News in Brief

Date: 12 October 2018 - 21:39

News ID: ۵۸۴۰۵

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump could meet in Paris on Nov. 11 if both leaders take part in the same event to commemorate the end of World War One, RIA news agency cited the Russian foreign ministry as saying on Friday.
Russia is open to dialogue and would be ready to consider times and locations of a possible meeting between the two leaders if Washington were also interested, the ministry said.

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BEIJING (Reuters) -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit China from Oct. 25 to 27 in the first official visit by a Japanese leader in seven years, China said on Friday, as the United States steps up trade pressure on Beijing and Tokyo.
President Donald Trump has made clear he is unhappy over Japan’s $69-billion trade surplus with the United States, and wants a two-way agreement to address it with the U.S. ally.
He has also slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports for what he calls its trade abuses, prompting retaliation from Beijing.
"We hope this visit by Prime Minister Abe can help consolidate and elevate mutual trust, deepen practical cooperation, and promote continuous new development in ties,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in Beijing.
China welcomes investment from Japanese firms, he told a regular briefing, adding that increasing trade and economic cooperation between the two major economies benefits both them and the world. "We attach importance to China-Japan relations.”

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PALU, Indonesia (AFP) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Friday visited the disaster-ravaged Indonesian city of Palu, where an earthquake and tsunami killed 2,000 people and left thousands more missing, presumed dead.
A 7.5-magnitude quake and a wall of water struck the city on Sulawesi island on Sept. 28, leaving entire neighborhoods in ruins and 200,000 people desperate for humanitarian assistance.
Rescue teams scoured the wreckage for a fortnight before calling off the search for the dead, acknowledging as many as 5,000 missing people would never be found.
Guterres and Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla toured one of the worst-hit areas, and spoke with survivors being treated at an outdoor tent hospital and evacuation center.
"We are with the people of Indonesia and Sulawesi," Guterres said after surveying the devastation at Balaroa, a hard-hit neighborhood in Palu.
Entire villages were sucked into the earth at Balaroa when soil turned to mush under the force of the quake.

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VATICAN CITY (NY Times) — Pope Francis on Friday accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, a moment many victims of clerical sexual abuse had hoped would demonstrate his commitment to holding accountable bishops who have mismanaged cases of sexual misconduct.
But instead of making an example of Cardinal Wuerl, who was named in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report that accused church leaders of covering up abuse, Francis held him up as a model for the future unity of the Roman Catholic Church. The pope cited Cardinal Wuerl’s "nobility” and announced that the 77-year-old prelate would stay on as the archdiocese’s caretaker until the appointment of his successor.
In an interview, Cardinal Wuerl said that he would continue to live in Washington and that he expected to keep his position in Vatican offices that exert great influence, including one that advises the pope on the appointment of bishops.
Cardinal Wuerl had a reputation as a reformer before the Pennsylvania grand jury report in August detailed widespread clerical abuse over many decades. The report included accounts of Cardinal Wuerl’s poor handling of accusations against priests when he was the bishop of Pittsburgh, mentioning his name more than 200 times.
The report said Cardinal Wuerl had relied on the advice of psychologists to permit priests accused of sexually abusing children to remain in the ministry.

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NAIROBI (AFP) -- Africa’s youngest billionaire was kidnapped Thursday by gunmen from a gymnasium in Tanzania’s economic capital Dar es Salaam, officials said.
Muhammad Dewji, 43, who heads the MeTL Group which operates in about 10 countries with interests in agriculture to insurance, transport, logistics and the food industry, was snatched as he entered the gym of a hotel in the city.
"Initial information indicates he was kidnapped by whites traveling in two vehicles,” regional governor Paul Makonda told journalists, adding that "this kind of incident is new here.”
Dewji was born in Tanzania and studied at Georgetown University in the U.S. He also served as a member of Parliament from 2005 to 2015.
In 2013, he became the first Tanzanian to grace the cover of Forbes magazine and was named Forbes Africa Person of the Year in 2015.
Dewji is also the main shareholder in Tanzania’s Simba FC football club. According to Forbes he is 17th on the list of Africa’s billionaires, and worth $1.5 billion.

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GENEVA (Reuters) -- A militia group fighting against the takfiri militant group Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria has released 833 children from its own ranks, some as young as 11, the UN children's agency UNICEF said Friday.
UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac said the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) was a local militia formed in 2013 by a number of vigilante groups in Nigeria's Borno state.