Також Зеленський ввів до складу РНБО осіб, що цього тижня стали міністрами
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На сьогодні лікарня «Феофанія» спеціалізується на чинних та колишніх посадовцях, дипломатах, народних депутатах та людях, що мають особливі заслуги перед Україною
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In a tit-for-tat round of recriminations, Belarus summoned Poland’s top diplomat in Minsk on Thursday to protest claims made earlier this week by Warsaw that Belarusian border guards had threatened to open fire on a Polish patrol.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said Polish allegations were unfounded and it accused Poland of engaging in “megaphone diplomacy” and issuing “dogmatic statements for the media.”
Amid rising tensions between the two countries over Belarus being used, with Minsk’s encouragement, as a transit point by migrants, mainly from Iraq, Poland’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday summoned Belarus’ top diplomat based in Warsaw to complain about Belarusian guards crossing into Poland. The incursion was said to have occurred Monday.
Stanislaw Zaryn, spokesman for Poland’s security services, said the Belarusians encroached 300 meters into Poland and were confronted by a Polish patrol. The Belarusians “reloaded their weapons and then departed,” Zaryn said.
Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have been militarizing their borders with Belarus to try to stop record numbers of migrants crossing their borders. They accuse Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of orchestrating migrant crossings as a form of “hybrid warfare” against the European Union in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Belarus over last year’s disputed elections. Those elections were widely seen as rigged and led to a harsh crackdown on protesters who challenged the legitimacy of Lukashenko’s rule.
The EU, United States and Britain also imposed sanctions in June targeting 86 officials and Belarusian state-owned entities in response to the forced landing in Belarus’ airspace of a Ryanair plane, which was carrying a Lukashenko critic.
‘We are forced to react’
Lukashenko has halfheartedly denied he’s seeking to needle or blackmail Europe by trying to fuel a migrant crisis, but said he was reacting to foreign pressure. “We are not blackmailing anyone with illegal immigration,” he told journalists in Minsk’s Independence Palace in August. “We’re not threatening anyone. But you have put us in such circumstances that we are forced to react. And we’re reacting.”
In October alone, Poland recorded 15,000 attempted illegal border crossings. Last week Poland deployed 2,500 more troops to the border, bringing to 10,000 the number of soldiers reinforcing the country’s border guards.
Piotr Wawrzyk, a deputy foreign minister, said: “The actions taken by the Belarusian authorities in recent weeks have the increasingly evident hallmarks of a deliberate escalation.” He told The Associated Press this week that there had been a “series of incidents and provocations organized by Belarusians,” but described the border crossing by Belarusian guards as “the most dangerous incident so far.”
Lithuanian officials also accuse Lukashenko of “weaponizing” migrants and of being behind a surge in Iraqi and Syrian asylum-seekers trying to cross their borders illegally.
Earlier this year, they said Belarus’s state-owned tourism agency had been organizing flights to Minsk from Baghdad and Istanbul for migrants, charging them from $1,800 to $12,000, and then handing them over to Belarusian border guards to transport them to the mainly forested 680-kilometer border Lithuania shares with Belarus.
Lithuania finished this week the first stretches of a razor-wire-topped steel wall it plans to extend along much of its border with Belarus. It has allocated $175 million for the project and plans to complete it in a year’s time.
Poland and Latvia have also laid stretches of coiled razor wire on their borders to stop the migrants. Polish officials, who accuse Belarusian border guards of slashing the wire, are bracing for even larger asylum-seeker surges.
Belarusian journalist Tadeusz Giczan reported last week that Minsk International Airport published a new schedule for the coming winter “according to which at least 55 planes will be flying from the Middle East to Minsk every week.”
Formal protests
The rising tensions along the Poland-Belarus border have seen the Poles summon the Belarusian charge d’affaires in Warsaw three times so far to the Foreign Ministry to be handed formal diplomatic protests.
The burgeoning crisis is also souring relations between EU member states and Poland about how to handle the asylum-seekers. According to analyst Elizabeth Braw of the Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute, that likely fits into what she dubs Lukashenko’s “sinister game.”
