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Sweden says Turkey pledges to ratify its NATO bid ‘within weeks’

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

BRUSSELS — Turkey has promised Sweden it will ratify its bid to join NATO “within weeks,” Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström said Wednesday.Referring to his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan, with whom he spoke on Tuesday, Billström said: “He told me that he expected the ratification to take place within weeks. And of course, we don’t take anything for granted from the side of Sweden, but we look forward to this being completed.”The Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs commission recently abruptly postponed a session to vote on Sweden’s accession bid. According to Billström, the top Turkish envoy didn’t put forward any new conditions in the conversation. “There were no new demands from the Turkish government, so we look [at] our part as being fulfilled,” he told reporters at the NATO foreign ministerial meeting.Apart from Turkey, Hungary has also not ratified Sweden’s membership status in the alliance.

At least one dead as US Osprey aircraft crashes off coast of Japan

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

Tokyo (CNN) — At least one person was killed Wednesday after a US military Osprey aircraft crashed off the coast of Japan’s Yakushima Island in southern Kagoshima prefecture, according to a spokesperson from the Japan Coast Guard.The spokesperson added that no further information was available on the other seven individuals on board and the reason behind the crash.The Coast Guard received information about the crash around 2:47 p.m. local time (12:47 a.m. ET), said the spokesperson, adding the 10th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters has dispatched a patrol boat and aircraft to the crash area.The Yakushima Airport Management Office in Kagoshima Prefecture received a call from the US military Wednesday afternoon requesting an emergency landing at Kagoshima Airport, a Kagoshima prefectural official told CNN.The Kagoshima prefectural official did not specify if the request came from the US Marines or Air Force.It is the latest crash to involve an Osprey military aircraft, with ...

Howie Carr: Latest lefty media darling busted

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

It never fails.Whenever the cackling hens of Boston’s state-run media start slobbering over some left-wing female, it’s only a matter of time until their latest crush gets jammed up.Monica Cannon-Grant.Rachael Rollins.Dianne Wilkerson.Kendra Lara.And now it’s happened again, right on schedule. This time it’s that terrorist teenybopper from Cambridge by the name of Calla Mairead Walsh.At age 19, Comrade Calla has had gushing profiles written about her in all the usual Democrat religious tracts – the Boston Globe, the New York Times and Boston Magazine.Now the red-diaper doper baby is charged with riot, sabotage, criminal mischief and trespass and disorderly conduct after trashing a building owned by an Israeli company in Merrimack, N.H.She was arrested with two other homely young ladies, and her bail was set at $20,000.The building’s windows were smashed, and spray-painted on the walls was “Free Gaza” and “Genocide Profiteers.” Cops found an “incendiary device.”It was Walsh’s second ...

Ski Wednesday: Spreading joy of the sport

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

A Massachusetts-raised, Jackson, New Hampshire-based lifelong skier who also happens to be a high school music director has secured a prestigious Share Winter Foundation (https://sharewinterfoundation.org/) grant to introduce dozens of the inner city high school students she works with to the mountain sports life.Danielle Trial Lucini, Music Director at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence, was awarded a grant to bring as many as 50 students, many of them transplants from spots like the Dominican Republic and other non-snow climates, and put them on skis and in the proper winter attire, in ski school and best of all, she says, experiencing first hand the beauty of the winter sport.The grant is a next step – a big one, she says – in a project she started when she and another school staffer who loves to ski were on a chairlift and had a brainstorm: Let’s get these kids out here.Lucini pulled it together with a bit of wing and prayer. She reached out to ski areas for discount passe...

India opens an investigation after US says it disrupted a plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

NEW DELHI (AP) — India has set up a high-level inquiry after U.S. authorities raised concerns with New Delhi that its government may have had knowledge of a plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader on American soil, an Indian official said on Wednesday.The U.S. side shared some information and India “takes such inputs seriously since they impinge on our national security interests as well, and relevant departments were already examining the issue,” a statement by External Affairs Ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi said.The U.S. government said it had raised the issue with New Delhi but declined to comment on when or how U.S. officials became aware of the plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who is considered a terrorist by the Indian government, as well as how the alleged assassination attempt was derailed. In September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there were credible allegations that the Indian government may have had links to the assassination in that country of...

