Category: 2. World

A Beijing city official has issued a rare public acknowledgment of official failings in the authorities’ response to the severe flooding that hit China’s capital this week.

Yu Weiguo, a Communist party secretary for Miyun, the northern district worst affected by this week’s extreme weather, said in a press conference on Thursday that there were “gaps” in the city’s readiness for the deadly floods.

More than 40 people are confirmed to have died in the flooding that hit Miyun and Yanqing, another Beijing district, on Sunday and Monday. Nine are still missing, including four municipal government workers.

A year’s worth of rain fell within seven days, turning cars upside down and flooding homes. More than 80,000 people have been relocated and more than 100 villages lost power. In total, more than 300,000 people have been affected.

“There were gaps in our preparatory plans. Our knowledge of extreme weather was lacking. This tragic lesson has warned us that putting the people first, putting human life first, is more than a slogan,” Yu said, according to Agence France-Presse.

Of the 44 confirmed fatalities, 31 happened at an elderly care home in Taishitun, a town in Miyun. A report published by Caixin, a Beijing-based business magazine, said the water in the nursing home was still knee-deep when journalists visited on Tuesday. The care home, where many residents had limited mobility, is near the banks of the Qingshui River, which overflowed during the deluge.

Yu expressed “deep mourning” for the deaths.

His comments are a rare admission of weaknesses in the authorities’ preparedness for extreme weather events, which are becoming more common. Beijing authorities said there was 67% more rainfall this year than in previous years.

City officials said their disaster prevention plans had been imperfect and there were “shortcomings” in the infrastructure needed in the mountainous outlying districts of Beijing.

Many flood victims interviewed by the Guardian said they did not receive advance warnings about the extreme weather.

“The government was caught off-guard, they didn’t know in advance either,” said Li Qingfa, a 75-year-old Miyun resident. “We didn’t really receive any specific warning. We didn’t receive any training in confronting the disaster.”

On Monday, before the scale of the destruction was apparent, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said government departments should “make every effort to protect people’s lives and property”.

Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu and Lillian Yang

On Wednesday, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded hit a sparsely populated region in far-east Russia.

It triggered a tsunami that started crossing the ocean at hundreds of miles an hour. What followed was a race against time: early-warning systems went into alert mode as waves fanned out towards the coastlines of Japan, Hawaii and the US west coast.

The damage appears to have been minor so far and this is, in part, thanks to a global and highly successful disaster response effort. More than 3 million people were successfully told to evacuate their homes.

At the centre of this remarkable response was the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC), based in Hawaii. Founded in 1949, ​it was monitoring tsunamis across the entire ocean by the 1960s. A small team of experts identified the size and depth of the earthquake, and a tsunami warning was triggered straight away. The whole thing worked like clockwork – their speed and accuracy may have saved thousands of lives, with temporary evacuees now allowed to return home.

But this type of work could be under threat. The PTWC is part of a US government agency that has faced cuts from the Trump administration.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake hit off Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula on Wednesday morning. The rupture happened along hundreds of miles of a fault line where the Pacific plate is sinking below the North American plate. This is one of the largest faults on Earth – it is called a megathrust fault – and parts of it are underwater, which means there is always a tsunami risk.

The earthquake was 30 miles (47km) beneath sea level and sent shock waves at a range of 200 miles. Tsunamis travel across the ocean at about 500mph, the speed of a jumbo jet, so some communities had just few minutes’ warning – while those on the other side of the ocean had a few hours. Unlike in the movies, when it is typically one massive wave, tsunamis are often several waves that will continue to travel around the world for days.

What has the damage been and where?

The epicentre was near the Russian city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which has a population of 180,000 people. Residents fled inland as ports flooded, while 200 miles north, the Klyuchevskoy volcano erupted, with lava descending its western slope.

Maximum tsunami wave heights of 4 metres (13ft) were observed in Kamchatka. Some buildings on the coastal area of Severo-Kurilsk in Russia were swept away, according to local officials. The Kremlin has said alert systems “worked well” in the earthquake response and there were no casualties.

