Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy once again Sunday urged Western allies to permit Kyiv to strike military targets deep inside Russia, especially air bases, after a deadly attack on Kharkiv.  

“Only a systemic solution makes it possible to oppose this terror: the long-range solution to destroy Russian military aviation where it is based,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address.  

“We are waiting for appropriate decisions coming primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy.”  

Earlier, a guided Russian bomb struck a residential building in Kharkiv, the latest of a series of attacks on the northeastern city, starting a blaze which firefighters extinguished.  

Rescuers pulled out the dead body of an elderly woman from the rubble, Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov said on Telegram, adding that 42 people were wounded.   

In his speech, Zelenskyy said Russia had also struck the Sumy and Donetsk regions Sunday with guided bombs.   

He said the Russian army carried out “at least 100 such air attacks” daily.

It is to prevent these sorts of attacks that Ukraine is asking for permission to strike military targets deep inside Russia from Western allies, who remain hesitant for fear of an escalation.  

Also Sunday, Russian shelling killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, local authorities said, as Moscow’s troops inched closer to the key logistics hub.  

More than 20,000 people — almost half of its population — have fled the city since August, while Russian strikes over the past two weeks have cut off water and electricity to many of its remaining residents.  

“Around 11 a.m. (0800 GMT), the enemy shelled the western part of the city… Unfortunately, one person died,” Pokrovsk’s military administration said on Telegram.  

Russia has been advancing toward Pokrovsk for months, getting to within 10 kilometers Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy once again Sunday urged Western allies to permit Kyiv to strike military targets deep inside Russia, especially air bases, after a deadly attack on Kharkiv.  

“Only a systemic solution makes it possible to oppose this terror: the long-range solution to destroy Russian military aviation where it is based,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address.

“We are waiting for appropriate decisions coming primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy.”  

Earlier, a guided Russian bomb struck a residential building in Kharkiv, the latest of a series of attacks on the northeastern city, starting a blaze which firefighters extinguished.  

Rescuers pulled out the dead body of an elderly woman from the rubble, Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov said on Telegram, adding that 42 people were wounded.   

In his speech, Zelenskyy said Russia had also struck the Sumy and Donetsk regions Sunday with guided bombs.   

He said the Russian army carried out “at least 100 such air attacks” daily.

It is to prevent these sorts of attacks that Ukraine is asking for permission to strike military targets deep inside Russia from Western allies, who remain hesitant for fear of an escalation.  

Also Sunday, Russian shelling killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, local authorities said, as Moscow’s troops inched closer to the key logistics hub.  

More than 20,000 people — almost half of its population — have fled the city since August, while Russian strikes over the past two weeks have cut off water and electricity to many of its remaining residents.  

“Around 11 a.m. (0800 GMT), the enemy shelled the western part of the city… Unfortunately, one person died,” Pokrovsk’s military administration said on Telegram.  

Russia has been advancing toward Pokrovsk for months, getting to within 10 kilometers (6 miles) of its eastern outskirts, according to the local administration.   

The city lies on the intersection of rail and road routes that supply Ukrainian troops and towns across the eastern front line and has long been a target for Moscow’s army.  

Russian strikes damaged two overpasses in the city earlier this week, including one that connected Pokrovsk to the neighboring town of Myrnograd, local media reported.  

Other eastern cities such as Bakhmut and Mariupol suffered massive bombardment before falling to Russian forces. of its eastern outskirts, according to the local administration.   

The city lies on the intersection of rail and road routes that supply Ukrainian troops and towns across the eastern front line and has long been a target for Moscow’s army.  

Russian strikes damaged two overpasses in the city earlier this week, including one that connected Pokrovsk to the neighboring town of Myrnograd, local media reported.  

Other eastern cities such as Bakhmut and Mariupol suffered massive bombardment before falling to Russian forces.
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Rome — The Italian army will start guarding medical staff at a hospital in the southern Calabria region from Monday, after a string of violent attacks on doctors and nurses by enraged patients and relatives across Italy, according to local media reports. 

Prefect Paolo Giovanni Grieco has approved a plan to reinforce the surveillance services already operated by soldiers on sensitive targets in the Calabrian town of Vibo Valentia, including the hospital, the reports added. 

Recent attacks on health workers have been particularly frequent in southern Italy, prompting the doctors’ national guild to ask for the army to be deployed to ensure medical staff’s safety. 

The turning point was an assault at the Policlinico hospital in the southern city of Foggia in early September. A group of about 50 relatives and friends of a 23-year-old woman — who died during emergency surgery — turned their grief and rage into violence, attacking the hospital staff. 

