From Gaza to Greenland, the disruptive force of President-elect Donald Trump is being felt across the world, his incoming administration casting aside conventional diplomatic niceties in favor of an intensive global pressure campaign that already appears to be yielding results.

In the Middle East, Trump quickly took credit for the Israel-Hamas hostage deal resulting from months of painstaking negotiations involving Biden and Trump administration officials working alongside US allies.

“This EPIC ceasefire agreement could only have happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

“We have achieved so much without even being in the White House. Just imagine all of the wonderful things that will happen when I return,” he added.

It is hard to deny that Trump’s implicit threat that there would be “hell to pay” if there was no Israel-Hamas deal before his inauguration on January 20 appears to have focused minds, not least among those in the Israeli government keen to lock-in Trump’s enthusiastic backing as he is poised to start a second US presidential term.

Friend and foe alike appear to be approaching the mercurial, unpredictable Trump – bolstered by his resounding US presidential election victory in November – with trepidation, franticly working to appease the president-elect amid concern his praise and favor could rapidly turn to fury.

One Israeli diplomat told me it was in his countries’ national interest to “keep Trump happy” amid concerns his “unflinching support for Israel were to suddenly flinch.”

That certainly doesn’t sound like the traditional basis of a stable international relationship, but in the short term Trump’s Might is Right, America First rhetoric is already proving remarkably effective, not just in Israel but across the gamut of global affairs.

Take Trump’s recently revived offer to buy Greenland, the vast frozen territory owned by Denmark and sitting strategically between the US and Russia on giant mineral deposits. The same suggestion, made by Trump in his first term, was scoffed at.

This time, Trump’s offer was accompanied by a chilling threat of US military force, or at least a refusal by the next US commander-in-chief to rule it out. The Danish and Greenlandic answer, for the moment, is still that Greenland is not for sale. But the possibility, however remote, has been scrutinized far more anxiously this time. Trump is, whatever else, being taken seriously.

Elsewhere, some nations are taking pre-emptive steps to appease the concerns of the incoming Trump administration or to avoid direct negotiations over sensitive issues.

In South Korea, for example, a five-year deal was agreed ahead of the November US election to share the cost of keeping more than 28,000 US troops in the country. The negotiations concluded early amid memories in Seoul that Trump, during his first presidency, had accused South Korea, a key Asian ally, of “free-riding” on US military might, and demanded that it pay as much as $5 billion a year for the deployment.

But it is Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine where the Trump factor could next produce extraordinary results. The president-elect once suggested he would end the conflict in a single day, but is now pushing more serious proposals to force an end to the violence, if not the Russian occupation.

Both Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin strongman, and the beleaguered Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, have cautiously welcomed Trump’s blustering intervention. To not do so may trigger the Trump factor’s unpredictable wrath.

A woman in Australia has been charged with poisoning a child and allegedly posting videos of the infant suffering online in order to garner viewers and donations, police said Thursday.

The 34-year-old woman from the Sunshine Coast allegedly “administered several unauthorised prescription and pharmacy medicines to a one-year-old girl, who was known to her, without medical approval,” according to a statement from Queensland Police.

“It will be further alleged the woman, disregarding medical advice, went to lengths to obtain unauthorised medicines, including old medicines for a different person available in their home,” the statement said.

Police allege the woman, who has not been officially named, poisoned the child from August 6 to October 15, 2024, when medical staff at a hospital where the child was admitted reported their suspicions to detectives.

“While the child was being subject to immense distress and pain, it is alleged the woman filmed and posted videos of the child,” said police.

“It is alleged the content produced exploited the child and was used to entice monetary donations and online followers.”

Testing for unauthorized medicines returned a positive result on January 7 and the woman was arrested Thursday, said police.

She has been charged with five counts of administering poison with intent to harm, three counts of preparation to commit crimes with dangerous things and one count each of torture, making child exploitation material and fraud, said police.

Detective Inspector Paul Dalton of the Morningside Child Protection and Investigation Unit (CPIU) said that the unit deals with the “worst offences against children.”

“We will do everything in our power to remove that child from harm’s way and hold any offender to account,” said Dalton in the statement.

“There is no excuse for harming a child, especially not a one-year-old infant who is reliant on others for care and survival.”

