World

(BERLIN) — Germany passed a grim milestone on Thursday: 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. In recent weeks, the situation has spiraled out of control as cases have spiked and intensive care beds have become scarce in some regions.

The country has one of the lowest rates vaccination rates in western Europe — only 68% of the population has been vaccinated, according to recent health statistics.

“Sadly, the coronavirus still hasn’t been beaten. Every day we see new records as far as the number of infections are concerned,” newly elected German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a press conference on Wednesday.

As of Friday morning, the country’s disease control agency, the RKI, said a record 76,414 cases had been reported in the past 24 hours.

With winter around the corner, Europe has once again become the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported deaths due to COVID-19 had reached 4,200 a day, double the death rate at the end of September. The organization warned that a further 700,000 people in the European region could die by March given the current trend.

The rise in cases is mainly do to the more contagious Delta variant and the fact that more people are staying indoors as winter begins. The number of people who remain unvaccinated is around 54%, according to WHO Executive Director Robb Butler.

“Let me be absolutely clear, the majority of people in ICU, in intensive care units and ICU today, are the unvaccinated” Butler said in an interview with Sky News.

Germany, like many countries around Europe, has moved ahead with stricter measures to cope, some of which apply to the entire country. Most blanket rules affect the unvaccinated population, which now need to show proof of vaccination, recent recovery or a negative COVID-19 test to enter public transport. Germany already had rules in place requiring similar proof when entering indoor spaces like bars, restaurants and entertainment facilities.

Yet each of Germany’s 16 states can also choose to implement their own measures. In Bavaria and Saxony where vaccination rates are low and hospitalization rates are rising to worrying levels, stricter lockdowns have been put in place. The seasonally popular Christmas markets were canceled for the second year in a row.

In Bavaria, a region with 13 million residents, politicians face grave crises in dealing with the growing number of cases.

“The situation is overwhelming and just keeps escalating,” the region’s leader, Markus Söder, told reporters. News agency DPA reported that a military plane will fly seriously ill patients from the Bavarian town of Memmingen to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia on Friday afternoon.

Söder is a proponent of making vaccinations mandatory.

“Compulsory vaccination does not violate the right to freedom — far more, it is a precondition for us to win back our freedom,” he wrote in an op-ed with politician Winfried Kretschmann of German region Baden-Württemberg in Tuesday’s newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Germany is mulling compulsory vaccination after Austria became the first European country to announce a vaccine mandate. It will go into effect February 2022. The announcement brought tens of thousands of people out to protest on the streets of Vienna last weekend.

On Monday, the country went into its fourth national lockdown, set to last for 10 days and likely to be extended to 20 days. Although less strict than previous lockdowns of 2020, citizens may only leave their houses for specific purposes, such as buying groceries, exercising or going to the doctor. Only 66% of the country of 8.9 million people have been vaccinated.

With the rise in COVID cases, particularly in northern Europe, and the introduction of new measures restricting access of unvaccinated people from public life, tensions seem to be flaring up in certain populations. Belgium and the Netherlands saw violent protests against lockdown measures last weekend.

Complicating matters is a worrying new virus variant B.1.1.529 which been discovered in southern Africa. As of Friday morning, a number of countries have implemented travel bans, including Germany, Italy and the U.K.

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(NEW YORK) — Honduras teeters on the edge of democracy.

In one of the most consequential elections in the Western Hemisphere, in one of Central America’s poorest countries, Hondurans head to the polls Sunday to choose a new president, new lawmakers, new mayors and new city council members.

“The elections this Sunday, November 28th, definitely present our golden opportunity, the only one, to rescue democracy in this country,” Clara López, a voter in the country’s capital Tegucigalpa, told ABC News. “It’s now or never.”

Honduras’ recent history of election-related violence has many on edge. Among them, President Joe Biden’s administration will be watching for a peaceful election outcome, a possible new partner to work with, and any effect on migration issues to the southern U.S. border.

The State Department also deployed a top U.S. diplomat to Honduras this week, who told ABC News the U.S. is prepared to act if there are any irregularities in the election.

There are 11 candidates in total for the presidency, but the race has really come down to two: Tegucigalpa’s mayor Nasry Asfura, who would extend the right-wing party’s hold on power, but faces allegations of corruption; and Xiomara Castro, a popular former first lady who has united a left-wing coalition and could become Honduras’s first female leader and Latin America’s only current female head of state.

