Viral Showbiz Pinay (2025)

17/11/2025

LONDON — The U.K.’s political right wants to quit another European institution. Battle-scarred Remainers are leaving nothing to chance this time.

With ministers struggling to stop undocumented migrants arriving on British shores, the poll-topping “Mr. Brexit” Nigel Farage has been pushing hard for another nuclear option: leaving the European Convention on Human Rights altogether.

The Conservative Party is jumping on the bandwagon too — and that’s putting Britain’s Labour government, haunted by the failed 2016 campaign to keep Britain in the EU, in fight-back mode.

Opponents argue ECHR departure is the only way to control asylum claims, which successive governments have struggled to reduce. The convention became part of U.K. domestic law in 1998, and allows people to appeal against government immigration decisions on human rights grounds. It means asylum-seekers can invoke Articles 8 — protecting a right to family life — and Article 3 — the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.

Supporters insist quitting the convention won’t actually solve the highly visible problem of small boats landing on British shores. They warn that walking away from the ECHR would weaken human rights protections for British citizens — and damage the country’s standing on the world stage.

“We need to get on the front foot and ensure there is a concerted campaign to make the case for the benefit of our membership of the ECHR to ordinary voters,” said a U.K. government official involved in discussions and granted anonymity to speak frankly about them.

“We don’t want to wake up in three years’ time trying to play catch-up after years of campaigning by Conservatives and Reform.”

Remain and reform?

While the shape of the nascent campaign is yet to settle, officials are already starting to think about how they can rapidly rebut noisy arguments made by the convention’s detractors.

Brits are unlikely to get a referendum vote on Britain’s membership as they did over membership of the European Union in 2016.

But both Reform UK and the Conservatives are pledging to stand at the next election, due in 2029, on an ECHR departure ticket.

Officials in government are acutely conscious of parallels with Brexit, where a Remain campaign faced an uphill battle against Farage after generations of politicians had briefed against the EU.

Like David Cameron in the 2016 Brexit referendum, ministers in the ruling Labour Party are not planning to fight their battle to remain in the ECHR on the status quo.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will on Monday unveil plans for a new U.K. law reforming the way Article 8 — the right to family life — is interpreted, to “constrain” the way it is applied in immigration cases.

Mahmood is also hoping to build alliances with members of the Council of Europe to address what she sees as the “over-expansive application” of Article 3, which prohibits torture.

Supporters argue this needs to be done quickly so that ministers can start making a positive case for the convention.

A long-awaited Home Office review, probing how the U.K. implements the convention in domestic law, and weighing potential reforms, is expected to be unveiled by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in the coming days. | Adam Vaughan/EPA

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in October that the government needs “to look again at the interpretation” by U.K. courts of the convention and other international treaties in immigration cases. But Starmer, a barrister by profession, has long insisted he does not want to “tear down” human rights laws, and stressed that it remains the government’s policy to stay in the ECHR.

Outrider campaigns

While ministers mull reform, an outrider campaign has already begun, with other British progressives vowing to take on Farage and the Conservatives — and mount a noisy defense of the convention.

“The Liberal Democrats have already been making it very clear that we’re campaigning to remain in the ECHR,” Max Wilkinson, the party’s home affairs spokesman said.

“We think that this is a total red herring from the perspective of solving issues to do with immigration and asylum, because leaving the ECHR is going to make very little difference to our ability to deal with small boat arrivals,” he argued.

Keir Starmer, a barrister by profession, has long insisted he does not want to “tear down” human rights laws, and stressed that it remains the government’s policy to stay in the ECHR. | Pool photo by Tolga Akmen/EPA

“If we thought that the chaos caused by leaving the European Union, and those years of painful debates about how Brexit was going to be done, were really difficult for the country, then leaving the ECHR is going to be another compounded impact on top of that.”

“We’re already making the case,” Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali said. “We’re already campaigning to make sure that the positives are talked about.”

Earlier this month the human rights group Liberty coordinated a statement from almost 300 organizations — from homeless charities to veterans groups — calling for a “full-throated” defense of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, and warning that the way the convention had been used as a political scapegoat over recent years had had “devastating real world consequences.”

