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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Germany’s foreign minister said Sunday that sanctions against Syrian officials responsible for war crimes must remain in place but called for a “smart approach” to provide relief to the Syrian population after last month’s overthrow of President Bashar Assad.

Annalena Baerbock spoke to reporters after arriving in Saudi Arabia for a conference on Syria’s future attended by top European and Middle Eastern diplomats.

Germany is one of several countries that imposed sanctions on the Assad government over its brutal crackdown on dissent. Those penalties could hinder Syria’s recovery from nearly 14 years of civil war that killed an estimated 500,000 people and displaced half the prewar population of 23 million.

“Sanctions against Assad’s henchmen who committed serious crimes during the civil war must remain in place,” Baerbock said. “But Germany proposes to take a smart approach to sanctions, providing rapid relief for the Syrian population. Syrians now need a quick dividend from the transition of power.”

Baerbock announced an additional 50 million euros ($51.2 million) in German aid for food, emergency shelters and medical care, highlighting the ongoing struggles of millions of Syrians displaced by the war.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who also attended the meeting, said European countries want to see a government that includes all of Syria’s religious and ethnic communities. “We want to see inclusivity of women also in the process, so these are the things that we are going to discuss,” she said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said his country, which was a strong supporter of the Syrian opposition to Assad, would try to aid Syria in normalizing ties with the international community.

He said it was important to establish “a balance between the expectations of the international community and the realities faced by the new administration in Syria.”

He pledged Turkish support to the new government, especially in combating threats from the Islamic State group. “As Turkey, we are ready to do our part to ease the difficult path ahead for the Syrian people,” he said in comments carried by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency.

Last week, the United States eased some of its restrictions on Syria, with the U.S. Treasury issuing a general license, lasting six months, that authorizes certain transactions with the Syrian government, including some energy sales and incidental transactions.

The U.S. has also dropped a $10 million bounty it had offered for the capture of Ahmad al-Sharaa, a Syrian rebel leader formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, whose forces led the ouster of Assad last month. Al-Sharaa was a former senior al-Qaida militant who broke with the group years ago and has pledged an inclusive Syria that respects the rights of religious minorities.

The rebels led a lightning insurgency that ousted Assad on Dec. 8 and ended his family’s decades-long rule.

Much of the world severed ties with Assad and imposed sanctions on his government — and its Russian and Iranian allies — over alleged war crimes and the manufacturing of the amphetamine-like stimulant Captagon, which reportedly generated billions of dollars as packages of the little white pills were smuggled across Syria’s porous borders.

With Assad out of the picture, Syria’s new authorities hope that the international community will pour money into the country to rebuild its battered infrastructure and make its economy viable again.

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Follow AP’s Syria coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/syria

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By Charlotte Greenfield

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai urged Muslim leaders on Sunday to back efforts to make gender apartheid a crime under international law, and called on them to speak out against Afghanistan’s Taliban over its treatment of women and girls.

At a summit on girls’ education in Muslim communities attended by international leaders and scholars in her home country of Pakistan, Yousafzai said Muslim voices must lead the way against the policies of the Taliban, who have barred teenage girls from school and women from universities.

“In Afghanistan an entire generation of girls will be robbed of its future,” she said in a speech in Islamabad. “As Muslim leaders, now is the time to raise your voice, use your power.”

The Taliban say they respect women’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Afghan culture and Islamic law. Taliban administration spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Yousafzai’s statements.

No foreign government has formally recognised the Taliban since it took over Afghanistan in 2021 and diplomats have said steps towards recognition require a change of course on women’s rights.

Yousafzai survived being shot in the head when she was 15 in Pakistan by a gunman after campaigning against the Pakistani Taliban’s moves to deny girls an education.

The summit, organised by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Muslim World League, included dozens of ministers and scholars from Muslim-majority countries.

Yousafzai asked the scholars to “openly challenge and denounce the Taliban’s oppressive laws” and for political leaders to support the addition of gender apartheid to crimes against humanity under international criminal law.

