Category: Євросоюз

Pacific Gas & Electric and a group of insurers announced Friday they reached an $11 billion settlement to cover most of the claims from wildfires in California in 2017 and 2018.   The utility said in a statement the tentative agreement covers 85% of the insurance claims from fires that included the one that decimated the town of Paradise and killed 86 people. A group of insurers said in a separate statement the settlement is well below the $20 billion the insurance companies had sought in bankruptcy court. FILE – A Pacific Gas & Electric truck enters their customer center …

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Turkish, Iranian and Russian presidents will meet in Ankara Monday under the Astana process, where the three countries regularly meet to try and resolve the Syrian conflict. The fate of the last rebel enclave in Idlib is expected top the agenda. With Syrian regime forces threatening to overrun Idlib, Ankara is warning of a humanitarian disaster. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.   …

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U.S. Democrats held their third presidential primary debate Thursday in Houston, Texas.  The debate was a spirited encounter that included clashes over health care, immigration and foreign policy involving the top 10 Democratic contenders vying for the right to take on President Donald Trump next year.  VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.   …

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For many new students, the biggest life lessons come from living on campus with other young people. “They may be doing their own laundry for the first time. They may be sharing space with another person for the first time. They may be, in some cases, responsible for making their own meals,” said Nick Lander, associate director of residence life at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. New students share sleeping quarters, kitchens, study spaces and bathrooms with many students while they may have come from a family home where they had their own room and spaces. “So those things …

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Juanita Abernathy, who wrote the business plan for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and took other influential steps in helping to build the American civil rights movement, died Thursday. She was 88. Family spokesman James Peterson confirmed Abernathy died at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta following complications from a stroke. In a statement, Peterson said Abernathy died surrounded by her three children and four grandchildren. The widow of the Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy worked alongside him and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others for the right to vote. She also taught voter education classes, housed Freedom Riders …

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The third Democratic presidential candidate debate took place in Houston Thursday. The candidates answered questions on a range of issues, including health care, gun control, immigration and an ongoing U.S.-China trade war. Here are some comments from each candidate: Former Vice President Joe Biden, during a discussion of foreign policy, offered that he should not have voted for a bill that launched the 2002 Iraq War, saying, “I should have never voted to give (former President George W.) Bush the authority to go in and do what he said he was going to do. … What I was arguing against …

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In the world of agriculture, there is often a dividing line marked by color — red and green — which on a farm, doesn’t mean “stop” or “go.” “Just like you might be accustomed to Ford or Chevy, on the farm, it’s either Case or John Deere,” said farmer Megan Dwyer of Colona, Illinois, whose family falls firmly in the red camp and uses Case tractors, even though they farm near the Moline headquarters of John Deere, manufacturer of the iconic green equipment. “We bleed red and have red on the farm,” Dwyer said. “It’s all I’ve ever known.” Some …

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The tentative settlement involving the opioid crisis and the maker of OxyContin could mean that thousands of local governments will one day be paid back for some of the costs of responding to the epidemic. But for public officials in Akron, no amount of money will restore the families and institutions that were upended by prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl. “The overwhelming sense of hopelessness that took over this community in 2016, you can’t monetize that,” former Assistant Summit County Prosecutor Greta Johnson told lawyers in a deposition in January. “Every single day the newspaper was reporting on the overdose …

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Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders agreed they wanted a deal with the United States, but some were in more of a hurry than others. Taliban negotiators were at odds with their Council of Leaders, or shura, about whether to travel to Camp David even before President Donald Trump abruptly canceled the high-stakes meeting planned for last weekend .   According to Taliban officials familiar with the discussions, the shura opposed the trip to Camp David and chastised the negotiators who were eager to attend.    The Taliban have been holding talks with the U.S. for over a year in the Qatari capital, …

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Fights over abortion and President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall have thrown Senate efforts to advance $1.4 trillion worth of agency spending bills into disarray, threatening one of Washington’s few bipartisan accomplishments this year. A government shutdown remains unlikely, but agencies face weeks or months on autopilot while frozen at this year’s levels if the logjam isn’t broken. At issue are 12 annual budget bills to fund the day-to-day operations of the government. The bills are needed to fill in the details of this summer’s budget and debt deal — which reversed cuts scheduled to slash the Pentagon and domestic …

