1UA TV

British tour operator Thomas Cook collapsed after failing to secure rescue funding, and travel bookings for its more than 600,000 global vacationers were canceled early Monday.The British government said the return of the firm’s 150,000 British customers now abroad would be its largest repatriation in peacetime history. The Civil Aviation Authority said Thomas Cook has ceased trading, its four airlines will be grounded, and its 21,000 employees in 16 countries, including 9,000 in the UK, will be left unemployed.The debt-laden company had said Friday it was seeking 200 million pounds ($250 million) to avoid going bust, was in talks with shareholders and creditors to stave off failure. The 178-year-old firm also operated around 600 UK stores.CAA said it had arranged an aircraft fleet for the British repatriation effort lasting two weeks beginning Monday.”Due to the significant scale of the situation, some disruption is inevitable, but the Civil Aviation Authority will endeavor to get people home as close as possible to their planned dates,” it said in a statement.Most of Thomas Cook’s British customers are protected by the government-run travel insurance program, which makes sure vacationers can get home if a British-based tour operator goes under while they are abroad. Thomas Cook, which began in 1841 with a one-day train excursion in England and now operates in 16 countries, has been struggling over the past few years. It only recently raised 900 million pounds ($1.12 billion), including from leading Chinese shareholder Fosun.In May, the company reported a debt burden of 1.25 billion pounds and cautioned that political uncertainty related to Britain’s departure from the European Union had hurt demand for summer holiday travel. Heat waves over the past couple of summers in Europe have also led many people to stay at home, while higher fuel and hotel costs have weighed on the travel business.The company’s troubles were already affecting those traveling under the Thomas Cook banner.A British vacationer told BBC radio on Sunday that the Les Orangers beach resort in the Tunisian town of Hammamet, near Tunis, demanded that guests who were about to leave pay extra money for fear it wouldn’t be paid what it is owed by Thomas Cook.Ryan Farmer, of Leicestershire, said many tourists refused the demand, since they had already paid Thomas Cook, so security guards shut the hotel’s gates and “were not allowing anyone to leave.”It was like “being held hostage,” said Farmer, who is due to leave Tuesday. He said he would also refuse to pay if the hotel asked him.The Associated Press called the hotel, as well as the British Embassy in Tunis, but no officials or managers were available for comment.
…

World leaders are gathering Monday in New York for a United Nations summit on climate change as scientists warn much more ambitious action must be taken to meet targets to mitigate the effects.Some 60 presidents and prime ministers are due to address the day-long event on topics including shifting away from coal toward renewable energy sources, preventing and responding to disasters, and climate finance.U.S. President Donald Trump will not be among those attending the summit.  He is spending Monday attending a meeting about the persecution of religious minorities, particularly Christians, before holding separate talks with leaders from Pakistan, Poland, New Zealand, Singapore, Egypt and South Korea.U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has sought to highlight the importance of the climate summit and challenged leaders to “come with concrete plans” and not just “beautiful speeches.”Ahead of Monday’s event, the U.N. released a report compiled by the World Meteorological Organization showing there has been an acceleration in carbon pollution, sea-level rise, warming global temperatures, and shrinking ice sheets.The report says the average global temperature for the period of 2015 through the end of 2019 is on pace to be the “warmest of any equivalent period on record” at 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels.The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which has been ratified by 186 nations, calls for actions to prevent global temperatures from surpassing 2 degrees, and ideally remain within 1.5 degrees by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  One of the world’s biggest emitters – the United States – announced under President Trump that it would leave the pact. The U.S. decision has not stopped climate action at the state, local and private sector levels. The report warns that in order to achieve the 2 degree target, “the level of ambition needs to be tripled.”Other global issues such as tensions between the United States and Iran; conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Kashmir; rising in equality and intolerance all figure to be themes as the U.N. General Assembly session begins Tuesday.
…

The British oil tanker seized by Iran in July will soon be released, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Sunday.The Stena Impero and its crew were seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the Strait of Hormuz for alleged maritime violations just weeks after British forces seized an Iranian oil tanker off the coast of Gibraltar.Britain accused Iran of trying to sell oil in violation of international sanctions against Tehran. Gibraltar released that tanker last month.The head of the Swedish company that owns the Stena Impero told Swedish public broadcaster SVT that the tanker may be released within hours.“We have received information now this morning that it seems like they will release the ship Stena Impero within a few hours. So we understand that the political decision to release the ship has been taken.” Erik Hanell said.The head of the Ports and Maritime Organization of Iran in Hormozgan Province, Allahmorad Afifipour, told Fars that the the process of allowing the tanker to move into international waters has begun but that a legal case against the ship is still pending.He did not release any other information about the tanker. 
…