The woman is scheduled to appear at Brisbane Magistrates court on Friday.

Pope Francis has fallen over and injured his right arm but did not suffer any broken bones, the Vatican says.

In a statement, the Holy See press office said that due to a fall Thursday morning in the Casa Santa Marta, the pope’s residence, the 88-year-old pontiff “suffered a contusion to his right forearm, without fracture.”

The statement added that his arm has been “immobilized as a precautionary measure.”

Official pictures showed the pope wearing a cloth sling as he held meetings.

Despite the fall, Francis held five meetings on Thursday according to the Vatican, including with Alvaro Lario, the President of the International Fund of Agricultural Development, and priests from an Argentine college based in Rome.

On Wednesday, the pope led his general audience in the Vatican and seemed in good spirits, throwing a tennis ball to a dog during a circus performance.

The pope has suffered a number of health problems in recent years and this is the second fall he has had in a matter of weeks. In early December, he appeared with a large bruise on his chin after falling and hitting his bedside table during the night.

Since 2022, the pope has made use of a wheelchair due to mobility problems caused by pain in his knee. In his recently published autobiography “Hope”, Francis said that he is in good health and ruled out resigning from his position, but said that “the reality is, quite simply, that I am old.”

He said it was “embarrassing at first to have to use a wheelchair, but old age never arrives by itself, and it must be accepted for what it is.”

He added: “the Church is governed using the head and the heart, not the legs. I do physiotherapy twice a week, I use a walking stick, do as many steps as I can, and I carry on.”

This story has been updated.

Cuban officials on Thursday freed a prominent opposition activist, a last-minute diplomatic change in fortunes for the Biden administration which had sought his release but long seemed unable to influence events on the island.

Jose Daniel Ferrer, the leader of one of the largest banned anti-government groups in Cuba, was released two days after a surprise flurry of diplomatic activity involving the communist-run island in the waning days of the Biden administration.

On Tuesday, State Department officials announced the removal of Cuba from a US list of countries that support terrorism, also saying that Cuban officials had agreed to a Vatican request to free Cubans jailed for anti-government activity among other crimes.

Cuban officials said they would “gradually” free 553 prisoners, although they cautioned that they were not issuing an amnesty and that those being selected for release could be forced to complete their sentences if they didn’t exhibit “good social behavior.”

For more than three years, US officials in particular had called on the Cuban government to release Ferrer, who was convicted of participating in the July 11, 2021 protests, the most wide spread demonstrations to take place on the island since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

“Don’t be afraid to fight for a free, prosperous and just Cuba,” Ferrer said in a telephone interview following his release Thursday with Radio Martí, a US government-funded radio station that Cuban officials have long accused of trying to destabilize the island.

While the fiery comments by Ferrer, whom the Cuban government calls “a mercenary” in the employ of the US, are likely to make officials in Havana grit their teeth, for years their top priority has been to convince US officials to remove them from the list of countries that support terrorism, which incurs devastating economic penalties.

Upon taking office, Biden seemed poised to do that until the 2021 protests that led to more than a thousand Cubans convicted in mass trials for rising up against the government.

Following the protests, State Department officials conditioned any improvement in relations on the release of the protestors while Cuban officials said they had received no concrete guarantees that economic sanctions would actually be lifted and that the US should stay out of the island’s internal affairs.

Even visits by Vatican representatives to the island to press for the release of the protestors were unable to break the deadlock until the final days of the Biden administration.

But even as governments across the region applaud the surprise diplomatic breakthrough this week, it looks unlikely that the incoming Trump administration will build upon the brief thaw in relations.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and one of the most hardline opponents to Cuba’s government, blasted their removal from the terrorism list and lifting of other sanctions.

“There is zero doubt in my mind that they meet all the qualifications for being a state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio said during his confirmation hearing.

While Rubio said during that hearing that any policy changes would be decided by President Trump, he seemed confident of the incoming administration’s position on Cuba.

“I think people know my feelings and I think they know what the president’s feelings have been about these issues when he was president previously,” he said. “And nothing that the Biden administration has agreed to in the last 12 or 18 hours binds the next administration, which starts on Monday.”

