The US president addresses members of the AFL-CIO, which represents more than 12.5 million workers, as he kicks off campaign rally.

United States President Joe Biden made his 2024 re-election pitch to union members in Philadelphia in his first political rally since launching his campaign in April, aiming to shore up a key part of his political coalition and bolster support among white working-class voters.

The event on Saturday was hosted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which includes 60 unions representing more than 12.5 million workers. It endorsed Biden and his running mate Vice President Kamala Harris this week – the earliest it has ever made an endorsement in a US presidential election.

“I told you when I ran for president, I’d have your back, and I have,” Biden told the approximately 2,000 union members in attendance. “But you’ve had my back as well.”

Biden said the early endorsement would make “a gigantic difference” in the election.

Hundreds of union workers inside the convention hall began chanting “Let’s go, Joe!” and blowing whistles and hoisting campaign signs hours before Biden arrived.

Members of unions representing professions from carpenters to airport service workers to entertainers to heavy service equipment engineers praised Biden from the stage – some speaking in Spanish with translators.

The Democratic president’s frequent appearances at union events, including at a labour conference in Washington right after announcing his re-election campaign, show how important he thinks the labour movement is to a second term.

Hailed by labour leaders as the most pro-union president in history, Biden has supported collective bargaining at companies, reversed rules implemented by his Republican predecessor Donald Trump that weakened worker protections, pushed to reverse a decades-long decline in union membership, and made it easier for union labour to build bridges and ports around the country.

In his remarks, Biden talked up his $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, which passed with bipartisan support in Congress.

The Philadelphia event also comes amid some encouraging economic news for Biden, with inflation cooling last month, continuing a steady decline in consumer prices primarily driven by lower gas prices, a smaller rise in grocery costs than in previous months and less expensive furniture, airfares and appliances.

The city and Pennsylvania have long been at the heart of Biden’s political efforts. Philadelphia was the site of his campaign headquarters in 2020 and the state was one of a handful that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but flipped back to Democrats four years later.

Until now, Biden’s primary campaign activity has been fundraising as the campaign tries to amass an impressive fundraising haul before the year’s second quarter concludes at the end of the month. The president raised money at a private home in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Friday and soon will hold fundraisers in California, Maryland, Illinois and New York.

Union member Jennifer McKinnon, 53, a grade school librarian and member of the National Education Association, said she felt that Biden had a personal commitment to education because his wife, Jill, was a teacher who continued to teach English at a Northern Virginia community college as first lady.

“I’m very optimistic. I fear that the Republicans are going to get caught in their cycle that they did last time and people aren’t going to buy it this time, so Joe’s going to sweep right in,” McKinnon said of the 2024 election, alluding to Donald Trump, who is the early front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Many in the crowd also said they thought the criminal cases in federal and New York courts against Trump could complicate his electoral pitch even though his message of economic populism resonated with some union members in the past.

AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the 2020 electorate, found that about 6 in 10 self-identified union members supported Biden, a margin that outpaced Trump but was not commanding.

UFO panel members say online abuse has been directed at their work to investigate the unexplained.

NASA has held its first public meeting on UFOs – officially referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs) – a year after launching a study into unexplained sightings.

The space agency televised the four-hour hearing on Wednesday featuring an independent panel of experts who promised to be transparent. The team of 16 scientists and other experts selected by NASA included retired US astronaut Scott Kelly who spent nearly a year in space.

NASA said the focus of the public session at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC was to hold “final deliberations” before the team publishes a report, which panel chair David Spergel said was planned for release by late July.

“If I were to summarise in one line what I feel we’ve learned, it’s we need high-quality data,” Spergel said during opening remarks on Wednesday.

NOW: An audio-only media briefing following today’s public discussion on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. https://t.co/y4gMK6n1M9

— NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2023

“The current data collection efforts about UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection,” Spergel said.

The team has “several months of work ahead of them”, said Dan Evans, a senior research official at NASA’s science unit, adding that panel members had been subjected to online abuse and harassment since they began their work.

The panel represents the first such inquiry ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency for a subject the government once consigned to the exclusive and secretive purview of military and national security officials.

The NASA study is separate from a newly formalised Pentagon-based investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena documented in recent years by military aviators and analysed by US defence and intelligence officials.

