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New Artificial Intelligence Solutions Developed to Combat Wildfires

Wildfires fueled by climate change have ravaged communities from Maui to the Mediterranean this summer, killing many people, exhausting firefighters and fueling demand for new solutions. Enter artificial intelligence.

Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to scan the horizon for signs of smoke. A German company is building a constellation of satellites to detect fires from space. And Microsoft is using AI models to predict where the next blaze could be sparked.

With wildfires becoming larger and more intense as the world warms, firefighters, utilities and governments are scrambling to get ahead of the flames by tapping into the latest AI technology — which has stirred both fear and excitement for its potential to transform life. While increasingly stretched first responders hope AI offers them a leg up, humans are still needed to check that the tech is accurate.

California’s main firefighting agency this summer started testing an AI system that looks for smoke from more than 1,000 mountaintop camera feeds and is now expanding it statewide.

The system is designed to find “abnormalities” and alert emergency command centers, where staffers will confirm whether it’s indeed smoke or something else in the air.

“The beauty of this is that it immediately pops up on the screen and those dispatchers or call takers are able to interrogate that screen” and determine whether to send a crew, said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The cameras, part of a network that workers previously had to watch, provide billions of bytes of data for the AI system to digest. While humans still need to confirm any smoke sightings, the system helps reduce fatigue among staffers typically monitoring multiple screens and cameras, alerting them to look only when there’s possible fire or smoke, SeLegue said.

It’s already helped. A battalion chief got a smoke alert in the middle of the night, confirmed it on his cellphone and called a command center in San Diego to scramble first responders to the remote area.

The dispatchers said that if they hadn’t been alerted, the fire would have been much larger because it likely wouldn’t have been noticed until the next morning, SeLegue said.

San Francisco startup Pano AI takes a similar approach, mounting cameras on cell towers that scan for smoke and alert customers, including fire departments, utility companies and ski resorts.

The cameras use computer vision machine learning, a type of AI.

“They’re trained very specifically to detect smoke or not, and we train them with images of smoke and images of not smoke,” CEO Sonia Kastner said.

The images are combined with feeds from government weather satellites that scan for hotspots, along with other data sources, such as social media posts.

The technology gets around one of the main problems in the traditional way of detecting wildfires — relying on 911 calls from passers-by that need confirmation from staffers before crews and water-dropping planes can be deployed.

“Generally, only one in 20 of these 911 calls are actually a wildfire. Even during fire season, it might be a cloud or fog or a barbecue,” Kastner said.

Pano AI’s systems do still rely on final confirmation, with managers playing a time lapse of the camera feed to ensure it’s smoke rising.

For fighting forest fires, “technology is becoming really essential,” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president of energy delivery at Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility and a Pano AI customer.

Utility companies sometimes play a role in sparking wildfires, when their power lines are knocked down by wind or struck by falling trees. Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started a devastating blaze in Maui this summer after apparently being downed by high winds.

PGE, which provides electricity to 51 cities in Oregon, has deployed 26 Pano AI cameras, and Bekkedahl said they have helped speed up response and coordination with emergency services.

Previously, fire departments were “running around looking for stuff and not even really knowing exactly where it’s at,” he said. The cameras help detect fires quicker and get teams on the ground faster, shaving up to two hours off response times.

“That’s significant in terms of how fast that fire can can spread and grow,” Bekkedahl said.

Using AI to detect smoke from fires “is relatively easy,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft.

“What is not easy is to have enough cameras that cover enough places,” he said, pointing to vast, remote areas in northern Canada that have burned this summer.

Ferres’ team at Microsoft has been developing AI models to predict where fires are likely to start. They have fed the model with maps of areas that burned previously, along with climate and geospatial data.

The system has its limitations — it can’t predict random events like a lightning strike. But it can sift through historical weather and climate data to identify patterns, such as areas that are typically drier. Even a road, which indicates people are nearby, is a risk factor, Ferres said.

“It’s not going to get it all perfectly right,” he said. “But what it can do is it can build a probability map (based on) what happened in the past.”

The technology, which Microsoft plans to offer as an open-source tool, can help first responders trying to figure out where to focus their limited resources, Ferres said.

Another company is looking to the heavens for a solution. German startup OroraTech analyzes satellite images with artificial intelligence.

Taking advantage of advances in camera, satellite and AI technology, OroraTech has launched two mini satellites about the size of a shoebox into low orbit, about 550 kilometers above Earth’s surface. The Munich-based company has ambitions to send up eight more next year and eventually put 100 into space.

As wildfires swept central Chile this year, OroraTech said it provided thermal images at night when aerial drones are used less frequently.

Weeks after OroraTech launched its second satellite, it detected a fire near the community of Keg River in northern Alberta, where flames burned remote stretches of boreal forest repeatedly this summer.

“There are algorithms on the satellite, very efficient ones to detect fires even faster,” CEO Thomas Gruebler said.

The AI also takes into account vegetation and humidity levels to identify flare-ups that could spawn devastating megafires. The technology could help thinly stretched firefighting agencies direct resources to blazes with the potential to cause the most damage.

“Because we know exactly where the fires are, we can see how the fires will propagate,” Gruebler said. “So, which fire will be the big fire in one day and which will stop on their own.”

EU Businesses ‘Questioning Their Position’ in China: Trade Commissioner

European businesses in China are increasingly questioning their positions in the face of tough new security laws and a politicization of trade, an EU commissioner warned in Beijing on Monday.

“European companies are concerned with China’s direction of travel,” Valdis Dombrovskis said in a speech at the capital’s Tsinghua University.

“Many are questioning their position in this country.”

He pointed to a new foreign relations law and a recent update to China’s anti-espionage laws as being of “great concern to our business community.”

“Their ambiguity allows too much room for interpretation,” he warned.

“This means European companies struggle to understand their compliance obligations: a factor that significantly decreases business confidence and deters new investments in China,” Dombrovskis said.

The EU trade commissioner is on a multi-day visit to the world’s second-biggest economy, where he is set to meet senior economic officials and press the bloc’s case that it is not seeking an economic decoupling from China.

His trip follows a report by the Chamber of Commerce of the European Union last week that showed business confidence was at one of its lowest levels in decades.

“For decades, European companies thrived in China,” the Chamber’s president Jens Eskelund said.

But, after three “turbulent” years, he said, “many have re-evaluated their basic assumptions about the Chinese market”.

And it comes in the face of mounting trade tensions between the EU and China, following Brussels’ decision to launch a probe into Beijing’s electric car subsidies.

The investigation could see the EU try to protect European carmakers by imposing punitive tariffs on vehicles it believes are unfairly sold at a lower price.

The day after that announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry hit back at the EU’s “naked protectionism” and said the measures “will have a negative impact on China-EU economic and trade relations”.

Speaking in Beijing on Monday, Dombrovskis insisted China remained an attractive investment opportunity for European businesses.

“The EU and China both benefited immensely from being open to the world,” he said. “Trading and cooperating across borders helped to shape our economic and geopolitical strength.”

But, he said, growing challenges for business risked turning “what many saw as a ‘win-win’ relationship in past decades could become a ‘lose-lose’ dynamic in the coming years”.

Ukraine war

China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine also poses a “reputational risk”, he said.

Beijing’s position “is affecting the country’s image, not only with European consumers, but also businesses”, he said.

China has sought to position itself as a neutral party in the Ukraine conflict, while offering Moscow a vital diplomatic and financial lifeline as its international isolation deepens.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin is due to visit China next month.

“China always advocates for each country being free to choose its own development path,” Dombrovskis said.

“So, it’s very difficult for us to understand China’s stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, as it breaches China’s own fundamental principles.”

Turkey’s Erdogan to Meet Azeri’s Aliyev as Thousands Flee Karabakh

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan is to meet his ally Azeri President Ilham Aliyev on Monday, as thousands of ethnic Armenians began an exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan defeated the breakaway region’s fighters last week.

Erdogan will pay a one-day visit to Azerbaijan’s autonomous Nakhchivan exclave – a strip of Azeri territory nestled between Armenia, Iran and Turkey – to discuss with Aliyev the situation in the Karabakh region, the Turkish president’s office said.

The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond its control, were forced into a ceasefire last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.

On Sunday, the Nagorno-Karabakh leadership told Reuters the region’s 120,000 Armenians did not want to live as part of Azerbaijan for fear of persecution and ethnic cleansing and started fleeing the area.

Russia’s RIA news agency cited early on Monday an Armenian government statement saying that more than 1,500 people had crossed into Armenia from Nagorno-Karabkah as of midnight.

