Police, security and medical staff parked their vehicles after Letzte Generation (Last Generation) activists staged a demonstration at Frankfurt airport. Photograph: Timm Reichert/Reuters
Flights at Germany’s busiest airport ‘gradually resuming’ on second day of coordinated ‘oil kills’ protests
Climate activists have disrupted flights at Frankfurt and Oslo airports on the second day of coordinated “oil kills” protests across Europe and North America.
Demanding an end to fossil fuels by 2030, supporters of Letzte Generation (Last Generation) briefly suspended flights at Frankfurt airport on Thursday morning. The activists said they had cut a wire fence, entered on bicycles and skateboards and glued themselves to the tarmac.
In Oslo, protesters from Folk Mot Fossilmakta and Scientist Rebellion Norway caused large queues by blocking a check-in lane with a banner that read: “Fast track to phase out.”
“I would rather not be here today, but I can no longer stand and watch as our elected officials do too little, too slowly,” said Ina Nagler, a climate researcher who took part in the Oslo protest. “The science is clear: We must drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels during this decade.”
The protests, which seek to pressure governments to speed the shift to a clean economy, have hit airports during the start of the busy summer season. On Wednesday morning, activists disrupted travel plans at airports from Helsinki to Barcelona. Further airport protests are expected in the US and Canada on Thursday.
Far-right Israeli lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir delivers a speech following the exit polls of the 2022 Israeli general election on November 2, 2022. (Photo: Ilia Yefimovich/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
The Israeli security minister, who leads the far-right Jewish Power party, accused the Biden administration of thwarting Israel’s victory against Hamas.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir endorsed former U.S. President Donald Trump—the 2024 Republican nominee—for the White House in an interview published Wednesday in which he accused the Biden administration of preventing Israel from winning its war on Gaza.
“I believe that with Trump, Israel will receive the backing to act against Iran,” Ben-Gvir, who heads the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, toldBloomberg. “With Trump, it will be clearer that enemies must be defeated.”
“A cabinet minister is supposed to maintain neutrality,” the 48-year-old minister conceded, “but that’s impossible to do after [U.S. President Joe] Biden.”
“The U.S. has always stood behind Israel in terms of armaments and weapons, yet this time the sense was that we were being reckoned with—that we were trying to be prevented from winning. That happened on Biden’s watch and fed Hamas with lots of energy,” added Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism after he advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Criminals have to stick together: Ben-Gvir, convicted of supporting terrorism, endorses convicted felon Trump for US President. https://t.co/4UpkE2ph1M
While Biden, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other administration officials have decried Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and high civilian casualties—at least 140,000 Palestinians killed, injured, or missing, according to local and international agencies—the U.S. has approved billions of dollars in new military aid and more than 100 arms sales to Israel since October.
During his White House tenure, Trump—who boasted that he “fought for Israel like no president ever before”—moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab nations Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Trump has said that Israel should “get the job done” in Gaza, while criticizing the Israel Defense Forces for posting videos showing its obliteration of the embattled Palestinian enclave.
“I don’t know why they released wartime shots like that. I guess it makes them look tough. But to me, it doesn’t make them look tough,” Trump said in April. “They’re losing the PR war. They’re losing it big. But they’ve got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.”
While Trump says he wants a deal with Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, as president he unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—also known as the Iran nuclear deal—and oversaw a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran featuring deadly economic sanctions.
On the advice of Iran hawks in his administration including then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump also ordered the January 2020 assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.
Ben-Gvir’s interview was published as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to address a joint meeting of U.S. Congress Wednesday in Washington, D.C. A growing number of Democratic lawmakers have called for not only a cease-fire in Gaza but also a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, whose conduct in the war is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have signaled they will skip Netanyahu’s speech. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is also the Senate president, said she will not preside over Wednesday’s session. Harris, who is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in the wake of Biden’s withdrawal from the race on Sunday, said she will meet privately with Netanyahu on Thursday.
Echoing calls from groups including CodePink and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said this week that the prime minister should be arrested for war crimes and genocide.
Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court prosecutor, has applied for arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes including extermination committed on and after October 7.
The National Electoral Council’s headquarters in Caracas, 2024. Photo: teleSUR
In the week ahead of Venezuela’s presidential elections, the National Electoral Council met with international electoral observers and representatives from all political parties
The Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) announced on Monday July 22 that all the electoral machines that will be used in the elections on Sunday, July 28 have been distributed. With this, the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso assured that the machines that will be used in Sunday’s elections have been reviewed by representatives of the political organizations.
“Witnesses from political organizations were present at the event to verify the operation of each of the telecommunications devices involved in the process of transmitting results and ensuring the network used by the CNE,” said Amoroso, at a press conference.
