Spain's rural regions become fierce battleground for votes

April 22, 2019

LA BIENVENIDA, Spain (AP) — Spanish politicians are swapping campaign buses for tractors, buddying up with hunters and inspecting home-grown tomatoes in Spain's often-neglected rural regions as they hunt for votes in Sunday's general election, one of the country's most polarized votes in decades.

The ballot comes as Spain's traditional bipartisan political landscape — which used to revolve around the center-left Socialists and the conservative Popular Party — has fractured into five main political parties, including a far-right populist newcomer. That has spurred a race for votes in Spain's overrepresented hinterland, where nearly one-third of the seats in parliament's lower house are up for grabs.

Spain's electoral rules grant a bigger say in parliament's lower house to provinces with shrinking populations. A few thousand votes in these areas can swing a win for one party or another, turning the "every vote counts" cliché into a reality for candidates far from the big cities.

That doesn't mean these politicians are getting a warm welcome. Marcy Jurado, 64, lives in central Spain's Alcudia valley, surrounded by pastures dotted with holm oaks, with her husband and son, the only remaining residents in the village of La Bienvenida. She's wary of politicians knocking on farmers' doors.

"All I wish is that they don't forget about us once the elections are over," she said. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is the politician most favored by the splintering of Spain's right wing into three parties. But his ability to stay in office hinges not just on how well the front-running Socialist party does in the national vote but also on how his divided opposition performs. Sánchez or others will likely need the backing of other parties to form a coalition government, making the race for rural votes even more critical.

Spanish politicians across the political spectrum are seeking both photos of themselves in muddy boots and headlines promising more investments for rural jobs, better internet access and more local schools and health care centers.

Nestled at the top of a hill, La Bienvenida has gone from having 50 families only 20 years ago to seeing "for sale" signs on house after house. A 37-year-old dairy farmer is the breadwinner in the only inhabited house, and also Jurado's only reason to stay.

"If my son loses his job, I'm done with it, I'll leave," said the retired truck driver. "The days are hard and long enough for somebody who enjoys company." Her wish list for lawmakers has two items: Make sure pensions keep up with inflation and create more jobs for the young.

At a state-of-the-art game preserve down the road, a provincial candidate from the far-right Vox party was telling people that his upstart party will unapologetically defend hunting against "lefties, ecologists and animalists who tell rural dwellers how to live their lives."

Ricardo Chamorro, a lawyer, fell out with the Popular Party and embraced the nationalist populism of Vox, whose program echoes the "take back control" mantra of populist movements across the globe. The party vows to defend Spain from Muslims, communists and Catalan separatists, who held a defiant secession referendum in 2017, unleashing a wave of Spanish nationalism.

"We are committed to rural Spain, which sees the money flowing to richer areas that are being disloyal to the nation," Chamorro said to applause from three dozen farmers who gathered under stuffed boar and deer trophies at a bar in Brazatortas, on the edge of the Alcudia valley.

Barring any last-minute surprises, Vox is poised to grab 29 to 37 deputies in Spain's 350-seat national parliament on Sunday, a big splash for a party that only last year made its first big advance with a win in the regional election in Andalusia, a Socialist stronghold.

With nearly 400,000 voters in a country of 37 million, the rural Ciudad Real province is a mirror of national politics. In the last general election in 2016, three of the five deputies chosen here went to the Popular Party and two to the Socialists. This year, polls are predicting at least two seats for the Socialists and one for the Popular Party, with the remaining two up for grabs among four parties, including the center-right Citizens Party and the Vox party.

Only the anti-austerity Unidas Podemos party seems to be left out in the province, according to the latest polls. At the national level, Podemos could lose up to 15 deputies from rural areas in Sunday's vote.

Blanca Fernández, Ciudad Real's 41-year-old Socialist candidate, said politicians and the media are victimizing the countryside. "It bothers me deeply when people (politicians) climb onto tractors in a forced manner," she said. "It's an insult to those who live here."

What the Socialists want, she said, "is for anybody in Spain to have access to services in comparable quality conditions, no matter where they live. And that means more opportunities in rural areas." "It all comes down to how much taxes we want to pay and what are the services we want to have," she said as she inspected a Manchego cheese business that exports to the U.S.

Fernández wants to boost women's roles in the countryside, subsidize young farmers taking over old operations and ensure that farmers have access to water. "There's no future for the farmland without women or schools," she said.

