Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced Friday the government will begin a nationwide lockdown Monday and mandate vaccinations for all, making it the first European nation to reimpose COVID-19 measures, as cases throughout the region surge.

At a news conference Friday, Schallenberg said Monday’s lockdown will be reevaluated after 10 days, but they will run a maximum of 20 days, ending automatically December 13. He also announced COVID-19 vaccinations will become mandatory beginning February 1.

The lockdown will include an all-day curfew for the entire country, though schools and kindergartens will remain open. People may leave their homes only for work, school and basic needs, which can include physical exercise or if there is a threat to their health or property.

Schallenberg told reporters substantially increasing vaccination rates “is our only way out of this vicious circle of virus waves and lockdown discussions once and for all. We don’t want a fifth wave, we don’t want a sixth and seventh wave.”

The chancellor said he understands that many people in the country are already vaccinated and also will be subject to the lockdown restrictions, which he blamed on “too many among us have shown a lack of solidarity.”

Despite months of persuasion, he said, the government had not succeeded in convincing enough people to get vaccinated. The latest figures from Europe’s Centers for Disease control show the 64.1% of Austria’s total population is fully vaccinated.

Schallenberg expressed anger at anti-vaccination campaigns that have spread misinformation about the vaccines or promote sham COVID-19 treatments.

“Personally,” he said, “I think it’s irresponsible by certain political forces to exploit this pandemic to divide society and not to put people’s health in the foreground but to endanger it.”

Other European countries also are tightening restrictions as cases surge across the continent.

The government of Hungary, which borders Austria to the east, announced Thursday it is mandating mask-wearing indoors again beginning Saturday.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
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German health officials said Friday the current COVID-19 situation in the country is a national emergency and called for immediate measures to be taken to mitigate the situation — including lockdowns, even for people who have been vaccinated.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases (RKI) reported 52,970 new COVID-19 cases Friday, the third straight day new infections topped 50,000.  The infection incidence rate remains just more than 340 per 100,000.

At a news conference Friday in Berlin, RKI President Lothar Wieler did not hold back his concern, saying, “All of Germany is one big outbreak. This is a nationwide state of emergency. We need to pull the emergency brake.”

Wieler told reporters they estimate there are more than half a million active COVID cases in Germany, the highest number ever recorded. He said among children aged 5-14, the incidence rate is more 700 per 100,000.

At the same news conference, Health Minister Jens Spahn was asked if Germany would consider returning to lockdowns, as neighboring Austria has done to address its own COVID-19 situation. Spahn said, “We shouldn’t rule anything out.”  

Wieler was more emphatic, saying Germany needs to “massively reduce contact to slow down the spread of the virus. This means, for example, staying at home if possible, canceling large events, reducing the number of people at small events, closing down hotspots such as bars and poorly ventilated clubs.”

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Thursday with the governors of Germany’s 16 states, and they agreed to introduce a new threshold linked to the number of hospital admissions of COVID-19 patients per 100,000 people over a seven-day period.

Some states also are considering mandatory vaccinations for some professional groups, such as medical staff and nursing home employees.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
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Ukraine said Friday that one of its soldiers had been killed by pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, as the West accuses Moscow of a troop build-up near Ukraine.

Kiev’s army has been battling fighters in two breakaway regions bordering Russia since 2014, after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.

Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russia of sending troops and arms across the border to support the separatists — claims Moscow denies.

Kiev’s military said Friday that the separatists had targeted Ukrainian military positions with artillery and mortars.

“As a result of hostilities, one serviceman was fatally wounded,” the military said on Facebook.

Ukraine said on Thursday it was seeking more military aid from its Western allies after they voiced concerns over Russian troop movements along the Ukrainian border.

Social media videos have in recent days shown Russia moving troops, tanks and missiles towards the Ukrainian border, raising concerns over an escalation in the conflict.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week voiced fresh concern about Russian troop movements and warned Moscow against any possible invasion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin for his part said Thursday that the West is “escalating” the Ukraine conflict by holding drills in the Black Sea and flying bombers near its borders.

After an uptick in violence at the beginning of the year, Russia massed around 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders in the spring, raising fears of a major escalation in the conflict.

Russia later announced a pullback but both Ukraine and its ally the United States said at the time the withdrawal was limited.

The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people.
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Officials in Belarus have cleared a refugee camp on the Poland-Belarus border where thousands of refugees had hunkered down in the hope of entering the European Union via Poland.

Approximately 2,000 refugees, many of them Middle Eastern, were moved Thursday into a large warehouse, enabling them to escape the freezing cold of the outdoor makeshift encampment.

European Union countries have been watching the developments at the Poland-Belarus border, anxious about the prospect of several thousand migrants entering within their borders.

Meanwhile, several hundred refugees decided Thursday to give up their hope of entering the EU and decided, instead, to take an Iraqi government repatriation flight to Irbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.
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A nonbinary pronoun added to an esteemed French dictionary has ignited a fierce linguistic squabble in the country. 

Le Petit Robert introduced the word “iel” — an amalgamation of “il” (he) and “elle” (she) — to its online edition last month. While the term is gaining currency among young people, it is still far from being widely used, or even understood, by many French speakers. 

Though at first the change went mostly unnoticed, boisterous debate broke out this week in a nation that prides itself on its human rights tradition but that also fiercely protects its cultural heritage from foreign meddling. In one camp are the traditionalists, including some political leaders, who criticize the move as a sign that France is lurching toward an American-style “woke” ideology. In the other is a new generation of citizens who embrace nonbinary as the norm. 