U.S. President Donald Trump admitted talking about corruption with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but stopped short of saying they talked about investigating 2020 leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.A Wall Street Journal report says Trump urged Zelenskiy eight times to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, and whether a Ukrainian gas company tried to win favors by hiring Hunter while Joe Biden was U.S. vice president.The reports say Trump was looking to get Zelenskiy to collaborate with Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, to investigate the Bidens.Trump telephoned Zelenskiy in July, two months after he took power in Ukraine.Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden puts on a Beau Biden Foundation hat while speaking at the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry, in Des Moines, Iowa, Sept. 21, 2019.”The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption…and largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump said Sunday.He said the White House will “make a determination” whether to release a transcript or details of the telephone call.Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko denies Trump pressured Zelenskiy, saying Ukraine would not take sides in U.S. politics.Joe Biden is seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, hoping to derail Trump’s re-election bid.Trump critics, including a number of Democratic lawmakers, say if Trump urged Zelenskiy to investigate Biden to discredit the former vice president, that would be a direct appeal to a foreign government to interfere in a presidential election — a potentially impeachable offense. Democrats also want to know if Trump promised Zelenskiy anything in return for an investigation.Trump had frozen $250 million in military aid to Ukraine. Congress voted to release those funds last month.An angry Biden said “there is truly no bottom to President Trump’s willingness to abuse his power and abase our country.” Referring to next year’s election, Trump knows “I’ll beat him like a drum” Biden said.”I’m not looking to hurt him with respect to his son. Joe’s got enough problems,” Trump said Sunday without specifying what those problems are.The newest controversy surrounding Trump began last week when reports emerged that an unidentified whistleblower in the national intelligence community became alarmed about a series of actions inside the Trump administration. They include what is now known to be Trump’s telephone call with Zelenskiy.FILE – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, left, gestures next to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, during a bilateral meeting in Warsaw, Poland, Sunday, Sept. 1, 2019.This person contacted the intelligence inspector general, who called the complaint “serious” and “urgent.”But acting National Intelligence director Joseph Maguire has refused to turn over the inspector’s report to Congress, which the law requires him to do.Trump says he does not know who the whistleblower is, but called that person “partisan” and committing “just another political hack job.”But congressional Democrats want to know why the inspector general’s report is being kept from them if Trump did not do anything wrong and want to know who Maguire and the Justice Department may be trying to protect.Trump is also accusing Democrats and the media of avoiding the reports about Joe and Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian ties.”The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat (sic) Party, want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money, so they fabricate…a story about me.”As vice president under Barack Obama, Joe Biden went to Ukraine in 2016 and threatened to withhold billions of dollars in U.S. loan guarantees unless the government cracked down on corruption. Biden also demanded that Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin be fired.Shokin had previously investigated the gas company on which Hunter Biden served on the board. But the probe had been inactive for a year before Joe Biden’s visit. Hunter Biden has said he was not the target of any investigation and no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens has surfaced.Wayne Lee contributed to this report.
…