Biden targeting GOP’s Boebert in fresh political attack on Republicans

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

DENVER (AP) — President Joe Biden will try to turn Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado into the embodiment of Republican opposition to his agenda as he visits her congressional district on Wednesday. The trip comes as Biden struggles with low approval ratings while he prepares for a likely 2024 rematch against former President Donald Trump, leaving Democrats eager for opportunities to score political points against Republicans. Biden plans to tour CS Wind, the world’s largest facility for wind tower manufacturing, in the town of Pueblo. The trip was originally scheduled for last month, but it was delayed as the Democratic president focused on the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. CS Wind is undergoing a $200 million expansion that is expected to create 850 jobs by 2026 with help from the tax benefits in the Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions of dollars of financial incentives. In addition, a new analysis from the Treasury Department said clean energy in...

The world economy will slow next year because of inflation, high rates and war, OECD says

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The global economy, which has proved surprisingly resilient this year, is expected to falter next year under the strain of wars, still-elevated inflation and continued high interest rates.The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated Wednesday that international growth would slow to 2.7% in 2024 from an expected 2.9% pace this year. That would amount to the slowest calendar-year growth since the pandemic year of 2020.A key factor is that the OECD expects the world’s two biggest economies, the United States and China, to decelerate next year. The U.S. economy is forecast to expand just 1.5% in 2024, from 2.4% in 2023, as the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases — 11 of them since March 2022 — continue to restrain growth.The Fed’s higher rates have made borrowing far more expensive for consumers and businesses and, in the process, have helped slow inflation from its four-decade peak in 2022. The OECD foresees U.S. in...

An ailing Pope Francis tells the public he’s better than a day earlier but has aides read speeches

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis presided at his weekly audience with the public at the Vatican, but he said that he’s still unwell and asked an aide to read his remarks for him on Wednesday, a day after canceling an overseas trip.Francis, who will turn 87 on Dec. 17 and had part of one lung removed as a young man, coughed near the end of the hourlong audience in a Vatican auditorium as he made some final comments, then stood up from his chair on the stage to give his blessing. With a soft voice, barely above a whisper, Francis told the public that “since I am not well,” his reading of his speech wouldn’t sound “pretty.” He then handed the printed speech to the aide.But Francis did speak at the end of the audience, voicing his contentment over the truce in fighting between Israel and Hamas, and saying he hopes it continues “so that all the hostages are released and access necessary to permit humanitarian aid” to reach Gaza is provided.“They lack bread, water, the p...

Stock market today: Global shares trade mixed and oil prices advance ahead of OPEC meeting

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — European shares were mostly higher on Wednesday after a mixed session in Asia, where selling of property and technology shares pulled Chinese benchmarks lower. France’s CAC 40 edged up 0.4% in early trading to 7,281.99, while Germany’s DAX added 1% to 16,151.57. Britain’s FTSE 100 lost 0.2% to 7,438.87. The future for the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.3% and that for the S&P 500 also gained 0.3%.In Asian trading, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 declined 0.3% to finish at 33,321.22. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.3% to 7,035.30. South Korea’s Kospi shed nearly 0.1% to 2,519.81. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 2.1% to 16,993.44, while the Shanghai Composite fell 0.6% to 3,021.69. Food delivery company Meituan’s Hong Kong-traded shares dropped 12.2% after it forecast its revenue will fall in the current quarter. Troubled property developer China Evergrande sank 10.4% following reports that its property services g...

US military Osprey aircraft with 6 aboard crashes off southern Japan, at least 1 dead

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:44:31 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — A crew member who was recovered from the ocean after a U.S. military Osprey aircraft carrying six people crashed Wednesday off southern Japan has been pronounced dead, coast guard officials said. The cause of the crash and the status of the five others on the aircraft were not immediately known, coast guard spokesperson Kazuo Ogawa said. Initial reports said the aircraft was carrying eight people, but the U.S. military later revised the number to six, he said. The coast guard received an emergency call from a fishing boat near the crash site off Yakushima, an island south of Kagoshima on the southern main island of Kyushu, he said.Coast guard aircraft and patrol boats found one person, who was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, and gray-colored debris believed to be from the aircraft, Ogawa said. They were found about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) off the eastern coast of Yakushima. An empty inflatable life raft was also found in the area. “The government will confirm...