The parallel NASA and Pentagon efforts, both undertaken with some semblance of public scrutiny, highlight a turning point for the US government after decades spent deflecting, debunking and discrediting sightings of unidentified flying objects – long associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens – dating back to the 1940s.

While NASA’s science mission was seen by some as promising a more open-minded approach to the topic, the US space agency made it known from the start that it was not leaping to any conclusions.

“There is no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin,” NASA said in announcing the panel’s formation last June.

“I want to emphasise this loud and proud: there is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with” unidentified objects, panel member Evans said after the meeting on Wednesday.

US defence officials have said the Pentagon’s recent push to investigate such sightings has led to hundreds of new reports now under examination, though most remain categorised as unexplained.

The head of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has also said the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out but that no sighting had produced evidence of extraterrestrial origins.

NASA’s Evans pointed out that the live stream of the meeting led to considerable trolling.

That comes on top of “online abuse” directed towards several committee members.

Harassment detracts from the scientific process and reinforces the stigma surrounding the topic of UAPs, said Evans, adding that NASA security is dealing with the issue.

“It’s precisely this rigorous, evidence-based approach that allows one to separate the fact from fiction,” he added.

As New Delhi holds a Group of 20 (G20) tourism meeting in Indian-administered Kashmir, a leading watchdog has condemned the crackdown on media and arrests of journalists in the region.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said press freedom remains under attack even as India tries to project normalcy in the disputed region.

“CPJ calls on the Indian government to end its brutal crackdown on the media and immediately release the four arbitrarily detained Kashmiri journalists,” the group said in a statement shared on Twitter on Monday. The journalists it wants freed are Asif Sultan, Fahad Shah, Sajad Gul and Irfan Mehraj.

As #India holds a #G20 meeting on tourism in Kashmir, #pressfreedom remains under attack in the region.

CPJ calls on the Indian government to end its brutal crackdown on the media and immediately release the four arbitrarily detained Kashmiri journalists.#FreeThePress pic.twitter.com/zKo4rwz6iK

— CPJ Asia (@CPJAsia) May 22, 2023

Sultan, who was a reporter with the Kashmir Narrator magazine, was arrested in 2018 under the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), an “anti-terror” law. He was charged with murder, attempted murder and harbouring rebels, but his family says he was targeted for the stories he wrote.

Shah was the editor of the Kashmir Walla website. He was arrested in February last year under the same UAPA law for “glorifying terrorism” in his writings.

Gul worked with Shah’s magazine and was arrested in January last year for spreading “false narratives” about India’s rule in its only Muslim-majority region.

Gul was booked under the Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law under which a person may be jailed for a year and sometimes more without bail.

Mehraj was jailed two months ago under “terrorism” charges for his association with a local human rights group, the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, where he formerly worked as a researcher.

All four journalists have been sent to prisons outside Indian-administered Kashmir, making it difficult for their families to visit them.

Press freedom worsened in the region after August 5, 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its limited autonomy and brought it under New Delhi’s direct control.

Thousands of people – including top politicians, activists, journalists and lawyers – were arrested as New Delhi tightened its control over the region, which is also claimed by neighbouring Pakistan.

Since then, Modi’s government has introduced a series of laws and policies that residents say are aimed at undermining their rights and denying them their livelihoods.

Kashmiri journalists say they are operating in a climate of fear since 2019 as homes of several journalists have been raided and they have been summoned by the police for questioning. Many journalists say they have been forced into self-censorship.

Observers described the measures as India’s attempts to silence the press from reporting about the realities in the region.

‘Real picture’

This year, Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media watchdog, ranked India 161 among 180 countries in its annual World Press Freedom Index, the lowest rank ever for the world’s largest democracy.

The CPJ released its statement as around 60 foreign delegates along with top Indian officials gathered in the region’s main city, Srinagar, starting on Monday for a three-day meeting to promote global tourism.

The meeting – the region’s first international event since 2019 – is being held under heightened security arrangements although visible signs of security deployments in one of the world’s most militarised regions have been removed.

Police officers and paramilitary forces are standing behind signs and cubicles erected across Srinagar as the delegates meet at a resort on the banks of the city’s famous Dal Lake. Military bunkers dotting the scenic city have been painted in blue while roads have been given a fresh coat of tar.

Locals have been barred from areas near the main venue while schools in some parts of the city have been closed until Wednesday.