But tensions have risen across Honduras, with a recent spate of election-related violence, including assassinations of candidates. Looming large over the elections, too, are last year’s back-to-back hurricanes and history’s shadow — a 2009 coup that forced Castro’s husband from power and the 2017 elections, riddled with irregularities, according to the Organization of American States, the region’s bloc.

Despite the OAS’ call for a new vote in 2017, presidential incumbent Juan Orlando Hernández was declared the winner, sparking protests that led to days of violent, deadly clashes.

Amid apparent concerns over the potential for more violence, the U.S. deployed the top diplomat for the Western Hemisphere, Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols, to Honduras for a three-day trip. But after his meetings, including with both Castro and Asfura, Nichols expressed optimism that the country can hold free and fair elections.

“We will call things as we see them. We believe this is going to be a free and fair process that reflects the will of the Honduran people. If we see something that deviates from that — well, then we’ll take the appropriate steps, but I’m confident that this is going to be a peaceful, free, fair election,” Nichols told ABC News in an exclusive interview.

To many Hondurans, however, recent years have chased away any confidence. Just 30% of Hondurans believe democracy is preferable to all other forms of government, according to Latinobarometro’s 2021 report — the lowest in all of Latin America — while four-fifths of Hondurans believe the country is on the wrong path.

.@MaggieRulli has an in-depth report on Honduras and “a presidential election that some say is the country’s last chance to prove democracy is still alive in one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere.” https://t.co/vAkidmdYRJ pic.twitter.com/gebU3rYVFy

— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) November 25, 2021

“The people are in a critical state,” Salvador Nasralla, Castro’s running mate and Hernández’s opponent in 2017, told ABC News. “I do not dismiss the possibility of a civil war in the country.”

In the 2017 elections, Nasralla was ahead in the polls and largely expected to win, making the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s declaration that Hernández won after a delayed count that much more suspicious to many Hondurans. But the Trump administration backed Hernández’s claim to victory, dismissing concerns from the OAS and other international election observers about irregularities.

This time around, Nasralla, a popular former sportscaster, said he felt compelled to join Castro’s ticket to try to ensure a left-wing victory.

“It wouldn’t be winning if I subtracted votes from the opposition, and that would’ve made me a bad Honduran,” he told ABC News in his only interview with an English-language outlet.

Castro herself has become a force in Honduran politics, leading the movement against the 2009 coup where the military deposed her husband Manuel Zelaya after he pushed a referendum to change the constitution and abolish its one-term limit.

Backed by her new liberal party, she has been ahead in the polls in recent weeks, especially after Nasralla’s surprising endorsement.

But Asfura remains a potent opponent, boosted by his own party’s hold on government and promises “to create jobs and opportunities so that people can bring food to their homes, health, and education,” as he said in a recent rally.

Asfura’s popularity comes despite allegations against him in the recent Pandora Papers which revealed he used offshore tax loopholes, and local officials accused him of embezzling funds from the capital city’s municipal government.

They’re not the first charges against the ruling National Party’s leaders. Hernández was named by a U.S. federal court as a co-conspirator in a huge narcotics trafficking case that saw his brother, former congressman Tony Hernández, sentenced to life in prison. The president has denied wrongdoing and has not faced criminal charges.

Despite those allegations, the Biden administration has tried to work with Hernández and other Central American governments to stem migration from the region, which has surged during his presidency. Nearly 1.7 million migrants reached the southern U.S. border in fiscal year 2021, which covers October 2020 through September 2021, and one-fifth of them — 308,931 in total — were Honduran.

“Honduras doesn’t guarantee its citizens a dignified life within its territory, and it forces them to flee,” said López, the Tegucigalpa voter who is backing Castro’s campaign.

During his own 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, Biden pledged to invest $4 billion in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — sometimes called the Northern Triangle countries — to improve the quality of life, including the rule of law and countering corruption, and give their citizens reasons to stay in their communities.
PHOTO: The president of the National Electoral Council of Honduras, Kevin Izaguirre (R), and the Chief of the Armed Forces of that country, Tito Livio Moreno, carry a box with electoral material for the elections in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Nov. 23, 2021.
Gustavo Amador/EPA via ShutterstockGustavo Amador/EPA via Shutterstock
The president of the National Electoral Council of Honduras, Kevin Izaguirre (R), and the…

While that money has started to flow, corrupt and increasingly power-grabbing political leaders in all three countries have made it difficult for the U.S. to find partners to work with.

