Military conflicts

About 20 people have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in Islamist terrorism after a series of raids across Denmark, authorities have said.

Flemming Drejer, the operative head of the Denmark’s Security and Intelligence Service, said the detainees were suspected to have been “driven by a militant, Islamist motive”. Copenhagen police’s chief inspector, Jørgen Bergen Skov, said some of them would be charged behind closed doors on Thursday under the country’s terrorism laws.

“Some have procured things to make explosives and have tried to acquire weapons,” Bergen Skov told a joint press conference with the domestic intelligence service.

Bergen Skov said six police departments across the country raided about 20 properties. The raids and arrests were coordinated by Copenhagen police.

No details were given as to what the alleged terrorists’ target was believed to be nor when an attack might have taken place.

Danish authorities have reported foiling several extremist attacks in recent years, including plots linked to the publication in a newspaper in 2005 of 12 cartoons by various artists depicting the prophet Muhammad.

A Danish court this year gave a Syrian asylum seeker in Sweden a 12-year prison sentence for planning to plant one or more bombs in Copenhagen and stab random people with kitchen knives. Moyed al-Zoebi, 32, acted on behalf of Islamic State, according to the Copenhagen city court.

An accomplice, Dieab Khadigah, was sentenced in Germany in July 2017 to a prison term of six and a half years.

The EU will attempt to revive the world’s flagging attempts to tackle the climate crisis with a historic proposal from Brussels to halve emissions by 2030, and reach net zero carbon by mid-century.

Wednesday’s announcement is seen as the vital first step towards gathering a “coalition of ambition” among key countries to fulfil the pledges of the 2015 Paris agreement, which is in danger of languishing amid deadlocked UN talks.

Ursula von der Leyen, the new president of the European commission, writing on Tuesday, said: “Science is telling us we are running out of time. The new European commission is wasting no time. Our goal is to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, slowing down global heating and mitigating its effects. This is a task for our generation and the next, but change must begin right now – and we know we can do it.”

The proposals will be aired on Wednesday lunchtime in Brussels followed by a debate in the EU parliament, and the 2030 target will be a signal of intent rather than a formal commitment at this stage. But negotiators are keen to take a strong position in the final days of the UN talks in Madrid, which have lacked much sense of urgency.

Her intervention – seen as a game-changer by experts – comes as the talks on implementing the Paris agreement stalled, with nations wrangling over small print on details such as carbon markets. Negotiators have largely ignored the key question hanging over these talks: how to ensure governments strengthen their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with scientific advice.

Current targets under the 2015 Paris accord would lead to more than 3C of warming, which would cause irreparable harm and violate the core Paris goal of holding global heating to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to hold to 1.5C. Global temperatures have already risen about 1.1C.

To fulfil the pledges they made in Paris, nations must step up in the next year with new targets for emissions for 2030. Global carbon emissions are now 4% above the levels they were in 2015 when the Paris accord was signed. According to scientific advice, to stay within 1.5C the world must begin cutting emissions in the next year and reduce them by more than 7% a year for the next decade.

In becoming the first major economic bloc to propose a 2030 and 2050 goal, the EU is hoping to galvanise other key countries such as China and India into making similar commitments to curb greenhouse gases by 2030, and so rescue the Paris agreement.

While 68 other countries have also come forward with 2030 pledges, most are small economies and the world’s big emitters – the US, China, India, Japan and others – have remained on the sidelines.

The US is in the process of withdrawing from Paris, though the Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg led a delegation in Madrid promising to continue action on the climate.

All eyes are now on China, as the EU will try to woo Beijing with promises of trade negotiations and the lure of joint investments. There may be sticks as well as carrots: Frans Timmermans, the EU vice president, said he would be “at the disposal of any country that wants to talk to us” about targets, but added the EU would “not hesitate” to impose measures such as carbon tariffs on imports from countries without strong Paris commitments.