Video footage, widely circulated on social media, showed doctors and nurses barricading in a room to escape the attack. Some of them were punched and injured. The director of the hospital threatened to close its emergency room after denouncing three similar attacks in less than a week. 

With over 16,000 reported cases of physical and verbal assaults in 2023 alone, Italian doctors and nurses have called for drastic measures. 

“We have never seen such levels of aggression in the past decade,” said Antonio De Palma, president of the Nursing Up union, stressing the urgent need for action. 

“We are now at a point where considering military protection in hospitals is no longer a far-fetched idea. We cannot wait any longer,” he added. 

The Italian Federation of Medical-Scientific Societies (FISM) has also proposed more severe measures for offenders, such as suspending access to free medical care for three years for anyone who assaults health care workers or damages hospital facilities. 

Understaffing and long waiting lists are the main reasons behind patients’ frustration with health workers. 

According to Italy’s largest union for doctors (ANAAO), nearly half of emergency medicine positions remained unfilled as of 2022. Doctors lament that Italy’s legislation has kept wages low, leading to overworked and burnout staff at hospitals. 

These problems have been further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed many health workers to leave Italy in search of better opportunities abroad. 

In 2023, Italy was short of about 30,000 doctors, and between 2010 and 2020, the country saw the closure of 111 hospitals and 113 emergency rooms, data from a specialized forum showed. 
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Paris — Hundreds of people marched through Paris on Sunday in support of women’s rights and the opposition in Iran, two years after the death of Mahsa Amini sparked protests against the country’s religious authorities. 

 

A 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, Amini died in custody after being arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women. 

 

The march, organized by around 20 human rights associations, took place as 34 women began a hunger strike in a Tehran prison to mark the two-year anniversary of her death. 

 

Chirinne Ardakani, a Franco-Iranian lawyer and member of the “Iran Justice” collective, said that the “sacrifices” made by Iranians opposed to the regime were “not in vain”. 

 

“Everything has changed in Iran,” Ardakani told AFP. 

 

“We’ve gone from an absolutely patriarchal culture, where there was no question of women being able to reveal themselves in the street, to massive support for these women,” the lawyer and activist added. 

 

The march in solidarity with the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement was attended by Benjamin Briere and Louis Arnaud, two Frenchmen who were arrested and arbitrarily detained in Iran. 

 

Iran is accused of arresting Westerners without cause and using them as bargaining chips in state-to-state negotiations, with French diplomats describing these prisoners as “state hostages”. 

 

Briere was eventually released in May 2023, while Arnaud was let go the month after. 

 

“Yes, I was in prison, but it is an immense honor to have been able to live among you, freedom fighters, who shared my suffering,” Arnaud told the crowd, in his first public address since his release. 

 

Three other French nationals are still being held in Iran. 

 

After Amini died in custody on September 16, 2022, the women-led protests which erupted rattled Iran’s leadership that autumn and winter. 

 

But the demonstrations were then crushed by the authorities, with rights group Amnesty International saying security forces used assault rifles and shotguns in the crackdown. 

 

Human rights groups say at least 551 people were killed. Thousands more were arrested, according to the United Nations. 
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London — U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of “bluster” Sunday over his warning that letting Ukraine use long-range weapons to strike inside Russia would put NATO “at war” with Moscow.

Tensions between Russia and the West over the conflict reached dire levels this week as U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met at the White House to discuss whether to ease rules on Kyiv’s use of western-supplied weaponry.

“I think that what Putin’s doing is throwing dust up into the air,” Lammy told the BBC. 

“There’s a lot of bluster. That’s his modus operandi. He threatens about tanks, he threatens about missiles, he threatens about nuclear weapons.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been asking for permission to use British Storm Shadow missiles and U.S.-made ATACMS missiles to hit targets deeper inside Russia for months.

Biden and Starmer delayed a decision on the move during their meeting on Friday.

It came after Putin warned that green-lighting use of the weapons “would mean that NATO countries, the U.S., European countries, are at war with Russia.”

“If that’s the case, then taking into account the change of nature of the conflict, we will take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face,” he added. 

The Russian leader has long warned Western countries that they risk provoking a nuclear war over their support for Ukraine.

“We cannot be blown off course by an imperialist fascist, effectively, that wants to move into countries willy nilly,” said Lammy.

“If we let him with Ukraine, believe me, he will not stop there.”

