The US has charged former Cuban leader Raúl Castro with conspiracy to kill US nationals and other crimes over the 1996 downing of two planes between Cuba and Florida.

The charges must be argued in a US court, with some carrying the possibility life terms. The murder charges each carry a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment.

The justice department’s new charges take aim at a key figurehead of Cuba’s communist leadership when it is facing intense US pressure to make significant political and economic reforms to its one-party rule there.

“I think the strategy is to increase the pressure gradually to the point where the Cuban government will give in and surrender at the bargaining table,” said Wiliam LeoGrand, a expert on Latin American politics at American University.

The US has issued sanctions on the country and imposed a blockade on oil to Cuba that has resulted in blackouts and food shortages.

Earlier on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a message to the Cuban people timed to the country’s independence day.

“President Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba,” Rubio said.

Rubio told citizens of the island that a Cuban military run conglomerate known as GAESA is primarily responsible for the blackouts and food shortages that the country continues to endure.

GAESA owns or operates most of the lucrative parts of the Cuban economy from the ports to the petrol pumps to five-star hotels.

In response to Rubio’s message, Díaz-Canel accused the US of lying and imposing a collective punishment on the Cuban people.

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges in Miami. (BBC)

Díaz-Canel also said that the indictment of Castro was being used to “justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba” and accused the US of distorting the facts around the downing of the plane.

He claimed that Cuba acted in “legitimate self-defence within its jurisdictional waters”.

Asked by reporters about the prospects of bringing Castro to the US to face charges, Blanche responded that there was a warrant for his arrest.

He did not confirm whether the US would try to capture Castro, but said, “we expect he will show up here, by his own will or another way”.

American University’s LeoGrande said he believes the US is ready to capture the former Cuban leader “if the Cubans don’t surrender at the bargaining table”.

In January, the US staged a military operation to seize former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the US, after the justice department indicted him.

It transformed Venezuela’s relationship with Washington, something LeoGrande cautioned would be unlikely to have the same effect in Cuba, noting Castro retired almost a decade ago.

Nearly 95 years old, Castro, the brother of late Cuban leader Fidel Castro, remains an influential figure, acknowledged on the island as the surviving “leader of the Cuban Revolution”.

He has relinquished his active government and party roles, but during his 2008-2018 presidency, he and former US president Barack Obama presided over a short-lived thaw in Washington-Havana relations.

Blanche said he would “not compare cases” between Castro’s and that of Maduro.

President Donald Trump was asked about the political aspect of Wednesday’s indictment.

“A lot of those people are related to me in the sense that I’ve had such a great relationship with Cuban-Americans,” Trump said. “On a humanitarian basis, we’re here to help.”

While Castro is not expected to be extradited or to appear in the case, all options appear to be on the table, says attorney Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, who served as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Miami.

“If he did appear in the case, he would be afforded the same legal rights as any other defendant,” Friedman said, adding that would ultimately include a trial by jury.

“No one expects that the case will follow this typical path… but the indictment is compelling and is supported by significant evidence,” she told the BBC.

Cuba unlikely to bow without a fight

The Miami centre where US officials announced the indictment of Raúl Castro was full of Cuban Americans, mostly representing Cuban exile organisations that have for decades led opposition of the Cuban government from within the United States.

Surrounded by pictures of the four people who died in the 1996 crashes, many at the Miami event described being thrilled by the news.

“It was time, 67 years of that murderous regime,” said Isela Fiterre. “Raúl Castro did not merely kill four individuals. Over the course of many years, he has killed countless people,” Fiterre said.

She said it is never too late for justice and that she is grateful to the Trump administration for taking this step.

Another attendee, Mercedes Puid-Soto, echoed those sentiments.

“I feel very happy. Justice has been served,” she said. “It’s very important that the families can close that chapter, and we Cubans too.”

Still looming over Blanche’s announcement was the answer to “whether the Trump administration will use this indictment in a similar way that it used the indictment against Maduro, as a justification to carry out a military operation under the cover of a law enforcement action,” said Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It’s unlikely that the Cuban regime will surrender to the United States without a fight,” Vigil noted. “And any move that includes working with the Cuban regime would be very difficult for the Cuban diaspora in the United States to accept.”

US and Cuban representatives, including Raúl Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, have held “conversations” in recent months, but US charges against the former president are unlikely to smooth these contacts.

On the contrary, the Cuban side showed signs of further entrenching into its “no surrender, no concessions” position against US pressure, with Cuban state media outlets blasting what they called the “false accusations”.

(BBC)

At least 10 people have died after heavy rains caused widespread flooding and landslides across southern and central China.

The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) maintained elevated orange alerts on Tuesday for heavy rain and severe stormy weather, warning that the huge precipitation system has entered its strongest, most destructive stage.

China’s State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters officially activated a Level-IV emergency response, the initial tier to accelerate state-level disaster relief for floods, in Hunan and Guangxi, while maintaining the same emergency tier for Hubei, Chongqing, and Guizhou.

The torrential downpours have shattered multiple local historical records, particularly in the central Hubei province. State broadcaster CCTV reported that 337 townships in Hubei recorded more than 100mm of rain within a 48-hour window.

In Guangxi, six people died after a pick-up truck carrying 15 passengers fell into a swollen river amid heavy rainfall, CCTV said. In Hubei, three people were killed by flash floods in a low-lying village, while another death was recorded in southern Hunan province.

Images on the Chinese social media platform Douyin showed residents in Jingzhou, Hubei, standing knee-deep in floodwater, with some catching fish swimming in submerged streets. Several cars were almost entirely underwater.

Authorities have suspended schools, businesses, and transport services in affected areas. Emergency responses are under way, and residents in parts of Hubei and Hunan are actively being relocated.

Meteorologists attributed the unusually large area of intense rainfall to the convergence of moisture from the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. They said the slow-moving nature of the weather system had exacerbated cumulative rainfall totals.

The National Meteorological Centre expects severe weather to move east and south over the next two days, with the heaviest rainfall forecast along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River from Wednesday.

[Aljazeera]

A Jackson Pollock artwork, described as one of history’s “first truly abstract paintings”, has sold at auction for $181m (£135m) in New York.

Number 7A, 1948, which went under the hammer at the renowned Christie’s auction house on Monday, smashed the previous record for the most a work by the late American artist has taken at auction.

The painting, which came from the private collection of media magnate SI Newhouse, is also now the fourth most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, according to ARTnews.

Also in the collection was a bronze sculpture by Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi, which sold for $107.6m – the second highest amount a sculpture has ever gone for at auction.

Pollock, who died in 1956, was a major figure in the abstract expressionist art movement. His drip painting technique is one the art world’s most recognisable and often imitated.

The previous auction record for one of Pollock’s artworks was $61.2m for his Number 17, 1951 painting, which was sold in 2021. Other pieces have sold for higher prices in private sales.

Christie’s called Number 7A, 1948, which depicts black drips of paint with touches of red on a huge canvas spanning more than three metres, a key piece of art history.

“It is with this work that Pollock finally frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art,” it wrote in its description of the piece online.

Other artworks sold at the Christie’s auction included pieces by Mark Rothko and Joan Miro, which also both broke previous records for works by the artists at auction.

[BBC]