The EU’s move was hailed as a potential “game-changer” by David Waskow, international climate director at the World Resources Institute. “This announcement could have a galvanising effect for numerous other countries to step up their efforts to tackle climate change.”

Todd Stern, former White House climate chief at the Paris negotiations, commended the EU’s move: “What the world most needs right now is a clear recognition of the scale and speed of decarbonisation we need, a clear plan to produce that transformation, and the political will to do what it takes. Europe has always been a climate leader and looks ready to take that leadership to the next level.”

Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and the French official who led the Paris agreement, said: “[This will] have a major impact. If one of the largest economies and largest trading bloc moves to climate neutrality by 2050, this sends a strong signal to markets and players across the globe.”

The commission’s proposals still face opposition from a few countries – Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary – that are concerned over economic losses from moving away from coal, and the proposals on emissions cuts for 2030 may take time to finalise. Von der Leyen promised €100bn funding for a “just transition” to help countries.

Green campaigners also want to see higher targets for 2030, and want the EU to confirm its commitments sooner. Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, told the Guardian: “To be truly credible and consistent with staying below 1.5C, the EU needs to commit to increasing its 2030 commitment to 65% [emissions cuts]. This is what’s needed to be taken seriously by China in the lead-up to the EU-China summit in autumn next year.”

Green campaigners are also worried that the EU will not finalise its commitments until late next year, but the Commission is confident that by signalling its intent now it can form alliances with other key countries to come up with the joint pledges needed at next year’s crunch conference in November in Glasgow. That is the deadline for new commitments on emissions to fulfil the Paris accord.

A Siberian shaman who says he wants to rid Russia of the “demon” Vladimir Putin has been detained by authorities after making a new attempt to trek across the country, rights activists have said.

Accompanied by two companions and four dogs, self-styled shaman Alexander Gabyshev set out from his native Yakutia in Russia’s north on Sunday after his first journey was cut short in September. He was detained by police on a highway on Tuesday, according to the human rights advocacy group Pravozashchita Otkrytki, which has been tracking his case.

The rights group released video footage of what it said was Gabyshev’s arrest on the snow-covered road, which depicted numerous policemen and several police cars with flashing lights at the scene. Gabyshev has been accused of making public calls to carry out extremist activities, a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

Alexei Pryanishnikov, a coordinator for the rights group, said he expected the authorities to formally charge Gabyshev after the arrest. “He was detained on the orders of an investigator,” he told AFP.

Gabyshev began his first trek in March, dragging a cart containing his belongings. He planned to reach Moscow by 2021, but was detained in September on the shores of Siberia’s Lake Baikal having walked about a third of the way.

After his first detention, he was sent to a psychiatric ward for evaluation and experts found that he was “not of sound mind”, the rights group has said.

Gabyshev’s eccentric bid to walk from his home city of Yakutsk to Moscow, a distance of more than 8,000km (5,000 miles), saw a group of followers join him on the way.

His simply expressed statements about Putin have captured public attention, prompting opposition protests as well as reports on pro-Kremlin television.

Pryanishnikov said that for the authorities the shaman’s attempts to oust Putin was not a joke. “The regime and law enforcement agencies take the occult, shamanism and witchcraft seriously,” he said.

Simon Coveney, Ireland’s foreign minister, has challenged Boris Johnson’s claim that under his Brexit deal there would be no checks or controls on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Britain.

Coveney insisted that under the terms of the withdrawal agreement the prime minister negotiated with the European Union there would be inspections on goods moving in both directions.

“It was very clear when the deal was done,” he said in Brussels on Monday. “The EU has made it clear they want to minimise the impact on goods coming from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, but at the same time goods coming from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will need to have some checks to ensure that the EU knows what is potentially coming into their market through Northern Ireland.”

The comments contradicted Johnson’s claims, repeated last Sunday, that there would be no checks on goods moving from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.

Coveney’s tacit rebuke followed sharper censure on Monday from Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist party leader, who accused the prime minister of misrepresenting the Brexit deal and breaking his word to Northern Ireland.

