New in Brief

Date: 30 November 2021 - 21:40

News ID: ۹۷۲۱۸

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday he had not yet decided whether to run for a new six-year term in the Kremlin when his current term ends in 2024. Putin has been in power as president or prime minister since the turn of the century, making him the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin. Russia passed reforms last year allowing him to run for two more six-year terms, without which he would have had to step down in 2024. Speaking at an investment forum in Moscow, the Kremlin leader suggested that the very option of him being able to run for president again had stopped the political system being undermined. “Whether or not I do this is yet to be decided, but the very existence of this right (to run) is already stabilizing the domestic political situation,” he said. Some analysts have said Putin could have become a “lame duck” president if he had not had the option of running again in 2024.

***
BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) — A military helicopter crashed in Azerbaijan during a training flight on Tuesday, killing 14 people and wounding two more, Azerbaijani authorities said. The helicopter of Azerbaijan’s State Border Guard service crashed on Tuesday morning during a flight over the Garaheybat training ground in the east of Azerbaijan, according to a joint statement of the border guard service and Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s office. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the crash, which the two state agencies are investigating. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mehriban Aliyeva have extended their condolences to the families of the victims.

***
BERLIN (AP) — German investigators said 14 suspects were arrested Tuesday in an investigation of a gang accused of bringing nearly five metric tons of cocaine from South America to Germany. The investigation was triggered by the seizure in a shipping container in Santos, Brazil, in November 2018 of 690 kilograms (1,521 pounds) of cocaine addressed to a company in Berlin, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office said in a statement. That led them to a smuggling network dating back to at least 2011. The gang disappeared from view after that find, but the investigation pointed to efforts to build new smuggling routes via Colombia, Panama and Mexico, police said. Alongside the drug smuggling, the participants are accused of using bogus companies to fraudulently apply for aid from coronavirus relief programs and launder money. Those suspected of involvement include a former officer with East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, and an insurance company’s office in Berlin.

***
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The United States revoked its designation of the Colombian group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as a foreign terrorist organization on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. FARC was formally dissolved after a 2016 Peace Accord with the Colombian government and no longer exists as a unified organization that engages in terrorism, Blinken said. The two dissident groups that have formed out of FARC, La Segunda Marquetalia and FARC-EP, or People’s Army, have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations, he added. Founded in 1964, FARC was responsible for summary executions and kidnappings of thousands of people, including Americans.

***
BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) -- Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo launched joint air and artillery strikes in eastern Congo on Tuesday against a Daesh-linked militia known as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), both countries said. Based in Congo since the late 1990s, the ADF is blamed for killing hundreds of villagers in the east of the country in raids after it pledged allegiance to Daesh in mid-2019. Daesh has in turn claimed responsibility for some of the ADF’s violence, including a string of recent bombings in Uganda, but United Nations researchers have found no evidence of Daesh command and control over ADF operations. Ugandan army spokeswoman Flavia Byekwaso said she was yet to receive details of the attacks on ADF bases, but they would not be a one-off. The joint offensive is the first time Uganda has publicly intervened against the ADF in Congo since a brief campaign in December 2017.

***
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AFP) -- NASA early Tuesday postponed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station by two of its astronauts after receiving a “debris notification” for the orbital outpost. Astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron had been due to head outside the space laboratory later Tuesday on a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to replace a faulty radio communications antenna. “NASA received a debris notification for the space station,” the space agency tweeted. “Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the Nov. 30 spacewalk until more information is available.” Earlier in November, Russia destroyed one of its own satellites during a missile test, generating a cloud of debris that NASA said had “increased the risk to the station.”