Mehbooba Mufti, the region’s last elected chief minister, said on Sunday that Kashmir has been turned into “Guantanamo Bay”, the United States military prison in Cuba, for the G20 meeting.

India, which holds the G20 presidency this year, is hosting a series of meetings across the country leading to a summit to be held in New Delhi in September.

China, which has an ongoing border dispute with India, has boycotted the Kashmir meeting while Pakistan, which is not a G20 member, has criticised it being held in the disputed territory.

Indian media reports on Tuesday said there were indications that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt have also remained away from the event.

Siddiq Wahid, a Kashmiri political analyst, told Al Jazeera the Indian government is clearly trying to project normalcy by hosting the G20 meeting in the region.

“Unfortunately for New Delhi, the absence of China has dealt a blow to give that [normalcy] impression,” he said.

Geeta Sesu, co-founder of the Free Speech Collective, an advocacy group for freedom of speech in India, told Al Jazeera, “The barricading of security bunkers behind cheerful and scenic pictures of Kashmir for the G-20 meet is a good illustration of the condition of press freedom in the valley.”

“Journalists are jailed and the mobility and access of others are severely restricted,” Sesu said. “Will [G20] delegates be allowed to engage with the real picture? Or be satisfied with what they are allowed to see?”

Three parties in Congo-Brazzaville are meeting to lay out their objectives for the 2026 elections and challenge President Nguesso’s long rule.

Three opposition parties in the Republic of Congo have met for their first convention as a coalition to outline the group’s goals ahead of the 2026 elections so they can unseat President Denis Nguesso, who has been in power since 1997.

The Alliance for Democratic Alternation in 2026 (2AD2026), whose members gathered on Sunday, is made up of the Democracy and Development party of former President Jacques Joachim Yhomby Opango, the Movement of Republicans and the People’s Party.

The parties have grassroots support but no seats in parliament.

“This work enabled us to adopt the texts and above all to set ourselves short-, medium- and long-term objectives,” said Destin Gavet, 2AD2026’s first president and a Movement of Republicans member.

Gavet said several recommendations were also made to address the issue of political prisoners, including Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and André Okombi Salissa.

“The release of political prisoners can be a way to ease the political climate and above all to promote social cohesion and national unity,” he said.

Both opposition figures were found guilty of undermining internal state security after the 2016 elections. Those polls were followed by violence, leading to the deaths of 17 people after the opposition accused  Nguesso, who had garnered 67 percent of the votes cast, of rigging the poll.

The opposition coalition was launched in April with the aim of bringing change to a political landscape dominated by Nguesso.

The 80-year-old president is set to run for a fifth term. He was also president from 1979 to 1991, losing in the 1992 elections before returning five years later.

Former US President Donald Trump has held the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign in Waco, Texas, railing against prosecutors investigating him, and employing dark and conspiratorial language to fire up his base ahead of next year’s Republican primary elections.

Trump — facing potential indictment — opened Saturday’s rally by playing a song, “Justice for All,” that features a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol singing the national anthem and a recording of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Some footage from the insurrection was shown on screens.

In his speech, Trump defended the insurrectionists, saying they will be “vindicated”, and described the investigations swirling around him as “something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show”.

“From the beginning it’s been one witch hunt and phony investigation after another,” he said.

Trump is being investigated by prosecutors in Manhattan for campaign finance violations stemming from his alleged payment of hush money to an adult film actress ahead of the 2016 election. A special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice is also investigating allegations he hoarded top-secret documents and masterminded a plot seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump declared on Saturday that his “enemies are desperate to stop us,” and “our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will”.

“But they failed,” he said. “They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”

Trump held his rally at the airport grounds in Waco as the city marked the 30th anniversary of a raid by federal agents on the Branch Davidians religious sect there that resulted in 86 deaths, including four law enforcement officers. Many right-wing extremists see the raid as a seminal moment of government overreach, and critics saw the rally’s timing as a nod to Trump’s far-right supporters.

Trump’s campaign insisted the location and timing of the event had nothing to do with the Waco siege or its anniversary.

A spokesperson said the site, 27 kilometres (17 miles) from the Branch Davidian compound, was chosen because it was conveniently situated near four of the state’s biggest metropolitan areas — Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — and has the infrastructure to handle a sizable crowd.

Trump did not make any overt references to Waco’s history, telling the crowd he told Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick he wanted to hold his rally in a place with overwhelming support, not “one of those 50-50 areas”.