But ramping up pressure on Cuba again after more than 60 years of US economic sanctions was unlikely to force the government to adopt political reforms said Peter Kornbluh, the co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.”

“Biden got some results,” he said. “He has reminded the world of the model of diplomacy and backchannel efforts to advance US interests. Trump and Rubio represent a model of coercion: sticks versus Biden’s carrots.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parilla said if the incoming Trump administration did place Cuba back on the list of countries that support terrorism, it would prove his government’s point that the list had become political tool rather than a deterrent.

“If another president came and included Cuba on the list again, we would have to ask ourselves what the reasons are, what the agencies of the US government would say, where the credibility of the government would be,” he said.

The British prime minister’s visit to Kyiv, his first since taking office in July, caps a week of hurried diplomatic activity by Ukraine’s NATO allies, keen to prove their commitment as uncertainty hangs over the incoming Trump administration.

The “100-year partnership” – the centerpiece of Keir Starmer’s visit – did have an air of a PR stunt about it in a country that has no idea what will happen in one year, and the text of the agreement didn’t offer anything revolutionary. The UK is already the third biggest military donor to Ukraine (though it’s given just over 10% of what the US has) and the two countries inked a bilateral security cooperation agreement last year. The 100-year deal adds maritime security, social integration, and a new UK program to track stolen grain to the slate, but none of those comes close to the security guarantees Ukraine is looking for, a point Starmer indirectly acknowledged. “We will work with you and all of our allies on steps that would be robust enough to guarantee Ukraine’s security,” he promised in a press conference in Kyiv.

Ukraine is on the clock here. The Institute for the Study of War estimates Russia gained more than 4,000 square kilometers of territory in 2024 (some of it retaken from Ukrainian forces in its own Kursk region), more than 10 times its total gains in 2023, though it came at significant manpower cost. The Trump administration has made clear it will push for a diplomatic solution that may involve Ukraine accepting these losses.

And so “peace through strength,” as Starmer posted on X Thursday, has become the refrain. In other words, try to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position, economically, politically and militarily, to negotiate. The same motto was in used in Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday when President Volodymyr Zelensky met Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who promised to accelerate Ukraine’s path to EU membership. Germany, Ukraine’s second biggest military backer, sent its defense minister to Kyiv Tuesday, with the promise of a brand-new artillery system.

Perhaps the strongest signal of support came from French President Emmanuel Macron, who called Zelensky on Monday to discuss, among other things, a French proposal to deploy “military contingents” in Ukraine – European boots on the ground – as a deterrent against any Russian effort to advance further into the country or beyond. “This is an issue that we are all discussing,” said Starmer Thursday, “but it must be capable of deterring future aggression. So that’s the test of any discussion, any conversation that we’re having.”

And perhaps in a sign of the diplomatic challenge ahead, Zelensky and Starmer did not shy away from discussing the elephant in the room – the imminent transfer of power in the US. For Zelensky, who has actively tried to charm the incoming administration in recent weeks, even endorsing Trump’s claim he can end the war quickly, there was no talk of managing without Washington’s help. “We do not consider security guarantees for Ukraine without the United States, so it is too early to talk about the details,” he told reporters.

Starmer took a conciliatory tone, paying tribute to the US contribution so far, and promising: “We can, we will continue to work with the US on this. We are working today. We will work tomorrow.”

Seoul, South Korea (AP) — Lawyers for impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol failed in their court effort to secure his release on Thursday, a day after he was detained at his residence for questioning over rebellion allegations linked to his martial law declaration last month.

Yoon was sent to a detention center near the country’s capital, Seoul, after undergoing more than 10 hours of questioning on Wednesday at the headquarters of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials, during which he exercised his right to remain silent. Yoon refused further questioning by the anti-corruption officials on Thursday as his lawyers maintained that the investigation was illegal.

Lawyers had asked the Seoul Central District Court to consider his release, questioning the validity of the detention warrant for Yoon issued by the Seoul Western District Court.

But the Central District Court denied their petition late Thursday.

Yoon had avoided several requests to appear for questioning before the anti-corruption agency and police carried out a major law enforcement operation involving hundreds of personnel to detain him at his residential compound in Seoul.

Investigators are expected to move to place him under arrest in the coming days.

