Category: Nation & World

Texans were caught off-guard several months ago when the Trump administration appeared poised to construct a 30-foot wall through Big Bend National Park, a rugged expanse of moonlike desert that is a point of pride for many in the state.

But after bipartisan opposition grew, the wall was removed from the federal government’s border construction map. Many exhaled, believing that the West Texas park, with its towering mountains and cliffs, would be spared.

Then the bulldozers arrived this month.

The sight of the earthmoving machines along the Rio Grande near the Santa Elena Canyon, one of the park’s major attractions, pointed to the most significant evidence of border barrier construction in the park. Contractors ripped through mesquite trees and brush and leveled the ground for more than 1 mile of what appeared to be a future roadway.

Big Bend is beloved by Texans and many across the country, even those who are not among its more than 500,000 annual visitors. It is a place to feel the immense and inhospitable wilderness of West Texas, where the stars at night actually are big and bright.

The construction sparked a fresh wave of anger and outrage from all sorts of people — environmentalists, former park officials, local sheriffs — who again insisted that such infrastructure was unnecessary in a border region so remote and dangerous that people have rarely tried to cross there, even at the peak of unauthorized migration.

Both John Cornyn, the state’s outgoing Republican senator, and James Talarico, the Democrat running to replace him, expressed concern this month about the start of construction inside the park.

“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence,” Cornyn said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Other Republican state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who defeated Cornyn in the Senate primary, have not weighed in directly on the construction.

On Friday, a local nonprofit and an outdoor recreation business represented by state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat, filed a federal suit to try to halt the project. A day earlier, a bipartisan group of Texas legislators sent Abbott a letter urging him to ask federal officials to stop the construction.

“It’s gotten to the point where people are picking up the torches and marching in the street right now,” said Tex Toler, a former tourism director for Marfa, Texas, northwest of the park. “This is one of Texas’ and the country’s last wild places.”

After days of confusion among West Texas residents, senior Trump administration officials explained their plans and rationale Thursday. There would be no wall, but there would be construction.

“CBP is building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said in a statement.

The park’s land sits along 118 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and a patrol road is slated to run along much of it. A few areas would have miles of 4- to 6-foot-tall vehicle barriers.

The bulldozers and excavators have been engaged this month in “survey and design work,” Scott said.

Fewer than six migrants a day have been encountered crossing from Mexico in recent months in the entire Big Bend patrol sector, which includes the park and hundreds of other miles of border, federal statistics show.

Officials have said that while unauthorized crossings are currently at record lows, they could increase in the future.

The Trump administration has been furiously building new border barriers, and Scott said the Big Bend construction was necessary to fill in gaps. Southwest Valley Constructors, one company currently at work in the region, was awarded a $1.7 billion contract. The company directed questions to federal officials.

“We will not leave Big Bend as an opening for cartels to exploit by shifting their routes and tactics,” Scott said in the statement.

Many of those who oppose a wall are also against building a patrol road. They include local sheriffs who have insisted that major border infrastructure projects are not necessary.

“What security problem are we trying to solve?” Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland of nearby Terrell County, a Republican and a former Border Patrol agent, wrote on social media. “Can the same security objective be accomplished more effectively another way?”

On Wednesday, people gathered for a demonstration against the construction at the Santa Elena Canyon. Many carried signs protesting the construction — “Stop the Steel,” “No Wall” — or held handmade depictions of javelinas and other wildlife that could be affected by the construction along the river. Some feared the road plan would require building bridges and blasting along Mariscal Mountain, a remote peak.

“There will be no coming back,” said Michael Ryan, a former Big Bend park ranger who attended the protest. “They’re taking taxpayer dollars to ruin this national park.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The black and white flags of the Taliban were flying high along the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, as the group celebrated five years in power on Saturday.

A shiny Mercedes drifted in front of graffiti praising the Taliban fighters’ “sacrifice,” the word painted in crimson, with depictions of drops of blood. Young Afghans chanted independence songs below posters hailing how “the carpet of democracy” had been removed for Islamic rule.

But the triumphant tone is only half the story. The Taliban may be boisterous in Kabul and have a tight grip on power, yet elsewhere they find themselves targeted and face crises both at home and abroad.

