, while installing additional quarantine facilities.”

KCNA also said health officials have developed a COVID-19 treatment guide aimed at preventing drug overdoses and other problems.

Earlier this week, North Korea mobilized the military to help staff a 24-hour medicine delivery system.

State television showed large numbers of troops gathered in a square to support anti-virus work.

A spokesperson for the United Nations’s human rights office said on Tuesday that measures taken by Pyongyang to fight COVID-19 could have “devastating” consequences for already limited human rights in the country, as the additional virus-related restrictions could make it more difficult for people to feed themselves.