Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to attend a G20 summit being hosted by Indonesia later this year, Russia’s ambassador in Jakarta said on March 23, dismissing suggestions by some members that the country is barred from the group.
“It will depend on many many things, including the COVID situation that is getting better. So far, his intention is… he wants to come,” ambassador Lyudmila Vorobieva told a news conference.
The United States and its Western allies are assessing whether Russia should remain within the Group of Twenty (G20) grouping of major economies following its invasion of Ukraine, sources involved in the discussions told Reuters.
Russia was suspended from what was then known as the Group of Eight (G8) club of leading economies after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. However, the G20 is a much broader grouping that includes India, China, Brazil and others and any move to exclude Russia could struggle to find unanimity.
Russia, the United States and Britain traded accusations at the United Nations on Tuesday (March 22) over the possibility of a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, but none produced any evidence to back their concerns.
The comments were made by diplomats to reporters after Russia raised the issue of an ammonia leak in Ukraine’s besieged northeastern city of Sumy – blaming “Ukrainian radical nationalist groups” – during a closed-door U.N. Security Council meeting. The accusation was rejected by Britain and the United States.
Russia’s deputy U.N. Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy said Russian troops “have never planned or carried out strikes against any Ukrainian facilities where toxic substances are stored or produced.”
“It is clear that the Ukrainian nationalist authorities, encouraged by the Western countries, will stop at nothing to intimidate its own people and stage false flag attacks to accuse Russia,” Polyanskiy said.
It was the third time Russia raised the issue of biological or chemical weapons since it began what it calls a “special military operation” on Feb. 24 to “demilitarize” Ukraine. The West and Ukraine reject that as a false pretext to invade a democratic country.
“It’s hard not to conclude – given their record in the UK, in Russia against Alexei Navalny, given what we’ve seen in Syria – that this might well be a prelude to the Russians themselves creating some sort of false flag chemical weapons attack,” Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward told reporters.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield dismissed Russia’s accusations as “ludicrous.”
“Our concern is that this is a precursor for Russia’s plans to use chemical weapons,” she said.
A senior U.S. defence official said on Tuesday that the United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring intelligence.
President Joe Biden said on Monday that Russia’s false accusations that Kyiv has biological and chemical weapons illustrate that Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering using them himself in the war against Ukraine.
Polyanskiy likened the situation in Ukraine to Syria, where he said chemical attacks by “terrorist groups” were blamed on the Syrian authorities.
A joint United Nations and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inquiry found the Syrian government used the nerve agent sarin and had several times used chlorine as a weapon. It also blamed Islamic State for mustard gas use.
Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate arrived in Jamaica on Tuesday (March 22) as part of a week-long Caribbean tour hours after activists protested to demand reparations for slavery amid growing scrutiny of the British Empire’s colonial legacy.
Dozens of people gathered outside the British High Commission in Kingston, singing traditional Rastafarian songs and holding banners with the phrase “seh yuh sorry” – a local patois phrase that urged Britain to apologize.
The government last year announced plans to ask Britain for compensation for forcibly transporting an estimated 600,000 Africans to work on sugar cane and banana plantations that created fortunes for British slaveholders.
Jamaica lawmaker Mike Henry has proposed a reparations package of 7.6 billion pounds ($10 billion).
He has said the figure is derived from a 20 million pound payment that Britain’s government made in 1837 to compensate slave owners in British colonies for the emancipation of enslaved people following the 1833 abolition of slavery.
The royal visits to Caribbean nations are seen as an effort to convince other former British colonies – including Belize and The Bahamas – to stay on as “realms” of the British monarchy amid a rising regional movement towards republicanism.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived in Belize on Saturday to start the tour that coincides with Queen Elizabeth’s 70th year on the throne and will conclude it over the weekend with a visit to The Bahamas.
Britain’s Royal Mint said it had found a way of reclaiming hundreds of kilograms of gold and other precious metals from electronic waste such as mobile phones and laptops.
Gold and silver are highly conductive and small quantities are embedded in circuit boards and other hardware, along with other precious metals.
Most of this material is never recovered, with discarded electronics often dumped in landfills or incinerated.
The more than 1,100-year-old mint said it had partnered with a Canadian start-up called Excir which has developed chemical solutions to extract the metals from the circuit boards.
It plans to build a plant in Wales to process hundreds of tonnes of e-waste and extract hundreds of kilograms of precious metals.
Sean Millard, the mint’s chief growth officer, said that disused electronics in households represent about seven per cent of the world’s gold.
On Monday (March 21) Gold prices rose as fighting in Ukraine boosted demand for safe-haven bullion. Spot gold rose 0.5% to $1,931.16 per ounce by 1:51 p.m. ET (1751 GMT). U.S. gold futures for April settled mostly unchanged at $1,929.50.
AMoscow court ruled on Monday to ban Facebook and Instagram in Russia, labeling the parent company of the two social networks Meta Platforms Inc. “extremist.”
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia said that the lawsuit was aimed at protecting Russians from “a violation of their rights,” according to local media.
Meta has violated its own rules by allowing posts with violent speeches towards the Russian military and has ignored more than 4,500 requests to remove fake information on Russia’s special military operation and calls for unauthorized rallies, the prosecutors said.
The court ruling will come into effect immediately but will not affect WhatsApp messenger.
