Monthly Archive 08/09/21

Росія: у місті під Москвою стався вибух газу, загинули двоє людей, є поранені

За даними Міністерства з питань надзвичайних ситуацій, унаслідок вибуху обрушилися частина зовнішньої стіни і перекриття будинку

Голови урядів Чехії, Австрії та Словаччини виступили проти прийому більшості афганських мігрантів у ЄС

Канцлер Австрії Себастьян Курц указав, що його країна внесе 21,3 мільйона доларів на допомогу афганцям у сусідніх з Афганістаном країнах

США стурбовані через кадровий склад очолюваного талібами уряду Афганістану

Фундаменталістське ісламістське угруповання «Талібан», що захопило владу в Афганістані, раніше 7 вересня оголосило склад свого уряду

МАГАТЕ: Іран блокує доступ до ядерних об’єктів і нарощує збагачення урану

У звіті МАГАТЕ підраховано, що зараз Іран має 84,3 кілограма урану, збагаченого до 20 відсотків, а також 10 кілограмів, збагачених до 60 відсотків

Paris Braces for Trial of 2015 Terror Attackers

Twenty people linked to the November 2015 terrorist attacks in France are going on trial in Paris Wednesday in proceedings expected to last nine months.  Six defendants are being charged in absentia. Reports say five of the six are presumed dead in Iraq or Syria.  Nine Islamic State terrorists, mostly from France and Belgium, left a trail of horror in a multi-pronged attack at the national stadium, various bars and restaurants and at a concert at the Bataclan Theater. A total of 130 people were killed, 90 of them at the concert hall. At least 490 people were injured.A 10th member of the terror cell and the only one still alive, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in Brussels four months after the November 13, 2015, strikes. He is accused of helping the others.”This trial is really an important step for the victims, those who have been wounded or injured, and those who lost members of their families,” Michael Dantinne, professor of criminology at the University of Liege, told France 24.He added that “it is only a step in the recovery process of the victims” and that “it won’t have any magical effect.”The trial will be held in a specially constructed court in Paris and is described as the biggest in France’s modern day legal history.Some information in this report came from the Associated Press and AFP.
 

Vaccines Offer Protection Against ‘Long COVID’, Scientists Say 

New research shows that coronavirus vaccines not only offer protection against infection and serious illness – but may also help prevent so-called ‘long COVID’, where symptoms can last for weeks or months. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.Camera: Henry Ridgwell   

Росія: за пів року 6 тисяч жителів Москви засуджені за статтею про мітинги

Загальна сума штрафів, накладених на обвинувачених за статтею про мітинги, склала за пів року майже 66 мільйонів рублів (близько 900 тисяч доларів)

European Leaders Mull Strategic Autonomy but Doubts Persist

Four years ago, newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron called for Europe to build “the capacity to act autonomously” in security matters so that the continent would be less dependent on the United States and could decide to act without U.S. backing. Most European leaders derided Macron’s idea as far-fetched. “Illusions of European strategic autonomy must come to an end,” said Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defense minister.But in the wake of the U.S.-led withdrawal from Afghanistan, her position has shifted. It is time to make “the European Union a strategic player to be reckoned with,” she announced last week in a commentary for the Atlantic Council, a New York-based think tank. She isn’t alone in rethinking the future of the transatlantic security arrangement. Europe’s opinion pages have been full of columns from politicians and security advisers advocating for the continent to become more independent militarily and less dependent on Washington. European leaders have been decrying President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as precipitous and complain Washington did not consult sufficiently with NATO allies.  Armin Laschet, a contender to succeed Angela Merkel as Germany’s chancellor, said last month: “We’re standing before an epochal change.”Even traditionally pro-American British politicians like Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, and a key partner for the United States in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, questions the reliability of the U.S. as a defense partner. On Monday he said Britain should strengthen its defense partnership with Europe to combat threats. In the U.S. there is “now an overwhelming political constraint on military interventions,” which represents a serious challenge to Britain and NATO, he said, in a speech to mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks that precipitated the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.Strategic autonomyHowever, there is little agreement in Europe about what strategic autonomy should mean and what Europe should do with it.,  The 27 member states of the EU have clashed repeatedly over foreign policy, from relations with Russia to whether China is an adversary or competitor. Central European leaders are especially nervous about loosening any defense ties with Washington and remain unconvinced they could rely on the Western Europeans in a confrontation with Russia.And skeptics question whether Europe is really prepared to spend what it would take to become a serious stand-alone strategic player, especially as they struggle with the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
 NATO Calls on Russia to Be Transparent With Military Exercises According to a tally by NATO Review, an allied magazine, Russia deployed between 60,000 and 70,000 troops in Zapad-2017 but only declared 12,700 personnel 
On average, European Union countries spend around 1.2 percent of their GDP on defense. Russia spends 4.3 percent while the U.S. spends 3.4 percent. But in a recent debate in the House of Commons, Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative lawmaker and chair of the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said the lesson he drew from the Afghanistan withdrawal was the need to help reinvigorate Britain’s European NATO partners and “to make sure that we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we can work together.”Changes needed?  
 
