By SAM McNEIL, Associated Press

LUXEMBOURG (AP) — NATO is working to thwart Russian jamming of civilian flights, said the alliance’s chief on Tuesday, two days after a jet carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen lost its ability to use GPS navigation midair in Bulgarian airspace.

The plane landed safely on Sunday, but Bulgarian authorities said they suspected Russia was behind the interference.

“It is taken very seriously,” said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte during a news conference in Luxembourg with the duchy’s prime minister and defense minister. “I can assure you that we are working day and night to counter this, to prevent it, and to make sure that they will not do it again.” He did not elaborate.

From left, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden and Luxembourg’s Defense Minister Yuriko Backes address a media conference in Luxembourg, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

Neither Russia nor von der Leyen has commented publicly on the incident. The EU and NATO are separate entities with different sets of member countries, but Europe’s security is a vital issue for both.

Rutte said the jamming was part of a complex campaign by Russia of “hybrid threats” like cutting of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, a plot to assassinate a German industrialist, and a cyberattack on the National Heath Service in the United Kingdom.

“I have always hated the words hybrid because it sounds so cuddly, but hybrid is exactly this jamming of commercial airplanes, with potentially disastrous effects,” he said.

The Associated Press has plotted almost 80 incidents on a map tracking a campaign of disruption across Europe blamed on Russia, which the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service has described as “staggeringly reckless.” Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents, ranging from vandalism to arson and attempted assassination.

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The interference from Russia includes jamming and spoofing. Jamming means a strong radio signal overwhelms communications, whereas spoofing misleads a receiver into thinking it is in a different location or in a past or future time period.

“The threat from the Russians is increasing every day. Let’s not be naive about it: this might also involve one day Luxembourg, it might come to the Netherlands,” Rutte said. “With the latest Russian missile technology for example, the difference now between Lithuania on the front line and Luxembourg, The Hague or Madrid is five to 10 minutes. That’s the time it takes this missile to reach these parts of Europe.”

The whole continent was under “direct threat from the Russians,” he warned. “We are all on the eastern flank now, whether you live in London or Tallinn.”

Bulgaria will not investigate the jamming of von der Leyen’s plane because “such things happen every day,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov said Tuesday.

He said it was one of the side effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine and had occurred across Europe.

Associated Press writer Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria contributed to this report.

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban said the death toll from a major earthquake in eastern Afghanistan passed 1,400 on Tuesday, with more than 3,000 people injured, as the United Nations warned of an exponential rise in casualties.

The figures provided by Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid were just for the province of Kunar.

Sunday night’s powerful 6.0 magnitude earthquake struck several provinces, causing extensive damage. It flattened villages and trapped people under the rubble of homes constructed mostly of mud bricks and wood that were unable to withstand the shock.

Rough terrain is hampering rescue and relief efforts, forcing Taliban authorities to air-drop dozens of commandos to evacuate the injured from places where helicopters cannot land.

Aid agency Save the Children said one of its teams walked for over 12 miles (19 kilometers) to reach villages cut off by rock falls, carrying medical equipment on their backs with the help of community members.

An aftershock of 5.2 close to the epicenter of Sunday’s quake rattled the area on Tuesday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. There were no immediate reports of damage.

Indrika Ratwatte, the U.N.’s resident coordinator for Afghanistan, said rescuers are scrambling in a “race against time” to reach the mountainous and remote area hit. In a media briefing in Geneva Tuesday, he warned of a surge in casualty numbers.

“We cannot afford to forget the people of Afghanistan who are facing multiple crises, multiple shocks, and the resilience of the communities has been saturated,” Ratwatte said, while urging the international community to step forward.

“These are life and death decisions while we race against time to reach people,” he said.

It is the third major earthquake since the Taliban seized power in 2021, and the latest crisis to beset Afghanistan, which is reeling from deep cuts to aid funding, a weak economy, and millions of people forcibly returned from Iran and Pakistan.

Ratwatte said that when the walls of wooden and mud homes collapse, the roof falls on the occupants, causing injury or death. While the area was low-density, the earthquake struck when everybody was asleep.

“If you were to model it based on what has happened before, clearly there’s no question that the casualty rate is going to be rather exponential,” he said.

Aid is trickling in to help victims

The Taliban government, which is only recognized by Russia, has appealed for assistance from the international community and the humanitarian sector. However, help for Afghanistan is in short supply due to competing global crises and reduced aid budgets in donor countries.

The U.K. has pledged £1 million ($1.3 million) to be split between humanitarian agencies rather than going to the Taliban government, which it does not recognize.

The European Union is sending 130 tons of emergency supplies and providing 1 million euros ($1.16 million). Other countries, including the United Arab Emirates, India and China have pledged disaster relief support.

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But earthquake victims are bearing the brunt of opposition to the Taliban government, especially their restrictive policies on Afghan girls and women, including a ban on them working for NGOs. Donor countries had already scaled back their funding and, earlier this year, the U.S. gutted aid to Afghanistan, partly due to concerns that money was going to the Taliban administration.

