News in Brief

Date: 08 September 2021 - 21:26

News ID: ۹۴۱۵۴

BRASILIA (Dispatches) - Dogged by an investigation as part of an inquiry into fake news and politically weakened, Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took part in demonstrations Tuesday in favor of his administration in the federal capital, Brasilia, and in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. In two inflammatory speeches on the country’s Independence Day, Bolsonaro threatened institutions and a coup and even said he would only leave power when he dies, Anadolu news agency reported. In Brasília, Bolsonaro made a direct threat to Supreme Court Chief Justice Luiz Fux.

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KYIV (Reuters) - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government said on Wednesday it could suspend an accord with the European Union on accepting refugees, as both sides traded blame over a build-up of migrants on the Belarusian border. Lukashenko has submitted a draft law to parliament to suspend the accord, which obliges Minsk to take back migrants who entered the EU via Belarus but who violated their conditions of stay, entry or residence. “The document was prepared in response to the unfriendly actions taken by the EU and its member states towards Belarus,” Lukashenko’s press service said in a statement.

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MOSCOW (Dispatches) -Russian Emergencies Minister Yevgeny Zinichev has died while attempting to save a person’s life during training exercises in the Arctic city of Norilsk. Zinichev, 55, was in the Arctic to oversee large-scale drills and visited the construction site of a new fire station in Norilsk, as well as a search-and-rescue team in the area, the ministry said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies on Wednesday. Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of the state-funded RT news broadcaster, said Zinichev died while rescuing a cameraman who slipped and fell into the water, the Moscow Times reported.

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BRUSSELS (Dispatches) -Pollution from coal-fired power stations on the European Union’s southeastern border are estimated to have caused thousands of deaths in the region due to breaches of legally-binding limits on harmful emissions. The 18 coal plants operating in Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Montenegro were responsible for 19,000 deaths over the past three years, according to projections in a report by CEE Bankwatch Network and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. More than half of those deaths were estimated to be within the EU. The power stations produced 2.5 times as much harmful sulfur dioxide emissions as all of the 221 coal stations in the EU combined last year, the report said.

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KHARTOUM (Dispatches) -- Sudan’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said it had summoned the Ethiopian Ambassador to Khartoum as the Sudanese authorities found 29 bodies in a border river. “On Aug 30, the Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Ambassador of Ethiopia in Khartoum after the Sudanese authorities, during July 26 and Aug 8, 2021, found 29 bodies carried by Setait River, east of the villages adjacent to Wad El Helew locality in Kassala State,” the ministry said in a statement. The ministry informed the Ethiopian ambassador that the bodies belonged to Ethiopian citizens of the Tigray region, whose identities were identified by some Ethiopian individuals residing in Wad El Helew area, the statement said.