Month: January 2023

The U.S. accused Russia on Tuesday of violating the nuclear arms control START treaty, contending that Moscow was refusing to allow inspection activities inside Russia. The treaty, the last major pillar of post-Cold War nuclear arms control efforts, took effect in 2011 and was extended in 2021 for five more years. It sets a limit on the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them. Together, the two countries still account for about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads. Washington has been …

READ MORE

Climate activists in South Africa are protesting a refueling stop by a Russian ship that they say is ignoring a ban on exploring oil and gas in Antarctica. Protest organizers Greenpeace Africa and Extinction Rebellion say the seismic tests the Akademik Alexander Karpinsky has been conducting in Antarctica for the past 25 years are harmful to marine life like dolphins and whales. They also say that fossil fuels should stay in the ground if the world is to prevent catastrophic global warming. The ship’s operator, Polar Marine Geosurvey Expedition, a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned mineral explorer RosGeo, insists it is …

READ MORE

Finnish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic unions will quit a global media federation on Tuesday in protest at “corruptive activity,” including allowing Russian state media journalists in Ukraine to stay as members, the Finnish union said. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which represents 600,000 journalists in 146 countries, denounced the accusations as “false, defamatory and damaging.” The Nordic members accused the IFJ of longstanding undemocratic practices, unethical finances and of allowing the Russian state media representatives to continue as members. “We call this corruptive activity,” Hanne Aho, the chair of the Union of Journalists in Finland, told Reuters, adding the …

READ MORE

Tuesday brought a new round of strikes in France as citizens protest proposed pension reforms.  Worker strikes severely limited Paris metro and other rail services, while Air France canceled some of its short and medium flights.  Half of the primary school teachers planned to strike, their union said, while power supplies were down with workers in the electrical sector also going on strike.  Tuesday’s round of protests follows an initial round on January 19 in which more than a million people participated.  President Emmanuel Macron’s government is proposing raising the retirement age in France from 62 to 64 years of …

READ MORE

France and Australia have agreed to join forces to produce thousands of artillery shells to help Ukraine push Russian forces out of its country. Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong are in Europe for talks with key allies. French and Australian officials say several thousand 155 millimeter artillery shells will be manufactured jointly by French arms supplier Nexter, while Australia will supply the gunpowder. The first supplies are expected to be delivered to Ukraine by the end of April. The announcement was made Monday at a joint news conference in Paris by French Defense Minister …

READ MORE

A decade ago this year, the head of the European Union’s executive branch stood, visibly shaken, before rows of coffins holding the corpses of migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Some of them, small and bone-white, contained the bodies of infants and children.  “That image of hundreds of coffins will never get out of my mind. It is something I think one cannot forget. Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child that was born just at that moment,” Jose Manuel Barroso, then president of the European Commission, said in 2013.  More than 300 people died …

READ MORE

Czech President-elect Petr Pavel vowed Monday to boost his country’s ties with Taiwan after holding a phone call with the island’s president and foreign minister.  President Tsai Ing-wen congratulated Pavel on his win in Saturday’s presidential run-off over the populist billionaire Andrej Babis.  “I thanked her for her congratulations, and I assured her that Taiwan and the Czech Republic share the values of freedom, democracy, and human rights,” Pavel said on Twitter.  “We agreed on strengthening our partnership,” added the former general, who served as head of NATO’s military committee in 2015-2018.  He said he “expressed hope to have the …

READ MORE