During two straight days of campaigning, Fernández and Chamorro listened to similar concerns. Tuberculosis tests were seen as too strict, forcing farmers to cull herds and lose money. Sheep ranchers had conflicts with laws on preserving natural spaces. The swelling numbers of wild boars and vultures were hurting livestock operations. All residents complained about too much administrative red tape, poor infrastructure, schools and clinics that were too far away, limited phone and internet services.

While Chamorro visited cattle farms and met with retirees, Fernandez toured a solar panel farm and a madeleine factory where three siblings have returned with university degrees to take over the family business.

"There was a time when all I wanted was to be away," said Julián Arenas, whose muffin-making plant is now the biggest employer in Corral de Calatrava, a village of 1,200. "I've seen what's out there and now I realize that, given the right setup, there are also plenty of opportunities here as well."

Mass graves from Franco era become Spanish election issue

April 18, 2019

PATERNA, Spain (AP) — When archaeologists in Spain unearthed layers of human bones from a mass grave last year, the remains of one body emerged draped in a shirt that had the letters "MG" embroidered on it in red.

The initials spoke volumes to Daniel Galán. They sparked hope he would be able to provide a proper burial for his grandfather, Miguel Galán, a village mayor who disappeared eight decades ago along with tens of thousands of others summarily executed by the forces of Gen. Francisco Franco during and after the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.

Galán is among a small number of descendants promised provincial government funds for DNA tests to confirm that their ancestors were tossed into a mass grave at Paterna Cemetery in Valencia. But with Spain's national election later this month exposing an ideological divide that has echoes of the clash of left and right during the civil war, some Spaniards worry they may lose the chance to recover their dead.

The far-right Vox party, which recently exploded onto Spain's political scene, wants to scrap efforts to exhume and identify Franco's victims. Its ambition counters the pledge by the ruling Socialists to remove Franco's remains from a huge, publicly maintained mausoleum near Madrid so they no longer attract nationalists celebrating the dictator as a hero.

"Depending on who wins, logically there would be a change. If the right wins, well, all this will just stop or worse," Galán, 61, said while visiting Paterna Cemetery to repair the grainy black-and-white photo of his grandfather, which had fallen off the headstone.

For other Spaniards, digging up bodies just stirs up a painful past unnecessarily and runs counter to the desire for reconciliation that made it possible for Spain to have a bloodless transition from dictatorship to democracy after Franco's death in 1975. They also fear that the exhumations could lead to a shaming of those who had relatives on the side of Franco*s right-wing forces.

"I think that that period of history was settled," Elena Escribano, a 60-year-old housewife, said at a Vox rally. "Not knowing where a relative is is hard, but there are victims on both sides. We must pray for them but we must look to the future."

Activists and relatives pushed for the excavations after the then-Socialist government passed the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which allowed exhumations of mass graves and condemned atrocities committed during Franco's regime. But the law did not guarantee funding, and the conservative Popular Party that governed between 2011 and 2018 included none in the national budget.

The result is a piecemeal and sometimes cumbersome process. At Paterna, the precarious funding scheme and a backlog of work meant the remains of 244 people — Galán's grandfather possibly among them — ended up being stored in a ceramics museum.

Rosa Pérez, a local lawmaker who championed funding for families to exhume mass graves at Paterna Cemetery and other sites in the province of Valencia, has promised that money will be there to carry out forensic and DNA tests on the bones stored in the museum regardless of who wins the April 28 national election.

But Pérez is putting on hold any spending for new exhumations until after regional and local elections this month and next to see if her United Left party remains in power locally. So far, archaeologists have removed the remains of 450 of the 2,237 bodies thought to be in the mass graves at the Paterna Cemetery.

"This shouldn't be how this is being handled," Pérez said. "We have been in need of a national plan for a long time." Experts have estimated for the Spanish government that 740 mass graves and 9,000 bodies have been exhumed nationally since 2000. That leaves an estimated 114,000 bodies still hidden in 2,500 mass graves, they added.

The Socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wanted to include 15 million euros ($20 million) in the national budget that failed to pass this year to continue identifying victims of Franco's regime. It has also mentioned establishing a "truth commission" to investigate the crimes of his dictatorship, and is studying a plan to have 25,000 bodies exhumed in five years.

But Sánchez faces strong competition in the April 28 national election, at which the far-right Vox is widely anticipated to win its first seats in the Spanish Parliament. Vox has already successfully pushed the Popular Party to commit to rolling back regional laws that allow the exhumations of mass graves in Spain's south in order to support their formation of a government for Andalusia earlier this year.