Sigmund Jaehn, who became the first German in space at the height of the Cold War during the 1970s and was promoted as a hero by communist authorities in East Germany, has died. He was 82.The German Aerospace Center said Sunday on its website that Jaehn died Saturday. The center did not give the cause of death. German news agency dpa said he died at his home in Strausberg, outside of Berlin.Astrophysicist Pascale Ehrenfreund, who chairs the German Aerospace Center’s executive board, said the center was deeply saddened by Jaehn’s death and that German aerospace had lost a “globally respected cosmonaut, scientist and engineer.”“The first German in space always saw himself as a bridge builder between East and West and for a peaceful use of space” Ehrenfreund said.Jaehn flew to the Soviet space station Salyut 6 on Aug. 26, 1978 and spent almost eight days in space. Upon his return, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. The East German government showcased his achievement as evidence of the communist state’s superiority over capitalist West Germany.While Jaehn was a household name for a generation of East Germans, he remained largely unknown in West Germany. German Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz described Jaehn last year on the 40th anniversary of his space flight as “an impressive man and a rather quiet hero.”“It is high time for his courage and his work to be recognized not just in the east but in all of Germany,” Scholz said.Jaehn was born Feb. 13, 1937, in Morgenroethe-Rautenkranz, a village near the Czech border. After he finished school, he trained as a printer before joining the East German air force in 1955. He became an officer and a fighter pilot with the National People’s Army in the late 1950s.Between 1966 and 1970, he studied at the Gagarin Military Air Academy in Monino, near Moscow. After returning to East Germany, he worked in the air force administration, where he was in charge of pilot education and flight safety.After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany’s reunification a year later, Jaehn became an adviser to the German Aerospace Center and the European Space Agency. He helped prepare future astronauts for space missions until his retirement in 2002.Recalling his seven days, 20 hours and 49 minutes in space, during which he orbited the Earth 124 times, Jaehn said last year that he vividly remembered the many sunrises he saw during his mission.“It’s not only one; every 1½ hours you can see the sun rise. It’s very fast. One can see exactly how the sun goes up and down and shows its many colors,” Jaehn told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.Jaehn said that unlike many people, he had no problems getting used to zero gravity. “I didn’t even get sick. I thought it was very pleasant,” he said.He said if he had grown up in West Germany, he probably would never have made it into space.“I didn’t go to university right away. … I was the best student, but my father wanted me to become a printer. When you’re 14, you listen to your parents,” he remembered.“I caught up on everything later, got my university entrance degree, went to university,” he added. “But in the West, they still sometimes like to say: This Jaehn, he only was a simple worker.”Jaehn was married and had two daughters.
…

Dozens of people dressed in black went on a “funeral march” up a steep Swiss mountainside on Sunday to mark the disappearance of an Alpine glacier amid growing global alarm over climate change.The Pizol “has lost so much substance that from a scientific perspective it is no longer a glacier,” Alessandra Degiacomi, of the Swiss Association for Climate Protection, told AFP ahead of the event.Sunday’s climb took place as the U.N. gathered youth activists and world leaders in New York to mull the action needed to curb global warming.The solemn two-hour “funeral march” led up the side of Pizol mountain in northeastern Switzerland to the foot of the steep and rapidly melting ice formation, situated at an altitude of around 2,700 meters (8,850 feet) near the Liechtenstein and Austrian borders.Upon arrival, a chaplain and several scientists were to give sombre speeches in remembrance of the glacier, accompanied by the mournful tones of  alphorns — a 3.6-metre (12-foot), pipe-shaped wooden instrument.A wreath will be laid for the Pizol glacier, which has been one of the most studied glaciers in the Alps.The move comes after Iceland made global headlines last month with a large ceremony and the laying of a bronze plaque to commemorate Okjokull, the island’s first glacier lost to climate change.500 glaciers goneBut unlike Iceland, Sunday’s ceremony does not mark the first disappearance of a glacier from the Swiss Alps.”Since 1850, we estimate that more than 500 Swiss glaciers have completely disappeared, including 50 that were named,” Swiss glaciologist and march participant Matthias Huss told AFP before the event.Pizol may not be the first glacier to vanish in Switzerland, but “you could say it is the first to disappear that has been very thoroughly studied,” Huss of the ETH technical university in Zurich said.The logs kept since scientists began tracking the glacier in 1893 paint a bleak picture of recent rapid changes to the climate.Pizol has lost 80-90 percent of its volume just since 2006, leaving behind a mere 26,000 square meters (280,000 square feet) of ice, or “less than four football fields,” Huss said.Pizol, which sits at a relatively low altitude, was never very big.According to Glacier Monitoring Switzerland, or GLAMOS, it, like nearly 80 percent of Swiss glaciers, has been considered a so-called glacieret.Greenhouse gas referendumIt has figured among some 4,000 glaciers — vast, ancient reserves of ice — dotted throughout the Alps, providing seasonal water to millions and forming some of Europe’s most stunning landscapes.But Huss and other ETH scientists recently cautioned more than 90 percent of the Alpine glaciers could disappear by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in.Regardless of what actions humans take now, the Alps will lose at least half of their ice mass by 2100, according to their study, published in April.And in a subsequent study published earlier this month, the researchers indicated that the Alps’ largest glacier, the mighty Aletsch, could completely disappear over the next eight decades.Sunday’s “funeral” for Pizol provides an occasion to point out that climate change is not only melting glaciers but is endangering “our means of subsistence”, according to the organizing groups, including Greenpeace.It is threatening “human civilisation as we know it in Switzerland and around the world,” they warn on the event webpage.With this in mind, the Swiss Association for Climate Protection recently presented the 100,000 signatures needed to launch a popular initiative, to be put to a referendum, demanding that Switzerland reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.The date for the vote has yet to be set, but the Swiss government in August said it supported the objective.   
…