The tsunami prompted warnings and evacuations across the Pacific, including in Japan, the US west coast, Hawaii, Canada, Chile, Ecuador and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the height of the waves turned out to be lower than initially feared. In Hawaii the highest recorded waves reached 1.8 metres, in California there were surges of just over a metre, and in Japan waves remained under half a metre.

How good was the warning system?

Local authorities were clear about how to evacuate and gave specific locations across more than a dozen nations.

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In Hawaii, for example, tsunami warning sirens blared. Evacuations were ordered for some coastal areas as the Honolulu department of emergency management announced: “Take action. Destructive tsunami waves expected.” People received alerts on their phones. All islands activated emergency operating centres, shelters opened, and people in coastal areas were told to go to higher ground.

Similar warnings were issued elsewhere. In Japan, almost 2 million people had been ordered to higher ground. Local media reported one fatality of a woman killed while driving her car off a cliff as she tried to escape. In Chile, authorities conducted what the interior ministry said was “perhaps the most massive evacuation ever carried out in our country” involving 1.4 million people.

Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, says: “It looks like it’s been very effective. People had that long-term education, and that long-term readiness to know what to do.” He estimates that this preparedness saved thousands of lives. At this time of year there is a lot of tourist activity along many Pacific coastlines, and visitors are often unfamiliar with local warning systems or evacuation zones. This can make evacuations more challenging.

“It appears from places where the tsunami wave has hit, numerous lives were saved by drawing on that past experience,” says Kelman, notably the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which killed more than 200,000 people. At the time there was no regional tsunami early warning system in place, and the Indian Ocean was not considered a high-risk area. Some warnings were sent by fax and email, and did not reach people in time.

The 2004 tsunami was also significantly more severe – some waves exceeded 30 metres in height; whereas so far waves from this latest tsunami appear to have reached a maximum of 5 metres in Russia, says Kelman. In most places, waves were less than a metre high, and in many places effects were negligible so the disaster that was anticipated did not arrive. This is another important factor in why damage has been limited.

What improvements can be made?

Several international centres send out automatic messages for earthquakes, depending on the location. The Indian Ocean tsunami warning system was set up after 2004. Kelman says: “It was never done before then because it was always too expensive, there were always other priorities, but suddenly it became a priority … It has been tested several times with mixed results, so we have to improve it.” There is no effective equivalent for the Atlantic Ocean.

The main centre to identify this earthquake was the PTWC. “They were on it right away,” says Kelman. “Knowing the size of the earthquake and the depth of the earthquake and the type of the earthquake meant that there was a significant chance of a major tsunami. They issued tsunami warnings and got the messages out there, which were then disseminated by national governments and local authorities.”

However, the PTWC sits within a US government agency targeted by Elon Musk-led cuts earlier this year. Kelman says this tsunami shows how needed it is. He says: “We would hope that if the cuts did affect them, they will be reversed and that the people who have saved lives today will also get more support for appropriate resources.

“It appears that they were nonetheless exceptionally effective, and we owe them so many thanks for issuing appropriate messages and saving many lives.”

At least 23 people were injured when a fairground attraction in Saudi Arabia snapped mid-ride, sending its full carousel plunging to the ground, local media reported on Thursday.

Footage circulating online showed the “360 Degrees” ride breaking in half, with the circular carousel crashing down from a height of several metres.

The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV channel reported 23 injured, four of them seriously, in the accident on Wednesday.

The amusement park in Taif, southwest Saudi Arabia, has been closed and an investigation is underway, Al Arabiya added.

Saudi Arabia has been building multiple leisure and entertainment attractions as the long-cloistered desert country seeks to diversify its oil-reliant economy.

Among its so-called giga-projects is Qiddiya near Riyadh, billed as an “entertainment city” of theme parks and a motorsports racetrack.

An M23 rebel attack on farmers and other civilians in east Democratic Republic of Congo killed 169 people earlier this month, a UN body told Reuters, in what would be one of the deadliest incidents since the Rwanda-backed group’s resurgence.

M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa told Reuters it would investigate but the report could be a “smear campaign”.

The UN rights body’s account has not been previously reported and emerged as US President Donald Trump’s administration pushes for peace between Congo and Rwanda that it hopes will unlock billions in mineral investments.

Reuters has not been able to independently confirm the killings but a local activist cited witnesses as describing M23 combatants using guns and machetes to kill scores of civilians.

