Month: November 2024

As the war in Ukraine entered its 1,000th day Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a revised nuclear doctrine stating that a conventional attack on Russia by any nation supported by a nuclear power is considered a joint attack and could trigger a nuclear response. The proclamation came a day after U.S. President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine to use long-range weapons from the U.S. to attack military targets in Russia. When Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked if the revised doctrine was issued in response to the U.S. authorization, he said it was put forth “in a timely manner” …

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VILNIUS, Lithuania — Lithuania’s Navy said on Tuesday it had increased monitoring of its waters after an undersea communications cable connecting the country with Sweden had been damaged. An assessment is now being carried out along with allies, a spokesperson for the Lithuanian armed forces told Reuters. The cable was one of two fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea which were severed in recent days, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors, countries and companies involved said on Monday. A spokesperson for Arelion, the owner and operator of the communications cable, told Reuters on Tuesday that the link between Lithuania and …

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NEW YORK — Arthur Frommer, whose “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take budget vacations abroad, has died. He was 95. Frommer died from complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pauline Frommer said Monday. “My father opened up the world to so many people,” she said. “He believed deeply that travel could be an enlightening activity and one that did not require a big budget.” Frommer began writing about travel while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s. When a guidebook he wrote for American soldiers overseas sold out, he …

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Russia vetoed a United Nation resolution Monday calling for an immediate cease-fire between Sudan’s warring parties and the delivery of humanitarian aid to millions of Sudanese. Russia was the only Security Council member that voted against the cease-fire resolution. China, Russia’s ally, supported the resolution, drafted by the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone. Russian Deputy U.N. Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told the council that Moscow vetoed the resolution because Sudan’s government should be “solely” responsible for what happens in Sudan. U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “It is shocking that Russia has vetoed an effort to save lives, though perhaps it shouldn’t …

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BAKU, Azerbaijan — Young people who attend the U.N. climate talks have a lot to be angry about. They’ve lost loved ones and months of school. They’ve lost homes and family farms and connections to their families’ native lands. They haven’t lost hope, though. Not yet. “It has become so tiring for me to be just a poster child,” said Marinel Ubaldo, who by age 16 had watched two back-to-back supersized typhoons destroy entire communities in her native Philippines. Missing a chunk of high school in the aftermath, because there was no school to go back to, was a wake-up call. …

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tbilisi, georgia — Demonstrators in Georgia’s capital have set up tents on a central thoroughfare and vowed Monday to stay around the clock to demand new parliamentary elections in the country. The October 26 election kept the governing Georgian Dream party in power, but opponents say the vote was rigged with Russia’s assistance. Many Georgians viewed the election as a referendum on the country’s effort to join the European Union. Several large protests have been held since then. President Salome Zourabichvili, who has rejected the official results, declared on Monday that she would appeal the vote results to the Constitutional Court. …

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Russian opposition members in exile took to the streets of Berlin Sunday to demand a pullout of Russian troops from Ukraine and the resignation of President Vladimir Putin in a protest that would have been impossible in Russia due to police and judicial pressure on opposition movements. Elizabeth Cherneff narrates this report from Ricardo Marquina in Berlin. …

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The Holocaust Museum LA recently installed a new exhibit on its roof: a German-made freight car that was used to deport Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. From Los Angeles, Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. …

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The Kremlin accused U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday of escalating hostility over Moscow’s nearly three-year-long war on Ukraine with his marked policy shift to allow Kyiv to use Washington-supplied, long-range missiles to strike inside Russia. The decision by Biden, who is leaving office in two months, marks a “new spiral of tensions and a qualitatively new situation from the point of view of the U.S.’s engagement in the conflict,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not comment publicly, but Peskov referred journalists to a Putin statement in September, in which he said allowing Ukraine to …

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