Meta is also banned from doing business in Russia as the Prosecutor General’s Office and Russia’s Federal Security Service accused the U.S. giant of acting against Russia and its armed forces.
An off-duty police officer accused of putting his knee on a 12-year-old girl’s neck to restrain her amid a lunchtime fight in Kenosha in the Midwest U.S. state of Wisconsin, is under investigation, NBC has reported, citing the city’s police department.
The surveillance footage released on Friday by Kenosha Unified School District shows that Kenosha officer Shawn Guetschow, who was working as a security guard at the school, intervening in a fight on March 4 by placing his knee on the girl’s neck for half a minute to subdue her, NBC reported on Tuesday.
Jerrel Perez, the girl’s father, has called for criminal charges against Guetschow for using a type of restraint that was banned for Wisconsin law enforcement officers last year. Perez said his daughter is in therapy and seeing a neurologist for her injuries.
Guetschow resigned from his security guard post with the school on Tuesday, but remains employed by the city police force, Kenosha Police Department tweeted.
Alcohol-related deaths soared during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a recent study has revealed.
Alcohol-related deaths spiked between 2019 and 2020 from 78,927 to 99,017, while deaths from other causes had smaller increases, according to the research published on Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The research found that alcohol-related deaths accounted for 2.8 percent of all deaths in 2019 and 3.0 percent in 2020.
The number and rate of alcohol-related deaths went up some 25 percent between 2019 and 2020, the first year of the pandemic, it showed.
A passenger plane with 132 people aboard crashed in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Monday afternoon, the regional emergency management department said.
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft, which departed from Kunming and was bound for Guangzhou, crashed into a mountainous area near the Molang village in Tengxian County in the city of Wuzhou at 2:38 p.m., causing a mountain fire, according to the department.
“I heard the roar of a plane on the other side of the hill. A second later, there was an explosion,” a worker near the crash site told Xinhua.
There were 123 passengers and nine crew members aboard flight MU5735, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on its website. The administration said it has initiated an emergency response mechanism and its working team has arrived in Wuzhou.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the immediate launch of an emergency response, all-out search and rescue efforts and the proper settlement of the aftermath of the crash.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in his instruction that he was shocked to learn about the accident.
Photo taken with a mobile phone shows the plane crash site in Tengxian County, south China
Xi ordered that swift action be taken to identify the cause of the crash and to strengthen the safety overhaul of the civil aviation sector to ensure the absolute safety of both the sector and people’s lives.
On behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, Vice Premier Liu He, also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, and State Councilor Wang Yong have led relevant officials to guide rescue work, the settlement of the aftermath and investigation into the cause of the crash, in Wuzhou.
Villager Chen Weihao was working on a farm when he saw the plane nosedived.
“The plane looked to be in one piece when it nosedived. Within seconds, it crashed,” said Chen, adding that the crash site was a gap in a mountain where no residents lived.
Flames from the crash have been extinguished and the rescue operation is underway, said Chen Jie, an official from the regional emergency management department.
The Wuzhou fire brigade has sent 117 firefighters with 23 fire trucks to the site. A further 538 firefighters from other parts of Guangxi have been dispatched to join the rescue efforts, the regional fire department said on its Weibo account.
The neighboring Guangdong Province has dispatched 505 firefighters and 97 vehicles to aid the rescue operation, with the first group already at the scene.
“There is some plane wreckage in a gap in the mountain,” a rescue worker at the crash site told Xinhua. “There are pieces of the wings, one of them about 2 or 3 meters. There is other debris, with some probably being pieces of clothing.”
Villager Shi Fuxiong said he saw a large pit at the crash site and surrounding trees within dozens of meters had been leveled.
The Guangxi regional health commission has dispatched 12 medical experts to the site, and over 80 medical workers and 36 ambulances sent by health authorities in the city of Wuzhou have arrived at the scene.
China Eastern Airlines said that it has initiated an emergency response mechanism. It has established nine special working groups for aircraft disposal, accident investigation, family assistance, logistics support, legal support, public relations, security, financial insurance, and cargo disposal.
The airline said the cause of the accident will be fully investigated.
Boeing China said it is aware of the media reports of the crash and is working to gather more information.
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) will vote Wednesday on a draft resolution on Ukraine, the second such resolution since the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, a spokesperson said Monday.
The 11th Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly will be held after a letter requesting the resumption was received by UNGA President Abdulla Shahid, his spokesperson Paulina Kubiak told reporters in an email.
“A draft resolution sponsored by Ukraine and other member states has been submitted and is being processed,” she said.
According to diplomatic sources, the new UNGA draft resolution focuses on the humanitarian situation, calling for the protection of civilians, medical personnel, aid workers, journalists, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure.
A China Eastern Airlines aircraft with 132 people on board crashed into the mountains in south China on Monday (March 21) while on a flight from the city of Kunming to Guangzhou, China’s Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said.
The jet involved in the accident was a Boeing 737 aircraft and the number of casualties was not immediately known, state broadcaster CCTV said. Rescue was on its way, it added.
There was no word on the cause of the crash of the plane, a 6-year-old 737-800 aircraft, according to Flightradar24.
The CAAC said the aircraft lost contact over the city of Wuzhou. It had 123 passengers and nine crew on board. State media said reported there were 133 people on board.
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