Those with fuel had started to drive down the Lachin corridor toward the border with Armenia, according to a Reuters reporter in the Karabakh capital known as Stepanakert by Armenia and Khankendi by Azerbaijan.

Reuters pictures showed dozens of cars driving out of the capital toward the corridor’s mountainous curves.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over the enclave in 30 years — with Azerbaijan gaining back swathes of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in a six-week conflict in 2020.

Erdogan, who backed the Azeris with weaponry in the 2020 conflict, said last week he supported the aims of Azerbaijan’s latest military operation but played no part in it.

Armenia says more than 200 people were killed and 400 wounded in last week’s Azeri operation, a hostility condemned by the United States and other Western allies of Armenia.

On Sunday, Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said it had confiscated more military equipment from Armenian separatists, including rockets, artillery shells, mines and ammunition.

The Karabakh Armenians are not accepting Azerbaijan’s promise to guarantee their rights as the region is integrated.

Armenia called for an immediate deployment of a U.N. mission to monitor human rights and security in the region.

“99.9% prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters.

Ukrainian Train Is Lifeline Connecting Kyiv With the Front Line

Among the hundreds of trains crisscrossing Ukraine’s elaborate railway network every day, the Kyiv-Kramatorsk train stands apart, shrouded in solemn silence as passengers anticipate their destination.

Every day, around seven in the morning, passengers of this route leave the relative safety of the capital and head east to front-line areas where battles between Ukrainian forces and Russian troops rage and Russian strikes are frequent with imprecise missiles that slam into residential areas.

The passengers are a mix of men and women that offer up a slice of Ukrainian society these days. They include soldiers returning to the front after a brief leave, women making the trip to reunite for a few days with husbands and boyfriends serving on the battlefields, and residents returning to check on homes in the Donetsk region.

They are all lost in thought and rarely converse with each other.

Nineteen-year-old Marta Banakh anxiously awaits the train’s next brief stop at one of its nine intermediate stations on the way to Kramatorsk. She disembarks at the station for a quick cigarette break, shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Her family doesn’t know she has made this journey from western Ukraine, crossing the entire country to meet her boyfriend, who has been serving in the infantry since the onset of Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He rarely gets a break, and Banakh has decided to surprise him with a visit.

“I worry that every day could be his last, and we may never see each other again,” she said wearing her hair down, crowned with a pearl-studded headband.

It’s the only high-speed daily train that drives to Kramatorsk. The city is about 30 kilometers (less than 20 miles) from the front line, which makes it susceptible to Russian strikes. And just a few kilometers away from the city, battles near the Russian-held city of Bakhmut rage for the second year.

The war has become an integral part of the lives of millions of Ukrainians, and the country’s vast railway system has remained operational despite the war. Night trains that rattle across the country still welcome customers with hot tea and clean sheets in the sleeping compartments. The trains also carry cargo, aid and gear.

The popularity of the Kyiv-Kramatorsk route highlights the reality of war.

Around 126,000 passengers used this route during the summer months this year, according to national railway operator Ukrzaliznytsia. It holds the fourth position for passenger volume among all intercity high-speed trains and maintains one of the highest occupancy rates — 94% — among all Ukrainian trains.

The connection was suspended for six months early in the war. The halt in April last year followed a Russian missile strike on the Kramatorsk railway station while passengers were waiting for evacuation. The strike killed 53 people and wounded 135 others in one of the deadliest Russian attacks.

Alla Makieieva, 49, used to regularly travel on this route even before the war. Returning from a business trip to the capital and back to Dobropillia, a town not far from Kramatorsk, she reflects on the changes between then and now.

“People have changed, now they seem more somber,” she says. “We’ve already learned to live with these missiles. We’ve become friends,” she joked. “In Kyiv, the atmosphere is completely different; people smile more often.”

Kyiv is regularly attacked by Russian missiles and drones. But unlike Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, the capital has powerful air defense protection, which gives residents an illusion of safety.

As the morning light gradually gives way to the midday sun, it fills the spacious train carriages in warm radiance. The train shelves are mostly filled with military backpacks and small bags. Occasionally, a waiter breaks the silence in the aisle, offering coffee, tea, and snacks. Along the way, one can order dishes like bolognese pasta or a cappuccino.

The high-speed train ride from Kyiv to Kramatorsk costs approximately $14. In nearly seven hours, passengers cover a distance of around 700 kilometers (400 miles).

Twenty-six-year-old Oleksandr Kyrylenko sits in the train’s lobby with a coffee in hand, gazing thoughtfully out of the window as the landscapes change rapidly.

It’s his first time heading to the front line, and he admits he didn’t expect to travel to the epicenter of the grinding war with such comfort.

He had been working as a warehouse manager in Poland when Russia invaded Ukraine. “I helped as much as I could,” he said. “Then I decided I needed to go myself.”

“There is no fear. I simply want it to end sooner,” he says of the war, dressed in military attire.

His parents were not thrilled about this idea, but this summer the young man returned to Ukraine and immediately went to the military enlistment office.

“It even feels lighter on my conscience,” he said, adding that this decision came naturally to him. “Human resources are running out. Something needs to be done about it.”

The train arrives at its destination on time, and the platform quickly fills with people.

Some, wearing military-colored backpacks slung over their shoulders, stride forward swiftly, while others linger on the platform in long-awaited embraces.

Twenty-year-old Sofiia Sidorchuk embraces her boyfriend, who has been serving since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The 20-year-old soldier refrains from disclosing his name for security reasons.

He holds Sidorchuk tightly, as if trying to make up for all the lost time during their longest separation in seven years of the relationship. “We missed each other,”  

Sidorchuk explains her decision to come from the northwestern Rivne region to Kramatorsk.

“It’s love,” added her partner, wearing military fatigues.

His commander granted him a few days alone with his beloved to recharge. In five days, he will embark on a new assault mission.

Macron: France Pulling Ambassador, Troops From Niger After Coup

French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday, France is imminently to withdraw its ambassador from Niger, followed by the French military contingent in the next months, in the wake of the coup in the west African country that ousted the pro-Paris president.

Macron’s announcement appeared to end two months of French defiance over the coup, which had seen Paris keep its ambassador in place in Niamey despite him being ordered by the coup leaders to go.

“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron told French television in an interview, without giving details over how this would be organized.  

Niger’s military rulers have banned “French aircraft” from flying over the country’s airspace, according to the Agency for the Safety of Air Navigation in Africa and Madagascar (ASECNA) website. It was not clear if this would affect the ambassador being flown out.

Macron added that military cooperation was “over,” and French troops would withdraw in “the months and weeks to come” with a full pullout “by the end of the year.”

“In the weeks and months to come, we will consult with the putschists, because we want this to be done peacefully,” he added.

France keeps about 1,500 soldiers in Niger as part of an anti-jihadis deployment in the Sahel region. Macron said the post-coup authorities “no longer wanted to fight against terrorism.”  

Niger’s military leaders told French ambassador Sylvain Itte he had to leave the country after they overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum on July 26.  

But a 48-hour ultimatum for him to leave, issued in August, passed with him still in place as the French government refused to comply, or to recognize the military regime as legitimate.

Earlier this month, Macron said the ambassador and his staff were “literally being held hostage” in the mission eating military rations with no food deliveries taking place.  

Macron in the interview reaffirmed France’s position that Bazoum was being held “hostage” and remained the “sole legitimate authority” in the country.

“He was targeted by this coup d’état because he was carrying out courageous reforms and because there was a largely ethnic settling of scores and a lot of political cowardice,” he argued.

The coup against Bazoum was the third such putsch in the region in as many years, following similar actions in Mali and Burkina Faso in 2021 and 2022 that also forced the pullouts of French troops.

But the Niger coup is particularly bruising for Macron after he sought to make a special ally of Niamey, and a hub for France’s presence in the region following the Mali coup. The U.S. also has over 1,000 troops in the country.

Macron regularly speaks by phone to Bazoum who remains under house arrest in the presidential residence.

The French president has repeatedly spoken of making a historic change to France’s post-colonial imprint in Africa, but analysts say Paris is losing influence across the continent especially in the face of a growing Chinese, Turkish and Russian presence.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) threatened military action to restore Bazoum but so far, its threats, which were strongly supported by France, have not transferred into action.

“We are not here to be hostages of the putschists,” said Macron. “The putschists are the allies of disorder,” he added.

Macron said that jihadi attacks were causing “dozens of deaths every day in Mali” after its coup and that now such assaults had resumed in Niger.  

“I am very worried about this region,” he said.