The M23 and Congolese government have pledged to work towards peace by August 18 after the rebels this year seized more territory than ever before in fighting that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

According to findings by the UN Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO), which monitors Congo, the M23 operation that led to the farmers’ killings began on July 9 in the Rutshuru territory of North Kivu province.

It targeted suspected members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Congo-based group that includes remnants of Rwanda’s former army and militias that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide, UNJHRO said.

“Civilians, mainly farmers temporarily camping in their fields for the ploughing season, have been attacked. The human toll has been particularly high: at least 169 people have been killed,” UNJHRO said in findings shared by Reuters.

The victims were “far from any immediate support or protection,” UNJHRO said, citing credible information from several independent sources.

In response, M23’s Bisimwa said the group had been notified about UNJHRO’s findings in a letter and would form a commission to investigate the unconfirmed accusations.

“We believe that before imposing sanctions, the facts must first be established by verifying their actual existence through an investigation,” he said.

“This rush to publish unverified information is propaganda whose purpose is known only to the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office,” he said, adding that the allegations could be part of a “smear campaign” by Congolese employees of UNJHRO.

UNJHRO is made up of the human rights division of Congo’s UN peacekeeping mission and the former office of the UN high commissioner for human rights in Congo. It has both Congolese and foreign staff members.

Hutu farmers targeted

The activist in Rutshuru, who did not want to be named for safety reasons, told Reuters the M23 combatants killed more than 100 civilians, mostly Congolese Hutu farmers.

The victims had initially fled when M23 advanced on the territory, but they returned after M23 promised them safety, the activist said.

UN human rights chief Volker Turk said last month that M23, Congo’s army and allied militias had all committed abuses in eastern Congo, many of which may amount to war crimes.

Rwanda has long denied helping M23 and says its forces act in self-defence against Congo’s army and ethnic Hutu militiamen linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, including the FDLR.

A report by a group of United Nations experts published this month said Rwanda exercised command and control over M23 and was backing the group in order to conquer territory in east Congo.

A government spokesperson said at the time that the report misrepresented Rwanda’s security worries related to the FDLR and affiliated groups. The spokesperson, Yolande Makolo, did not respond to a request for comment about UNJHRO’s findings.

Persistent violence in eastern Congo threatens Trump’s vision for the region, which has been plagued by war for decades and is rich in minerals including gold, cobalt, coltan, tungsten and tin.

A peace agreement signed on June 27 in Washington by the Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers requires Congo to “neutralise” the FDLR as Rwanda withdraws from Congolese territory.

Both the Congolese operations against the FDLR and the Rwandan withdrawal were supposed to have started on Sunday, though it is unclear what progress has been made. They have three months to conclude.

Congolese government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya told Reuters the killings in Rutshuru demonstrate that M23 is a destabilising force incapable of bringing security. Kinshasa wants a peace deal that will allow for the restoration of its authority in the region, Muyaya said.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced sanctions against members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), accusing them of supporting “terrorism” and seeking to destabilise peace efforts.

Thursday’s announcement from Trump’s Department of State denies visas to members of either organisation.

“It is in our national security interests to impose consequences and hold the PLO and PA accountable for not complying with their commitments and undermining the prospects for peace,” the announcement read.

Both the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization serve as representatives for the Palestinian people, pushing for the recognition of a Palestinian state on the international stage.

But the State Department said it reported to Congress that the groups had violated international agreements, including the Middle East Peace Commitments Act of 2002.

Specifically, the State Department denounced the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization for seeking to “internationalize its conflict with Israel” by seeking relief at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

It also accused the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization of “continuing to support terrorism including incitement and glorification of violence” and “providing payments and benefits in support of terrorism to Palestinian terrorists and their families”.

By way of example, the State Department cited textbooks as a means that these groups have allegedly supported “terrorism”.

Israel has been waging a nearly 22-month-long war in Gaza that human rights experts at the United Nations have compared to a genocide. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign, with more at risk of dying from hunger as a result of its blockade of the territory.

Meanwhile, since the war started on October 7, 2023, illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have increased, as has violence against Palestinians there. Nearly 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed in attacks, some by settlers, others by members of the Israeli armed forces.