“It is very important that dictionaries include the ‘iel’ pronoun in their referencing as it reflects how the use of the term is now well accepted,” said Dorah Simon Claude, 32, a doctoral student who identifies as “iel.” 

“It is,” Claude added, “also a way of confronting the Academie Francaise that stays in its conservative corner and continues to ignore and scorn users of the French language.” 

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer is not in the same camp. He went to Twitter on Wednesday to say that “inclusive writing is not the future of the French language.” The 56-year-old former law professor warned that schoolchildren should not use “iel” as a valid term despite its inclusion in Le Robert, seen as a linguistic authority on French since 1967. 

Francois Jolivet, a lawmaker from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party, also made his distaste plain. Nonbinary pronouns are, he suggested, a worrying sign that France is embracing a “woke” ideology. 

Jolivet wrote a letter to the bastion of French language, the 400-year-old Academie Francaise, claiming that Le Robert’s “solitary campaign is an obvious ideological intrusion that undermines our common language and its influence.”

The general director of Le Robert editions, Charles Bimbenet, jumped to the dictionary’s defense Wednesday in a statement. Far from dictating which terms should be used, he said, Le Petit Robert was elucidating the word’s meaning, now that it is growing in currency nationwide. 

Since “the meaning of the word ‘iel’ cannot be understood by reading it alone,” Bimbenet said, “it seemed useful to us to specify its meaning for those who encounter it, whether they wish to use it or … reject it.” 

“Robert’s mission is to observe and report on the evolution of a changing and diverse French language,” he said. 

Warning on neutrality

In 2017, the Academie Francaise warned that moves to make French more gender neutral would create “a disunited language, with disparate expression, that can create confusion verging on illegibility.” 

Gendered languages like French are seen as a particular hurdle for advocates of nonbinary terms as all nouns are categorized as either masculine or feminine, unlike in English. 

Not all European countries are moving at the same speed as France. In Greece, where all nouns have not two, but three possible genders, there is no official nonbinary pronoun, but groups who support them suggest using “it.” 

In Spain, after Carmen Calvo, a former deputy prime minister and affirmed feminist, asked the Royal Spanish Academy to advise on the use of inclusive language in the Constitution, its reply the next year was crystal clear: “Inclusive language” means “the use of the masculine to refer to men and women.”
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The leader of a Cuban dissident group who left the island for Spain said Thursday that the communist government was “behaving like an abusive husband” toward its people.

Activist and playwright Yunior Garcia Aguilera arrived Wednesday in Madrid with his wife, Dayana Prieto, two days after police surrounded his house in Havana to stop him from taking part in a national protest planned by an opposition group, which is demanding the release of imprisoned dissidents and greater freedoms for Cubans.

Leaders of Archipelago, the opposition organization, had announced it would stage a “Civic March for Change,” a mass demonstration Monday that the Cuban government described as “counter-revolutionary” and said was part of a U.S. interventionist plan.

At a news conference Thursday in Madrid, Garcia said, “The relationship between the Cuban government and the people is like a marriage which has failed. The government is behaving like an abusive husband to the people.”

“This is a dictatorship and brutal tyranny,” he said.

Harassment

On the eve of the planned demonstration, police and government supporters surrounded the home of Garcia and other activists and independent journalists to prevent them from leaving.

Garcia said Thursday that the Cuban government had cut his telephone and access to social media.

“My house is watched continually by people. They left doves with their heads cut off outside my house to put me off taking part in the demonstration,” he told journalists.

Garcia contends the Cuban government allowed him to leave the country only so that he would not become “a symbol of resistance.”

“The regime needed to silence me, to convert me into a non-person,” he told reporters.

He said he had come to Spain so he could be free to speak out against the Cuban government.

“All I have is my voice. I could not stay silent. That is why I came to Spain,” he said, adding that he wanted to return to the island in the future.

Archipelago blamed the failure of the demonstration on government coercion.

It said there were “more than 100 activists under arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, acts of repudiation, violence, threats, coercion and hate speech.”

Garcia said fear of reprisals had prevented people from joining the demonstration Monday.

“The problem is the fear, but we have social media, which they cannot control,” he said.

Call for condemnation of oppression

Garcia said the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba had helped the communist government, which he asserted used it for propaganda purposes.

He speculated that if opinion polls were allowed, however, they would show that the government has lost the support of the people.

He called on the international community to condemn what he said was repression in his home country.

“What is important is that the international community stops looking the other way,” Garcia said.

After Archipelago said it had been unable to contact Garcia, he reported on his Facebook page Wednesday that he had left Cuba and was in Spain with his wife.

While the protests were suppressed in Havana, Cuban expatriates were in the streets in Mexico City and other cities across Latin America in solidarity with their compatriots.

‘Absolute failure’

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said that Cuban opposition groups had failed in their efforts to organize Monday’s demonstration.

“It is clear that what I called a failed operation — a political communication operation organized and financed by the United States government with millionaire funds and the use of internal agents — was an absolute failure,” Rodriguez said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press.

“I wish they [the United States] would allow Americans their freedom to travel and that they could come to Cuba and see the reality firsthand and discover the deception to which they are frequently subjected, with the aim of sustaining an obsolete, genocidal policy that violates human rights and international law and causes suffering among the Cuban people,” he added.

The arrival of Garcia in the Spanish capital means the Cuban dissident movement has largely moved to Madrid in much the same way as opposition leaders from Venezuela have done.

