Europe – Page 27 – praag.org

Ebola patient in Germany dies

A United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures,” a German hospital said Tuesday, AP reported.

The St. Georg hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name has not been released, died overnight of the infection. It released no further details and did not answer telephone calls.

The man tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 6, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place 41 staff members who had possibly been in contact with him under “close medical observation.”

He arrived in Leipzig for treatment on Oct. 9. The hospital’s chief executive, Dr. Iris Minde, said at the time that there was no risk of infection for other patients, relatives, visitors or the public.

The man was kept in a secure isolation ward specially equipped with negative pressure rooms that are hermetically sealed and can only be accessed through a number of airlocks. All air and fluids are filtered and all equipment is decontaminated after use, Minde said.

The Ebola patient was the third to be flown to Germany for treatment.

The first, a Senegalese man infected with Ebola while working for the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone was brought to a Hamburg hospital in late August for treatment. The man was released Oct. 3 after recovering and returned to his home country, the hospital said.

Another patient, a Ugandan man who worked for an Italian aid group in West Africa, is undergoing treatment in a Frankfurt hospital.

‘Russia inseperable part of European culture and politics’

Russia’s top diplomat said in an interview with Moscow State Institute of International Relations’ MGIMO Journal, that for at least the past 300 years Russia has been an inseparable part of European culture and politics.

“The periods of Russia’s most active participation in European affairs were marked by stability and peace on the continent,” Lavrov added.

He noted that only collective efforts can put up efficient counteraction to the challenges like terrorism, drug industry, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal migration, climate change and many others. “To give up collaboration is not a good option for relations between Russia and the West — neither for ourselves nor for them.”

Russia has been ostracized by Western countries as a most active upholder of independent views, Lavrov said. “Over the past quarter of a century, we have been holding discussions with our North-Atlantic partners on how to build a strategic relationship and set up joint agencies tasked with facilitating this relationship,” Lavrov said. “We passed political declarations and called for forming a unified space in the world, for stability and security.”

“Still our Western partners were pressing forward with their own agenda, ignoring Russia’s interests in many ways, expanding NATO, and generally seeking to push the geopolitical territory under their control right up to Russia’s borders,” he said.

One may clearly get an impression that Russia got under a strike as a most active upholder of independent views in the modern world, as a force considering independent politics to be its natural right. “A line of this kind doesn’t match the claims for exceptionality made by whoever, no doubt,” Lavrov said.

“It’s equally clear, however, that there is no return to the previous model of actions towards Russia that was based on insincerity and filled with double standards,” he said. “It’s impossible to keep adjusting international law to someone’s petty one-sided plans and ruining the authority of the UN Security Council by unscrupulous interpretations of its resolutions.”

“Business should be conducted decently and with respect for international law, in the first place for the UN Charter with all of the norms and principles embedded in it,” Lavrov said.

Meanwhile the Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergey Naryshkin declared at a meeting with Prime Minister of the Chinese State Council Li Keqiang that “Russia regards the developments in Hong Kong as China’s internal affair.”

Naryshkin said he did not agree with interference by any external forces.

Demonstrations involving thousands of students have been supported by Western interests. Hong Kong is a former British colony.

French author wins Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French author Patrick Modiano, the award committee announced Thursday.

The author of “Missing Person” received the prize “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies.”

Modiano was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the second world war ended in Europe in July 1945.

His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his mother during the occupation of Paris and his beginnings have strongly influenced his writing.

Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s La Place de l’Etoile – later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work.

Modiano owes his first big break to a friendship with a friend of his mother, French writer Raymond Queneau, who first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early twenties.

Dutch foreign minister says MH17 victim wore oxygen mask

A passenger of the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was found with an oxygen mask over the mouth when the body was recovered from the crash site, Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans said on Wednesday.

Timmermans’ statement came in response to a comment from TV host Jeroen Pauw that the final moments aboard Flight MH17 were not as suggested by Timmermans in his speech at the U.N. Security Council in the week after the tragedy.

Timmermans had reportedly said during his U.N. speech on July 21 that the passengers on board the Malaysia Airlines plane remained conscious after the aircraft was struck by a suspected missile.