The summit was hosted by Pakistan, which has had frosty relations with the Afghan Taliban in recent months over accusations that militants are using Afghan soil to launch attacks on Pakistan, a charge the Taliban deny.

(Reporting by Charlotte Greenfield in Islamabad; Additional reporting by Mohammad Yunus Yawar in Kabul; Editing by Helen Popper)

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MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian troops have taken control of the villages of Yantarne in the Donetsk region and Kalynove in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, the Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday.

Reuters could not immediately confirm battlefield reports.

Separately, the ministry said that over the past 24 hours, Russian forces have carried out strikes on Ukrainian military airfields, personnel and vehicles in 139 locations using its air force, drones, missiles and artillery.

(Reporting by Maxim Rodionov; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

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MORONI, Comoros (AP) — Comoros held a parliamentary election Sunday that some opposition leaders pledged to boycott, accusing President Azali Assoumani and his ruling party of adopting an increasingly authoritarian stance and raising concerns over the integrity of the vote.

The one-day election will decide the 33 seats in the legislature. Results are expected next week, according to the national electoral commission.

Around 330,000 people out of a population of 850,000 on the Indian Ocean archipelago are registered to vote, the electoral commission said. However, opposition parties said they expected a low turnout, citing disaffection with the democratic process.

Assoumani’s Convention for the Renewal of the Comoros party and its coalition partners won 20 out of the 24 seats that were contested in the last parliamentary election in 2020. On Sunday, Assoumani cast his vote in his hometown of Mitsoudjé on the largest island of Grande Comore.

Opposition parties called the 2020 vote a “masquerade” and said it was not free and fair. Assoumani won a new five-year term as president in an election last year that the opposition also said was fraudulent, triggering violent protests on the streets.

The Juwa Party of former President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi was one of those boycotting Sunday’s vote. It also boycotted the 2020 parliamentary election.

Comoros is an archipelago of three islands off the east coast of Africa near Madagascar. It has been beset by a series of military coups since gaining independence from France in 1975, with Assoumani, a former military officer, first seizing power in 1999 by overthrowing the president.

Assoumani, 66, stepped down from the presidency in 2006 after one term but returned and won another election in 2016. He has been president since, winning three successive elections. He pushed through constitutional changes in 2018 that allowed him to sidestep term limits and avoid a previous political agreement that saw the presidency rotated between Comoros’ islands.

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a U.S. Congress-funded research institution, has said that Assoumani’s presidency “has been marked by growing political repression and non-competitive elections.”

Officials said voting was going ahead despite Tropical Cyclone Dikeledi, which was expected to pass near Comoros and the nearby French territory of Mayotte on Sunday.

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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

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CAIRO (Reuters) – Eight people were killed and 50 others injured in an explosion of a gas station and a gas storage tank in Yemen’s al-Bayda province, a medical source and a local official said.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari and Jaidaa Taha)

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SYDNEY (Reuters) – The premier of Australia’s New South Wales state Chris Minns said on Sunday that an attack on a Sydney synagogue on Saturday marked an escalation in anti-Semitic crime in the state, after police said the attack was attempted arson.

Australia has seen a series of anti-Semitic incidents in the last year, including graffiti on buildings and cars in Sydney, as well as an arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne that police ruled as terrorism.

In the latest incident, police were notified of anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue in the inner suburb of Newtown early on Saturday. An arson attempt was also made on the synagogue, police later said.

“This is an escalation in anti-Semitic crime in New South Wales. Police and the government remain very concerned that an accelerate may have been used,” Minns, the leader of Australia’s most populous state, said on Sunday in a televised media conference alongside state police commissioner Karen Webb.

“In the last 24 hours, these matters have now been taken over by counter-terrorism command,” Webb said.

A house in Sydney’s east, a hub of the city’s Jewish community, was also daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti, police said on Saturday, adding they were also probing offensive comments on a street poster in the suburb of Marrickville.

On Friday, a special police task force was set up to investigate an attack on the Southern Sydney Synagogue in the suburb of Allawah in the early hours of Friday morning.

“(There is) no place in Australia, our tolerant multicultural community, for this sort of criminal activity,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday, referring to the Southern Sydney Synagogue incident.