More than 600,000 vacationers who booked through tour operator Thomas Cook were on edge Sunday, wondering if they will be able to get home, as one of the world’s oldest and biggest travel companies teetered on the edge of collapse.
 
The debt-laden company, which confirmed Friday it was seeking 200 million pounds ($250 million) in funding to avoid going bust, was in talks with shareholders and creditors to stave off failure.
 
A collapse could leave around 150,000 travelers from Britain stranded, along with hundreds of thousands from other countries. The company has sought to reassure customers that flights were continuing to operate as normal.
 
Most of Thomas Cook’s British customers are protected by the government-run travel insurance program, which makes sure vacationers can get home if a British-based tour operator goes under while they are abroad.
 
Thomas Cook’s financial difficulties also raised questions about the jobs of the 22,000 people employed by the company around the world, including 9,000 in Britain.
 
Unions and Britain’s opposition Labour Party urged the government to intervene financially to save jobs if the company fails to raise the necessary financing from the private sector.
 
If the company collapsed, Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority would probably be ordered by the government to launch a major operation to fly stranded vacationers home, much as it did when Monarch Airlines went bust nearly two years ago.
 
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab gave assurances that British vacationers will not be left stranded.
 
 “I don’t want to give all the details of it because it depends on the nature of how people are out there,” he told the BBC. “But I can reassure people that, in the worst-case scenario, the contingency planning is there to avoid people being stranded.”
 
Rebecca Long Bailey, Labour’s business spokesperson, said the government “faces a simple choice between a 200 million-pound government cash injection to save the company now versus a 600 million-pound bill to repatriate U.K. holidaymakers.”
 
Thomas Cook, which began in 1841 with a one-day train excursion in England and now operates in 16 countries, has been struggling over the past few years. It only recently raised 900 million pounds ($1.12 billion), including from leading Chinese shareholder Fosun.
 
In May, the company reported a debt burden of 1.25 billion pounds and cautioned that political uncertainty related to Britain’s departure from the European Union had hurt demand for summer holiday travel. Heat waves over the past couple of summers in Europe have also led many people to stay at home, while higher fuel and hotel costs have weighed on the travel business.
 
The company’s troubles appear to be already affecting those traveling under the Thomas Cook banner.
 
A British vacationer told BBC radio on Sunday that the Les Orangers beach resort in the Tunisian town of Hammamet, near Tunis, demanded that guests who were about to leave pay extra money for fear it wouldn’t be paid what it is owed by Thomas Cook.
 
Ryan Farmer, of Leicestershire, said many tourists refused the demand, since they had already paid Thomas Cook, so security guards shut the hotel’s gates and “were not allowing anyone to leave.”
 
It was like “being held hostage,” said Farmer, who is due to leave Tuesday. He said he would also refuse to pay if the hotel asked him.
 
 The Associated Press called the hotel, as well as the British Embassy in Tunis, but no officials or managers were available for comment.  
…

Jean-Claude Juncker, chief of the European Union’s executive arm, says border controls will be placed on the Irish border if Britain leaves the bloc without a deal.Juncker told Sky News on Sunday the EU has to “make sure that the interests of the European Union and of the internal market will be preserved.”
 
How to preserve a frictionless border between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, is the thorniest issue in the Brexit discussions.
 
Juncker noted that without a border after a no-deal Brexit, an animal entering Northern Ireland could then enter the EU via Ireland without any controls. He says “this will not happen. We have to preserve the health and the safety of our citizens.”
Britain is scheduled to leave the EU on Oct. 31.
   
