Новини

A Russian helicopter crashed shortly after takeoff in Siberia on Saturday, killing all 18 people aboard.

The Interstate Aviation Committee, which oversees civil aviation in much of the former Soviet Union, said the Mi-8 helicopter collided with the load being carried by another helicopter that had taken off from the same pad in Vankor, above the Arctic Circle about 2,600 kilometers (1600 miles) northeast of Moscow. The second helicopter was undamaged and landed safely, the committee said.

Helicopters frequently carry loads in slings that hang below the craft.

There were 15 passengers and three crew aboard the crashed helicopter, said a statement from the operator, UTair airlines.

Russian news reports said all the passengers were believed to have been working for a subsidiary of the state oil company Rosneft.

UTair, one of Russia’s largest airlines, operates an extensive fleet of helicopters serving Siberian oil fields as well as fixed-wing flights within Russia and to international destinations, mostly in former Soviet republics.

The helicopter that crashed was manufactured in 2010 and the pilot had nearly 6,000 hours of experience, including 2,300 as a captain, the UTair statement said.

Russian air safety has improved since the 1990s, when poor aircraft maintenance, pilot training and official oversight in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a high crash incidence.

In February, a Saratov Airlines An-148 regional jet crashed about six minutes after takeoff from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, killing all 71 people aboard. Investigators said the crew had failed to turn on a heating unit, resulting in flawed airspeed readings. A UTair ATR 72 crashed in Siberia in 2012, killing 33 of the 43 people aboard, after failing to be de-iced before takeoff.

 
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Greek Civil Protection Minister Nikos Toskas resigned on Friday in the wake of a wildfire last month that killed 88 people and led to widespread criticism of the government for its handling of the disaster.

Toskas had previously offered to quit after the July 23 blaze in the small seaside town of Mati east of Athens, but Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras refused to accept his resignation.

The minister reiterated his desire to step aside again on Friday during a meeting with Tsipras, in a move that the main political opposition said came too late to appease the public.

“This natural disaster, and the loss of so many people in Mati, overwhelms my desire to continue. This is something I had stated publicly from the first moment,” Toskas, a retired army general, said in a statement.

Pressure has been growing on the government, which is trailing the conservative opposition in opinion polls, at a time when it had hoped to extricate Greece from years of bailouts prompted by its debt crisis and reap the political benefits.

There have been recriminations over what went wrong and led to the deaths of dozens in Mati, where hundreds of people were trapped by towering walls of flames when they tried to flee.

Many jumped into the sea to survive but others died, either in their cars or when they were cornered on the edge of steep cliffs by the rapidly advancing inferno.

Last Friday Tsipras said he took political responsibility for the deadly wildfire amid accusations that his government had failed to protect lives and to apologize for the disaster.

Seeking to deflect public anger, he told his ministers he was conflicted over whether the authorities had done everything right in response to the disaster.

“Responsibilities have a name: Alexis Tsipras. He and his government do not have the courage to assume them 11 days after the tragedy,” the conservative New Democracy party said after the minister’s resignation.

Tsipras’s office quickly responded, accusing the conservative party of trying to score political gains from a national tragedy.

The death toll rose to 88 on Friday when a 35-year-old woman died from her injuries. Her six-month old baby, the youngest victim, had died in her arms from smoke inhalation as they tried to escape the flames.

Greek authorities say they suspect the fire was set deliberately. Arson is thought to be a frequent cause of forest fires in Greece, a crude method to clear the way for potential development.

Toskas’s duties have been assigned to Panos Skourletis, the country’s interior minister.
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Preparations are being made to send thousands of Ebola vaccines next week to North Kivu, the site of the latest outbreak of this deadly disease.

The World Health Organization says it foresees huge difficulties ahead in efforts to combat the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

North Kivu province, the site of the new outbreak, has been riven with ethnic and political clashes for at least two decades.

WHO’s emergency response chief, Peter Salama, said the operation getting under way in North Kivu will be much more difficult and complex than past Ebola response efforts.

Salama was at the forefront of efforts to combat an Ebola outbreak this April in the DRC’s Equateur Province.

“On the scale of degree of difficulty, trying to extinguish an outbreak of a deadly high-threat pathogen in a war zone reaches the top of any of our scales,” he cautioned.

