Month: September 2024

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Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy once again Sunday urged Western allies to permit Kyiv to strike military targets deep inside Russia, especially air bases, after a deadly attack on Kharkiv.  

“Only a systemic solution makes it possible to oppose this terror: the long-range solution to destroy Russian military aviation where it is based,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address.  

“We are waiting for appropriate decisions coming primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy.”  

Earlier, a guided Russian bomb struck a residential building in Kharkiv, the latest of a series of attacks on the northeastern city, starting a blaze which firefighters extinguished.  

Rescuers pulled out the dead body of an elderly woman from the rubble, Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov said on Telegram, adding that 42 people were wounded.   

In his speech, Zelenskyy said Russia had also struck the Sumy and Donetsk regions Sunday with guided bombs.   

He said the Russian army carried out “at least 100 such air attacks” daily.

It is to prevent these sorts of attacks that Ukraine is asking for permission to strike military targets deep inside Russia from Western allies, who remain hesitant for fear of an escalation.  

Also Sunday, Russian shelling killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, local authorities said, as Moscow’s troops inched closer to the key logistics hub.  

More than 20,000 people — almost half of its population — have fled the city since August, while Russian strikes over the past two weeks have cut off water and electricity to many of its remaining residents.  

“Around 11 a.m. (0800 GMT), the enemy shelled the western part of the city… Unfortunately, one person died,” Pokrovsk’s military administration said on Telegram.  

Russia has been advancing toward Pokrovsk for months, getting to within 10 kilometers Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy once again Sunday urged Western allies to permit Kyiv to strike military targets deep inside Russia, especially air bases, after a deadly attack on Kharkiv.  

“Only a systemic solution makes it possible to oppose this terror: the long-range solution to destroy Russian military aviation where it is based,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address.

“We are waiting for appropriate decisions coming primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy.”  

Earlier, a guided Russian bomb struck a residential building in Kharkiv, the latest of a series of attacks on the northeastern city, starting a blaze which firefighters extinguished.  

Rescuers pulled out the dead body of an elderly woman from the rubble, Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov said on Telegram, adding that 42 people were wounded.   

In his speech, Zelenskyy said Russia had also struck the Sumy and Donetsk regions Sunday with guided bombs.   

He said the Russian army carried out “at least 100 such air attacks” daily.

It is to prevent these sorts of attacks that Ukraine is asking for permission to strike military targets deep inside Russia from Western allies, who remain hesitant for fear of an escalation.  

Also Sunday, Russian shelling killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, local authorities said, as Moscow’s troops inched closer to the key logistics hub.  

More than 20,000 people — almost half of its population — have fled the city since August, while Russian strikes over the past two weeks have cut off water and electricity to many of its remaining residents.  

“Around 11 a.m. (0800 GMT), the enemy shelled the western part of the city… Unfortunately, one person died,” Pokrovsk’s military administration said on Telegram.  

Russia has been advancing toward Pokrovsk for months, getting to within 10 kilometers (6 miles) of its eastern outskirts, according to the local administration.   

The city lies on the intersection of rail and road routes that supply Ukrainian troops and towns across the eastern front line and has long been a target for Moscow’s army.  

Russian strikes damaged two overpasses in the city earlier this week, including one that connected Pokrovsk to the neighboring town of Myrnograd, local media reported.  

Other eastern cities such as Bakhmut and Mariupol suffered massive bombardment before falling to Russian forces. of its eastern outskirts, according to the local administration.   

The city lies on the intersection of rail and road routes that supply Ukrainian troops and towns across the eastern front line and has long been a target for Moscow’s army.  

Russian strikes damaged two overpasses in the city earlier this week, including one that connected Pokrovsk to the neighboring town of Myrnograd, local media reported.  

Other eastern cities such as Bakhmut and Mariupol suffered massive bombardment before falling to Russian forces.
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Rome — The Italian army will start guarding medical staff at a hospital in the southern Calabria region from Monday, after a string of violent attacks on doctors and nurses by enraged patients and relatives across Italy, according to local media reports. 

Prefect Paolo Giovanni Grieco has approved a plan to reinforce the surveillance services already operated by soldiers on sensitive targets in the Calabrian town of Vibo Valentia, including the hospital, the reports added. 

Recent attacks on health workers have been particularly frequent in southern Italy, prompting the doctors’ national guild to ask for the army to be deployed to ensure medical staff’s safety. 

The turning point was an assault at the Policlinico hospital in the southern city of Foggia in early September. A group of about 50 relatives and friends of a 23-year-old woman — who died during emergency surgery — turned their grief and rage into violence, attacking the hospital staff. 

Video footage, widely circulated on social media, showed doctors and nurses barricading in a room to escape the attack. Some of them were punched and injured. The director of the hospital threatened to close its emergency room after denouncing three similar attacks in less than a week. 