Lammy said that talks between Starmer, Biden and Zelensky over the use of the missiles would continue at the United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York later this month.
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LIPOVA LAZNE, Czech Republic — One person drowned in southwest Poland and thousands were evacuated across the border in the Czech Republic as heavy rains continued to batter central Europe on Sunday, causing flooding in several areas.

A firefighter tackling flooding in lower Austria was also killed, Austrian Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler said on Sunday on social platform X as authorities declared the province, which surrounds Vienna, bordering the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a disaster area.

Rivers overflowed from Poland to Romania, where four people were found dead on Saturday, after days of torrential rain in a low-pressure system named Boris.

Some parts of the Czech Republic and Poland faced the worst flooding in almost three decades.

In the Czech Republic, a quarter of a million homes were without power due to high winds and rain. Czech police said they were looking for three people who were in a car that fell into the river Staric near Lipova Lazne, 235 kilometers east of Prague on Saturday.

In Poland, one person died in Klodzko county, which Prime Minister Donald Tusk said was the worst-hit area of the country and where 1,600 had been evacuated.

“The situation is very dramatic,” Tusk told reporters on Sunday after a meeting in Klodzko town, which was partly under water as the local river rose to 6.65 meters Sunday morning before receding slightly.

That surpassed a record seen in heavy flooding in 1997, which partly damaged the town and claimed 56 lives in Poland.

The nearby historic town of Glucholazy ordered evacuations Sunday morning as the local river started to break its banks, while firefighters and soldiers had been fighting since Saturday to protect a bridge in the town.

Residents across the Czech border also said the situation was worse than flooding seen before.

“What you see here is worse than in 1997, and I don’t know what will happen because my house is under water, and I don’t know if I will even return to it,” said Pavel Bily, a resident of Lipova Lazne.

The fire service in the region said it had evacuated 1,900 people as of Sunday morning, while many roads were impassable.

In the worst-hit areas, more than 10 centimeters of rain fell overnight and around 45 centimeters since Wednesday evening, the Czech weather institute said.

More rain is expected Sunday and Monday.

In Budapest, officials raised forecasts for the Danube to rise in the second half of this week, to above 8.5 meters, nearing a record 8.91 meters seen in 2013, as rain continued in Hungary, Slovakia and Austria.

“According to forecasts, one of the biggest floods of the past years is approaching Budapest but we are prepared to tackle it,” Budapest’s mayor Gergely Karacsony said.

In Romania, authorities said the rain was less intense than on Saturday, when flooding killed four and damaged 5,000 homes. Towns and villages in seven counties across eastern Romania were affected, and the country’s emergency response unit said it was still searching for two people missing. 
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rome — Italian prosecutors requested on Saturday a six-year prison sentence for Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, for allegedly blocking migrants from disembarking at one of the country’s ports in 2019.

Salvini, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition, is on trial for alleged deprivation of liberty and abuse of office for keeping 147 migrants at sea for weeks on a ship run by the Open Arms charity.

“The prosecution has asked for former interior minister Salvini to be sentenced to six years,” Open Arms’ lawyer Arturo Salerni told AFP, as the “long and difficult trial” nears an end.

A verdict in the trial, which began in October 2021, could come next month, he said. Salvini would be free to appeal any decision.

Salvini was not present, but wrote on Facebook: “Six years in prison for having blocked arrivals and defended Italy and Italians? Madness. Defending Italy is not a crime.”

Meloni also criticized the prosecutors.

“It is incredible that a minister of the Italian Republic risks 6 years in prison for doing his job defending the nation’s borders, as required by the mandate received from its citizens,” the prime minister wrote on X.

In summing up, prosecutor Geri Ferrara told the Palermo court in Sicily that there was “one key principle that is not debatable.”

“Between human rights and the protection of state sovereignty, it is human rights that must prevail in our fortunately democratic system,” he said.

The ship was stuck at sea for nearly three weeks before the migrants were allowed to disembark on the island of Lampedusa following a court order.

Members of Open Arms have testified that the migrants’ physical and mental well-being reached a crisis point as sanitary conditions onboard became dire, including a scabies outbreak.

Salvini, head of the anti-immigration League party and interior minister at the time, testified in January that he had understood that “the situation was not at risk” onboard the ship.

“The POS (safe port) should have been provided immediately and without delay,” prosecutor Marzia Sabella said Saturday, according to Italian media reports.

“Refusing to do so was breaking the rules, not being in line with a government plan,” and Salvini’s “choices” had given rise to “chaos,” she said.

A populist known for an “Italians first” policy, Salvini has repeatedly used attacks against illegal immigration to boost his political capital.