He said he told Patrick, “Let’s go right into the heart of it.”

“But as far as the eye can see,” he immediately added, “the abuses of power that we’re currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, depraved chapters in all of American history.”

Audience members were holding red-and-white signs handed out by the campaign that said “WITCH HUNT” and “I stand with Trump.”

‘High wire’ act

Trump does not just face legal peril. His effort to lock in the Republican nomination faces a potential challenge from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis amid signs that his own support is softening, at least in places like New Hampshire, an early primary battleground.

“I’m not a big fan,” Trump said of DeSantis, accusing him of plotting to slash social security.

“Florida has been tremendously successful for many years, long before this guy became governor.”

The former president is seeking to turn the hush money case in New York City to his advantage by raising money off it and using it to rally supporters. On Friday, he issued an apocalyptic warning, saying the country faced potential “death & destruction” if he was charged with a crime.

In a move that seemed designed to preempt a formal announcement, he claimed last Saturday that he would be arrested the following Tuesday. While that did not happen, Trump has repeatedly invoked violence — urging his supporters to protest — and used increasingly racist and dehumanising rhetoric as he has launched ever more personal attacks against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

But few supporters have heeded his calls to take to the streets to protest his possible indictment in the Manhattan case, and Trump’s escalating rhetoric has repelled at least some within his party.

“Trump is walking on a high wire without a net, telegraphing that he has nothing to lose and is willing to risk dangerous outcomes to rally support,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist in Washington, DC.

Democrats have also warned that Trump’s remarks had the potential to incite violence.

“The twice-impeached former president’s rhetoric is reckless, reprehensible and irresponsible. It’s dangerous, and if he keeps it up he’s going to get someone killed,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said.

At the Waco rally, supporters said they were unfazed by the prospect that Trump could be indicted.

“It’s just another political attack on him to keep him from running and winning this race again,” said Eugene Torres, 41, from the Texas coastal city of Corpus Christi.

Alan Kregel, 56, travelled with his wife from Dallas to see Trump in person for the first time. While he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, he said he felt the former president’s “methods and vocabulary” often detracted from his policies. But now, two years out of office, he said he is more supportive of Trump than he was before.

“He’s an innocent man, just persecuted,” said Kregel, arguing an indictment would help Trump win in 2024.

Aside from his attacks on law enforcement and DeSantis, Trump’s speech was largely devoted to prosecuting old grievances and making extreme claims about his enemies.

Several times Trump repeated the false claim that his election loss in 2020 was due to a systemic fraud orchestrated by the Democrats.

Trump painted the stakes of the next election in apocalyptic terms, speaking of “demonic forces” trying to demolish the country, which he said was at risk of falling into a “lawless abyss” unless he is voted back into the White House.

He described some US officials and senior politicians — including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — as a bigger threat to the US than China or Russia.

“Either the Deep State destroys America or we destroy the Deep State,” Trump said.

Rare meeting dedicated to agriculture comes amid outside assessments of a food crisis in North Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has kicked off a ruling party meeting to discuss agricultural improvements, according to state media, amid outside assessments of a worsening food crisis in the isolated country.

Kim oversaw the seventh enlarged plenary meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea on Sunday as it reviewed rural development projects, state news agency KCNA reported.

KCNA said the meeting, which is ongoing, will determine “immediate, important” tasks on agricultural issues and “urgent tasks arising at the present stage of the national economic development”.

KNCA did not say whether Kim spoke during the meeting or how long it would last. Senior officials such as Cabinet Premier Kim Tok Hun and Jo Yong Won, one of Kim’s closest aides who handles the Central Committee’s organisational affairs, were also attending.

The meeting is the party’s first plenary session convened only to discuss agriculture.

In announcing the gathering in February, KCNA said it was “a very important and urgent task to establish the correct strategy for the development of agriculture”.

It comes as the South Korean government said its assessments indicate that the food situation in North Korea appears to have deteriorated.

Officials in Seoul pointed to the meeting as a de facto acknowledgement of serious shortages. Last month, the United States-based 38 North programme, which monitors North Korea, also said in a report that “food availability has likely fallen below the bare minimum with regard to human needs,” with food insecurity at its worst since the famines of the 1990s.

