Cease-fires wavered in Lebanon and Gaza

Israeli forces killed at least 22 people yesterday in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, while in Gaza, Israel prevented Palestinians from moving back north. Israel said that Hamas had violated the terms of their truce. Follow our coverage.

Israeli forces opened fire on Sunday as thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war poured onto roads leading to their homes. The military said in a statement that a vehicle with flags of the militant group Hezbollah had approached their troops, prompting them to “remove the threat.”

The Israeli military also said troops had identified dozens of rioters and fired warning shots to disperse them. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that more than 120 people were injured.

More people are expected to try to return to their homes today, prompting fears of further violence. Israel has remained in the country past a 60-day deadline for both Israel and Hezbollah to withdraw amid Israeli concerns that Hezbollah remained active there.

Despite the fragility of the truces, the warring sides appeared to want the cease-fires to hold.

Lebanon cease-fire: The agreement, which was signed in November, stipulated that Israel and Hezbollah withdraw from southern Lebanon, and that the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers be deployed in force to secure the area.

Gaza: Israel was preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes, saying that Hamas had violated the cease-fire. Under its terms, Arbel Yehud, the last female civilian hostage that Israel believes is most likely alive, should have been released. But Yehud may be in the custody of another group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which said she would be released before next Saturday.

South Korea’s president was formally indicted

President Yoon Suk Yeol was indicted yesterday on charges of leading an insurrection last month when he briefly imposed martial law, according to prosecutors. He is the first president in South Korean history to face criminal charges while still in office.

A trial for Yoon, who was impeached in December, will most likely begin soon. A former defense minister and several military generals and police chiefs were also recently indicted, and all face criminal charges of helping Yoon commit the same crime.

The country’s Constitutional Court is deliberating whether the parliamentary impeachment was legitimate and if Yoon should be formally removed from office. A majority of South Koreans approved of his impeachment and consider him guilty of insurrection, according to public opinion polls.

Colombia refused to accept U.S. deportation flights

President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said yesterday that the country would not accept military migrant deportation flights until the Trump administration provided a process to treat migrants with “dignity and respect.” Shortly after, Trump announced a barrage of tariffs and sanctions on the country, including a 25 percent tariff on all Colombian imports.

Petro said that Colombia had already turned away military planes carrying deportees. Colombia appears to be among the first in Latin America to explicitly refuse to cooperate. Petro’s statement followed Brazil’s complaints of “degrading treatment” of deported migrants who arrived there handcuffed.

Related: As the threat of mass deportations of illegal immigrants looms, fear and uncertainty — and the potential for political repercussions — are rippling through India.

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Caity Weaver, a Times magazine writer, loves sugar. Like, really loves it. Her home contains stashes of Dunkaroos, pouches of Gushers and packs of Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups, auto-delivered from Amazon.

Determined to kick the habit and learn about sugar dependence, Weaver traveled to a food therapy facility in Austria to try to change her ways. It was, as she writes, a journey into hell.

Lives lived: Arthur Blessitt, a preacher who carried a 110-pound wooden cross across the U.S. and then through every country on the planet, has died at 84.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

Solving a vast art fraud scheme

Two art fraud rings in a remote Canadian city produced thousands of paintings sold in galleries as works by Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artist.

Convictions came only after a series of unusual events linking a rock star; a cold-case murder of a teenager; his aging, grieving parents; and the hard-boiled homicide detectives initially skeptical of art fraud.

“None of us knew anything about art,” one of the detectives said. They carried out their investigation by reconstructing Morrisseau’s life so they could understand how and what he painted, and how he signed his works. Read about the saga here.

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Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham, whose only purpose was to cement his autocratic grip on the former Soviet republic, Russia’s closest ally.

“Don’t use the word election to describe this farce,” said Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, an opposition leader who fled Belarus after the country’s previous presidential vote in 2020 and a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests over election fraud. “It is a staged performance by Lukashenko to cling to power at any cost.”

A survey of voters leaving polling places that was released by state media Sunday evening showed Mr. Lukashenko getting 87.6 percent of the vote, more than the 81 percent he claimed to have won in 2020. Exit polls are controlled by the state like all aspects of elections in Belarus and generally reflect the ultimate outcome.

Unlike in 2020, when Ms. Tikhanovskaya was allowed to run against Mr. Lukashenko and declared herself the winner, Sunday’s election was a tightly controlled and tame affair, featuring only candidates loyal to the president. None expressed any desire to actually defeat Mr. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.

Four rival candidates, according to the exit poll, garnered less than two percent of the vote each, except for the leader of the Communist Party, Sergei Syrankov, who captured 2.7 percent.

With all of Mr. Lukashenko’s prominent opponents either in jail or in exile and Belarus’ media outlets all cheering for the incumbent, the result was a foregone conclusion. But it is one that still mattered to the president, who is eager to show his country — and also President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that the turmoil of 2020 has been tamed.

In a statement on Sunday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, described the election as a “sham” that “has been neither free, nor fair.”