Free and fair elections, a peaceful transfer of power and a new leadership partner in Honduras are important to Biden’s agenda, particularly because if the situation deteriorates, even more Hondurans could flee in search of a better life to the north.

“Everything is at stake here. For the first time, you have a very clearly differentiated path that is being put forward by the proposals of both parties,” said Sergio Bahr, a Honduran sociologist. “This election will define the direction in which the country goes in the next 10 to 20 years.”

That’s why the State Department deployed its top diplomat for the region to Honduras. Nichols, the assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, met with Honduras’ national electoral council, its chief of defense, and its attorney general, among others, saying he was assured they’re taking “all measures necessary” to secure the election and prevent violence like 2017.

“We certainly will be looking to Honduran electoral authorities to carry out their responsibilities professionally and transparently, and they’ve assured their own people as well as the international community of the same,” he told ABC News.

For voters like Ela Rubio, that’s all that they want, she said.

“We want democracy. We want transparent elections,” said Rubio, an Asfura supporter.” We don’t want to regress. We want to move forward. We want to keep going, and to show the world that not everything in Honduras is bad.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. government is warning American citizens in Ethiopia even more starkly to leave the country now, as the conflict there continues to deteriorate.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is heading to the front lines to lead the federal government’s forces, he announced, urging his fellow citizens to join him and “lead the country with a sacrifice.”

On the other side, forces from Ethiopia’s Tigray region, now aligned with other ethnic-based groups, are marching toward the capital Addis Ababa, pledging to end Abiy’s blockade of their region one year after fighting there burst open decades-old wounds.

Now the conflict in Africa’s second-most populous nation is increasingly existential for both sides, potentially “ripping the country apart and spilling over into other countries in the region,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned in recent days.

The U.S. special envoy for the region said he still had hope for a ceasefire and a negotiated resolution after some “nascent progress,” but he warned the fast-moving conflict threatened to swiftly sweep away international diplomatic efforts and cause “a bloodbath situation or chaos.”

That fear has driven fresh warnings from foreign countries, including France and Turkey, urging their citizens to depart the country immediately while commercial flights remain. The United Nations announced it was evacuating its staff’s dependents on Tuesday, too.

Since Nov. 5, the U.S. embassy in Addis has been on ordered departure, evacuating non-emergency staff and diplomats’ families and leaving a smaller team behind. While the mission remains open and continues to provide services like passports and repatriation loans, the U.S. military is maintaining a “state of readiness,” according to U.S. Africa Command, in case there are issues “related to the safety of our diplomats where the security environment has deteriorated.”

But after the unprecedented, chaotic evacuation effort from Afghanistan, the State Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure U.S. citizens in Ethiopia know military flights like those out of Kabul will not be coming to rescue them.

“There should be absolutely no expectation of the military becoming involved,” a senior State Department official said Monday. For months now, the agency has issued travel warnings, urging Americans to leave now while Addis’s international airport continues commercial flights.

This week, their warnings have employed even stronger language: “We just want to make sure that we don’t get into a situation where U.S. citizens are waiting for something that’s never going to happen,” the senior State Department official added. “We need them to remember what the norm is, and the norm is leaving via commercial while that’s available.”

The official and others have declined to speak to any plans to close the embassy or evacuate American diplomats, except to say that they’re “engaged in contingency planning for hypotheticals” with the Pentagon.

The Pentagon declined to comment on any troop movements to ABC News after a report that the U.S. had put Navy ships in the region on “standby” and deployed a small number of Army Rangers to the neighboring country Djibouti. The Pentagon’s East African Response Force — a team trained to move within 24 hours to assist U.S. embassies in the region with additional security or an evacuation — is based in the small African country.

Despite the increasingly grim developments on the battlefield, the State Department made clear it has not yet given up on a diplomatic resolution.

“There is some nascent progress in trying to get the parties to move from a military confrontation to a negotiating process, but what concerns us is this fragile progress risks being outpaced by the alarming developments on the ground… by the military escalation on the two sides,” Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, special envoy for the Horn of Africa, told reporters Tuesday.

In particular, Tigrayan forces said this week they are now some 130 miles northeast of Addis, while Abiy declared Monday that he would go to the front lines to lead troops directly.

“Unfortunately, each side is trying to achieve its goals by military force and believe they are on the cusp of winning,” Feltman said Tuesday, back in Washington after days of meetings in Addis. He met not just Abiy and Tigrayan leaders, but also the African Union’s special envoy for the conflict, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.