Australia has seen an increase in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 and Israel launched its war on Gaza. Some Jewish organisations have said the government has not taken sufficient action in response.

(Reporting by Sam McKeith in Sydney; Editing by David Gregorio)

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By Jackie Luna and Jonathan Allen

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Before one of the most destructive fires in California history swept through, the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on Los Angeles’ west side was filled with expensive homes fronted by green, well-tended landscaping and popular boutiques and cafes.

This week, the Palisades Fire leveled much of it to blackened rubble. To see what has been lost, a Reuters video journalist visited the neighborhood on Friday to retrace the path taken by a YouTube travel influencer couple who made a video last year of a walking tour, which is being reproduced with their permission.

In May 2024, when the original video was recorded under a California blue sky, a white building with ionic columns on Sunset Boulevard at the Palisades Village shopping complex was home to a Starbucks and Cafe Vida. It is now gutted, darkened with soot, the palm trees outside denuded, the sky hazy and yellowed.

On the surrounding residential streets, home after home has collapsed in charred piles topped with a scattering of terracotta roofing tiles that withstood the blaze. Still-standing concrete doorways open onto ruins.

The Palisades Fire has grown to more than 20,000 acres since breaking out on Tuesday and was still only 11% contained on Saturday, and the Palisades neighborhood remains a mandatory evacuation zone. Other fires, some nearly as vast, are destroying other parts of Los Angeles and neighboring towns, killing at least 11 people so far and destroying thousands of buildings.

The Palisades was almost devoid of life on Friday: a few Los Angeles firefighters here and there, and a few ravens watched from a road before scattering. Outside one home, what was once a wheelchair sat on the sidewalk, everything melted or burned except for its steel frame.

A scenic lookout spot from the Point at the Bluffs encompasses the ocean and curving Pacific Coast Highway. From there, what remains of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates fills the view: dozens of relatively affordable mobile homes that sloped down towards the beach are now rows of rubble.

(Reporting by Jackie Luna in Los Angeles and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

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PARIS (AP) — Two trams collided in Strasbourg in eastern France on Saturday, causing dozens of injuries, though none critical, authorities said. The accident took place during the afternoon in a tunnel leading to the station near the city’s central train station.

An additional 100 people, though uninjured, were assessed for shock or stress, said René Cellier, director of the Bas-Rhin Fire and Rescue Service. Emergency services deployed 130 firefighters, 50 rescue vehicles and established a wide safety perimeter.

“Around 50 people are in a state of relative emergency, with injuries such as scalp wounds, clavicle fractures and knee sprains. But there are no critical injuries. It could have been much worse,” Cellier said.

The exact cause of the collision was unclear but local media reported that one of the trams was reversing at the time.

Mayor Jeanne Barseghian, who visited the site, described the incident as a “brutal collision” and expressed her gratitude to emergency responders. “I am at the station with the injured and rescuers. Thank you for your mobilization,” she said on X. She urged the public not to obstruct rescue operations.

Images shared on social media showed two severely damaged tram cars, one of which had derailed in the tunnel.

Strasbourg, the first major French city to reinstate tram services in 1994, had not experienced a significant tram accident until now, according to French media. Authorities launched an investigation to determine what caused the collision.

Cleanup operations continued Saturday evening, and residents were advised to avoid the area around the train station.

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(Reuters) – Authorities in Moldova’s separatist Transdniestria region said on Saturday that energy conservation measures have allowed them to ease restrictions caused by a halt to Russian gas supplies, with the duration of rolling blackouts to be further reduced.

Moldova’s pro-European central government renewed its criticism of Russia, saying it caused the energy crisis and now wants to portray itself as the power that was coming to the separatist region’s rescue.

Transdniestria, which split from Moldova at the end of Soviet rule, has relied on Russian gas shipped through Ukraine. Authorities in Ukraine, locked in a 34-month-old conflict with Russia, refused to extend a transit deal into 2025.

Russian gas giant Gazprom has said it will not send the gas to Moldova along alternative routes, citing what it describes as Moldovan arrears of $709 million. Moldova, which denounces Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, disputes that figure.