They face a conflict just short of open war with neighboring Pakistan. They’re dealing with new waves of attacks from armed groups that want to topple them. Add to that mass unemployment, international isolation, and growing domestic discontent, and the Taliban face their most serious threats since their return to power in 2021.

It is too early to tell whether all those challenges will escalate and threaten their survival as a governing force. And as the scenes of celebration on Saturday showed, the Taliban are popular among many.

Still, the threats they face have cracked the veneer of security and stability that the Taliban have heralded as their primary achievement — and their main selling point to the world.

As workers were preparing Kabul for celebrations Thursday, a resistance group claimed responsibility for the killing of the Taliban mayor of a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. Two weeks earlier, another Taliban official had been assassinated in the same province.

A tight grip on power — and yet

The Taliban are holding Afghan society in a chokehold that spares no one. Girls and women face restrictions to a degree unseen anywhere else in the world. Religious minorities are witnessing the forced closure of their places of worship. Anyone who voices criticism is repressed. United Nations staff members face arrests; journalists and rights workers suffer forced disappearances.

The Taliban are collecting taxes and building roads, dams, and canals. European countries have welcomed them in Brussels to facilitate the deportation of Afghan migrants and asylum seekers. They have expanded trade ties with Central Asian states and want the Trump administration to come back to Afghanistan.

Whenever a sign of dissent emerges in a province, the country’s secretive and ultraconservative leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, places a key ally in a leadership position to keep things in check.

And yet the signs of trouble that have appeared in recent months are impossible to ignore.

Troubles in the North

Sporadic sounds of gunfire reverberated across the remote mountains of northeastern Afghanistan on a recent evening. Weary Taliban fighters peppered drivers with questions at checkpoints dotting the main road snaking through the province of Badakhshan.

On the same road, two attackers had killed a senior provincial Talib official a week earlier. A small group of anti-Taliban fighters had briefly seized control of a police headquarters in a nearby district.

Now fighting between the Taliban and another group opposing their rule was continuing in another district of Badakhshan. The province, bordering China, Pakistan and Tajikistan, is emerging as a hot spot.

On a trip to the province this month, we talked to residents ready to support anti-Taliban groups because they said they were fed up with the Taliban’s iron grip, the lack of job opportunities, and the government’s confiscation of natural resources.

We drove through dozens of checkpoints and witnessed the heavy presence of intelligence officers in the isolated village where anti-Taliban fighters had stormed police headquarters.

The clashes and the attacks have so far been scattered. The leader of one of the anti-Taliban groups described them as “opportunity targets” aimed at challenging the Taliban’s sense of control. But the leader, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the group’s strategy, said the number of attacks would only increase in coming months.

Tensions in the East

An underequipped Afghan army waits nervously at the border with Pakistan. Once a sponsor of the Taliban, Pakistan has launched dozens of airstrikes on Afghanistan, killing 500 civilians since October, according to the United Nations, and has threatened to use even more force if the Taliban don’t rein in militants who are staging attacks on Pakistani territory.

The mistrust goes both ways: The Taliban have accused Pakistan of supporting the armed groups that have attacked Taliban outposts in Badakhshan.

Whether, or to what extent, Pakistan is actively supporting anti-Taliban groups is not clear, but suspicions are running high.

“The Pakistanis are happy to be portrayed now as a potential patron for the armed opposition to the Taliban, because that increases their leverage over the group,” said Fabrizio Foschini, a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

Food, education, and the economy

The picture on the domestic front is also grim. Extreme hunger has been spreading fast from one province to another after aid cuts last year plunged millions into deeper food insecurity. The Taliban’s ban on secondary and university education for women and girls is stifling development, experts say.

The Taliban have deprived 2.4 million Afghan girls of an education, according to UNESCO — the equivalent of all school-age girls in New York, Mexico City, and Moscow combined — and they are forced to stay home indefinitely.

Some scattered signs of discontent have popped up. At a rare protest in June, demonstrators chanted “Work, education, freedom,” similar to what their Iranian neighbors chanted in 2022. And the leader of a large religious minority warned the Taliban in May: Don’t squeeze Afghan society too much, or it will explode.

The potential to spiral?

The Taliban know the world wants a stable Afghanistan — one that isn’t a source of refugees, drugs, or terrorism.

They assert that the country no longer poses a security threat to the region or the West. They say that they have cracked down on the Islamic State militant group, and that they want peaceful relations, based on trade and diplomacy, including with the U.S.

