Month: February 2023

Wong Yu-wing, who holds a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering from the City University of Hong Kong, swapped out his career to start an organic farm in Hong Kong in 2010. “My mother was very opposed to me becoming a farmer,” he told The Loop, a lifestyle news website, in 2016 while operating what he reckoned was one of the top organic spreads in Hong Kong. “She worked so hard to pay for my education.” Now that Wong has left Hong Kong to start anew in Britain, he’s still relying on organic farming. His effort to educate Britons on the …

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German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said Saturday it was “regrettable” that China had blocked a Group of 20 communique to condemn Russia’s war on Ukraine. “But for me it was more important that all the others adhered to a clear position of international law, multilateralism and the end of the war,” he said. Lindner was speaking to reporters after a meeting of finance leaders from the world’s major economies in Bengaluru. He said that he was cautiously optimistic that there could be progress this year on debt restructuring for highly indebted countries. China is one of the largest creditors to …

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A man in Spain who was suspected of having the deadly Marburg disease tested negative Saturday and does not have the virus, the health ministry said. Health authorities in Valencia earlier said they had detected the country’s first suspected case of the infectious disease that has led to the quarantining of more than 200 people in Equatorial Guinea. The 34-year-old man, who had recently been in Equatorial Guinea, had been given the all-clear but would be tested again in the coming weeks, officials said. He had been transferred from a private hospital to an isolation unit at the Hospital La …

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The European Union agreed Saturday to impose new sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The EU said in a statement the new sanctions “are directed at military and political decision-makers, companies supporting or working within the Russian military industry, and commanders in the Wagner Group.” The EU sanctions also prohibit transactions with three more Russian banks and hit Iran, restricting exports by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of drones used in attacks against civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. The new measures announced Saturday were adopted after much internal disagreement over their exact makeup and made public one day …

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Turkey has arrested 184 people suspected of responsibility for the collapse of buildings in this month’s earthquakes and investigations are widening, a minister said Saturday, as anger simmers over what many see as corrupt building practices. Overnight, the death toll from the earthquakes, the most powerful of which struck at the dead of night Feb. 6, rose to 44,128 in Turkey. That took the overall number of deaths in Turkey and neighboring Syria to more than 50,000. More than 160,000 buildings containing 520,000 apartments collapsed or were severely damaged in Turkey by the disaster, the worst in the country’s modern …

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Britain and the European Union are inching toward concluding talks on revising post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland and an agreement is possible, but by no means guaranteed, in the coming days, Ireland’s prime minister said Saturday. Momentum has been building for weeks toward a deal to ease checks on trade that were introduced under the Northern Ireland Protocol – the arrangements agreed to avoid a hard border with EU member Ireland when Britain exited the EU in 2020. Lawmakers in British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party have been told to be in parliament Monday, in a sign that …

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Russia has likely depleted its supply of Iranian one-way-attack uncrewed aerial vehicles or OWA-UAVs, the British Defense Ministry said Saturday in an intelligence update. The ministry said there have not been any reports of the vehicles being used in Ukraine “since around” Feb. 15, while at least 24 were reported downed between late January and early February. “Scores were destroyed in the first few days of the year,” the ministry said. The British ministry said Ukraine will likely seek more stock of the unmanned vehicles, despite their bad track record for destroying their intended targets. “Russia likely sees them as …

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Spain has identified its first suspected case of Marburg disease.  The Spanish patient is a 34-year-old man who had recently traveled to the Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea.  He was in a private hospital but has been transferred to an isolation unit at Hospital La Fe in Valencia for further tests, regional medical officials said. Marburg virus disease, or MVD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “is a rare but severe hemorrhagic fever which affects both people and non-human primates … Primates [including people] can become infected with Marburg virus, and may develop serious disease with …

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