“France, sometimes alone, has taken all its responsibilities and I am proud of our military. But we are not responsible for the political life of these countries, and we draw all the consequences.”

Kremlin Critic and Journalist Kara-Murza Transferred to Siberian Prison, Lawyer Says

An imprisoned Russian opposition figure has been transferred to a maximum security prison in Siberia and placed in a tiny “punishment cell,” his lawyer said Sunday.

Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., 42, earlier this year was convicted of treason for publicly denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine and sentenced to 25 years in prison as part of the Kremlin’s relentless crackdown on critics. On Thursday, he arrived at IK-6 — a maximum security penal colony in the Siberian city of Omsk, his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said in a Facebook post Sunday.

Prokhorov said the transfer from a detention center in Moscow, where Kara-Murza was being held pending trial and appeals, took less than three weeks. Russian prison transfers, usually done by train, are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes weeks, during which there’s no access to prisoners, and information about their whereabouts is limited.

Kara-Murza, a journalist and an opposition activist, was jailed in April 2022. The charges against him stemmed from a speech he gave weeks prior to the arrest to the Arizona House of Representatives in which he denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

An associate of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was killed near the Kremlin in 2015, Kara-Murza survived poisonings in 2015 and 2017 that he blamed on the Kremlin. Russian officials have denied responsibility.

Kara-Murza rejected the charges against him and called them punishment for standing up to President Vladimir Putin. He likened the proceedings to the show trials under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Prokhorov said Sunday that upon arrival at the penal colony in Omsk, Kara-Murza was immediately placed in a “punishment cell” — a tiny concrete cell where convicts are held in isolation for violating prison regulations.

Prison authorities have regularly sent imprisoned dissidents to such cells in recent months over alleged minor infractions, a practice that is widely considered designed to put additional pressure on Kremlin critics behind bars.

Prokhorov called the news about Kara-Murza’s extreme confinement “worrying” given his deteriorating health, undermined by the poisonings and solitary confinement he had undergone in pre-trial detention.

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy Says He Met Top Businessmen During US Visit

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday he met leading American entrepreneurs and financiers during a visit this week to the United States, where investment opportunities in Ukraine were discussed.

Zelenskyy said the businessmen, who included Michael Bloomberg, Larry Fink and Bill Ackman, were prepared to make major investments in rebuilding Ukraine after its war with Russia.

“The American entrepreneurs and financiers confirmed their readiness to make large-scale investments in our country immediately after the end of the war and the receipt of security guarantees,” he posted on Telegram, along with photos of the meeting.

“We are working for the victory and reconstruction of Ukraine.”

On a trip to the U.S. and Canada this past week, Zelenskyy sought continued military and financial support for Kyiv’s effort to fend off Russia’s 19-month-old invasion.

NASA’s 1st Asteroid Samples Land on Earth After Spacecraft Release 

NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.

In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the mothership set off after another asteroid.

Scientists estimate the capsule holds at least a cup of rubble from the carbon-rich asteroid known as Bennu but won’t know for sure until the container is opened. Some spilled and floated away when the spacecraft scooped up too much and rocks jammed the container’s lid during collection three years ago.

Japan, the only other country to bring back asteroid samples, gathered about a teaspoon in a pair of asteroid missions.

The pebbles and dust delivered Sunday represent the biggest haul from beyond the moon. Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, the samples will help scientists better understand how Earth and life formed.

Osiris-Rex, the mothership, rocketed away on the $1 billion mission in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed rubble from the small roundish space rock in 2020. By the time it returned, the spacecraft had logged 4 billion miles (6.2 billion kilometers).

NASA’s recovery effort in Utah included helicopters as well as a temporary clean room set up at the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range. The samples will be flown Monday morning to a new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The building already houses the hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts more than a half-century ago.

The mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, will accompany the samples to Texas. The opening of the container in Houston in the next day or two will be “the real moment of truth,” given the uncertainty over the amount inside, he said ahead of the landing.

Engineers estimate the canister holds 250 grams (8.82 ounces) of material from Bennu, plus or minus 100 grams (plus or minus 3.53 ounces). Even at the low end, it will easily surpass the minimum requirement of the mission, Lauretta said.

It will take a few weeks to get a precise measurement, said NASA’s lead curator Nicole Lunning.

NASA plans a public show-and-tell in October.

Currently orbiting the sun 50 million miles (81 million kilometers) from Earth, Bennu is about one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across, roughly the size of the Empire State Building but shaped like a spinning top. It’s believed to be the broken fragment of a much larger asteroid.

During a two-year survey, Osiris-Rex found Bennu to be a chunky rubble pile full of boulders and craters. The surface was so loose that the spacecraft’s vacuum arm sank a foot or two (0.5 meters) into the asteroid, sucking up more material than anticipated and jamming the lid.

These close-up observations may come in handy late in the next century. Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182 — possibly close enough to hit. The data gleaned by Osiris-Rex will help with any asteroid-deflection effort, according to Lauretta.

Osiris-Rex is already chasing after the asteroid Apophis and will reach it in 2029.

This was NASA’s third sample return from a deep-space robotic mission. The Genesis spacecraft dropped off bits of solar wind in 2004, but the samples were compromised when the parachute failed, and the capsule slammed into the ground. The Stardust spacecraft successfully delivered comet dust in 2006.

NASA’s plans to return samples from Mars are on hold after an independent review board criticized the cost and complexity. The Martian rover Perseverance has spent the past two years collecting core samples for eventual transport to Earth.

Armenian PM Says Armenians May Flee Karabakh, Blames Russia

Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Sunday the likelihood was rising that ethnic Armenians would flee the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh and blamed Russia for failing to ensure Armenian security.

If 120,000 people go down the Lachin corridor to Armenia, the small South Caucasian country could face both a humanitarian and political crisis.

“If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity,” Pashinyan said in address to the nation.

“Responsibility for such a development of events will fall entirely on Azerbaijan, which adopted a policy of ethnic cleansing, and on the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said, according to a government transcript.

He added that the Armenian-Russian strategic partnership was “not enough to ensure the external security of Armenia.”

Last week, Azerbaijan scored a victory over ethnic Armenians who have controlled the Karabakh region since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. An adviser to the leader of the Karabakh Armenians told Reuters earlier on Sunday that the population would leave because they feel unsafe under Azerbaijani rule.

Russia had acted as guarantor for a peace deal that ended a 44-day war in Karabakh three years ago, and many Armenians blame Moscow for failing to protect the region.

Russian officials say Pashinyan is to blame for his own mishandling of the crisis, and have repeatedly said that Armenia, which borders Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia, has few other friends in the region.

“The government will accept our brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh with full care,” Pashinyan said.

Pashinyan has warned that some unidentified forces were seeking to stoke a coup against him and has accused Russian media of engaging in an information war against him.

“Some of our partners are increasingly making efforts to expose our security vulnerabilities, putting at risk not only our external, but also internal security and stability, while violating all norms of etiquette and correctness in diplomatic and interstate relations, including obligations assumed under treaties,” Pashinyan said in his Sunday address.

“In this context, it is necessary to transform, complement and enrich the external and internal security instruments of the Republic of Armenia,” he said. 

Holocaust Revisionist Is Top Mayor Candidate in One German City 

A populist far-right politician is the front-runner in a mayoral race Sunday in the German city of Nordhausen, best known as the location of the Nazi concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora.

Joerg Prophet of the Alternative for Germany party, won 42.1% of the vote in the first round of the election earlier this month. His opponent, independent incumbent candidate Kai Buchmann, had just 23.7%.

The prospect of a far-right mayor holding a revisionist version of Germany’s Holocaust past has not gone unnoticed by Holocaust survivors and people who work in Germany to combat discrimination.

Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, told AFP that an AfD mayor would not be welcome at commemorative events.

Agence France-Presse reports that Prophet posted in a blog in 2020 that the Allied forces liberated Mittelbau-Dora because they were interested only in the site’s rocket and missile technology.

“Everything I hear,” Wagner said, “suggests that Prophet will be elected not despite such historical revisionist positions, but precisely because of such positions.”

The AfD party’s popularity has been growing, especially as thousands of migrants have sought asylum in Germany recently. Migration is AfD’s signature issue.

AfD’s growing popularity has presented a dilemma for other political parties that must decide whether or how to cooperate with the controversial party.

Information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.

Police Officer Killed in Kosovo 

Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, said Sunday that a police officer was killed and another was wounded in an area of the country near Serbia.  

The prime minister said “masked professionals armed with heavy weapons” opened fire on police in the northern village of Banjska in Leposavic. 

European Union-facilitated talks in Brussels between Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, designed to normalize ties between the countries, collapsed earlier this month.   

