Month: June 2023

Can you pay my bills? That seems to be what Sweden is asking Beyoncé after the star came to town. When the singer launched her global tour last month in Stockholm, tens of thousands of fans from around the world swarmed the Swedish capital. But it’s not all fun and games for the host of the kickoff of Beyoncé’s first solo tour in seven years. A senior economist at a top Scandinavian bank says Beyoncé had something to do with Sweden’s higher-than-expected inflation rate last month. Consumer prices rose 9.7% last month in Sweden compared with a year earlier, the …

READ MORE

Key African countries stressed the need for grain imports to tackle food insecurity as Russian President Vladimir Putin prepares to discuss with the continent’s leaders the fate of a deal allowing the safe Black Sea export of food and fertilizer from Ukraine.  Putin said on Tuesday that Russia was considering quitting the Black Sea Grain Initiative – brokered by the United Nations and Turkey last July – because its own grain and fertilizer shipments still face obstacles. The pact could expire on July 17.  A delegation of African leaders is due to visit both Ukraine and Russia soon in a …

READ MORE

Spain must do more to prepare for increasingly virulent wildfires stoked by climate change, a large group of the country’s leading wildfire prevention experts said Thursday.  A declaration backed by 60 experts and institutions said the “increasingly intense fires … are producing unprecedented ecological and social consequences.”  The experts concluded that Spanish society must come to terms with the emergencies that it will likely face, given that wildfires in increasingly hot and dry conditions in the Iberian Peninsula are often “beyond the capability [of firefighters] to extinguish” with their own means.  The declaration was the outcome of a two-day meeting …

READ MORE

Despite a surging far right and anti-immigrant rhetoric in a number of rich nations, immigrants flocking to them are faring better in areas like education, jobs and integration than they were a decade ago, according to a new report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “Perception does not necessarily match with reality,” Thomas Liebig, senior administrator with the OECD’s International Immigration Policy Division, said in an interview. “The reality is things have improved. The perception is that things have not improved or gotten worse.” Another reality is that the number of immigrants continues to rise, regardless …

READ MORE

Finland’s accession to NATO and Sweden’s bid for membership have turned the Baltic region into a stronghold of alliance forces, a new political-military scenario very different from the one that existed prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Marcus Harton narrates this report from Ricardo Marquina in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. …

READ MORE

A committee of lawmakers harshly rebuked former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday, saying he lied to Parliament about lockdown-flouting parties and was complicit in a campaign to intimidate those investigating his conduct. The House of Commons Privileges Committee found Johnson’s actions were such a flagrant violation of the rules that they warranted a 90-day suspension from Parliament. That sanction would have been more than enough to trigger a by-election that could have cost Johnson his seat in Parliament, but the former prime minister avoided that ignominy by resigning on Friday after the committee gave him advance notice of …

READ MORE

Pope Francis will be discharged from hospital on Friday morning, nine days after he underwent surgery to repair an abdominal hernia, the Vatican said in a statement. Earlier on Thursday the Vatican released the first pictures of the 86-year-old pontiff since his admission to Rome’s Gemelli hospital on June 7, showing him in a wheelchair visiting its cancer ward for children. The pope’s engagements have been canceled until June 18. Francis rested well during the night, his recovery is proceeding normally, and his blood tests are in line with expected parameters, the Vatican statement said. The pope traditionally takes all …

READ MORE

Ukraine’s security needs, both immediate and long-term, are expected to dominate the discussion when NATO defense ministers meet Thursday and Friday in Brussels, where Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov will brief the participants on the progress of the war. The most urgent of those needs, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar told VOA in an interview Wednesday, is ammunition for her country to defend its skies against Russian aerial attacks and to sustain its long-awaited bid to recapture some Russian-held Ukrainian territory that began last week. Kyiv’s longer-term appeal is for early admission to the 30-nation defensive alliance, a request …

READ MORE

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country has begun taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The deployment is Moscow’s first move of such warheads — shorter-range less powerful nuclear weapons that could potentially be used on the battlefield — outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. “We have missiles and bombs that we have received from Russia,” Lukashenko said in an interview with the Rossiya-1 Russian state TV channel, which was posted on the …

READ MORE

Three Kosovo police officers were detained by Serbian forces on Wednesday but officials from Kosovo and Serbia gave different locations for the arrest, accusing each other of crossing the border illegally. Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti demanded the release of the three officers. He said they had been arrested 300 meters inside Kosovan territory, near the border with Serbia. “The entry of Serbian forces into the territory of Kosovo is aggression and aimed at escalation and destabilization,” Kurti wrote on his Facebook page. In response to the detentions, Kosovo’s interior minister, Xhelal Svecla, told reporters he had ordered officers at …

READ MORE