MOSCOW (Anadolu) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump are likely to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China in November if both attend, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said Sunday. “If the leaders are at the same event, then it seems to me they will inevitably meet and talk,” Ushakov said in an interview with Russian broadcaster VGTRK. According to him, there had been no signals or indications of plans for such a meeting yet, but the APEC summit is still about three months away. “We have to live until then. Before that, we still have many major international events,” he said. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a separate interview with VGTRK that NATO and EU countries would not be able to publicly distance themselves from providing military assistance to Ukraine and pursuing an anti-Russian policy.

 

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ALMATY (Reuters) - Kazakhs began voting on Sunday, in a snap parliamentary election that looked set to strengthen President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s power over the Central Asian country, a major energy and minerals exporter. The election was triggered by the adoption of a new constitution earlier this year, which streamlines parliament from two chambers into one. Kazakhstan’s supreme court said last month that the new constitution allowed Tokayev, who took office in 2019, to run for a fresh seven-year term. Opinion polls show a large majority for Adilet, a pro-Tokayev party founded only months ago, and into which the previous ruling party Amanat, which had dominated Kazakh politics since the 1990s, has dissolved itself.

 

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OSLO (Xinhua) -- An ongoing strike by Norwegian air traffic controllers caused widespread flight disruptions on Saturday. Airports in western Norway were also affected on Saturday. Bergen Airport saw mounting delays and cancellations throughout the day, while major restrictions and temporary airspace closures over western Norway disrupted regular passenger services at Bergen and Stavanger airports in the evening. 

 

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WARSAW (Xinhua) -- Around 5,000 customers in Poland’s northeastern Podlaskie province remained without electricity on Sunday afternoon after strong winds damaged power infrastructure a day earlier, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported. At the height of the outages on Saturday, some 145,000 customers across Podlaskie and parts of the neighboring Warmian-Masurian and Mazowieckie provinces lost power, including around 120,000 in Podlaskie. Firefighters in Podlaskie responded to 850 incidents related to the strong winds on Saturday, most involving fallen trees and branches, PAP reported.

 

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ELSENBORN, Belgium (AP) — The wildfires burning across Europe this summer have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the blackened landscape: rusty bombs and mines from World War I and II that threaten crews responding to the flames. Some of the weapons have exploded in the intense heat. Blasts have been reported in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, where a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames near a site of fierce fighting in the Limburg province in 1944. A fast-moving brush fire that kicked up on a hillside in Northern Nevada just outside Reno on Saturday has exploded to more than 10,000 acres, threatening hundreds of homes.

 

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Berlin (DW) - Germany’s train worker union on Sunday threatened to call nationwide strikes from January if the government fails to tighten sentences for attacks on train crew. Martin Burkert, head of the EVG union, told the Sunday edition of the Bild tabloid that regional services would be brought “to a standstill in January” if a promised law on tougher penalties is not introduced in parliament this year. German train workers have been calling for enhanced security since a conductor died after being attacked by a passenger in February. “A train conductor was killed while on duty six months ago, and while politicians looked concerned and made grand statements, they took no action,” Burkert said.