Month: October 2018

The death toll from flooding and gale-force winds battering Italy rose to 11, authorities said Tuesday as storms raged across Europe. Roads were reported blocked and thousands were left without power in southern and central Europe, where fierce winds and rain felled trees. Venice flooded to a level seen few times before in the lagoon city’s history, with tourists and residents holding bags above their heads as water sloshed above their knees. Debris from pulverized yachts filled the harbor of Rapallo near Genoa after a dam broke under the pressure of flood waters. Heavy snow trapped many in their cars and …

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Recent allegations that an oligarch with close personal ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind several attacks and at least one killing has compelled some journalists and free speech advocates to take a stand against intimidation tactics in Russia. An October 22 Novaya Gazeta article by reporter Denis Korotkov, who just days prior to publication received a funeral wreath bearing an anonymous threat at his private residence and a severed goat’s head in a basket outside his newsroom, says billionaire businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin has directed clandestine hits on multiple continents. Prigozhin, who is known as “Putin’s Chef” for catering …

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Russia’s only aircraft carrier was damaged while undergoing repairs in the north of the country after the floating dock holding it sank in the early hours of Tuesday and a crane crashed onto its deck, tearing a gash up to 5 meters wide. The Admiral Kuznetsov has seen action in Russia’s military campaign in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad with its planes carrying out airstrikes against rebel forces. It was being overhauled on one of the world’s biggest floating docks in the icy waters of the Kola Bay near Murmansk close to where Russia’s Northern Fleet is based …

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The head of Europe’s largest airport is urging the British government to quickly implement plans allowing more overseas passengers, including Americans, to use the shorter e-passport gates. Under the plan outlined by Treasury chief Philip Hammond in his budget Monday, air passengers from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan will be allowed to use the gates starting this summer.   Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said Tuesday the government should think about making it happen sooner, perhaps before March, when Britain is set to leave the European Union. He says doing so would “demonstrate that Britain is open …

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British Jews held vigils Monday to honor the 11 people killed last week in the mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. As they gathered in London, Liverpool, Brighton and Oxford to mourn those killed in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, many said the massacre has added greater urgency to the question, “Where’s safe?” “For many of us America has been seen as a sanctuary, the safest place for Jews.  That is until Saturday,” says Julia Kaufman, a 34-year-old mother of two, who attended a vigil in northwest London. “Pittsburgh is a bleak reminder, nowhere’s really …

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The leader of Sweden’s Social Democrats, Stefan Lofven, on Monday abandoned efforts to form a government, extending a political deadlock that has gripped the country since an inconclusive national election seven weeks ago. The failed attempt brought the prospect of a snap election closer, though the speaker of parliament said he would try to avoid that at all costs. The Sept. 9 vote gave the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power, but neither Lofven’s center-left bloc nor the center-right group of parties has been willing to give them a say in policy due to their white supremacist roots. …

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Belarusians gathered in Minsk on Monday to commemorate more than 100 people, including 22 writers and poets, who were executed by the NKVD secret service on Oct. 29, 1937, during Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. The 100 victims, many of them from the Belarusian intelligentsia, were among between 600,000 and 1.5 million people in then-Soviet Belarus who were swept up in Stalin’s mass repression of dissent that came to a head in 1937. At one memorial event Monday, about 20 people lit candles next to the Minsk headquarters of the KGB security service, the present-day successor to the NKVD. …

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Russia has sent a high-level official delegation to Venezuela, including a deputy finance minister, to help advise the cash-strapped country on economic reform at a time of crisis, a spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Finance said Monday. Almost 2 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015, driven out by food and medicine shortages and violent crime with inflation running at 200,000 percent and the OPEC nation’s oil production hitting a 28-year low in 2017. Russian oil major Rosneft said in August Venezuela owed it $3.6 billion, while Moscow and Caracas last year signed a debt restructuring deal that …

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