Fearing the border may close "forever" after President Vladimir Putin's mobilisation order for the war in Ukraine, Russians are rushing to flee across Finland's Vaalimaa crossing.. He fears the border might "close forever" and Russians "will live in a totalitarian state where they can't do anything at all".
Hurricane Ian slammed into the coast of southwest Florida as a monster Category 4 storm on Wednesday with powerful winds and torrential rains threatening "catastrophic" damage and flooding.. The NHC said Ian was packing maximum sustained winds of 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour when it made landfall and forecast "catastrophic storm surge, winds and flooding in the Florida peninsula."
Kremlin-backed officials in Ukraine appealed to President Vladimir Putin Wednesday to annex the regions under their control, after the territories held votes denounced by Kyiv and the West as a "sham".. Lugansk was the first Russian-controlled region of Ukraine to appeal to Putin to intervene, with the recently captured southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson following shortly after.
Moscow questioned Wednesday whether Washington caused mystery undersea gas pipeline leaks in Europe, that have been blamed on sabotage, which US officials bluntly called ridiculous as Russia opened a "terrorism" probe. . Swedish intelligence announced it was opening an investigation into the massive leaks in the Baltic Sea, branding them "aggravated sabotage," hours after the EU called the damage a "deliberate act".
Iran is imposing increasingly severe restrictions on access to the internet, albeit still short of a total shutdown, in an apparent bid to limit the sharing of footage of protests which have erupted nationwide, activists charge.. The restrictions still fall short of the total shutdown seen in November 2019 when a crackdown on less than a week of protests, according to Amnesty International, left at least 321 people dead.
Iran's police warned Wednesday they will confront "with all their might" women-led protests that erupted nearly two weeks ago over the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, despite growing calls for restraint.. The statement came only hours after the UN said its secretary general, Antonio Guterres, had called on Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi not to use "disproportionate force" against protesters.
Russia fired a salvo of missiles at Ukraine's second city Kharkiv overnight, officials said on Wednesday, hitting a railway yard and knocking out power to more than 18,000 households.. Kharkiv governor Oleg Synegubov said Russian forces had fired S-300 missiles, designed as an anti-aircraft weapon but now often re-purposed to hit civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities.
Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini was visiting Tehran with her family when she encountered the notorious morality police and died after a "violent blow to the head", her cousin living in Iraq said.. - 'Better life' - Amini's mother said doctors at the hospital told the family that her daughter "had received a violent blow to the head", Mortezaee said.
A search team retrieved the body of top US ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson from the Himalayas on Wednesday, two days after she disappeared on the slopes of Nepal's Manaslu peak.. "The search team that left this morning on a helicopter spotted her body and is bringing her back," Jiban Ghimire of Shangri-La Nepal Trek, which organised the expedition, told AFP. Ghimire said that the body was brought to the peak's base camp and will later be flown to Kathmandu.
Switzerland's glaciers lost six percent of their total volume this year due to a dry winter and repeated summer heatwaves, shattering previous ice melt records, a report revealed Wednesday.. "The trend also reveals how important glaciers are to the water and energy supply in hot, dry years," the report stressed -- something to consider given that hydroelectricity provides more than 60 percent of Switzerland's total energy production.
