Germany urges India, Pakistan to de-escalate, updates travel advice
"After the horrific terrorist attack in Kashmir and the Indian military response to it, there is an urgent need for both countries to act responsibly," the German Foreign Office wrote on social media platform Bluesky, calling on both sides to prevent escalation and protect civilians.
The office said it was in contact with both India and Pakistan.
It comes after 26 people were killed and 46 were injured in strikes launched by the Indian military overnight on targets in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled parts of the contested Himalayan region of Kashmir, with three people reportedly killed on the Indian side.
India says the attacks are retaliation for a terrorist attack in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir on April 22 in which at least 26 civilians were killed, most of them Indian tourists.
New Delhi blames the attack on Pakistan, but Islamabad has denied the accusations and has said it will retaliate against the Indian strikes.
The German Foreign Office updated his travel advisory for Pakistan on Wednesday, recommending that citizens postpone planned flights to the country.
Following the overnight Indian strikes, Pakistan initially closed its airspace but has since reopened it.
International flights to and from Pakistan as well as domestic flights have been suspended, according to the Foreign Office, which also advised against travelling to the regions of Jammu, Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir.
Travellers were advised to contact their airline for more information on their flight status.
The Attari-Wagah border crossing between India and Pakistan remains closed, according to the German Foreign Ministry, which noted that further travel restrictions are possible.
A chinar tree branch has fallen on a residential house following a plane crash in Wuyan, after India launched airstrikes on Pakistan. Basit Zargar/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Security personnel cordon off the area following a plane crash in Pampore, as tensions rise after India launched air strikes on Pakistan on May 7. Basit Zargar/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Army soldiers examine a building damaged by a suspected Indian missile attack near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan controlled Kashmir. Hussain Ali/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
A person receives treatment for injuries sustained during a suspected Indian missile attack at a hospital in Bahawalpur, following missile strikes by India on cities in Pakistan, as reported by the Pakistani military's Inter Services Public Relations. Hussain Ali/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
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Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
How a call from Trump ignited a frantic week of diplomacy by Ukraine
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What followed was a week of frantic diplomacy as Ukraine scrambled to avoid being sidelined in the negotiations and prevent Russia from dictating the terms of peace talks. Zelenskyy spoke with nearly 30 world leaders, while his top advisers met online and in person with senior European and American officials to press their case. In doing so, Ukraine turned to a tactic honed over more than three years of war: rallying partners through repeated behind-the-scenes calls and meetings to keep a seat at the negotiating table. Crucially, Ukraine leaned heavily on its European allies to form a united front and relay its message to the Trump administration. 'The goal was to build a common position with the Europeans and a way to communicate it to Trump,' Oleksandr Kraiev, the director of the North America program at the Kyiv research group Ukrainian Prism, said in an interview. 'The Europeans have been really useful in helping Ukraine get back to the table.' Ukraine's first task was to determine exactly what Russia had proposed to end the war. Trump had been vague on the call, the officials briefed on it said, leaving it unclear which territories might be swapped. Would it involve large areas such as the Ukrainian-controlled part of the eastern Donbas region for Russian-occupied land in the south, or smaller, strategic sites like the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant for a Ukrainian city? Zelenskyy instructed his top aides to clarify the situation. They got on a call last Thursday with European counterparts and Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy for peace missions, who had received Russia's proposal during a meeting with Putin in Moscow last week. But Witkoff's explanations were muddled, according to the Kyiv-based European diplomat, prompting another call the next day to clear up the confusion. 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Over the past week, Zelenskyy spoke by phone with more than 20 European leaders, including several times with President Emmanuel Macron of France, a close ally. That strategy echoed a familiar tactic first applied this spring, when European leaders repeatedly engaged with Trump to press Ukraine's case during early rounds of peace talks and acted as troubleshooter during moments of tension between Kyiv and Washington. On Saturday, senior European and Ukrainian officials met outside London with top American officials, including Vice President JD Vance, to try to dissuade the United States from cutting a peace deal with Russia behind their backs. The intense week of diplomacy culminated in a joint call between European leaders, Zelenskyy and Trump on Wednesday, exactly a week after Trump first revealed Russia's peace proposal. 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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Bracing for cuts, New Mexico public media stations are among the most vulnerable in the U.S.
