China says BRICS not seeking ‘confrontation’ after Trump tariff threat

China says BRICS not seeking ‘confrontation’ after Trump tariff threat
Top officials representing BRICS economies pose for a family photo during the bloc’s summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 6, 2025. (AFP)
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China says BRICS not seeking ‘confrontation’ after Trump tariff threat

China says BRICS not seeking ‘confrontation’ after Trump tariff threat
  • Statement: ‘China has repeatedly stated its position that trade and tariff wars have no winners and protectionism offers no way forward’
  • BRICS has come to be seen as a Chinese-driven counterbalance to US and western European power

BEIJING: China said on Monday that BRICS, the grouping that also includes Brazil, Russia and India, was not seeking “confrontation” after US President Donald Trump vowed to impose an extra 10 percent tariff on countries aligning with the bloc.

“Regarding the imposition of tariffs, China has repeatedly stated its position that trade and tariff wars have no winners and protectionism offers no way forward,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said.

Trump said he would send the first tariff letters to various countries on Monday, days before his deadline for trading partners to reach a deal expires.

He said on Sunday he would send a first batch of up to 15 letters, warning that US levies on imports would snap back to the high levels he set in April if countries failed to make agreements.

And, in a post on his Truth Social network, he threatened a further 10 percent tariff on countries aligning themselves with the emerging BRICS nations, accusing them of “anti-Americanism” after they slammed his tariffs at a summit in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.

Conceived two decades ago as a forum for fast-growing economies, BRICS has come to be seen as a Chinese-driven counterbalance to US and western European power.

However, Beijing defended the grouping on Monday as “an important platform for cooperation between emerging markets and developing countries.”

“It advocates openness, inclusivity and win-win cooperation,” Mao said.

“It does not engage in camp confrontation and is not targeted at any country,” she said.


Poland reinstates border controls with Germany and Lithuania to discourage asylum-seekers

Poland reinstates border controls with Germany and Lithuania to discourage asylum-seekers
Updated 15 sec ago

Poland reinstates border controls with Germany and Lithuania to discourage asylum-seekers

Poland reinstates border controls with Germany and Lithuania to discourage asylum-seekers
SLUBICE: Poland reinstated border controls on Monday with neighboring Germany and Lithuania following similar German restrictions imposed earlier this year aimed at discouraging asylum-seekers.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose government recently survived a confidence vote in parliament, announced the restrictions last week. Pressure has been mounting after far-right groups in Poland have alleged Germany was transporting migrants into Polish territory after they reached Western Europe.
The reinstated controls, which began overnight Sunday, will last for an initial period of 30 days, though authorities have not ruled out extending them, according to the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration.
“Illegal migration is simply a crime,” Polish Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said Sunday during a news conference.
The Polish border with Lithuania, which stretches 104 kilometers (65 miles), will see checks in 13 locations. Poland’s border with Germany, 467 kilometers (290 miles) long, will have controls at 52 crossing points.
After taking office in May, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who made a tougher migration policy a pillar of his election campaign, ordered more police at the border and said some asylum-seekers trying to enter Europe’s biggest economy would be turned away.
Last week, Merz said Poland and Germany were in close contact to keep the impact of Germany’s border controls “as low as possible.”
The European Union has a visa-free travel area, known as Schengen, that allows citizens of most member states to travel easily across borders for work and pleasure. Switzerland also belongs to Schengen although it is not an EU member.
According to the EU, member states are allowed to temporarily reintroduce border controls in cases of a serious threat, like internal security. It says border controls should be applied as a last resort in exceptional situations, and must be limited in time.

Nairobi tense as Kenya marks democracy uprising

Nairobi tense as Kenya marks democracy uprising
Updated 5 min 19 sec ago

Nairobi tense as Kenya marks democracy uprising

Nairobi tense as Kenya marks democracy uprising
  • Young Kenyans frustrated over economic stagnation, corruption and repeated acts of police brutality are once again engaging in protests that have degenerated into looting and violence, leaving dozens dead and thousands of businesses destroyed