Since the Taliban no longer carry out suicide attacks, bomb schools, or target the security forces they now represent, their main argument may hold.

“The greatest achievement we have had over the past five years is security,” Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said in an interview with the New York Times in Kabul on Wednesday.

They don’t want their various crises to spiral either.

All the ingredients for things to get out of control in Afghanistan again are here, analysts say: A vast population of unemployed young Afghans are fertile ground for radicalization, especially as economic opportunities are nearly nonexistent. And with animosity growing between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is unclear who might come to the Taliban’s aid: Afghanistan is, once again, a pariah state, with barely any allies.

The past five years have brought some predictability and an end to almost two decades of fighting, which many Afghans have welcomed, despite the immense hardship and repression. But the country remains shattered, and the fragile peace is already at risk.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.

The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, Iran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub the Navy has relied on for decades.

The Navy needed a Plan B to continue feeding the sailors working around the clock to keep warplanes flying strike missions, and later to maintain a blockade of Iran’s ports.

With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub. Diego Garcia is south of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman.

The loss of the hub in Bahrain has contributed to a host of reported problems on carriers supporting operations against Iran, as Democratic senators raise concerns about the Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and their nearly nine-month deployment.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) said in a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the reported problems included shortages of basic supplies and the deteriorating mental health of its crew members.

On Friday at a military air base in Maryland, President Donald Trump dismissed those concerns. “That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another, very similar, ship,” he said.

The Lincoln’s replacement is the Japan-based carrier USS George Washington, which earlier this week was heading west through the Strait of Malacca in Indonesian waters en route to the Middle East.

Another carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, has been operating in the Middle East for months since deploying from Norfolk, Va., on March 31.

When asked if the carrier deployments were too long, the president said, “No, no, no, not nearly long enough.”

Hegseth had a similar response on Thursday when a reporter asked how long the United States could maintain its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

“We can hold it as long as we need to, indefinitely,” he replied.

At the war’s outset, Keir Starmer, then the British prime minister, denied the Pentagon access to Diego Garcia for use in the operation against Iran. That decision drew Trump’s ire, and Starmer ultimately relented on March 1, granting the U.S. military access to the island for what he described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose.”

A U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive logistics, said the Navy began using Diego Garcia as the main shipment point shortly after the Navy’s base in Bahrain was heavily damaged.

The use of Diego Garcia as the Navy’s new logistics hub may explain why Iran fired two medium-range ballistic missiles at the island on March 20.

One of the missiles fell into the Indian Ocean short of its target. A Navy warship shot down the other.

The San Diego-based Lincoln has been at sea for nearly nine months without what the Navy calls a “liberty port” — where sailors can get off the ship for a few days.

Bahrain is one of the two ports where U.S. aircraft carriers in the region have typically moored so their crews can get some downtime. The other, the Emirati port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, is also well within the range of Iranian missiles.

The Trump administration relied on yet another carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in the Caribbean for its pressure campaign against Venezuela and later extended its deployment to the Middle East to launch airstrikes against Iran. So far the war has seen the commitment of a significant portion of the Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers, which will go down to 10 with the expected retirement of USS Nimitz next year.

While six months is the typical length of a Navy deployment at sea in peacetime, some carriers have done far longer stretches following the 9/11 attacks. The Ford’s 326-day deployment, however, broke the record for the longest by a carrier since the Vietnam War.

But in that war, carriers assigned to Yankee Station, a section of the Pacific off the coast of Vietnam, would often head to the Navy base at Subic Bay, Philippines — a short two-day transit away — where sailors could take a break from running nonstop flight operations and the ship could load up on ordnance, food, fuel, and other necessary supplies.

By tradition and Navy regulation, the commanding officer of a warship can request a “beer day” for their crews when they have been at sea for 45 straight days or longer. Given the Lincoln’s time at sea, the crew would have been eligible for five beer days already.

A spokesperson for the U.S. 5th Fleet, which covers naval operations in the region and would authorize beer days, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about whether any of the ships participating in the Iran war had requested them.

In an interview, Rep. Mike Levin (D., Calif.) said his constituents included sailors aboard the Lincoln, and their family members had reached out to express their concerns about the deployment.