WHO reports four of six suspected cases of Ebola have been confirmed in and around Mangina, a town of about 60,000 people in North Kivu. Around 20 deaths have been reported. Salama, however, said the deaths have not yet been confirmed as Ebola cases.

He said laboratory tests indicate that this particular strain is Ebola Zaire, the same one as in Equateur Province. He added that more information will be forthcoming Tuesday when genetic sequencing results are known.

If confirmed, he said it will be possible to use the same vaccine that was used in Equateur. He told VOA that preparations are under way to deploy vaccines to the affected area next week.

The bad news, he cautioned, is that the Zaire strain carries the highest case fatality rate of any of the strains of Ebola — 50 percent or higher.

“The good news is that we do have, although it is still an investigational product, a safe and effective vaccine that we were able to deploy last time around,” he said. “But, remember last time around — and this is a critical point — we had really large-scale access despite all the logistical constraints to be able to do the contact tracing.”

Salama said security constraints will make moving around in North Kivu far more difficult. He said 3,000 doses of the vaccine that are in the capital, Kinshasa, can be deployed immediately and 300,000 additional doses can be mobilized at very short notice.

Ebola is a constant threat in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the virus thrives in heavily forested areas. The newest outbreak is the 10th since the first one was discovered in 1976.
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U.S. firm Best Western Hotels & Resorts, the last Western hotel chain still in Crimea, has pulled out because of sanctions imposed after Russia

annexed the region from Ukraine, two hotel employees said.

“The Best Western Sevastopol Hotel,” a Soviet-era building on the quayside in the port of Sevastopol was one of the few visible signs of an international business presence left since the 2014 annexation. Other major brands, among them McDonald’s Corp and Radisson Hotels have already quit Crimea.

The hotel is still running but branding identifying it as a Best Western hotel has been removed from the building and is now identifying itself on booking sites under the name “Sevastopol Hotel and Spa.”

The ending of Best Western’s presence this year shows that, even four years after the sanctions were first imposed by the United States and the European Union, they are still forcing Western investors out of Crimea.

The sanctions bar U.S. companies from operating in Crimea and prohibit new investment in Crimea. They block business with a long list of Crimean individuals and entities and make it impossible for Western firms to move money through Crimean banks.

The general director of the hotel declined to comment. Best Western, which has its headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, declined to comment, and referred questions to the hotel’s owner or operator.

The majority owner of the hotel is a company called Sevastopol Investment Group Ltd, which is registered in the Seychelles, according to Russian tax service records. Reuters was unable to seek comment from the Seychelles firm because no contact details were listed for it.

Best Western does not own or operate hotels itself but has a franchising system under which hotel owners or operators can pay for the right to use the company’s brand, marketing and support services.

A member of the staff at the hotel told Reuters the franchise agreement with Best Western ended in October last year because of the sanctions.

“Now we’re just called the Sevastopol Hotel,” said the employee, who wished to remain anonymous. “We stopped paying for the franchise.”

A second employee also told Reuters that the agreement with Best Western ended because of the sanctions. It was not clear, from the employees’ accounts, whether the deal was ended by Best Western, or at the initiative of the hotel’s owners, and it was not clear which aspect of the sanctions led to the agreement ending.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, still internationally recognized as part of Ukraine, prompted international condemnation and sanctions from the United States and European Union. Russia said it acted to protect Crimea’s Russian-speaking population, and that the majority of residents wanted the region to be part of Russia.

Since then, Crimea has seen an influx of Russian state investment. Pensions and public sector wages have gone up, and new infra-structure has been built. However, the private sector, which depends heavily on tourism, has suffered from the effects of the sanctions.
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Russia is allowing thousands of fresh North Korean laborers into the country and granting new work permits in potential violation of U.N. sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

More than 10,000 new North Korean workers have registered in Russia since September, the paper said, citing records from the Russian Interior Ministry.

Russia’s action potentially violates U.N. sanctions to reduce cash flows to North Korea and put pressure on Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons, the Journal reported, citing U.S. officials.

Labor Ministry records obtained by the Journal showed that a minimum of 700 new work permits have been issued to North Koreans in Russia this year, the paper said.

U.N. officials are probing potential violations of the sanctions, which contain narrow exceptions, WSJ reported citing sources.

Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.

Russia ‘working against us’

“It’s absolutely clear that Russia needs to do more. Russia says it wants better relations with the United States, so Moscow should prove that by cooperating with us, not working against us, on this urgent threat to all nations,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Reuters.

“It is estimated that North Korean laborers in Russia send between $150-$300 million annually to Pyongyang. Now is the time for Russia to take action: Moscow should immediately and fully implement all the U.N. sanctions that it has signed on to,” the State Department spokesperson said.

The labor prohibition is a part of a broader array of sanctions that are aimed at eliminating an important revenue stream for Kim Jong Un’s regime. Most of the money North Koreans earn abroad ends up in government coffers as workers toil in gruelling conditions, the Journal reported.

Humanitarian need

U.N. Humanitarian Chief Mark Lowcock visited Pyongyang last month and posted a video online outlining his observations. 

“One of the things we’ve seen is very clear evidence of humanitarian need here,” he said in the video, posted to his official Twitter account and the U.N. website.
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Kosovo’s president reiterated Thursday his idea of “a correction” of the border with Serbia, which is widely seen as essentially a territorial swap as part of a strategy to stabilize relations between both EU-aspirant nations.

“Kosovo’s border with Serbia needs to be redefined, or corrected,” President Hashim Thaci told VOA’s Albanian Service on Thursday, largely repeating comments he made online Wednesday.

Thaci was responding to an idea floated by some Serbian government officials that Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority but also a Serb minority, should be divided as a possible solution to settle a long-running dispute that is hindering both sides’ ambitions to join the European Union.

No divided Kosovo

Ostensibly dismissing the idea of a divided Kosovo along ethnic lines as unacceptable, Thaci instead proposed the concept of a “redefined” or “corrected” border with its Serbian neighbor to the north.

“It means that in the process of our future dialogue with Belgrade, we will work together with the international community to define the Kosovo-Serbia border,” he said. “I want to emphasize that Kosovo will not be divided; I want to forcefully stress it: Belgrade cannot bring to the table the division of Kosovo, a thing that they have asked for in the past.

“In the context of border correction, I met with the representatives of [Serbia’s] Presevo Valley, who want to have the right to join Kosovo,” he added. “I will officially present their request at the next round of talks with Belgrade.”

Thaci is to meet Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Brussels after the summer break under an EU-sponsored dialogue that has made little progress in normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina since it was launched in 2013.

Experts and former diplomats have warned that rethinking borders in the Balkans would pose a risk to the stability in a region still struggling to come to terms with the wars of the 1990s, which tore apart Yugoslavia in Europe’s deadliest post-World War II conflict.

A partition described

Although Thaci told VOA his idea would not amount to a land swap, Daniel Serwer, director of conflict management at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), said what Thaci describes is nonetheless a partition, not a correction of borders.

“It’s a bad idea because it could be destabilizing for the Balkan region, [and it could] enhance political support for those inside Kosovo who oppose Kosovo statehood and want union with Albania,” Serwer, a former U.S. special envoy to the Balkans, told VOA.

“It could also hurt moderates in Serbia,” he added. “It would also have a bad impact more broadly than that, on Macedonia, on Bosnia and Herzegovina … and then you have Russian ambitions to control South Ossetia in Georgia and other territories, so it opens a Pandora(’s) box.”

It was earlier this week that some Serbian government officials informally broached the idea of a land swap based on geographic concentrations of ethnic Serb and Albanian minorities — Kosovo’s northern Mitrovica region for Serbia’s Presevo Valley — as a possible solution to the Kosovo issue.

“I did not talk about a land swap or division, I talked about correction of borders, and a solution can be reached if there is a will on both sides,” Thaci told VOA on Thursday. “Kosovo cannot join EU or NATO without an agreement with Serbia. Serbia, too, cannot join EU without the agreement with Kosovo.”

In 1999, NATO intervened to stop a bloody Serb crackdown on Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and is recognized as a separate nation by more than 100 countries, but not by Serbia.

Tensions remain high after seven years of negotiations, even though the EU has made it clear to the governments in Pristina and Belgrade that they must normalize relations to advance toward membership in the bloc.