From those meetings, Feltman said he sensed a “greater willingness to brainstorm with us about how you could put together the pieces of a deescalation and negotiated ceasefire process” — instead of an outright refusal to even consider any other means but force.

What the two sides say they want can be achieved at the same time, too, Feltman added: Abiy wants to return Tigrayan forces to Tigray region, and Tigrayan forces want Abiy’s de facto blockade of the region to end.

“The tragedy is, the sadness is that both sides have in mind the same type of elements. … They just need to muster the political will in order to pivot from the military to the negotiations, and we’re not the only ones encouraging them to do so, but we can’t force them to the table,” Feltman said.

As of now, U.S. and international pressure, Obasanjo’s mediation and the humanitarian suffering of the Ethiopian people have not yet been enough for leaders to come to the table. Feltman said Abiy also told him in their meeting Sunday that he had “confidence” he could achieve his goals militarily — and the seasoned U.S. diplomat warned the incitement of ethnic-based violence is spiraling out of control.

That means there’s “no sign” that direct negotiations are “on the horizon,” but perhaps some back-channel diplomacy is possible — and Feltman and Obasanjo will continue to pursue that, according to the U.S. diplomat.

“Right now, both sides are still pursuing military options, but they are also engaged on other ways to pursue their objectives… And that’s what I find marginally encouraging, but again, I don’t want to overstate the case,” Feltman said.

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(LUXOR, Egypt) — After more than seven decades of stop-start attempts to excavate a nearly 2-mile ancient walkway in the southern city of Luxor, Egypt will finally open the 3,000-year-old Avenue of Sphinxes to the public Thursday in a glitzy ceremony.

The full stretches of the 1.7 mile long and about 250 feet wide avenue, which connects Karnak Temple with Luxor Temple, have been uncovered in the ancient city of Thebes, with its distinctive sphinxes and ram-headed statues lined up on both flanks.

In recent years, Egypt has stepped up its efforts to promote its archeological discoveries as it strives to revive its ailing tourism industry, which took a fresh battering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One element of this approach has been recreating ancient settings in flamboyant ceremonies, which were first introduced when Egypt held what was dubbed a “royal procession” to parade 22 mummies through the streets of Cairo as they were being conveyed to a newly inaugurated museum last April.

Construction of the Avenue of Sphinxes began during the New Kingdom era and was completed during the reign of 30th Dynasty ruler Nectanebo I (380-362 B.C.), but the road was buried under layers of sand over the centuries.

“The amount of rubble that was removed over the decades was up to 8 meters high. Every layer of sand tells us a story about that avenue,” Mostafa el-Sagheer, the head of Karnak’s Antiquities Department who oversaw the project to excavate the last stretch of the avenue, told ABC News.

The first trace of the avenue was found in 1949 when Egyptian archeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim discovered eight statues near the Luxor Temple, el-Sagheer said, with 17 more statues uncovered from 1958 to 1961 and 55 unearthed from 1961 to 1964 — all within a perimeter of 250 meters.

From 1984 to 2000, the entire route of the walkway was finally determined, leaving it to excavators to uncover the road. It was never a walk in the park, however.

Urban development meant hundreds of homes, as well as mosques and a 115-year-old Evangelical church, had to be demolished to make way for the road.

The political turmoil that followed the 2011 uprising in Egypt further complicated efforts to complete the restoration project, stalling it for several years before it was resumed in 2017.

“From 2017 to 2021, the final 20 or 25% of the road was excavated,” el-Sagheer said.

Most of the original 1,057 statues in the avenue have been recovered. They are divided into three shapes, the first being a body of a lion with ram’s head that was erected over a nearly 1,000-foot area between the Karnak Temple and the Precinct of Mut during the reign of New Kingdom ruler Tutankhamen, famously known as King Tut.

The second shape is a full ram statue, built in a remote area during the reign of the 18th dynasty’s Amenhotep III before being later moved to the Temple of Khonsu in the Karnak complex.

The third shape, which comprises the biggest chunk of the statues, is one of a sphinx (a lion’s body and a human’s head), with the statues stretching over a mile from the Precinct of Mut to the Luxor Temple. They were erected during the tenure of Nectanebo I.

El-Sagheer said the ancient Opet festival would be also relived during Thursday’s celebrations.

The festival primarily involved a procession in which shrines of the “triad of deities” — supreme god Amun-Re, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu — were paraded by priests on wooden barques from Karnak to Luxor in a symbolic recreation of their marriage.