Amoroso also said that the representatives of the political parties that will participate in the elections were able to verify the security codes as well as the functioning of the software to be used by the machines. The CNE thus seeks to guarantee the integrity of the elections and to safeguard the decision of the voters of the Caribbean country.
On the other hand, in its eagerness to cover the election with greater international confidence, the CNE accredited several international observers such as the Carter Center of the United States, the Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America, and the UN Panel of Experts, among others.
Even though an international media campaign tried to popularize the idea that the presidential candidate and current president would not recognize the results, Maduro said in a political rally that “nobody is going to stain the name of Venezuela or the electoral process; rain, thunder or shine, on Sunday there will be free elections in Venezuela. And we will recognize and defend the results”.
Similarly, Jorge Rodríguez, deputy of the Venezuelan National Assembly and an important leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) said in an interview with El País, that “we will recognize the results of the National Electoral Council”, and that if the ruling party were to lose the elections, there would be a “peaceful transition”.
On the other hand, the political team of the right-wing candidacy of Edmundo González Urrutia has repeatedly refused to affirm that it will accept the result of the presidential elections if its candidate were to lose in the elections of Sunday, July 28. María Corina Machado, head of the Venezuelan opposition, said a few weeks ago to the newspaper La Opinión that “The only way for Nicolás Maduro to win is with a monumental fraud”.
This political uncertainty promoted by the right-wing keeps Venezuela on high alert in the face of possible allegations of electoral fraud that, according to Jorge Rodriguez, are already being planned from abroad: “The violent people are trying to deny reality, they have a center in Miami where they will chant fraud on the afternoon of July 28…On Sunday, we will take to the streets, to celebrate the triumph of President Nicolas Maduro!”.
Police and Heathrow airport security were on high alert after Just Stop Oil protesters were arrested at the airport’s perimeter fence. Photograph: Kristian Buus/In Pictures/Getty Images
Ten activists arrested at Heathrow, over 30 flights cancelled at Cologne-Bonn, and planes delayed or diverted
Climate activists acting under the banner “oil kills” have glued themselves to the tarmac and grounded flights across Europe as holidaymakers attempt to make summer getaways.
In a wave of protests at airports from Oslo to Barcelona, activists disrupted flights and demanded that rich and polluting countries phase out fossil fuels by 2030. The protests, which the activists said had led to several arrests, came a day after climate scientists logged the world’s hottest day on record.
An activist taking part in the protest at Cologne-Bonn airport holds her hand glued to the runway. Photograph: Letzte Generation Handout/EPA
“Ordinary people are taking matters into their own hands today to do what our criminal governments have failed to do,” the campaign said in a statement. “We are putting our bodies on the wheels of the machine of the global fossil economy and saying ‘oil kills’.”
In Germany, protesters from the climate group Letzte Generation (Last Generation) briefly stopped flights on Wednesday morning after they cut a chain-linked fence and glued themselves to the tarmac at Cologne-Bonn airport. The airport said that 31 flights had been cancelled and six diverted.
In Austria, activists delayed a flight by refusing to sit down before takeoff while others spilled orange paint in the terminal at Vienna airport. In Switzerland, they blocked roads leading to Zürich and Geneva airports.
Scientists compiling the annual State of the UK Climate report say they have have started to pay more attention to extremes. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The water near the UK’s coasts was hotter in 2023 than scientists have ever before recorded, a report has found, with children today experiencing a hotter and wetter climate than that in which their parents and grandparents grew up.
The sea surface temperature near coasts was 0.9C hotter and winter rainfall across the country was 24% greater over the last decade than the average from 1961 to 1990, according to the State of the UK Climate 2023 report. It found the number of “hot” (28C) days has more than doubled over that period, and the number of “very hot” (30C) and “extremely hot” (32C) days has more than tripled.
Since the UK hit 40C heat for the first time in 2022 – “absolutely smashing records” – the scientists behind the annual report started to pay more attention to extremes, said Mike Kendon, a climate scientist at the Met Office who was the lead author of the report.
The scientists found the number of “very wet” days was 20% greater in the last decade than in the 1961-1990 period.
The mass burning of coal, oil and gas since the 1850s – together with the boom in livestock farming and heavy industry – has heated the planet by 1.3C and upended weather patterns that used to vary only naturally. The report found human activity had made the UK’s unusually high average temperature last year 150 times more likely.
Still, projections show that “2023 will be a fairly average year by the middle of the century and a fairly cool year by the end of the century,” said Kendon. “It’s a really dramatic indicator that our climate will be pushed out of the envelope of the historical range.”
The UK, which has pumped more planet-heating gas into the atmosphere than all but a handful of countries, according to an analysis from Carbon Brief – is already suffering from increasingly violent weather that scientists have traced back to the breakdown of a stable climate. An analysis in May found that a spell of “never-ending” rain in the UK and Ireland last autumn and winter was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by global heating.