Now, Vox could prove influential in the creation of possible coalition government at the national level after the election. Popular Party president and opposition leader, Pablo Casado, who in 2015 called those who want to recover the mass grave bodies "old fogeys," wants a new "Law of Concord" that would subsume the Law of Historical Memory.

The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, criticized the exhumations when he kicked off his campaign. "How are we going to condemn our grandparents?" Abascal asked supporters. "For us, we only have one doctrine for the recent historical memory. And that is liberty: liberty for you to respect your grandparents."

Outside the walls of the Paterna Cemetery, a walk through scrubland leads to a wall in which bullet holes from the Francoist firing squads that executed people like Miguel Galán still are visible. Galán insists he does not want to drag Spain back into its bloody past.

"The difference is between them lying in mass graves like rotting dogs and being able to take them and give them dignified burial," Galán said. "For those who say we are only reopening old wounds, that is not true, because these wounds have been open for 80 years."

South Africa's ruling ANC set to celebrate election victory

May 11, 2019

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — South Africa's ruling African National Congress on Saturday was preparing to celebrate its win in national elections, with the formal announcement of final results coming later in the day.

With all votes counted, the ANC had 57.5%, the electoral commission said . While a win was never in doubt, it was the worst-ever showing at the polls for the party of the late Nelson Mandela which has ruled South Africa since the end of apartheid 25 years ago. The party won 62% of the vote in 2014.

Voter turnout was another low at 65%, reflecting the frustrations of many South Africans after corruption scandals around the ANC that led former president Jacob Zuma to resign last year under party pressure. Turnout was 74% in 2014.

Current President Cyril Ramaphosa, a Mandela protege, has vowed to clean up the rot and apologized to South Africans. But his new five-year term is threatened by Zuma allies within the ANC's leadership, who could pressure the party to oust him from power.

Observers have said South Africa's economy, the most developed in sub-Saharan Africa, would be further weakened if Ramaphosa is removed by his own party. He narrowly won the party leadership in late 2017, weeks before Zuma was pushed out.

Ramaphosa's image as a leader willing to rid the government of graft helped the ANC's showing in this election, political analyst Karima Brown said. "It's a departure from a president who faced continuous allegations of corruption," she said.

But ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, seen as leading the party faction opposed to Ramaphosa, has said the victory could not be attributed to the president alone. Widespread disillusionment over the ANC and long-standing issues of high unemployment and poor delivery of basic services had been expected to give top opposition parties a boost in Wednesday's election.

Top opposition party the liberal Democratic Alliance slipped in its share of votes, however, winning 20.7%, down from 22.2% in 2014. The populist Economic Freedom Fighters in just their second showing in parliamentary and presidential elections did gain ground, winning 10.7% of the vote, up from 6.3% five years ago.

The EFF won support notably among younger voters with its outspoken demands for a bigger share of South Africa's wealth from the country's white minority. It struck a chord in a country where unemployment is 27% and many in the black majority struggle to get by. The party also had promised to expropriate white-owned land without compensation and nationalize mines and banks.

The ANC barely retained control of the country's economic hub of Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria, with just over 50% of the vote. ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte said the party was now focused on constituting a credible government. "The task now is to roll up our sleeves and to sort these problems out," she said.

In South Africa, the president and parliament are not elected directly. The number of votes won by each party determines how many representatives are sent to the national 400-seat legislature. The president of the country is the leader of the party that gets the most votes.

"I knew that the ANC would win the elections so my vote for them did not go waste," said Karabo Kgole, a gas station attendant in Pretoria.

South Africa votes with corruption, jobs as big issues

May 08, 2019

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africans voted Wednesday in presidential and parliamentary elections, with signs of a relatively low turnout and voters saying they were disillusioned by widespread corruption and unemployment.

Despite the demise of apartheid 25 years ago, South Africa remains divided by economic inequality . The African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela that has been in power since 1994, is likely to win a majority but it will face a difficult challenge to match the 62% of the vote it got five years ago.

The party has been tarnished by corruption scandals and a national unemployment rate of 27%. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who leads the ANC, has campaigned on promises to clean up his party, an acknowledgment of the problems that forced out his predecessor last year.

