الكاتب: kafej

Polish truckers and farmers are staging an around-the-clock blockade of the southeastern Medyka crossing.

Polish truckers and farmers have started a blockade of one of the busiest border crossings with Ukraine, expanding a protest against what they say is unfair competition from Ukraine and demanding more government support.

The Polish truckers and farmers began an around-the-clock blockade of the southeastern Medyka crossing on Monday.

Medyka is the fourth border point Polish workers have blocked since November 6, stranding thousands of lorries for days in kilometres-long lines.

The Polish truckers said they are losing out to Ukrainian companies, which offer cheaper prices and are transporting goods within the European Union rather than just between the bloc and Ukraine.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU lifted permit requirements for Ukrainian truckers entering the bloc and for EU truckers entering Ukraine.

‘No intention of giving up’

The Polish truckers are demanding the EU reintroduce the old permit system, offering exemptions for the transport only of humanitarian and military supplies.

They also want empty trucks from the EU to be excluded from an electronic queueing system in Ukraine and measures to stop Belarusian and Russian hauliers from setting up companies in Poland to get around sanctions.

Polish farmers joining the blockade are pressuring their government to extend support to help them cope with low grain prices.

Tomasz Borkowski, leader of a Polish transporters union, said the workers are committed to maintaining the blockade until their demands are met.

“I would like to end this protest as soon as possible because it is as burdensome for us as for everyone around us,” Borkowski said.

“We have no intention of giving up, and we will stand until we get our terms.”

Long waits

Protesters said only two trucks were being allowed to pass through the Medyka border crossing per hour with exemptions made for humanitarian aid and war supplies.

This has led to a 127-hour wait for trucks to cross at Medyka, one of just eight road border crossings with Ukraine, according to data from the Polish border guard.

Ukraine said the protest is damaging its fragile wartime economy by hampering exports and stopping supplies of essentials like motor vehicle gas from entering the country.

With Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, a key export route before the war, virtually blocked by Russia, Ukrainian businesses rely on roads and railways to reroute exports and imports.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Infrastructure estimated that an average of 40,000 to 50,000 trucks had been crossing the border with Poland per month via eight existing crossings, twice as many as before the war. Most of the goods are carried by Ukraine’s transport fleet.

The teacher was killed in 2020 outside his school in Paris, after sharing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in class.

Six teenagers have gone on trial behind closed doors in connection with the beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty.

The murder, which shocked the country, took place in 2020 after the teacher had shown his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression.

Paty, 47, was killed outside his school in a Paris suburb by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old assailant of Chechen origin, who was shot dead by police soon afterwards.

The six youths cannot be identified due to their age. They entered court on Monday wearing hoodies to hide their faces.

Five of the six, who were 14 to 15 years old at the time, face up to 2.5 years in prison for criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence. They are accused of identifying the teacher to the killer in exchange for money.

The other defendant, a girl who was 13 at the time, allegedly told her parents that Paty had asked Muslim pupils to leave the room before showing the caricatures. However, she was not in the class at the time.

Consumed with regret

During questioning, the teenagers swore that at most they thought Paty would be “flagged up on social media”, “humiliated” or maybe “roughed up”, but they never imagined “it would go as far as murder”.

“He is consumed with regret and is very fearful of the confrontation with Paty’s family,” Antoine Ory, lawyer for one of the accused, said on Monday before the hearing started.

Paty’s sister Mickaelle said in a statement through lawyer Louis Cailliez that her brother would still be alive without a “fatal association of small cowardices, big lies”.

“The role of the minors was fundamental in the sequence of events that led to his assassination,” a lawyer for Paty’s family said.

The hearings, due to last until December 8, will be held behind closed doors. Eight adults are also accused and will appear before a special criminal court.

Last month, almost two years to the day of Paty’s killing, a 20-year-old man fatally stabbed teacher Dominique Bernard and gravely wounded two other people in an attack at a school in northern France.

Like Anzorov, Bernard’s suspected killer Mohammed Moguchkov also hailed from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus region.

Anzorov targeted Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class the cartoons. They had originally featured in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, triggering a deadly attack by gunmen.

Pope Francis is receiving antibiotics intravenously to treat a lung inflammation and will scale back some appointments.

However, the Vatican has said the pontiff does not have pneumonia or fever.

The pope himself revealed on Sunday that he had been unwell and had been forced to cancel his weekly window appointment to greet people in St Peter’s Square.

Instead, he gave his blessing from the chapel of the hotel on Vatican grounds where he lives.

The Vatican said in a written statement on Monday that an inflammation was causing some respiratory difficulties for Francis, whose 87th birthday is next month.

“The condition of the pope is good and stationary, he doesn’t have a fever, and the respiratory situation is in clear improvement,” the statement said.

A CT scan, which the pope underwent on Saturday afternoon at a Rome hospital, ruled out pneumonia.

To aid the pope’s recovery, “some important commitments expected for the next days have been postponed so he can dedicate the time and desired energy” to his recovery, the statement added.

It is not clear what appointments were being put off, but it appeared he was keeping his private audience with the president of Paraguay.

In televised remarks on Sunday, the pope indicated he is going ahead with a three-day trip to the United Arab Emirates on 1 December to deliver a speech on climate change at the upcoming United Nations COP28 talks.

When he gave his blessing on Sunday, a bandage, holding in place a cannula for intravenous treatment, was clearly visible on his right hand.

Around 500,000 people have been left without power after a storm took down power lines, ripped up trees and damaged buildings in Crimea.

Russian state news agency Tass said the storm also hit southern Russia and sent waves flooding into the beach resort of Sochi.

It is part of a weather front that hit Romania and Moldova on Sunday, leaving one person dead and hundreds of places without electricity amid heavy snowfall and strong blizzards.

Several Crimean regions declared a state of emergency after it became the strongest recorded storm in 16 years with wind speeds reaching 90mph (144kph).

The government in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, told people to stay at home on Monday.

Government offices were also shut as well as schools and hospitals.

The head of one Crimean region, Natalia Pisareva, said everyone in the Chornomorske area of western Crimea had no water supply and central heating because pumping stations had lost power.

There were also reports of a problem with a gas pipeline in Saky, western Crimea.

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In an aquarium in Sevastopol, around 800 exotic fish and animals died after the room they were in was flooded, the Crimea 24 TV channel reported.

In Russia, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium stopped crude oil loading at the Novorossiysk port due to “extremely unfavourable weather conditions”.

A five-year-old British boy has died after falling into a swimming pool while on holiday in Egypt.

Kelan Logan-Derench from Sutton Coldfield in Birmingham was on his first holiday abroad when he had the “tragic accident” on Saturday 25 November.

The boy was on holiday with his mother Ciara, elder sister Cienna and his grandmother at the time.

Serena Whitehead, a friend of Kelan’s mother, has set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to bring him back to the UK and pay for his funeral.

She wrote on the page: “Kelan had a tragic accident and fell into the swimming pool and heartbreakingly nothing could be done to save him and he sadly lost his life.

“Kelan was a cheeky, mischievous, happy little boy, he was a younger brother to Cienna and was about to become a big brother himself in February 2024.”

Ms Whitehead added that Kelan’s family were “absolutely broken” after the boy’s death.

The page, which was created on Sunday, had raise more than £12,000 of its £15,000 target as of Monday morning.