One of those signatories, Naomi Smith, chief executive of the Best for Britain campaign group, said the group plans to reconvene after Mahmood’s speech. Best for Britain was set up after Brexit and unsuccessfully campaigned for a second referendum. “We’re certainly not twiddling our thumbs,” Smith said, but she stressed the group is also “giving the government the space to land in the right place” on the issue.

Reverse Midas touch

Allies of Starmer see Labour’s former human rights lawyer leader as one of their most authoritative voices when it comes to making the case for the ECHR.

But other progressives fear a man whose party is streets behind Farage in the polls and beset by factionalism could be an encumbrance.

“We’re already making the case,” Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali said. “We’re already campaigning to make sure that the positives are talked about.” | Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

“If I’m totally honest, I think [Starmer] is a liability for any cause right now because of how poorly he’s performing, and how unpopular he is,” the Green’s Ali, whose party wants to challenge Labour from the left, said.

He’s pushing the Greens’ charismatic new leader Zack Polanski as a strong advocate, pointing out the success of the Brexit campaign’s willingness to get populist under both Farage and Boris Johnson.

“They were both very charismatic figures and both were very populist-style campaigns that were easily digestible,” Ali said.

“I think you always need a plurality of voices in any winning campaign,” Smith of Best for Britain said.

Farage is gunning for Brexit 2.0. Can he be stopped?

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LONDON — The U.K.’s political right wants to quit another European institution. Battle-scarred Remainers are leaving nothing to chance this...

16/11/2025

BELÉM, Brazil — United Nations climate summits have for years ended with bold promises to stave off global warming. But those commitments often fade when nations go home.

Three years ago, in a resort city on the Red Sea, delegates from nearly 200 countries approved what they hailed as a historic fund to help poorer nations pay for climate damages — but it’s at risk of running dry. A year later, negotiations a few miles from Dubai’s gleaming waterfront achieved the first-ever worldwide pledge to turn away from fossil fuels — but production of oil and natural gas is still rising, a trend championed by the new administration in Washington.

That legacy is casting a shadow over this year’s conference near the mouth of the Amazon River, which the host, Brazil, has dubbed a summit of truth.

Days after the gathering started last week, nations were still sorting out what to do with contentious issues that have typically held up the annual negotiations. As the talks opened, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the world must “fight” efforts to deny the reality of climate change — decades after scientists concluded that people are making the Earth hotter.

That led one official to offer a grim assessment of global efforts to tackle climate change, 10 years after an earlier summit produced the sweeping Paris Agreement.

“We have miserably failed to accomplish the objective of this convention, which is the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy and lead negotiator, during an interview at the conference site in Belém, Brazil.

“Additional promises mean nothing if you didn’t achieve or fulfill your previous promises,” he added.

It hasn’t helped that the U.S. is skipping the summit for the first time, or that President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and urged the world to abandon efforts to fix it. But Trump isn’t the only reason for stalled action. Economic uncertainty, infighting and political backsliding have stymied green measures in both North America and Europe.

In other parts of the world, countries are embracing the economic opportunities that the green transition offers. Many officials in Belém point to signs that progress is underway, including the rapid growth of renewables and electric vehicles and a broader understanding of both the world’s challenges and the means to address them.

“Now we talk about solar panels, electric cars, regenerative agriculture, stopping deforestation, as if we have always talked about those things,” said Ana Toni, the summit’s executive director. “Just in one decade, the topic changed totally. But we still need to speed up the process.”

Still, analysts say it’s become inevitable that the world’s warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius since the dawn of the industrial era, breaching the target at the heart of the Paris Agreement. With that in mind, countries are huddling at this month’s summit, known as COP30, with the hope of finding greater alignment on how to slow rising temperatures.

But how credible would any promises reached in Brazil be? Here are five pledges achieved at past climate summits — and where they stand now:

Moving away from fossil fuels

The historic 2023 agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels, made at the COP28 talks in Dubai, was the first time that nearly 200 countries agreed to wind down their use of oil, natural gas and coal. Though nonbinding, that commitment was even more striking because the talks were overseen by the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company.