The anti-corruption agency, which is leading a joint investigation with the police and the military over whether Yoon’s martial law declaration amounted to attempted rebellion, has 48 hours either to request a court order for his formal arrest or to release him.

On Thursday, his lawyers formally declared that Wednesday’s raid at the presidential residence, which led to the detention of a head of state, was illegal, in complaints filed with prosecutors.

Yoon didn’t attend a hearing at the Central District Court on Thursday, which was part of the review over his detention warrant, because of security concerns, according to Seok Dong-hyeon, one of the president’s lawyers.

Hundreds of Yoon’s supporters rallied for hours in streets near the court and the detention center where Yoon was being held, waving banners and chanting slogans calling for his release.

Yoon set off the country’s most serious political crisis since its democratization in the late 1980s when he attempted to break through gridlock in legislation by declaring martial law and deploying troops around the National Assembly on December 3. The standoff lasted only hours before lawmakers managed to get through the blockade and voted to lift the measure.

His presidential powers were suspended when the opposition-dominated assembly voted to impeach him on December 14, accusing him of rebellion. His fate now rests with the Constitutional Court, which has begun deliberating on whether to formally remove Yoon from office or reject the charges and reinstate him.

Yoon and his allies have defied efforts to investigate his role in the chaos of December 3. He ignored requests to appear for questioning for weeks, remaining in his official residence to avoid detention as his lawyers turned away police, citing a law that protects locations potentially linked to military secrets from search without the consent of the person in charge — Yoon himself. They also said that the anti-corruption agency had no legal authority to investigate rebellion allegations.

Yoon also resisted one attempt to detain him as the presidential security service barricaded the residence. He was finally brought into custody after hundreds of anti-corruption investigators and police raided the presidential compound for around five hours in a second attempt.

In a video message recorded shortly before he was escorted to the headquarters of the anti-corruption agency, Yoon lamented that the “rule of law has completely collapsed in this country.” He echoed the arguments of his lawyers that the anti-corruption agency doesn’t have the authority to investigate his actions, but said that he accepted detention to prevent violence.

The Constitutional Court rejected a request by Yoon’s lawyers to postpone a hearing on his case scheduled for Thursday. It remains possible for Yoon to exercise his right to attend, even while under detention.

If a court grants a warrant for Yoon’s formal arrest, the anti-corruption investigators can extend his detention to 20 days, during which it will transfer the case to public prosecutors for an indictment.

If prosecutors indict Yoon on the possible charges of rebellion and abuse of power, he could remain under arrest until the first court ruling, which is typically made within six months, said Park Sung-bae, an attorney specializing in criminal law. Under South Korean law, the leader of a rebellion can face the death penalty or life imprisonment, if convicted.

A Pakistani court on Friday sentenced the country’s already-imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife to 14 and seven years in jail after finding them guilty of corruption, officials and his lawyer said.

The couple are accused of accepting a gift of land from a real estate tycoon in exchange for laundered money when Khan was in power.

Prosecutors say the businessman, Malik Riaz, was then allowed by Khan to pay fines that were imposed on him in another case from the same laundered money of 190 million British pounds ($240 million) that was returned to Pakistan by British authorities in 2022 to deposit to the national exchequer.

Khan has denied wrongdoing and insisted since his arrest in 2023 that all the charges against him are a plot by rivals to keep him from returning to office.

Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April 2022, had previously been convicted on charges of corruption, revealing official secrets and violating marriage laws in three separate verdicts and sentenced to 10, 14 and seven years respectively. Under Pakistani law, he is to serve the terms concurrently — meaning, the length of the longest of the sentences.

This is a developing story.

With its manicured garden and spacious interior, the three-story villa was once described as “paradise” by the mother who raised her five children there. And much was done to preserve the household’s tranquility, given its immediate neighbor: the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz.

Inside the family home, Rudolf Höss – the longest serving SS commandant of Auschwitz – dreamt up the most efficient way to kill the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political prisoners that the Third Reich had decided to eliminate.

Tall trees and a high concrete wall obscured the view and the screams of the camp so that Rudolf’s wife Hedwig and their five children – Klaus, Heidetraud, Brigitte, Hans-Jürgen and Annegret – could live shielded from the atrocities committed just feet from their door.

