Greenland votes Tuesday in legislative elections following a campaign largely focused on when — not if — to cut ties with Denmark without falling into the clutches of the United States.President Donald Trump’s at-times threatening remarks about seizing Greenland have lent fresh momentum to the self-governing territory’s independence movement.Many of the island’s 57,000 inhabitants insist they want to be neither American nor Danish — just Greenlandic.”Donald Trump has kind of sparked the issue of independence again,” University of Greenland political scientist Maria Ackren told AFP.”It’s nothing new for Greenlanders … But it is giving the Greenlandic decision-makers and politicians momentum now to actually maybe reach some goals that haven’t been available lately,” she said.The issue of independence has featured predominantly in the campaign, alongside education, social affairs, fisheries — which account for 90 percent of the vast Arctic island’s exports — and tourism.Almost all of the parties represented in parliament support the idea of full sovereignty for the massive ice-covered island, 50 times the size of Denmark yet 100 times less populated.Clusters of building cranes towering over the capital Nuuk are a sign of Greenland’s rapidly modernising society, one that has left some of its mainly Inuit population — mostly hunters and fishermen — by the wayside.While visible on the streets, the social woes are even more glaring in the statistics: Greenland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, more abortions than births and a life expectancy for men under 70 years.  – Fast track? -While most parties vying for the 31 seats in parliament back independence, their views differ on the timeline. Some prefer a “fast track” while others want to take it slow.Among the most impatient is the opposition nationalist Naleraq party, which has been highly prominent in the campaign.It wants the independence process to begin immediately. In the previous 2021 election, it won 12 percent of votes.”The interest that we’re seeing, not only from the United States but basically from the whole world, which has been there for quite some years now, is turning out to be in our favour,” Juno Berthelsen, one of Naleraq’s most prominent candidates, told AFP.When does he think independence will happen?”We could try and predict that it’s going to be within one or two election cycles” of four years each, he said.But “it depends on how the negotiations are going to go between Greenland and Denmark”.Colonised by Danes more than 300 years ago, the island was granted home rule in 1979, with Copenhagen maintaining control over matters such as foreign and defence affairs.Since 2009, a law has enabled Greenland to unilaterally initiate the independence process.The law stipulates that negotiations be held between the Danish and Greenlandic governments to reach an agreement, which must be approved by the Greenlandic parliament, endorsed by a referendum on the island and voted on by the Danish parliament.- ‘Jail’ -The outgoing government coalition, made up of Prime Minister Mute Egede’s green-left Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) and the social democratic Siumut party, also support independence.But despite internal divisions, they are in less of a rush to attain it.They have insisted the island must first gain economic independence. It currently receives around $565 million from Copenhagen in annual subsidies, equivalent to around a fifth of its GDP.”The independence talk is always on the table. That’s the end goal for a lot of us from Greenland but it will be in 10, 20 years or more,” said Aaja Chemnitz, a member of IA and one of two Greenlandic representatives in the Danish parliament.”It’s important to talk about the economic development of Greenland and how we do this in a way that’s much more sustainable,” she said.Siumut party leader Erik Jensen, the outgoing finance minister, expressed frustration that the independence issue has eclipsed — at least in Danish and international media — issues affecting Greenlanders’ daily lives. “It’s also an important part of our programme but everyone here in Greenland talks about health, schools and kindergarten,” he told AFP.In the chilly, windy streets of Nuuk, residents swing between wanting to break free and economic realism.”Of course we want to have independence from Denmark, because we are seen as lower-ranking people,” said Peter Jensen, an entrepreneur.But with its subsidies, Copenhagen has “kept us in this ‘jail’,” he said.The exploitation of Greenland’s mineral resources, often seen as an economic springboard to independence, is in its infancy.”We should think about how we can become self-sufficient in our food and fuel. Because everything we’ve got is from abroad,” added Ole Moeller, a middle manager at a transport company.”And as you can see right now, the world is not very safe right now.”