Israel faces several international legal challenges as the result of those actions. In November 2024, for instance, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, based on accusations of war crimes in Gaza.

Other countries, including South Africa, have brought cases before the International Court of Justice alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The US, however, has been an unwavering ally of Israel throughout its war in Gaza and has supplied the Israeli government with billions of dollars in military aid.

It also has opposed efforts in international court to bring Israel to account for human rights abuses, arguing that neither the US nor Israel are subject to the courts’ jurisdictions.

But Palestine is a nonmember observer state at the UN, which governs the International Court of Justice. And it is also a member of the Rome Statute, the founding document of the International Criminal Court.

The State Department’s order on Thursday comes as several Western countries, among them France, the United Kingdom and Canada, pledge to recognise Palestine’s statehood at the upcoming UN General Assembly in September.

Trump, however, has dismissed such efforts as inconsequential. He has also warned that recognition of Palestinian statehood would serve as a “reward” to Hamas, a group that has fought the Palestinian Authority for power.

The US has issued a series of sanctions in recent months seemingly poised to weaken individuals and entities that have been critical of Israel.

In June, for instance, it sanctioned judges on the International Criminal Court who were involved in the decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. And earlier this month, it also sanctioned a special rapporteur at the UN, Francesca Albanese, whose job is to monitor the human rights situation of Palestinians.

At the time, the US accused Albanese of waging a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel”.

In response, the UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, called for an end to the “attacks and threats” faced by international observers.

Al Jazeera’s White House correspondent Kimberly Halkett explained that the United States is now “collectively targeting, with visa restrictions, members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and also the Palestinian authority”.

But she said Trump’s unconditional support for Israel may run contrary to emerging trends in his Republican Party.

“This is a position that, for the president at least, is increasingly at odds with members of his own Republican Party — namely the so-called MAGA wing or Make America Great Again wing — that have started, in the last week or so, to use the word genocide to describe Israel’s starvation tactics,” Halkett said.

Indian opposition parties criticised the government on Thursday, describing US President Donald Trump’s threat of a 25 per cent tariff as a diplomatic failure for New Delhi, while the rupee currency tumbled and equity indexes slid in response to the news.

The 25pc rate would single out India more harshly than other major trading partners, and threatens to unravel months of talks, undermining one of Washington’s strategic partners in the region, viewed as a counterbalance to China.

Trump said the tariff on imports from India would start from Friday, in addition to an unspecified penalty for Russian dealings and involvement in the BRICS grouping of nations.

In response, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi said it was studying the implications of Trump’s remarks and was dedicated to securing a fair trade deal.

“This development reflects a broader collapse of foreign policy under the Modi government,” a lawmaker of the main opposition Congress party said in a notice to the lower house of parliament, asking for a discussion on the matter.

The debate would focus on the “government’s economic and diplomatic failure in preventing the imposition of 25pc US tariffs plus penalties on Indian exports,” the notice added.

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal was expected to brief the lower house later on Thursday, his office said.

“I don’t care what India does with Russia,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday, adding, “They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”

Russia remained India’s top oil supplier during the first six months of 2025, accounting for 35pc of overall supplies.

Economists warned the steep tariff could hurt India’s manufacturing ambitions and trim up to 40 basis points off economic growth in the financial year to March 2026.

India’s benchmark equity indices, the Nifty 50 and BSE Sensex, fell as much as 0.9pc each in early trade before paring losses and trading flat.

The rupee was trading down 0.2pc at 87.6175 after touching its lowest in more than five months earlier in the day. The dollar’s rise gains momentum as the Fed signals patience on rate cuts.

‘Raw Deal’

India has received a “raw deal”, said Priyanka Kishore, an economist at Asia Decoded. “While further trade talks may bring the tariff rate down, it appears unlikely that India will secure a significantly better outcome than its eastern neighbours,” she added.

That would raise questions about India’s relative appeal as a China plus one destination, she said, referring to a strategy of diversifying supply chains through manufacturing outside China to reduce geopolitical and operational risks.

Trade talks continued, Trump said on social media, however, as nations face a Friday deadline to strike deals on reciprocal tariffs or have a US tariff slapped on their exports.

