Thursday, Mar 26th
Last update08:26:46 AM GMT
International Glance
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak has said Moscow will support Iran to counter US oil sanctions.
Washington on Friday restored sanctions on Tehran, which had previously been lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal.
The measures are due to come into effect on Monday.
In an interview with the British Financial Times newspaper, Novak said that Russia is looking to continue trading Iranian crude oil beyond the Monday cut-off.
A high-profile investment summit in Riyadh later this month is rapidly becoming a fiasco as prominent businesses and media groups have pulled out over Saudi Arabia’s alleged involvement in the disappearance and possible murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, said he would not be attending, and the Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNN and CNBC have withdrawn as media sponsors.
The world’s business elite were due to attend the Future Investment Initiative (FII), which begins in the Saudi capital on 23 October. However, some of the companies involved say they are withdrawing pending the outcome of investigations into Khashoggi’s disappearance, while others have pulled out unconditionally.
The president of Interpol is missing. While the international law enforcement organization based in Lyon, France, has yet to comment, French police have opened an investigation into the disappearance of Meng Hongwei. His wife reported that he has not been seen since late September, when he left Lyon for China.
Meng has been the president of Interpol, one of two top positions in the organization, since he was elected by the group’s general assembly in 2016, but that’s not the only hat he wears. Meng has been the vice minister of public security in China since April 2004. And there is widespread speculation he ran afoul of the Communist Party leadership. What isn’t clear is why or how.
A British-based investigative group claims that one of two men charged with attempted murder in the nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal earlier this year is a highly decorated officer in Russia's military intelligence service.
Bellingcat, an open-source investigation website that has reported on the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, says that one of the two men — whose passport name is Ruslan Boshirov — is actually Anatoly Chepiga, who was deployed to Chechnya three times and in 2014 was given a "Hero of the Russian Federation" citation, the country's highest award.
Boshirov and another man whose passport name is Alexander Petrov, have been charged in the U.K. in the March attack in Salisbury on the Russian ex-double agent Skripal and his daughter Yulia using the Novichok, a type of nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
"In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than any administration in the history of our country," Trump said, opening his address to the U.N. General Assembly.
Audience members then began chuckling and the laughs grew louder when Trump said "so true."
Trump smiled and paused, then responded: "I didn't expect that reaction but that's OK."
TVNL Comment: What an embarrasssment for this idiot to be President of the US. Finally, an assembly of world leaders was able to ridicule him as one voice.
Typhoon Mangkhut, which meteorologists called the most powerful storm in the world this year, swept through the northern end of the Philippine island of Luzon, leaving at least 25 people dead and wreaking havoc. It uprooted trees, ripped off roofs, set off landslides and flooded farms and roads.
Yet amid the suffering, there was also relief that the situation was not much worse. The initial casualty toll was far lower than officials had feared in the days before the storm made landfall early Saturday on the Philippines’ largest and most populous island.
Around the world, Sweden is viewed as a haven for liberal values and progressive policy. This image is likely to change after the election this Sunday. If polls are accurate, the far-right Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) will receive about a fifth of the vote, giving them tremendous power in parliament.
In the past few weeks, international media have descended upon Sweden, attempting to explain this rise of the far-right. Most have come up with a similar story, that goes something like this: the political establishment, and the governing parties of the past decade, from the center-left and center-right, have completely failed to handle the challenges of mass immigration, and now they are paying the price. So voters are turning to the Sweden Democrats as a kind of corrective to an unrealistic immigration policy.
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