“It gets back to that big picture, which is: What is the mission here?” Levin said. “That’s what the families want to know.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

A mission organization said on Friday that a pilot who was kidnapped while working for the group in the West African country of Niger last year was in “good health” after his release.

The missionary pilot, Kevin Rideout, was seized from his home in Niamey, the capital of Niger, in October. A U.S. official said on Friday that Rideout had arrived at Ramstein Air Base in Germany and was undergoing medical evaluation. Like others in this article, the official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

Rideout’s organization, called Serving in Mission, said in a statement that he would soon be reunited with his loved ones.

“We are grateful to confirm that our good friend and brother in Christ, Kevin Rideout, has been released,” the statement read. The mission noted that he was in “good health in the care of U.S. officials” and would soon be reunited with his wife, Krista; their four children; and his extended family.

“Krista and the rest of Kevin’s family are profoundly grateful for the prayers offered on their behalf by people around the world throughout his captivity,” the statement added.

Another U.S. official said on Thursday that Rideout’s release, which was earlier reported by the New York Times, was not the result of a military rescue operation but “by other means,” offering no further details.

The official linked Rideout’s release to U.S. military pressure on the Islamic State in Nigeria, Niger’s southern neighbor, in recent months. In May, President Donald Trump said that American and Nigerian forces had killed Abu Bilal al-Minuki, a high-ranking Islamic State leader in Lake Chad, a region at the intersection of four countries, including Nigeria and Niger.

The official said that raid had helped influence the kidnappers’ decision to release Rideout.

How and where he was released were not yet clear, U.S. officials said earlier, and it was also unclear which group held him at the end of his captivity. Rideout’s release had been a major priority for the White House and for the military’s Africa Command.

In May, French journalist and researcher Wassim Nasr, who has been monitoring jihadi groups in the area for several years, said that Rideout was being held in Ménaka, a region in Mali just over the border with Niger. That area is mostly controlled by a local branch of the Islamic State.

For years, Mali and Niger have been battling insurgents affiliated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State. In April, al-Qaida-linked militants launched coordinated attacks across Mali, seizing a major city and killing the country’s defense minister.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

LONDON — In one of the most remote towns on Earth, on the frozen crust of Greenland’s east coast, the American oilman made his pitch.

Near to the very room where they were all sitting, he told a crowd of Greenlanders, could be as much as 13 billion barrels of oil. His company planned to drill two exploratory wells, and if it struck oil, it could be a major worldwide discovery bringing much-needed jobs, loads of tax money, and relief to world energy markets.

The people who attended the meeting, which was held in June in an isolated town called Ittoqqortoormiit, had some questions.

Why would Greenland get only 15% of the profit?

What kind of chemicals would be used?

And what about the musk ox? (Musk ox hunting is a big deal up there.)

The meeting wrapped up with a lot of unhappy people filing out, according to a video of it that was shared with the New York Times, and a showdown over oil exploration has now joined the cloud of issues swirling over Greenland.

The wildcat oil project is being pumped up by Dr. Phil McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr. Phil, and Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, both powerful allies of President Donald Trump. It’s the latest push by the MAGA camp to close in on this gigantic Arctic island that Trump threatened to annex and remains a fixation of his.

If the discovery is anything close to what the company says, and if it makes economic sense for major production — and those are two enormous ifs — this project could thrust Greenland into a radically different future, possibly as an Arctic petrostate.

But it’s off to a bumpy start. After a wave of negative publicity, protests by Greenlanders, and a slipup by the project’s organizers who have a drilling license, Greenland’s authorities tapped the brakes. This week, the government pushed back the timeline for granting final approvals, saying that it’s unlikely any drilling would be authorized before 2028.

The Texas-based firm leading the project, Greenland Energy Co., now says it will focus on drilling only one well, not two. And the delays are expected to cost millions. As a result, Greenland Energy’s share price has plummeted, trading at little more than a dollar, half its value from just days ago.

A few years ago, Greenland declared it was suspending oil exploration. The Arctic is among the fastest-warming regions in the world, and the Greenlandic government felt it was wrong to contribute more fossil fuel pollution.

But the oil prospectors in this case are operating with a valid license granted before the policy changed, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times. So Greenlandic officials, who have been trying to navigate the intense pressure Trump has put on them, find themselves in a tight spot.