Experts say the current food shortages were probably triggered by poor harvests amid extreme weather conditions and have been exacerbated by lockdowns and a sharp reduction in trade with China due to border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

North Korea is also under strict international sanctions over its banned nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

Last year, the country’s grain production was estimated at 4.5 million tonnes, a 3.8 percent drop from 2020, according to South Korean government assessments. North Korea was estimated to have produced between 4.4 million to 4.8 million tonnes of grain annually from 2012-2021, according to previous South Korean data.

North Korea needs about 5.5 million tonnes of grain to feed its 25 million people annually, so it is short about 1 million tonnes this year. Previously, half of such a gap was usually met by unofficial grain purchases from China, with the rest remaining as unresolved shortfall, according to Kwon Tae-jin, a senior economist at the private GS&J Institute in South Korea.

Kwon says trade curbs due to the pandemic have probably hindered such unofficial rice purchases.

Efforts by North Korean authorities to tighten controls and restrict market activities have also worsened the situation, he said.

It is unclear what action North Korea will take to quickly address its food problems.

The country’s official newspaper last week called for economic self-reliance, arguing that depending on external aid to cope with the food situation would be like taking “poisoned candy”.

Some experts say Pyongyang will use this week’s plenary meeting to boost public support for Kim during his confrontations with the US and its allies over his nuclear ambitions.

Despite limited resources, Kim has been aggressively pushing to expand his nuclear weapons and missile programmes to pressure Washington into accepting the idea of North Korea as a nuclear power and lift international sanctions. After a record year of weapon testing activities in 2022, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile and other missiles this month.

Nigeria’s elections for the presidency and both houses of the federal parliament were under way on Saturday across the country’s 36 states.

This vote is the sixth successive civilian-to-civilian transition of power since a return to democracy in 1999.

Only four of the 18 candidates are considered frontrunners: Bola Tinubu of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the leading opposition People’s Democratic Party, Peter Obi of the Labour Party, and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP).

Key issues at stake include the economy, which has suffered two recessions in four years, and security.

More than a third of the total eligible voters in Nigeria are youths and their voices are expected to make a difference after years of low turnout.

There have been calls for stakeholders in the electoral process to allow for a smooth and transparent election, amid concerns about voter suppression, inducement and intimidation.

The tiny Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti is voting in parliamentary elections on Friday that have been boycotted by the main opposition parties, who have branded the polls a sham.

Only two parties are contesting seats in the 65-member National Assembly, where veteran President Ismail Omar Guelleh’s ruling Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) is assured of victory.

Despite its diminutive size, Djibouti enjoys a strategically crucial position at the mouth of the Red Sea, using it to woo trade investors and foreign military powers.

The opposition charges that the poll, which follows a presidential ballot in April 2021 that saw Guelleh re-elected for a fifth term with 97 percent of the vote, will not be free and fair.

“This election is only a formality, nothing will change,” said a 32-year-old unemployed man, who gave his name as Ali.

Guelleh, 75, has ruled Djibouti with an iron fist since 1999 and the country has seen an erosion of press freedom and a crackdown on dissent.

The economy took a hit in 2022 from the war in Ukraine, a regional drought and fallout from the two-year conflict in neighbouring Ethiopia, but is expected to grow by about five percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

‘Single party’

The main opposition parties, including the Movement for Democratic Renewal and Development (MRD) and the Republican Alliance for Democracy (ARD), have announced they will not take part.

“Elections in our country are still not free, not transparent and not democratic,” the MRD said in a statement in January, describing Friday’s vote as nothing more than a “charade”.

“The people of Djibouti are deprived of their right to freely choose their leaders,” it added, denouncing the country’s “single party” system.

Djibouti’s 230,000 voters will choose MPs for a five-year term, with the law stipulating that 25 percent of the 65 seats must go to women.

In the last legislative ballot in 2018, the UMP – which emerged from a party that ruled Djibouti since independence from France in 1977 – won 58 seats.

The Union for Democracy and Justice (UDJ), the only other party running on Friday, took five of the remaining seven.

“This election, similar to the presidential polls in 2021, are not really taken seriously by the population any more – the public interest is very, very limited,” Benedikt Kamski, Horn of Africa researcher for Germany’s Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, told AFP news agency.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional bloc, said it would be sending an observer mission.

Strategic position

Under Guelleh, the country of one million people has exploited its prime geographical advantage, investing heavily in ports and logistics infrastructure.

