Month: June 2023

Huge strides in life expectancy worldwide are bringing new challenges that come with increased longevity, the Dutch health minister told VOA this week. “If you look at it from a global perspective, we’ve seen that over the past 25 years, on average we added more than five years of global life expectancy,” Ernst Kuipers, Dutch minister of health, welfare and sport, noted during a stop in Washington. Looking at it another way, the former internist continued, “It actually means that for more than 20 years in a row, every week we added more than a day to the life expectancy …

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The southern reach of the Dnipro river is likely to return to its banks by June 16 following a vast flood unleashed by the breach of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam this week, a Russian-installed official said Saturday. The flood has inundated towns and villages below the dam, trapping residents and sweeping away entire houses on both sides of the Dnipro, which separates Ukrainian-controlled Kherson province from the southern section that Russian forces control. Vladimir Saldo, who heads the Russian-controlled part, said the water level at Nova Kakhovka, the town adjacent to the dam on the downstream side, had dropped by 3 …

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Lithuania’s capital was flooded with pink food, decor, and colorful outfits on Saturday, as residents celebrated the Baltic nation’s love for a cold beetroot dish commonly known as “pink soup.”  While beetroot soup is beloved in many eastern European nations, Lithuania lays claim to Saltibarsciai — made of kefir, cucumbers, beetroot, and dill — eaten cold and a favorite on a hot summer’s day.  “It’s not just soup – it’s a way of life,” said the city’s tourism agency Go Vilnius, which organized the inaugural festival in its honor.  French student Victor Delcroix came dressed as a bowl of “Pink …

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An explosion at a rocket and explosives plant in Turkey caused a building to collapse Saturday, killing all five workers inside, an official said.  The explosion occurred at around 8:45 a.m. at the compound of the state-owned Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation, on the outskirts of the capital, Ankara, Gov. Vasip Sahin told reporters.  Sahin said the explosion was likely to have been caused by a chemical reaction during the production of dynamite. Prosecutors have launched a formal investigation, he said.  Gray smoke was seen rising from the compound as ambulances and fire trucks rushed to the area, private NTV …

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French judges Saturday handed preliminary charges of attempted murder to a man suspected of stabbing four young children and two adults in a French Alps park, an attack that reverberated across France and beyond.  The suspect, a 31-year-old Syrian refugee with permanent Swedish residency, has a 3-year-old daughter living in Sweden, regional prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said. Witnesses told investigators that the suspect mentioned his daughter, his wife and Jesus Christ during the attack Thursday targeting a playground in the lakeside town of Annecy.  The victims, who came from multiple countries, are no longer in life-threatening condition, the prosecutor said. The …

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The United Nations and Russia began talks Friday about Russia’s continued participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which facilitates the export of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products from Back Sea ports. Rebecca Greenspan, secretary-general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, held discussions with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin. Before the talks, however, Vershinin said some recent Ukraine developments could not be overlooked in the talks. Those events include the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in the Kharkov region and the destruction of Russia’s Togliatti Odessa ammonia pipeline, also in Kharkov. The pipeline is one of …

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The United States and Kosovo are continuing to engage in an unusual public spat, after the staunch U.S. ally’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, resisted calls to take steps that the West says are necessary to de-escalate ethnic tensions in the country’s north. Tensions flared last week as ethnic Albanian mayors entered municipal buildings with the backing of police, despite having won with only 3.5 percent of the vote in local elections that ethnic Serbs boycotted. U.S. Special Envoy for the Western Balkans Gabriel Escobar and EU Special Envoy Miroslav Lajcak visited Kosovo and Serbia this week, where they asked the …

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U.S. President Joe Biden is set to meet outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House on Monday as jockeying to secure his successor intensifies. While the White House says the official agenda for the meeting is to discuss the alliance’s July summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the issue of who will be next at NATO’s helm during this difficult period in its 74-year history will no doubt be front and center, as the alliance faces Russia’s war in Ukraine. Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, is the longest-serving NATO chief in a generation and has had his tenure extended …

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