They are more than aware that if they reflexively block Americans from drilling, especially at a time when world events have squeezed the global oil supply, that could give Trump the pretext he needs to return to his threats to “get” Greenland, “one way or the other.” At the same time, there’s obvious resistance from ordinary Greenlanders and government officials to the project.

“In a world where Donald Trump has pursued such a confrontational policy toward Greenland, you can’t help but be a little concerned,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “If you suddenly throw a major oil discovery into the mix, who knows what might happen.”

For months, the United States, Greenland, and Denmark — the island’s former colonial master that still controls many of its affairs — have been locked in sticky negotiations over the island’s future. One key issue has been America’s access to Greenland’s natural resources.

Ever since Trump set his sights on the island, Greenland has become a magnet for investors and allies chasing Arctic resource dreams. But oil has never been easy.

Chevron and Shell prospected decades ago with no success. It’s incredibly expensive to build an oil industry from scratch in one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. Most of Greenland is covered in ice. One major U.S. company, ARCO, decades ago sank today’s equivalent of $250 million — far more than the $80 million the current players have raised — into seismic studies in the same area, only to abandon the project in 1990.

“There are so many red flags here,” said Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s former minister of natural resources and now a representative in Denmark’s parliament. She said she hasn’t seen any hard data supporting the project’s tantalizing claims, adding, “I think they are selling hot air.”

Not so, say the backers of the project, a joint venture between Greenland Energy, the small, publicly traded U.S. company that raised the money, and 80 Mile Plc, a British outfit that acquired the drilling licenses several years ago.

Roderick McIllree, 80 Mile’s executive director and a board member of Greenland Energy, said this stretch of Greenland had the same geology as the North Sea oil fields, where European countries have extracted billions of barrels. And climate change is working in their favor, he said.

Warming temperatures mean less ice clogging Greenland’s coast, making any oil discovered cheaper to export than it would have been decades ago, he said.

One investor is the Citadel hedge fund, run by investment titan Ken Griffin, and the Trump administration fully supports the project.

“Greenland could be exporting 2 million barrels of oil a day,” said Landry, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, in a Fox News interview in May. He added, “Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Straits of Hormuz.”

Before the project is allowed to start, its plans, including a detailed environmental assessment, must be approved. But the organizers have been moving ahead anyway and recently carried out two disputed equipment transfers.

First, they brought in a barge load of equipment from another part of Greenland on what authorities said was an expired permit. Jorgen Hammeken-Holm, the head of Greenland’s mineral resources department, called the move “naughty, naughty.”

Then, a few days later, they unloaded another piece of heavy equipment without proper notification, authorities said.

“We have the police and the military,” Hammeken-Holm warned. “They can assist in dealing with unlawful activities if necessary.”

McIllree admitted, “We kind of fell down.” He said the company apologized to Greenlandic officials.

The potentially oil-rich area, known as Jameson Land, is a highly protected environmental zone, an Arctic swampland of sorts, home to tenacious shrubs and musk ox, foxes and migrating birds like the pink-footed goose. The musk ox is prized for its meat and its fur, which is turned into a luxurious yarn.

All this has attracted Dr. Phil, who did a recent 44-minute podcast on the project. He titled the episode “Frozen Gold,” and according to documents on Greenland Energy’s website, the company has established “a wide-ranging partnership” with him to make a six-episode series on “this modern-day treasure hunt.”

His company did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the project. But on his podcast, Dr. Phil said he would soon head to the Arctic.

“I’m going to have to mug a kitten and get some mittens because I’m going to go up there and see this firsthand,” he said.

Ittoqqortoormiit (It-tok-kor-TOR-meet), population 329, is trying to make sense of what’s happening. This spring, members of the local council seemed ready to negotiate and drafted a list of things they wanted from the oil company: a heated community pool, new hunting cabins, and funding for residents to fly over Jameson Land in helicopters one last time before their hunting grounds were turned into an industrial site.

But the public meeting in June changed the mood.

McIllree conceded that the team that led the meeting didn’t show enough respect.

“They forgot whose house they were in,” he said.

Still, some residents support the project.

Aage Uugi Pike Barselajsen, a construction worker, said in a telephone interview that Ittoqqortoormiit desperately needed jobs.

“You have to think about the future and the money,” he explained. “Maybe Greenland could become like Dubai. That’s my dream.”

This article originally appeared in he New York Times.