Lawrence Freedman, the influential emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, suspects the surge in talk about European strategic autonomy, though, is a knee-jerk reaction to what Armin Laschet has described as the “biggest NATO debacle” since the founding of the alliance.“It is always tempting but usually unwise to draw large geopolitical conclusions from specific events, however dramatic and distressing,” he noted in a commentary for The Times of London this week.The United States’ core strategic alliances in Europe and even Asia have weathered plenty of setbacks and disputes in the past, he said.“These alliances were built up over decades and remain in place. They have survived past disagreements and are unlikely to be set aside because the Biden administration mishandled the final withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan,” he added. “The post-mortems on the withdrawal from Afghanistan will most likely conclude that there is no need to make any fundamental policy changes,” he added.Afghan Pullout Hurt Biden Politically, but for How LongExperts are divided on whether the scenes of chaos in Kabul over the past two weeks will have an impact when the 2022 mid-term elections take place  
European interventions with no or little U.S. military support have not fared well. In July Macron announced that France’s anti-jihadist intervention in the volatile Sahel region, involving over 5,000 troops and launched by his predecessor in office, will end next year. The French leader has for years tried to persuade European allies to help shoulder more of the burden of the anti-terror fight in the Sahel, but to no avail. Britain, Denmark, and Sweden provided helicopter capabilities for air-mobility but little else from other European countries aside from some symbolic deployments emerged. In almost a pre-echo of Biden’s reasons for withdrawing from Afghanistan, Macron said: “We cannot secure certain areas because some states simply refuse to assume their duties. Otherwise, it is an endless task.” He added that the “long-term presence” of French troops “cannot be a substitute” for nation states handling their own affairs.Some diplomats suggest the current surge in talk about strategic autonomy will diminish as the shock of withdrawal wears off. They suggest much of the criticism should be seen as displacement activity, a way of coping with antagonistic urges. “They feel bad about leaving [Afghanistan] but they are also relieved to be out of a forever war they know couldn’t be won,” a European envoy in Brussels suggested to VOA. He asked not to be identified for this story.Other diplomats think the transatlantic security bonds will remain tight, but it will take some time for recovery from what they admit was a disorderly withdrawal.It is going to take quite a long time for the West as a whole — because it is a Western failure, a Western disaster, this is not just the UK and the U.S. — to recover from all this, to recover our reputation,” Kim Darroch, former British ambassador to the U.S. and the EU, told the BBC last month. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, though, says the withdrawal has offered “an opportunity for us to discuss the European Union as a geopolitical actor,” he said. “But this will require unity, in small things and in big things,” he told reporters in Brussels this week.Oxford University historian Timothy Garton Ash agrees. In an interview Tuesday he told the broadcaster Euronews: “President Joe Biden has made the case for what all Europeans are talking about, namely strategic autonomy and European sovereignty.”However, Ash, an advocate for European strategic autonomy, lamented that European powers missed the chance to show what they could do. “There were 2,500 American troops stabilizing Afghanistan. France and Britain alone have 10,000 troops and a rapid reaction force. Why didn’t we have a European conversation about what we could have done about it?”