Flanked by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and across the sea from Yemen, the desert nation has remained stable in a volatile neighbourhood.

Foreign military powers including colonial ruler France, the United States and China, as well as Italy and Japan, have established bases or support facilities there.

It dreams of becoming the “Dubai of Africa” with the help of foreign investment, notably from China.

The Asian giant helped fund a rail link between Djibouti and the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, which opened in 2017. It is also financing Africa’s biggest free trade zone.

In January, the government announced a memorandum of understanding with a Hong Kong-based company to build a $1bn commercial spaceport expected to take five years to build.

Joint air exercises conducted after Pyongyang launches long-range ballistic missile into the sea off Japan.

The United States has held air exercises with South Korea and Japan involving strategic bombers, a day after North Korea fired a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the exercises on Sunday demonstrated the allies’ “overwhelming” defence capabilities and readiness.

“[The exercises] strengthened the combined operation capability and affirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defence of the Korean Peninsula and the implementation of extended deterrence,” South Korea’s military said in a statement.

Japan flew F-15 fighter jets over the Sea of Japan with US B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters, Japan’s defence ministry said in a statement. It called the security environment “increasingly severe” after the latest North Korean missile landed within its Exclusive Economic Zone.

The long-range ballistic missile landed in the sea off Japan’s west coast after North Korea warned of a strong response to the planned military drills by South Korea and the US.

State news agency KCNA said North Korea test-fired a Hwasong-15 from Pyongyang airport on Saturday in what it called a “surprise ICBM launching drill”.

KCNA said the missile flew 989km (615 miles) and travelled for just over an hour “before accurately hitting the pre-set area in open waters of the East Sea of Korea” – using the North Korean name for the Sea of Japan.

UN resolutions prohibit North Korea from testing ballistic missiles of any range, which – depending on their design – can also be equipped with a nuclear warhead.

It would be the first test of such a missile in more than a month.

The test was condemned “in the strongest terms” by the Group of Seven, the group of the leading seven world economies.

A statement released after a meeting of G7 foreign ministers at the Munich Security Conference called the attack a “blatant violation” of UN Security Council resolutions.

Male, Maldives – The Maldives’s governing party is set to hold a primary that is pitting incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih against his former ally and the nation’s first democratically-elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed.

The closely fought election on Saturday follows a bitter campaign, with Nasheed framing the poll as a choice between autocracy and democracy, and accusing Solih of vote rigging and bribery — allegations he denies.

Enmity between the two has raised concerns of new turmoil in the popular Indian Ocean tourist destination, four years after Maldivians voted out former President Abdulla Yameen, who had overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent, including by jailing or forcing into exile nearly all of his political rivals, arresting Supreme Court judges, and shuttering critical and independent media.

Some also fear the vote could split the governing Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) ahead of September’s presidential election, as Nasheed has yet to state — even when pushed by reporters — whether he would back Solih if he were to lose.

“The Maldives has never seen a more contentious primary,” wrote Fazeena Ahmed, editor at Mihaaru, a prominent news site. “Both Nasheed and Solih’s campaign teams have crossed the red line,” she said.

Mudslinging and relentless insults mean “the two sides are now at a point where it is unclear if they will be able to unite and work together for the upcoming presidential election”, Ahmed added.

The question on everyone’s mind, she wrote, “is what will happen to MDP after this primary”.

The stakes are indeed high.

‘Real MDP’

For Nasheed, his political future hangs in the balance.

Considered an icon of democracy for his lifelong campaign for multiparty politics in the Maldives, Nasheed, 55, has seen his political star wane since Solih, 60, assumed the presidency in 2018. The bitter rivalry between the childhood friends, who are also related by marriage, began earlier that year when the MDP’s top decision-making body decided to transfer the party’s presidential ticket from Nasheed to Solih. At the time, party officials feared the MDP would be left without a presidential candidate as Nasheed was being prevented from contesting the election because of a trumped-up “terrorism” conviction.

Living in exile at the time and left with little choice, Nasheed, who had previously served as president from 2008-2012, acquiesced to Solih’s candidacy.

And Solih — backed by the MDP as well as a coalition of disparate opposition parties — went on to defeat Yameen by a landslide.

Within months of his election defeat, Yameen was jailed on money laundering and corruption charges.

But it was Nasheed who emerged as Solih’s biggest critic.