“I’ve been thinking how horrible the final moments of their lives must have been, when they knew the plane was going down,” Timmermans reportedly said at the time. “Did they lock hands with their loved ones, did they hold their children close to their hearts, did they look each other in the eyes, one final time, in a wordless goodbye? We will never know.”

A preliminary report of the investigation by the Dutch Safety Board into the crash stated that the jetliner broke apart in mid-air after being hit by “a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.”

Timmermans’ announcement indicates that some passengers on board Flight MH17 may have remained conscious after the aircraft was reportedly hit by a surface-to-air missile. It contradicts findings that claimed that the people aboard the jetliner, which was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had been killed instantly after the strike of a BUK missile.

Jeroen Pauw accused Timmermans of making an emotional speech about the last moments of those on board the plane to the United Nations shortly afterwards.

The first report on the crash shows there is no single moment when the passengers could have realised that a rocket was approaching the plane, Pauw said.

In his rebuttal, Timmermans said one of the passengers was found with an oxygen mask on. ‘So there was time to do that,’ the minister said.

The plane had 298 people on board, of whom 196 were Dutch. So far 262 of the victims have been identified. The Netherlands is in charge of the investigation.

Timmermans was invited to a Dutch late-night talk show “Pauw,” Dutch News reported.

Experts said earlier that the passenger may not have noticed the attack. “The passengers probably lost consciousness immediately,” said researcher James Vosswinkel to Bloomberg. Joris Melkert, lecturer in aeronautical engineering at Delft University concluded that the device disintegrated in the air.

Relatives of the victims this morning received yet another email confirming that an oxygen mask was found on an Australian victim.

About 228 coffins have been reportedly flown back to the Netherlands for identification of the victims. However, forensic experts have not been able to recover all the bodies from the crash site due to the ongoing conflict in the area.

Nuclear meets showbiz

While engineers from French nuclear company Areva argued with trade unionists, and its representatives all but besieged key Eskom employees, Rosatom flew two South African teenagers to a resort on the coast of the Black Sea, tutored them in musical theatre and then took them on tour.

Nuclear Kids, or just NucKids, is a musical theatre group.

The children of nuclear workers were initially only from Russia’s “closed” nuclear cities, the Soviet-era sites where much of the modern Rosatom’s work is still done, but now include some from a small group of partner countries.

They are auditioned, trained by experts and celebrities, and then put on a full-blown musical.

In 2012, the group included the daughters of employees of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa, including some who worked on the nuclear reactor at Pelindaba. Another South African teenager joined the 2013 group.

Cosatu said in a statement this week: “The federation has a congress resolution emphatically rejecting nuclear power as a solution and therefore objects in principle to its use. It is alarmed at the speed at which this decision has apparently been taken, with no public discussion on such an important and controversial topic, and also the secrecy surrounding it.”

It hinted the nuclear programme could go down the same route as the multibillion-rand arms deal. “In the aftermath of the arms deal controversy, it is more important than ever that there should be total transparency so we can be certain that the Public Finance Management Act is fully adhered to.”

Source: M&G

Germans want investigation of crimes in Ukraine

More than half of the German population thinks that the European Union should investigate crimes committed during the Ukrainian crisis, with most respondents pointing out the crimes against humanity, an ICM poll commissioned by Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency revealed.

According to the poll, 54 percent of Germans say crimes that occurred during the conflict need to be investigated, while 41 percent stated that the union should not do so, with 5 percent remaining uncertain on the issue.

As much as 94 percent of the German respondents believe that it is crimes against humanity that should be investigated first and foremost. Almost everyone aged between 35 and 44, or 99 percent, support this idea.

Among those polled, 90 percent believe that cases of abduction and murder of media workers should also be investigated, with 94 percent of those between 35 and 44 years old, and 93 percent of those aged between 24 and 35 supporting such an investigation.

The reasons behind the Malaysia Airlines aircraft crash in eastern Ukraine in July should be investigated as well, 89 percent said. Such an opinion is common for Germans aged between 55 and 64, with 95 percent of respondents agreeing.