"Corruption got into the way," Ramaphosa said after voting, saying graft has prevented his party from serving the people. Selina Molapo, a 38-year-old resident of Tembisa township in eastern Johannesburg, agreed with him, complaining the ANC has not delivered on its promise of jobs.

"In 2014, we voted for the ANC but our situation has not changed," Molapo said. "I am voting for a different party." Firebrand opposition leader Julius Malema voted in his home area of Polokwane in northern Limpopo province and said he expects a good turnout for his party, the populist, leftist Economic Freedom Fighters .

"If the people want to continue unemployed, if the people want to continue landless, then they can continue voting for the same party," Malema said, referring to the ruling ANC. "But if you need change, the EFF is the way to go!"

Young voters make up about 20% of the electorate and largely support Malema, who broke from the ANC six years ago. However, registration of voters under 30 was relatively low. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, was one of the first voters at the Dobsonville polling station in Soweto, Johannesburg's largest black township.

"Soweto represents to me the home of the struggle against apartheid and it is where we are now struggling against corruption and for a new government," Maimane said. Black support for his party is limited because it is generally perceived to be run by whites.

The ANC has vowed to embark on a program of seizing white-owned land without compensation, for which it needs a 67% majority to change South Africa's constitution. In the most likely scenario, the ANC will need to form a coalition government with another party to get the votes needed. That is likely to be the EFF, which supports land seizures.

If the ANC's share of the vote slips below 60%, Ramaphosa could be vulnerable and his party could oust him and choose a new leader. More than 40 smaller parties also are vying for power in the balloting.

Neither the president nor the parliament is elected directly. Voters cast ballots for a national party and the number of votes won by each party determines how many representatives are sent to the legislature. The president is the leader of the party that gets the most votes.

At the polling station in the overwhelmingly white, upscale Parkhurst suburb of Johannesburg, a lanky young man hustling as one of the city's "car guards" — the ubiquitous youths who offer to keep an eye on a vehicle while the driver is away — paused to say he had given up on the ANC and was voting for the Democratic Alliance instead.

"They ate a lot of millions," 26-year-old Anthony Molele said of the ANC's many corruption scandals. At a lonely-looking table for the populist EFF, party agents and domestic workers Marie Lekgothoane and Sophie Tsoai watched the arrival of mostly white voters.

Lekgothoane described how she and her 13-year-old daughter must wake up at 5 a.m. daily to commute more than an hour by minibus to Parkhurst, where she works and once lived before being asked to move out.

"We struggle a lot," Lekgothoane said, adding that she has put her faith in the EFF and its promise of change. "I like this party with all of my heart," she said. "I like the way they talk." When South Africa held its first all-race elections in 1994 after the end of the harsh apartheid system of racial discrimination, voters waited in long, snaking lines. Few such scenes were evident Wednesday, except in the poor Diepsloot township north of Johannesburg.

Voter apathy could be trouble for the ANC. Winston Rammoko, 41, did not vote because he said he did not believe it would be significant. "We all know that the ANC is going to win the elections so I do not think mine will make any difference," said Rammoko, who sells tires in the eastern suburb of Kempton Park. "They have won since 1994 and it will happen again."

Tracy van Tonder, 20, is one of the younger South Africans who did not register to vote. "By the time I got interested in voting, the deadline to vote had already passed," she said while accompanying her older sister. Van Tonder is one of the nearly 6 million eligible voters under 30 who did not register.

Some 26 million people of South Africa's population of 57 million are eligible to vote, and the day is a national holiday to encourage turnout. Most of the 22,900 polling stations opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 9 p.m. (0500 to 1900 GMT).

Preliminary results will be announced from the electoral commission in the capital, Pretoria. Final results are not expected for 48 hours.

Associated Press writer Cara Anna contributed.

Trump: US to deploy anti-drug Navy ships near Venezuela

April 02, 2020

MIAMI (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Navy ships are being moved toward Venezuela as his administration beefs up counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean following a U.S. drug indictment against Nicolás Maduro.

The president's announcement was a break from the daily White House press briefing to discuss the coronavirus pandemic, which has left much of the country in lock-down and which the government warns could cause 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.

“The Venezuelan people continue to suffer tremendously due to Maduro and his criminal control over the country, and drug traffickers are seizing on this lawlessness,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said after the president's announcement.

The mission involves sending additional Navy warships, surveillance aircraft and special forces teams to nearly double the U.S. counter-narcotics capacity in the Western Hemisphere, with forces operating both in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Esper said the mission would be supported by 22 partner nations.