Venezuelan dissident Leopoldo Lopez has made Madrid his home since making a dramatic exit from Venezuela in 2020. He was living in the Spanish Embassy in Caracas before making a dash for Colombia, from which he headed to Spain.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.
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The G-7 group of nations condemned what it called the Belarus government’s “orchestration of irregular migration across its borders” Thursday, as neighboring Poland reported new attempts to cross its border.

“We call on the regime to cease immediately its aggressive and exploitative campaign in order to prevent further deaths and suffering,” the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the United States said in a joint statement. “International organizations need to be provided with immediate and unhindered access to deliver humanitarian assistance.”

European countries accuse Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko of pushing thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, to cross the border illegally in retaliation for European Union sanctions punishing Belarus for cracking down on pro-democracy protesters. Belarus has denied orchestrating the gathering of migrants at the border.

The G-7 said Thursday that Belarus is trying to “deflect attention” from its violations of international law and human rights. The statement expressed solidarity with Poland as well as two other neighbors of Belarus-Lithuania and Latvia.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said China’s hypersonic missile test over the summer drew “concerns” about Beijing’s growing capability, but he said he did not compare it to Russia’s launching of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, in the 1950s.

“Those are terms that I wouldn’t use, I don’t personally use,” Austin replied Wednesday to reporters asking whether the July 27 launch was a “Sputnik moment.”

Austin called China the U.S. military’s “pacing challenge” but added that the U.S. was focused on “robust capability across the board” rather than one specific capability such as hypersonic weapons.

Even though the Chinese weapon missed its target by several kilometers, according to the Financial Times, the test marked the first time any country had sent a hypersonic weapon fully around the Earth. Hypersonic weapons travel at more than five times the speed of sound and are incredibly difficult to track.

China has denied it carried out a hypersonic missile test, saying it was testing a reusable spacecraft.

In an interview with CBS News that aired this week, General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, struck a more forceful tone when discussing the hypersonic test.

“It’s a very significant capability that has the potential to change a lot of things,” Hyten said.

Asked if he would compare the Chinese test to Sputnik, Hyten replied that “from a technology perspective, it’s pretty impressive.”

“But Sputnik created a sense of urgency in the United States,” the second highest ranking general said. “The test on July 27 did not create that sense of urgency. I think it probably should create a sense of urgency.”

China has already deployed one medium-range hypersonic weapon, according to Hyten, while the U.S. is still years away from fielding its first one.

Last month, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also called the Chinese test “very concerning.”

“I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention,” Milley said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

Russia-Ukraine tensions

Earlier in the Pentagon briefing Wednesday, Austin called on Russia to be more transparent about its troop buildup on the border of Ukraine.

“We’re not sure exactly what Mr. [Vladimir] Putin [Russia’s president] is up to, but these movements certainly have our attention,” he said.

In early November, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said about 90,000 Russian troops were close to the border and in rebel-controlled areas in Ukraine’s east.

A buildup of Russian troops near Ukraine earlier this year heightened tensions with the West. Russian officials said the troops had been deployed for training to counter security threats posed by nearby NATO forces.

Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and has since been supporting a separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s east.
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Poland is dealing with a huge migrant crisis as thousands try to enter its territory from Belarus. Polish authorities have created an exclusion zone and do not allow volunteers to help migrants who reach European Union soil. Jamie Dettmer narrates this report by correspondent Ricardo Marquina from the Polish town of Michalowo near the border with Belarus.
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Dozens of Armenian soldiers have been captured or gone missing following the latest clashes on the border with Azerbaijan, officials in Yerevan said on November 17.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said on the morning of November 17 that seven of its soldiers were killed and 10 others wounded in renewed fighting on the shared border that erupted on November 16.

According to a statement by Armenia’s Defense Ministry, 13 Armenian soldiers were captured by Azerbaijani forces and another 24 Armenian servicemen have gone missing and that their fate remains unknown.

The statement added that one Armenian soldier was killed in the fighting, which Yerevan says has stopped following talks with Moscow.

Both sides blamed each other for starting the latest conflict amid tensions between the two former Soviet nations that have simmered since a six-week war last year over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan said its forces prevented “large-scale provocations” by Armenian forces in the Kalbacar and Lachin districts bordering Armenia.

In turn, Armenia’s Defense Ministry accused Azerbaijani soldiers of shooting at its positions along the border, using artillery, armored vehicles, and guns.

Later on November 16, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that hostilities on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border had ceased after a cease-fire was reached with Moscow’s mediation. Armenia confirmed that report.

The situation along the border has been tense since the two South Caucasus nations fought a 44-day war over Nagorno-Karabakh last year that killed at least 6,500 people and ended with a cease-fire that granted Azerbaijan control of parts of the region as well as adjacent territories occupied by Armenians.

The breakaway region is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Washington was “troubled” by the reports of the fighting. In a tweet on November 17, Blinken called on both sides to engage “directly and constructively to resolve all outstanding issues, including border demarcation.”

On November 16, the European Union also urged the two sides to show restraint.

Calling for “urgent de-escalation and [a] full cease-fire,” the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, described the situation in the region as “challenging.”

“The EU is committed to work with partners to overcome tensions for a prosperous and stable South Caucasus,” Michel wrote on Twitter.

Some information for this story came from the Associated Press.
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Migrants in a makeshift camp on the western border of Belarus are being taken away by bus, a Polish government official was quoted as saying Wednesday.

Thousands of migrants, primarily from the Middle East, have been stuck in the camp since Nov. 8. Most are escaping conflict and instability at home for opportunities in Germany or other countries in western Europe. 