NAIROBI: Kenya marked its fight for democracy on Monday, with police blocking main roads in Nairobi ahead of potential protests, after last month’s demonstrations descended into violent clashes.
Saba Saba Day marks the uprising on July 7, 1990 when Kenyans demanded a return to multi-party democracy after years of autocratic rule by then-president Daniel arap Moi.
This year’s event comes as young Kenyans — frustrated over economic stagnation, corruption and repeated acts of police brutality — are once again engaging in protests that have degenerated into looting and violence, leaving dozens dead and thousands of businesses destroyed.
Protesters accuse the authorities of paying armed vandals to discredit their movement, while the government has compared the demos to an “attempted coup.”
On Monday, the streets of Nairobi were eerily quiet after police mounted roadblocks on the main roads, preventing most people from entering the center, with many businesses closed for the day.
Leading activist Hanifa Aden wrote on X: “the police getting rained on as they block every road while we stay at home warming our beds.”
“Total shutdown and forced holiday executed by the state,” she said.
On Sunday afternoon, a press conference by the Kenyan Human Rights Commission calling for an end to “enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings” was broken up when men, some armed with sticks, forced their way into the compound.
Social media and rising economic expectations have created anger at inequalities in a country where around 80 percent are trapped in informal, poorly paid jobs.
But the violent response of the police — at least 80 people have died in protests since June 2024 and dozens detained illegally — has scared many off the streets.


Politically, President William Ruto — elected in 2022 — still holds a strong position having forged an alliance with the main opposition leader Raila Odinga, leaving no clear challenger ahead of the next vote in 2027.
But each violent crackdown is fueling further unrest, said activist Nerima Wako.
“Every time people organize a protest, they kill more people, so it just continues to feed off itself,” she said.
It is as though the government is recycling tactics from the 1990s, said Gabrielle Lynch, an African politics expert at Britain’s University of Warwick.
“But we’re not in the nineties,” she said. “They don’t seem to have realized the world is different.”
“People don’t have the same inbuilt fear of the state.”


Nearly 450,000 Afghans left Iran since June 1: UN migration agency

Nearly 450,000 Afghans left Iran since June 1: UN migration agency
Updated 24 min 50 sec ago

Nearly 450,000 Afghans left Iran since June 1: UN migration agency

Nearly 450,000 Afghans left Iran since June 1: UN migration agency
  • IOM spokesman: From June 1 to July 5, 449,218 Afghans returned from Iran

ISLAM QALA/KABUL: Nearly 450,000 Afghans have returned from Iran since the start of June, the United Nations’ migration agency said on Monday, after Tehran ordered those without documentation to leave by July 6.

From June 1 to July 5, 449,218 Afghans returned from Iran, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration said, adding that the total for the year so far was 906,326.

Tens of thousands of Afghans streamed over the border from Iran in the days before a return deadline set for Sunday, the United Nations said, sparking an “emergency” situation at border points.

In late May, Iran said undocumented Afghans must leave the country by July 6, potentially impacting four million people, out of the six million Afghans Tehran says live in the country.

Numbers of people crossing the border have surged since mid-June, with a peak of more than 43,000 people crossing at Islam Qala in western Herat province on July 1, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.

The UN migration agency IOM said more than 250,000 Afghans returned from Iran in June.

UNICEF country representative Tajudeen Oyewale said this was an “emergency” situation in a country already facing a “chronic returnee crisis,” with 1.4 million Afghans returning from traditional hosts Iran and Pakistan this year.

“What is concerning is that 25 percent of all these returnees are children... because the demographics have shifted” from individual men to whole families, crossing the border with scant belongings and money, he said on Thursday.

He noted Islam Qala could accommodate the vast numbers but was inadequately equipped in terms of services, saying, “When you start hitting more than 20,000 people (a day) that is completely beyond the planning scenario that we have.”

The agency has engaged emergency processes to ramp up water and sanitation systems built for 7-10,000 people a day, along with vaccinations, nutrition and child-friendly spaces.

Many people crossing reported pressure from authorities or even arrest and deportation.

“Some people are so afraid that they don’t leave the house themselves... They send their young children out just for a piece of bread, and even those children get arrested sometimes,” said 38-year-old Aref Atayi of the pressures Afghans face in Iran.

“Even if I have to beg in my own country, it’s still better than staying in a place where we’re treated like this,” he told AFP on Saturday, as he waited at the IOM-run reception center for some support to help his family resettle.