Tensions have been running high in Kosovo since May, when violent clashes followed a disputed local election.  

The 1998-1999 war between Serbia and its former province, Kosovo, killed more than 10,000 people, mostly Kosovo Albanians.  

Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008 but Belgrade has refused to recognize the move. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press. 

Ukraine Grain Shipment Reaches Turkey

A second shipment of Ukrainian wheat reached Turkey on Sunday, according to Agence France-Presse. Russia had threatened to attack vessels headed to or from Ukraine.  However, Ukraine is now testing shipping waters controlled by NATO members Bulgaria and Romania. The Palau-flagged ship is headed to Egypt.

Gasoline and diesel customers of Russia have “highly likely” experienced local shortages, the British Defense Ministry said Sunday in its daily intelligence update on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The ministry said Russia suspended almost all diesel and gasoline exports on Thursday “to stabilize its internal markets.” That move, according to the ministry, “will almost certainly” further limit supplies globally.

The shortages are “unlikely” a direct result of the war but are instead “probably” caused by several factors, including “short term increases” in agricultural demands, the summer maintenance needs of refineries, and “attractive” export prices.

Countries currently depending on Russia for the supplies will “likely” be impacted the most, the ministry said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asserted Saturday that the Black Sea Grain Initiative allowing safe passage for Ukrainian exports will not be revived and castigated Ukraine’s proposed 10-point peace plan, calling both “not realistic.”

Lavrov addressed the United Nations General Assembly at the annual gathering of world leaders at U.N. headquarters in New York. In a week of global diplomacy, Ukraine and its Western allies sought to rally support for Kyiv on its defensive war against Russian aggression.

“It is completely not feasible,” Lavrov said of the peace plan initiated by Kyiv. “It is not possible to implement this. It’s not realistic and everybody understands this, but at the same time, they say this is the only basis for negotiations.”

Lavrov said the conflict would be resolved on the battlefield if Kyiv and the West persisted in that position.

Lavrov also said Moscow left the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which had allowed the safe passage of Ukrainian agricultural exports, because promises made to Russia had not been fulfilled.

He said the latest U.N. proposals to revive that export corridor also were “simply not realistic.”

Lavrov also lashed out at “the U.S. and its subordinate Western collective,” for stoking conflicts “which artificially divide humanity into hostile blocks and hamper the achievement of overall aims. They’re doing everything they can to prevent the formation of a genuine multipolar world order,” he said.

Lavrov addressed the U.N. General Assembly four days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joe Biden.

During his speech, Zelenskyy accused Russia of weaponizing food, energy and even children against Ukraine and “the international rules-based order” at large.

Biden struck a similar note, while urging world leaders to keep up support for Ukraine: “If we allow Ukraine to be carved up, is the independence of any nation secure?” he mused.

Pope Francis suggested Saturday that some countries were “playing games” with Ukraine by first supplying weapons and then mulling on whether they should back out of their promises.

The pope’s comments to a reporter’s question, aboard a plane returning from the French port city of Marseilles, reflected frustration that his efforts to bring about peace in Ukraine had not succeeded.

Francis has condemned the international arms trade in general but said last year that it is morally legitimate for nations to supply weapons to Ukraine’s defensive war against Russian aggression.

Several countries, including the United States, face domestic political pressure to stop or reduce spending on military aid to Ukraine.

During a stopover in Poland Saturday, Zelenskyy presented state awards to two Polish volunteers in Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. He honored Bianka Zalewska, a journalist who helped transport wounded children to Polish hospitals, and Damian Duda, who gathered a medical team to help wounded soldiers near the front line.

During his visit he did not meet with Polish officials as the relations between Ukraine and Poland are strained over Poland’s ban on Ukraine’s grain imports.

Zelenskyy offended his neighbors when he told the United Nations General Assembly in New York that Kyiv was working to preserve land routes for grain exports, but that the “political theater” around imports was only helping Moscow.

Ukraine targets Sevastopol

Meanwhile, Ukraine targeted the Crimean-occupied city of Sevastopol on Saturday morning, leaving the city of 500,000 under an air alert for about an hour after debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier, the Russian-installed regional governor Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

It was the second missile assault in as many days after Friday’s Ukrainian strike on the headquarters of Russia’s navy in Crimea that reportedly left dozens dead and wounded, including senior fleet commanders.

In an interview Friday with VOA’s Ukrainian Service, Ukraine’s intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said at least nine people were killed and 16 were injured, among them, Russian generals.

“Among the wounded is the commander of the group, Colonel-General [Alexander] Romanchuk, in a very serious condition. The chief of staff, Lieutenant General [Oleg] Tsekov, is comatose,” he said.

Alexander Romanchuk is the commander of a group of Russian forces in the Zaporizhzhia region and was promoted to the rank of colonel-general in 2023. Tsekov is the commander of the 200 OMSBR Coastal Forces of the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy.

Budanov did not confirm reports about the alleged death of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, Admiral Viktor Sokolov.

Budanov’s claims could not be independently verified.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted naval facilities in Crimea in recent weeks, while its counteroffensive makes slow gains in the east and south of Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War said Thursday.

Military experts say it is essential for Ukraine to maintain its attacks on targets in Crimea to degrade Russian morale and weaken its military.

As World’s Problems Grow More Challenging, United Nations Head Gets Bleaker

At the annual meeting of world leaders last year, the U.N. chief sounded a global alarm about the survival of humanity and the planet. This year, the alarm rang louder and more ominously, and the message was even more pressing: Wake up and take action — right now.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ assessment, delivered in his no-nonsense style, aimed to shock. We are becoming “unhinged,” he said. We are inching closer to “a great fracture.” Conflicts, coups and chaos are surging. The climate crisis is growing. Divides are deepening between military and economic powers, the richer North and poorer South, East and West. “A new Rubicon” has been crossed in artificial intelligence.

Guterres has spoken often on all these issues. But this year, which he called “a time of chaotic transition,” his address to leaders was tougher and even more urgent. And looking at his previous state-of-the-world speeches, it seems clear he has been headed in this direction for quite some time.

In his first address to world leaders in 2017 after taking the helm of the 193-member United Nations, Guterres cited “nuclear peril” as the leading global threat. Two years later, he was warning of the world splitting in two, with the United States and China creating rival internets, currency, trade, financial rules “and their own zero-sum geopolitical and military strategies.” He urged vigorous action “to avert the great fracture.”

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. The global response Guterres called for never happened; richer countries got vaccines and poorer ones were left waiting. At last year’s leaders’ gathering, his message was almost as dire as this week’s: “Our world is in peril and paralyzed,” Guterres said. “We are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.”

This year, his message to the presidents and prime ministers, monarchs and ministers gathered in the vast General Assembly hall was unambiguous and stark.

“We seem incapable,” Guterres said, “of coming together to respond.”

The world’s future, and the UN’s

At the heart of Guterres’ many speeches this week is the very future of the United Nations, an institution formed immediately after World War II to bring nations together and save future generations from war. But in a 21st-century world that is far more interconnected and also more bitterly divided, can it remain relevant?

For Guterres, the answer is clear: It must.

The Cold War featured two superpowers — the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union. When it ended, there was a brief period of U.S.-dominated unipolarity after the breakup of the Soviet Union and its dissolution into a dominant Russia and smaller former republics. Now it is moving to a more chaotic “multipolar world” — and creating, Guterres says, new opportunities for different countries to lead.

But Guterres’ key argument is rooted in history. He says it teaches that a world with many power centers and small groups of nations can’t solve the challenges that affect all countries. That’s why strong global institutions are needed, he told leaders on Thursday, and “the United Nations is the only forum where this can happen.”

The big question, upon which Guterres is now laser-focused, is whether an institution born in 1945 — a time when the tools to address chaos and fragmentation were more rudimentary — can be retooled and updated to tackle today’s challenges.

“I have no illusions,” he said. “Reforms are a question of power. I know there are many competing interests and agendas. But the alternative to reform is not the status quo. The alternative to reform is further fragmentation. It’s reform or rupture.”

That is the conundrum sitting in the U.N. chief’s lap: Can 193 nations with competing agendas undertake major reforms?

To meet the challenge, Guterres has called on world leaders to attend a “Summit of the Future” at next September’s U.N. global gathering, and in the coming, year to negotiate a “Pact for the Future.” At a meeting Thursday to prepare, he told ministers that the pact “represents your pledge to use all the tools at your disposal at the global level to solve problems – before those problems overwhelm us.”

The secretary-general said he knows reaching agreement will be difficult. “But,” he said, “it is possible.”

