Cincunri Sakia

Minggu, 31 Juli 2022

‘Call a spade a spade’ — Latvia urges terror sponsor label for Russia - POLITICO Europe

The EU should designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs said, after an attack that killed dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war on Friday renewed calls to further isolate Moscow on the international stage.

“We see all the brutality of Russian forces, that actually resemble a lot of ISIS, who we have been always calling a terrorist organization,” Rinkēvičs told POLITICO in a phone interview on Sunday. “Let’s call a spade a spade,” he said.

Ukraine’s military has accused Russia of deliberately shelling a jail containing Ukrainian POWs in the eastern Donetsk region, while Russia’s Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of striking the prison. On Sunday, Russia said it formally invited the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate.

Rinkēvičs said that Europe should double down on efforts to isolate Russia.

“The only way to move forward is to strengthen the current strategy, which is support to Ukraine, send more military aid,” he said.

The minister also called for the confiscation of Russian government assets and for EU countries to restrict issuing visas for Russians, with an exemption for humanitarian reasons.

“Society needs to feel it,” Rinkēvičs said, arguing that the majority of Russians support the Kremlin’s policies. “If we condemn countries like Iran,” Rinkēvičs said, “Russia is not different.”

Ukraine’s government has asked its Western partners to designate Russia as a “terrorist state.”

“Our state received many signals from different countries condemning the Russian terrorist act in Olenivka,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video message posted late Saturday.

Zelenskyy, who is urging civilians to leave the Donbas area, said that the “world sees the truth” and “there must be legal steps on the part of the world community against the terrorist state.”

“Formal legal recognition of Russia as a terrorist state, in particular, recognition by the U.S. Department of State,” he said, “is needed not as a political gesture but as an effective defense of the free world.”

The comments by Rinkēvičs come after Russian gas monopoly Gazprom on Saturday said it was stopping deliveries to Latvia for an alleged breach of contract terms. “Today Gazprom stopped gas supplies to Latvia within the framework of the July order due to the violation of … conditions,” the company said in a Telegram post, without providing further details.

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2022-07-31 09:32:42Z
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Chinese anger over Taiwan visit grows after Pelosi departs on Asia tour - Financial Times

China has escalated its threats over Nancy Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan this week and conducted naval exercises across the region, just hours before the US House Speaker was expected to arrive in East Asia.

Pelosi’s office announced that a Congressional delegation headed by the Speaker had departed on Sunday for Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. The statement did not confirm if or when Pelosi would follow through with her plans to also visit Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims is an inalienable part of its sovereign territory.

The purpose of the trip, which has further strained fragile China-US ties, is to “reaffirm America’s strong and unshakeable commitment to our allies and friends in the region”, Pelosi’s office said. The six-member delegation includes the heads of the House foreign affairs and armed services committees.

The American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore has said it will be holding an in-person event with Pelosi on Monday afternoon.

Last week, during their first video call since March, Xi Jinping told Joe Biden that the US was “playing with fire” by not stopping such visits by American delegations, which the Chinese government regards as “interference by external forces” in its internal affairs.

In a Chinese social media post on Saturday, Hu Xijin, an outspoken former state media editor, said “it is OK [for the People’s Liberation Army] to shoot down Pelosi’s plane” if it was escorted to Taiwan by US fighter jets.

In an earlier post on Twitter, the former head of a tabloid published by the Chinese Communist party’s flagship newspaper group said that China should “punish” Pelosi if she did not cancel her planned visit to Taiwan. “[The] PLA Air Force will surely make her visit a disgrace to herself and to the US,” Hu added.

“Pelosi is one of the most important national leaders in the US,” said Lu Xiang, a US expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “For people in her position, every move comes with consequences. If she visits Taiwan without the consent of China there would be serious consequences, including military consequences.”

In a demonstration of its capabilities, the PLA conducted live-fire exercises on Saturday in Pingtan, a coastal area in southeastern Fujian province about 125km from Taiwan. State media also broadcast footage of a Chinese destroyer firing its weapons in the South China Sea, which the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier group is believed to be sailing through after visiting Singapore.

China’s Maritime Safety Administration has warned vessels that the PLA will conduct more live-fire exercises in another area of the South China Sea on August 2 and August 3.

Additional reporting by Xinning Liu and Maiqi Ding in Beijing

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2022-07-31 07:52:37Z
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In the small city of Hazard, the debris of destroyed homes shows just how powerful flash floods were - Sky News

It's the amount of water that passed through these rural Kentucky creeks that is so astonishing.

I'm standing by the banks of the river which runs through the town of Hazard.

I'm at least 30ft above the current water level. Yet there is mud and debris all around. The water level two nights ago was 10m (30ft) higher than it is now.

And that extraordinary extra volume of water was cascading through communities all over this part of Kentucky.

No wonder the power of the torrent was so huge.

A little down the valley, Eunice Howard showed us what was left of her home.

The house she built 27 years ago with her late husband has been ripped apart.