…

Greek police said Saturday they have arrested a suspect in the 1985 hijacking of a flight from Athens that became a multiday ordeal and included the slaying of an American.Police said a 65-year-old suspect in the hijacking was arrested Thursday on the island of Mykonos in response to a warrant from Germany.Lt. Col. Theodoros Chronopoulos, a police spokesman, told The Associated Press that the hijacking case involved TWA Flight 847. The flight was commandeered by hijackers shortly after taking off from Athens on June 14, 1985. It originated in Cairo and had San Diego as a final destination, with stops scheduled in Athens, Rome, Boston and Los Angeles.FILE – While holding carnations he carried off the plane, former hostage Victor Amburgy hugs an unidentified girl upon arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, July 2, 1985. Thirty former hostages from TWA flight 847 were greeted by President Reagan.The hijackers shot and killed U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, 23, after beating him unconscious. They released the other 146 passengers and crew members on the plane during an ordeal that included stops in Beirut and Algiers. The last hostage was freed after 17 days.Suspect from LebanonThe suspect was in custody Saturday on the Greek island of Syros but was set to be transferred to the Korydallos high security prison in Athens for extradition proceedings, a police spokeswoman told The Associated Press. She said the suspect was a Lebanese citizen. The spokeswoman spoke on condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing.Police refused to release the suspect’s name.In Beirut, the Foreign Ministry said the man detained in Greece is a Lebanese journalist called Mohammed Saleh, and that a Lebanese embassy official planned to try to visit him Sunday.However, several Greek media outlets identified the detainee as Mohammed Ali Hammadi, who was arrested in Frankfurt in 1987 and convicted in Germany for the plane hijacking and Stethem’s slaying. Hammadi, an alleged Hezbollah member, was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled in 2005 and returned to Lebanon.Germany had resisted pressure to extradite him to the United States after Hezbollah abducted two German citizens in Beirut and threatened to kill them.Hammadi, along with fellow hijacker Hasan Izz-Al-Din and accomplice Ali Atwa, remains on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists. The FBI offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to each man’s capture.News agency dpa reported Saturday that Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on news reports about the case.
 
…

U.S. President Donald Trump is denying he said anything “wrong” in a telephone conversation with the new president of Ukraine during which Trump allegedly urged him to investigate the son of former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.Democrats meanwhile stepped up their criticism of the president for what they characterized as an attempt to engage a foreign leader in a scheme to damage the candidacy of Trump’s leading rival in the 2020 campaign.Trump tweeted Saturday morning he had a “perfectly fine and routine conversation” on July 25 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and that, “Nothing was said that was in any way wrong.”Trump accused Democrats and the news media of ignoring allegations against the Bidens and creating a false story about him.”The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat (sic) Party, want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money, so they fabricate … a story about me …”The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money, so they fabricate a…..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) FILE – Rudy Giuliani speaks at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council in Washington, Nov. 14, 2016.Trump and Giuliani have pushed for an investigation of the Bidens for weeks, following news reports this year that explored whether a Ukrainian energy company tried to secure influence in the U.S. by employing Biden’s younger son, Hunter.Democrats are condemning what they perceive as a concerted effort to damage Biden, who has been thrust into the middle of an unidentified whistleblower’s complaint against Trump. Biden is currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.The Trump administration has blocked procedures under which the whistleblower complaint would have normally been forwarded by the U.S. intelligence community to members of the Democrat-controlled Congress, keeping its contents secret.FILE – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, left, gestures next to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, during a bilateral meeting in Warsaw, Poland, Sept. 1, 2019.However a series of leaks have indicated the complaint is based on multiple events, including the July telephone conversation between Trump and Zelenskiy, two people familiar with the matter said. The sources were granted anonymity in order to discuss the issue.
 