ICM conducted a survey among 3,006 randomly selected respondents from September 17 to 28 in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

In mid-April, the Ukrainian government launched a military operation in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to suppress independence supporters of the eastern regions, leading to thousands of casualties among civilians.

On September 23, several mass graves with more than 400 bodies of civilians and independence supporters were found near the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. Russia’s Investigative Committee has launched a criminal case against several Ukraine’s officials accusing them of genocide of the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine.

Happy birthday President Putin!

Russian President Vladimir Putin will celebrate his birthday on October 7 in the Siberian taiga, a vast forested area in the northern regions of Russia covering hundreds of thousands of square miles, Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday.

“Putin has booked a holiday for tomorrow. Tonight he will fly over to Siberia, to the Siberian taiga, 300-400 kilometers away from the nearest town or village, where he will relax on his birthday,” Peskov said.

Peskov added that no “official meetings” were planned for Russian leader’s birthday.

“Most likely, everyone will send their best wishes to the President tomorrow. Although I cannot tell you who he will be with, because I do not know,” Peskov said.

“Everyone who can, will be able to reach him by phone. Also everyone who wants to will be able to send telegrams, just like they do every year. We receive a huge number of letters, best wishes, telegrams, etc.,” Peskov commented.

When journalists asked the Presidential spokesman, why Putin decided to take time-off on his birthday for the first time, Peskov said that “everything is evolving… this year he decided to spend it this way.”

“You know that in the past his birthdays were busy with official meetings, you know this year his timetable is not simply tight, but extremely tight, sometimes he gets close to a 24-hour-long busy schedule with a very large area to travel,” Peskov explained.

Vladimir Putin was born on October 7, 1952 in Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). On Tuesday, the Russian leader will celebrate his 62nd birthday.

Jewish schools in Amsterdam guarded

Several Jewish schools in Amsterdam’s Buitenveldert district are being guarded by military police officers and have been for the past month, the Parool said on Thursday.

Four police officers in full uniform are on duty at the entrance of the orthodox Cheider school, while Maimonides and Rosj Pina have similar protection, the paper says. The street also has a mobile police post which has fitted with cameras.

The protection is at the instigation of the mayor, council officials and justice ministry, the paper says.

‘We do not want to sow panic and there have not been any concrete threats,’ one officer told the paper. ‘The guards are a consequence of developments in society. They are part of the policy of discouragement.

Source: Dutch News

The flying car has landed

Organisers of Vienna’s Pioneers Festival, an annual conference for future technology and digital entrepreneurship, announced on Thursday that they would unveil the prototype of “the world’s most advanced flying car” on 29 October.

An earlier prototype of the Flying Roadster by Slovakian company AeroMobil reportedly took its first test flight in October last year. The latest version will be tested a day before its premiere, on 28 October.

Company co-founder Juraj Vaculik said that AeroMobil had sped up the prototyping process after having seen “enthusiastic reactions of the global engineering and design community”.

Weighing 450 kg, with carbon-fibre wings that fold behind the cabin and a flight top speed of 124mph, the two-seater promises to be more of a flying sports car than a flying family car.

“We want to make personal transportation exciting, more efficient and sustainable. With ever more cars on the roads and ever more crowded airports, travelling is no longer what it used to be,” said AeroMobil’s CTO Stefan Klein, who has been working on developing a flying car for two decades.

In June, Terrafugia announced that it was two years away from finishing its first “roadable aircraft” , but now it looks like the US company will be beaten to the prize.

Spain moves to block Catalonia independence

Spain’s Constitutional Court on Monday suspended an independence referendum called by Catalonia for November 9, although leaders of the rich northeastern region vowed to press ahead anyway with preparations for the vote.

The unanimous and expected decision by the court’s 12 judges came just hours after Spain’s central government asked it to declare the independence referendum illegal on the grounds that it breaches the country’s constitution.

The court said in a statement that it had accepted the appeal and had suspended the referendum while it considers the central government’s arguments. The court had up to five months to give its ruling although it can request an extension.

The head of the regional government of Catalonia, Artur Mas, signed a decree on Saturday calling for the referendum.

Since then a luminous clock on Barcelona’s historic Sant Jaume square has been ticking down the seconds to November 9 and television and radio stations in the region have aired ads informing the public of the vote.

Conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he “deeply” regretted Mas’s move, saying it “divides Catalans, alienates them from Europe and the rest of Spain and seriously harms their welfare”.

Buoyed by mass street demonstrations, Mas has pushed ahead for a vote in defiance of Rajoy’s warnings.

“You cannot use the law to prevent people indefinitely from stating their opinion,” Mas said in a television interview on Sunday in anticipation of Monday’s appeal.

“Voting on November is the best thing for everyone because it will allow us and also the Spanish government to know what the Catalan people’s opinion is.”

The main opposition Socialist Party is calling for a constitutional reform instead of a vote to answer Catalan demands for greater autonomy.

The Socialists’ leader Pedro Sanchez on Monday said the referendum plan “deeply damages Spanish democracy”.

Fitch Ratings has chimed in also by placing the Autonomous Community of Catalonia’s (Catalonia) and Institut Catala de Finances’ (ICF) Long-term foreign and local currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDR) of ‘BBB-‘ on Rating Watch Negative (RWN).

Their Short-term foreign currency IDRs of ‘F3’ have also been placed on RWN. Catalonia’s EMTN programme and bond issues, rated ‘BBB-‘, were also placed on RWN.

The last scheduled review date for Fitch’s ratings of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia was on 25 July 2014 and the next review date for 2015 has not yet been set.

Marine Le Pen’s party takes Senate seats

The National Front won its first ever seats in France’s upper house of parliament on Sunday, as President Francois Hollande’s Socialist party lost its Senate majority.

The left still controls the lower house, which is the dominant legislative body in France, but Sunday’s ballot underlined the unpopularity of the president and the continued rise of the anti-immigration, anti-euro National Front.

The party, led by Marine Le Pen, took two seats in the august Senate, following on from its surprise victory in European parliamentary elections in May and its strong showing in municipal elections in March.

“These results are beyond what we hoped for,” said Le Pen. “Each day that passes, our ideas are increasingly being adopted by the French people… We have great potential.”

Half of the Senate’s 348 seats were up for grabs on Sunday, with only some 158,000 people, the vast majority local councillors, able to vote.

Early results showed that the main opposition party, the UMP, and the center-right UDI party took at least 20 seats from the left, which had a Senate majority of just six heading into the election. Final results were due later on Sunday.

“There is a complete rejection of Socialist policies,” UMP senator Roger Karoutchi told BFM TV.

Hollande’s popularity fell to a record low this month, with only 13 percent of those surveyed saying they were satisfied with the performance of president, who has struggled to revive the stagnant economy.

The National Front hopes to score an upset in the 2017 presidential election.

“There is only one door left for us to push and it is that of the Elysee,” said newly-elected National Front senator Stephane Ravier, referring to the French presidency.

Source: Reuters

Inspector Clouseau? French bungle jihadist arrest

The French government struggled to explain its bungling of the arrest of three men suspected of having fought for the Islamic State in Syria and deported by Turkey, after police waited for them at the wrong airport.

France joined the US in airstrikes in Iraq earlier. “This affair didn’t go as it should have,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday. “The Interior Minister has spoken about it, and will have the chance to do so again.”

Meanwhile a 55-year-old French mountain guide became the first victim of the threatened “revenge” executions following western air attacks on Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq.

A video placed online by an Algerian jihadist group linked to Isil appeared to show the beheading of Hervé Gourdel, who was kidnapped earlier this week in a mountainous region of Algeria.

French officials said they believed the video to be authentic but could not immediately confirm Mr Gourdel’s death.

In the bungled arrest, the men turned themselves in at a gendarme station in southern France, BFM TV reported.

“We went through customs, we showed our passports, and there was no one to meet us,” one of the three men, who gave his name as Imad, told Europe1 radio. “We were quite surprised,” he said, adding that they planned to turn themselves in.

They rang the bell at the station in the town of Caylar and were told to wait outside because there was no one there. A police car came 20 minutes later to pick them up and take them to a nearby police station, according to BFM.

The missteps, which Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called a “major foul-up,” led to accusations of incompetence from the opposition and forced Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to promise an investigation.