"I heard a noise and I raised the window and I saw the water and I knew I had to get help."

She began to sob: "I was in the house... I said 'well my house will be okay'…"

She doesn't really know how she managed to escape and had she not, she would certainly have lost her life.

Eunice's granddaughter, Cortney Clemons, wanted to show us the power of the water.

As we walked up the river bank from where the half intact house now sits, I realised what she had been trying to explain, because the house wasn't built where where it now sits.

A few hundred metres away, she showed us a patch of ground with some cement gridding. It was the foundations of her grandmother's home.

The building had literally been picked up and carried downstream.

We put our drone up and it became clear: a path of destruction. It was one snapshot of so many communities destroyed.

I asked Eunice and Cortney if they had ever seen this sort of flooding before.

"Not at all... not in all our time here," said Eunice who has been in this valley for more than 50 years.

Cortney added: "It's just very very sad to see the house you grew up in and everything get washed away. Memories... all that stuff you can't get back."

She said they would go 'creek fishing' to find things belonging to her late 'pop'.

Two things strike me on every extreme weather story I report on - and there have been many recently.

The first is that it's always the poorest hit hardest. So often the weather does discriminate.

In New York last year, the dead were those living in the basement apartments.

Here in Kentucky, the communities are not well off and their homes are not well built.

And that's the second thing - governments need to wholly rethink building and planning regulations with much more urgency.

Homes are not built to withstand the extreme weather that is now increasingly the norm.

There is lots of talk about funding for climate adaptation, but it's too late for every community hit, now seemingly with such regulatory.

Fighting climate change is about much more than cutting our emissions.

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2022-07-31 02:56:26Z
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Ukraine war: UN and Red Cross invited to investigate deaths of prisoners of war, Russia says - Sky News

Russia has invited the United Nations and the Red Cross to investigate the deaths of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

The prisoners were being held by Moscow-backed separatists at a jail in the town of Olenivka, in eastern Donetsk, when it was hit by rockets early on Friday.

Russia's defence ministry said 50 prisoners were killed and another 73 were injured, adding that it wanted to act "in the interest of conducting an objective investigation" into the attack.

It claims Ukrainian soldiers had used a US-made high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) to target the prison.

Ministry spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov said "all political, criminal and moral responsibility" rested with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, "his criminal regime and Washington who supports them".

But Ukraine said Russian artillery had been behind the attack, using it to hide the mistreatment of prisoners.

Mr Zelenskyy said: "It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

"There should be a clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism."

Subscribe to the Ukraine War Diaries on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and Spreaker

UN and Red Cross ready to head to prison attack site

According to reports, among those killed were Ukrainian soldiers captured in May after the fall of Mariupol, a southern port city where they famously held out against a months-long Russian siege.

The UN had earlier said it was ready to send experts to investigate the prison attack if both parties agreed.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had requested access to the prison to "determine the health and condition of all the people present on the site at the time of the attack".

It added: "Our priority right now is making sure the wounded receive life-saving treatment and that the bodies of those who lost their lives are dealt with in a dignified manner."

Night-time attacks

Meanwhile, Russia launched night-time attacks on several Ukrainian cities.

Rockets hit a school in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, with another attack about an hour later.

Mayor Ihor Terekhov said there were no reports of injuries.

One person was killed and six injured in shelling that hit a residential part of Mykolaiv in the south, the region's administration said.

A bus station in Sloviansk was also hit, according to the city's mayor Vadim Lyakh.

Thanks for those who housed Ukrainian refugees

Meanwhile, people in the UK who have housed more than 100,000 Ukrainians during the conflict will get a letter of thanks from the Ukrainian and British governments.

The letters will come from Ukraine's ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko and Refugees Minister Lord Harrington, praising households for contributing to the UK's "largest offer of help to people fleeing war since 1945".

About 104,000 people have arrived in Britain since the Ukraine visa schemes were launched in March - 31,300 under the family scheme and 72,700 under the Homes For Ukraine sponsorship scheme.

There have been almost 200,000 applications, meaning just over half who have applied have arrived in the UK.

The letter is expected to say: "You have saved lives, given hope, and offered sanctuary to people in desperate need.

"This represents the UK's largest offer of help to people fleeing war since 1945."

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2022-07-31 04:41:11Z
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Sabtu, 30 Juli 2022

Joe Biden tests positive for COVID again after 'rebound infection' - Sky News

Joe Biden has again tested positive for COVID-19 in what doctors say may be a "rebound" infection.

The US president, 79, has "experienced no re-emergence of symptoms and continues to feel quite well", White House physician Dr Kevin O'Connor said.

Mr Biden also tested positive nine days ago, on 21 July, when he was said to be "experiencing very mild symptoms".

The second confirmation of the virus is believed to be a "rebound" experienced by some patients, Dr O'Connor said.

It is something that can be experienced by patients who have been treated with an anti-viral medication called Paxlovid - the drug the president received.