A South Carolina man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was put to death by firing squad on Friday in the first such execution in the United States in 15 years.Brad Sigmon, 67, was executed by a three-person firing squad at the Broad River Correctional Institution in the state capital Columbia, South Carolina prison spokeswoman Chrysti Shain said.Shain said the fatal shots were fired at 6:05 pm (2305 GMT) and Sigmon was pronounced dead by a physician at 6:08 pm (2308 GMT).Journalists who witnessed the execution from behind bulletproof glass said Sigmon was wearing a black jumpsuit with a small red bullseye made of paper or cloth over his heart and was strapped into a chair in the death chamber.In a final statement read out by his attorney, Gerald “Bo” King, Sigmon said he wanted to send a message of “love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”A hood was then placed over Sigmon’s head. About two minutes later, the firing squad — volunteers from the South Carolina Department of Corrections — fired their rifles through a slit in a wall about 15 feet (five meters) away.Anna Dobbins of WYFF News 4 TV station said the shots “were all fired at once” like it was “just one sound.””His arms flexed,” Dobbins said. “There was something in his midsection that moved — I’m not necessarily going to call them breaths, I don’t really know — but there was some movement that went on there for two or three seconds.””It was very fast,” she said. “I did see a splash of blood when the bullets entered his body. It was not a huge amount, but there was a splash.”Sigmon, who confessed to the 2001 murders of David and Gladys Larke and admitted his guilt at trial, had asked the Supreme Court for a last-minute stay of execution but it was denied.South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster also rejected his appeal for clemency.- ‘Impossible’ position -“Brad’s death was horrifying and violent,” King, his lawyer, said in a statement. “It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.”Sigmon had a choice between lethal injection, the firing squad or the electric chair.King said Sigmon had chosen the firing squad after being placed in an “impossible” position, forced to decide how he would die.The electric chair “would burn and cook him alive,” he said, but the alternative was “just as monstrous.””If he chose lethal injection, he risked the prolonged death suffered by all three of the men South Carolina has executed since September,” King said.The last firing squad execution in the United States was in Utah in 2010, which also carried out two others, one in 1996 and one in 1977.The 1977 execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was the basis for the 1979 book “The Executioner’s Song” by Norman Mailer.The vast majority of US executions have been carried out by lethal injection since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.Alabama has carried out four executions recently using nitrogen gas, which has been denounced by UN experts as cruel and inhumane. The execution is performed by pumping nitrogen gas into a facemask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.Three other states — Idaho, Mississippi and Oklahoma — have joined South Carolina and Utah in authorizing the use of firing squads.There have been six executions in the United States so far this year following 25 last year.The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have moratoriums in place.President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in office called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”

Scientists rallied in cities across the United States on Friday to denounce efforts by the administration of US President Donald Trump to eliminate key staff across multiple agencies and curb life-saving research.Since Trump returned to the White House, his government has cut federal research funding, withdrawn from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement, and sought to dismiss hundreds of federal workers working on health and climate research.In response, researchers, doctors, students, engineers and elected officials took to the streets in New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin to vent their fury at what they see as an unprecedented attack on science.”I have never been so angry,” said Jesse Heitner, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who joined more than 1,000 people demonstrating in the US capital.”They’re lighting everything on fire,” Heitner told AFP at the Lincoln Memorial.He felt particularly incensed about the appointment of noted vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services.”If you put someone in charge of NASA who’s a ‘Flat Earther,’ that’s not okay,” he said.- ‘Inexcusable’ -“Fund science, not billionaires” and “America was built on science,” read some of the signs brandished at the Washington protest.”What’s happening now is unprecedented,” said Grover, a university researcher in his 50s who declined to provide further personal details due to professional constraints. Dressed in a white lab coat and wielding a pink sign that read “Stand Up for Science,” he told AFP his employer had urged staff to keep a low profile, fearing financial retribution in the form of suspended or cancelled federal grants. “I’ve been around research over 30 years, and what’s going on has never happened,” he said, adding that the “inexcusable” actions by the federal government would have “long-term repercussions.”- Brain drain? -Many researchers told AFP about their fears about the future of their grants and other funding.The suspension of some grants has already led some universities to reduce the number of students accepted into doctoral programs or research positions. For those just getting started in their careers, the concern is palpable. “I should be at home studying, instead of having to be here defending my right to have a job,” said Rebecca Glisson, a 28-year-old doctoral student in neuroscience. Glisson is due to defend her thesis at her program in Maryland next week, but feels apprehensive about her future beyond that, as funding for the laboratory she had planned to work for has been cut.Chelsea Gray, a 34-year-old environmental scientist working on shark preservation, had dreamed of working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the federal agencies under particular threat over its climate research. Instead, she has begun the process of obtaining an Irish passport. “I did everything right and set myself up for success, and I’ve watched my entire career path crumble before my eyes,” Gray told AFP. “I want to stay and serve the United States as a United States citizen,” she said.”But if that option is not available to me, I need to keep all doors open.”

