News in Brief

Date: 19 October 2018 - 21:13

News ID: ۵۸۶۷۷

TASHKENT (AFP) -- Russia and Uzbekistan Friday hailed the construction of an $11 billion nuclear power plant that should help solve an energy deficit in the Central Asian country while binding it tighter to Moscow politically.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was paying a first state visit to Uzbek counterpart Shavkat Mirziyoyev since Mirziyoyev replaced the late Islam Karimov, who ruled for nearly three decades before his death in 2016.
During the visit the two countries signed deals worth $27.1 billion, according to the Uzbek economy ministry.
"Uzbekistan is our loyal ally and our strategic partner... We will do all we can to strengthen our cooperation," Putin said while meeting Uzbek counterpart Shavkat Mirziyoyev in the capital Tashkent.
The nuclear power plant, set to be completed by 2028, has strategic significance for Moscow which is looking to reassert its economic and political clout in Central Asia amid fierce competition from China and other players.
According to the Russian Rosatom nuclear energy agency overseeing the project the plant's output should account for a fifth of Uzbekistan's overall power generation.

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PARIS (AFP) -- Four French marines were injured in an accident involving a helicopter on an assault ship in the North Sea, the armed forces said Friday.
The accident took place about 130 kilometers off the coast of Dunkirk on Wednesday night, when the combat helicopter attempted to take off from the Dixmude ship for a training flight, the military said in a statement on Twitter, without giving details.
The helicopter's crew escaped unharmed but four navy members working on the flight deck were injured, one seriously.
The seriously injured member was initially treated in the ship's hospital before being evacuated to a military hospital, the statement said, adding that the cause of the accident was being investigated.

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A heated argument in the West Wing between chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton over a recent surge in border crossings turned into a shouting match Thursday, two sources familiar with the argument told CNN.
The exchange lay bare a bitter disagreement that has existed between two of President Donald Trump's top aides for weeks now.
Trump, who was incensed about the rising levels of migrants and threatened to shut down the southern border on Twitter earlier that morning, took Bolton's side during the argument. Bolton favors a harder line approach to the issue and criticized Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the argument, a source said. Nielsen used to serve as Kelly's deputy when he ran DHS. Bolton reportedly said Nielsen needed to start doing her job, which incensed Kelly.
The president, who sources say was present for the beginning of the shouting match, later denied knowledge of it.
"I've not heard about it. No," Trump told reporters before boarding Air Force One to fly to Montana on Thursday afternoon.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders did not deny the incident, and instead pushed blame onto Democrats in a statement later Thursday, insisting that her colleagues are "not angry at one another."

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PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) -- Haitian police said Thursday at least two people were shot dead and more than a dozen injured in a huge anti-corruption protest that rocked the Caribbean country a day earlier, as pressure mounted on unpopular President Jovenel Moise.
In their initial report, authorities did not say who was to blame for the shootings, but police had fired in the air on Wednesday to help Moise escape from a public ceremony after he was shoved by protesters.
Elsewhere, near the presidential palace, police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators.
Tempers have been running high for weeks in Haiti over the alleged embezzlement of funds obtained through Petrocaribe, a Venezuelan initiative that provided poor countries in the Americas oil at cut rate prices.
In 2016 and again last year, probes carried out by Haiti's Senate concluded that nearly two billion dollars in money from the fund had been embezzled. A dozen former government ministers were implicated but nobody was ever charged.
Moise issued a series of tweets on Thursday saying he was serious about getting to the bottom of the scandal.

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BERLIN (Reuters) -- Some members of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Bavaria who are under surveillance for alleged links to extremist groups won seats in its parliamentary election at the weekend, the state’s intelligence agency said.
An agency spokesman said Thursday that the Bavarian domestic intelligence agency was checking whether it has a constitutional mandate to continue monitoring those individuals, who are now lawmakers in the state assembly.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition is divided over whether the federal intelligence agency should monitor the AfD, which entered the national Parliament for the first time in an election last year after campaigning on an anti-Islam platform.
In Bavaria, the party, which says Islam is incompatible with the German constitution, secured 22 seats in the regional Parliament based on a little over 10 percent of the vote.

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