“During this journey, people of Thebes would line up on both sides, with military marches and music playing, dancers performing and oblations offered,” el-Sagheer said.

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(LONDON) — A rare manuscript by Albert Einstein that changed the course of modern science was just sold for over 13.3 million euros (over $15 million), including fees, beating all predictions.

The 54-page, handwritten document outlines calculations that led to his theory of relativity. One of two existing copies went on sale at Christie’s auction house in Paris on Tuesday evening. It was expected to fetch $2.4 million to $3.5 million. The manuscript was being sold as part of a judicial sale, and had to be handled by a special judicial commissioner. It was bought over the phone by an anonymous buyer.

“This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction,” Christie’s said in a statement ahead of the sale.

The iconic German physicist co-wrote the manuscript with a lifelong friend, the Swiss engineer Michele Besso, in Zurich from June 1913 into early 1914, according to Christie’s, which is hosting the sale on behalf of Aguttes auction house.

Although this copy isn’t the final draft, the Einstein-Besso manuscript shows the trial and error that went into the calculations. When equations about the relativity of rotational movements proved correct, Einstein excitedly wrote in the margins of one of the pages, “Stimmt!” That’s German for, “It works!”

While the document contains mistakes, it ultimately led to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which states that gravity is not a force happening between objects in space but rather a deformation of space and time geometry. The final theory was published in 1915, about a year after the Einstein-Besso manuscript.

The manuscript consists of 26 pages of Einstein’s handwriting, 25 pages of Besso’s and thjree pages that appear to have been written together. Some portions are crossed or torn out, and pages have rust stains, according to Christie’s, which described the document as depicting “a crucial stage in the development of the general theory of relativity.”

“Even today, in 2021, when we study cosmology, or even when we study fusions of black holes, gravitational waves, pulsars, we still use Einstein’s equations,” French astrophysicist Etienne Klein explained in a video on the Einstein-Besso manuscript, released by Christie’s ahead of the sale. “Over a century after being laid down on paper by Einstein, they are still the right equations for describing any gravitational phenomenon.”

Einstein and Besso met at a concert while both students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Einstein studied physics and Besso engineering. Friends for life, Besso described their collaboration as one between an eagle (Einstein) and a sparrow (Besso), saying the sparrow could fly higher under the eagle’s wing, according to Carl Seelig’s 1956 biography of Einstein.

Einstein, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for 1921, was known for destroying most of his work. But Besso preserved the manuscript for posterity.

“A good scientist is someone who makes mistakes, discovers and corrects them,” Klein said in Christie’s catalogue of the sale.

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(MOSCOW) — At least 45 people, including a dozen children, were killed after a tourist bus from North Macedonia crashed and caught fire in Bulgaria early Tuesday, officials said.

The accident occurred on the Struma highway near the village of Bosnek in western Bulgaria at around 2 a.m. local time. Emergency teams rushed to the scene, where 45 people were confirmed dead, according to a statement from the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior.

Seven people who sustained injuries from the crash were transported to a hospital for treatment, the ministry said.

The bus, carrying 53 people, was heading back to North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, after a tourist trip to Istanbul, Turkey, according to Monika Markovska, an official at the North Macedonian Embassy in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. The Bulgarian Ministry of Interior confirmed that the bus was registered in North Macedonia.

Most of those on board were Macedonian, apart from one Belgian national. Twelve children were among the dead, Markovska told ABC News.

The seven people who were hospitalized were admitted to Pirogov Hospital in Sofia.

The patients — four men and three women — suffered from burns and lacerations but were all in stable condition, Dr. Ljubo Topkov of Pirogov Hospital told ABC News.

The cause of the crash was unclear and is under investigation.

Traffic was stopped in both directions on the highway as first responders and investigators worked on scene.

The Macedonian travel agency that owns the bus, Besa Trans, did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

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(NEW YORK) — Two of the Christian missionaries who were kidnapped in Haiti last month have been released, according to the ministry.

Nineteen people — including 17 missionaries, five of them children — were kidnapped by a Haitian gang on Oct. 16 during an airport run, a source at the U.S. embassy told ABC News last month.

The Ohio-based ministry the missionaries are affiliated with, Christian Aid Ministries, announced in a statement Sunday that two of the hostages have been released and “are safe, in good spirits, and being cared for.”

“We welcome reports that two individuals held hostage in Haiti have been released. We do not have further comment at this time,” a White House official told ABC News.

