Europe

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland deployed hundreds of troops at its border with Belarus to support border guards, the Polish defense minister said on Wednesday, amid a surge of migrants seeking to enter the country.

Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said that more than 900 Polish troops are involved in the operation. It’s believed most of the migrants trying to cross are from Iraq.

Late Tuesday, a Polish deputy interior minister tweeted that the border with Belarus is sealed and that the soldiers have already been there for a week.

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union ministers are holding emergency talks on Wednesday in response to allegations that Belarus is deliberately sending migrants to Lithuania as part of a “hybrid warfare” campaign to destabilize the Baltic EU member country.

The ministers are holding a videoconference in a so-called “integrated political crisis response” format. Such meetings are usually called to organize a response to natural disasters or terror attacks. Foreign policy, border, asylum and law enforcement officials are taking part.

MOSCOW, August 17. / TASS /: Moscow improved its position in the international Tech Cities of the Future rating of the fDi Intelligence analytical agency, moving up four lines and taking 14th place among 76 cities in Europe, according to the information made avaialble on the official web site of the mayor and the city administration on Tuesday.

MOSCOW, August 17. /TASS/: Rescue work is currently underway at the scene of the crash site in the Moscow Region, where Russia’s latest Ilyushin Il-112V military transport plane with three crew members on board crash landed earlier in the day, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) told TASS.

KALININGRAD, August 17. /TASS/: Western countries will certainly make attempts to undermine the Nord Stream 2 project, but they are all doomed to failure, since it has already been implemented, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday. He said this during a meeting with professors and students of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad.

"I am convinced that all attempts to undermine it, challenge it, all attempts to surround its completion with some conditions, they are doomed to failure. Although there will be such attempts," he said.

BERLIN, Aug 17 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A first German military plane to land in Kabul since the Taliban takeover evacuated only seven people, the government said on Tuesday, due to chaos at the Afghan capital’s airport.

Germany, which had the second-largest military contingent in Afghanistan after the United States, wants to airlift thousands of German-Afghan dual nationals as well as rights activists, lawyers and people who worked with foreign forces.

MOSCOW, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader who oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 after Moscow's failed decade-long campaign there, said on Tuesday that NATO's own deployment to the country had been doomed from the start.

Gorbachev, 90, regarded the Soviet presence in Afghanistan as a political mistake that was sapping precious resources at a time when the Soviet Union was living through what turned out to be the twilight of its own existence.

GENEVA, Aug 17 (Reuters) - The Taliban have assured the United Nations it can pursue humanitarian work in drought-hit Afghanistan, where the world body will insist on women's rights and access to all civilians, the top U.N. aid official in the country said on Tuesday.

In an interview with Reuters, Ramiz Alakbarov, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan, urged Western donors to keep funding its work in a country where 18.5 million people, nearly half the population, depend on life-saving assistance.

BERLIN, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Images of throngs trying to flee Kabul are shameful for Western nations, Germany's president said on Tuesday, as desperate people clamoured at the airport after the Taliban takeover.

"We are experiencing a human tragedy for which we share responsibility," said President Frank-Walter Steinmeier after the Western-backed government in Kabul collapsed and its foreign-trained security forces melted away. 

17 Aug 2021; MEMO: Forensic Architecture is pulling an exhibition it was holding at the University of Manchester-run Whitworth Art Gallery after a statement declaring support for the Palestinian people was removed by the venue.