United States

EU leader Costa and the German government have hit back at a US security strategy harshly critical of Europe.

European Council President Antonio Costa and the German government have lambasted a new US national security strategy that paints Europe as a troubled, declining power that may one day lose its usefulness as an ally to Washington.

The remarks on Monday from the European Union’s leading economy and one of its top officials delivered a stinging rebuke to the National Security Strategy released on Friday by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

The 33-page document contains scathing criticism of the continent, claiming it is facing the “prospect of civilisational erasure” due to migration, scorning it for “censorship of free speech” and suppression of anti-immigration movements, and suggesting that the US may withdraw the security umbrella it has long held over it.

The stoush over the strategy, playing out as Washington ramps up pressure on Ukraine to agree to a plan to end the war with Russia, reflects what EU leader Costa said was a “changed” relationship between the US and Europe.

“We need to focus on building a Europe that must understand that the relationships between allies and the post-World War II alliances have changed,” Costa said at the Jacques Delors Institute, a think tank in Paris.

In response to the strategy document’s comments on free speech, Costa warned, “There will never be free speech if the freedom of information of citizens is sacrificed for the aims of the tech oligarchs in the United States.”

Costa strongly criticised allegations that free speech is being censored in Europe and said only European citizens can decide which parties should govern them.

“What we cannot accept is this threat of interference in Europe’s political life. The United States cannot replace European citizens in deciding which are the right parties and the wrong parties,” Costa said.

“The United States cannot replace Europe in its vision of freedom of speech,” he noted, adding, “Our history has taught us that there is no freedom of speech without freedom of information.”

‘Ideology, not strategy’

In Berlin, Sebastian Hille, a deputy spokesperson for the German government, said some of the criticisms in the document were “ideology rather than strategy”.

“Political freedoms, including the right to freedom of expression, are among the fundamental values of the EU,” he said.

He said Berlin also disagreed with the document’s failure to classify Russia, which in February 2022 launched a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, as a threat.

“We stand by NATO’s joint analysis, according to which Russia is a danger and a threat to trans-Atlantic security,” he added.

Divisions over Russia

The US strategy document makes clear that Washington wants to improve its relationship with Moscow, saying that it has a “core interest” in ending the conflict with Ukraine to “reestablish strategic stability with Russia”, while hitting out at European officials’ “unrealistic expectations” for a solution to the war.

An initial US plan for ending the war, which would have allowed Russia to hold on to large territories in eastern Ukraine, sparked criticism from European leaders amid concerns that Washington is trying to force Kyiv to accept unfavourable terms.

The plan has since been altered, first with input from Ukraine alongside its European allies and then in meetings between Ukrainian and US officials. The full details of the proposal as it stands have not been disclosed.

By contrast, Moscow has welcomed Trump’s strategy document.

Costa said that given the strategy document’s position on Ukraine, “we can understand why Moscow shares [its] vision.”

“The objective in this strategy is not a fair and durable peace. It’s only [about] the end of hostilities, and the stability of relations with Russia,” he said.

“Everyone wants stable relations with Russia,” Costa said, but “we can’t have stable relations with Russia when Russia remains a threat to our security”.

Trump has vowed to unleash AI competitiveness, but removing state oversight riles members of his Republican Party.

United States President Donald Trump has said he will sign an executive order creating “one rulebook” for artificial intelligence (AI) development.

The announcement on Monday via Trump’s Truth Social account represented the US president’s latest effort to remove AI barriers, a priority of his administration that has raised concerns related to oversight of the transformative technology.

Trump said the so-called “one rule executive order” would override state approvals of AI, although the legality of such a presidential action remained unclear.

“There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI,” he said. “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS.”

“THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT ABOUT THIS! AI WILL BE DESTROYED IN ITS INFANCY!” Trump added, employing his typical use of all-capital letters.

The announcement comes as the White House has pushed for provisions creating a federal AI framework to be added to this year’s defence budget.

The initiative has divided members of Trump’s Republican Party, which has traditionally strongly supported the rights of states and a smaller federal government.