The US levy on India exceeds those agreed by some other nations in deals with the Trump administration. For example, the tariff on Vietnam is set at 20pc and on Indonesia at 19pc, with levies of 15pc on Japanese and European Union exports.

On Wednesday, Trump said Washington had reached a trade deal with India’s arch-rival Pakistan that Islamabad said would lead to lower tariffs on its exports, but neither side has yet revealed the agreed rate.

Since India’s short but deadly conflict with Pakistan in May, New Delhi has been unhappy about Trump’s closeness with Islamabad and has protested, casting a shadow over trade talks.

Despite former public displays of bonhomie between Trump and Modi, India has taken a slightly harder stance against the United States in recent weeks.

Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the India-Pakistan ceasefire he announced on social media on May 10, but India disputes his claim that it resulted from his intervention and trade threats.

“The government has destroyed our economic policy, has destroyed our defence policy, has destroyed our foreign policy,” opposition leader Rahul Gandhi told reporters.

The United States, the world’s largest economy, now has a trade deficit of $45.7 billion with India, the fifth largest.

Trump’s announcement and the lack of clarity on the penalty have created “considerable uncertainty”, said Krishan Arora, a partner at consultants Grant Thornton Bharat.

“India is also actively realigning its position in global supply chains through deeper trade and investment linkages with other countries – an effort that must now accelerate to reduce long-term vulnerabilities,” Arora said.

At least 91 people have been killed and 600 wounded while waiting for aid in Gaza over the past 24 hours, as the US envoy, Steve Witkoff, visits Israel for ceasefire discussions and to inspect food distribution.

On Wednesday night, crowds of hungry people had gathered at the Zikim crossing with Israel, waiting for trucks loaded with humanitarian aid to enter the besieged strip, when they were shot. Al-Saraya field hospital said it had received more than 100 dead and wounded after the shooting, while the death toll was expected to rise, the Associated Press reported.

On Thursday morning, 19 people seeking aid were killed by Israeli soldiers outside aid distribution points in the central Gaza Strip and in Rafah in south Gaza.

Gaza is in the throes of famine, according to the international authority on food insecurity. Seven children died of hunger on Wednesday, bringing the total number of malnutrition deaths to 154, the Gaza health authority said.

“Dying of starvation is slow and painful,” the World Health Organization said in a statement on Thursday. “A starving child, among the most vulnerable, might cry constantly from pain until becoming too weak to even do that. If not urgently treated, a child with acute malnutrition will die.”

The UN agency added that it would take “months, if not years” to reverse what it called a “man-made tragedy”.

As Gaza’s famine has deepened, social order has broken down. It is common for crowds of hundreds of desperate people to wait for the rare aid truck to enter Gaza and to loot the vehicle once it arrives.

Starvation graphic

More than 1,000 people have been shot, primarily by Israeli soldiers, while trying to get food from the private US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and while waiting for aid trucks by border crossings.

The UN has said the key to stopping the looting of aid is to reassure the population that a constant, adequate supply will enter Gaza. Israel controls aid crossings into Gaza and has been accused of creating the hunger crisis through its blockades of humanitarian supplies – something it denies, alongside its rejection that there is starvation in Gaza.

Israel recently expanded aid access into Gaza, but humanitarians have said the new measures will not reverse the starvation crisis and have called for urgent, unfettered aid access into Gaza.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said on Wednesday that the amount of food being brought into Gaza was “far from enough”.

The foreign minister of Cyprus announced on Thursday that his country was working to reactivate a sea route to ship humanitarian aid to Gaza. Cyprus had previously helped deliver about 2,200 tonnes of aid to Gaza last year, before several incidents stopped the route altogether.

Constantinos Kombos said more planning was needed before reopening the sea corridor. He called the situation in Gaza “unacceptable, unbearable” and said aid must be let into the territory “so that it has tangible, visible outcomes immediately”.

As the hunger crisis worsened, Witkoff landed in Israel, where he met the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli media reported that they discussed the flagging ceasefire talks and the White House later announced that Witkoff and the US ambassador, Mike Huckabee, would travel to Gaza on Friday “to inspect the current [food] distribution sites and secure a plan to deliver more food and meet with local Gazans to hear first-hand about this dire situation on the ground”.

graphic

Israel sent a response on Wednesday to Hamas’s latest ceasefire plan, which proposed a 60-day pause in fighting and a hostage-prisoner exchange.