In a tweet, Mr Biden said two positive tests in close succession can happen to a "small minority of folks".

He added: "I've got no symptoms but I am going to isolate for the safety of everyone around me.

"I'm still at work, and will be back on the road soon."

The president had tested negative for the last four days, Dr O'Connor said.

Given Mr Biden's lack of symptoms, there is no plan to reinitiate treatment, the medic added.

Mr Biden's diary includes a trip to Michigan on Tuesday to promote new legislation to boost the semiconductor industry - a visit announced earlier on Saturday.

After his initial positive test, the White House said the president was continuing to carry out his duties "fully".

Multiple members of the Biden administration and other senior figures in Washington have tested positive for the virus in recent months, including vice-president Kamala Harris, House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

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2022-07-30 21:30:11Z
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Thousands of protesters breach Iraq's parliament for second time this week - Sky News

Thousands of protesters have breached Iraq's parliament for a second time this week.

Followers of influential Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, are demonstrating against efforts by Iran-backed political groups to form the next government.

Security forces deployed tear gas and sound bombs in a bid to prevent people from entering the parliament building in the capital Baghdad.

But demonstrators used ropes to pull down cement barricades leading to the gate of the Green Zone - which is home to official buildings and foreign embassies.

At least 60 people have been injured in the clashes on Saturday, which saw an expected parliament session cancelled.

Demonstrators occupied the parliament floor and held aloft the Iraqi flag and posters of Mr al-Sadr.

The protests erupted as Iraq continues to face political deadlock, with ordinary people suffering most as a result of the stand-off.

Mr al-Sadr's party came first in a general election in October but fell short of a majority. Nine months later, no official government has been formed.

The party left talks in June after failing to form a government without Shi'ite rivals - mainly backed by Tehran.

The withdrawal handed the Coordination Framework bloc, led by Iran-backed Shi'ite parties and their allies, the majority necessary to move forward.

At least 70 people were hurt after protesters stormed the Iraqi parliament on Wednesday in protest over Mohammed al Sudani being nominated for the Iraqi premiership by the Coordination Framework.

Mr al-Sadr insisted any new government should be free of foreign influence and corruption that has plagued Iraq for decades - and has vowed civil unrest if he does not approve of the new regime.

One person among the crowds, Raad Thabet, 41, said: "We came today to remove the corrupt political class and prevent them from holding a parliament session, and to prevent the framework from forming a government.

"We responded to al-Sadr's call. We will go to the Green (Zone). No matter the cost."

Another protester, Abu Foad, said: "We are calling for a government free from corruption and those are the demands of the people."

The political stalemate is exacerbated by the fact Mr al-Sadr's loyalists are involved in running the country and hold powerful positions within Iraq's ministries and state organisations.

Caretaker prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi called on protesters to "immediately withdraw" as he urged people to show calm and restraint.

A statement posted on his official Twitter account on Saturday said Mr al-Kadhimi had "directed security forces to protect the demonstrators, and called on the demonstrators to remain peaceful in their movement, not to escalate, and to abide by the directives of the security forces whose goal is to protect them, and to protect official institutions."

Why is Iraq in political deadlock?

The selection of a president and the prime minister has been a painfully slow process since Saddam Hussein was toppled by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The former Iraqi leader warned the Americans they would not be able to run the country in the wake of the war - because they did not understand the language, history, or the "Arab mind".

A former CIA analyst who debriefed the captured leader warned that had Hussein stayed, Islamic State may not have gained ground in Iraq.

In March this year, Iraq's parliament failed again to vote for a president after a boycott by Iran-backed groups.

Mr al-Sadr had hoped Rebar Ahmed Khalid, veteran Kurdish intelligence official and interior minister of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region in the north, would be elected.

But just 202 members of 329 attended the vote - less than the minimum two-thirds required to choose a new president - while 126 officials boycotted the session.

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2022-07-30 15:11:15Z
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US Mega Millions lottery jackpot: Ticketholder wins nearly $1.3bn in Illinois - Sky News

A ticketholder has won the US Mega Millions jackpot of $1.28bn (£1.05bn) - the third biggest lottery prize in the country.

Officials said the single winning ticket was bought in Illinois.

The numbers drawn on Friday night were 13-36-45-57-67, with a Mega Ball of 14.

The jackpot grew to such an astronomical figure after 29 consecutive draws without a winner.

The jackpot is the biggest lottery prize in nearly four years.

The winner can either claim the $1.28bn prize in the annuity option, which spreads the amount over 30 annual payments, or a cash option for an estimated $747.2m (£613.3m). Nearly all jackpot winners choose the cash option.

Those who opt for the full prize could eventually afford to buy the world's largest yacht twice over. The 590ft megayacht belongs to Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates.

The odds of winning the jackpot were one in 302.5 million.

The UK's largest ever lottery win was £195m - claimed earlier this month.

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2022-07-30 12:53:06Z
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Minggu, 31 Juli 2022

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Sabtu, 30 Juli 2022

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