Just two years later, fossil fuel consumption is on the rise, despite rapid growth of wind and solar, and many of the world’s largest oil and gas producers plan to drill even more. The United States — the world’s biggest economy, top oil and gas producer and second-largest climate polluter — is pursuing a fossil fuel renaissance while forsaking plans to shift toward renewables.

The president of the Dubai summit, Sultan al-Jaber, said at a recent energy conference that while wind and solar would expand, so too would oil and gas, in part to meet soaring demand for data centers. Liquefied natural gas would grow 65 percent by 2050, and oil will continue to be used as a feedstock for plastic, he said.

“The exponential growth of AI is also creating a power surge that no one anticipated 18 months ago,” he said in a press release from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., where he remains managing director and group CEO.

The developed world is continuing to move in the wrong direction on fossil fuels, climate activists say.

“We know that the world’s richest countries are continuing to invest in oil and gas development,” said Bill Hare, a climate scientist who founded Climate Analytics, a policy group. “This simply should not be happening.”

The Paris-based International Energy Agency said last week that oil and gas demand could grow for decades to come. That statement marked a reversal from the group’s previous forecast that oil use would peak in 2030 as clean energy takes hold. Trump’s policies are one reason for the pivot.

Still, renewables such as wind and solar power are soaring in many countries, leading analysts to believe that nations will continue to shift away from fossil fuels. How quickly that will happen is unknown.

“The transition is underway but not yet at the pace or scale required,” said a U.N. report on global climate action released last week. It pointed to large gaps in efforts to reduce fossil fuel subsidies and abate methane pollution.

Lula opened this year’s climate conference by calling for a “road map” to cut fossil fuels globally. It has earned support from countries such as Colombia, Germany, Kenya and the United Kingdom. But it’s not part of the official agenda at these talks, and many poorer countries say what they really need is funding and support to make the shift.

Triple renewable energy, double energy efficiency

This call also emerged from the 2023 summit, and was considered a tangible measure of countries’ progress toward achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets.

Countries are on track to meet the pledge to triple their renewable energy capacity by 2030, thanks largely to a record surge in solar power, according to energy think tank Ember.

It estimates that the world is set to add around 793 gigawatts of new renewable capacity in 2025, up from 717 gigawatts in 2024, driven mainly by China.

“If this pace continues, annual additions now only need to grow by around 12 percent a year from 2026 to 2030 to reach tripling, compared with 21 percent originally needed,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s chief analyst. “But governments will need to strengthen commitments to lock this in.”

The pledge to double the world’s energy efficiency by 2030, by contrast, is a long way behind. While efficiency improvements would need to grow by 4 percent a year to reach that target, they hit only 1 percent in 2024.

‘Loss and damage’ fund

When the landmark fund for victims of climate disasters was established at the 2022 talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, it offered promise that billions of dollars would someday flow to nations slammed by hurricanes, droughts or rising seas.

Three years later, it has less than $800 million — only a little more than it had in 2023.

Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, excoriated leaders this month for not providing more. Her rebuke came little more than a week after Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever seen in the Atlantic, swept across the Caribbean.

“All of us should hold our heads down in shame, because having established this fund a few years ago in Sharm El-Sheikh, its capital base is still under $800 million while Jamaica reels from damage in excess of $7 billion, not to mention Cuba or the Bahamas,” she said.

Last week, the fund announced it was allocating $250 million for financial requests to help less-wealthy nations grapple with “damage from slow onset and extreme climate-induced events.” The fund’s executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, said the call for contributions was significant but also a reminder that the fund needs much more money.

Richard Muyungi, chair for the African Group of Negotiators and Tanzania’s climate envoy, said he expects additional funds will come from this summit, though not the billions needed.

“There is a chance that the fund will run out of money by next year, year after next, before it even is given a chance to replenish itself,” said Michai Robertson, a senior finance adviser for the Alliance of Small Island States.

Global Methane Pledge

Backed by the U.S. and European Union, this pledge to cut global methane emissions 30 percent by 2030 was launched four years ago at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, sparking a wave of talk about the benefits of cutting methane, a greenhouse gas with a relatively short shelf life but much greater warming potential than carbon dioxide.