The Haitian National Police also confirmed the release of the two hostages to ABC News.

The ministry could not provide the names of those released, the reasons for their release or their current location, according to the statement. Further details about the remaining hostages were not provided.

“We encourage you to continue to pray for the full resolution of this situation,” the statement read. “While we rejoice at this release, our hearts are with the fifteen people who are still being held. Continue to lift up the remaining hostages before the Lord.”

The Haitian government suspects the gang known as 400 Mawozo to be responsible for the abductions, the source at the U.S. embassy said last month. The FBI made contact with the 400 Mawozoa on Oct. 18 and was assisting in negotiations, the agency told ABC News.

The group, which included 16 Americans and one Canadian, was abducted while on a trip to an orphanage, according to the ministry.

The country is experiencing a rise in gang-related kidnappings, many demanding ransom, which stalled after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7 and a 7.2-magnitude earthquake on Aug. 14 that killed more than 2,200 people.

The U.S. State Department issued a warning in August about the risk of kidnapping for ransom in Haiti.

ABC News’ Joshua Hoyos contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The wife of an American held hostage by Islamist militants in Africa broke years of silence on Wednesday to criticize U.S. government efforts and to make a plea to the leader of an al-Qaida-affiliated group to release her husband.

Els Woodke’s husband, Jeffery Woodke, is a Christian humanitarian aid worker who was kidnapped in October 2016 in Niger, where he had worked for decades aiding nomadic peoples in the Sahel region. She has largely avoided public comments other than several pleas to the captor networks, as her family and U.S. officials worked quietly to bring him home — but now she has decided to speak out.

“That situation has changed, and I’m now asking for help from my brothers and sisters in Christ, from the public, and from the governments of Mali and the United States,” said Woodke, a teacher’s assistant in McKinleyville, California.

Els Woodke appears in the new ABC News feature documentary “3212 UN-REDACTED” on Hulu to tell her husband’s story and reflect on an ill-fated U.S. Special Forces mission in 2017, which a former commanding general of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) claimed publicly was tied to finding Woodke.

On Wednesday she said her family has grown deeply frustrated with the U.S. government’s failure to secure her husband’s release. Woodke’s captivity has now spanned three U.S. administrations.

“I have been repeatedly threatened [by U.S. officials] that if I disclosed certain information that came from certain sources that I would no longer receive any information. I have also had so many restrictions imposed by the U.S. government that any meaningful attempt to raise a ransom is effectively prohibited,” Els Woodke said in her prepared remarks.

U.S. officials have shared with Els Woodke details of her husband’s captivity drawn from classified intelligence under condition of strict secrecy, sources involved in hostage recovery have told ABC News in the past.

Els Woodke disclosed that her family now has reason to believe from their own sources in Africa that her husband has been transferred from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (IS-GS) to an al-Qaida affiliate in northwest Africa known as JNIM — which would offer hope because the JNIM leader in the past has negotiated the release of Western hostages in the Sahel. In August, French forces killed Adnan Abou Walid al-Sahrawi, the ISIS leader in northwest Africa, which Els Woodke said offers hope for a negotiation with JNIM.

“According to multiple sources of information, we believe that at some point prior to the death of Walid, Jeff was moved from the custody of ISIS-GS to the custody of JNIM,” she said in her remarks. “The circumstances of that movement aren’t understood yet.”

Jeffery “was alive this summer,” she said, adding that she was asking fellow Christians to help her raise funds for a ransom because foreign governments have shared that the captors want to be paid “millions.”

Addressing her husband directly, she said, “Jeff, I hope you hear that we are working hard for your release. Do not lose hope. We love you. Stay strong. Stay strong.”

Woodke also released a new video plea in French addressed to JNIM’s leader, Sheik Iyad ag Ghali.

“I believe that you have kept Jeff safe and healthy and I thank you for that. I believe that you also desire that Jeff should be returned to his home and his work on behalf of the Tuareg and other nomadic people of the region,” Els Woodke said in the video. “You are the only one with the power to make that happen. Releasing Jeff will require compassion and mercy, but these are the characteristics of a strong and courageous leader.”

U.S. counterterrorism and hostage recovery officials have disagreed over intelligence about who kidnapped and held Woodke captive, pivoting more than a year ago toward a belief that JNIM had taken custody of the aid worker, officials have told ABC News. JNIM has held most of the Western hostages kidnapped in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger for motives that range from acquiring ransom to using them as political bargaining chips.

