DUBAI, 11 October 2021, (TON): The UAE and Syria have agreed on plans to enhance economic cooperation and explore new sectors.

The Emirates’ economy ministry announced the agreement on Sunday.

The ministry said “value of non-oil trade between the two countries in the first half of 2021 was one billion dirhams ($272 million).”

It added that the UAE is Syria’s most prominent global trade partner.

The announcement came after the UAE’s Minister of Economy Abdulla bin Touq Al-Marri met with his Syrian counterpart.

The UAE re-opened its mission to Damascus in late 2018 after closing it due to the Syria conflict.

ATHENS, 11 October 2021, (TON): Greece’s police minister said “250 additional guards would be deployed on the country’s land border with Turkey, where thousands of asylum-seekers tried to enter last year.”

According to a ministry statement “we are ready and we are further increasing (security) forces by hiring 250 new border guards to support Greek police,” Citizens’ Protection Minister Takis Theodorikakos said during a visit to the border area of Kastanies.”

In February 2020, tens of thousands of migrants surged toward Greece after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he would let migrants seeking to reach the EU pass through.

Days of clashes with asylum seekers on the border ensued, with Greek police accusing their Turkish counterparts of firing tear gas against them.

In the aftermath of the incident, Greece invested in a new anti-migration arsenal including cameras, radar and a 40-km steel fence, to cover part of the 200-km border region crossed by the river Evros.

The Greek civil aviation authority on Saturday also said a tethered balloon known as an aerostat, equipped with a long-range thermal camera, had been deployed at Alexandroupolis airport in August to assist border surveillance.

KABUL, 11 October 2021, (TON): Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister Amir Khan Motaqi leading a high-level delegation met with Muhammad Bin Abdurahmand Al-Thani, the deputy Prime Minister and foreign minister of Qatar. The meeting was conducted in the Qatari capital Doha.

Deputy Minister of information and culture and spokesperson of the Taliban Zabiullah Mujahid in a series of tweets said that the Qatari deputy PM welcomed the Afghan delegation to Doha and discussed economic projects along with other issues.

Al-Thani expressed joy over the visit of the Afghan delegation to Qatar and meeting representatives of other countries and added that his country will remain cooperative with Afghanistan.

Afghan acting foreign minister also expressed his gratitude to Al-Thani for their cooperation and added to have better bilateral relations in the future.

KABUL, 11 October 2021, (TON): Hundreds of male and female doctors from Samangan and Nuristan provinces gathered at the gate of UNAMA in Kabul and asked the World Bank to pay their salaries for the past 14 months.

The protestors said that not only their salaries have been paid but the clinics in their respective provinces are confronting a dire shortage of medicine.

Protestors accused an Afghan contractor of World Bank- Asad Fayaz, who has fled Afghanistan and has taken money from World Bank but have not been paid to them.

They said that Fayaz had a two-year health contract in the provinces and was providing health services, medicines, and salaries of doctors.

A protestor said “Asad Fayaz has fled Afghanistan and stole our money. He was leading a corrupt firm and that caused an increase in the mortality of children and mothers in Samangan and Nuristan provinces.”

The doctors in a statement said that since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has no relations with the World Bank and cannot ask for money, asked the bank to directly pay their money through Afghanistan’s health ministry or other NGOs.

WASHINGTON, 11 October 2021, (TON): Senate Republicans, with a few exceptions, are hoping that former President Trump does not announce his intention to run again for president.

These GOP senators definitely don’t want to see Trump announce a bid before the 2022 midterm elections, fearing that could sink their hopes of winning back the Senate.

More broadly, they’re generally reluctant to see him on the ballot in 2024 at all because of his track record with independent and swing voters.

Several Republican senators, who requested anonymity to discuss Trump frankly, said they don’t want to see Trump return as the party’s standard bearer.

“I think we’re better off when he’s not part of any story,” said a Republican senator, who said his view is widely shared in the GOP conference.

“He’s a clinical narcissist. He threw away the election in the debate with Biden and he threw away the Senate out of spite,” the lawmaker added, referring to Trump’s first against Biden, which many Republican senators viewed as a disaster, and his influence on Republican voter turnout in the Georgia special election.