Kate Carey, the deputy head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Afghanistan, said more than 420 health facilities had closed or were suspended due to the “massive reduction” in funding, with 80 of them in the eastern region, the heart of Sunday’s quake.

“The consequence is that the remaining facilities are overwhelmed, have insufficient supplies and personnel, and are not as close to the affected populations as the more local facilities at a time when providing emergency trauma care is needed in the first 24 to 72 hours of the earthquake response,” said Carey.

Taliban authorities have set up a camp in Kunar to organize supplies and emergency aid. There are also two centers to coordinate the transportation of the injured, the burial of the dead, and the rescue of survivors.

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

By MICHAEL PHILLIS, Associated Press

A federal judge was wrong to block the Trump administration from freezing billions of dollars and terminating contracts for nonprofits to run a “green bank” aimed at financing climate-friendly projects, a divided appeals court ruled Tuesday.

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The ruling is a win for the Trump administration that had blasted the program as a waste of taxpayer money and tried to claw back funding.

The groups sued the EPA, its administrator Lee Zeldin and Citibank, which held the grant money, saying they had illegally denied the groups access to funds awarded last year. They wanted access to those funds again, saying the freeze had paralyzed their work and jeopardized their basic operations.

Those arguments have no place in federal court, according to the split D.C appeals court panel.

“In sum, district courts have no jurisdiction to hear claims that the federal government terminated a grant agreement arbitrarily or with impunity. Claims of arbitrary grant termination are essentially contractual,” the majority wrote.

Instead, the divided panel said they should go to federal claims court — a loss for Climate United Fund and other nonprofits who wanted the federal court system to ensure it quickly received its funding.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

By GERALD IMRAY, Associated Press

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Three men deported by the United States to Eswatini in July have been held in a maximum-security prison in the African nation for seven weeks without charge and with no access to legal counsel despite completing criminal sentences in the U.S., their lawyers said Tuesday.

The New York-based Legal Aid Society said it was representing one of the men, Jamaican national Orville Etoria, and that he had been “inexplicably” sent to Eswatini when his home country was willing to accept him back.

Etoria was the first of at least 20 deportees sent by the U.S. to various African nations in the last two months to be identified publicly. The deportations are part of the Trump administration’s largely secretive third-country program to crack down on immigration.

The 62-year-old Etoria was convicted of a serious crime in the U.S. in 1997 and was released from prison on parole in 2021, the Legal Aid Society said in a statement. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a post on X that Etoria had been convicted of murder.

The Legal Aid Society said the U.S. government had falsely claimed that Jamaica refused to accept him back. Homeland Security, when announcing the deportation of a total of five men to Eswatini in mid-July, claimed they were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”

Homeland Security said at the time the men were dangerous criminals from Jamaica, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen but didn’t identify them by name.

A lawyer representing the two other men, from Laos and Vietnam, said Tuesday his clients also served their criminal sentences in the U.S. and had “been released into the community.”

“Then, without warning and explanation from either the U.S. or Eswatini governments, they were arbitrarily arrested and sent to a country to which they have never ever been,” the lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said in a statement. He said the U.S. government was “orchestrating secretive third-country transfers with no meaningful legal process, resulting in indefinite detention.”

Homeland security said those two men had been convicted of charges including child rape and second-degree murder.

A third lawyer, Alma David, said she represented two men from Yemen and Cuba who are also held in Eswatini and were denied access to lawyers. She said she had been told by the head of the Eswatini prison that only the U.S. Embassy could grant access to the men.

“Since when does the U.S. Embassy have jurisdiction over Eswatini’s national prisons?” she said in a statement, adding the men weren’t told a reason for their detention, and no lawyer has been permitted to visit them.”

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David said all five were being held in Eswatini’s main maximum-security prison indefinitely at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

Since July, the Trump administration has expanded its third-country deportation program and sent migrants to at least three African nations: South Sudan, Eswatini and Rwanda, and has a deal in principle with a fourth African country, Uganda.

Though no deportations to Uganda have been announced, the U.S. has said it wants to deport Kilma Abrego Garcia there. His case has been a flashpoint in U.S. President Donald Trump’s crackdown.

The deportation deals the U.S. has struck have been largely secretive.

Authorities in South Sudan have given little information on where eight men sent there in early July are being held or what their fate might be. They were also described by U.S. authorities as dangerous criminals from South Sudan, Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar and Vietnam.

The five men in Eswatini are being held at the Matsapha Correctional Complex. It’s the same prison where Eswatini, which is ruled by a king as Africa’s last absolute monarchy, has imprisoned pro-democracy campaigners. Authorities said when the five men arrived in Eswatini that they would be held in solitary confinement.

Another seven migrants were deported by the U.S. to Rwanda in mid-August, Rwandan authorities said. They didn’t say where they are being held or give any information on their identities.

The deportations to Rwanda were kept secret at the time and only announced last week.