A sense that things are ‘fundamentally broken’

Time, Guterres says, is against the United Nations and countries that support the return of united global action. Perhaps that is why his words grow more dire each year.

He points to new conflicts like Ukraine, more intense geopolitical tensions, signs of “climate breakdown,” a cost-of-living crisis and the debt distress and default that is bedeviling more countries than ever.

“We cannot inch towards agreement while the world races towards a precipice,” Guterres said. “We must bring a new urgency to our efforts, and a shared sense of common purpose.”

That’s easier said than done, as this week’s high-level meetings — and the priorities and problems they raise — make clear.

Can all the U.N.’s far-flung nations unite behind a common purpose? Whether that happens in the next 12 months remains to be seen. Certainly there is support. Consider Bahamas Foreign Minister Frederick Audley Mitchell, addressing the global gathering Friday night. “Now, more than ever, we need the United Nations,” he said.

Richard Gowan, the U.N. director for the International Crisis Group, said Guterres’ state-of-the-world speech spoke “truth to power” and was an especially blunt and bleak assessment.

“He really seems to think that the multilateral system is fundamentally broken,” Gowan said. The secretary-general seems frustrated after years of difficult dealings with the divided U.N. Security Council, Gowan said, alluding to the United States and its Western allies increasingly clashing with Russia and China.

“Sometimes it feels like Guterres no longer believes in the institution he leads,” Gowan said.

For Guterres, then, the Summit of the Future presents an opportunity but also a possible demarcation point — between a brighter future and a more desolate one, between a chance at progress and the prospect of a closing door. To Gowan, it will be “a last chance for U.N. members to get their act together and rethink how the multilateral system could work.”

And that could present a potentially insurmountable peak for the world’s most senior diplomat to scale. Mark Malloch-Brown, president of the Open Society Foundations and a former U.N. deputy secretary-general, pronounced Guterres’ keynote speech to world leaders “a brave and frank admission that the U.N. is broken — no longer fit for purpose.”

“The problem is that precisely because of that, nobody may hear him,” Malloch-Brown said. “He may be speaking to an empty room.”

6 Young Portuguese Activists Head to Court in Climate Fight

Sofia Oliveira was 12 years old when catastrophic wildfires in central Portugal killed more than 100 people in 2017. She “felt it was now or never to raise our voices” as her country appeared to be in the grip of deadly human-caused climate change.

Now a university student, Sofia and five other Portuguese young adults and children between 11 and 24 years of age are due on Wednesday at the European Court of Human Rights, where they are accusing 32 European governments of violating their human rights for what they say is a failure to adequately address climate change. It’s the first climate change case filed with the court and could compel action to significantly slash emissions and build cleaner infrastructure.

Victory for them in Strasbourg would be a powerful instance of young people taking a legal route to force their governments to adopt a radical recalibration of their climate measures.

The court’s rulings are legally binding on member countries, and failure to comply makes authorities liable for hefty fines decided by the court.

The courts are increasingly seen by activists as a way of sidestepping politics and holding governments to account. Last month, in a case brought by young environmental activists, a judge in the U.S. state of Montana ruled that state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development.

When the Portuguese group decided in 2017 they would pursue legal action, Sofia wore braces on her teeth, stood taller than her younger brother André and was starting seventh grade at school. The braces are long gone and André, who is now 15, is taller than her by a few centimeters.

The past six years, André noted in an interview with The Associated Press, represent almost half of his life.

What has kept them going through the piles of legal documents gathered by the nonprofit group supporting them and through lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic is what they call the pressing evidence all around them that the climate crisis is getting worse.

The Praia do Norte beach at Costa da Caparica near where Sofia and André live, just south of the Portuguese capital Lisbon, was about 1 kilometer long when his father was his age, André says. Now, amid coastal erosion, it measures less than 300 meters. Evidence like that led him to attend climate demonstrations even before he became a teen.

The other four members of the Portuguese group — Catarina, Cláudia, Martim and Mariana — are siblings and cousins who live in the region of Leiria in central Portugal where summer wildfires are common.

Scientists say the climate of the Sahara is jumping across the Mediterranean Sea to southern European countries like Portugal, where average temperatures are climbing and rainfall is declining. Portugal’s hottest year on record was 1997, followed by 2017. The four driest years on record in the country of 10.3 million people have all occurred since 2003.

It’s a similar story across Europe, and the legal arguments of the six Portuguese are backed by science. The Earth sweltered through its hottest Northern Hemisphere summer ever measured, with a record warm August capping a season of brutal and deadly temperatures, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The world is far off its pledge to curb global warming, scientists say, by cutting emissions in line with the requirements of the 2015 Paris climate accord. Estimates say global average temperatures could rise by 2 to 4 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times by 2100 at current trajectories of warming and emissions reductions plans.

Among the specific impacts listed by the young Portuguese are being unable to sleep, concentrate, play outside or exercise during heat waves. One of their schools was closed temporarily when the air became unbreathable due to wildfire smoke. Some of the children have health conditions such as asthma that makes them more vulnerable to heat and air pollution.

They are being assisted by the Global Legal Action Network, an international nonprofit organization that challenges human rights violations. A crowdfunding campaign has drawn support from around the world, with messages of support coming from as far away as Japan, India and Brazil.

Gerry Liston, a GLAN legal officer, says the 32 governments have “trivialized” the case. “The governments have resisted every aspect of our case … all our arguments,” he said.

André describes the governments as “condescending.” Sofia adds: “They don’t see climate as a priority.”

Portugal’s government, for example, agrees the state of the environment and human rights are connected but insists the government’s “actions seek to meet its international obligations in this area” and cannot be faulted.

At the same time, some governments in Europe are backsliding on commitments already made.

Poland last month filed legal challenges aimed at annulling three of the European Union’s main climate change policies. Last week, the British government announced it is delaying by five years a ban on new gas and diesel cars that had been due to take effect in 2030. The Swedish government’s state budget proposal last week, meanwhile, cut taxes on gas and diesel and reduced funding for climate and environmental measures.

Amid those developments, the courts are seen by activists as a recourse.

The London School of Economics says that globally, the cumulative number of climate change-related cases has more than doubled since 2015 to more than 2,000. Around one-fourth were launched between 2020 and 2022, it says.

The Portuguese activists, who are not seeking any financial compensation, will likely have to wait some more. The verdict in their case could take up to 18 months, though they see the court’s decision in 2020 to fast-track the proceedings as an encouraging sign.

A precedent is also giving the activists heart. The Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch organization that promotes sustainability and innovation, brought against the Dutch Government the first case in the world in which citizens argued that their government has a legal obligation to prevent dangerous climate change.

In 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court found in Urgenda’s favor, ruling that the emissions reduction target set by the government was unlawfully low. It ordered authorities to further reduce emissions.

The government consequently decided to shut down coal-fired power plants by 2030 and adopted billion-euro packages to reduce energy use and develop renewable energy, among other measures.

Dennis van Berkel, Urgenda’s legal counsel, accused governments of choosing climate change targets that are “politically convenient” instead of listening to climate scientists. Judges can compel them to justify that what they are doing on climate issues is enough, he said.

“Currently there is no such scrutiny at any level,” he told the AP. “That is something incredibly important that the courts can contribute.”

Illegal Migration to Greece Surges, Sparking Measures to Shield Borders

Thousands of migrants have made their way illegally into Greece from Turkey, using rickety rafts to cross the Aegean, the narrow waterway between the two countries.

United Nations data in September shows sea arrivals have already more than doubled the roughly 12,000 migrants who were caught trying to illegally enter Greece last year. Illegal entries along the land border and the massive Evros River that snakes along the rugged frontiers of the two countries in the northeast also count record increases of more than 65 percent in the last two months alone, police said.

“Much of this has to do with favorable weather conditions, and the receding levels of the Evros River that makes crossings easier,” said Dimitris Petrovic, Deputy Regional Governor of Evros, Greece.

Many of the migrants are spotted and rounded up by soldiers and border police, but police officials such as Alexandros Sfeliniotis said human traffickers have become increasingly ruthless.

“They have even begun recruiting minors, paying them tiny sums of money to lead caravans of migrants through illegal crossings,” he said. “They know that minors can get off the hook easier than adult smugglers.”

Illegal migration has always been a thorn in relations between Greece and Turkey. In the past, the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis went as far as accusing Turkey and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan of instrumentalizing migration — pushing migrants to Europe in a bid to win more concessions and aid from the European Union.

But as tensions between the two NATO members have eased in recent months, a meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of the recent U.N. General Assembly showed strong willingness by the long-standing rivals to work together to stem illegal migration.

