News in Brief

Date: 13 December 2017 - 20:43

News ID: ۴۷۴۴۳

SEOUL (Dispatches) -- A Russian delegation has arrived in North Korea, state media said Wednesday, hours after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson indicated the United States is open to talks with Kim Jong Un's government without preconditions.
Victor Kalganov, vice-director of Russia’s National Defense Command Center, was pictured at Pyongyang’s airport alongside three other officials from the country’s defense ministry in an image released by the state-run KCNA news agency.
Russian state news agency Interfax gave no details of Wednesday's North Korea visit, but reported that Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had welcomed Tillerson’s comments.

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (Reuters) -- Democrat Doug Jones won a bitter fight for a U.S. Senate seat in deeply conservative Alabama on Tuesday, dealing a political blow to President Donald Trump in a race marked by sexual misconduct accusations against Republican candidate Roy Moore.
The stunning upset makes Jones the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Alabama in a quarter-century and will trim the Republicans’ already narrow Senate majority to 51-49, opening the door for Democrats to possibly retake the chamber in next year’s congressional elections.
The ugly campaign drew national attention and split the Republican Party following accusations by several women that Moore sexually assaulted or pursued them when they were teens and he was in his 30s.
Trump endorsed Moore even as other party leaders in Washington walked away from him, but Jones, 63, a former federal prosecutor, portrayed the campaign as a referendum on decency and promised the state’s voters he would not embarrass them in Washington.

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two FBI officials who would later be assigned to the special counsel's investigation into Donald Trump's presidential campaign described him with insults like "idiot" and "loathsome human" in a series of text messages last year, according to copies of the messages.
One of the officials said in an election night text that the prospect of a Trump victory was "terrifying."
Peter Strzok, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, was removed over the summer from special counsel Robert Mueller's team following the discovery of text messages exchanged with Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer who was also detailed this year to the group of agents and prosecutors investigating potential coordination between Russia and Trump's Republican campaign.

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COPENHAGEN (Dispatches) -- The Danish Immigration Authority has added Saudi preacher Abdullah bin Radi Almoaede al-Shammary to a ‘blacklist’ of 10 foreign clerics barred from entering the country amid allegations that these individuals promote hate speech.
The country’s Minister for Immigration Inger Stojberg welcomed the announcement Tuesday. "Hate preachers have no business being in Denmark. They travel around spreading hateful messages and try to convince others to share their rapturous views,” Stojberg said.
"That’s why I’m glad to see that the Immigration Authority is doing a good job by continually discovering these hate preachers,” the minister added.
There were six people on the list, including two Saudis, one Syrian, one Canadian, and two Americans, when it was first published in May this year. Several other individuals were added to the list in June and in August.

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PARIS (Reuters) -- French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a bleak assessment on the global fight against climate change to dozens of world leaders and company executives, telling them: "We are losing the battle”.
"We’re not moving quickly enough. We all need to act,” Macron said, seeking to breathe new life into a collective effort that was weakened this summer when President Donald Trump said he was pulling the United States out of an international accord brokered in the French capital two years ago.
Macron, who has worked to establish his role as a global leader since his sweeping election win in May, said modern-day science was revealing with each day the danger that global warming posed to the planet, he sai
"We are losing the battle,” he said, urging a new phase in the fight against global warming.

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VIENNA (AFP) -- The major European gas pipeline hub in Austria that suffered a deadly explosion on Tuesday has resumed pumping gas abroad, its operator said Wednesday.
"All transit connections were put into operation again before midnight and are 100-percent operational," Harald Stindl, Gas Connect Austria chief, told Oe1 public radio.
The explosion at the Baumgarten site on Tuesday killed one person and left 18 others injured, including one seriously. The cause is currently being investigated.
The compressor station in eastern Austria is one of Europe's main entry points for Russian gas and pumps it onwards to other countries including Italy and Germany.
It handles around 40 billion cubic meters of gas per year, or six million cubic meters per hour, equating to some 10% of the continent's needs.