“The Global Methane Pledge has been instrumental in catalyzing attention to the issue of methane, because it has moved from a niche issue to one of the critical elements of the climate planning discussions,” said Giulia Ferrini, head of the U.N. Environment Program’s International Methane Emissions Observatory.

“All the tools are there,” she added. “It’s just a question of political will.”

Methane emissions from the oil and gas sector remain stubbornly high, despite the economic benefits of bringing them down, according to the IEA. The group’s latest methane tracker shows that energy-based methane pollution was around 120 million tons in 2024, roughly the same as a year earlier.

Despite more than 150 nations joining the Global Methane Pledge, few countries or companies have devised plans to meet their commitments, “and even fewer have demonstrated verifiable emissions reductions,” the IEA said.

The European Union’s methane regulation requires all oil and gas operators to measure, report and verify their emissions, including importers. And countries and companies are becoming more diligent about complying with an international satellite program that notifies companies and countries of methane leaks so they can repair them. Responses went from just 1 percent of alerts last year to 12 percent so far in 2025.

More work is needed to achieve the 2030 goal, the U.N. says. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have pressured the EU to rethink its methane curbs.

Barbados and several other countries are calling for a binding methane pact similar to the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 agreement that’s widely credited with saving the ozone layer by phasing out the use of harmful pollutants.

That’s something Paris Agreement architect Laurence Tubiana hopes could happen.

“I’m just in favor of tackling this very seriously, because the pledge doesn’t work [well] enough,” she said.

Climate finance

In 2009, wealthy countries agreed to provide $100 billion annually until 2025 to help poorer nations deal with rising temperatures. At last year’s climate talks in Azerbaijan, they upped the ante to $300 billion per year by 2035.

But those countries delivered the $100 billion two years late, and many nations viewed the new $300 billion commitment with disappointment. India, which expressed particular ire about last year’s outcome, is pushing for new discussions in Brazil to get that money flowing.

“Finance really is at the core of everything that we do,” Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s climate envoy, told POLITICO’s E&E News. But he also recognizes that governments alone are not the answer. “We cannot say finance must only come from the public sector.”

Last year’s pledge included a call for companies and multilateral development banks to contribute a sum exceeding $1 trillion by 2035, but much of that would be juiced by donor nations — and more countries would need to contribute.

That is more important now, said Jake Werksman, the EU’s lead negotiator.

“As you know, one of the larger contributors to this process, the U.S., has essentially shut down all development flows from the U.S. budget, and no other party, including the EU, can make up for that gap,” he said during a press conference.

Zack Colman and Zia Weise contributed to this report from Belém, Brazil.

Past promises haunt Brazil’s climate summit

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BELÉM, Brazil — United Nations climate summits have for years ended with bold promises to stave off global warming. But those commitments of...

16/11/2025

ATHENS — Athens and Kyiv signed an agreement on Sunday for Ukraine to import liquified natural gas to help meet the country’s winter energy needs, as Greece becomes the first EU country to actively participate in the U.S. plan to replace “every last molecule of Russian gas” with American LNG.

The plan calls for U.S. LNG deliveries routed through Greece from next month to March 2026 via the vertical gas corridor, a newly activated pipeline system for natural gas that includes pipelines, LNG terminals and storage facilities.

The project — actively lobbied by the U.S. — is intended to provide energy to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, with Greece being the entry point for U.S. gas going up to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and farther north to Ukraine and Moldova.

“Ukraine gains direct access to diversified and reliable energy sources, while Greece becomes a hub for supplying Central and Eastern Europe with American liquefied natural gas,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, emphasizing Greece’s growing role as an energy hub.

The agreement will “cover nearly €2 billion needed for gas imports to compensate for the losses in Ukrainian production caused by Russian strikes,” Zelenskyy said in a statement Sunday.

The deal was signed during a visit by Zelenskyy to Athens, attended by Mitsotakis, Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou and U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle. The agreement signed on Sunday formalized a declaration of intent between Greece’s gas company DEPA Commercial and Ukraine’s Naftogaz.