This story originated in VOA’s Albanian Service. Some information is from AP and Reuters.
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Ankara is vowing to hit back against Washington’s sanctions on the Turkish justice and interior ministers in connection with the detention of American protestant pastor Andrew Brunson.

Turkey Vice President Fuat Oktay threatened retaliation in a tweet Thursday, “We will not hesitate for a split second to do what great nations must do under the leadership of our president.” 

However, in a written statement, Berat Albayrak, the powerful economics minister, indicated a less confrontational approach.

“Our priority is to ensure that this process is settled through diplomacy and constructive efforts that would be consistent with the relations between the two allied countries sharing a strong historical background,” Albayrak said.

Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu were hit by financial and diplomatic measures Wednesday, for what Washington called their role in the unjust detention of Brunson.

The American pastor is on trial on terrorism and espionage charges for links to followers of U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is blamed by Ankara for the 2016 failed coup and whom Turkey is seeking to extradite.

Last month, in a move widely seen as a gesture to Washington, Brunson was moved to house arrest after nearly two years in jail. But U.S. President Donald Trump is demanding Brunson’s return to America. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists Brunson’s detention is a matter for the courts.

Washington accuses Ankara of hostage-taking, claiming the pastor’s detention is part of efforts to extract concessions over several disputes between the countries.

WATCH: Crisis Over Detained Pastor Deepens

News of U.S. sanctions saw Turkish financial markets falling, with the lira hitting record lows amid fears Washington could target Turkey’s fragile economy.

The U.S. Treasury is considering a significant fine against the Turkish state-controlled Halkbank for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. According to local and international reports, Ankara had pressed for a reduced penalty against Halkbank as part of a deal to release Brunson. Turkish officials have rejected the reports.

A fine is viewed as powerful leverage against Ankara. 

“Just float the news Halkbank is about to receive a major fine, the leak itself would cause such massive damage in Turkish markets,” political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners said, “which would reverberate in inflation, corporate balance sheets, etc., etc. I think we would have to hoist the white flag.”

But Ankara’s robust stand against Washington is playing well domestically.

In a rare display of political unity, the main opposition parties, except for the pro-Kurdish HDP, joined Erdogan’s ruling AKP Party in issuing a joint statement condemning Washington’s sanctions as “unacceptable and incompatible neither with principles of friendship, alliance, NATO membership,” read the statement.

The leader of the main opposition CHP Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, demanded retaliation. 

“In line with the reciprocity, we are expecting similar actions to be taken against U.S. ministers,” said Kilicdaroglu.

“The anti-Americanism in the past decade has hit a record high among all the social classes, and from all the political parties from left to right,” former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen said, “so there is no political bill to pay for the government to go against the United States.”

Despite such rhetoric and strong support for facing down Washington, analysts predict Ankara will likely have to step back. 

“Turkey has this unfortunate habit of political hostage taking. We’ve seen this before,” Yesilada said. “German national journalist Deniz Yucel comes to mind, who was jailed without charge for more than a year, to extract concessions from Germany. Germany did not relent. It put the word out, advising banks not to lend to Turkey. Within a few months, Yucel was in Frankfurt.”

But given the strong anti-American sentiment that reverberates among Erdogan’s electoral base, stepping back for the president is not predicted to be easy.

Diplomatic efforts are continuing between the NATO allies. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu reportedly spoke Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The two men are expected to meet Friday on the sidelines of an ASEAN meeting in Singapore.

“For Brunson, I would prefer not to overplay my hand and send him back immediately,” Selcen said. “From then on, there will be new paths to explore to put relations back on track. But it won’t be easy. I think Erdogan is strong enough to package this and sell this to his supporters.”

Erdogan has refrained mainly from speaking on the controversy and avoided directly criticizing Trump since the announcement of sanctions. The few comments the Turkish president has made over Brunson’s detention have been mostly restrained. 

Analysts suggest Ankara is likely to be looking for a face-saving exit strategy before irreparable damage is done to both U.S.-Turkish relations and the economy.
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Much of the Iberian Peninsula is experiencing the year’s first heatwave, with the mercury expected to soar before peaking at 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit) in some areas of southern Portugal this weekend.

Authorities say temperatures are being driven higher Thursday by a hot air mass moving northward from Africa.

Forecasts are for a high of 44 degrees (111 Fahrenheit) in the Portuguese city of Evora, 130 kilometers east of Lisbon, and the Spanish province of Badajoz across the border.