LONDON, 11 October 2021, (TON): According to a draft speech released on Sunday “Britain is set to ratchet up pressure on the EU this week to agree an overhaul of the post-Brexit deal on Northern Ireland.”

Britain’s Brexit minister David Frost will use a speech in Lisbon to say there must be “significant change” to the agreement, known as the Northern Ireland protocol, a day before the EU is expected to issue its own proposals to break the impasse.

The protocol was negotiated as part of Britain’s divorce from the EU to avoid a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland by effectively keeping the province in the EU single market.

But it has caused an outcry among Northern Ireland’s pro-UK unionists who argue the arrangement creates a trade border between Great Britain and the province, undermining its constitutional position in the union.

Among the most contentious side effects an EU ban on British sausages and chilled meats being imported into Northern Ireland, dubbed the “sausage war” because of the UK’s post-Brexit break with EU food hygiene laws.

Frost, who was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator in the run-up to Britain’s departure, has spent much of his time in cabinet since trying to convince the EU to unravel the withdrawal agreement he was pivotal in delivering.

WASHINGTON, 11 October 2021, (TON): The United States has lifted sanctions on several Russian officials ahead of Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s trip to Moscow, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on 10 October.

Maria Zakharova confirmed that Nuland had been barred from entering Russia in a tit-for-tat move after Washington slapped Russian officials with entry bans. Nuland is expected to come to Moscow on Monday to meet with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and other dignitaries.

Zakharova told “she was on the sanctions list, which means she could not cross the border. They [the US] put Russian officials, foreign affairs experts on their blacklist. In this case, we approached the problem reciprocally. Yes, she will come to Russia.”

TEHRAN, 11 October 2021, (TON): Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian stated that Iran does not intend to become dependent on Russia and China and will develop relations with these countries on the basis of mutual interest.

“Of course, we do not want to tie ourselves to China and Russia, but we will conduct our foreign policy on the basis of mutual interests,” the ISNA agency quoted him as saying .

According to the minister “one of the key features of a balanced foreign policy is that, taking into account priority areas, Tehran will use every opportunity in other areas in the world to maximize national interests.”

He added that “looking to the east does not mean a complete rejection of the western vector.”

KINSHASA, 11 October 2021, (TON):  Rebels went on a rampage in villages around the northeastern DR Congo city of Beni at the weekend, killing at least eight people and abducting many more, local officials said.

The first attacks occurred overnight Friday in the villages of Mbingi and Mapasana.

Kinos Katuo, the head of a civil society body said "there we had four people killed, seven motorbikes and several houses torched, and the kidnapping of several people.”

He said the victims were shot dead or hacked to death.

Sunday morning the rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) attacked the nearby village of Mangazi, he said, noting that a rebel was killed as the army repelled the assault.

Katuo said “the rebels moved on to the villages of Matekelambi and Mabuo, where the death toll stands at four, with "many others missing,".

No military source was available Sunday to confirm his account.

WASHINGTON, 11 October 2021, (TON): Justice Department said that a US Navy nuclear engineer and his wife have been charged with selling secret information about nuclear submarines to an undercover FBI agent who posed as an operative for a foreign country.

Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Diana, were arrested on Saturday in West Virginia and charged with violating the Atomic Energy Act, the Justice Department said in a statement. They are scheduled to appear in a West Virginia federal court on Tuesday.

The Justice Department said “Toebbe, 42, a Navy nuclear engineer with top secret security clearance, sent a package of restricted data to an unidentified country in 2020 and later began selling secrets for tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to an undercover FBI agent posing as a foreign official.”

At one point, Toebbe hid a digital memory card containing documents about submarine nuclear reactors in half a peanut butter sandwich at a "dead drop" location in West Virginia, while his wife acted as lookout, the Justice Department said.

The memory card contained "militarily sensitive design elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of Virginia-class submarine reactors," according to a federal court affidavit.

Another memory card was concealed in a chewing gum package, the Justice Department said.

Toebbe received separate cryptocurrency payments totalling $100,000, according to the Justice Department.