On Tuesday, Polish security forces along the border fired water cannons and tear gas at stone-throwing migrants, after Poland accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government of providing smoke grenades and other weapons to the migrants. 

But on Wednesday, a Polish deputy interior minister, Maciej Wasik, reportedly said tensions had deescalated and that the camp, which is now closed, had fewer people. 

“I have received information that Lukashenko has provided the first buses which migrants are boarding and leaving,” Wasik said, according to The Associated Press. “The camp site near Kuznica is slowly emptying.” 

The Associated Press reported Wasik’s information is hard to verify because of restrictions on journalists on both sides of the Belarusian-Polish border. 

The Belarusian state news agency Belta reported that migrants were being sheltered inside a logistics center at the border. 

Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak warned Wednesday in an interview with Poland’s Radio Jedynka the crisis at the border could last months or even years, according to Agence France-Presse. 

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. 

 
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The World Health Organization says Europe is once again the epicenter of the pandemic. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the latest wave of infections is casting a shadow over recent signs that European economies were rebounding.
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Turkish authorities arrested businessman Samir Handal, a suspect “of great interest” in the July assassination of Haiti’s president, according to Haitian Foreign Minister Claude Joseph. 

The Monday arrest is the latest in a globe-trotting effort to round up Jovenel Moïse’s killers as Haiti contends with political instability, fuel shortages, gang violence and hunger made worse by a deadly August earthquake. 

Turkey’s state-run media reported Handal was being held in Istanbul after court officials issued a 40-day custody order, according to The Associated Press. Handal, who has been identified as a Haitian national by several media outlets, was arrested after his flight touched down in Istanbul during layover on a flight from the United States to Jordan. 

Joseph tweeted that he had spoken by phone with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, late Monday after Handal’s arrest. Joseph gave no more details about whether Haiti will seek Handal’s extradition.

In an interview with The Miami Herald, Joseph called Handal’s arrest a “huge step” in the investigation of Moïse’s death. He said Haiti passed an arrest warrant to Turkey’s Foreign Ministry before Handal’s flight arrived in Istanbul, rounding out an Interpol Red notice issued Sunday. 

“I myself am more than determined to do justice to the president and make sure that it’s rendered to his allies, his family and more importantly, the country,” Joseph told The Miami Herald. “When we render justice to the president, we render it to the whole nation.” 

Handal joins more than 40 suspects in custody around the world for Moïse’s killing, including former Colombian military officer Mario Palacios Palacios, who is being held in Jamaica, and several Haitian police officers. Among the people Haitian authorities have linked to the assassination plot are Venezuelan businessman Antonio Intriago, Haitian American James Solages, former Haitian Senator John Joël Joseph and a group of U.S.-trained former Colombian soldiers. 

It’s unclear whether Handal will be extradited to Haiti, where authorities believe he met with suspected mastermind Christian Emmanuel Sanon to plan Moïse’s assassination, Reuters reports. Haitian police found Handal’s name on three Palestinian passports and seven Haitian passports stowed in Sanon’s home. 

President Moïse was killed at his home in the early hours of July 7. Haitian authorities allege Sanon hired Intriago’s Florida-based security company, CTU Security, to help carry out the politically motivated attack in Port-au-Prince. Sanon aspired to take over the presidency, according to Haitian police. The two Haitian Americans implicated in the plot claim they were hired only as interpreters; they, like some of the former Colombian soldiers, said they expected to arrest, not kill, the Haitian president. 

In August, only five weeks after the president’s death, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 2,200 people. Haiti has struggled to recover amid political instability sparked by Moïse’s killing, leading to gang rule that has kept the Caribbean country from receiving much-needed humanitarian aid. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 

 
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Polish forces at the border with Belarus used water cannons and tear gas Tuesday against stone-throwing migrants, as Warsaw accused Belarusian authorities of giving smoke grenades and other weapons to those trying to cross the frontier. 

The events marked an escalation in the crisis on the European Union’s eastern border, where the West has accused President Alexander Lukashenko of using the migrants as pawns to destabilize the 27-nation bloc in retaliation for its sanctions on his authoritarian regime. Belarus denies orchestrating the crisis. 

The Poland Border Guard agency posted video on Twitter showing water being sprayed across the border at a group of migrants who threw debris, and the Defense Ministry also said tear gas was used against the attackers. Polish authorities said nine of its forces were injured — seven policemen, one soldier and a female border guard. 

About 2,000 migrants were at the frontier in makeshift camps in freezing weather, but only about 100 were believed to be involved in attacking the Polish forces at the crossing near Kuźnica, said Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska. The crossing has been closed since last week. 

Police spokesman Mariusz Ciarka later said the migrants there had been “pacified.” He also said the attackers had been given smoke grenades by the Belarusians and threw stones at the Polish police, with the events monitored by the Belarusian services using a drone. The Polish Defense Ministry also said Belarus gave some migrants flash-bang grenades. 

Belarus’ State Border Guard Committee and the Foreign Ministry said they would investigate Poland’s actions.

“These are considered violent actions against individuals who are on the territory of another country,” committee spokesman Anton Bychkovsky was quoted as saying by Belarus’ state news agency Belta. 

Lukashenko on Tuesday again rejected accusations of engineering the crisis and said his government has deported about 5,000 illegal migrants from Belarus this fall. 

On Tuesday, Lukashenko said he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed Monday by phone that neither Belarus nor the EU would benefit from an escalation of the crisis. He said he proposed a resolution but did not elaborate, adding that Merkel is discussing it with other EU leaders. 