In Woodke’s case, years went by without any communication or ransom demands by the captor network, sources involved in the case have told ABC News.

After a Green Beret team was ambushed leaving four U.S. soldiers dead in October 2017, then-AFRICOM commander Gen. Thomas Waldhauser made the startling claim that the team was attacked by ISIS near the village of Tongo Tongo after they had searched an empty ISIS campsite looking for intelligence on Woodke’s whereabouts. The claim shocked officers in the chain of command and in hostage recovery, whistleblowers say in the new documentary.

“I think it’s important to underscore why, then, was that mission undertaken? Why was it so important to send those people up there?” Waldhauser said at a Pentagon press conference in 2018. “We’ve had an American citizen by the name of Jeffery Woodke who has been captured and held hostage somewhere in that area for the last year and a half, and there was a possibility that what they might find at that target would be a piece of the puzzle of the whole-of-government approach, to try to return an American who’s been held hostage.”

“I had never heard that,” former Assistant Secretary of Defense (Acting) for Special Operations Mark Mitchell said in the ABC News film, regarding the Woodke connection to the ill-fated missions of the American team. “So I’m not sure where that characterization came from.”

Intelligence, military, FBI, and Trump White House officials have told ABC News that despite Waldhauser’s statements, the mission was never pegged to or driven by any efforts to find or recover Woodke and his name appears nowhere in AFRICOM’s 268-page investigative report, Mitchell and others have told ABC News.

Els Woodke and her two sons have wondered, however, if efforts to free her husband somehow led to the loss of the four American special operations soldiers.

“If this [mission] was indeed on my husband’s behalf, I would have to say, ‘Thank you so very much.’ Still, I am very sorry it happened,” she said in the documentary. “It’s a terrible burden to know that people [could] die in the attempt to rescue my husband … I don’t take that lightly.”

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(BIALYSTOK, Poland) — Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel talked with Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, on Wednesday, as part of a burst of European diplomatic efforts to end the migration crisis on the Belarusian border with Poland that Lukashenko is accused of orchestrating.

Lukashenko’s office claimed that during a call Wednesday, he and Merkel had come to a “certain understanding” over the crisis and agreed to begin immediate negotiations to resolve it. In a statement, the office said the two had agreed the negotiations would also look at resolving the “refugees’ wish to get to Germany.”

But Merkel’s spokesperson did not confirm the same, saying only that during her call she had “underlined the need to provide humanitarian care and opportunities of return” for the migrants trapped at Belarus’ border.

The call with Merkel — the second in three days — nonetheless raised hopes the crisis at the border may be easing, as at least 2,000 migrants remained trapped in a camp near it on Wednesday night and likely hundreds more in the surrounding forests.

Videos aired by Belarusian state media shows groups of migrants in the camp near the border dancing and cheering, supposedly following the call between Lukashenko and Merkel.

Over 2,000 migrants, mostly from the Middle East, have been stranded in a makeshift camp at the border with Poland in freezing temperatures for over a week, since Belarusian forces escorted them there in what European countries say was an escalation of a months-long campaign to use migrants weapons.

Lukashenko is accused of luring thousands of migrants to Belarus and funneling them to neighboring Poland and Lithuania to create a crisis on the European Union’s eastern border as retaliation for its support of the pro-democracy movement that came close to toppling him last year.

Poland and Lithuania have blocked the migrants, and Belarusian border troops have prevented them from retreating, resulting in hundreds of people finding themselves trapped in the forests along the border without food or shelter, often for weeks. Several thousand are estimated to be in Belarus currently. At least 10 people have died, though activists believe the true toll is likely higher. Hundreds of migrants have been filmed in recent days in central Minsk.

Merkel’s call with Lukashenko followed violent clashes on Tuesday, when Polish border guards fired water cannons into some migrants who were throwing stones and missiles at them at a crossing point near the town of Kuznica. Poland’s government, as well as some migrants in the camp, have accused Belarusian authorities of inciting the violence.

In recent days there has been a flurry of European diplomatic activity to try to resolve the crisis. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has called on Belarus’ foreign minister, while Merkel and France’s President Emmanuel Macron have called Lukashenko’s chief backer: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Lukashenko’s office said on Wednesday Merkel had conveyed a demand from the European Union’s president Ursula Von Der Leyen to allow international humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, to begin working with the migrants.

Von Der Leyen wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “People trapped at the border have to be repatriated.” The European Commission also said that it had allocated 700,000 euros in assistance to the people trapped at the border.

