Iran says budget to rely less on oil
TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's president said on Sunday his country will depend less on oil revenue next year, in a new budget that is designed to resist crippling U.S. trade embargoes.
Iran is in the grip of an economic crisis. The U.S. re-imposed sanctions that block Iran from selling its crude oil abroad, following President Trump's decision to withdraw from Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
"The budget sends a message to the world that despite the sanctions, we will manage the country," President Hassan Rouhani told the opening session of Parliament.
The proposed budget will counter "maximum pressure and sanctions" by the U.S., he said.
Iranian media, including the semiofficial Tasnim news agency, said that the submitted budget would raise taxes, sell some government-owned property and add more government bonds. But it wasn't immediately clear from Rouhani's speech whether these proposed measures would fully compensate for plummeting oil revenue.
Rouhani added that Iran will also benefit from a $5 billion loan from Russia that's being finalized.
2 survivors found in Kenya rubble
NAIROBI, Kenya -- Kenyan rescuers digging through the rubble of a six-story building found two survivors alive Sunday, two days after it collapsed in Nairobi, as the death toll rose to 10.
When the survivors of Friday's building collapse were found Sunday morning, a crowd of onlookers burst into cheers and claps.
A military member at the scene told The Associated Press they had been communicating with people believed to have been trapped in pockets of debris. He said some were screaming for help but the sounds of their voices had died down as time wore on. He insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
Nairobi Police Chief Philip Ndolo said four bodies were recovered from the scene Sunday including that of a child, while a fifth person died in a hospital. According to authorities, that brings the overall toll to 10 dead, 30 injured and 20 missing.
Ndolo said the rescue of a man and a woman had invigorated emergency workers with hopes of finding other survivors. He said the two were in stable condition in a hospital.
"Given we have rescued two people two days after the incident, we hope to find more survivors. Remember there is more than 20 people missing," he said.
German firefighter killed; 6 arrests made
BERLIN -- Six people have been arrested after an off-duty firefighter was killed in an altercation between two couples and a group of young men in the southern German city of Augsburg, authorities said Sunday.
The couples had just left a Christmas market late Friday when they ran into the seven-person group and an argument started, according to police. One of the young men hit the 49-year-old victim in the head and he fell to the ground. He died at the scene.
A 50-year-old man who was with him was hit in the face and seriously injured. Their wives were not attacked.
The youths fled. Dozens of Augsburg firefighters held a vigil Sunday for their colleague and German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer voiced his dismay at the killing.
Bavaria's state Interior Ministry then announced the arrest of the suspected main culprit and a suspected accomplice. Both were 17 and born in Augsburg; the first had German and unspecified other citizenship and the second was a citizen of an unidentified southern European country.
Later Sunday, police said four more suspects had been arrested, the German news agency dpa reported. No details were immediately given on those suspects.
NATO seminar off over Trump critic
TALLINN, Estonia -- The Danish Atlantic Council says it has canceled a U.S. government-sponsored seminar on NATO and transatlantic relations after the U.S. Embassy in Denmark allegedly banned an American academic known for being critical of President Donald Trump from speaking there.
The Danish organization said Sunday in a statement that "regrettably" the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, "did not want Mr. [Stanley] Sloan's participation" in the event that the U.S. government was co-organizing and sponsoring.
Sloan, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council in the U.S., was among several invited speakers for the "Celebrating NATO's 70th Anniversary" conference scheduled in Copenhagen's Frederiksberg Palace on Tuesday.
Lars Bangert Struwe, the head of the Danish Atlantic Council, said "we have all the time known that Mr. Sloan has a critical approach towards President Donald Trump. It is no secret -- especially when following his Twitter and Facebook profile." He added, however, that the organization never doubted that Sloan would deliver "unpolitical and objective lecture."
The U.S. Embassy said on its Twitter account that the "proposed last-minute inclusion" of Sloan into the conference did not comply with the "agreement that we followed when recruiting all other speakers."
-- Compiled by Democrat-Gazette staff from wire reports
A Section on 12/09/2019