Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Six In The Morning Tuesday 6 July 2021

 




Afghan anger over US’s sudden, silent Bagram departure


Military officials say troops turned off power and slipped away without notifying new commander

 and agencies

US forces shut off the Bagram airfield’s electricity supply and did not notify the base’s senior Afghan officer when they departed on Friday, prompting puzzlement and anger among Afghan soldiers there.

The airfield’s new commander, Gen Mir Asadullah Kohistani, only discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, he said on Monday.

The fresh details of the American forces’ stealthy nighttime withdrawal from the sprawling base near Kabul, where they had spent two decades, underlined the uneasiness with which US forces sometimes regarded their Afghan partners.



Man charged in Germany with spying for China

Suspect is a political scientist who worked at a think tank, prosecutor’s office says

Matt Mathers@MattEm90


A man suspected of spying for China's secret service for nearly a decade has been arrested and indicted in Germany, authorities have said.

The prosecutor's office said on Tuesday the man is a political scientist who had been working at a Munich-based think thank.

Under German media laws, he has been identified only as Klaus L. and is understood to have been employed by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the German public broadcaster ARD said.

According to the prosecutor's office, Chinese security agencies recruited Klaus S. while he was on a lecturing trip to Shanghai in 2010 - some 10 years after joining the think tank.


Nigerian kidnappings reach crisis point

Abductions have become more indiscriminate across northern Nigeria as local criminal gangs view victims as a source of income, and the villagers — who have been ignored by the government — as disposable.


Gunmen kidnapped 140 students from a boarding school in northwestern Nigeria on Monday. It was the latest in a wave of mass abductions targeting schoolchildren in Africa's most populous nation. 

The assailants opened fire and overpowered security guards after storming the Bethel Baptist High School in Kaduna state before abducting most of the 165 pupils boarding there overnight.

'Government failure'

"The kidnappers took away 140 students, only 25 students escaped," teacher Emmanuel Paul said.

"We still have no idea where the students were taken." 

Amid champagne dispute, Russian winemaker doubts new law will boost local sales

As controversy bubbles over a new Russian law requiring bottles of French champagne and other foreign fizz to have a reference to “sparkling wine” on the bottle, Russian winemaker Abrau-Durso said Tuesday that the law would do little to spur on sales of Russia’s “shampanskoye”.

Champagne makers are used to having the prestigious name usurped by rival producers here and there, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has upped the ante by signing a law reserving the appellation for Russian sparkling wine, which has prompted a call for a bubbly blockade.

Pavel Titov, the president of Abrau-Durso and co-owner with his father, told Reuters that he did not believe the new law would change the level of competition in Russia’s market.

Egypt angry as it says Ethiopia has resumed filling GERD


Egypt says unilateral move violates international laws and norms as tensions continue to rise over huge dam built on Nile’s main tributary.


Egypt has said it received an official notice from Ethiopia that it had started the next phase of filling a controversial huge dam on the Nile River’s main tributary, raising tensions days before an upcoming meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the issue.

In a statement late on Monday, the Egyptian irrigation ministry expressed its “firm rejection of this unilateral measure” and said the move was “a violation of international laws and norms that regulate projects built on the shared basins of international rivers”.

An American lawyer went on a lunch date in Moscow. Now he's languishing in a jail cell in Belarus

Updated 0404 GMT (1204 HKT) July 6, 2021


When Youras Ziankovich, a lawyer with American citizenship, returned to his Moscow hotel after a lunch date with a friend in April, he found four men waiting for him in the street.

Ziankovich's wife, Alena Dzenisavets, says that according to the manager of the Nordic Rooms hotel, the men -- all in plain clothes -- put a hood over his head and bundled him into a car outside the hotel in the Moscow suburb of Ostankino.

    She told CNN that Youras was then spirited across the Russian border in a three-vehicle convoy and driven more than 700 kilometers (435 miles) to the Belarusian capital, Minsk.
     





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