With over 16,000 reported cases of physical and verbal assaults in 2023 alone, Italian doctors and nurses have called for drastic measures. 

“We have never seen such levels of aggression in the past decade,” said Antonio De Palma, president of the Nursing Up union, stressing the urgent need for action. 

“We are now at a point where considering military protection in hospitals is no longer a far-fetched idea. We cannot wait any longer,” he added. 

The Italian Federation of Medical-Scientific Societies (FISM) has also proposed more severe measures for offenders, such as suspending access to free medical care for three years for anyone who assaults health care workers or damages hospital facilities. 

Understaffing and long waiting lists are the main reasons behind patients’ frustration with health workers. 

According to Italy’s largest union for doctors (ANAAO), nearly half of emergency medicine positions remained unfilled as of 2022. Doctors lament that Italy’s legislation has kept wages low, leading to overworked and burnout staff at hospitals. 

These problems have been further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed many health workers to leave Italy in search of better opportunities abroad. 

In 2023, Italy was short of about 30,000 doctors, and between 2010 and 2020, the country saw the closure of 111 hospitals and 113 emergency rooms, data from a specialized forum showed. 
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Madrid — The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, called Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government “dictatorial” during an interview broadcast Sunday in Spain, echoing comments made by a Spanish minister that angered Caracas.

Venezuela on Thursday recalled its ambassador to Madrid for consultations and summoned Spain’s envoy to Caracas for talks after Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles referred to Maduro’s administration as a “dictatorship” and saluted “the Venezuelans who had to leave their country” because of his regime.

Asked about the row during an interview with private Spanish television channel Telecinco, Borrell said over 2,000 people had been “arbitrarily detained” since Venezuela’s disputed July 28 presidential election, which the Latin American country’s opposition accuses Maduro of stealing.

Political parties in Venezuela are “subjected to a thousand limitations on their activities” and the leader of the opposition, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, “has had to flee” to Spain, he added.

“What do you call all this? Of course, this is a dictatorial, authoritarian, dictatorial regime. But just saying so doesn’t solve anything. What we need to do is to try to solve it,” said Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister.

“Sometimes resolving things requires a certain verbal restraint, but let us not fool ourselves about the nature of things. Venezuela has called elections, but it was not a democracy before and it is much less so after.”

Maduro, who succeeded iconic left-wing leader Hugo Chavez on his death in 2013, insists he won a third term but failed to release detailed voting tallies to back his claim.

The opposition published polling station-level results, which it said showed Gonzalez Urrutia winning by a landslide.

Maduro’s claim to have won a third term in office sparked mass opposition protests, which claimed at least 27 lives and left 192 people wounded. About 2,400 people, including numerous teens, were arrested in the unrest.

 
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London — U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of “bluster” Sunday over his warning that letting Ukraine use long-range weapons to strike inside Russia would put NATO “at war” with Moscow.

Tensions between Russia and the West over the conflict reached dire levels this week as U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met at the White House to discuss whether to ease rules on Kyiv’s use of western-supplied weaponry.

“I think that what Putin’s doing is throwing dust up into the air,” Lammy told the BBC. 

“There’s a lot of bluster. That’s his modus operandi. He threatens about tanks, he threatens about missiles, he threatens about nuclear weapons.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been asking for permission to use British Storm Shadow missiles and U.S.-made ATACMS missiles to hit targets deeper inside Russia for months.

Biden and Starmer delayed a decision on the move during their meeting on Friday.

It came after Putin warned that green-lighting use of the weapons “would mean that NATO countries, the U.S., European countries, are at war with Russia.”

“If that’s the case, then taking into account the change of nature of the conflict, we will take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face,” he added. 

The Russian leader has long warned Western countries that they risk provoking a nuclear war over their support for Ukraine.

“We cannot be blown off course by an imperialist fascist, effectively, that wants to move into countries willy nilly,” said Lammy.

“If we let him with Ukraine, believe me, he will not stop there.”

Lammy said that talks between Starmer, Biden and Zelensky over the use of the missiles would continue at the United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York later this month.
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LIPOVA LAZNE, Czech Republic — One person drowned in southwest Poland and thousands were evacuated across the border in the Czech Republic as heavy rains continued to batter central Europe on Sunday, causing flooding in several areas.

A firefighter tackling flooding in lower Austria was also killed, Austrian Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler said on Sunday on social platform X as authorities declared the province, which surrounds Vienna, bordering the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a disaster area.

Rivers overflowed from Poland to Romania, where four people were found dead on Saturday, after days of torrential rain in a low-pressure system named Boris.

Some parts of the Czech Republic and Poland faced the worst flooding in almost three decades.