In 2019, serving under prime minister Giuseppe Conte, he implemented a “closed ports” policy under which Italy refused entry to charity ships that rescue migrants stranded while crossing the Mediterranean.

He cast it as a tough measure against traffickers who operate boats between North Africa and Italy and Malta, the deadliest migrant crossing in the world.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, also known for her anti-immigrant politics, offered Salvini a message of support on Saturday night, alleging he was the target of “judicial harassment aimed at silencing him.”

Salvini thanked her and promised not to “give in.”

Much of the trial has been focused on determining whether the decision-making and responsibility in the case lay with the Conte government or Salvini alone.

Salvini has previously faced a similar trial, accused of refusing to allow 116 migrants to disembark from an Italian coast guard boat in July 2019. But it was thrown out by a court in Catania in 2021. 
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Geneva, Switzerland — Limited capacity is keeping mpox testing coverage low in the DR Congo — the epicenter of the international emergency — the World Health Organization said Saturday in its latest situation report. 

“Testing coverage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains low, due to limited testing capacity,” the United Nations health agency said in its update. 

It said the mpox case fatality ratio in the DRC in 2024 was 0.5% among confirmed cases — or 25 deaths from 5,160 cases — and 3.3% among suspected cases, both tested and untested — or 717 deaths among 21,835 cases. 

“Due to limited access to laboratory testing in remote areas, only about 40% of all suspected cases have been tested in 2024 (up from 9% in 2023), and among these, around 55% tested positive,” the WHO said. 

It said the three countries reporting the most suspected cases in the year up to September 8 were the DRC, followed by Burundi (1,489 suspected cases, no deaths), and Nigeria (935 suspected cases, no deaths). 

There are two clades of mpox, each with a and b subclades. 

The WHO said the clades and their subclades were circulating in different geographic areas and were affecting different populations — and therefore needed “tailored and locally adapted outbreak responses.” 

The WHO declared an international emergency over mpox on August 14, concerned by the surge in cases of the new Clade 1b strain in the DRC that spread to nearby countries. 

In the DRC, Clade 1b has been detected chiefly in the eastern South Kivu and North Kivu provinces, with additional cases in the Kinshasa capital province. 

Current sequencing capacity in the DRC “is limited, and clade distribution might be broader than what is currently known” the WHO said. 

Clade 1b has also been detected in the DRC’s eastern neighbors Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, plus Kenya. Additionally, a single case has been detected in Sweden and another in Thailand. 

Looking at global vaccine availability, the WHO said more than 3.6 million doses had been pledged for the global response, including more than 620,000 doses of the MVA-BN vaccine by European countries, the United States and manufacturer Bavarian Nordic. 

Meanwhile Japan has pledged 3 million doses of the LC16 vaccine. 

To date, 265,000 MVA-BN doses have been delivered to Kinshasa, while 10,000 have gone to Nigeria. 
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Marseille, France — Walking into court each day with her head held high, the ex-wife of a Frenchman on trial for orchestrating multiple rapes of her in her own bed for almost a decade has become a feminist icon. 

With her now trademark auburn bob and dark glasses, 71-year-old Gisele Pelicot has become a figurehead in the battle against the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.  

Her life was shattered in 2020 when she discovered that her partner of five decades had for years been secretly administering her large doses of tranquilizers to rape her and invite dozens of strangers to join him.  

But she has decided not to hide and demanded the trial of Dominique Pelicot, 71, and 50 co-defendants since September 2 be open to the public because, as she has said through one of her lawyers, it should be up to her alleged abusers — not her — to be ashamed.  

“It’s a way of saying … shame must change sides,” her attorney Stephane Babonneau said as the trial opened.   

Since then, feminist activists have held up her stylized portrait by Belgian artist Aline Dessine, with the words “Shame is changing sides,” to show support at protests.  

The artist with 2.5 million followers on TikTok has given up all rights to the image.  

Thousands protest

Thousands protested in cities across France on Saturday in support of Gisele Pelicot and demanding an end to rape. 

“Gisele for all, all for Gisele,” read one hand-drawn poster at a gathering in the southern city of Marseille. 

A day earlier, outside the courthouse in the southern town of Avignon, protester Nadege Peneau said she was full of admiration for the trial’s main plaintiff. 

“What she’s doing is very brave,” she said. “She’s speaking up for so many children and women, and even men” who have been abused. 

Gisele Pelicot in August obtained a divorce from her husband, who has confessed to the abuse after meticulously documenting it with photos and videos. 

She has moved away from the southern town of Mazan where, in her own words, for years he treated her like “a piece of meat” or a “rag doll.”  