British PM Johnson Raises Taxes to Tackle Health, Social Care Crisis

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson set out plans Tuesday to raise taxes on workers, employers and some investors to try to fix a health and social care funding crisis, angering some in his governing party by breaking an election promise.After spending huge amounts of money to fight the coronavirus pandemic, Johnson is returning to an election pledge to address Britain’s creaking social care system, where costs are projected to double as the population ages over the next two decades.He also moved to try to tackle a backlog in Britain’s health system, which has seen millions waiting months for treatment from the state-run National Health Service, after resources were refocused to deal with COVID-19.”It would be wrong for me to say that we can pay for this recovery without taking the difficult but responsible decisions about how we finance it,” Johnson told Parliament.”It would be irresponsible to meet the costs from higher borrowing and higher debt,” he said, outlining increases that broke a promise made in his Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto not to raise such levies to fund social care.British politicians have tried for years to find a way to pay for social care, though successive Conservative and Labor prime ministers have ducked the issue because they feared it would anger voters and their own parties.Ignoring disquiet in his party, Johnson outlined what he described as a new health and social care levy that will see the rate of National Insurance payroll taxes paid by both workers and employers rise by 1.25 percentage points, with the same increase also applied to the tax on shareholder dividends.He said the increases would raise $50 billion (36 billion pounds) over three years.The pound fell against the euro and dollar after the announced measures, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies said would increase Britain’s tax burden to 35% of GDP – a peacetime record.Johnson has tried to cool anger within his party, which has for decades positioned itself as a defender of low taxes, over the hikes, which some lawmakers fear could cost them support in an election due in 2024. Parliament will debate the measures further on Wednesday.Manifesto breaking  Johnson explained that elderly Britons would no longer face crippling care costs that have forced many to sell their homes and said he could not have predicted the coronavirus pandemic, which has further stretched services.”You can’t fix health and social care without long-term reform. The plan I’m setting out today will fix all of those problems together,” he said, to jeers and laughter from opposition Labor Party lawmakers.”I accept that this breaks a manifesto commitment, which is not something I do lightly, but a global pandemic was in no one’s manifesto.”Shortly afterwards, his work and pensions minister, Therese Coffey, said Britain would not raise state retirement pensions in line with earnings next year, breaking another election commitment to maintain the so-called “triple lock.”Labor leader Keir Starmer was quick to pounce on Conservative fears.”This is a tax rise that breaks a promise that the prime minister made at the last election … Read my lips, the Tories [Conservatives] can never again claim to be the party of low tax,” Starmer said.Some British businesses said the rise in national insurance would only compound damage done to firms by the pandemic. “This rise will impact the wider economic recovery by landing significant costs on firms when they are already facing a raft of new cost pressures and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit needed to drive the recovery,” said Suren â Thiru, head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce.Trade body Make UK said the move might put jobs at risk just as pandemic job support programs end.”Putting a tax on jobs and workers at a time when government is pulling the furlough scheme is ill-timed as well as illogical,” its chief executive Stephen Phipson said.Like many Western leaders, Johnson is facing demands to spend more on welfare, even though government borrowing has ballooned to 14.2% of economic output – a level last seen at the end of World War Two.For Johnson, who helped win the 2016 Brexit vote and then as prime minister presided over Britain’s exit from the European Union, fixing social care for the elderly and disabled “once and for all” offers a possible way to broaden his domestic legacy. In 2019, Johnson said he had a social care plan. Two years later, his proposals are a gamble.Critics say Johnson is expanding state spending again without any clear reform of the way social care is administered, and that the rise in National Insurance payments will disproportionately hit the young people and lower paid workers.

Україна потрапила в трійку країн, чиї громадяни найчастіше відвідували Грузію у серпні

Кордони Грузії відкриті для всіх іноземців, які пройшли повний курс вакцинації від COVID-19 вакциною будь-якого типу

Афганістан: «Талібан» оголосив склад свого уряду

Угруповання прагне встановити своє правління після падіння уряду Афганістану, підтримуваного ООН, у середині серпня