Some of the migrants have children with them at the border in their desperate bid to reach the EU. Most are fleeing conflict, poverty and instability in the Middle East and elsewhere. At least 11 deaths have been reported in recent weeks as the weather has turned colder, and they are trapped in the dank forest between the forces of the two countries. 

While some have managed to get into the EU before Poland, Lithuania and Latvia bolstered their borders, passage appears to be much harder now. 

Poland has taken a tough stand against the migrants’ illegal entry, reinforcing the border with riot police and troops, rolling out razor wire, and making plans to build a tall steel barrier. The Polish approach has largely met with approval from other EU nations, who want to stop another wave of migration. 

But Poland also has been criticized by human rights groups and others for pushing migrants back into Belarus and not allowing them to apply for asylum. 

“It’s very clear that if you see what’s been happening to this group of people — that their own specific concerns, their particular dignity and their rights — have not been treated with the respect that they should have,” said U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq. “And that is why we want them to be able to speak for themselves and to be heard. We don’t want these people to be instrumentalized and used as pawns in the disputes involving the countries.” 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Poland’s actions “violate all conceivable norms of international humanitarian law and other agreements of the international community.” 

Warsaw says Moscow bears some responsibility for the border crisis, given its strong support for Belarus. The Russian government has denied responsibility. 

Events at the border have been difficult to verify independently. Poland has imposed a state of emergency, which bars reporters and human rights workers from the area. In Belarus, journalists face severe restrictions on their ability to report. 

The EU has been pressuring airlines to stop carrying Syrians, Iraqis and others to Belarus, and the efforts were having some effect. A Beirut travel agency said flights from the Lebanese capital to Minsk had been stopped for now. A Tuesday evening flight by Belarusian carrier Belavia was shown as canceled on the airport’s website. 

Iraq urged its citizens at the border to return home. About 200 Iraqis in Belarus hoping to travel to the EU have contacted the Iraqi Embassy in Russia about returning home, an embassy spokesman told the Interfax agency. The spokesman said an evacuation flight will leave Thursday from Minsk, and Belarusian authorities have helped bring migrants back from the border. 

 
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Threats by the leader of the Serb-majority Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, to break his mini-state away from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country shakily balanced between Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs, is adding to growing regional and international dismay at unfolding developments in the Balkans.

Dodik’s threats combined with a major rearmament program by neighboring Serbia are fueling concerns the Balkans could be heading for conflict.

Serbia started negotiating last month with Israel about buying anti-tank missiles and some European Union officials suspect Belgrade may be in the process of reaching out to Ankara to discuss buying the type of Turkish-made armed drones used with devastating effect by Azerbaijan in its recent clash with Armenia.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic says his Balkan neighbors shouldn’t be alarmed about the rearming, which he casts as an updating of his country’s armed forces, and says Belgrade has no offensive intentions. Earlier this year, he said: “Everyone is rearming and we will also rearm. If everyone else, does it, we must too.”

Alarm rising

But Serbia’s neighbors are unsettled by the rearmament program, which has seen Belgrade increase its defense spending by 70% since 2015, and by what they see as Vucic’s increasing nationalist rhetoric.

Belgrade has also provided strong political backing for Dodik.

Last week Christian Schmidt, the specially appointed High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, warned the U.N. Security Council that the war-scarred Balkans is facing its biggest threat since the ethnic cleansing and wars of the early 1990s. “The prospects of further division and conflict are very real,” he said.

And he urged the international community to curb any threatened separatist actions by Bosnian Serbs.

Alarm is also rising in Western European capitals, with officials noting that Vucic’s arms purchases have served to deepen Serbia’s relations with China and Russia, which is sympathetic to Dodik’s ambitions to separate his mini-state and have it join Serbia.

Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has placed the Balkans on the agenda for next month’s meeting of NATO’s foreign ministers in Riga, according to British officials. Germany has been pressing fellow EU member states to prepare sanctions against Dodik. Heiko Maas, German foreign minister, said Saturday that Berlin wants to see “individual measures against those who question the territorial integrity” of Bosnia.

Maas added: “We will not be able to accept the continuation of this irresponsible policy without taking action.” He accused Republika Srpska of “actively working to destroy Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole state.”

A former British foreign minister, William Hague, warned Tuesday: “History has shown many times that we neglect the western Balkans at our peril.” He said: “For years, the leader of the Serb-majority Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has been undermining the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina with active Russian and Serbian support,” he wrote in a commentary for The Times newspaper. “In recent weeks the situation has become grave. Dodik is coming close to secession from Bosnia,” he added.

Unresolved disputes

He and others fear unresolved disputes from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and simmering tensions between Croatia, which has also been rearming, and Serbia are jeopardizing stability in the Western Balkans. The Balkan disputes also include disagreements over the status of Kosovo, the former Serbian province, which declared independence in 2008 after a war that killed more than 13,000 people, mainly ethnic Albanians.

EU-brokered talks aimed at normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo restarted recently but a cross-border dispute in September prompted by Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti decision not to recognize Serbian automobile license plates saw Belgrade deploy tanks to its border with Kosovo and Vucic announce economic and political sanctions against the former Serb province.

The Serb leader urged the international community to intervene and warned if it didn’t “we will know how to protect our country, there is no doubt about it.” Hundreds of Kosovo Serbs closed a key border road and Kosovo officials dispatched extra police units.