Opponents included Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, formerly a staunch supporter of Trump, who has broken with him on several issues.

“States must retain the right to regulate and make laws on AI and anything else for the benefit of their state,” she wrote in November.

State lawmakers from across the political spectrum have also warned against federal actions that would override state policies.

“In recent years, legislatures across the country have passed AI-related measures to strengthen consumer transparency, guide responsible government procurement, protect patients, and support artists and creators,” they wrote in a letter to Congress in November.

“These laws represent careful, good-faith work to safeguard constituents from clear and immediate AI-related harms. A federal preemption measure on state AI laws risks sweeping these protections aside and leaving communities exposed,” they said.

Trump has maintained close ties with AI and tech leaders since taking office in January.

He has already signed an executive order calling for the removal of “barriers” to AI innovation. He has also published a so-called AI action plan and an AI “Genesis Mission”.

He compared the latter to the Manhattan Project programme, which led to the creation of the world’s first nuclear weapons.

A prominent Sudanese doctor’s group has accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of raping at least 19 women as they fled the city of el-Fasher in Darfur.

The Sudan Doctors Network said in a statement on Sunday that it documented the rapes among women who had fled to the town of al-Dabba in the neighbouring Northern State.

Two of the women were pregnant, the group said.

“The Sudan Doctors Network strongly condemns the gang rape being perpetrated by the RSF against women escaping the horrors of El-Fasher, affirming that it constitutes a direct targeting of women in a blatant violation of all international laws that criminalise the use of women’s bodies as a weapon of oppression,” the group wrote on X.

Sudan Doctors Network: We have documented 19 cases of rape committed by the Rapid Support Forces, including two pregnant women, at Al-Afad Camp in Al-Dabba

The Sudan Doctors Network team at Al-Afad Camp in Al-Dabba has documented the rape of 19 women while they were fleeing from… pic.twitter.com/u5qWp4bdSD

— Sudan Doctors Network – شبكة أطباء السودان (@SDN154) December 7, 2025

Sudan has been engulfed in civil war since April 2023, when fighting erupted between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary RSF. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 12 million, according to the United Nations. It has also left some 30 million in need of humanitarian aid.

The RSF took the city of el-Fasher, the capital of the state of North Darfur, in October after an 18-month campaign of siege and starvation. The city was the Sudanese army’s last stronghold in the region.

Survivors who fled the city in the subsequent days recounted mass killings, rape, pillaging and other atrocities, prompting an international outcry.

Amnesty International has accused the RSF of “war crimes”, while the UN Human Rights Council has ordered an investigation into the abuses in el-Fasher. Officials who visited Darfur and spoke to survivors described the region as an “absolute horror show” and a “crime scene”.

Widespread sexual assault

Mohammed Elsheikh, a spokesperson for the Sudan Doctors Network, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that he was “100 percent sure” that sexual violence committed by RSF fighters is far more widespread than reported.

“Because most of the communities look at it as a stigma, most of the raped women tend not to disclose this information,” he said.

Elsheikh said the network had also documented 23 cases of rape among women who fled el-Fasher for the nearby town of Tawila.

“Unfortunately, the age of these raped victims varies from 15 years to 23 years old,” he said.

In its statement, the Sudan Doctors Network urged the international community to take urgent action to protect Sudanese women and girls.

It also called for “serious pressure on RSF leaders to immediately stop these assaults, respect international humanitarian law, and secure safe corridors for women and children”.

The latest accusations came amid a growing outcry over another RSF attack on a pre-school in the state of South Kordofan that local officials said killed at least 116 people. Some 46 of the victims were children, according to the officials.

On Sunday, Justice Minister Abdullah Dirife said Khartoum was willing to pursue political talks aimed at ending the conflict, but insisted that any settlement must “ensure there is no presence for ‘terrorist’ militias in both the political and military arenas”.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on the sidelines of the Doha Forum, he said the rebels “need to agree to give their weapons in specific areas and leave all these cities, and the police should take over”.