The anti-abortion movement in the United States has set its sights on a new target: doctors sending pills across state lines to help women end unwanted pregnancies.Since the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the federal protection of the right to an abortion, states like Texas and Louisiana have adopted tough anti-abortion laws.Women seeking to end pregnancies, even victims of rape or incest, are now obliged to travel long distances or to seek the delivery of abortion pills from other jurisdictions.And that measure is now under attack.Texas and Louisiana are launching a legal case against a doctor in New York, a state which in turn has passed a “shield law” to protect its physicians from outside prosecutions.  “These are the first kind of cross-border fights that we’ve seen since Roe was overturned,” said California legal scholar Mary Ziegler, referring to the 2022 Supreme Court decision.”And those are just, I think in some ways, the tip of the iceberg. We’re likely to see a lot more of these cross-border fights.”From Texas or Louisiana’s standpoint, they’re saying: ‘Why is this doctor mailing pills into our state?'” explained Ziegler, a professor at the law school at the University of California, Davis.”And from New York’s standpoint, they’re saying: ‘Our doctor wasn’t doing anything wrong. Why are you trying to prosecute her?'”- ‘Chilling effect’ -In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton declared that “out-of-state doctors may not illegally and dangerously prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents.”Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor and a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, was ordered to stop sending pills to Texas and fined $100,000.  In Louisiana, she faces criminal charges and the state has demanded her extradition, to which New York Governor Kathy Hochul responded: “Not now, not ever.”Hochul said the state’s shield law was designed to “anticipate this very situation.”According to #WeCount, an initiative that collates abortion statistics nationwide, 10 percent of abortions in the second quarter of 2024 were conducted under the protection of shield laws.This accounts for approximately 10,000 women each month. In Louisiana, this was the solution chosen by 60 percent of women — about 2,500 — to terminate pregnancies in the second half of 2023, #WeCount estimates.Now, abortion rights activists fear that individual doctors will be targeted.”The tactic of going after providers, patients and helpers through the courts is definitely something that we are going to see them try more of,” Amy Friedrich-Karnik, of the Guttmacher Institute, told AFP.”And I think the goal is both to, you know, scare those individuals… and there’s a chilling effect from that,” said Friedrich-Karnik, a policy director at the pro-abortion rights think tank.The legal battles will be long, and the results are far from certain. Some cases may get to the Supreme Court, and it is not clear whether President Donald Trump’s administration will attempt to intervene. “This is a long-lasting debate, even if it goes to the Supreme Court,” Ziegler said.”Because then what would happen is the next case that comes along will be different enough that whatever the Supreme Court has to say about these cases won’t give us the answer necessarily,” she said. “There’s not… going to be one clean solution that the Supreme Court reaches that resolves this once and for all.”- Procedure rejected -Meanwhile, the attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri have demanded that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) end prescriptions of the pill via online medical visits — effectively restricting access nationwide.A similar request was nevertheless rejected by the Supreme Court in 2024.”There’s uncertainty about what Trump is going to do. There’s uncertainty about what power states have to project power outside of state lines. There’s uncertainty about what the FDA is going to do,” Ziegler said. “Simply not knowing can impact patients and doctors. But that’s the scenario right now — there’s a big question mark around a lot of it.”