Speaking to RTE, the Irish foreign minister said negotiators on both sides spent a lot of time nailing down details to leave no ambiguity.

“Goods going the other way from Northern Ireland into Great Britain will have far less requirement for checks at all. In fact, it will probably be limited to an export declaration, because, of course, that is a matter internally for the UK.

“So, there was always a distinction between goods coming from Great Britain into Northern Ireland versus goods going from Northern Ireland into Great Britain and we spent many hours discussing and negotiating that, and I think explaining it too.”

Coveney added that clinching a trade deal with the UK by the end of 2020 was a “tall order”.

Johnson, who was due on Wednesday to campaign in the Midlands and north-west England, has been accused of lying about the Brexit deal and the likelihood of securing a trade deal within a year.

A document leaked last week, written by officials in the government’s Brexit department, warned that Johnson’s stated goal of implementing his deal by the end of 2020 presented a major challenge because of the need to create new protocols and systems for business in Northern Ireland.

The document, obtained by the Financial Times, claimed that 98% of export businesses were “likely to struggle to bear the cost” of the extra paperwork, fuelling concerns of increased prices for consumers.

The government dismissed a similar document leaked to the Labour party on Friday as instant analysis done when Johnson brought home his Brexit deal in October.

The German publisher Bauer Verlag has apologised for a horoscope published in Tina magazine, which announced possible domestic violence to the reader.

In the magazine’s Relationships section, the horoscope read: “Your partner won’t touch you with kid gloves this month, bruises are planned. But maybe that’s for the best: after the big bang, everything will seem to be coming back to normal again. You will start over together, finally make peace.”

Völlig normales Horoskop von einer offensichtlich völlig normalen Frauenzeitschrift pic.twitter.com/UAZfF2kCp8

— Guillotines (@beehrdigung) December 8, 2019

The text appeared in a special edition of the women’s weekly magazine in September.

A Twitter user told Euronews she had discovered the picture on Instagram then published on Twitter.

“I didn’t expect this much attention,” she wrote on Monday morning.

In a statement, Bauer Verlag said it was a “fundamental formulation error” which had been overlooked when proofing. They said they wanted to apologise “emphatically” and that the text stood in complete contrast to the magazine’s view on women.

This explanation, too, sparked a lot of criticism on social media. “How exactly does the countercheck work?” asks one user in the comments.

Another asked: “Formulation? Image of women? Wasn’t the problem rather the trivialization of domestic violence?”

France’s transport system is expected to be brought to a standstill on Monday as a general strike over President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed pension reform continues.

Railway operator SNCF has warned that traffic would be “extremely disrupted” with only a fifth of high-speed trains and a fifth of cross-country services scheduled to run.

It called on commuters to avoid crowding stations, flagging security reasons and urged them to use alternative means of transport including carpooling.

Public transport in Paris is also severely disrupted with nine of the capital city’s subway lines interrupted and five of them only scheduled to run during peak hours. The automated 14 line was the only one expected to run as usual, although the RATP warned of “a risk of saturation at peak time”.

The public transport woes had by 08:00 CET already impacted road traffic. Sytadin, an official website keeping tabs of road conditions, estimated that more than 600 kms of traffic jams had formed.

The mass protest started on Thursday (December 5) with 800,000 people rallying across the country according to the government, stranding commuters and leading to school closures.

Organisers, who put the figure at more than 1.5 million protesters, have called for a second day of national action on Tuesday.

They protest plans by Macron’s government to overhaul the pension system by rolling the 42 different plans into a universal one. The plans would also see pension payouts calculated from salaries from across the whole career instead of just the last five years of activity, which unions say would result in much smaller payouts.

The government has so far been steadfast but ministers convened on Sunday afternoon at the behest of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and later with Macron.

Philippe is expected to unveil the new retirement programme on Wednesday.