“As governments and nations focus on the coronavirus there is a growing threat that cartels, criminals, terrorists and other malign actors will try to exploit the situation for their own gain,” said Trump. "We must not let that happen."

The enhanced mission has been months in the making but has taken on greater urgency following last week's indictment of Maduro, Venezuela's embattled socialist leader, and members of his inner circle and military. They are accused of leading a narcoterrorist conspiracy responsible for smuggling up to 250 metric tons of cocaine a year into the U.S., about half of it by sea.

“If I was just indicted for drug trafficking by the United States, with a $15 million reward for my capture, having the U.S. Navy conducting anti-drug operations off my coast would be something I would worry about," said Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who has been among those calling for a tougher stance against Maduro.

It also comes as Maduro steps up attacks on his U.S.-backed rival, Juan Guaidó. Maduro’s chief prosecutor ordered Guaidó to provide testimony Thursday as part of an investigation into an alleged coup attempt. Guaidó, the head of Venezuela's congress who is recognized as his country's legitimate leader by the U.S. and almost 60 other nations, is unlikely to show up, raising the possibility he could be arrested. The U.S. has long insisted it will not tolerate any harm against Guaido.

“No matter where you sit ideologically, any move to try to bring democracy back to Venezuela requires first recognizing the criminal nature of the Maduro regime, and making moves that scare the regime into negotiating," said Raul Gallegos, a Bogota, Colombia-based director in the Andean region for Control Risks, a consulting group.

Maduro has blasted the Trump administration’s offer of a $15 million reward for his arrest, calling it the work of a “racist cowboy” aimed at getting U.S. hands on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the world's largest. He also points out that the vast majority of cocaine leaves South America from Colombia, a staunch U.S. ally.

Others have faulted a U.S. plan, unveiled Tuesday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to create a five-member council without Maduro or Guaidó to govern the country until elections can be held within a year. While its the first attempt in months by the U.S. to seek a negotiated solution to Venezuela's stalemate, coming on the heels of the indictments many say it has little hope of succeeding and likely to drive Maduro farther away from the path of dialogue.

The Trump administration has long insisted that all options are on the table for removing Maduro, including military ones. Still, there’s no indication then, or now, that any sort of U.S. invasion is being planned.

Rather, the sending of ships fits into a longstanding call by the U.S. Southern Command for additional assets to combat growing antinarcotics and other security threats in the hemisphere. In January, another Navy vessel, the USS Detroit, conducted a freedom of navigation operation off the coast of Venezuela in a show of pressure against Maduro.

“That presence sends a big statement about U.S. commitment, it sends a big statement to our friends, it reassures them, and then to our adversaries that those are capable performers,” Adm. Craig Faller, the head of the U.S. military's Southern Command, said in congressional testimony last month.

The report of the planned deployment comes two days after one of Venezuela's naval patrol boats sank after colliding with a Portuguese-flagged cruise ship near the Venezuelan-controlled island of La Tortuga. Maduro accused the ship of acting aggressively and said it was possibly carrying “mercenaries” seeking his ouster.

“You have to be very naive to see this as an isolated incident,” Maduro said Tuesday night on state TV. But Columbia Cruise Services, the operator of the cruise ship, said the patrol boat fired gunshots and than purposely rammed into the liner at speed. There were no passengers on board and none of its 32 crew members were injured, the company said.

US opposes Kosovo's 'new barriers' to Serbian goods

April 01, 2020

TIRANA, Albania (AP) — The decision of Kosovo's government to phase out the country's 100% tariff on imports from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina starting Wednesday did not ease international pressure on the tiny Western Balkans country and sparked more domestic tensions.

Although the United States and the European Union had pushed for lifting the import taxes, Prime Minister Albin Kurti announced early Wednesday that his caretaker Cabinet would instead require goods from Serbia to be certified for quality, a mandate already in place for Kosovar products shipped to Serbia.

Marko Djuric, head of Serbia’s office for Kosovo, rejected Kurti’s move, saying “the situation did not deescalate or return to the previous state when uncivilized taxes were introduced.” Kosovo imposed the punitive tariffs in November 2018 over Serbian efforts to block Kosovo from joining international organizations. The dispute led to the suspension of European Union-mediated talks to normalize ties between Pristina and Belgrade.