Public radio affiliates in rural New Mexico, some owned and operated by Native Americans, are scrambling to stay on the air after the Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump made good on a push to defund public media. As Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham considers adding public media funding to a possible special session of the Legislature, the 20 New Mexico radio and TV stations that shared in $5.8 million in federal grants and allocations last year are weighing their options. Some stations dependent on that funding are trying to close the gap by scaling back programming and presence; but for others, the challenge appears to be insurmountable, with closings possible unless something major changes soon. KSHI 90.9 FM on the Zuni Pueblo ranks the third most vulnerable station in the U.S. because it has been as much as 95% reliant on federal funding, according to an analysis published by a former product manager for NPR. New Mexico, a rural state that has long struggled with high rates of poverty, has the third-highest reliance on federal funding in the country, after West Virginia and Alaska. Rural stations, which tend to see lower rates of donations than their urban counterparts, are the most at risk of closure. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes federal funding to both NPR and PBS and more than 1,000 public radio and television stations nationally, recently announced it will shut down next year after Congress voted last month to claw back more than $500 million of the organization's annual funding in a party-line vote. 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Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján — both New Mexico Democrats — convened a meeting Thursday in Albuquerque to allow local public media leaders to sound off on the emerging crisis for public media. Panelists at the forum, which included a number of public media general managers for broadcast and radio stations in the state, said it will be a daunting task to close funding gaps. A hard road forward KSFR 101.1 FM is the only news station based in Santa Fe to receive funding from CPB, with about 30% to 40% of its budget coming from the organization, said Tazbah McCullah, the station's general manager. KSFR, which has a staff of five, received $131,252 in federal funding in the last fiscal year. Though McCullah said KSFR will be able to survive without staff cuts, she believes some stations in the state will go dark. 'Our budgets are right now in flux, and we have only a couple of weeks to react to this,' McCullah said, noting stations are still awaiting some answers on the CPB closeout. 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Time Magazine
2 hours ago
- Time Magazine
How to Fix America's Gerrymandering Problem
President Donald Trump has thrust the country into a new political battle: mutually assured gerrymandering. And the antidote is what we call 'mutually assured representation.' The current saga began in June, when Trump called for Texas to start a congressional redistricting process in the middle of the decade—rather than after the next census in 2030. Last month, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to replace the state's current House map which would favor his party. Now, Trump's push for mid-decade redistricting in Republican-controlled states appears likely to spread to Missouri, Ohio, and Florida. If this happens, Democrats would have retaliate in the states they control in order to have a chance at winning a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives in 2026. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has declared her readiness to 'fight fire with fire.' In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed holding a special election in November for voters to approve a ballot initiative allowing the legislature to redraw the state's congressional map. Read More: 'Time to Stand Down': Newsom Gives Trump Deadline to Call Off Redistricting Plan In Texas, Republicans are claiming that they are entitled to five more congressional seats—even if they receive the exact same number of votes as before. To achieve this, they can redraw the boundaries of the districts that Democrats won in 2024, moving Democratic voters into heavily Republican districts where their votes will not matter, and moving Republican voters into previously Democratic districts so that they can win these seats. In 2024, Republicans in Texas won 25 of the state's 38 seats, and Democrats won 13. With this new map, Republicans could win in 30 of 38 congressional districts. The proposed gerrymander is likely to give Republicans four or five new seats even if Democrats win substantially more votes for Congress than they did in 2025. According to our calculation, this will happen even if there is a five percentage point swing towards Democrats in the 2026 elections. In recent years, just a few congressional seats have determined control of the House, and a flip of just five seats on its own might determine the national result. Partisan gerrymandering makes it harder for voters to hold their representatives