Quote of the day
"This was a despicable act of violence that strikes against not just this soldier and his colleagues but frankly against our very values as a civilized democracy." Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, after a convert to Islam killed a Canadian soldier in a hit-and-run
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NATO jets intercept Russian aircraft
HELSINKI — NATO scrambled fighter jets twice in two days to intercept Russian military aircraft over the Baltic Sea, it said Tuesday.
Two Canadian F-18 Hornet jets were scrambled from the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania on Monday to intercept a Russian Ilyushin-20 surveillance aircraft, which they shadowed for some 15 minutes, NATO said.
Lt. Col. Robert Gericke said the Russian aircraft were flying in international airspace and had not violated the territory of alliance members.
Earlier, the Latvian military said on Twitter that NATO F-16 jets were dispatched Tuesday to intercept a Russian Ilyushin-20 surveillance aircraft over the Baltic Sea. Gericke confirmed that NATO jets had also intercepted a Russian aircraft that day but could not immediately provide more details.
NATO, which has 16 fighter jets in the region monitoring Baltic airspace, said it regularly launches jets to identify “unknown or potentially hostile aircraft” in the proximity of national airspace.
Afghan opium poppy acreage at record
KABUL, Afghanistan — Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan grew to an all-time high in 2013 despite America spending more than $7 billion to fight it over the past decade, a U.S. report shows.
Federal auditors reported Tuesday that Afghan farmers grew more than 516,000 acres of the poppy in 2013, blowing past the previous peak of nearly 477,000 acres in 2007.
As of June 30, 2014, the report said, the United States had spent approximately $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan.
One factor for the surge was affordable deep-well technology, which during the past decade turned more than 494,000 acres of desert in southwestern Afghanistan into arable land, much of which is now being used for poppy cultivation.
Nangarhar province had been considered a model for successful counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts and was deemed “poppy-free” by the United Nations in 2008. It saw a fourfold increase in opium poppy cultivation between 2012 and 2013.
Pole takes heat for Ukraine quote
WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s former Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski came under fire Tuesday from the prime minister and political opponents over a U.S. magazine interview in which he reportedly said Russia’s president offered Poland the opportunity to jointly carve up Ukraine in 2008.
Sikorski, now the parliamentary speaker, was quoted as saying in Sunday’s issue of Politico Magazine that Russian President Vladimir Putin “wanted us to become participants in this partition of Ukraine.”
He said Putin made the offer to then Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Moscow in 2008.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, described Sikorski’s comments as false.
“First, we don’t know much about the work of this publication,” Peskov told Russian news website Gazeta.ru. “In general, this information seems like a fable.”
In a news conference on Tuesday, Sikorski was vague about whether he made those exact remarks. He said he didn’t hear Putin’s words firsthand but stressed that they were treated in 2008 as “surrealistic” or a joke.
Women hold Torah in ad; stones fly
JERUSALEM — Dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews hurled stones and slashed the tires of buses bearing ads promoting worship by women at a key Jerusalem holy site, Israeli police said Tuesday.
The attack, which happened Monday night in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, underscores the still simmering tensions in Israel over religious extremists who want to separate the sexes in public spaces.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police units were dispatched to quell the violence in Mea Shearim, where about 50 men slashed tires and pelted the buses with stones.
The ads were posted by the group Women of the Wall, which seeks to achieve gender equality at the Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can pray. The advertisements showed girls and women wearing prayer shawls and holding a Torah scroll — rituals seen by many Orthodox Jews as reserved for men only.