After being arrested in Turkey last month, the three men were put on a flight to Orly airport in Paris this week. The pilot of that plane refused to fly with them on board, according to a statement from the French Interior Ministry. Turkish police then placed them on a flight to Marseille without informing their French counterparts of the change until after their arrival in France, the ministry said.

A computerized passport system at Marseille airport that should have alerted police about the suspects’ arrival was broken, Le Drian said on France Info radio on Wednesday.

“It’s a complete mess but a large part of it is due to a lack of good cooperation with the Turkish authorities,” he said. Cazeneuve told reporters he’ll be speaking today to his Turkish counterpart to improve cooperation.

About 580 French have fought or are fighting in Syria, and 36 died there, Valls said. He said 189 have returned, of which 114 have been arrested, 78 charged, and 53 sent to jail.

Toy tiger cub joins space ride

Beloved by generations of Russian children, Goodnight Little Ones is the longest-running children’s show in the world and has featured virtually the same evening format since it started in 1964.

A new addition to the show will be Mur to join Khryusha, a piglet (introduced in 1970), Stepashka, a hare (introduced the same year), Philya, a dog, introduced in 1968, Karkusha, a crow, introduced in 1982, and Mishutka, a bear, introduced in 2002.

Mur is a tiger cub.

‘The ideas were discussed with children and their parents, and the opinion of psychologists was asked. It is important that the little TV viewers should take a fancy to the new personage because it is coming to the TV show for good.’

He explained: ‘The idea to take an Amur tiger cub ‘on the staff’ came into our mind after an interview with President Putin, who told of his active support of several ecological programmes to protect rare animal species on the verge of extinction.

He said that these animals are our national treasure and that they need protection.

He admitted that the tiger cub proposal initially ‘sounded a bit surprising’ but ‘we looked carefully at this idea, we realized it was a bingo!’

A new Soyuz crew will take the plushy toy tiger cub to the International Space Station, ISS, as part of an action to call public attention to rare species.

The action has been organized by the Russian Space Agency Roskosmos and two non-profit organizations – the Amur Tiger and the Far Eastern Leopards centers.

A new ISS crew whose composition was approved by a state commission earlier on Wednesday is to take off from Baikonur on September 26. For the first time in ten years, the crew will comprise a woman – Elena Serova. The ISS expedition will last for 168 days.

“On the eve of the International Tiger Day, Roskosmos has decided to support an environmental action designed to call public attention to rare species. The Amur tiger cub named Mur and a far eastern leopard will fly to the International Space Station,” Yuri Lonchakov, the head of the space training center, said.

In addition to that, the crew, comprising Alexander Samokutayev, Elena Serova and Barry Wilmore, will take a flask with water taken from the River Kazanka in Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, in honor of the 16th FINA World Championship in aquatics to be hosted by Kazan in 2015.

The crew of Maxim Surayev which the new ISS expedition in going to replace will return the flask with water back to Earth. The ‘space’ water will later be handed over to a museum.

International investigation called after mass graves found in Ukraine

The Russian Foreign Ministry, legislators and members of non-governmental and human rights organizations have demanded an international investigation into mass graves in Ukraine.

Russia’s Public Chamber has adopted a statement with a call to the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to investigate mass graves in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region.

The graves were found on Ukrainian National Guard positions in eastern Ukraine. Forensic experts examined one of them to arrive at the conclusion that the victims had been shot in the head at a point-blank range. Four bodies have been examined so far.

“The discovered graves are evidence of outrageous war crimes and require investigation under international control,” runs the statement read out by the Civic Chamber’s deputy secretary Sergey Ordzhonikidze.

“The Public Chamber is asking the United Nations, the OSCE and other agencies to create an independent panel of inquiry to investigate the affair,” Ordzhonikidze said, adding that “a military tribunal for war crimes in Ukraine must be the end goal.”

On September 23 there were reports local militias discovered several mass graves near the Kommunar coalmine near Donetsk. Earlier the territory was under the control of the Ukrainian army and the National Guard’s battalion Aidar.

The whole territory will be combed. Militias have already found several other graves, which are kept intact for the time being.