Have you missed the news a bit in the last two days? We summarize the main news for Saturday September 30 and Sunday October 1.
Three hours before the deadline, the American Congress finally postponed, on Saturday, the risk of paralysis of the federal administration, the famous shutdown. After the House of Representatives, the Senate adopted an emergency funding measure, which provides that the American federal administration can continue to operate normally for forty-five days. Joe Biden signed it immediately. “This is good news,” the American president said in a statement, “but I want to make things clear: we should never have found ourselves in this position. »
This development came after the Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, proposed earlier Saturday a last-ditch attempt to prevent the shutdown, which could only pass with the support of Democrats. Successfully: the text was adopted with 335 yes votes (and 91 no votes). In the Senate, he obtained a very large majority of 88 yes to 9 no.
As soon as the Senate vote was announced, Mr. Biden called on Congress to quickly approve aid to Ukraine, which was excluded by the Republican speaker from the emergency funding measure. The White House had requested, in vain, that the finance law passed by elected officials include $24 billion in military and humanitarian aid for kyiv.
An explosion occurred on Sunday at the police headquarters in the center of the Turkish capital, Ankara. The suicide attack was claimed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
“One of the terrorists blew himself up and the other was neutralized. Two of our police officers were slightly injured” by the flames caused by the explosion, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X (formerly Twitter). The police headquarters is located within the premises of the Ministry of the Interior, near Parliament.
“The terrorists will never achieve their objectives,” responded Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in front of Parliament shortly after the explosion. On Sunday evening, Ankara carried out airstrikes in Iraqi Kurdistan to “neutralize the PKK,” the Turkish Defense Ministry announced in a statement.
“Around a million people” gathered on Sunday, at the start of a large anti-government march in the center of Warsaw, the town hall said. “This is absolutely the biggest demonstration in the history of Warsaw,” Monika Beuth, city hall spokesperson, told Agence France-Presse.
“I want to tell you that there are more than a million of us,” Donald Tusk, the leader of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) bloc, told the demonstrators. It is, according to him, “the largest political demonstration in the history of Poland” and “the largest political gathering in the world today”. “We are Poland! “, he chanted at the end of this demonstration, called “March of a million hearts”.
European leaders are “criminals against the Armenian people, they are shedding the blood of the Armenian people.” These words are those of one of the organizers of a demonstration which took place on Sunday October 1 in Brussels, Belgium. Thousands of Armenians, from several European countries, converged there to denounce Europe’s “complicity” after a lightning offensive by Azerbaijan to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh, controlled for three decades by Armenian separatists who ended up capitulating and agreeing to lay down their arms last week. Since then, the enclave has been almost entirely deserted by its inhabitants, more than 100,000 refugees having fled to Armenia for fear of reprisals from Azerbaijan.
Similar rallies were to be held in several other cities in Europe and France, notably in Marseille, where more than a thousand people, according to the police, and some 5,000, according to the organizers, also gathered to support the Armenians who have fled Nagorno-Karabakh are demanding stronger action from the international community, noted an AFP journalist.
Armenian Ambassador to France Hasmik Tolmajian called on the international community and the United Nations to establish “decent conditions” for the return of Armenian refugees to Nagorno-Karabakh. “There is another alternative to being a refugee”, namely the return of these populations, she declared on Franceinfo, stressing that “no one wants to be a refugee when they can stay in their country”.
A United Nations mission arrived the same day in Nagorno-Karabakh – for the first time in thirty years – in order to assess the humanitarian needs there.
According to the almost final results announced Sunday October 1, the national-populist party Smer-SD (smer: “leadership”) came in first, with nearly 23% of the votes. Its leader, Robert Fico, is in a strong position to become prime minister again after having already held this position twice between 2006 and 2018.
Aged 59, Mr. Fico ran his entire campaign promising to align the foreign policy of this Central European country of 5.5 million people with that of neighboring Hungary. His program thus speaks of “rejecting military aid to Ukraine” because it “only prolongs the conflict”, of opposing “sanctions which hurt Europe more than Russia”. or “normalize relations” with Moscow.
Denying being “pro-Russian”, the candidate assures that he wants Slovakia to remain a member of the European Union and NATO, but his probable return to power will put an end to the policy of the pro-Western government outgoing who had gone so far as to give the Slovak army’s MiG-29s to Ukraine. On Sunday, Fico said Slovakia’s foreign policy direction would not change because “we are naturally members of the EU.” “This obviously does not mean that I cannot criticize things that I do not like within the EU,” he clarified.
Summer in October. Up to 34°C in the South-West this Sunday
Fire at a nightclub in Spain. The toll continues to rise. At least thirteen people died
Disappearance of Lina. The Strasbourg public prosecutor’s office opens a judicial investigation for “kidnapping or sequestration”
Return of Antoine Dupont. With a black right eye, the captain of the Blues carried out his first training with the XV of France
Policy. Laurent Wauquiez commits to leading the right “towards great collective success” in 2027 and announces withdrawing the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region from the “zero net artificialization” system.
PSG-OM. Summoned by the LFP disciplinary committee, Dembélé, Kolo Muani, Hakimi and Kurzawa apologize after offensive chants during the match