One person briefed on the call said said Trump urged Zelenskiy to investigate Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The controversy unfolded amid a White House-ordered delay in the delivery of lethal military assistance to Ukraine, but the unnamed source was quoted saying Trump did not mention U.S. aid in his conversation with Zelenskiy.Biden said late Friday that if the reports are accurate, “then there is truly no bottom to President Trump’s willingness to abuse his power and abase our country.” Biden also called on Trump to disclose the transcript of his conversation with Zelenskiy so “the American people can judge for themselves.”The intelligence community inspector general has described the whistleblower’s August 12 complaint as “serious” and “urgent,” conditions that would normally require him to forward the complaint to Congress. Trump has characterized the complaint as “just another political hack job.”The standoff  raises new questions about the extent to which Trump’s appointees, including the acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire, are protecting the Republican president from congressional oversight.House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a Democrat, speaks to reporters after the panel met behind closed doors about a whistleblower complaint, at the Capitol in Washington, Sept. 19, 2019.Democrats maintain the administration is legally required to give Congress access to the complaint. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said any attempt by Trump to urge a foreign country to “dig up dirt” on a political foe while withholding aid is inappropriate.”No explicit quid pro quo is necessary to betray your country,” Schiff tweeted Friday.House Democrats are also battling the administration for access to witnesses and documents in ongoing impeachment investigations.The whistleblower case has lawmakers investigating whether Giuliani traveled to Ukraine to pressure the government to help Trump’s reelection chances by investigating Hunter Biden and whether his father intervened in the country’s politics to help his son’s business.Late in the administration of then-President Barack Obama in 2016, Joe Biden was sent to Kyiv armed with a threat to withhold billions of dollars in government loan guarantees unless the country cracked down on corruption. Biden’s primary demand was to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, for ineffectiveness. Shokin was fired shortly thereafter.But before the vice president arrived in Kyiv, Shokin had already opened an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company on which Hunter was a board member receiving $50,000 per month. Burisma is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian businessman and politician.While Republicans are suggesting the senior Biden used the loan money as leverage force an end to the Bursima investigation, Bloomberg News, citing a former Ukrainian official and Ukrainian documents, reported that the probe had been dormant since 2015, long before Biden’s trip to Kyiv.Giuliani  had meetings this year in New York with Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko. Around the same time, Ukraine revived the case against Burisma. The New York Times reported Lutsenko relaunched the probe to “curry favor from the Trump administration for his boss and ally.”The reported timeline appears to be more consistent with Biden’s contention that he was pushing for the ouster of a prosecutor who was failing to rein in rampant corruption, instead of seeking the firing of a prosecutor threatening a company linked to his son.During a CNN interview Thursday,  Giuliani initially said “No” when asked if he had asked Ukraine to investigate Biden, but said seconds later, “of course I did.” 
…

A senior Danish official says his country hopes to set an example for the world with an ambitious scheme to cut carbon emissions by 70% in little more than a decade, but it has no illusions that it can have a meaningful impact on global warming by itself. 
 
“To be honest, for the climate, even if we just close down our country tomorrow, it wouldn’t help much,” Dan Jørgensen, Denmark’s top climate and energy official, told VOA during a visit to Washington this week. “I guess you can argue: Does it really matter what you do?” 
 
Jørgensen said Denmark accounts for just 0.1% of the world’s carbon emissions, a drop in the bucket compared with emissions from the largest polluters such as China, the United States and India. But he said, “The reason we do these things anyway is that if we succeed in doing that, then hopefully we’ll inspire others.” 
 
Jørgensen, who will be in New York next week to promote his country’s climate agenda at the United Nations, said his country hopes to demonstrate that it can carry out a green transformation and still be competitive in the global marketplace. In the process, it expects to develop new technologies that “other countries can also use.” Stages of debate
  
According to Jørgensen, the climate debate in Denmark has gone through several stages since the issue started to enter the public’s consciousness about 15 or 20 years ago. 
 
At that time, he said, some in Denmark still questioned how real climate change was and whether humans had anything to do with it. That was followed by a period in which the public by and large understood that climate change was real, but some remained reluctant to devote resources to the problem, concerned that efforts by Denmark alone would be futile.  People hold placards during the Global Climate Strike at Raadhuspladsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Sept. 20, 2019.Now, he said, most people agree on the nature of the problem. Looking out the window, “they see droughts, they see flooding, they see extreme weather phenomena,” he said. “We are also a nation that’s closely connected to Greenland,” one of the places where climate change is most evident in the form of melting glaciers. 
 
With that consensus, the debate has shifted to an energetic discussion about the best policy instruments to address the problem. 
 
The issue so dominated Danish general elections in June that the campaign has been described as the country’s “first climate election,” with the question of how to achieve a green transformation topping the agenda in debates among the candidates for prime minister and other posts. 
 
Looking beyond Denmark, Jørgensen said Denmark and its partners in the European Union were sad to see the United States withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and hope it will reconsider. “There’s nothing I would hope more than the U.S. taking leadership on the global stage also on green issues,” he said. Join the battle
 
Meanwhile, Jørgensen said, all countries and especially the “big growing economies” must join in the battle to prevent climate change “from becoming irreversible and having the most catastrophic consequences.” 
 