Massive foreign aid cuts have impacted the response to the crisis, with the UN, international non-governmental groups and Taliban officials calling for more funding to support the returnees.

The UN has warned the influx could destabilize the country already grappling with entrenched poverty, unemployment and climate change-related shocks and urged countries not to forcibly return Afghans.


Ambushes, mines, kidnappings: the Sahel’s roads of fear

Ambushes, mines, kidnappings: the Sahel’s roads of fear
Updated 07 July 2025

Ambushes, mines, kidnappings: the Sahel’s roads of fear

Ambushes, mines, kidnappings: the Sahel’s roads of fear
  • With 433 recorded incidents since 2012, Mali’s National route 16 connecting Mopti in central Mali to Gao in the north, is “by far” the most dangerous transport axis

ABIDJAN: In the Sahel, a region plagued by jihadist violence, there are roads people steer clear of and others they travel on with their heart in their mouth.
Such was the case for Moussa, when in March he had to take his mother’s body to another village for burial, forcing him onto National route 15 in central Mali.
While on it, he witnessed a terrifying scene — jihadists on motorcycles, armed with military-grade weapons, their heads wrapped in turbans, kidnapping passengers from a bus.
“They stopped us, but seeing my mother’s body, they told us to continue,” he told AFP.
Africa’s turbulent Sahel region, sometimes referred to as the global epicenter of terrorism, has been plagued by violence from jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State for more than a decade.


According to a recent OECD report, “70 percent of violent events and 65 percent of fatalities in North and West Africa occur within just one kilometer (0.6 mile) of a road.”
In the central Sahel — as well as the Lake Chad basin and western Cameroon — some roads “have become epicenters of violence,” the 145-page report said, disrupting financial trade and governance.
“Transport routes have become a prime target for attacks against government forces, particularly military convoys, and a means to pressure rural communities,” said Olivier Walther, a co-author of the study, adding that jihadists regularly set up roadblocks around towns.
Road insecurity “is directly linked to the spread of jihadist insurgencies” in the region, Walther, an associate professor at the University of Florida, said.
With 433 recorded incidents since 2012, he said Mali’s National route 16 connecting Mopti in central Mali to Gao in the north, is “by far” the most dangerous transport axis.


South of the Malian border, in Burkina Faso, “all roads leading to Djibo” are dangerous “due to blockades imposed on the town” by the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), Walther said.
National route 22 that connects Bourzanga, Djibo and the capital Ouagadougou has been nicknamed “the death corridor” due to the frequency of deadly jihadist attacks.
In September 2022, jihadists burned over 200 supply trucks on the Bourzanga-Djibo section, killing 11 soldiers and civilian volunteers supporting the army, with numerous civilians missing.
A few months later, Abdoul Fhatave Tiemtore, editor-in-chief of the Burkinabe radio station Omega, wrote about his experience of traveling that section of road.
He described feeling “sadness, anxiety, fear and stress” after witnessing “truly horrific things.”
“We saw bodies that were still fresh, decaying bodies, abandoned vehicles and craters from mines on the road,” Tiemtore wrote in an article.


Niger has two high-risk highways, both in the southwest and both leading to Burkina Faso.
Since 2022, it has been nearly impossible to travel from the capital Niamey to Burkina’s Ouagadougou by road due to the threat posed by jihadists along the 600-kilometer (373-mile) border between the two countries.
The National Association of Wood Operators in Niger told AFP in May that it had lost 24 of its drivers and apprentices since 2015 and that 52 of its trucks had been burnt on roads in the southwest of the country.
“We are tired of counting our dead,” another Nigerien truck drivers’ union said, with several of its members, drivers and apprentices also killed in attacks.
“The terrorists have banned us from traveling to local fairs, they even held some drivers hostage in the bush for days,” said Zakaria Seyni, a Nigerien driver based in the tri-border region shared by Niger, Burkina and Mali — a hotspot for jihadist attacks.
According to the OECD, security measures in the Sahel must be accompanied by the development of transportation infrastructure, cross-border cooperation and economic integration to promote stability.
The scarcity of roads and their poor condition have forced armies in the region to travel in convoys, leaving rural areas to jihadists, Walther said.
An alternative would be to rethink the way armies move around, using for instance “vehicles as light and versatile as those of jihadists,” such as motorcycles, he said.