“We have to join forces and work together if we are going to crack down on smugglers,” said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

For Greece, this has meant an increased deployment of forces along the Evros River, as well as beefed up patrols across the Aegean Sea. Greek and Turkish coast guards that once refused to cooperate are now in contact again, and migration ministers on both sides are talking.

The endgame, senior government officials tell VOA, is to revise a key deal that the EU stitched together with Turkey in 2016, allowing for the return of the tens of thousands of illegal migrants to Turkey in exchange for more financial aid and visa-free entry of its Turkish travelers to Europe.

With relations between Greece and Turkey frequently see-sawing, the outcome remains uncertain.

Both sides have ordered teams of senior officials to hash out a deal that could be signed by early December, when Mitsotakis and Erdogan meet for a summit in Greece.

Ukraine War Pushes NATO to Bolster Drone-Tackling Expertise

A small drone flits over opened earth, and an explosion appears on the video feed.

The drone has just dropped a grenade into a trench in Ukraine. The images were being projected on a giant screen in the Netherlands, in front of NATO military officers and defense company executives.

These drones being used against Ukrainian forces are “small, fast” and finding a way to defend against them is “complex,” says Willem Koedam, a former Dutch air force officer turned expert for NATO’s C-UAS unit, which looks at anti-drone defenses.

The solution may be complex, but it’s not impossible.

Representatives from 57 companies visited a military base in the Dutch town of Vredepeel to present their systems to the NATO brass.

The systems they offer are designed to counter threats ranging from off-the-shelf drones available to the public to the Iranian Shahed drones used by Russia’s forces.

Using nets

“The best way to kill a Shahed is a jet” — meaning a jet-propelled drone — said Ludwig Fruhauf, head of DDTS, a German firm specializing in anti-drone defenses.

A jet-powered drone flying at 500 kph would be able to intercept a propellor-driven Shahed-136 travelling at 180 kph, he explained. And jet devices are cheaper than the rocket-type defenses usually employed.

But threats persist from much smaller drones, which can be deadly or destructive for critical infrastructure such as power stations, said Matt Roper of the NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency, the alliance’s tech and cyber hub.

In some cases, the best method is not to blow a drone out of the sky, which could cause collateral damage, but to catch or redirect it.

Argus Interception, another German company, has developed a sort of “fishing net” to be used against enemy devices.

The target first has to be detected by radar, camera or by monitoring frequencies used to guide it.

Once located, an interceptor drone is launched that fires the net over the hostile drone, allowing it to be captured. It is especially useful in protecting airports, Argus Interception boss Christian Schoening said.

For Romanian Air Force Captain Ionut-Vlad Cozmuta, however, that method may not be best against drones deployed by the Russian military close to Romanian airspace. Debris from some of them has been found in Romanian territory in recent weeks.

Romania, a NATO member, is keen to find ways to protect itself against possible drone attacks, and Cozmuta was carefully following the drone-defense exercises at the Vredepeel base.

He said signal “jamming” would be a solution, sending the device off-course rather than capturing it.

Big benefits

More aggressive than jamming is technology to seize control of an enemy drone and guide it to a new target or another destination.

But for that, NATO needs to establish a common standard allowing different anti-drone defense systems to speak to each other. That looks to now be in place with the adoption of a British system called Sapient.

Its use will bring “big benefits” to the alliance, a senior NATO officer in the NCI Agency, General Hans Folmer, told reporters.

No Ukrainian officer was present for the anti-drone exercises.

But NATO has “ongoing discussions” with the besieged country on these issues, said Claudio Palestini, a NATO science expert.

And the Ukrainians themselves “innovate on the ground all the time,” he said. 

Ukraine’s Peace Plan, Grain Deal ‘Not Realistic,’ Lavrov Says

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov castigated Ukraine’s proposed 10-point peace plan and spurned a revival of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, calling both “not realistic.”

Lavrov addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday at the annual gathering of world leaders at U.N. headquarters in New York. In a week of global diplomacy, Ukraine and its Western allies sought to rally support for Kyiv on its defensive war against Russian aggression.

“It is completely not feasible,” Lavrov said of the peace plan initiated by Kyiv. “It is not possible to implement this. It’s not realistic and everybody understands this, but at the same time, they say this is the only basis for negotiations.”

Lavrov said the conflict would be resolved on the battlefield if Kyiv and the West persisted in that position.

Lavrov also said Moscow left the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which was allowing for safe passage of Ukrainian agricultural exports, because promises made to Russia had not been fulfilled.

He said the latest U.N. proposals to revive that export corridor also were “simply not realistic.”

Ukraine attacks Sevastopol

Meanwhile, Ukraine targeted the Crimean-occupied city of Sevastopol on Saturday morning, leaving the city of 500,000 under an air alert for about an hour after debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier, the Russian-installed regional governor Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

It was the second missile assault in as many days after Friday’s Ukrainian strike on the headquarters of Russia’s navy in Crimea that reportedly left dozens dead and wounded, including senior fleet commanders.

In an interview Friday with VOA’s Ukrainian Service, Ukraine’s intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said at least nine people were killed and 16 were injured, among them, were Russian generals.

“Among the wounded is the commander of the group, Colonel-General [Alexander] Romanchuk, in a very serious condition. The chief of staff, Lieutenant General [Oleg] Tsekov, is comatose,” he said.

Alexander Romanchuk is the commander of a group of Russian forces in the Zaporizhzhia region and was promoted to the rank of colonel-general in 2023. Lieutenant-General Oleg Tsekov is the commander of the 200 OMSBR Coastal Forces of the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy.

Budanov did not confirm reports about the alleged death of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, Admiral Viktor Sokolov.

Budanov’s claims could not be independently verified.

Counteroffensive makes gains, says think tank

Ukraine has increasingly targeted naval facilities in Crimea in recent weeks, while its counteroffensive makes slow gains in the east and south of Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War said Thursday.

Military experts say it is essential for Ukraine to maintain its attacks on targets in Crimea to degrade Russian morale and weaken its military.

The attack came a day after Russia pounded cities across Ukraine with missiles and artillery strikes, killing at least five people.

Russia’s most prestigious airborne regiments experience “extreme attrition and high turnover” rates in Russia’s deployed military, including its senior ranks, the British Defense Ministry said Saturday in its daily intelligence update on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Three successive commanders of the 247th Guards Air Assault Landing Regiment have either resigned or been killed, it said. First, Colonel Konstantin Zizevsky, a unit commander, was killed near the beginning of the Russian invasion. Then, Colonel Vasily Popov was “likely killed” in the “heavily contested Orikhiv sector,” early this month, according to the intelligence report.

Colonel Pytor Popov “likely resigned” his command of the 247th in August, the report said, after protesting the military’s failure to recover the bodies of Russian casualties.

‘We keep giving them hell’

Meanwhile, Ukrainian commanders told Reuters on Saturday that their use of heavy weapons provided by the West in the fierce battle raging on the outskirts of Bakhmut is inflicting significant damage on enemy lines.

Ukrainian troops said the Western-supplied 155-millimeter howitzers were key to capturing the village of Klishchiivka last week.

Unit commander Oleksandr said Ukrainian armed forces “very much rely” on heavy artillery, including the Polish-made Krab gun and the U.S.-made M109 self-propelled howitzer.

“Even one gun can completely turn the situation around. An attack can be stopped with one such gun,” he said.

“They [the Russians] hate our hardware. That’s what we gather from our intercepts. We hear that we keep giving them hell and they keep wondering how much ammunition we have left,” he said.

Ukrainian commanders have described the gains by Ukrainian forces of the villages of Klischiivka and nearby Andriivka as steppingstones to taking back Bakhmut, which fell to the Russians after months of some of the war’s heaviest fighting.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and senior officials have praised the advances and defied Western commentary that the counteroffensive is progressing too slowly.

Ostap Yarish of VOA’s Ukrainian Service contributed to this story. Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

 VOA Immigration Weekly Recap, Sept. 17–23

Editor’s note: Here is a look at immigration-related news around the U.S. this week. Questions? Tips? Comments? Email the VOA immigration team: ImmigrationUnit@voanews.com.

Texas City Sees Jump in Irregular Migrant Crossings

U.S. immigration authorities reported a significant uptick in unauthorized border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, particularly in areas such as Eagle Pass, Texas, where the mayor has issued a state of emergency. U.S. Border Patrol officers apprehended about 9,000 migrants along the entire border in a 24-hour period, according to media reports on Wednesday. VOA asked the Border Patrol to confirm the number of apprehensions, but an official, who spoke on background, said they were waiting to release monthly migrant encounter numbers. VOA’s immigration reporter Aline Barros has the story.