But it is Dodik’s secession talk that is of the most immediate worry for Western powers, say U.S. and European diplomats. They fear that if Dodik tries to tear Bosnia apart it would risk triggering a new Balkans conflict that could all too easily reignite disputes between Serbia and Croatia as well as between Serbia and Kosovo, plunging the Western Balkans into a replay of the vicious inter-ethnic wars that erupted on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The 1995 U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords set up the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia as an international protectorate with complex power-sharing constitutional arrangements among the three principal ethnic groups that make it up. It has two semi-autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska but Dodik has threatened to pull out of Bosnia’s state-level institutions, including the army and has been militarizing his police which could serve as a reconstituted ethnic Bosnian Serb armed force. He has also said he wants to set up a separate judiciary.

The 62-year-old Dodik last month warned he will speed up his secession plans, if Western sanctions are imposed on him, telling Gabriel Escobar, a U.S. envoy, “F*** the sanctions,” according to a leaked transcript of the meeting. “If you want to talk to me, then stop threatening me,” he told Escobar.

Dodik has warned that any NATO military intervention aimed at preventing him from breaking up Bosnia will be opposed by his “friends,” seen as a reference to the rearmed Serbia and Russia. Vucic appeared last month to rein in Dodik, saying, “It is important to preserve peace and show that Republika Srpska is not the source of the problem, but that we are all ready to talk in the region.”

But he added Serbia will not join in any sanctions against Republika Srpska. 
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The US Naval Station at Rota in the south of Spain has often been the target of protests by anti-war activists and environmentalists. But ever since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged Spain’s tourism industry, it has been a vastly different scenario. Jon Spier narrates this report by Alfonso Beato in Rota. Producer: Rob Raffaele.
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Polish border forces on Wednesday said they were attacked with stones by migrants at the border with Belarus and responded by using water cannons against them.

The Border Guard agency posted video on Twitter showing a water cannon being directed across the border at a group of migrants in a makeshift camp in freezing temperatures.

Polish police said one officer was seriously injured. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital and it is likely his skull was fractured after being hit by an object.

The situation marks an escalation in a tense migration and political border crisis where the lives of thousands of migrants are at stake.

Poland’s Defense Ministry said its soldiers and other border forces were attacked with stones and other objects.

The ministry also said that Belarusian forces tried to destroy fencing along the countries’ common border, while the Interior Ministry posted video apparently showing migrants trying to tear down a fence.

There was no way to independently verify what was happening because a state of emergency in Poland is keeping reporters and human rights workers out of the border area. In Belarus journalists face severe restrictions on their ability to report as well, with only a few present at the border.

At one point Tuesday a Polish independent broadcaster, TVN24, was forced to rely on CNN in order to show a picture of the border not filtered through government authorities.

Poland’s parliament is expected Tuesday to take up a legislative proposal that would regulate the ability of citizens to move in the area of the border with Belarus after the state of emergency ends at this end of this month.

The state of emergency was imposed at the beginning of September as a large number of migrants from the Middle East sought to cross into Poland from Belarus.

The border is also part of the European Union’s eastern border, and the EU accuses the authoritarian regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of fomenting a migration crisis in order to pressure the bloc.

The EU has been putting pressure on airlines to stop transporting Syrians, Iraqis and others to Belarus.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is urging its citizens trapped at the border to return home.

Some 200 Iraqi nationals who arrived in Belarus with the intention of crossing into the EU reached out to the Iraqi embassy in Russia and expressed a desire to return to their homeland, an embassy spokesman told the Interfax agency on Tuesday.

The spokesman added that an evacuation flight will take place on Thursday and all those wishing to return to Iraq are already in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, awaiting the flight. There were no issues with transporting the migrants from the border to Minsk, the diplomat told Interfax, and Belarusian authorities have provided all the necessary assistance.
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Russian officials on Tuesday rejected accusations that they endangered astronauts aboard the International Space Station by conducting a weapons test that created more than 1,500 pieces of space junk.

U.S. officials on Monday accused Russia of destroying an old satellite with a missile in what they called a reckless and irresponsible strike. The debris could do major damage to the space station as it is orbiting at 17,500 mph (28,000 kph).

Astronauts now face four times greater risk than normal, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told The Associated Press.

The test clearly demonstrates that Russia, “despite its claims of opposing the weaponization of outer space, is willing to … imperil the exploration and use of outer space by all nations through its reckless and irresponsible behavior,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos wouldn’t confirm or deny that the strike took place, saying only that “unconditional safety of the crew has been and remains our main priority” in a vague online statement released Tuesday.

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday confirmed carrying out a test and destroying a defunct satellite that has been in orbit since 1982, but insisted that “the U.S. knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities” and called remarks by U.S. officials “hypocritical.”

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also charged that it is “hypocrisy” to say that Russia creates risks for peaceful activities in space.

Once the situation became clear early Monday morning, the four Americans, one German and two Russians on board the International Space Station were ordered to immediately seek shelter in their docked capsules. They spent two hours in the two capsules, finally emerging only to have to close and reopen hatches to the station’s individual labs on every orbit, or 1 1/2 hours, as they passed near or through the debris.

NASA Mission Control said the heightened threat could continue to interrupt the astronauts’ science research and other work. Four of the seven crew members only arrived at the orbiting outpost Thursday night.

A similar weapons test by China in 2007 also resulted in countless pieces of debris. One of those threatened to come dangerously close to the space station last week. While it later was dismissed as a risk, NASA had the station move anyway.

Anti-satellite missile tests by the U.S. in 2008 and India in 2019 were conducted at much lower altitudes, well below the space station at about 260 miles (420 kilometers.)
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Greece and U.S. tech giant Microsoft have teamed up to digitally revive one of the ancient world’s most sacrosanct sites: the birthplace of the Olympic Games. The ambitious project uses technology to immerse viewers in the world of ancient Olympia. 