Dirife also called for putting a stop to the “transfer of weapons and the infiltration of mercenaries into Sudan” and claimed that fighters and arms were entering from regions including South America, Chad and the UAE.

The RSF currently holds all five states of Darfur, while the Sudanese army retains control of most of the remaining 13 states, including Khartoum.

Dirife also accused the RSF of repeatedly breaking past commitments to adhere to regional and global mediation initiatives.

“The last initiative we signed was the Jeddah Declaration. However, this militia didn’t commit to what we agreed on,” he said in Doha.

The Jeddah Declaration – brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia in May 2023 – was meant to protect civilians and lay the groundwork for humanitarian access. Several ceasefires followed, but both sides were accused of violating them, prompting the mediators to suspend talks.

The UN has meanwhile formally declared famine in el-Fasher and Kaduguli in South Kordofan and warned of the risk of a hunger crisis in 20 additional areas across the Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan regions.

The World Food Programme’s Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the agency was providing aid to five million people, including two million in areas that are difficult to reach, but warned that assistance has fallen far short of needs.

“World attention needs to be on Sudan now, and diplomatic efforts need to be stepped up in order to prevent the same disaster we saw in el-Fasher,” he said.

Lawmakers in the United States have urged the release of a video of a controversial double-tap strike on a vessel in the Caribbean amid growing scrutiny of the legality of Washington’s militarised anti-drug trafficking campaign.

The bipartisan calls on Sunday came amid mounting controversy over revelations that military officials ordered a follow-up strike in the September 2 operation targeting a suspected drug-smuggling vessel, killing two survivors of the initial attack.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers watched footage of the strikes last week in a closed-door briefing with military officials, but emerged from the screening with substantially different accounts of what happened.

Reactions to the footage split along partisan lines, with Democrats expressing deep concerns about the legality of the strikes and Republicans insisting they were justified.

Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’s armed services committee, said the targeted vessel had been “clearly incapacitated” in the initial strike, and the survivors were unarmed and without any means of communication.

“They ought to release the video. If they release the video, then everything that the Republicans are saying will clearly be portrayed to be completely false, and people will get a look at it, and they will see,” Smith said in an interview with the ABC News programme This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

“It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it because it’s very, very difficult to justify,” Smith added.

Jim Himes, who leads the Democrats on the House’s intelligence committee, said the American public should have the chance to judge the video for themselves.

“Look, there’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners, but I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing,” Himes told CBS News’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.

Several Republicans said they would support the release of the video, even as they defended the strikes.

Senator Tom Cotton, whose account of the survivors trying to “flip” the boat and continue their voyage has been disputed by Democrats, said he would not object to the video’s release, but would defer to the judgement of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon.

“I didn’t find it distressing or disturbing. It looks like any number of dozens of strikes we’ve seen on Jeeps and pickup trucks in the Middle East over the years,” Cotton, who chairs the intelligence committee in the Senate, told NBC News’s Meet the Press.

John Curtis, a Republican senator from Utah, also suggested that he would support the video’s release, saying officials should “err on the side of transparency”.

“The American people, they like to make decisions too based on facts, not just on what we tell them,” Curtis told CNN’s State of the Union.

President Donald Trump, whose administration has carried out at least 22 strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific, said last week he would have “no problem” with releasing the footage.

Hegseth on Saturday struck a more cautious note during an appearance at a defence forum in California, telling a Q&A that officials were reviewing the possibility, but needed to make a “responsible” decision.

Scrutiny of the strikes has mounted since The Washington Post reported last month that US military officials carried out a second attack on two people clinging to the vessel’s wreckage after Hegseth directed commanders to leave no survivors.

Hegseth has repeatedly denied the report, which cited two unnamed sources, labelling it “fake news”, “fabricated” and “inflammatory”.

Legal scholars have argued that both the double-tap strike and the Trump administration’s military campaign against suspected drug traffickers more generally are illegal.