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Saudi Arabia’s new energy minister on Thursday reiterated calls for “cohesiveness” in OPEC ahead of a key meeting in Abu Dhabi. “To achieve market stability, it’s imperative we maintain a high degree of cohesiveness within OPEC and within also our partners in OPEC,” said Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, speaking at a meeting of the organization’s Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.     Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak similarly called for unity in cuts, though estimates show Moscow went over its voluntary cap as well.   Fueling concerns Thursday, a report by …

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Beto O’Rourke was back at Keene State College, but the large crowd that flocked to see him six months ago was not. Far removed from the whirlwind opening days of his presidential campaign, the former Texas congressman faced a far smaller, quieter gathering. An attempted “Beto! Beto!” chant fizzled and when an elderly voter declared that O’Rourke was “so clear and consistent on what the world needs,” the candidate responded, “Could you travel with us to every campaign stop and say what you just said?” That joke was prophetic since O’Rourke has already undertaken two major campaign reboots since first …

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President repeats false claim that he spent time at ground zero alongside first responders …

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Boeing’s 737 MAX could be brought back into service gradually by government regulators but is still on track to be cleared to fly again in 2019, the company’s CEO said Wednesday. “A phased ungrounding is a possibility,” Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg said at an investor conference in California. The aircraft has been grounded since mid-March following two deadly crashes but could return to the air on a staggered schedule in different countries. Muilenburg said the company is still working through a number of questions with the US Federal Aviation  Administration and other regulators but that “all of that work …

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LONDON — Malaria could be wiped out in a generation if $2 billion more every year is invested in tackling the disease, according to a report published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet. Malaria kills around 435,000 people every year, most of them children. Significant progress has been made this century in fighting the disease, with the number of deaths cut in half since 2000. But, eradicating malaria won’t be easy, says Professor Jake Baum, who leads the malaria research network at Imperial College London. “You might think that right now, that’s the trajectory. The challenge is in the last …

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Like father, like son? A son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has caused a stir by questioning democracy in Latin America’s biggest country, which emerged from a two-decade military dictatorship in 1985. “The transformation that Brazil wants will not happen at the speed we are aiming for in democratic ways,” tweeted Carlos Bolsonaro, a close aide to his father and a municipal councilor in Rio de Janeiro. Bolsonaro, 36, did not say what he meant by “transformation,” but his father’s governing party is struggling to implement economic and social changes since it has to form alliances to get a majority …

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Britain’s foreign minister on Tuesday said Iranian tanker Adrian Darya 1 had sold its crude oil to the Assad regime in Syria, breaking assurances it had given not to sell crude to the country. The vessel, formerly named Grace 1, was seized by British Royal Marine commandos on July 4 on suspicion of being en route to Syria. Gibraltar released it on Aug. 15 after receiving formal written assurances from Tehran that the ship would not discharge its 2.1 million barrels of oil in Syria. But Britain’s foreign office said in a statement it was clear Iran had breached those …

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NAIROBI/LONDON — Hundreds of refugees trapped in Libyan detention centers will be evacuated to Rwanda as conflict rages in the north African nation, the United Nations said Tuesday. Vincent Cochetel, special envoy for the central Mediterranean for the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR), said 500 refugees would be evacuated to Rwanda in a deal signed with the small east African nation and the African Union. “The agreement with Rwanda says the number can be increased from 500 if they are satisfied with how it works,” Cochetel told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview ahead of the official U.N. announcement. “It really …

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Argentina’s presidential front-runner Alberto Fernandez is on a tightrope between the interventionist policies of his better-known running mate Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the stumbling free-market reforms of incumbent Mauricio Macri. Whichever way he leans lies danger, with markets ready to pounce on any hint that he would follow Kirchner’s example as a debt defaulter and voters ready to punish anyone who agrees with Macri’s orthodoxy, which has led the economy to ruin. “He is in a difficult position,” said Martin Vauthier, an economist at the consultancy Eco Go. “He has to deliver messages that in many respects are contradictory.” …

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