News in Brief

Date: 13 February 2022 - 21:31

News ID: ۹۹۹۹۲

BERLIN (AFP) – German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was re-elected on Sunday to serve a second five-year term in the largely ceremonial role, Germany’s parliament speaker said. In office since 2017, the Social Democrat and former foreign minister was supported by an overwhelming majority of delegates to the specially constituted Federal Convention, including members of the parliament and regional nominees, among them celebrities and leading figures from civil society. Germany’s president has little executive power but is considered an important moral authority. After a messy parliamentary election result in 2017, Steinmeier helped prod politicians to form a new coalition government rather than holding out for a new vote.

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OUAGADOUGOU (AFP) – French forces have killed dozens of alleged militants in Burkina Faso and claimed it was linked to deadly attacks this week in neighboring Benin whose victims included a Frenchman, the army said. The French-led Barkhane force in the Sahel region “engaged its air intelligence capacities to locate the armed group” responsible for the attacks, before carrying out air attacks that killed 40 militants, the army’s general command said on Saturday. The Frenchman had been among nine people killed this week in two attacks on park rangers in the W National Park, a wildlife reserve in Benin’s remote north bordering troubled Niger and Burkina Faso. Two roadside bombs killed five park rangers, one park official, one soldier and a French trainer on Tuesday, according to a Beninese government toll. Two days later, another park official was killed in an explosion. Anti-France sentiments are rife in the region. Protests have been staged in the countries, calling on the French government to withdraw its troops.

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TRIPOLI (Reuters) – A convoy of fighters have moved into Tripoli from the Libyan city of Misrata to shore up the interim prime minister amid a push by the parliament to oust him in favor of its own candidate. Interim Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah has sworn he will hand over power only after an election and has rejected the move by parliament this week to appoint former interior minister Fathi Bashagha to head a new government. The convoy’s arrival underscored the danger of renewed fighting in Libya as the crisis plays out, following mobilizations in recent weeks by armed factions backing different political sides. The convoy, comprising more than 100 vehicles according to a Reuters witness, arrived after Dbeibah earlier on Saturday accused the parliament of being “responsible for all this bloodshed and chaos” in Libya over recent years.

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TOKYO (Dispatches) – A Japanese venture has developed a plan to build the country’s first nuclear fusion power plant. Kyoto Fusioneering Ltd., a startup company based in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, has secured funds for the experimental project and plans to start operations at the plant in the next five years, CEO Taka Nagao said in a recent interview, Japanese media reported. Nagao pointed out that while experimental reactors aimed at showing the feasibility of nuclear-fusion-power generation exist in Japan and abroad, “a plant that actually generates power is rare.” Unlike nuclear power generation, which involves fission chain reactions, fusion power generation converts the energy created by merging nuclei into electricity; and is considered safer than nuclear power plants with less highly radioactive nuclear wastes. The growing trend to create cleaner energy through nuclear fusion has prompted the Japanese to take a shot in this field. In Europe, the Munich-based Marvel Fusion and Siemens Energy, alongside France’s Thales and the privately-owned German mechanical engineering group Trumpf, have joined the race to create energy through nuclear fusion, as well. Last month, the European Union’s internal market commissioner said the bloc would need to invest 500 billion euros ($568 billion) in new generation nuclear power stations until 2050.

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OSLO (Reuters) – A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world’s crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes will receive new deposits on Monday, including one from the first organization that made a withdrawal from the facility. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only open a few times a year to limit its seed banks’ exposure to the outside world. On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds, including millet, sorghum and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples. ICARDA made the first seed withdrawal from the vault in 2015 to replace a collection damaged by the war, and two further withdrawals in 2017 and 2019 to rebuild its own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco. The vault, which holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally, also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties. The world used to cultivate over 6,000 different plants but UN experts say we now get about 40% of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail.

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LONDON (The Independent) – The UK Home Office and Crown Prosecution Service have refused to issue apologies to a group of asylum seekers who were wrongfully jailed after crossing the English Channel. British judges have so far overturned 12 cases, presenting an obstacle for the Home Office campaign to clamp down on Channel crossings. The migrants, mostly hailing from Iraq, were prosecuted for “facilitating illegal immigration” after steering small vessels across the Channel. And despite the Home Office’s extended campaign to label the men as “people smugglers,” the government body has still not acknowledged the overturning of their convictions. After the UK Court of Appeal identified an “error of law,” the asylum seekers who had been jailed were released and had their convictions overturned. More are expected to be released later this year. The Home Office said: “We must do all we can to prevent the further tragic loss of life on the Channel and put an end to dangerous people smuggling across our borders. “We continue to work with the CPS and National Crime Agency to crack down on and prosecute smugglers who risk lives for profit. These cruel people could face life sentences under our Nationality and Borders Bill.” Regardless of the claims, the court found that none of the convicted asylum seekers had profited from their trips or were part of any organized crime group.