UK Gov’t Eyes Tax Hike to Pay for Care for Older People

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans Tuesday to fulfill a election promise to grapple with the rocketing cost of the long-term care needed by Britain’s growing older population. To do it, he appears set to break another election vow: not to raise taxes. Johnson is scheduled to tell Parliament how his Conservative government will raise billions to fund the care millions of Britons need in the final years of their lives. That burden currently falls largely on individuals, who often have to deplete their savings or sell their homes to pay for care. One in seven people ends up paying more than 100,000 pounds ($138,000), according to the government, which calls the cost of care “catastrophic and often unpredictable.” Meanwhile, funding care for the poor who can’t afford it is placing a growing burden on overstretched local authorities. Johnson has been tight-lipped about his plans, which are being unveiled to the Cabinet on Tuesday morning before he makes a statement in the House of Commons. But the prime minister said late Monday he would “not duck the tough decisions needed.” He is expected to announce an increase in National Insurance payments made by working-age people to fund care and the broader National Health Service, which has been put under immense strain by the coronavirus pandemic. That would break the firm promise in Johnson’s 2019 election platform not to hike personal taxes. Breaking promises is hardly novel for politicians, but those enshrined in British parties’ election manifestos have long been considered binding on governments. Johnson’s rumored plan has alarmed many Conservative lawmakers — both because it involves breaking a firm election commitment, and because the burden would fall on working-age people and not retirees. Jake Berry, one of a crop of Conservative lawmakers representing northern England seats won from the Labour Party with promises of investment and new jobs, said the proposed plan would help affluent, older voters at the expense of younger, poorer ones. And William Hague, a former Conservative leader, said breaking an election promise would be a “loss of credibility when making future election commitments, a blurring of the distinction between Tory and Labour philosophies, a recruiting cry for fringe parties on the right, and an impression given to the world that the U.K. is heading for higher taxes.” Attempts to reform the care system have stymied British governments. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, campaigned in a 2017 election on a plan to cut benefits to retirees and change the way they pay for long-term care. The idea was quickly dubbed a “dementia tax” by opponents, and May ended up losing her majority in Parliament. 

У Чехії учасника бойових дій на Донбасі проти України заочно засудили на 20 років

Їржі Урбанек перебуває в розшуку, бо лишився жити в окупованому Донецьку

Адвокат Фонду боротьби з корупцією та звинуваченого у держзраді Івана Сафронова залишив Росію

Адвокат Іван Павлов назвав свій від’їзд вимушеним і зазначив, що своє сьогодення і майбутнє продовжує пов’язувати з Росією і розраховує туди повернутися

Бразилія готується до масових мітингів за і проти ультраправого президента

Президент Жаїр Болсонару планує відвідати мітинги в столиці країни, місті Бразиліа, а також у Сан-Паулу

Теракти 11 вересня: судовий розгляд у справі поновлюється за декілька днів до річниці нападів

Досудові слухання поновлюються після 17-місячної паузи, коли Сполучені Штати готуються відзначити 20-ту річницю нападів

Британський експрем’єр Блер: іноземна військова присутність в Афганістані необхідна

Блер, який очолював британський уряд в 2001 році, коли міжнародна коаліція ввела свої війська в Афганістан, пропонує чітко визначити заходи протидії новому підйому тероризму

ПАРЄ відправить на вибори до Росії п’ятьох спостерігачів

ПАРЄ зазначила, що провести повноцінну місію цього року не вийде через епідеміологічну ситуацію, а також тому що в Росію на майбутні вибори не приїдуть їхні міжнародні партнери – спостерігачі від ОБСЄ

Жінки вийшли на акцію протесту на півночі Афганістану, попри погрози талібів

Організатори протесту повідомили Радіо Свобода, що бойовики руху «Талібан» зупинили журналістів, які намагалися висвітлити демонстрацію, і побили декого з них

Sweden Arrests Two Women Linked to IS

Swedish police said Monday they had arrested two women linked to Islamic State after they flew back from Syria, as media reported that one was being investigated for war crimes. Stockholm police spokesman Ola Osterling said the prosecutor leading the investigation into the two women had ordered their arrest. “We executed that decision when the plane arrived in Stockholm in the afternoon,” Osterling told AFP. A third woman had been taken in for questioning, he added. A statement Monday from the Prosecution Authority said multiple investigations were underway against men and women returning from areas that had been controlled by Islamic State. “The international crimes that are relevant for people returning from IS-controlled areas are war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity,” public prosecutor Reena Devgun said in the statement. “Sweden has an international commitment to investigate and prosecute these crimes,” she added. The Prosecution Authority added that it could not comment on individual cases or the number of investigations underway. But public broadcaster SVT reported that at least one of the women arrested was being investigated for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. SVT also reported that the women who had returned Monday had been staying in camps in northern Syria but were deported after Kurdish authorities decided they did not have enough evidence to prosecute them.