The collaboration between Microsoft and the Greek Culture Ministry will allow millions of visitors to immerse themselves in an experience that organizers say brings history to life. 

At a recent news conference in Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games, Microsoft officials said they used artificial intelligence to map the site, augmenting reality to help restore the sacrosanct location as it might have looked some 2,000 years ago.  

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitostakis attended the launch and said the project would revive Greece’s greatest commodity — its history. 

“Technology is opening up a completely different way of experiencing what our culture is all about. And the project in Olympia is so important because it demonstrates the power of technology to not just look at the site, but also the lives of people, how societies were organized,” Mitostakis said.

Among the 27 monuments being featured are the original Olympic stadium, the temples of Zeus and Hera, and the workshop of the renowned sculptor Phidias. 

Through data provided by Greek archaeologists, the sites are as close as possible to their original forms. In-person visitors are provided with smart glasses at the site so they can get an idea of what the locations would have looked like in ancient times. Visitors also see timelines of how the sites have changed over time, as well as depictions of artifacts from various periods.  

Antigone Papanikolaou of Microsoft explained in a presentation.  

“It’s like passing the flame from the old generations to the next. The fact that we can now go and experience how our predecessors were creating and living and seeing that as it was in ancient Greece, It’s amazing,” Papanikolaou said.

Organizers say people who are not able to visit the site in southern Greece will be able to take a virtual tour using a computer or mobile app. Critics tell The Associated Press that the program will extend “the invasive power” of U.S. tech giants. 

Work on the ambitious project took 18 months, with drones and sensors being used to help map the sites. 

Officials in Greece, a treasure trove of antiquities, say the cultural implications for the country are now endless. 

Some information came from The Associated Press. 
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Belarus appeared to be moving Monday to de-escalate a long-running standoff with Poland and the European Union. Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said he is preparing to start repatriating around 4,000 asylum-seekers camped out in freezing temperatures at the border with Poland.

“Active work is underway in this area, to convince people —please, return home,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying by state news agency Belta. But he added the caveat: “Nobody wants to go back.”

Poland — as well as Lithuania and Latvia — have been militarizing their borders with Belarus to try to stop record numbers of migrants, mainly from Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, attempting to cross their borders. They accuse Lukashenko of weaponizing human desperation by using asylum-seekers as pawns in reprisal for the EU’s imposing sanctions on Belarus for last year’s disputed elections. The election was widely seen as rigged.

Lukashenko’s remarks came as European Union leaders advanced a raft of new sanctions against Belarus targeting officials, businesses and airlines involved in the organized ferrying of migrants from the Middle East and the Gulf to the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

The sanctions package contains two parts targeting migration facilitators and also those accused of human rights abuses inside Belarus, where Lukashenko has overseen a harsh crackdown on protesters challenging the legitimacy of his rule.

Belavia, the Belarusian state-owned airline, is high on the target list and the company’s existing and future aircraft leasing contracts would be impacted. But ahead of the imposition of new EU sanctions, the airline announced it would stop flying travelers from Dubai who have come from several other Middle Eastern countries. Iraq also announced it is planning a repatriation flight Thursday for Iraqis stranded on the Belarusian-Polish border.

Before a meeting in Brussels of EU foreign ministers to discuss fresh sanctions, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said, “Today we are going to approve a new package of sanctions against Belarusian people responsible for what’s happening … and we are going to launch a framework in order to implement other sanctions to other people, airlines, travel agencies and everybody involved on this illegal push of migrants in our borders.”

Migrant crisis

Borrell told reporters he spoke with the Belarusian foreign minister telling him “The situation on the border was completely unacceptable and that humanitarian help was needed.”

Meanwhile, Poland is calling on NATO to intervene in the migrant crisis on the border with Belarus. “It is not enough just for us to publicly express our concern. Now we need concrete steps and the commitment of the entire alliance,” Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said Sunday. He said Poland, Lithuania and Latvia may request a meeting under Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty which requires member states to consult when the territorial integrity of another is being compromised.

Lukashenko has half-heartedly denied he has been seeking to needle or blackmail Europe by trying to fuel a migrant crisis, but said he was reacting to foreign pressure. “We are not blackmailing anyone with illegal immigration,” he told journalists in Minsk’s Independence Palace in August. “We’re not threatening anyone. But you have put us in such circumstances that we are forced to react. And we’re reacting,” he said.

In October alone, Poland recorded 15,000 attempted illegal border crossings. Last week, the country’s defense minister tweeted that his government had boosted the number of Polish troops sent to the border to 12,000, up from the 10,000 deployed earlier.

Katarzyna Zdanowicz, a spokesperson for the Polish Border Guard, said Monday that the situation at the border in the Kuznica area was “very tense and very dangerous.” She said migrants had been throwing stones at Polish border guards and “weapons” were being “pointed towards our servicemen” with a flare fired at them. Polish officials say Belarusian guards have been encouraging migrants to trample down obstacles and cut wire fences, handing them bolt-cutters.

In the last few days, several airlines and governments have scrambled to avoid being impacted by EU sanctions. Syria’s Cham Wings Airlines suspended flights between Damascus and Minsk Saturday. Turkey said it will ban Syrian, Yemeni, and Iraqi citizens from boarding flights from Istanbul to Minsk. The Iraqi government suspended direct flights between Iraq and Belarus last week.