Portuguese authorities have issued a nationwide health warning, while warnings have also been issued for 40 of Spain’s 50 provinces.

The Portuguese town of Beja is expected to record a peak of 47 degrees on Saturday.

Spain’s Meteorological Agency says thermometers are expected to begin dropping that day.
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The Vatican said Thursday Pope Francis has asked the church to change its teachings to reflect his view that the death penalty should be inadmissible.

The new language in the Catechism of the Catholic Church says the death penalty was long considered an appropriate response to certain crimes in order to protect the public, but that now there is “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.”

The text says there are more effective detention systems that “do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

It further says the Catholic Church teaches the death penalty is an attack on a person’s dignity, and that the church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
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Imagine this – a fully autonomous 3D-printed mobile house that can survive any weather and is completely self-powered. This is not a technological dream – it’s the ambitious project of a Ukrainian company called PassivDom. It’s working on the prototype of a printed home in Reno, Nevada. VOA’s Iuliia Iarmolenko gives us a look inside the 3D-printed walls of the futuristic house.
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Three Russian journalists were investigating Russian military contractors and mining industries in Central African Republic when they were killed there, their editor said Wednesday.

The reporters were ambushed and killed outside the town of Sibut late Monday, according to local and Russian officials. CAR officials said the three were kidnapped by about 10 men wearing turbans and speaking Arabic, but have yet to give further details.

Exiled Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky said on Facebook Wednesday that the journalists were collaborating with his investigative media project on a story entitled “Russian Mercenaries.”

Andrei Konyakhin, the chief editor of Khodorkovsky’s Investigations Management Center, said the reporters were trying to shed light on a private Russian security company operating in CAR as well as on Russia’s interests in diamond, gold and uranium mining there.

He said the men — Kirill Radchenko, Alexander Rastorguyev and Orkhan Dzhemal — arrived in CAR on tourist visas to work undercover and were planning to stay there for two weeks.

Ruslan Leviev, who leads a group of investigative journalists in Russia called the Conflict Intelligence Team, said the security firm the dead journalists were investigating, known as Wagner, also has been active in Syria, eastern Ukraine and Sudan.

The company is linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg entrepreneur dubbed “Putin’s chef” for his close ties to the Kremlin.

Konyakhin said the journalists were traveling to northern CAR to speak with a United Nations representative and carrying several thousand dollars in cash and valuable equipment such as cameras when they were attacked.

The trio had been advised not to travel at night, but did so Monday, Konyakhin said. He also said the reporters were about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from their planned route when they were killed.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said CAR is a very dangerous place and the government has advised Russians not to travel there. But Konyakhin was skeptical the slayings were the result of a mere robbery. He said he thinks the attack could be linked to their investigation.

“This was done in a very demonstrative fashion,” he said, wondering why the attackers didn’t bother to cover their tracks and left the journalists’ driver alive. “If they could have just taken everything from them, why kill them?”

Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once Russia’s richest man, lives in London after spending 10 years in a Russian prison in a case widely seen as politically motivated. From exile, Khodorkovsky supports a number of civil society groups and media projects in Russia, where authorities continue to investigate him on a variety of charges.

Deeply impoverished Central African Republic has faced deadly interreligious and intercommunal fighting since 2013, with thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. The nation saw a period of relative peace in late 2015 and 2016, but the violence intensified and spread in the past year.
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European Union imports of U.S. soybeans were already rising substantially before a top EU official told President Donald Trump last week that the bloc would buy more.

EU Commission figures released Wednesday show that 37 percent of the bloc’s soybean imports last month were coming from the U.S., compared with 9 percent in July 2017.

Amid a looming trade war over tariffs, Trump and Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker agreed on July 25 to start talks intended to achieve “zero tariffs” and “zero subsidies” on non-automotive industrial goods.

The EU also agreed to buy more U.S. soybeans and build more terminals to import liquefied natural gas from the United States.

“The European Union can import more soybeans from the U.S. and this is happening as we speak,” Juncker said.

But a high level EU official said the increase in soybean purchases from the U.S. is due only to economics, as they are cheaper than imports from Brazil and Argentina. The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said there was no political reason for the increase.

 
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