New York Mayor Urges UN Leaders to Act on Migration Crisis

New York City is hosting world leaders at the United Nations this week. But it is also facing a crisis because border states such as Texas are sending hundreds of migrants to the city each day. Jorge Agobian has the story in this report narrated by Aline Barros.

Biden Grants Protection to Hundreds of Thousands of Venezuelans

The Biden administration said Wednesday that it was granting temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who are already in the country as it grapples with growing numbers of people fleeing the South American country and elsewhere to arrive at the U.S. border with Mexico. The Associated Press reports. Watch the VOA60 American story.

VOA in Photos:

Migrants seeking asylum in the United States cross a razor-wire fence near a border wall on the banks of the Rio Bravo, as it’s known in Mexico, on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Sept. 18, 2023.

Immigration around the world

VOA60 Africa – UNHCR said over 1,200 children have died in Sudanese refugee camps since May

More than 1,200 children have died in refugee camps since May, while thousands of newborns are likely to die across the war-torn country by year’s end, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Rights Groups, Refugees Wary of Thailand’s New Asylum Program

Days before Thailand launches a new protection program for foreign asylum-seekers, rights groups and refugees are expressing concern that many worthy hopefuls will be turned down or feel too frightened of arrest and deportation to even apply. Story by Zsombor Peter.

Migrants Burst Into Southern Mexico Asylum Office Demanding Papers

Migrants, mostly from Haiti, burst into an asylum office in southern Mexico on Monday, demanding papers. Throngs of migrants knocked over metal barricades and rushed into the office in the city of Tapachula, pushing past National Guard officers and police stationed at the office. Some of the migrants were trampled in the rush.

Italy Toughens Asylum Laws Amid Surge in Migrant Arrivals

Italy’s government Monday passed measures to build new migrant detention centers and allow for the rapid deportation of failed asylum-seekers. Italy is facing another surge in migrant arrivals on the small island of Lampedusa. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.

Protesters Urge Compassion for Migrants Left in Limbo in Australia

Campaigners are urging Australia to allow thousands of migrants whose asylum claims were rejected under a controversial policy to stay. A weeklong protest starts Monday outside the offices of Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil over the cases of up to 12,000 asylum-seekers who have spent more than a decade on temporary bridging visas but face the threat of deportation. Produced by Phil Mercer.

European Leaders Visit Lampedusa

European Union Commission President Ursula von de Leyen and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni toured a migrant center Sunday on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. The center was recently overwhelmed with almost 7,000 migrants in a 24-hour period, a total that is nearly equivalent to the number of people who live on the island. VOA News reports.

News brief

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the extension and redesignation of Afghanistan for temporary protected status for 18 months, from November 21 to May 20, 2025, because of  continuing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions in Afghanistan that prevent individuals from safely returning.

Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Concealing Loan From Former Intelligence Officer

Former FBI official Charles McGonigal pleaded guilty on Friday to accepting $225,000 from Albanian-American Agron Nezaj, a former Albanian intelligence officer who McGonigal admitted was helping him foster relationships in Albania to help lay the groundwork for future business opportunities in the country.

According to court documents, Nezaj became an informant for the FBI’s investigation into McGonigal’s contacts in Albania.

In Washington, McGonigal faced a nine-count indictment charging him with failing to report cash payments, contacts with foreign officials and trips to Europe he took with Nezaj in 2017 and 2018 that neither he nor the FBI paid for.

The guilty plea was entered in U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, based on a deal between prosecutors and McGonigal’s lawyers. He pleaded guilty to one count of the indictment — concealing material evidence — and prosecutors dropped the other eight counts.

The settlement means the case will not go to trial.

McGonigal apologized to the court for his actions.

“Before I left the FBI in September 2018, I was planning to launch a security consulting business with a friend. I knew that my government contacts and international relationships might be useful to me when I later launched the business,” he told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

“I did not disclose an approximately $225,000 loan I received from my friend and prospective business partner in the U.S. for several meetings I attended with foreign nationals. These meetings were an effort to develop potential business relationships for my future consulting business. And the loan was intended to help start the business,” McGonigal said.

Those contacts included several meetings in 2017 and 2018 with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in the presence of Nezaj and an adviser to the prime minister, who had business interests in arranging the meetings.

In one instance, McGonigal opened a criminal investigation in New York into a U.S. lobbyist who was working for an Albanian opposition party. According to the indictment, he received this information from the Albanian prime minister’s office. The indictment does not identify the American lobbyist nor the Albanian party.

But on November 14, 2017, lobbyist Nick Muzin — an ex-Trump aide — filed on the lobbying activity on behalf of the Albanian Democratic Party, the main opposition party, with the Department of Justice. While lobbying for a foreign political force is not illegal for a registered lobbyist, Muzin had filed that activity months after an initial filing that was not complete.

The payment he received eventually became the subject of an investigation in Albania over the suspect origin of the money.

McGonigal told the court he had an ongoing relationship with the prime minister.

Rama has denied any wrongdoing.

McGonigal’s lawyer Seth DuCharme said after the hearing that his client takes full responsibility for his actions and looks forward to putting the case behind him.

“While he may have had or did have, I think, some pretty legitimate interests that aligned with the United States in keeping up those relationships, he also clearly had a personal interest,” DuCharme said.

McGonigal led the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York before retiring in 2018.

In a separate case in New York, McGonigal pleaded guilty in August to a conspiracy charge, admitting that after leaving the FBI he agreed to work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. McGonigal went to work for Deripaska, whom McGonigal had once investigated, to dig up dirt on the oligarch’s wealthy rival in violation of U.S. sanctions on Russia. He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced in mid-December.

The District of Columbia court charge carries a maximum of five years in prison, but prosecutors will likely seek a more lenient sentence as part of the plea agreement.

The judge said McGonigal will be sentenced in February and said he will not be able to appeal it.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters and The Associated Press.

Swedish Sinkhole Opens After Landslide

At least three people were injured early Saturday after a landslide in western Sweden resulted in the opening of a massive sinkhole.

Cars and at least one bus skidded off the E6 highway near the small Swedish town of Stenungsund.

The highway has been closed in both directions.

Report: Russian Military Suffers High Turnover and Attrition

The experience of one of Russia’s most prestigious airborne regiments highlights the “extreme attrition and high turnover” rates in Russia’s deployed military, including its senior ranks, the British Defense Ministry said Saturday in its daily intelligence update on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Three successive commanders of the 247th Guards Air Assault Landing Regiment have either resigned or been killed, it said. First, Colonel Konstantin Zizevsky, a unit commander, was killed near the beginning of the Russian invasion.  Then, Colonel Vasily Popov was “likely killed” in the “heavily contested Orikhiv sector,” early this month, according to the intelligence report.

Meanwhile, Colonel Pytor Popov “likely resigned” his command of the 247th in August, the report said, after protesting the military’s failure to recover the bodies of Russian casualties.

Ukraine claimed responsibility for a missile attack Friday on the headquarters of Russia’s navy in Crimea, delivering a major blow for Moscow as it suffers a string of attacks on the strategically significant port in recent months.

“The headquarters of the fleet have been hit in an enemy attack,” said Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol.

Video on social media showed plumes of thick smoke coming out of the Russian naval headquarters in the region.

“Ukraine’s defense forces launched a successful attack on the headquarters of the command of the Black Sea fleet of Russia in the temporarily occupied Sevastopol,” the Ukrainian army said on Telegram.

According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, one serviceman was missing. The ministry reported that its historic headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet were damaged.

The Crimean Peninsula was simultaneously hit by an “unprecedented cyberattack” on its internet providers, said Oleg Kryuchkov, an adviser to the Crimea governor.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted naval facilities in Crimea in recent weeks, while the brunt of its summer counteroffensive makes slow gains in the east and south of Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War said Thursday.

Military experts say it is essential for Ukraine to keep up its attacks on targets in Crimea to degrade Russian morale and weaken its military.

The attack came a day after Russia pounded cities across Ukraine with missiles and artillery strikes, killing at least five people.

A Russian attack injured 13 people in a town west of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, close to Ukraine’s eastern front, a local official said early Friday.

Two airstrikes on the town caused a fire, Roman Padun, the administrative head of the town of Kurakhove, told public broadcaster Suspilne.

Russia and Ukraine have recently experienced “unusually intense” attacks “deep behind their lines,” the British Defense Ministry said Friday in its daily intelligence update on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the last four days, the ministry said there have been reports of explosions at Russian logistics sites, air bases and command posts in Crimea, the Russian Krasnodar region and near Moscow.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Thursday that Russian forces carried out aerial attacks on multiple cities overnight, killing at least two people.