Greece aims to showcase its importance as an entry point for American LNG, bolstering Europe’s independence from Russian gas. Athens last week signed a 20-year deal to import 700 million cubic meters of U.S. LNG a year starting in 2030, aiming to boost U.S. LNG shipments from Greece to its northern European neighbors.

“What we see for the future of Greece and the United States is Greece being an energy hub and showing this energy dominance that both of our countries can experience and work together cooperatively to achieve tremendous outcomes,” Ambassador Guilfoyle said in an interview with Antenna TV on Thursday.

The deal was signed during a visit by Zelenskyy to Athens, attended by Mitsotakis, Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou and U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle. | Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

“Cooperation within the framework of the ‘vertical corridor’ may prove to be more decisive for peace and prosperity in the region than NATO,” Energy Minister Papastavrou told a conference in Athens on Tuesday.

In addition to the U.S. LNG deal, Greece has opened its waters to gas exploration for the first time in more than four decades, with American help, under an agreement signed with ExxonMobil, the U.S.’s biggest oil company, along with Greece’s Energean and HelleniQ Energy.

“This is understood and portrayed to be significantly adding to Greece’s value added as a commercial partner and geopolitical ally,” said Harry Tzimitras, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo Cyprus Centre.

But he also noted criticisms of Greece’s energy push, including environmental consequences, financial challenges and geopolitical risks.

“These span the whole gamut of the project’s aspects: Greece would have to double its storage capacity … requiring extensive construction of depots and LNG facilities with serious potential environmental footprint,” Tzimitras said.

“U.S. LNG is currently very expensive, straining energy budgets; the likelihood of geopolitical antagonisms is heightened; and the whole project is identified as going against the efforts to achieve environmental targets, contributing to the delay in transitioning to renewable energy sources,” he said.

Athens and Kyiv sign LNG deal as Greece adopts US energy agenda

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ATHENS — Athens and Kyiv signed an agreement on Sunday for Ukraine to import liquified natural gas to help meet the country’s winter energy ...

16/11/2025

Ukraine will import gas from Greece to help secure its energy supply for the coming winter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday.

The Ukrainian leader said the deal “will be another gas supply route to secure imports for the winter as much as possible.”

The agreement will “cover nearly €2 billion needed for gas imports to compensate for the losses in Ukrainian production caused by Russian strikes,” Zelenskyy said in a statement.

Ukraine is also preparing a deal with France for “a significant strengthening of our combat aviation, air defense and other defense capabilities,” said Zelenskyy, who is set to travel to Paris on Monday for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron.

The Ukrainian leader is in Athens Sunday to meet with Greek President Konstantinos Tasoulas and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

After visiting France on Monday, Zelenskyy will travel to Spain on Tuesday. Spain is “another strong country that has joined the partners in the initiatives that really help us,” Zelenskyy said, although he did not mention a specific deal with Madrid.

“Our top priorities today are air defense, systems and missiles for air defense,” Zelenskyy said in the statement.

“Full financing will be secured” for the Greek deal from Ukrainian government funds, funding from European banks with guarantees from the European Commission, and from Ukrainian banks, with help from “European partners” including Norway, Zelenskyy said. Kyiv is also undertaking “active work” with partners in the U.S., he said.

Ukraine is also working with Poland and Azerbaijan on energy supplies, and “we very much count on long-term contracts,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine reaches gas-import deal with Greece, Zelenskyy says

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Ukraine will import gas from Greece to help secure its energy supply for the coming winter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on ...

15/11/2025

U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion over a misleading edit of his speech, after the broadcaster apologised but declined to compensate him.

“We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Friday evening. “We have to do it.”

The BBC conceded on Thursday that edited footage of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech on its Panorama documentary program had unintentionally created “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” and said the segment would not be aired again.

While Britain’s state broadcaster apologized to the president for the way it edited his speech, it said it would not offer financial compensation, as Trump has demanded. Two of the BBC’s top executives, Director General Tim Davie and its news chief, Deborah Turness, resigned over the incident and accusations of biased coverage. BBC chair Samir Shah sent a personal apology Thursday to the White House.