“The Belarusian ruler knows that immigration is a hugely divisive issue within the European Union, and within individual EU member states. Poland’s strategy of pushing migrants back into Belarus has already caused a rift with Brussels — and thus worsened Poland’s already tense relations with EU headquarters,” she wrote in a commentary for the news site Defense One.
EU officials say Poland is in breach of international norms by trying to force migrants back into Belarus and that it is obliged to offer them protection.
Poland has declared a state of emergency along part of its border with Belarus, hindering journalists and NGO workers from monitoring what’s happening in an exclusion zone in the Podlasie forests. NGOs say there is an urgent need for them to gain access to the militarized zone on the Polish side of the border and they have accused Poland of using the migrants as political weapons.
Eight migrants have died trying to cross the border so far, the latest a 19-year-old Syrian man whose body was retrieved from the River Bug by divers on October 21.“Disgraceful things are happening on the Polish-Belarusian border,” said the Polish refugee charity Fundacja Ocalenie, or the Salvation Foundation.
‘Illegal and inhumane practices’
In a letter in September to the EU commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, the charity said it had documented “numerous illegal and inhumane practices of the Polish authorities” along the border.
They included denying migrants the right to apply for international protection, rounding up migrants on Polish territory and “illegally transporting them back to the border and forcing them to cross the border back to Belarus.” The charity said sometimes the migrants were deposited in dangerous areas, such as swamps, “exposing these people, including young children, to life-threatening conditions.”
Fundacja Ocalenie said it and other humanitarian organizations had been denied the opportunity to provide assistance to migrants trapped in a no-man’s land between the borders, including dozens of Afghans camped in the Usnarz Górny area.
Rights organization Amnesty International has also complained about 17 Afghans at the border being violently pushed back into Belarus by Polish guards.
Two former Polish officials, Adam Bodnar, a former ombudsman of Poland, and Agnieszka Grzelak, who served as a deputy director of the Constitutional, European and International Law department in the office of the ombudsman, urged Brussels on Thursday to intervene with Warsaw, saying, “The EU can’t sit by while migrants die at the Belarusian border.”
Writing in Politico.eu, a news site, they said: “A few days ago, a former colleague from the Ombudsman’s office carried a three-year-old child out of the forest in his arms. If he had not found and taken care of him, or forced the border guards to register him, the child and his family would have been pushed back from Polish territory without any guarantee of safety by Belarusian authorities.”
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Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.
Leaders talk global warming in Glasgow
— World leaders met in Glasgow, Scotland, this week to try to halt global warming. But with some of the world’s biggest emitters like China and Russia skipping the conference, known as COP26, hopes dimmed that leaders will find a way to keep the world from warming more than the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius this century.
Hope Eroding as COP26 Climate Pledges Fall Short
— Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change. Phasing out its use between 2030 and 2040 is one of the United Nation’s most ambitious appeals. More than 40 countries made coal-related pledges on Thursday at COP26.
COP26: Britain Hails Global Deals to End Coal but Plans New Mine
— The world’s youth have the most at stake as the planet warms, and they have been vocal advocates for change. On Friday, they took center stage during Youth and Public Empowerment Day at COP26.
‘It’s Our Lives on the Line’, Young Marchers Tell UN Climate Talks
War crimes committed in northern Ethiopia
— The conflict between the Ethiopian federal army and Tigrayan fighters in northern Ethiopia reached the one-year milestone this week. A report written by a joint investigative team from the United Nations and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission was published Wednesday, saying all belligerents have committed atrocities during the year-long conflict.
UN Report Says Ethiopia’s War Marked by ‘Extreme Brutality’
— The U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffery Feltman, traveled to Ethiopia on Thursday, as the internal armed conflict intensified. On Tuesday, the Ethiopian federal government declared a state of emergency, saying Tigrayan fighters were advancing toward the capital, Addis Ababa.