The uncle of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad is due to go on trial in Paris on charges of embezzling his country to buy property worth at least €90m in France.

Rifaat al-Assad, 82, who denies the charges and reportedly splits his time between France and Britain, will not be present in court for “medical reasons”, his lawyers said.

The trial, beginning on Monday, is one of a string of so called “ill-gotten gains” cases being brought in France against members of foreign ruling families whose extravagant spending and lavish lifestyles are in stark contrast to the hardship of their citizens. Teodorin Obiang, the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, will appeal against his 2017 conviction and three-year suspended sentence for corruption in a hearing on Tuesday.

Rifaat al-Assad has been nicknamed the “Butcher of Hama ” for allegedly commanding the troops behind the brutal and bloody crushing of an uprising in central Syria in 1982. He has been under investigation in France since 2014 after the anti-corruption organisations Sherpa and Transparency International raised complaints.

Assad left Syria in 1984 after leading a failed coup against his brother, the current Syrian president’s father, who ruled the country from 1971 to 2000, and settled with his four wives and 16 children in Europe. He nominally retained the post of vice-president of Syria until 1998.

Between 2009 and 2011, he was living at a £10m townhouse off Park Lane in Mayfair, but there were reports that this and his family’s portfolio of flats and houses in London were being sold off.

His fortune is said to include two Paris townhouses, one of them boasting more than 3,000 sq metres (30,000 sq ft), a stud farm, a chateau and a swathe of office space in the city of Lyon. Prosecutors believe most of the properties were acquired through offshore companies in Panama, Curacao, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. Assad and his family also own more than 500 properties in Spain that were seized by the authorities in 2017, Spanish prosecutors have said.

The Spanish high court is pursuing Assad and 13 others in his entourage, on allegations of money-laundering saying they acted in a “concerted manner” to hide the property acquisitions.

Assad has denied the French and Spanish charges, claiming most of his fortune was given to him by the Saudi royal family, and that he did not personally handle the acquisition or running of the properties. However, prosecutors say they have evidence he was hands-on and did not delegate. The hearing is expected to run until 18 December.

Assad has also been investigated in Switzerland for alleged war crimes, which he denies. In the 1980s, he was in command of the Defense Companies, an elite commando group suspected of carrying out the massacre of several thousand people at Tadmor prison, near Palmyra, in 1980 and between 10,000 and 40,000 Syrians in the Hama massacre in 1982.

Magnus Carlsen, the world’s best chess player for the last decade, is on the brink of reaching the top in another game – fantasy football.

The grandmaster is enjoying his best season ever in the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game and after Saturday’s results he climbed to the third position in a table of more than 7 million players worldwide.

Carlsen, who is currently competing at the London Chess Classic at Olympia, puts his fantasy football success down to luck. But his FPL team, Kjell Ankedal, has consistently scored high in the overall rankings for the past four years, finishing among the top 3,000 players in the 2017–2018 league.

This season, it took Carlsen just six weeks to make it into the top 1,000 and he has been climbing up the table ever since. It will not comfort anyone languishing in the FPL’s lower millions to learn that Carlsen is also an occasional model.

Like many Norwegians, Carlsen is obsessed with both the Premier League and its fantasy league spin-off. In 2017, eight players from Norway were in the top 50 FPL players in the world. Norway has an advantage for FPL obsessives because of the relatively free availability of live matches on the country’s TV channels, compared to broadcast restrictions in other countries.

Carlsen likes to relax before matches by kicking a ball about and when he is not playing chess he spends hours watching English football, according to chess journalist Tarjei Svensen, who has known Carlsen since he was eight and follows all of his games.

“His ability at fantasy league has been known for a couple of seasons now, but this season has been exceptional and he’s had another good week,” Svensen said.

He added: “His rise up the charts is incredible. He had a really good year for a while last season and then he dropped a couple of hundred places at the end of the season, but he was still in the top 1,000.”