But NATO officials and EU diplomats appear less than convinced that Lukashenko is sincere about ending the high-stakes standoff, which they see as part of a broader pattern of provocations ultimately authored and stoked by Moscow.

They point to the Belarusian leader’s comment that the migrants do not want to be repatriated. And they say Belarusian authorities Monday encouraged thousands of migrants sheltering in a migrant camp in the village of Bruzgi to join the throng already on the border by circulating a rumor in the camp that the Polish government was about to open the border.

Polish authorities sent out SMS messages saying the information was a “total lie,” and in the text messages: “Poland won’t let migrants pass to Germany. It will protect its border. Don’t get fooled, don’t try to take any action.”

Poland has accused the Kremlin of pulling Belarusian strings and Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has called on Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to intervene, saying he could bring an end to the migrant crisis with a phone call to his ally Lukashenko, who has also raised the prospects of shutting down a pipeline running through Belarus carrying natural gas to Western Europe from Russia.

Russia

In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin rejected accusations that Russia is stoking the migrant crisis, saying Western powers had “a desire to place their own problems at somebody else’s door. It’s their own fault.”

But Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said the migrant crisis is part of a Kremlin strategy of hybrid warfare. He linked it with a Russian military build-up on the border of Ukraine, which is also prompting alarm in Washington, Kyiv, and European capitals.

“When we see migrants used as a weapon, when we see disinformation used as a weapon, when we see gas used as a weapon, and soldiers and their guns, these are not separate elements,” Ukraine’s top diplomat said in an interview with the Politico.eu website.

After meeting with Kuleba, NATO’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg warned Monday that the Russian military build-up near the Ukrainian border has reduced the time the West will have to prepare for any incursion into Ukraine. He said the Western alliance needs to be “realistic” following warnings last week by US intelligence officials that Moscow could be planning a repeat of its 2014 annexation of Crimea.

“We see an unusual concentration of troops, and we know that Russia has been willing to use these types of military capability before to conduct aggressive actions against Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. Russia has dismissed talk of an invasion as “alarmist” and accuses Western powers of provoking tensions in the region, saying there has been an uptick in military activity by the West, mirroring the European and American claims against it.

Russia’s defense ministry said last week it had scrambled a Sukhoi SU-30 warplane to intercept a British spy plane, a British Boeing RC-135, when it neared Crimea.

Russia assembled around 100,000 troops near the Ukraine border earlier this year, saying they were there for training. Moscow later announced their withdrawal, but Ukraine claims most of the force remained in the region. Western and Ukrainian officials say more Russian units, including elite ones, have been deployed near the border, with some troop movements happening covertly overnight.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that Washington did not immediately know what to make of the massing of tens of thousands of Russian troops along the Ukraine border. “We’ve seen this before. … What does this mean? We don’t know yet, too early to tell,” he said.

“Everyone is wondering, what’s Putin going to do? I think he loves it when we ask those questions,” said David Kramer, who was assistant secretary of state in the administration of George W. Bush. He said the Kremlin thrives on discomfiting the West by being unpredictable. 
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Germany’s capital, Berlin, joined several German states Monday in limiting access to restaurants, cinemas, museums and concert venues to only people who have been vaccinated or recently recovered, as new COVID-19 cases continue to surge. 

The country’s infectious disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, reported Monday that the country’s number of new cases per 100,000 residents in the past seven days climbed to 303, the first time the rate climbed over 300 since the pandemic began. The record comes just one week since an unprecedented jump to over 200 new cases per 100,000 residents. 

Only 67.5% of the German population is fully vaccinated. The highly contagious delta variant has run rampant through the unvaccinated population as the temperature drops and people stay indoors. 

The German parliament is scheduled to vote Thursday on a new legal framework for COVID-19 restrictions drawn up by the three parties expected to make up the nation’s next ruling coalition — the Social Democrats, the Green Party and the Free Democrats. The plans are reportedly being strengthened to allow for more strict contact restrictions than originally planned.

The coalition, which hopes to finalize its formation and take office early next month, is also expected to introduce a vaccine mandate in some areas, a step that officials have so far resisted.

Reports say the new laws will give Germany’s 16 states a series of options they can apply individually, given that the infection rate varies greatly across the country. Higher rates have been detected in regions with the lowest vaccination rates, namely eastern and southern Germany. 

 
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The British government Monday announced Monday an expansion of the nation’s COVID-19 booster shot program to people ages 40 and up, to fight off a potential winter surge of the deadly disease.

Until now, only British residents ages 50 and up, those clinically vulnerable because of underlying conditions, and frontline health workers were eligible for booster shots. But at a news briefing in London, the chairman of Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, Wei Shen Lin, announced the extension to those ages 40 and up who have been fully vaccinated for at least six months.

He said, as with the original booster program, either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines can be used as the booster dose, regardless of the type of vaccine originally received.

The committee also recommended a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for young people between the ages of 16 and 18. In August, the committee had advised only one dose of the vaccine for people of that age group, but would review the data, and were anticipating that a second dose may well be advised. Monday, the committee chairman said that was “indeed the case.” 

The chief executive of Britain’s drug regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Dr. June Raine, said they had closely monitored the use of the vaccines in people under 18, and their use raised no additional safety issues specific to this age group. 

Speaking via video conference, British Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said the data so far showed that adults over age 60 who have received the booster were achieving over 90% protection against symptomatic illness and he expected protection against hospitalization and death to be even higher. 

He said if the booster program is successful and participation numbers are high, it would “massively reduce the worry about hospitalization and death due to COVID at Christmas and for the rest of this winter, for literally millions of people.” 

 
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