In the Czech Republic, a quarter of a million homes were without power due to high winds and rain. Czech police said they were looking for three people who were in a car that fell into the river Staric near Lipova Lazne, 235 kilometers east of Prague on Saturday.

In Poland, one person died in Klodzko county, which Prime Minister Donald Tusk said was the worst-hit area of the country and where 1,600 had been evacuated.

“The situation is very dramatic,” Tusk told reporters on Sunday after a meeting in Klodzko town, which was partly under water as the local river rose to 6.65 meters Sunday morning before receding slightly.

That surpassed a record seen in heavy flooding in 1997, which partly damaged the town and claimed 56 lives in Poland.

The nearby historic town of Glucholazy ordered evacuations Sunday morning as the local river started to break its banks, while firefighters and soldiers had been fighting since Saturday to protect a bridge in the town.

Residents across the Czech border also said the situation was worse than flooding seen before.

“What you see here is worse than in 1997, and I don’t know what will happen because my house is under water, and I don’t know if I will even return to it,” said Pavel Bily, a resident of Lipova Lazne.

The fire service in the region said it had evacuated 1,900 people as of Sunday morning, while many roads were impassable.

In the worst-hit areas, more than 10 centimeters of rain fell overnight and around 45 centimeters since Wednesday evening, the Czech weather institute said.

More rain is expected Sunday and Monday.

In Budapest, officials raised forecasts for the Danube to rise in the second half of this week, to above 8.5 meters, nearing a record 8.91 meters seen in 2013, as rain continued in Hungary, Slovakia and Austria.

“According to forecasts, one of the biggest floods of the past years is approaching Budapest but we are prepared to tackle it,” Budapest’s mayor Gergely Karacsony said.

In Romania, authorities said the rain was less intense than on Saturday, when flooding killed four and damaged 5,000 homes. Towns and villages in seven counties across eastern Romania were affected, and the country’s emergency response unit said it was still searching for two people missing. 
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rome — Italian prosecutors requested on Saturday a six-year prison sentence for Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, for allegedly blocking migrants from disembarking at one of the country’s ports in 2019.

Salvini, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition, is on trial for alleged deprivation of liberty and abuse of office for keeping 147 migrants at sea for weeks on a ship run by the Open Arms charity.

“The prosecution has asked for former interior minister Salvini to be sentenced to six years,” Open Arms’ lawyer Arturo Salerni told AFP, as the “long and difficult trial” nears an end.

A verdict in the trial, which began in October 2021, could come next month, he said. Salvini would be free to appeal any decision.

Salvini was not present, but wrote on Facebook: “Six years in prison for having blocked arrivals and defended Italy and Italians? Madness. Defending Italy is not a crime.”

Meloni also criticized the prosecutors.

“It is incredible that a minister of the Italian Republic risks 6 years in prison for doing his job defending the nation’s borders, as required by the mandate received from its citizens,” the prime minister wrote on X.

In summing up, prosecutor Geri Ferrara told the Palermo court in Sicily that there was “one key principle that is not debatable.”

“Between human rights and the protection of state sovereignty, it is human rights that must prevail in our fortunately democratic system,” he said.

The ship was stuck at sea for nearly three weeks before the migrants were allowed to disembark on the island of Lampedusa following a court order.

Members of Open Arms have testified that the migrants’ physical and mental well-being reached a crisis point as sanitary conditions onboard became dire, including a scabies outbreak.

Salvini, head of the anti-immigration League party and interior minister at the time, testified in January that he had understood that “the situation was not at risk” onboard the ship.

“The POS (safe port) should have been provided immediately and without delay,” prosecutor Marzia Sabella said Saturday, according to Italian media reports.

“Refusing to do so was breaking the rules, not being in line with a government plan,” and Salvini’s “choices” had given rise to “chaos,” she said.

A populist known for an “Italians first” policy, Salvini has repeatedly used attacks against illegal immigration to boost his political capital.

In 2019, serving under prime minister Giuseppe Conte, he implemented a “closed ports” policy under which Italy refused entry to charity ships that rescue migrants stranded while crossing the Mediterranean.

He cast it as a tough measure against traffickers who operate boats between North Africa and Italy and Malta, the deadliest migrant crossing in the world.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, also known for her anti-immigrant politics, offered Salvini a message of support on Saturday night, alleging he was the target of “judicial harassment aimed at silencing him.”

Salvini thanked her and promised not to “give in.”

Much of the trial has been focused on determining whether the decision-making and responsibility in the case lay with the Conte government or Salvini alone.

Salvini has previously faced a similar trial, accused of refusing to allow 116 migrants to disembark from an Italian coast guard boat in July 2019. But it was thrown out by a court in Catania in 2021. 
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