Transdniestria’s pro-Russian leaders, reporting on the region’s official Telegram channel, said daily rolling blackouts would be reduced to three hours on Sunday. The power cuts, eight hours long earlier this week, were cut to five hours on Friday.

“With current super efficiencies in consumption, Transdniestria has enough gas until the end of January,” the channel quoted First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Obolonik as saying.

Many factories have switched to night shifts, when the power grid is under less strain, but authorities said one plant, a cement manufacturer in the town of Rybnitsa, closed down.

A steel mill of critical importance to the region also closed in the city.

Russian gas supplied to the separatist region powered a thermal plant which provided electricity both for Transdniestria and most of the needs of government-held regions.

MOLDOVA HOLDS RUSSIA RESPONSIBLE 

The press secretary of Moldova’s central government, Daniel Voda, said suggestions that Russia might relent and eventually send gas to Transdniestria do not alter Moscow’s responsibility for the energy crisis.

“Every time that Russia wants to show its might, it cuts off vital resources and turns people into hostages,” Voda told the media outlet Nokta.

“This is an experiment using people that shows that Moscow is not worried about residents’ comfort and security. … No one deserves to live in fear and in the cold.”

Moldova’s government has accused Russia of artificially creating the energy crisis to destabilise the country ahead of this summer’s parliamentary election. It has offered to help Transdniestria tackle the power shortages, but the separatist region’s leaders deny receiving any official proposals.

Moldovan President Maia Sandu has said Gazprom could supply gas to Transdniestria via an alternative route, the Turkstream pipeline through Turkey and then Bulgaria and Romania.

Transdniestria fought a brief war against Moldovan government forces in 1992 and still hosts 1,500 Russian soldiers on the tiny territory that neighbours Ukraine.

(Reporting by Alexander Tanas; Writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by Will Dunham)

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By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Pope Francis on Saturday and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, the nation’s highest civilian honor, the White House said.

It was the first time during his four years in office that Biden awarded the medal “with distinction,” it said.

Biden, 82, leaves office on Jan. 20. To oversee the federal response to the fires in California, he canceled a trip to Rome this week, where he was due to meet Francis in person.

A lifelong Catholic who has met the pope several times, Biden told reporters on Friday that he was disappointed to cancel the trip, but felt it was more important to stay in Washington.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is presented individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the U.S., world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors.

One week ago, Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chef Jose Andres and conservationist Jane Goodall, among others.

The White House said Biden spoke by phone with Francis on Saturday and expressed his deep regret that he was unable to visit Rome and Vatican City. The two leaders discussed efforts to advance peace around the world, including Francis’ work to alleviate suffering for vulnerable communities, it said.

In his citation for Francis, who was born as Jorge Bergoglio in Argentina, Biden lauded the religious leader’s life of service to “the voiceless and vulnerable across Argentina” and his lifetime of service to the poor.

“A loving pastor, he joyfully answers children’s questions about God. A challenging teacher, he commands us to fight for peace and protect the planet,” Biden wrote.

“The first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, Pope Francis is unlike any who came before. Above all, he is the People’s Pope – a light of faith, hope, and love that shines brightly across the world.”

Both Biden and Francis have been weakened by global events, said Massimo Faggioli, an Italian academic and professor at Villanova University who follows the papacy.

“That is really hard to underestimate how tragic this moment is for both men in different ways,” he said. “Because what could go wrong did go wrong in these few years.”

Francis has pushed for an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine and has been critical of Israel’s military campaign against Palestinian militant group Hamas. Both conflicts are ongoing.

Biden, 82, a regular attender of Mass, departed from church doctrine later in life with his support for abortion rights. In 2021 he said Francis had defended him from criticism by some U.S. Catholics over the issue, including many bishops.

Francis, 88, has pushed to open the Church to the modern world since he took the helm in 2013. He has drawn criticism from some U.S. Catholics who view him as too liberal.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; additional reporting by Stephanie Kelly and Joshua McElwee; Editing by Will Dunham and David Gregorio)

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