News in Brief

Date: 31 October 2022 - 21:48

News ID: ۱۰۸۴۴۹

LONDON (Reuters) -- The British government came under increasing pressure on Monday to tackle deteriorating conditions at a migrant processing centre in southeast England a lawmaker said was “overwhelmed” by the numbers of people arriving across the English Channel. Nearly 1,000 migrants arrived in Britain in small boats on Saturday alone, according to the Ministry of Defense. Conditions at the site at Manston in Kent were last week described by Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Neal as “pretty wretched”. Intended to house around 1,500 migrants for less than 24 hours at a time, numbers have swelled to more than double that, with one Afghan family telling Neal they had been there for 32 days. Neal told a parliamentary committee that out of 11,000 people who had gone through the centre in the past two months, there had been four cases of diphtheria. On Sunday, a similar centre in the nearby port of Dover was attacked by a man who drove up and threw petrol bombs attached to fireworks before killing himself.

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SAINTE-SOLINE, France (AFP) – French protesters on Monday defied a massive police presence to try to stop an agriculture water storage project, as the government vowed to prevent any encampment and denounced “eco-terrorism”. Violent clashes with security forces marked the launch of the protest Saturday near Sainte-Soline in the western Deux-Sevres department, where officials said 4,000 people had turned out against the project. A group of 400 farmers is hoping to build a network of 16 giant retention basins for groundwater pumped out during the winter, which can then be used for irrigation in summers, which have experienced severe drought in recent years. But climate activists and local opponents see a “water grab” by intensive agricultural producers that will deprive smaller farmers of access by disrupting natural groundwater recharge. One farmer has allowed protesters to set up camp on his land, where watchtowers and fences are being built to create a “village of Gauls”, a reference to the popular “Asterix” comic books.

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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s government said Monday that it has chosen South Korea as its partner for building its second planned nuclear power plant, a decision that comes days after it picked the U.S. and Westinghouse to build the first one. The central European country’s plans to construct two nuclear power plants are part of an effort to burn less coal and gain greater energy independence. Officials from the Polish and South Korean governments as well as from energy companies met in Seoul on Monday to sign a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on construction of the plant in Patnow in southwestern Poland, some 230 kilometers (140 miles) from Warsaw. A binding contract is due to be signed next year. Polish energy companies PGE and ZE PAK signed the letter of intent with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power to cooperate on the plant.

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NOVELETA, Philippines (AFP) – The death toll from a storm that battered the Philippines has jumped to 98, the national disaster agency said Monday, with little hope of finding survivors in the worst-hit areas. Just over half the fatalities were from a series of flash floods and landslides unleashed by Tropical Storm Nalgae, that destroyed villages on the southern island of Mindanao on Friday. Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that strike the Philippines each year, but storms that do reach the region tend to be deadlier than in Luzon and central parts of the country. The number of fatalities is likely to rise, with the national disaster agency recording 63 people still missing in its latest report. Scientists have warned that deadly and destructive storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

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PREDAPPIO, Italy (AP) — Several thousand black-clad fascist sympathizers chanted and sang in praise of the late Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as they marched to his crypt, 100 years after Mussolini entered Rome and completed a bloodless coup that gave rise to two decades of fascist rule. The crowd of 2,000 to 4,000 marchers, many sporting fascist symbols and singing hymns from Italy’s colonial era, was more numerous than in the recent past, as the fascist nostalgics celebrated the centenary of the March on Rome. On Oct. 28, 1922, black-shirted fascists entered the Italian capital, launching a putsch that culminated two days later when Italy’s king handed Mussolini the mandate to start a new government. The crowd in Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace and final resting place in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, also was apparently emboldened by the fact that a party with neo-fascist roots is heading an Italian government for the first time since World War II.

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CAIRO (AP) — An oil refinery in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum resumed operations following a brief halt due to an act of “sabotage” on one of its pipelines, state-run media said on Monday. According to the SUNA news agency, the pipeline was “forced to stop for a limited period due to sabotage of the crude carrier line.” The report did not elaborate when the purported sabotage took place or what it entailed. It said all pipelines were back working now, it said. The report comes as Sudan’s ruling generals and the pro-democracy movement’s main factions continue negotiations toward finding a political settlement.