But foreign election observers, drawn from far-right political parties like Alternative for Germany and other pro-Russian groups, hailed the vote as a triumph for democracy and denounced tart criticism of the election by the European Parliament and other institutions.“They say that there is a dictatorship here, but I don’t think so — the reality in Belarus is completely different,” Krastyo Vrachev, an observer representing a fringe nationalist party from Bulgaria, told Belarus’s state news agency. “People are calm and communicate with ease, in Europe this is not at all the case,” he added.

The election was certainly calm, so much so that Mr. Lukashenko barely bothered to campaign, saying he was too busy to take part in a debate with four, state-selected rival candidates or to hold rallies. In a nod to conventional politics, however, last week he signed a decree raising pensions by 10 percent starting Feb. 1.

A recent survey of public opinion in Belarus by Chatham House, a British research group, indicated widespread dissatisfaction with the economy, which has been hit hard by economic sanctions imposed on the country over its support for Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Just 11 percent of respondents were definitely satisfied with the economy, while only 32 percent said they supported Russia’s invasion.

Mr. Lukashenko’s main appeal, according to the survey, is his “favorable image” as a “politician striving to prevent Belarus from being involved in the military conflict following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Russian troops used Belarus as a staging ground for an initial, abortive thrust toward Kyiv in early 2022, but Mr. Lukashenko has resisted pressure from Moscow to send Belarus’s troops to join the fight against Ukraine.

After casting his vote Sunday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Mr. Lukashenko predicted that “there will be some kind of resolution this year,” to the conflict, adding that President Trump “is not an idiot, not a fool” and recognizes that “you can’t push us around,” referring to Belarus and Russia. “We will see light at the end of the tunnel this year,” he said of the war.

His nominal rivals in Sunday’s vote all avoided criticism of Mr. Lukashenko, who brooks no open dissent and has embraced his moniker as “Europe’s last dictator,” an insult coined in 2005 by the United States’ then secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

While delighting in taunting the West, particularly neighboring Poland, and displaying his loyalty to Moscow, Mr. Lukashenko has in recent months signaled a desire to improve frosty relations with Western capitals by releasing political prisoners.

This process, aimed at getting relief from Western sanctions, continued on Friday when Mr. Lukashenko pardoned 15 more prisoners, including five people jailed for “extremist crimes,” a blanket term used to describe criticism of the president. The names of those released were not made public.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a social media post on Sunday, indicated that they included a United States citizen whom he named as Anastasia Nuhfer “who was taken under JOE BIDEN!” Mr. Rubio said she had been “unilterally released” thanks to President Trump’s leadership.

None of Mr. Lukashenko’s most prominent opponents, who include Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s husband, Sergei, have been set free. The United States and European Union have left sanctions in place.

In a sign that the authorities are hoping for a more sympathetic hearing from the new Trump administration, Belarus’s state media last week reported gleefully that, following the inauguration in Washington, the State Department had removed from its website a statement critical of Sunday’s election that had been made by the outgoing secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

Mr. Blinken’s deleted statement denounced the Belarus election as a farce, saying:“The United States joins many of our European allies in assessing that elections cannot be credible in an environment where censorship is ubiquitous and independent media outlets no longer exist.”

It was a contentious, aggressive telephone call, five days before the inauguration of President Trump on Jan. 20.

Speaking to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Mr. Trump insisted he wanted the United States to take over Greenland, the massive and autonomous Danish island that occupies a strategic part of the ocean as the ice caps melt and new shipping lanes open up.

The tone and content of the icy exchange was described by two European officials who were briefed on the 45-minute call and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. The United States has not publicly commented on the call.

Ms. Frederiksen made various suggestions for more cooperation on military and economic issues, but insisted that Greenland, which already hosts an important American base, was not for sale, according to the European officials.

Since that Jan. 15 call, whose aggressive tenor was earlier reported by The Financial Times, Denmark has tried to calm the waters, urging its partners in the European Union not to inflame the situation until matters become more clear, the officials said. The issue of Greenland is not on the agenda for an E.U. foreign affairs council meeting in Brussels on Monday, for example.

If Mr. Trump decides to pressure Denmark with economic means, through tariffs, the European Union itself would be expected to respond as a whole with countertariffs, said Zaki Laïdi, a professor at Sciences Po and an adviser to the former E.U. foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles.

“I was told that Trump is quite serious about Greenland, and it’s going to be a huge challenge for the E.U., if we don’t react strongly to it,” Mr. Laïdi said. He confirmed that “the Danes are saying, ‘Keep it down,’ but they’re scared.”

That sense of foreboding was obvious in Davos, Switzerland, where European leaders gathered last week with corporate executives and academics for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. Rumors about Mr. Trump’s call with Ms. Frederiksen were rampant at the gathering, as was nervousness about what a second Trump administration will mean for Europe as a whole.

For now, the Danes are concentrating on dialogue. On Friday, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, Denmark’s foreign minister and prime minister during the first Trump administration, had a 20-minute telephone discussion with the new U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Afterward, Mr. Rasmussen said that the two countries had agreed to discuss “the Arctic region” and that the conversation, which included other issues like Ukraine, had a “good and constructive tone.”