US Envoy to Visit Ethiopia After Government Declares State of Emergency
News in brief
World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley has for months been trying to attract the attention of some of the world’s richest men on Twitter, seeking $6 billion to assist 42 million people who are “marching toward starvation” due to conflict, climate change and COVID-19. On Monday, he finally caught the attention of the world’s richest man, Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Quote of note
“We are not drowning, we are fighting. This is our warrior cry to the world.”
— Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean, 23, of her Pacific Island peers to world leaders at the opening of COP26 on Monday.
What we are watching next week
An international conference on Libya will be held in Paris on November 12. Libya is set to hold elections on December 24, but concerns are growing that it may not be on track to carry out a free and fair election on time.
Did you know?
The 15 members of the U.N. Security Council take turns being council president for a month at a time. Rotation is in alphabetical order. Kenya was president in October, Mexico took over Monday for November, and Niger will finish out the year in December.
To mark their presidency, Mexico donated a new sculpture now on display at U.N. headquarters in New York City.
your ad hereChina now depends almost entirely on its own online content providers, as the number of big foreign companies in the market, such as Yahoo and LinkedIn, keeps dwindling, giving the government a boost in controlling the internet, analysts say.
On Monday the Silicon Valley internet service provider Yahoo closed all of its services in China, following LinkedIn’s pullout announcement in October and earlier blockages of Google content.
In an e-mailed statement, Yahoo cited an “increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China.” Many Yahoo services were largely blocked in China, where the email and search engine provider has operated since 1999.
“My first reaction was, I didn’t know Yahoo was still alive in China,” said Danny Levinson, Beijing-based head of technology at the seed investment firm Matoka Capital.
Domestic services flourish
Chinese netizens seldom use Yahoo or other major Silicon Valley internet services, especially for media and communications, as domestic rivals have flourished over the past two decades. The government can handily monitor local providers for what it considers subversive content by calling in company managers for discipline.
Chinese use China-based WeChat for the bulk of their daily communication, watch TikTok videos instead of YouTube and check China’s Baidu.com rather than Wikipedia. Alibaba, headquartered in Hangzhou, takes care of e-commerce, although foreign rivals can still get into China given their trade’s lack of political sensitivity.
“They had all the ingredients in place,” said Kaiser Kuo, a U.S.-based podcaster who has worked in Chinese tech. “You had a really large, very fast-growing market. There was a need for people to come in with services that were catered to Chinese language users and Chinese tastes. On top of that, it was so cutthroat that foreign internet companies just couldn’t compete very well.”
The roughly 1 billion Chinese who use the internet have spawned an industry with an operating revenue of about $155 billion in the first 11 months of 2019, up 22.4% over the same months of 2018, according to Caixin Globa, a Chinese economic news-focused website.
Chinese mass media have said the country aims to become technologically self-sufficient by 2030 and get around U.S. government bans on doing business with some of its flagship companies.
Chinese netizens contacted this week say they’re unfazed by Yahoo’s withdrawal. Many Chinese have never visited Yahoo’s homepage, one veteran Beijing internet user said.
Laws discourage foreign providers
China has monitored the internet for two decades, by blocking websites and filtering social feeds, to intercept anti-government material. Its latest effort, the Data Security Law, restricts outflows of sensitive data from China and requires internet operators to give their internal data to law enforcement agencies.
Getting around that law can be costly and upset users outside China who oppose censorship, some analysts say.
“If there was a platform that was willing to go into China and completely cede control to the Chinese government and regulators to manage that, I think there would be an opportunity to grow, but so far most companies have chosen not to,” said Zennon Kapron, director of the finance industry research firm Kapronasia.
China previously blocked Facebook, Google and most other global social media sites and search engines as well as flagship Western news websites. Foreign media content providers “haven’t been really there for a long time in force,” said Ma Rui, founder of the San Francisco-based consultancy Tech Buzz China.
Users in China can still access foreign internet content by using a virtual private network, but authorities search out and block overseas-based VPNs that are not authorized for specific companies doing business in China. The “efficacy” of VPNs to stop filtering or blocking of content has declined over the years, Levinson said.