But he acknowledges the frustration of newly developing countries, which are only now acquiring energy-intensive amenities that the developed nations have long enjoyed. 
 
“It’s not up to us who’ve been polluting and emitting greenhouse gases for more than 100 years — when I say us, I mean the West, the United States, Europe — it’s not up to us to tell them, ‘No, you cannot drive a car, you cannot buy a fridge or an air conditioner, no, you can’t start to eat meat a few times a week because you can afford it all of a sudden because you’ve come out of poverty.’ ” 
 
Rather, he said, it is up to Denmark and the other developed countries to say, “Can we help you in any way to make that growth green?” 
…

The head of Ukraine’s state-owned oil company says Kyiv will remain able to supply Europe with natural gas from its subterranean storage units even if European Union-mediated talks don’t pan out.“We are fully confident that Ukraine can maintain gas supply … at least during the first quarter of 2020,” Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev said Friday at a public event in Brussels.On Thursday, Russia and Ukraine held their third round of ministerial-level talks in Brussels about the transit of Russian natural gas to Europe, where all parties hoped to negotiate EU Commissioner for Energy Maros Sefcovic attends a news conference after gas talks between the European Union, Russia and Ukraine at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Sept. 19, 2019.According to Sefcovic, all parties agreed that a future contract would be based on EU law, and that the unbundling of Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas transport operations should be completed, which would create a separate entity to handle the transit of gas through Ukraine.He also said all parties agreed to resume ministerial-level talks before the end of October, and those representatives from companies involved in the contract development would continue negotiating the details of Thursday’s general agreement.On Friday, however, CEO Kobolyev said that even if talks fail, Naftogaz’s 19.6 billion cubic meters of natural gas currently held in underground storage will remain in play, and that Ukraine has signed at least one deal for reverse flows from Europe.It was also reported Friday that Naftogaz is already seeking to recover any losses from maintaining the transit network if the deadline arrives without a deal.“We are looking for full recovery of all relevant costs, including recovery of residual value of Ukraine’s gas transmission system,” Kobolyev was quoted as saying by Reuters on Friday.“We are not disclosing a number here. But the number is quite high.”Nord Stream 2, TurkStream, and litigationThis week’s talks follow a Sept. 10 decision by the top European Union court in Luxembourg to reimpose limits on gas flows via the Opal pipeline, a spur that connects Germany with the Nord Stream pipeline system operated by Russia’s state-owned Gazprom.FILE – The Nord Stream 2 pipe-laying vessel Audacia is pictured off Ruegen island, Germany, Nov. 7, 2018.Gazprom is pushing to complete the Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream pipeline projects in 2020, after which it would no longer depend upon Ukraine’s pipelines for transit. Ukraine’s loss of roughly $3 billion gas-transit fees — about 3% of national GDP — would be a substantial blow to the Ukrainian economy.Naftogaz announced in July 2018 that it had submitted a claim to the Stockholm arbitration court demanding compensation of up to $14 billion for the loss of gas-transit system value if Gazprom refuses to sign a contract by the deadline.Ukraine, however, is ready to recall this claim if Russia signs a contract agreeing to continue transporting gas through its territory after January 1.In February 2018, the Stockholm arbitration tribunal awarded $4.63 billion in compensation to Naftogaz; Gazprom still owes Naftogaz $2.56 billion plus interest on this amount.In recent months, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin adopted a conciliatory tone, saying Russia was ready to keep up transit via Ukraine if Naftogaz is willing to recall the legal claims.Edward Chow, senior associate in the Energy and National Security Program at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the Ukrainian delegation should resist forfeiting their legal wins to reach the deal.Litigation and contract negotiations, he said, “should be kept as separate as possible” and that “whenever the final judgment comes, Gazprom should honor that judgment.”Gas warsIn 2006 and 2009, disagreements between the two nations cut natural gas supplies to Western Europe in the middle of winter, leaving many without heat.FILE – A general view shows the headquarters of Gazprom, with a board of Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Gazprom seen in the foreground, in Moscow.Some analysts say an interruption in gas flows to Europe this winter “might damage the reputation of Gazprom permanently.””Europe is already going through an examination of what role fossil fuels should play in the energy future. The gas seemed like a good bridging fuel between carbon-emitting fossil fuels and renewables,” Chow said. “However, it does not have to be that way. So, if Gazprom wants to maintain market share in Europe, it should not want a supply interruption.”Margarita Assenova, an energy expert with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, says although Ukraine has substantial natural gas reserves, other countries would be especially vulnerable to an interruption.”The most vulnerable countries to gas interruptions from Russia are Bulgaria, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina,” she told VOA. “They don’t have sufficient gas storage facilities, and they don’t have alternative suppliers.”Russia depends on sales to Europe more than Europe depends on buying Russian gas,” she added, explaining that this fact gives Ukraine an upper hand in ongoing negotiations.”Russia supplies about one-third of the gas that Europe consumes, but Russia sells 99% of its gas to Europe,” she said. “So, who is going to lose more if Europe turns to other sources?”After Thursday’s talks in Brussels, the energy ministers of Russia and Ukraine, Aleksandr Novak and Oleksiy Orzhe, said both sides had agreed to meet again by the end of October.This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service.
…

