WORLD BRIEFS

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is “strong and unpredictable,” and those qualities can be a decisive factor in his policy approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

However, Zelenskyy said it won’t be possible to end the almost three years of war in one day, as Trump claimed during his election campaign that he could do.

“The ‘hot’ stage of the war can end quite quickly, if Trump is strong in his position,” Zelenskyy said in a Ukrainian television interview late Thursday, referring to fighting on the battlefield.

“I believe (Trump) is strong and unpredictable. I would very much like President Trump’s unpredictability to be directed primarily toward the Russian Federation,” Zelenskyy said.

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, hasn’t publicly fleshed out his policy on Ukraine, but his previous comments have put a question mark over whether the United States will continue to be Ukraine’s biggest — and most important — military backer.

Zelenskyy is eager to guarantee that Washington’s support keeps coming, and he met with Trump in New York even before the U.S. presidential election in November.

With the war about to enter its fourth year next month,

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and with Trump coming to power, the question of how and when Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II might end has come to the fore.

Russia controls about onefifth of Ukraine, and capitalized last year on weaknesses in Ukraine’s defenses to slowly advance in eastern areas despite high losses of troops and equipment. The war’s trajectory isn’t in Ukraine’s favor. The country is shorthanded on the front line and needs continued support from its Western partners.

Trump responded favorably to the possibility raised by French President Emmanuel Macron of Western peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine to oversee an agreement that stops the fighting, Zelenskyy said. He met with Trump and Macron in Paris last month.

Honduras may end U.S. military cooperation over Trump mass deportation threat

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Honduras President Xiomara Castro’s comments earlier this week threatening to stop her country’s cooperation with the U.S. military if President- elect Donald Trump follows through on promised mass deportations have generated political heat at home, even as the U.S. government has remained silent.

In a New Year’s Day speech on a national television channel, Castro said that if Trump goes ahead with massive deportations, Honduras would reconsider military cooperation with the U.S.

“Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change of our cooperation policies with the United States, especially in the military realm,” Castro said.

She said the U.S. had maintained a presence in Honduran territory for decades without paying a cent and if Hondurans are expelled en masse that presence would cease to have any reason to exist in Honduras. She added that she hoped the Trump administration would be open to dialogue.

It was just the latest response in the region to early pronouncements from Trump.

His threat to impose tariffs

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on Mexico if it didn’t do more to stop illegal migration and drug trafficking was met with a suggestion of retaliatory tariffs from that government. More recently Trump criticized charges to transit the Panama Canal and suggested the U.S. could take it back, something Panama’s president emphatically rejected.

The main U.S. military presence in Honduras is at Soto Cano Air Base outside the capital. While it is a Honduran base, the U.S. has maintained a significant presence there since 1983 and it has become a key U.S. launching point for humanitarian and anti-drug missions in Central America.

It is home to Joint Task Force Bravo, which the U.S. Defense Department has described as a “temporary but indefinite” presence.

Senior minister says Musk is ‘misinformed’ over grooming attacks in U.K.

LONDON (AP) — A senior British politician pushed back Friday on Elon Musk’s criticism of the government’s handling of a historic child grooming scandal.

In recent days, Musk has shared and reacted to posts on his X platform that have been critical of the British government after it rejected a call for a public inquiry into the grooming scandal in the north of England town of Oldham.

Though Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Musk’s views were was “misjudged and certainly misinformed,” he urged the world’s richest man and close confidant of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to work with the government on tackling the issue of child sexual exploitation.

The government has argued that Oldham must follow in the footsteps of other towns and commission its own inquiry into the historical abuse of mainly girls.

A 2022 report into safeguarding measures in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found that children were failed by local agencies, but that there was no cover-up despite “legitimate concerns” that the far-right would capitalize on “the high-profile convictions of predominantly Pakistani offenders across the country.”

Musk has also targeted British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who he claimed had failed to bring what many term “rape gangs” to justice when he was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. The scandals, Musk said Friday, represent a “massive crime against humanity.”

Streeting told ITV News that the government took child sexual exploitation “incredibly seriously” and that it was supportive of an inquiry into the Oldham scandal, but that it should be led locally.

“Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made, I think are misjudged and certainly misinformed, but we’re willing to work with Elon Musk, who I think has got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries to tackle this serious issue,” Streeting said. “So if he wants to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that.”