Day: November 28, 2023

The wife of Ukraine’s military spy chief has been poisoned with heavy metals and is undergoing treatment in a hospital, a spokesperson for the agency said on Tuesday.

Marianna Budanova is the wife of Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukrainian military intelligence agency GUR, which has been prominently involved in clandestine operations against Russian forces since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“Yes, I can confirm the information, unfortunately, it is true,” GUR spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Reuters, without clarifying when the poisoning took place.

The BBC’s Ukrainian service cited Yusov as saying that several GUR officials had also experienced milder symptoms of poisoning.

Budanov’s public profile has risen in Ukraine and the West, where he is portrayed as a behind-the-scenes mastermind of operations to strike back at Russia. In Russian media he is a hate figure.

The 37-year-old has himself been the target of several attempts on his life, including a botched car bombing.

If confirmed as deliberate, the purported poisoning of his wife would represent the most serious targeting of a high-profile Ukrainian leadership figure’s family member during the 21-month-long war.

The poisoning was first reported by Ukrainian media outlets.

One publication, Babel, cited an unidentified source who said Budanova had been in hospital, and was finishing a course of treatment for the effects of the poisoning.

Another outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, cited an unidentified source who said the poison was likely administered through food.

Moscow has previously blamed Ukrainian secret services for the murders of a pro-war Russian blogger and a pro-war journalist on Russian soil. Ukraine denies involvement in those deaths.

Separately, Russian media has reported that a court in Moscow had arrested Budanov in absentia in April on terrorism charges.

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U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths will travel to the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday for talks on the possibility of opening the Kerem Shalom crossing to allow for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from Israel.

Located at the intersection of Israel, the Gaza Strip and Egypt, the Kerem Shalom crossing was used to carry more than 60% of the truckloads going into Gaza before the current conflict.

Aid currently being allowed into Gaza comes through the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border, which was designed for pedestrian crossings and not trucks.

“We have said from start we need more than one crossing,” Griffiths told a briefing of member states at the United Nations in Geneva on Tuesday.

“The opportunity to use Kerem Shalom should be explored, and that will be topic in Amman. It would hugely add scope (to the response).”

A Western diplomat said there was no prospect of opening the Kerem Shalom crossing for the moment. The diplomat said that Israel does not want to open the crossing because their troops are located in the area.

There was no immediate comment from Israel.

Since a fragile truce came into force last week, some 200 trucks have carried aid into Gaza on a daily basis, but the amount of aid is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of its population.

“We know that more humanitarian aid should be delivered in Gaza. We know how we could increase it, but there are constraints beyond our control,” Griffiths said.

“We know that the people of Gaza need much more from us.”

Since the truce, the United Nations has scaled up the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza and sent aid to some northern areas that had been largely cut off for weeks due to Israeli bombing.

“We need to have reliable and scalable aid delivery mechanisms, that include all humanitarian partners – including NGOs,” Griffiths said.

“We are refining prioritisation, advocating for more entry points and the resumption of (the) private sector.”

Indian rescuers on Tuesday pulled out the first of 41 construction workers trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas for 17 days, hours after drilling through the debris of rock, concrete and earth to reach them, officials said.

The evacuation of the men to safety began more than six hours after rescuers broke through to end an ordeal that began early on Nov. 12 when the tunnel caved in.

“The first one is out,” a rescue official told reporters outside the 4.5 km (3 mile) tunnel in the northern state of Uttarakhand.

Ambulances with their lights flashing lined up at the mouth of the tunnel to transport the workers to a hospital about 30 km away.

The men have been getting food, water, light, oxygen and medicines through a pipe but efforts to dig a tunnel to rescue them with high-powered drilling machines were frustrated by a series of snags.

The tunnel is part of the $1.5 billion Char Dham highway, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most ambitious projects, aimed at connecting four Hindu pilgrimage sites through an 890- km network of roads.

Authorities have not said what caused the cave-in but the region is prone to landslides, earthquakes and floods.

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The conservative U.S. political network led by billionaire Charles Koch on Tuesday endorsed Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, giving the former South Carolina governor a boost among party rivals struggling to make a dent against frontrunner Donald Trump.

The influential group, which pushes for tax cuts and less government regulation, has made clear that beating former president Trump in the primaries is a top priority, as they think he would lose the November 2024 election to President Joe Biden. Biden beat incumbent Trump in the 2020 White House race.

“We would support a candidate capable of turning the page on Washington’s toxic culture – and a candidate who can win. And last night, we concluded that analysis,” the Koch group, Americans for Prosperity Action, said in a statement.

“That candidate is Nikki Haley.”

The group said its internal polling confirms anecdotal reports from activists on the ground on what they are hearing from voters in states with early presidential nominating contests.

They show Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, is in the best position to defeat Trump in the Republican primary, it said. Internal polling also “consistently shows” that Haley is the strongest candidate by far to beat Biden in a general election, it said.

Public opinion polls show Haley battling with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for a distant second place behind Trump.

The super-PAC has raised over $70 million to spend on political races, an official with the group said in July.

“In sharp contrast to recent elections that were dominated by the negative baggage of Donald Trump and in which good candidates lost races that should have been won, Nikki Haley, at the top of the ticket, would boost candidates up and down the ballot, winning the key independent and moderate voters that Trump has no chance to win,” it said.

The group promised Haley “the full weight and scope of AFP Action’s unmatched grassroots army and resources” in her bid to become the next U.S. president.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden on Tuesday offered to testify publicly in the House Republican impeachment inquiry of his father’s Democratic administration, while a leading lawmaker stuck to his demand of testimony behind closed doors.

Escalating a months-long investigation across three congressional committees, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden in September, which focuses on Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

House Republicans allege Biden and his family improperly traded access to Biden’s office as vice president in President Barack Obama’s administration. The White House denies wrongdoing.

As part of the inquiry, the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Hunter Biden, 53, to appear before the panel in a closed-door interview on Dec. 13. The panel also subpoenaed the president’s brother, his late son’s widow and Hunter Biden’s business associates, among others.

The House Oversight Committee has held one public hearing as part of the probe, instead conducting most of their interviews in private.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer on Tuesday blasted the panel’s probe as “a fishing expedition” and an “empty investigation,” telling the panel chairman a public hearing was the only way to prevent “your cloaked, one-sided process.”

“We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public. We therefore propose opening the door,” attorney Abbe Lowell wrote committee chairman James Comer.

Hunter Biden would appear for a public hearing on Dec. 13 or any other date in December that they could arrange, his lawyer said.

Comer said in a statement that the subpoena required Hunter Biden to appear for a deposition on Dec. 13, but added that he should also have a chance to testify publicly at another time.

“Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else. That won’t stand with House Republicans,” Comer said.

The White House has called the investigation a “smear campaign” that “has turned up zero evidence.”

Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has cheered on the impeachment probe. During his four years in the Oval Office, he became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. He was acquitted both times by the Senate.

Hunter Biden in October pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied about his drug use while buying a handgun, in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a sitting U.S. president’s child.

Special Counsel David Weiss brought those charges against Hunter Biden after an earlier proposed plea deal unraveled under questioning from a judge. Weiss is still investigating whether the younger Biden can be charged for tax law violations.

The younger Biden earlier this month sought a federal court’s permission to subpoena documents from Trump and top Justice Department officials in his administration as part of his defense against federal gun charges.

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