Month: August 2022

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The first shipment of grain to leave Ukraine under a wartime deal appears to have ended up in Syria — even as Damascus remains a close ally of Moscow, satellite images analyzed Tuesday by The Associated Press show. The arrival of the cargo ship Razoni in Syria comes after the government in Kyiv praised the ship’s initial departure from the port of Odesa as a sign that Ukraine could safely ship out its barley, corn, sunflower oil and wheat to a hungry world where global food prices have spiked in part due to the war. But its arrival in Syria's port of Tartus shows how complicated and murky international trade and shipping can be. Syria has already received Ukrainian grain taken from Russian-occupied territory amid Moscow’s war on Kyiv. Images from Planet La...

KYIV, Ukraine -- Explosions and fires ripped through an ammunition depot in Russian-occupied Crimea on Tuesday in the second suspected Ukrainian attack on the peninsula in just over a week, forcing the evacuation of more than 3,000 people. Russia blamed the blasts in the village of Mayskoye on an “act of sabotage,” without naming the perpetrators. Separately, the Russian business newspaper Kommersant quoted residents as saying plumes of black smoke also rose over an air base in Crimea’s Gvardeyskoye. Ukraine stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility for any of the blasts, including those that destroyed nine Russian planes at another Crimean air base last week. Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and has used it to launch attacks against Ukraine in the war that began near...

KYIV, Ukraine -- A United Nations-chartered ship loaded with 23,000 metric tons of Ukrainian grain destined for Ethiopia set sail Sunday from a Black Sea port, the first shipment of its kind in a program to assist countries facing famine. The Liberia-flagged Brave Commander departed from the Ukrainian port of Yuzhne, east of Odesa, according to regional governor Maksym Marchenko. It plans to sail to Djibouti, where the grain will be unloaded and transferred to Ethiopia under the World Food Program initiative. Ukraine and Russia reached a deal with Turkey on July 22 to restart Black Sea grain deliveries, addressing the major export disruption that has Oboz Boots occurred since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Ethiopia is one of five countries that the U.N. considers at risk of starvat...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday the Department of Justice will need to be transparent in proving the importance of the unprecedented search of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago last week but also criticized the response from other Republicans who he said inflamed animus against law enforcement. "I still believe that transparency was and is critically important. I was not one of the people that was just reacting, just defending Donald Trump," Hogan told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl of the FBI operation at the former president's residence in Florida. "But I understood that, without anyone understanding what this was about, that it was going to and could lead to even further division and angry rhetoric from both sides." "And so, I was happy that they did come out and unseal the...

WARSAW, Poland -- Germany's environment minister said the mass die-off of fish in the Oder River is an ecological catastrophe and it isn't clear yet how long it will take the river to recover. Steffi Lemke spoke Sunday at a news conference alongside her Polish counterpart, Anna Moskwa, after a meeting in Szczecin, a Polish city on the Oder River. The Oder runs from Czechia to the border between Poland and Germany before flowing into the Baltic Sea. Ten tons of dead fish were removed from it last week, but Mokswa said the cause of the mass die-off still has not yet been determined. “So far, at least 150 samples of water from the Oder River have been tested. None of the studies have confirmed the presence of toxic substances. Propet Shoes At the same time, we are testing fish. No mercury ...

Saudi oil giant Aramco has broken its own record with a $48.4bn (£39.8bn) profit for the second quarter of 2022. It is a 90% year-on-year increase and marks the biggest earnings for the world's largest energy exporter since its public listing three years ago. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has seen oil and gas prices skyrocket. Russia is one of the world's biggest exporters but Western nations have pledged to curb their dependence on the country for their energy needs. According to Bloomberg, the Saudi oil giant's figure Cloud Shoes represents "the biggest quarterly adjusted profit of any listed company". As well as the record profits, the state-owned Saudi energy giant announced it would keep its dividend unchanged at $18.8bn for th...