Svensen reckons Carlsen excels at FPL because of a phenomenal memory for Premier League details. “His level of knowledge about English football is amazing, which must help him a lot,” he says.

When a Norwegian film crew stumbled upon Carlsen celebrating France’s victory in Euro 2016, he was singing a West Ham chant praising Dimitri Payet, the French player who was at the club at the time.

In general, the cerebral skills of chess are thought to be a big advantage in fantasy football. Svenson says: “It is a similar game, it requires planning and strategy. And he has an incredible memory which helps.”

The 29-year-old reigning world chess champion tops an elite FPL made up solely of chess grand masters and is dominating another where Martin Ødegaard, a Norwegian prodigy who became the youngest player to represent Real Madrid, is languishing near the bottom of the table. “He is really competitive at anything he does. Any competition he enters he really wants to win,” Svensen said.

This season Carlsen astutely chose Sheffield United’s John Lundstram from the start, as well as bringing in both Liverpool forwards Mo Salah and Sadio Mané and Tottenham’s Son Heung-min.

He’s also benefited from some good fortune – such as the moment Wolves’ Leander Dendoncker came off the bench for Carlsen last week to score his only goal of the season so far.

Svenson says: “Clearly there is some luck but when you do consistently so well, it isn’t luck. He says he has a lot of time on his hands because he doesn’t have a regular job. And he is just a huge football fan, he watches everything. I once went to White Hart Lane with him to watch Spurs. But he doesn’t have a favourite English team, he supports Real Madrid.”

When he was asked about the success of his FPL team on Norwegian TV in October, Carlsen was worried such questions would jinx his performance. Still, he climbed from 162 in the table to the top three.

Carlsen said: “In chess, you know when you’ve done well and when you’ve done poorly, but it’s hard for me to take praise for fantasy league, when I’ve just been lucky.”

Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, has come under pressure to appear before the media in Oslo this week when he collects the Nobel peace prize on Tuesday.

Senior officials of the Norwegian Nobel Institute have said the 2019 winner’s refusal to attend any event where he could be asked questions publicly is “highly problematic”.

Olav Njølstad, the secretary of the Nobel committee, said it would “very much have wanted Abiy to engage with the press during his stay in Oslo”.

“We strongly believe that freedom of expression and a free and independent press are vital components of peace … Moreover, some former Nobel peace prize laureates have received the prize in recognition of their efforts in favour of these very rights and freedoms,” he said.

Nobel peace prize laureates traditionally hold a news conference a day before the official ceremony, but Abiy has told the Norwegian Nobel committee he does not intend to do so.

Neither will the 43-year-old leader take questions from reporters after his meeting with the Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, nor participate at a traditional annual event with children celebrating peace at the Nobel Peace Center museum.

Njølstad added that the committee’s concerns had been made “very clear to the prime minister and his staff”.

Abiy was awarded the Nobel prize for the peace deal he concluded with neighbouring Eritrea last year, three months after coming to power in 2018. The agreement resolved nearly two decades of military stalemate following a border war that ended in 2000.

The former military intelligence officer has pushed through reforms at home, dramatically changing the atmosphere in what was regarded as a repressive state. Measures have included the lifting of a ban on political parties, the release of imprisoned journalists and the sacking of previously untouchable officials, some of them accused of torture.

In November, Abiy faced perhaps the most serious crisis of his term in office after the death of scores of people in a wave of violent disorder.

Abiy’s press secretary, Billene Seyoum, said it was “quite challenging” for a head of state to find enough time for the extensive Nobel programme, particularly since “domestic issues are pressing and warrant attention”.

Abiy would attend essential events in consultation with the Nobel Institute “to honour and respect the Nobel tradition”, she said.

At the same time, “the humble disposition of the prime minister, rooted in our cultural context, is not in alignment with the very public nature of the Nobel award”, Billene said. “The prime minister is … grateful for the recognition.”

Norwegian media have raised concerns that the Nobel prize committee have “once again made a problematic choice”.