Elected as parliament speaker in 2019, Nasheed used his podium to lambast the president for his alleged failure to take action on the Maldives’s biggest-ever corruption scandal, pointing out that only Yameen had so far been jailed over the theft of some $79m in state funds from tourism leases. He also slammed Solih’s alleged inaction against violent groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS). Animosity gradually escalated, resulting in members of Nasheed and Solih’s family publicly taking sides. It then broke out into open hostility when the speaker was targeted in a bomb attack in the capital, Male, in May of 2021.

Nasheed survived, albeit narrowly.

The police blamed “extremist” religious groups, but some of Nasheed’s supporters — alleging security lapses — held the government equally responsible.

All the while, Solih has gradually consolidated his power within the coalition that brought him to power and tightened his grip on the MDP.

Some of Nasheed’s closest aides, such as legislator Hisaan Hussain and Environment Minister Aminath Shauna, have sided with Solih, while the president’s candidates have won nearly every internal vote in recent years, including a hotly-contested election for the party’s chairmanship last year.

He also looked set to win the MDP’s presidential ticket without a contest — until his estranged friend announced his intention to run at the last minute.

Nasheed’s entry has now electrified the primary.

Running under the slogan “Revival of a creed”, Nasheed has crisscrossed the island nation over the past month, mobilising ever larger crowds with promises to end corruption, tackle rising costs of living, and reverse tax hikes introduced by Solih’s government. He has also accused Solih of bribing voters and bringing back autocracy, including depriving tens of thousands of MDP members of the right to vote and reviving a culture of citizens having to beg government ministers and legislators for public services and infrastructure.

“We are the real MDP,” Nasheed told a campaign rally on Thursday. “We are concerned that this government is enacting policies that are alien to our ideology, and we are seeking to win this election in order to reclaim our party.”

Uncertainty

Solih’s campaign, however, has denied the allegations as “baseless”.

While 39,000 people were removed from the party’s nearly 100,000-strong member registry, the campaign has stressed this was done in line with electoral laws that require members to submit fingerprinted registration forms and said all those taken off the membership list were given the opportunity to re-register. Now, some 57,255 members will be allowed to vote in Sunday’s ballot.

“We believe what Nasheed is doing is casting a shadow on the process because he also realises the overwhelming support the president enjoys,” a spokesperson for Solih told Al Jazeera.

Indeed, Solih, too, has drawn equally large — though quieter — crowds.

The president, whose slogan is “Onwards”, is campaigning on a platform of ensuring stability.

Most of all, he has touted his ability to hold the ruling coalition together, saying the backing of the smaller parties will be crucial for MDP to win the majority of the vote in the presidential election.

“MDP is the biggest, and most popular party,” Solih told a large crowd at a campaign rally on Thursday. “But every MDP member knows that in order to win a presidential election, we have to win more than 50 percent of the vote. And they know, this will be difficult for MDP alone to achieve right now.”

Among the president’s supporters at the rally was Adam Zakariyya, a taxi driver who said Solih deserves a “chance to finish everything he has started” and praised the president for successfully steering the Maldives through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hafeeza Azhar, a 25-year-old Solih supporter, also said the president deserved a second term. She said she was backing Solih because his government had introduced free university education, a policy that was allowing her to pursue a degree in marketing.

“Previously I was unable to go for higher studies because I had to earn money to support my parents. Now I am able to support my parents with a job while doing my degree for free,” she told Al Jazeera.

MDP members — in both Solih and Nasheed’s camps — said they hoped for unity after the primary, but concerns remain.

“There is a real possibility of unrest,” said one Maldivian journalist, who asked to remain anonymous. He pointed to Nasheed’s claims that many of the 39,000 names removed from the voter registry were his supporters and said some of those voters were likely to try and cast ballots on Saturday and cry foul if they were not allowed to do so.

“Given that so many of Nasheed’s supporters will be unable to vote, he is unlikely to win. But the margin will be much narrower than Solih anticipates,” the journalist said.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty because we just don’t know what Nasheed will do. Either way, the campaign has shown Nasheed remains a formidable force in the Maldives and has the capacity to cause a lot of damage to Solih,” they added.

“We’ll have to wait and see how the numbers line up.”

Mohamed Junayd reported from Male, Maldives. Zaheena Rasheed reported and wrote from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.