The US president, Donald Trump, called on Hamas to surrender and release the remaining Israeli hostages. The group holds about 50 captives, 20 of whom are believed to be living.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!”

Trump had suggested on Wednesday that the US would partner with Israel to run new food distribution points in Gaza, but has given few details about what this plan would look like. The GHF has the backing of the Trump administration and is chaired by an associate of Trump, but it was not clear whether the US would work through the private initiative.

Israel has come under huge international pressure as images of starving people have prompted an outcry. More than a dozen countries have condemned Israel for its conduct in Gaza and taken steps to recognise the Palestinian state – a largely symbolic move.

Several countries, including Canada, said they would move toward recognising a Palestinian state in September. Canada’s recognition would be contingent on some changes within the Palestinian Authority, Mark Carney, the prime minister, said.

Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said before a visit to Israel on Thursday that recognition of a Palestinian state should come at the end of talks on a two-state solution, but said Berlin would respond to any unilateral actions, after citing “annexation threats” by some Israeli ministers.

On Tuesday, the European Commission proposed a partial suspension of Israel from its most prestigious science research programme over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

airdrops into Gaza graphic

Israel has condemned the international censure of its actions in Gaza and moves to recognise the Palestinian state, which it says are in service of Hamas.

The past week, however, has brought the sharpest rebukes of Israel from the international community since the war in Gaza began on 7 October 2023. It has put more pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire in Gaza or face more international isolation.

Last week, ceasefire talks seemed to completely stall after Israel and the US withdrew their negotiators from Doha, where talks were being held. Both parties blamed Hamas for the collapse, saying the group had introduced new demands late in the talks – a claim Hamas denied.

Israeli officials have warned that if Hamas does not become more flexible with its demands, Israel will reimpose a tight siege on humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to the country’s public broadcaster, Kan. The broadcaster said that the military proposed expanding its ground operations in the territory to put pressure on Hamas to make concessions in negotiations.

Israel launched its war in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack in 2023 that killed about 1,200 people. More than 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s military operation and much of the territory has been destroyed.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Canada’s announcement it will recognize a Palestinian state “will make it very hard” for the U.S. to reach a trade agreement with its northern neighbor.

Trump’s threat, posted in the early hours Thursday on his social media network, is the latest way he has sought to use his trade war to coerce countries on unrelated issues and is a swing from the ambivalence he has expressed about other countries making such a move.

The Republican president said this week that he didn’t mind British Prime Minister Keir Starmer taking a position on the issue of formally recognizing Palestinian statehood. And last week he said that French President Emmanuel Macron’s similar move was “not going to change anything.”

But Trump, who has heckled Canada for months and suggested it should become its 51st U.S. state, indicated on Thursday that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s similar recognition would become leverage ahead of a deadline he set in trade talks.

“Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine,” Trump said in his Truth Social post. “That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”

Trump has threatened to impose a 35% tariff on Canada if no deal is reached by Friday, when he’s said he will levy tariffs against goods from dozens of countries if they don’t reach agreements with the U.S.

Some imports from Canada are still protected by the 2020 United States Mexico Canada Agreement, which is up for renegotiation next year.

Carney’s announcement Wednesday that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state in September comes amid a broader global shift against Israel’s policies in Gaza.

Though Trump this week said he was “not going to take a position” on recognizing a Palestinian state, he later said that such a move would be rewarding Hamas, whose surprise Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel prompted a declaration of war and a massive military retaliation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump’s new cudgel against Canada comes after he sought this week to impose steep tariffs on Brazil because it indicted its former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who like the U.S. president has faced criminal charges for attempting to overturn the results of his election loss.

Citing a personal grievance in trade talks with Brazil and now Canada’s symbolic announcement on a Palestinian state adds to the jumble of reasons Trump has pointed to for his trade war, such as stopping human trafficking, stopping the flow of fentanyl, balancing the budget and protecting U.S. manufacturing.

White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. File
| Photo Credit: AP