Theirs was a joyful life. The children played with turtles, cats, rode horses and swam in the nearby river. Meanwhile, the concentration camp’s chimneys spewed smoke as other families were pushed into the gas chambers.

Since Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, the house at 88 Legionow Street had been in the private hands of a Polish family. But last year it was acquired by the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based NGO that has sought to combat extremism since 2014.

Within days, this building – a potent symbol of how the Holocaust was orchestrated and a major character in the Oscar-winning movie “The Zone of Interest” – will open its door to visitors in a brand-new form.

The NGO’s plans for the house are twofold: to give a new center to their organization and to open this long closed-off house to the public in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp on January 27.

“When you look at this property, the gardens, the fountains, the normal, ordinary life, we’ve been taught since the time of the Holocaust to never forget,” said Mark Wallace, CEO of the Counter Extremism Project. “Eighty years later it’s clear that while essential, “never forgetting” is not enough to prevent the hate and antisemitism that right now grips our society.”

Now, it isn’t just pictures of the Höss’s blissful domesticity that remain, but also diaries, one written by the family’s housekeeper and the other by Rudolf Höss himself. This was not out of choice: After his capture and before his execution, Höss was ordered to write his memoir, giving an insight into the workings of a mind that was both ordinary and chillingly evil.

In it, Höss described himself as man committed to discipline and dedicated to order. He wrote that it was “to protect the mental health” of his guards that he decided to utilize Zyklon B, an insecticide he used to murder as many Jews as effectively as possible.

During Höss’s three and a half years at the camp, four additional gas chambers were built intended for industrialized annihilation. More than 1.1 million people were murdered there, making Auschwitz-Birkenau the deadliest of all the Nazi camps.

The diary also gave much of the material for 2023’s “The Zone of Interest,” which is almost completely set in the house and its immediate surroundings. The movie highlights the ‘banality of evil,’ a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, and puts forward the idea that the commandant was just a person, not a monster.

“Human beings did this to other human beings and it’s very convenient for us to try and distance ourselves from them because we think we can never behave this way, but I think we should be less certain than that,” said the movie’s director Jonathan Glazer.

Höss’s diary also helps readers understand more about the family’s life at 88 Legionow Street and the lengths they went to to protect their children. The frosted windows, the high walls, a revved-up motorcycle outside gas chamber number 1 to drown out the cries of the people inside.

In the memoir, Höss also recounts how he watched women and children being taken to the gas chambers.

“A woman approached me and pointed at her four children, who were helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, and whispered, ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful darling children? Have you no heart at all?’”

After witnessing such scenes, Höss wrote, he would ride his horse to clear his mind.

But at no point did he appear to understand the horror of his actions. He called the extermination of the Jews a “mistake” rather than a crime and something that was the result of obeying too blindly orders from above, given, he says, on the basis of a mistaken ideology.

“Let the general public continue to regard me as a bloodthirsty beast, a cruel sadist, as the mass murderer of millions of human beings: for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light,” Höss wrote. “They will never understand that I, too, had a heart.”

Höss went on the run after the liberation of Auschwitz, but was then captured, becoming the first person at such a senior level to admit the extent of the slaughter at the camp. He was made to testify at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and was later condemned to death by a Polish tribunal.

Höss was hanged from the gallows between the camp and his house in 1947.

The surviving Höss family continued to put a distance between themselves and what Rudolf Höss had done. His wife Hedwig and daughter Brigitte moved to the United States following his execution. In an interview in 2013 with the Washington Post, Brigitte said: “It was a long time ago. I didn’t do what was done. I never talk about it – it is something within me. It stays with me.”

“There must have been two sides to him. The one that I knew and then another.”

As to the house, the plan is for it to open to the public in time for the 80th anniversary commemorations. Work to turn part of the property into a museum and the rest into a workspace will take many months, the Counter Extremism Project says.

“Everyone has or can relate to the “house next door.” But today hatred lurks with ubiquity in houses as close to us as next door. House 88 will take up the fight against destructive hatred, and against extremism and antisemitism,” Wallace said.

The first thing members of the Counter Extremism project did was to attach a mezuzah to the front door, as a way of both reclaiming the house and opening it to all.