Ukraine’s military described the Russian action as a “massive missile attack on the civilian infrastructure of a number of regions.”

Oleksandr Prokudin, the regional governor of Kherson, said a Russian strike hit a residential building, killing two people and injuring five others.

Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on Telegram that debris fell on the Ukrainian capital after air defenses shot down Russian missiles.

Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said seven people were injured and several buildings were damaged.

In northeastern Ukraine, the regional governor of Kharkiv, Oleh Syniehubov, said at least six Russian strikes hit the city of Kharkiv and damaged civilian infrastructure.

Russia said Thursday it destroyed 19 Ukrainian drones over the annexed Crimean Peninsula and nearby Black Sea.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it downed three Ukrainian drones over the Kursk, Belgorod and Orlov regions of Russia.

Poland tensions

On Friday, Poland’s prime minister told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to “insult” Poles, sustaining harsh rhetoric toward Kyiv despite the Polish president’s efforts to defuse a dispute over grain imports.

Brewing tensions between Poland and Ukraine over grain imports will not significantly affect good bilateral relations, Polish President Andrzej Duda said Friday at a business conference. “I have no doubt that the dispute over the supply of grain from Ukraine to the Polish market is an absolute fragment of the entire Polish-Ukrainian relations.”

Tensions have been growing between Poland and Ukraine since Warsaw started its’ temporary ban on imports of grain from Ukraine to protect Polish farmers.

Ukraine pushed for a deal with Poland on Thursday to end the grain restrictions.

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Zelenskyy said Kyiv is working to preserve land routes for the export of grain, but he added that the “political theater” surrounding the import of grain only helps Moscow.

“I … want to tell President Zelenskyy never to insult Poles again, as he did recently during his speech at the U.N.,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was quoted as saying by state-run news agency PAP.

Poland said Thursday it will only supply Ukraine with previously agreed upon deliveries of ammunition and armaments.

The statement from a government spokesperson came a day after Morawiecki announced an end to weapons transfers to Ukraine as Poland works to arm itself “with the most modern weapons.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

Ukraine Claims Responsibility for Striking Russian Navy Headquarters in Crimea

Ukraine claimed responsibility for a missile attack Friday on the headquarters of Russia’s navy in Crimea, delivering a major blow for Moscow as it suffers a string of attacks on the strategically significant port in recent months. 

“The headquarters of the fleet have been hit in an enemy attack,” said Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol. 

Video footage on social media showed plumes of thick smoke coming out of the Russian naval headquarters in the region.

“Ukraine’s defense forces launched a successful attack on the headquarters of the command of the Black Sea fleet of Russia in the temporarily occupied Sevastopol,” the Ukrainian army said on Telegram. 

According to Russia’s defense ministry, one serviceman was missing. The ministry reported that its historic headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet were damaged. 

The Crimean Peninsula was simultaneously hit by an “unprecedented cyberattack” on its internet providers, said Oleg Kryuchkov, an adviser to the Crimea governor.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted naval facilities in Crimea in recent weeks, while the brunt of its summer counteroffensive makes slow gains in the east and south of Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War said Thursday. 

Military experts say it is essential for Ukraine to keep up its attacks on targets in Crimea to degrade Russian morale and weaken its military.

The attack came a day after Russia pounded cities across Ukraine with missiles and artillery strikes, killing at least five people. 

A Russian attack injured 13 people in a town west of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, close to Ukraine’s eastern front, a local official said early Friday. 

Two airstrikes on the town caused a fire, Roman Padun, the administrative head of the town of Kurakhove, told public broadcaster Suspilne.

Russia and Ukraine have recently experienced “unusually intense” attacks “deep behind their lines,” the British Defense Ministry said Friday in its daily intelligence update on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the last four days, the ministry said there have been reports of explosions at Russian logistics sites, air bases and command posts in Crimea, the Russian Krasnodar region and near Moscow.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Thursday that Russian forces carried out aerial attacks on multiple cities overnight, killing at least two people. 

Ukraine’s military described the Russian action as a “massive missile attack on the civilian infrastructure of a number of regions.” 

Oleksandr Prokudin, the regional governor of Kherson, said a Russian strike hit a residential building, killing two people and injuring five others.

Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on Telegram that debris fell on the Ukrainian capital after air defenses shot down Russian missiles.

Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said seven people were injured and several buildings were damaged.

In northeastern Ukraine, the regional governor of Kharkiv, Oleh Syniehubov, said at least six Russian strikes hit the city of Kharkiv and damaged civilian infrastructure. 

Russia said Thursday it destroyed 19 Ukrainian drones over the annexed Crimean Peninsula and nearby Black Sea.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it downed three Ukrainian drones over the Kursk, Belgorod and Orlov regions of Russia. 

Poland tensions

On Friday, Poland’s prime minister told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to “insult” Poles, sustaining harsh rhetoric toward Kyiv despite the Polish president’s efforts to defuse a dispute over grain imports.

Brewing tensions between Poland and Ukraine over grain imports will not significantly affect good bilateral relations, Polish President Andrzej Duda said Friday at a business conference. “I have no doubt that the dispute over the supply of grain from Ukraine to the Polish market is an absolute fragment of the entire Polish-Ukrainian relations.” 

Tensions have been growing between Poland and Ukraine since Warsaw started it’s temporary ban on imports of grain from Ukraine to protect Polish farmers.

Ukraine pushed for a deal with Poland Thursday to end the grain restrictions.

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Zelenskyy said Kyiv is working to preserve land routes for the export of grain, but he added that the “political theater” surrounding the import of grain only helps Moscow.

“I … want to tell President Zelenskyy never to insult Poles again, as he did recently during his speech at the U.N.,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was quoted as saying by state-run news agency PAP.

Poland said Thursday it will only supply Ukraine with previously agreed upon deliveries of ammunition and armaments.  

The statement from a government spokesperson came a day after Morawiecki announced an end to weapons transfers to Ukraine as Poland works to arm itself “with the most modern weapons.” 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 

UK Trophy-Hunting Bill Fails; Southern African Countries Relieved

Southern African countries that allow trophy hunting are relieved after a bill seeking to ban the import of legally obtained wildlife trophies from Africa into the United Kingdom was blocked in the House of Lords this week.

The trophy-hunting bill, championed by conservationists, sailed through the House of Commons and appeared set to win approval in Britain’s House of Lords.

However, a group of peers successfully blocked the legislation, which would have banned the importation of wildlife trophies into the U.K.

A U.K.-based conservation biologist, Keith Lindsay, said it is a shame the bill did not succeed.

“It is [a] great injustice that unrelated peers in the British House of Lords can block the passage of legislation that was already approved by an overwhelming majority of elected MPs from all parts of the Commons and all parties,” Lindsay said. 

Peers who opposed the bill argued that politicians failed to listen to experts and ignored the science on trophy hunting.

Lindsay disagreed, saying there are scientists opposed to trophy hunting.

“There are in fact many biologists and conservationists who are concerned about the negative impact of selective hunting on wildlife populations that are already under pressure from poaching and land use conversion,” he said. “There are many communities in parts of Africa, other than a handful in southern Africa, who value their animals alive.”

Five southern African countries — Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe — released a statement Friday thanking the group of peers for blocking the proposed law.

Botswana’s Siyoka Simasiku, who was part of a committee of conservationists from southern African countries that traveled to the U.K. to lobby against the bill, was elated with the outcome.

“We are really happy that it has not gone through just for the reason that it was going to be detrimental to the gains that conservation has done over the years,” Simasiku said.

“We believe in sustainable utilization of biodiversity within our communities,” he said. “Our communities have actually, [from] generation to generation, protected wildlife within their area, which is why we see growth in wildlife numbers.”

Botswana has earned millions of dollars by allowing trophy hunters to shoot and kill a limited number of elephants and other animals each year.

Simasiku said that had the bill won approval in Britain, other Western countries would likely have followed suit.

“This was going to move to other countries that have ties with the U.K. and, at the end of the day, our communities will be at loss,” he said.

Despite the bill’s failure, Britain’s Labor Party is already leading calls to resurrect the legislation.

Arizona Governor: Taiwan Firm’s Semiconductor Plant Back on Schedule

Earlier this year, Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC announced that it was delaying the opening of a computer chip plant in the U.S. state of Arizona because of a shortage of specialized workers. But during a visit to Taiwan this week, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs told officials that the project is back on schedule and should have no further delays. From Phoenix, Arizona, Levi Stallings has our story.