Most Serb goods stopped arriving in Kosovo after the import taxes were introduced, except for products that were mainly smuggled into Kosovo's Serb-dominated Mitrovica. Annual trade between Serbia and Kosovo was valued at about 400 million euros ($440 million) before the tariffs were adopted, and inflation in Kosovo rose to about 3% in 2019 after the import taxes took effect compared to 1.1% the previous year.

Kosovo was formerly a part of Serbia and won independence after a 1999 NATO bombing campaign that ended a bloody Serb crackdown on an armed uprising by members of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. Serbia refuses to accept Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence.

Since the start of the Pristina-Belgrade talks in 2011, 33 deals have been signed to ensure the country's recognition each other in areas such as education and professional degrees. Kosovo claims Serbia has not fulfilled its side of the agreements. Kosovo recognizes diplomas from Serbian universities, but Serbia does not accept the degrees of Kosovar university graduates. It’s the same with drivers' licenses.

Kurti said the government would monitor whether Serbia moves toward reciprocity until June 15 and if not, the tariffs will be restored. The junior partner in Kurti's coalition government, the Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, initiated a successful parliamentary vote of no-confidence vote in his Cabinet last week. His government now is acting in a caretaker capacity.

The motion came after an LDK minister was fired for not supporting the restrictions on movement the government imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus. The LDK also wanted Kurti to fully revoke the 100% tariff and not damage ties with the Kosovo's most important ally, the United States.

The United States argued that Kurti's actions would strangle Kosovo's economy. “We remain opposed to the latest move to implement reciprocal measures on the movement of goods from Serbia.” the U.S.Embassy in Kosovo said in a statement Wednesday.

Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign policy chief, hailed Kosovo's move as “an important decision.”

Associated Press witers Dusan Stojanovic and Jovana Gec contributed from Belgrade.

UN climate summit postponed until 2021 because of COVID-19

April 02, 2020

LONDON (AP) — This year's United Nations global climate summit is being postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic, host country Britain said Wednesday, The U.K. government said the meeting, due to take place in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, will now be held next year at a date still to be determined.

The government said in a statement that “in light of the ongoing, worldwide effects of COVID-19, holding an ambitious, inclusive COP26 in November 2020 is no longer possible.” The meeting is formally known as the 26th Conference of the Parties.

The decision was made by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Britain and Italy, which had been due to host some preparatory events. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that it was a “disappointing decision, but absolutely the right one as we all focus on the fight against #coronavirus.”

Glasgow’s SEC Arena, which had been due to host the event, has been named as the site of a temporary hospital for COVID-19 patients. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made tackling climate change a priority, but Britain’s tenure at the helm of the conference got off to a bumpy start even before the coronavirus pandemic. In January, Johnson fired Claire O'Neill, a former British government minister appointed last year to head the event, and replaced her with Business Secretary Alok Sharma.

“We will continue working tirelessly with our partners to deliver the ambition needed to tackle the climate crisis and I look forward to agreeing a new date for the conference,” Sharma said Wednesday.

Patricia Espinosa, who heads the U.N. climate office, said the new coronavirus “is the most urgent threat facing humanity today, but we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stresses that safeguarding lives “is our foremost priority" but countries must step up action on climate change especially as they recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

“Countries must work to protect the health of people, and the planet has never been more at risk,” the U.N. chief’s spokesman said. “Solidarity and greater ambition is needed now more than ever to transition to a sustainable, resilient low carbon economy that limits global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).”

The meeting in Glasgow would have been held five years after the 2015 Paris climate accord was agreed. Countries that signed the landmark agreement are still expected to provide an update on their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.

In the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and do their best to keep it below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, compared with pre-industrial times.

President Donald Trump has triggered the United States's withdrawal from the Paris accord, a move that formally comes into force in November. His Democratic rivals have said they would rejoin if elected.

Environmental campaigners said postponing this year's U.N. talks was the right move. “It doesn’t make sense to bring people from every country together in the middle of a pandemic," said Mohamed Adow, a longtime participant at U.N. climate meetings who heads the think tank Power Shift Africa.

Adow said postponing the conference mustn't stop countries from taking action to curb global warming, though, and suggested plans to revive economies after the pandemic ends should avoid propping up the kinds of industries that contribute to climate change.

“Economies in the rich north must not be kick-started with dirty investment that will lead to climate suffering in the global south,” he said. Environment officials are planning to hold a lower-level meeting online at the end of April.

Associated Press writer Jill Lawless reported this story in London and AP writer Frank Jordans reported from Berlin.