accountable. Congressional district elections become uncompetitive. With reelection in the general assured, candidates are focused on catering to their own party base, which tends to be a more extreme subset of their constituents. Through this process, partisan gerrymandering often reduces effective representation in Congress and can play a role in crowding out moderate and independent voters. But here's a twist: President Trump's new wave of extreme gerrymandering may actually backfire, paving the way for electoral reform. Partisan gerrymandering is unpopular with voters, as we've seen repeatedly in recent years. Voters in states such as Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, and New Jersey, have supported nonpartisan redistricting commissions. In 2021, Democrats tried and failed to pass the For the People Act, a bill that would have limited partisan gerrymandering nationwide and implemented non-partisan redistricting commissions in every state. But Republican senators blocked the bill. Gerrymandering reform often fails because only one party makes the necessary reforms. For instance, previous successful anti-gerrymandering measures in states like California and New York created fairer maps in each state—but actually cost the party in power (Democrats in both instances) more seats than the margin determining control of the House in 2024. One proposed solution is bipartisan redistricting commissions. These can fail when the parties cannot agree on a map. For instance, the Virginia commission deadlocked in 2022, leaving the courts to draw the maps. Then there are more radical solutions that effectively blow up the current electoral system as we know it, such as multi-member districts or aproportional representation. But we think it is unrealistic to get rid of a system that has been in place for two hundred and fifty years. Instead, we believe it is possible to make reforms that keep the current electoral system while also overcoming some of its flaws. We've developed a process-based solution that has a number of appealing properties. It's inspired by the problem parents face when dividing a cake between two children. How can they make sure everyone gets an equal slice? One child cuts the cake in two, and the other child chooses between the two pieces. Our approach, which we call the 'Define-Combine Procedure,' splits the map drawing process into two simple stages. First, one party divides the state into twice the number of needed districts—for example, 20 sub-districts for a state that needs 10 congressional seats. Then, the second party pairs those sub-districts into the final 10 districts. The result is a fairer map than either party would have drawn on its own. Instead of mutually assured gerrymandering, this approach leads to mutually assured representation. Read More: Gerrymandering Isn't New—But Now We Have a Solution We used real-world census and election data from 2020 in each state to forecast the results of extreme partisan gerrymandering and the Define-Combine Procedure in every state. In Texas, Republicans could draw a map where they won 30 of 38 congressional seats. If Democrats could unilaterally gerrymander Texas, they could create a map with 28 Democratic and 10 Republican seats. Depending on party control of redistricting in Texas, a whopping 20 seats could change hands. When we used the Define-Combine Procedure, the resulting map would produce 19 Republicans seats and 17 Democratic seats, with the two remaining seats changing hands depending on which party defines and which combines. This result comes much closer to the 53% of the two-party vote that Republicans won in 2020. Scaling nationwide, we estimate that extreme gerrymandering could determine which party holds almost 200 seats, out of the 435 seats in the House. Processes like ours could reduce the advantage that a party can earn just from drawing a map, with outcomes that are less biased and closer to proportional. The trick here is to use the impulse to score more seats for your party as a tool for fairness instead. It's a partisan solution for a partisan problem. One party alone cannot protect voting rights and ensure fair representation. That's why, in 1965, Democrats and Republicans came together to pass the Voting Rights Act—and why they continued to amend and renew it for the next 40 years. But, a series of Supreme Court decisions over the last 12 years have substantially weakened the Voting Rights Act and allowed states to engage in extreme partisan gerrymandering. Now, a case before the court next year is likely to further diminish its remaining provisions. Instead of settling for mutually assured gerrymandering, with less effective representation, reduced accountability, and uncompetitive elections, both parties should unite behind solutions that achieve fairer outcomes nationwide. Such an outcome seems unrealistic right now as tit-for-tat gerrymandering ramps up, but the moment when the dust settles and voters take stock of the damage done may well be the best opportunity to address the scourge of partisan gerrymandering. If we don't seize this opportunity, America will pay the price.