Following the violence on Tuesday, Belarus has moved hundreds of migrants to a warehouse near the border. But the vast majority of the migrants remained in the makeshift camp, according to Polish authorities, living largely in the open air and huddled around camp fires.

Migrants and Polish refugee charities have accused Belarusian authorities recently of manipulating migrants and spreading disinformation that they would soon be resettled to Germany and Poland.

Poland’s government has said it is strongly opposed to Germany and the EU’s outreach to Lukashenko over its head. Belarus’ democratic opposition has also cautioned against it.

“Dancing with the dictator is dangerous,” said Franak Viacorka, an aide to Belarus’ main opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, after the call with Merkel was announced. “Appeasement leads to impunity. When he feels that blackmail works, and can give him what he wants, he will escalate and lead to more victims if needed. Your humanity is just a weakness for him.”

Estonia’s foreign minister, Eva-Maria Liimets, said on Tuesday that during the call with Merkel on Monday, Lukashenko had demanded Europe recognize him as Belarus’ legitimate president and lift sanctions as conditions for ending the migrant crisis.

There was no sign on Wednesday of such a concession. Lukashenko’s press office said during his call with Merkel he had not raised the issue of his legitimacy and sanctions because they were “beneath him.”

Activist groups and volunteer medics have been continuing to try to reach migrants that are ill and who find themselves trapped in the forest on the Polish side. Poland’s border guard released a video on Wednesday showing a large number of migrants packing up at the Kuznica camp and being marched somewhere, escorted by Belarusian border guards. It was not clear where they were being taken.

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(LONDON) — Prime Minister Boris Johnson commented in a meeting Tuesday with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis that the decision to return the famous Parthenon marbles to Greece would be left to the British Museum, rather than the coming from Downing Street.

This is a break from his previous comments to Greek newspaper Ta Nea in March, when Johnson said the marbles shouldn’t be sent back as they’d been “legally acquired” at the beginning of the 19th century.

The marble sculptures are part of a Frieze previously wrapped around the walls of the Parthenon, which represents the procession of the Panathenaic festival, a commemoration of the birthday of the goddess Athena. Built 442 to 438 BC by the great Greek sculptor Phidias, the Frieze is composed on 115 marble panels, adorned with carved reliefs that represent humans, divine figures, mythological creatures and animals honoring Athena.

In 1801, while Greece was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, several of these blocks were taken by Thomas Bruce, the lord of Elgin, who was then the British ambassador to Constantinople. According to the museum’s website, “Elgin’s workmen cut off with saws or crowbars only the faces of the blocks that bore the relief decoration.”

Elgin claimed he had secured a permit from the then Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Selim III, a fact still disputed — some say his permit only allowed for conducting research on the site.

“He secured a permit from the Sultan to conduct research on the Acropolis which was under Ottoman-Turkish rule. However, he did not limit himself to that, but went ahead and removed numerous sculptures,” according to the Acropolis museum website, which says the sculptures were “forcibly removed” and “looted.”

Upon Elgin’s return to Britain, the pieces where moved to the British Museum, where they’ve remained.

“His actions were thoroughly investigated by a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816 and found to be entirely legal, prior to the sculptures entering the collection of the British Museum by Act of Parliament,” says the British Museum’s website.

A large part of the Parthenon already had been destroyed in 1687, during a bombardment orchestrated by the Venetian army of Francesco Morosini against the Ottomans. The temple continued deteriorating until 2009, when the Acropolis museum was built at the foot of the monument, and all the marbles were transferred there for safekeeping.

While most of the remaining marbles are divided between the British Museum and the Acropolis Museum, some fragments can be found at the Louvres in Paris, at the Vatican and in other major western European capitals. Mitsotakis has offered to exchange the marbles for other Greek artifacts that could be shown in their place.

While the Louvres temporarily sent back some of its marbles to Greece in 2019, in exchange for other artifacts, the British museum has not relented.

Paul Cartledge, a professor emeritus of Greek culture at Cambridge University and vice-chair of the British Committee for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles, told ABC News that the responsibility lies with the British government, which would have to approve the museum’s final decision by rescinding the 1816 parliamentary act that legally recognized ownership of the marbles.

“As the recent September 2021 UNESCO conference on cultural property reaffirmed,” Cartledge wrote in an email, “the decision and prior negotiations have to be ultimately nation-to-nation, Greece-to-Britain, and it has to be the decision of the U.K. Parliament.”

 

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