Over a hundred demonstrators were arrested at yellow vest protests in Paris on Saturday as about 7,500 police were deployed to deal with the movement’s radical anarchist “black blocs” strand.After first marching with the yellow vests, around 1,000 radical demonstrators joined a separate march against climate change where they provoked clashes with police, authorities said.Two bank buildings were damaged in the clashes, along with motor scooters, windows and other property. Some activists built makeshift roadblocks which they then torched.The climate march organizers urged protesters to go home to avoid the clashes which involved teargas and baton charges.The yellow vest movement erupted 10 months ago and blindsided President Emmanuel Macron, whom protesters accuse of being out of touch with the needs of ordinary French people.”We are assembling just to say that we can’t make ends meet. [The protest] is not only against the president, it’s against the system,” said a female protester who did not give her name.A protester holds a French flag as he takes part in a demonstration on Act 45 (the 45th consecutive national protest on Saturday) of the yellow vests movement in Paris, France, Sept. 21, 2019.Others denounced what they said was overreach by security forces.”This is hell. We’re fewer than 100, and police charge. That’s David versus Goliath,” said demonstrator Pierre, his eyes red with teargas.The weekly demonstrations — Saturday was the 45th — prompted Macron to loosen the state’s purse strings to the tune of nearly 17 billion euros ($18.8 billion) in wage boosts and tax cuts for low earners, but tapered off over the summer.However, it remains to be seen whether the movement will regain the momentum of the winter and early spring, when the protests often descended into violent clashes with security forces, especially in Paris.’Treated like criminals’By the afternoon, police had arrested 106 demonstrators, police headquarters said, adding that some had been found to carry hammers or petrol canisters.”We are being treated like criminals,” said a woman, who identified herself as Brigitte.The authorities had banned demonstrations in some areas of the city including tourism hotspot Champs-Elysees but some protesters violated the ban, leading to a tense standoff with police who used teargas and batons to scatter them.Macron on Friday called for “calm,” saying that while “it’s good that people express themselves”, they should not disrupt a climate protest and cultural events also due to go ahead on Saturday.The number of police deployed for Saturday’s rallies are on a par with the peak of the yellow vest protests in December and March.Key yellow-vest figure Jerome Rodrigues has billed Saturday’s protest as “a revelatory demonstration”, claiming “many people are going to come to Paris”.But officials again outlawed protests on the Champs-Elysees and other areas in the heart of the capital, where previously protesters had ransacked and set fire to luxury shops and restaurants during previous rallies.Some demonstrators in January even used a forklift truck to break down the doors of a government ministry.The police have also been criticized for being heavy-handed in clashes with hardcore anti-capitalist “black bloc” groups blamed for much of the violence that has accompanied the demonstrations.Saturday coincides with the annual European Heritage Days weekend, when public and private buildings normally off-limits to the public are open to visitors.FILE – Members of the Gendarmerie stand in front of fences and a fire as protesters linked to the Yellow Vests movement (unseen) take part in a demonstration on the side of the annual Bastille Day ceremony, July 14, 2019, on the Champs-Elysees.After attracting 282,000 people nationwide on the first day of protests last November, yellow-vest protest participation had fallen sharply by the spring, and only sporadic protests were seen over the summer.Macron said in an interview with Time magazine published Thursday that the movement had been “very good for me” as it had made him listen and communicate better.”My challenge is to listen to people much better than I did at the very beginning,” he said.  
…