Other winners have failed to engage with the media. The former US president Barack Obama also declined to speak to reporters when he won the peace prize in 2009 – and Abiy has rarely given interviews since taking office last year.

Analysts say Abiy’s reforms have lifted the lid on long-repressed tensions between Ethiopia’s many ethnic groups and unrest is expected to worsen in the run-up to the country’s election in May.

When announced earlier this year, the Nobel chairwoman, Berit Reiss-Andersen, defended the choice of Abiy, saying that though some people might have considered it too early to give the Ethiopian leader the prize “it is now that Abiy Ahmed’s efforts need recognition and deserve encouragement”.

Abiy is expected to give an acceptance speech on Tuesday at Oslo City Hall before officials, including Norwegian royals, after receiving the 9m kronor (£721,000) cash award, a gold medal and a diploma.

Abiy also is to meet with Solberg and open a Nobel prize exhibition during a private ceremony. Billene said Abiy was “one of the most accessible Ethiopian prime ministers to date in public and media engagements”.

The global wave of school strikes for the climate over the past year has “achieved nothing” because greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, Greta Thunberg has told activists at UN climate talks in Madrid.

Thousands of young people were expected to gather at the UN climate conference and in the streets of the Spanish capital on Friday to protest against the lack of progress in tackling the climate emergency, as officials from more than 190 countries wrangled over the niceties of wording in documents related to the Paris accord.

In the four years since the landmark agreement was signed, greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 4% and the talks this year are not expected to produce new commitments on carbon from the world’s biggest emitters.

Thunberg, whose solo protest in Sweden in 2017 has since snowballed into a global movement, spoke at a press conference before a march through the centre of Madrid. She said that although schoolchildren had been striking around the world, this “has not translated into action” from governments.

“I’m just an activist and we need more activists,” she said. “Some people are afraid to change – they try so desperately to silence us.”

Thunberg expressed hope for the UN negotiations but doubted whether governments had got the message, and warned the world could not afford continued inaction.

“I sincerely hope COP25 will reach something concrete and increase awareness among people, and that world leaders and people in power grasp the urgency of the climate crisis, because right now it does not seem that they are,” she said.

Although young people would keep striking, Thunberg said, they wanted to stop – if governments made credible promises and showed a willingness to act.

“We can’t go on like this; it is not sustainable that children skip school and we don’t want to continue – we would love some action from the people in power. People are suffering and dying today. We can’t wait any longer,” she said.

The march was scheduled to coincide with protests and youth climate strikes around the world. In the US, Bernie Sanders and Jane Fonda were among the politicians and celebrities planning to join in.

As well as the march and a sit-down protest in the conference centre, there were shows of international solidarity among young people from around the world, including a picnic in a central Madrid park. The conference centre was flooded with hundreds of schoolchildren accompanied by their parents, many with babies in prams, who were kept separate from the rooms where negotiators were working on a draft text to clarify aspects of the Paris agreement.

Young people voiced their frustration at protests inside and outside the conference centre on the outskirts of Madrid.

Brianna Fruean from Samoa, speaking for the Pacific Climate Warriors, told the conference: “World leaders need to know that people like me are watching them. The text we put down today on paper at COP is what our future will look like.”

Many of the young people joining the conference from developing nations around the world bore personal witness to suffering they had experienced or seen.

“I’ve had typhoid. I’ve had malaria. My grandmother died from cholera. I know what I’m talking about,” said Jimmy Fénelon, the national coordinator of the Caribbean Youth Environmental Network in Haiti. “We need to raise awareness among young people. We can get them to work together and send a strong message.”

Renae Baptiste, also from CYEN, said: “For us, climate change is no longer a concept or theory, it’s our new reality. It’s affecting our lives now.”

The activist Miguel van der Velden said: “These things are not games. They’re getting worse. They’re affecting millions of people around the world. I come here because I have hope that we can work together.”