The strange case of Evgeniya Mayboroda, Russia’s rebel retiree

The strange case of Evgeniya Mayboroda, Russia’s rebel retiree
Updated 07 July 2025

The strange case of Evgeniya Mayboroda, Russia’s rebel retiree

The strange case of Evgeniya Mayboroda, Russia’s rebel retiree
  • Evgeniya Mayboroda was accused of sharing “false information” on the Russian army on social media and of "making a public appeal to commit extremist activities"

WARSAW: The elegant 72-year-old Russian put her hand on her heart as the verdict fell. Five and a half years in prison for posts opposing the war in Ukraine.
Then, according to a witness who saw her in the dock, “her nose began to bleed.”
Yet only a few years before, Evgeniya Mayboroda had been an ardent fan of Russian leader Vladimir Putin and had celebrated his annexation of Crimea.
A photo taken in the court in Shakhty shows her shock as the sentence was pronounced — her punishment held up as an example of what can happen to even model citizens if they question the war.
Mayboroda — who comes from the Rostov region bordering Ukraine — was accused of sharing “false information” on the Russian army on social media and of “making a public appeal to commit extremist activities.”
Even before she was convicted in January 2024, the posts on her social media feed — thick with pictures of cats and flowers — had put her on the Russia’s “terrorist and extremist” watchlist.
Curious to discover how a pro-Kremlin pensioner could so quickly become an enemy of the state, AFP tracked her down to a penal colony where she said her faith and prayers were sustaining her.
We also talked to those who know her and were able to piece together a picture of this unlikely rebel, whose strange story says much about today’s Russia.


Evgeniya Nikolaevna Mayboroda was born on June 10, 1951 near the coal-mining town of Shakhty and met her husband Nikolai at the local technical institute.
They both got jobs at a facility just outside the city — he was a miner in an elite squad, while she worked in the power station above ground. They had a son, Sergei, in 1972.
The Mayborodas were the ideal Soviet family. As mine workers they occupied a privileged place in the communist hierarchy and were able to travel regularly across the Eastern Bloc.
But when the USSR collapsed in 1991 so did their world. Not only was there no money to pay their wages but the socialist values they believed in were replaced by a wild, cowboy capitalism.
Then on Miners’ Day 1997, an important date in the Soviet calendar, Sergei, their only child was killed in a car accident. He was 25.
“We were at the burial. Evgeniya was in such a state that she can’t remember it,” a friend of the family, too afraid to give her name, told AFP.
“Her son was everything to her.”
The mine shut down in 2002 and, less than a decade later, her husband died after a sudden illness and Mayboroda found herself alone.


She took refuge in religion and was soon back on her feet, again taking pride in her appearance. Photos show that even on a budget, she kept her sense of style, always with a little touch of mascara.
“She is a leader in life,” a friend said. “She is hard to break.”
At the end of 2017, she discovered social media and joined VK (Russia’s equivalent to Facebook). Her page shows her political evolution.
For five years she shared hundreds of pictures of cats and flowers, religious messages or nostalgic reminiscences about life in the good old USSR.
And she was effusive in her praise of President Vladimir Putin, posting some 30 photos of him from March to August 2018, hailing him as a marvellous leader who was making Russia great again.
In one of them, Putin tells Donald Trump that Russia would give Crimea back to Ukraine “if the United States gives Texas back to Mexico and Alaska back to Russia.”
She also called former Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko — who accused Putin of having him poisoned — a “moron.”
Like many Russians laid low by the crisis of the 1990s, Mayboroda was receptive to the Kremlin’s rhetoric that Russia had regained its power and stability under Putin.


Then something changed. In the summer of 2018, a sudden raising of the retirement age saw discontent with the government spread beyond the big cities.
“Normally Putin, as a great popular leader, likes to position himself as referee, guaranteeing the interest of the people,” said French sociologist Karine Clement, a specialist on Russian protest movements.
“But this was the first time he spoke up to defend a reform that, let’s say, went against the interests of the poor.”
While his popularity plummeted, there were no large protests.
At around the same time, the mood of Mayboroda’s posts about politics began to change.
She started to share posts denouncing poverty in Russia, contrasting it with the country’s vast natural resources.
Tatyana Vasilchuk, a journalist from the independent outlet Novaya Gazeta, said the Maiski area where Mayboroda lived was wracked by neglect and unemployment when she visited.
“It was drowning under rubbish,” she said.
In 2020, Mayboroda made clear her opposition to a change in the constitution allowing Putin to stay in power until 2036, reposting a message that said: “No to an eternal Putin... No to eternal lies and corruption.”


Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“One of the motors” for Putin going to war, Clement said, was his need to silence opposition and “restore control.”
On her VK account, Mayboroda — who had family in Ukraine — criticized the invasion and even expressed support for the Azov Brigade, a Ukrainian unit founded by far-right militants.
While some Azov members were neo-Nazis, its dogged resistance on the battlefield, particularly during the siege of Mariupol in 2022, won it hero status in Ukraine and recruits beyond ultranationalist groups.
In Russia, where all opposition — particularly online — is tracked, her posts did not go unnoticed.
The security services have locked up hundreds of people for criticizing the conflict and Mayboroda’s turn came in February 2023.
Police raided her home and she got her first jail term and a fine. A more serious criminal investigation was also opened, which led to her conviction last year.
Investigators accused her of criticizing the Russian assault on Mariupol in which thousands of besieged Ukrainians died.
They also said she reposted a disturbing video in which a young girl, sat in front of a screen showing a swastika, holds a knife and declares in Ukrainian that Russians should have their throats cut.
The video seems to support the Kremlin line that Russia had gone into Ukraine to fight “neo-Nazis,” playing on the admiration some Ukrainian nationalist groups have for those who fought with the Germans against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during World War II.
Mayboroda was accused of being a Nazi for reposting the video, which had in fact been published by a pro-Kremlin account on VK. Ukraine’s SBU security service claim the clip was part of a Russian “propaganda campaign.”
“She does not support that ideology,” a source close to the case told AFP.
Mayboroda, who regularly crossed the border to visit her Ukrainian relatives before the war, told the court that one was wounded in a Russian strike on a building in Dnipro in the summer of 2022.


Yet at the time Mayboroda did not see how dangerous her online comments were, a friend told AFP. She compared the pensioner — who is now 74 — to a “lost lamb” who she still loved despite being “in the wrong.”
Expert Clement said she could understand how Mayboroda became politicized once she saw through the Kremlin line.
Beyond prosecuting its opponents, the Kremlin tries to “scramble minds” with a fog of often contradictory disinformation to stop “the forming of mass political movements,” Clement said.
This strategy of confusion allows it to present the invasion as “a fight against Nazism,” she added, even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.
Russians are cynical about politics after watching oligarchs present their ultraliberal reforms that robbed the poor in the 1990s as an advance toward “democracy,” the expert argued, a distrust which now works in favor of Putin’s authoritarianism.
“You have to be very smart to navigate public life in Russia,” she said, adding that a “thirst for community” was part of the reason why so many have got behind the war.
Despite that, Mayboroda’s plight has garnered attention from opposition media and NGOs both in Russia and in exile. The banned group Memorial quickly recognized her as a “political prisoner,” and Kremlin critics said her jailing showed the growing intensity of repression.



Unlike thousands of Ukrainian prisoners who human rights groups say are being held in secret and sometimes tortured, as a Russian citizen Mayboroda’s prison conditions are much better.
Theoretically she can receive letters, though censored by prison authorities, and occasionally make phone calls.
In June, after a six-month wait, AFP was able to talk to her during a mediated and recorded 10-minute call from her prison in the Rostov region.
During the spring her friends said she was depressed and unwell. But her tone during this call was surprisingly upbeat given she has been behind bars for 18 months.
“The hardest thing for me was losing my freedom. It’s very hard... But my faith and prayers help me,” she told AFP, her voice sometimes cut by the crackly line.
Asked why she reshared the video of the girl calling for Russians to be killed, she said “it happened by accident. It was stupid.”
She insisted that she detested “hate” and “lies,” and that she believed in “love and the joy of living.”
Her opposition to the war was on simple moral grounds, she said. “I am a (Christian) believer. Thou shalt not kill.”
Nor could she see why the invasion had to happen. “Why all this? I don’t understand.”