“The United States is not currently operating in a context of armed conflict in its strikes in the Caribbean. For that reason, this is not a context in which war crimes apply,” Tom Dannenbaum, an expert in the laws of war at Stanford University, told Al Jazeera.

“Instead, all of the strikes qualify as murder in violation of domestic criminal law, and extrajudicial killings in violation of international human rights law.”

At least 87 people have been killed in the strikes, which the Trump administration began in September.

The Trump administration has yet to make public any evidence to back its claims that the boats were carrying narcotics, were headed to the US, or that they were being commandeered by members of proscribed cartels.

As Israel and Hamas prepare to move towards phase two of a United States-led blueprint to end Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, disagreements loom over the as-yet undefined role of an international stabilisation force in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

Senior Hamas official Basem Naim said on Sunday that the US draft required “a lot of clarifications”. While the group was ready to discuss “freezing or storing” weapons during the ongoing truce, he said it would not accept that an international stabilisation force take charge of disarmament.

“We are welcoming a [United Nations] force to be near the borders, supervising the ceasefire agreement, reporting about violations, preventing any kind of escalations,” he said, adding that Hamas would not accept the force having “any kind of mandates” on Palestinian territory.

His comments came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier in the day that he would meet with Donald Trump to discuss entering a new phase of the US president’s plan at the end of the month. The focus of the meeting, he said, would be on ending Hamas governance in Gaza and ensuring it fulfilled its “commitment” to the plan, which calls for demilitarisation of the enclave.

“We have a second phase, no less daunting, and that is to achieve the disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarisation of Gaza,” Netanyahu said during a news conference with visiting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

It was not clear whether Naim’s comments on the group freezing or storing arms would satisfy Israel’s demands for full disarmament. The Hamas official said the group retained its “right to resist”, adding that laying down arms could happen as part of a process leading to a Palestinian state, with a potential long-term truce lasting five to 10 years.

The US-drafted plan for Gaza leaves the door open to Palestinian independence, but Netanyahu has long rejected this, asserting that creating a Palestinian state would reward Hamas.

Vague plan

Trump’s 20-point plan offers a general way forward on such plans as the establishment of the stabilisation force and the formation of a technocratic Palestinian government operating under an international “board of peace”, but does not offer concrete details or timelines.

US officials have said they expect “boots on the ground” early next year, but while countries like Indonesia have agreed to contribute troops, there is no roadmap for setting up the force, and its exact makeup, command structure and responsibilities have not been defined.

Netanyahu appeared to recognise the plan’s vagueness. “What will be the timeline? What are the forces that are coming in? Will we have international forces? If not, what are the alternatives? These are all topics that are being discussed,” he said on Sunday.

The Israeli prime minister said that phase two of the plan, which will be set in motion once Hamas returns the last Israeli captive, a policeman killed in the October 7 attack on southern Israel, would be “more difficult”.

Stage one of the plan has already proven challenging, with Israel continuing to bomb Gaza throughout the ceasefire, killing more than 370 Palestinians, according to health officials. Meanwhile, it has accused Hamas of dragging out captive returns.

Israeli army says yellow line ‘new border’

The plan’s initial steps saw Israeli forces withdraw to positions behind a so-called yellow line in Gaza, though the Israeli military remains in control of 53 percent of the territory. The Israeli military said on Sunday that the line of demarcation was a “new border”.

“We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip, and we will remain on those defence lines,” said Israeli military chief Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir. “The yellow line is a new border line, serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity.”

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani warned at the Doha Forum on Saturday that the truce was at a “critical moment” and could unravel without rapid movement towards a permanent deal.

He said a true ceasefire “cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal” of Israeli forces, alongside restored stability and freedom of movement for Palestinians, which has so far not transpired under phase one of the plan. He did not allude to the yellow line in his comments.

Amid growing momentum for a move to phase two of the peace plan, Israeli and Qatari officials met with US counterparts in an effort to rebuild relations after Israel’s air strike on Doha in September, Axios reported, citing unnamed sources.