Emailing can still take care of Chinese people’s overseas business matters, Ma said, while foreign companies active in China normally use WeChat. China, however, does not allow end-to-end encrypted e-mail or chats.
“The email gets through, but based on the originating DNS [domain name system], it might get blocked, and it might get filtered. So it’s not a 100 percent panacea, but for normal business communication it’ll be fine,” Levinson said.
China’s constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but authorities target web content that the government believes will expose state secrets or might endanger the country, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a research group.
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На конференції представники близько 200 країн підбивають перші підсумки Паризької угоди щодо клімату 2015 року і планують дії на найближчі роки
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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has reported its Food Price Index, which tracks the international prices of a basket of food, found that in October, the cost of a basket of food was up 3% from September.
The FAO Cereal Price Index increased 3.2% in October from the previous month, while the price of wheat rose by 5% amid reduced harvests from major exporters of wheat that include Canada, Russia and the United States. The FAO also recorded the international prices of other major cereals have increased.
Meanwhile, the U.N. agency said the price of vegetable oil hit an “all-time high” increase of 9.6% in October, marking a fourth consecutive month of price hikes. The FAO said the rising vegetable oil price was “largely underpinned by persisting concerns over subdued output in Malaysia due to ongoing migrant labor shortages.”
Dairy prices rose by 2.5%, while the price of meat fell by 0.7%, “marking the third monthly decline.”
Some information from The Associated Press and Reuters was used in this report.
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Оскільки загиблий мав дипломатичний статус, німецька прокуратура не змогла розслідувати смерть
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Документ спрямовано для офіційного опублікування
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Володимир Зеленський призначив головою Національної тристоронньої соціально-економічної ради Анатолія Кінаха, який лобіював «Харківські угоди»
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Activists will take over the UN climate summit in Scotland on Friday, capping off a week of dizzying government speeches and pledges with a student march, youth-led presentations, and a giant iceberg shipped from Greenland to Glasgow’s River Clyde to dramatize the plight of the Arctic.
UK organizers decided to hand the day over to civic groups in an acknowledgement of how young campaigners like Vanessa Nakate of Uganda and Greta Thunberg of Sweden have raised public understanding of climate change, and a nod to their stance that today’s youth must live with consequences of state decisions.
“We’re expecting lots of people to come and join us in the streets and not only youth but also adults supporting youth, and adults that want climate action,” said Isabelle Axelsson, 20, an activist with Thunberg’s climate movement Fridays For Future, which is organizing the march.
The COP26 talks in Glasgow aimed to secure enough national promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions – mainly from fossil fuels – to keep the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Crossing that threshold could trigger a cascading climate crisis, scientists say.
The COP26 summit has so far yielded deals to phase out coal, reduce deforestation and curb methane, but a clear picture has yet to emerge on what these voluntary initiatives would add up to in terms of moderating temperature rises.
The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said on Thursday that emissions cut pledges made so far – if all implemented – could potentially hold warming to 1.8 C. But some U.N. negotiators said that assessment was too rosy.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and UK COP26 President Alok Sharma will sit down Friday with civil society leaders to discuss the progress made so far and what remains to be done over the next week of negotiations.
Professor Gail Whiteman, founder of the climate activist group Arctic Basecamp, said she hoped to bring a sense of urgency to discussions on Friday by using an iceberg as a giant prop.
She said her group had the iceberg shipped from Greenland via Iceland to the east coast of England, and then onward on a truck to the River Clyde.
“Studies are showing that if we lose the snow and ice in the Arctic we will amplify global warming by 25 to 40%,” she said. “We felt that negotiators here had to actually come face to face with the Arctic, so we brought the iceberg.”
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Колись найбільша нафтова компанія Росії зазнала процедури банкрутства у 2006 році після того, як її засновник Михайло Ходорковський став обвинуваченим у кримінальній справі про розкрадання та несплату податків
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США також закликали країни, які приховують кіберзлочинців, «відновити справедливість» для постраждалих від програм-здирників хакерської організації
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Галину Третьякову відсторонили за висловлювання про смерть депутата від групи «За майбутнє» Антона Полякова
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Російська сторона не коментувала цих заяв СБУ, але Кремль зазвичай заперечує повідомлення про агентурну діяльність в Україні
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The “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain, host of the COP26 climate summit, after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels.
Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change, accounting for about 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions, Britain said. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, Thursday, more than 40 countries pledged to phase out coal entirely.
The signatories included big coal consumers such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Poland and Ukraine. They, alongside several global banks and financial institutions, also committed to ending all investment in new coal power generation.
End of coal
COP26 President Alok Sharma hailed the agreement as a major step toward combating global warming.
“Today, we are publishing the Global Coal to Clean Power transition statement, a commitment to end coal investment, to scale up clean power, to make a just transition and phase out coal in the 2030s in major economies, and in the 2040s, elsewhere,” Sharma told delegates Thursday.
“I think we can say that the end of coal is in sight,” he added. “The progress we’ve seen over the past two years would have seemed like a lofty ambition when we took on the COP presidency back in 2019. Who would have thought back then that today we’re able to say that we are choking off international coal financing, or that we would see a shift away from domestic coal power?”
But the world’s biggest coal consumers, including China, the United States, Australia and India, did not sign the deal. Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, wrote on Twitter that without those countries, “there’s still a very real danger that the end won’t come soon enough.”
Separately, 25 countries, including the United States, also pledged to stop public financing for all overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of next year and to prioritize clean energy finance. Key Asian coal investors China, Japan and South Korea did not sign up. Katharina Rall, an environmental researcher at Human Rights Watch, criticized their absence.
“Countries that choose not to sign on, including Japan and South Korea, are signaling a lack of regard for their human rights obligations and for the rights of communities around the world already facing a mounting toll from climate impacts,” she said.
Accusations of hypocrisy
Britain has also been accused of hypocrisy as it considers opening a new mine to produce coking coal for steelmaking. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently voiced opposition to the plan but said it was a planning matter for local government.
Mike Starkie, mayor of Copeland Borough Council in Cumbria, where the mine is planned, explained his support for the project.
“The coal that will be extracted from this mine is exclusively for the use of making steel, and if we are going to have the green industrial revolution that we need in developing solar, wind, wave — and certainly here we’d love to develop more nuclear — it’s all going to take significant amounts of steel,” Starkie told The Associated Press.
“And if the coal that produces the steel is not mined here, we’re going to be shipping it in from around the world, leaving a huge transport carbon footprint from mines that aren’t net-zero extraction, like the most modern mine that will ever be built, here in Whitehaven,” he said.
Britain is also considering the development of a new oil field off Scotland’s Shetland Islands, north of Glasgow, the host city of the climate summit.
Emissions rebound
A new report warns that emissions of carbon dioxide have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
“The rebound is caused by emissions from coal and gas, which grew more in 2021 than they had fallen in 2020. And behind this, we see a rapid rise in emissions in China, particularly pushed by probably economic stimulus packages, whereas other countries have tended to follow the trajectory pre-pandemic of decreasing emissions in the U.S. and Europe and increasing emissions in India,” Corinne Le Quéré a professor at the University of East Anglia and co-author of the report, told the AP.
The International Energy Agency said Thursday that if all the commitments made at COP26 so far were fully implemented, global warming would be limited to below 2 degrees Celsius — a significant improvement on the 2.7 degrees Celsius rise the U.N. forecasted before the summit.
your ad hereThe “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain — the host of the COP26 climate summit — after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from the Glasgow summit, weaning economies off coal won’t be easy — even for Britain itself.
Camera: Henry Ridgwell
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Росіянина заарештовано в межах розпочатого з ініціативи колишнього президента Дональда Трампа розслідування можливих порушень закону під час розслідуванні російського втручання у вибори президента США
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До мурала на її честь біля Річкового вокзалу в столиці прийшли понад 100 людей, які поклали квіти та запалили лампадки під портретом загиблої
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