The State Department, for its part, said that Mr. Rubio had “reaffirmed the strength of the relationship” between the two countries. The two men, the State Department said, “discussed the importance of deepening bilateral and regional cooperation on security and defense, economic and trade matters, and ending the war in Ukraine.”

Officially, Denmark has said little about the phone call between Mr. Trump and Ms. Frederiksen. A statement from Ms. Frederiksen’s office immediately afterward made no mention of sharp disagreements but emphasized trade with the United States and talked of cooperation, dialogue and enhanced investment in security by Denmark.

“In the conversation, the Prime Minister emphasized the importance of strengthening security in the Arctic, and that the Kingdom of Denmark is ready to shoulder even greater responsibility for this,” the statement said. In the statement, Ms. Frederiksen cited the chairman of the Greenlandic Parliament, Mute Egede, saying that Greenland is not for sale and argued that “it is up to Greenland itself to make a decision on independence.”

The officials who were briefed on the phone call and Mr. Laïdi suggested that Mr. Trump’s intentions were unclear, and that he might move to encourage Greenlanders to vote for independence in a referendum and then to bind themselves to the United States. Or he may want to pressure Denmark and the European Union with tariffs. Brussels is working with the Danes to strike the right tone and to figure out what Mr. Trump really wants, one official said.

In a response to questions on Sunday, the Danish prime minister’s office said it did “not recognize the interpretation of the conversation given by anonymous sources.”

Under a 2009 agreement with Denmark, Greenland can declare independence only after a successful referendum — which Mr. Egede has suggested might be held in tandem with the island’s upcoming parliamentary election in April.

Mr. Trump has called U.S. control over Greenland “an absolute necessity” for Western security, and on Saturday, in a gaggle with reporters, said “I think we’re going to have it.”

Friis Arne Petersen, a former Danish ambassador to Washington, said that “Europe, Greenland and the rest of the world must take Donald Trump’s statements very seriously, because they were carefully prepared.”

“The terms used and their context left no room for interpretation,” he said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro. Mr. Trump’s interest in Greenland was more commercial in his first term — when he first offered to buy it — but is now predominantly about security, Mr. Petersen said.

The issue of Greenland “is of the utmost importance to the E.U.,” Mr. Laïdi said. “Our credibility is at stake. The Danish want to keep a low profile but that’s not the way the world works.”

Greenland, with a population of around 60,000, was a Danish colony until it became self-ruling with its own Parliament in 1979. It remains a territory of Denmark, with Copenhagen exercising control over its foreign and defense policy.

Colombia will not accept military deportation flights from the United States until the Trump administration provides a process to treat Colombian migrants with “dignity and respect,” the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, said on Sunday in a series of posts on X.

Mr. Petro also said that Colombia had already turned away military planes carrying Colombian deportees. While other countries in Latin America have raised concerns about President Trump’s sweeping deportation plans, Colombia appears to be the first to explicitly refuse to cooperate.

“I cannot make migrants stay in a country that does not want them,” Mr. Petro wrote, “but if that country sends them back, it should be with dignity and respect for them and for our country.”

Mr. Petro’s stance is likely to put him on a collision course with Mr. Trump, who since taking office last Monday has issued a series of executive orders and made other moves aimed at laying the groundwork to try to deport an enormous number of migrants.

The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Among other things, Mr. Petro said he would be willing to allow civilian planes carrying deportees to land in Colombia, but not military aircraft. “A migrant is not a criminal,” he wrote on X.

He did not include details about when or how many military planes and migrants had been turned away.

There were 190,000 unauthorized Colombian immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022, according to the most recent data available from the Pew Research Center.

A representative for the president confirmed that the planes had been turned away, but did not immediately respond to other questions. Representatives for Colombia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The announcement comes as countries around the world are grappling with how to prepare for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants that Mr. Trump has threatened.

Officials in Mexico, the source of the largest number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, have said they remained open to receiving deported citizens and routine deportations have taken place to Mexican cities along the U.S. border in recent days.

“When it comes to repatriations, we will always welcome Mexican men and women back to our territory with open arms,” Mexico’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement on social media on Friday night.

Still, Mexican authorities have not disclosed whether they plan to accept deported migrants from other countries, as Mexico has sometimes done in the past.

Other countries are crafting their own responses to Mr. Trump’s push for more deportations. Honduras, for instance, warned that expelling migrants could push the country closer to China’s political orbit.

Brazil’s foreign ministry complained of “degrading treatment” of its citizens after 88 migrants arrived in the country handcuffed on Friday.

On the other hand, Guatemala, Central America’s largest source of unauthorized migrants, appears to be one of the first countries to reach an agreement with the United States to receive deported citizens transported on U.S. military planes.

About 4 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico live in the United States, representing about 37 percent of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center.

But while Mexico is still the most common country of birth for unauthorized immigrants in the United States, that number is down from a peak of 6.9 million 2007.

The unauthorized immigrant population from other countries has grown in recent years, especially from the Caribbean, South America and Asia.