Trump has launched a flurry of lawsuits against publications and media companies he has accused of being unfriendly and defamatory, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC and Paramount. In July, Paramount agreed to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris on CBS news program “60 Minutes” that the president said was deceptively edited, paying him $16 million.

The crux of Trump’s BBC complaint is a segment in which footage in the Panorama show was selectively edited to suggest, incorrectly, that the U.S. president had told supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”

The words were in fact spliced from sections of the speech almost an hour apart, and omitted a section in which Trump had said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Trump says he will sue BBC for up to $5B

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U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion over a misleading edit of his speech, after the broadcaster ap...

15/11/2025

First published on politicalcartoons.com, Croatia, Nov. 13, 2025. | By Nikola Listes

First published in The Boston Globe, Nov. 14, 2025. | By Christopher Weyant

First published on Caglecartoons.com, Costa Rica, Nov. 13, 2025. | By Arcadio Esquivel

First published on Caglecartoons.com, Nov. 12, 2025. | By Rick McKee

World’s cartoonists on this week’s events

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First published on politicalcartoons.com, Croatia, Nov. 13, 2025. | By Nikola Listes First published in The Boston Globe, Nov. 14, 2025....

14/11/2025

BERLIN — Dozens of politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will travel to Washington in December at the invitation of a group of House Republicans, said U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.

The invitation to AfD politicians comes at a time when German far-right figures are increasingly looking for support from MAGA Republicans in the U.S. for what they frame as a struggle against political persecution and censorship at home.

“It’s 40 members that we’re hosting from the AfD,” Luna said in an interview with Welt, which is a sister publication of POLITICO in the Axel Springer Group. “And it’s not just going to be me, it’s going to be other members of Congress as well.”

A spokesperson for the AfD said he could “neither confirm nor deny” whether that number of the party’s politicians is in fact set to travel to the U.S. next month. The spokesperson of the AfD’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag said the number of federal lawmakers traveling to the U.S. capital would not be that high.

Luna has taken an active interest in German far-right figures’ claims that they are being persecuted in Germany for their views, recently telling POLITICO that “the German government’s recent actions against its own citizens resemble the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union prior to its fall more than Russia does today.”

Some Trump administration officials have also spoken out in support of the AfD.

When Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency declared the AfD to be an extremist organization earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move “tyranny in disguise.” During the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President JD Vance urged European mainstream politicians to knock down the “firewalls” that shut out far-right parties from government.

Germany’s postwar constitution allows domestic intelligence agencies to surveil political parties, actors and organizations deemed extremist — and to make it theoretically possible to ban such parties. These restrictions were intended by the drafters of the West German constitution to prevent a repeat of the N**i rise to power, when anti-democratic forces were able to subvert democracy from within.

AfD leaders see the invitation to Washington as an opportunity to win more legitimacy domestically for their claims of persecution. Luna invited AfD co-leader Alice Weidel to Washington at the end of last month via a post on X. Weidel reacted postively and said she would reach out to discuss further arrangements.

Luna also recently met with Naomi Seibt, a right-wing influencer and AfD ally, who recently said she had applied for asylum in the U.S., claiming to be the target of “severe government and intelligence surveillance and harassment” for her political views and defense of free speech in Germany.

“I think that she [Seibt] is a great young woman, and I do think that she has a promising future whatever she decides to do, and so we’ll be fully backing her,” Luna told Welt.

“I’m actually not just going to be helping her, but I’m going to be helping others like her,” Luna said. “I do hope that maybe this at least provides some open dialogue on how the German government — specifically the politicians, law enforcement — treat their own citizens even if they don’t agree with them.”

The trip to Washington by AfD members in December is to be followed by a larger-scale conference early next year, Luna said, something that “will counter Davos” and be more focused on “the sovereignty of nations.”

Julius Brinkmann contributed to this report from Washington.

Large far-right German delegation to visit Washington, Trump ally says

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BERLIN — Dozens of politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will travel to Washington in December at the invitatio...

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