She now uses her maiden name, but during the trial has asked the media to use her former name as a married woman. 

Her lawyer Antoine Camus said she had transformed from a devoted wife and retiree, who loved walks and choir singing, into a woman ready for a battle. 

“I will have to fight till the end,” she told the press on September 5, in her only public statement outside court in the first days of the four-month trial. 

“Obviously it’s not an easy exercise and I can feel attempts to trap me with certain questions,” she added calmly.  

Learning truth behind memory lapses

She met Dominique Pelicot, her future husband and rapist, in 1971. 

She had dreamed of becoming a hairdresser but instead studied to be a typist. After a few years temping, she joined France’s national electricity company EDF, ending her career in a logistics service for its nuclear power plants. 

At home, she looked after her three children and later seven grandchildren. 

Only when the police caught her husband filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in 2020 did she find out the true reason behind her troubling memory lapses. 

Camus, her lawyer, said his client “never wanted to be a role model.” 

“She just wants all this not to be in vain,” he said. 
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WARSAW, Poland — Thousands of people attended an antigovernment rally organized by Poland’s nationalist conservative opposition party to boost support before next year’s presidential election.

Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski called on supporters to be active at social and political levels and to back the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential election. He hasn’t yet named the candidate.

Kaczynski also accused the pro-European Union government of acting against the nation’s interests and violating its laws and cited recently opened investigations into allegations of mismanagement and corruption of the Law and Justice government.

Up to 4,000 people with national white-and-red flags gathered for the rally held in windy weather outside the Justice Ministry in Warsaw, which has become a symbol of years of deep rifts between the backers of Kaczynski and Donald Tusk, now the prime minister and leader of the center-right Civic Platform party.

Law and Justice, which governed Poland for from 2015 until 2023, drew criticism from Brussels and Tusk alike for making changes to Poland’s judicial system that were deemed undemocratic.

Many in the nation of 38 million people were also tired of the aggressive and divisive language that Kaczynski, who dictated the government’s policies from the sidelines, used to energize support.

The party lost power in the 2023 election, but is still exerting control through President Andrzej Duda, who is allied with Law and Justice. Duda, whose second and last term runs out in August, has been blocking many of the government’s draft laws.
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DUBAI — Iran’s foreign minister said that Tehran was open to diplomacy to solve disputes but not “threats and pressure,” state media reported on Saturday, after the U.S. and three European powers imposed sanctions against the country’s aviation sector.

Abbas Araqchi’s comments come a day after the European Union’s chief diplomat said the bloc is considering new sanctions targeting Iran’s aviation sector, in reaction to reports Tehran supplied Russia with ballistic missiles in its war against Ukraine.

“Iran continues on its own path with strength, although we have always been open to talks to resolve disputes … but dialogue should be based on mutual respect, not on threats and pressure,” Araqchi said, according to the official news agency IRNA.

Araqchi said on Wednesday that Tehran had not delivered any ballistic missiles to Russia and that sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and three European powers would not solve any problems between them.

The United States, Germany, Britain and France on Tuesday imposed new sanctions on Iran, including measures against its national airline, Iran Air.
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KYIV, UKRAINE — Russia and Ukraine conducted a major exchange of prisoners Saturday, 206 in all, in their second such swap in two days, following negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates, officials said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that all 103 Ukrainians returned were from the military — 82 soldiers and privates and 21 officers.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that the 103 Russian soldiers exchanged had been taken prisoner in the Kursk border region where Ukrainian forces launched a surprise incursion in August.

“Our people are home,” Zelenskyy said on the Telegram messaging app. “We have successfully brought back another 103 warriors from Russian captivity to Ukraine.”

Zelenskyy posted pictures of servicemen wrapped in the national blue and yellow flag, hugging each other, talking on mobile phones and posing for group photographs at an undisclosed location.

The exchange was mediated by the UAE, Emirati state news agency WAM said. It was the country’s eighth such mediation since the start of 2024, it said.

Kyiv and Moscow have frequently exchanged prisoners since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and Saturday’s swap was the third since Ukraine began its incursion into the Kursk region.

Ukrainian officials have previously said its troops had captured at least 600 Russian soldiers during the incursion, and that this would help it secure the return of captured Ukrainians.

Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s ombudsman, said most of the freed Ukrainians had been in Russian captivity since the early days of the invasion.

He posted a short video on the Telegram messaging app showing the servicemen standing in front of a bus and shouting “Glory to Ukraine.”

Lubinets said that Kyiv had so far secured the return of 3,672 Ukrainians in 57 exchanges.
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