News in Brief

Date: 22 October 2018 - 21:43

News ID: ۵۸۸۱۴

MONTREAL (AFP) -- Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said working with U.S. President Donald Trump is "not always simple," as he welcomed the successful renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Speaking on an episode of Quebec's most popular talk show, "Tout Le Monde En Parle," broadcast Sunday Trudeau said he had done his job of "standing up for Canadians" in agreeing the USMCA trade pact with the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Asked about his relationship with Trump, Trudeau cautiously acknowledged it is "not always simple."
"He knows it and so do I. We are not aligned on many things and it is sometimes difficult to find common ground, but we managed to do it fairly well," Trudeau said.
Relations between the two leaders took a hit in June, when Trump taunted Trudeau as "very dishonest & weak" and "meek and mild" as he left a G7 summit in Canada that the prime minister had hosted.

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TAIPEI (Reuters) -- The United States sent two warships through the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan's defense ministry said Monday, in a move that could anger Beijing amid heightening U.S. tensions with China.
The ministry said it was in full control of the situation during the U.S. warships' route through the Taiwan Strait, the self-ruled island's defense ministry said in a statement. The U.S. navy conducted a similar mission in July.
Last week, Reuters reported that the United States was considering a new operation to send warships through, aimed at ensuring free passage through the strategic waterway.
China views Taiwan as a wayward province and has been ramping up pressure to assert its sovereignty over the island.
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SYDNEY (Reuters) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Monday offered a rare national apology, only the second since 2008, to victims of institutional child sexual abuse and their families, bringing some survivors to tears.
The gesture followed a five-year inquiry into child sexual abuse that delved into more than 8,000 cases of sexual misconduct, most of them at religious and state-run institutions responsible for keeping children safe.
"Today, as a nation, we confront our failure to listen, to believe, and to provide justice,” Morrison told lawmakers in the Australian capital, Canberra.
"We say sorry. To the children we failed, sorry. To the parents whose trust was betrayed and who have struggled to pick up the pieces, sorry.”
Expressions of national regret such as Monday’s are reserved for egregious misdeeds in which the state has played a role.
Morrison also repeated Monday’s apology in a speech to nearly 800 victims, some of whom began to cry, images broadcast on television showed.

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PARIS (Guardian) – Three former high school students are suing the French state for racial discrimination saying they were stopped and searched by police on a school trip because of their skin color.
The high-profile court case, which opens in Paris on Monday, is the latest legal battle in France over men of black and North African heritage being routinely pulled over on the street and asked to show their identity papers with no explanation.
Lawyers for the high school students argue that the French police continue to use racial profiling to arbitrarily stop non-white people, despite a landmark court ruling in 2016 when the French state was found guilty of carrying out unjustified identity checks on men from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Norway on Monday mourned World War II saboteur Joachim Roenneberg, who headed a five-man team that daringly blew up a plant producing heavy water, depriving Nazi Germany of a key ingredient it could have used to make nuclear weapons.
Prime Minister Erna Solberg said Roenneberg, who died Sunday at 99, was "one of our finest resistance fighters” whose "courage contributed to what has been referred to as the most successful sabotage campaign” in Norway.
Roenneberg, then 23, was tapped by the Special Operations Executive, or SOE — Britain’s war-time intelligence gathering and sabotage unit — to destroy key parts of the heavily guarded plant in Telemark, in southern Norway, in a raid in February 1943.
In a 2014 Norwegian documentary in connection with his 95th birthday, Roenneberg said the daring operation went "like a dream” — a reference to the fact that not a single shot was fired.
Parachuting onto snow-covered mountains, the group was joined by a handful of other commando soldiers before skiing to their destination. They then penetrated the fortress-like heavy-water plant to blow up its production line.

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KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) -- Communal violence in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna over the last few days has killed 55 people, the local police commissioner Ahmad Abdel-Rahman said.
Abdel-Rahman said in a telephone interview that the clashes between two communities in the Kasuwan Magani area of southern Kaduna had led to 22 arrests. He did not give details on the cause of the conflict but tension and clashes along ethnic lines have plagued that part of the state in the last few years.
He said a curfew in Kasuwan Magani imposed by the state government Thursday had helped to calm the situation.
Hundreds of people have been killed this year in outbreaks of communal violence across Nigeria. Security has become a key campaign issue ahead of the February 2019 election in which President Muhammadu Buhari will seek a second term.