In a sharp reversal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday that he will hold a call with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov "in the coming days," which will mark the first time the two have spoken since the war in Ukraine began and will be a meaningful step toward reopening high-level diplomatic channels between the two countries.
Blinken told reporters during a press briefing that a critical topic of discussion will be securing the freedom of WNBA superstar Brittney Griner and former Marine Paul Whelan, both of whom are held in Russia.
The secretary revealed that the U.S. has already put forward a plan to accomplish that and is hopeful for a breakthrough on their cases.
Alabama is set to execute a man Thursday evening who was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend nearly three decades ago, despite a request from the victim’s family to spare his life.
Joe Nathan James Jr. is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. CDT at a south Alabama prison. James was convicted and sentenced to death in the 1994 shooting death of Faith Hall, 26, in Birmingham. Hall's daughters have said they would rather James serve life in prison. But Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said Wednesday she planned to let the execution proceed.
Prosecutors said James briefly dated Hall and that he became obsessed. after she rejected him, stalking and harassing her for months before killing her. On Aug. 15, 1994, after Hall had been out shopping with a friend, James forced his way inside the friend's apartment, pulled a gun from his waistband and shot Hall three times, according to court documents.
A Jefferson County jury first convicted James of capital murder in 1996 and voted to recommend the death penalty, which a judge imposed. The conviction was overturned when a state appeals court ruled a judge had wrongly admitted some police reports into evidence. James was retried and again sentenced to death in 1999, when jurors rejected defense claims that he was under emotional duress at the time of the shooting.
Hall’s two daughters, who were 3 and 6 when their mother. was killed, had said recently they would rather James serve life in prison.
“I just feel like we can’t play God. We can’t take a life. And it’s not going to bring my mom back,” one of the daughters, Terryln Hall, told The Associated Press in a recent telephone interview.
“We thought about it and prayed about it, and we found it in ourselves to forgive him for what he did. We really wish there was something that we could do to stop it,” Hall had said, adding the road to forgiveness was long.
“I did hate him. I did. And I know hate is such a strong feeling word, but I really did have hate in my heart. As I got older and realized, you can’t walk around with hate in your heart. You still got to live. And once I had kids of my own, you know, I can’t pass it down to my kids and have them walk around with hate in their hearts,” she said.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had urged Ivey to let the execution go forward, writing that “it is our obligation to ensure that justice is done for the people of Alabama.”
“The jury in James’s case unanimously decided that his brutal murder of Faith Hall warranted a sentence of death,” Marshall said.
In response to a reporter's question, Ivey said Wednesday she would not intervene.
“My staff and I have researched all the records and all the facts and there’s no reason to change the procedure or modify the outcome. The execution will go forward," she said.
James has acted as his own attorney in his bid to stop his execution, mailing handwritten lawsuits and appeal notices to the courts from death row. A lawyer on Wednesday filed the latest appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court on his behalf.
According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), Conservative councillors have heavily criticised the plans barely a week after they voted for the revised draft strategy for the Forest of Dean District local plan to go out for consultation.
Their main concerns centre around the proposed growth for Lydney and Beachley, which they fear could lead to grid-lock on the A48.
Tory group leader Harry Ives said: "After the cabinet's failed plan to create a new village near Churcham, they are now hoping to build 2,460 houses in Lydney.
"These plans will put immense pressure on local healthcare, education, employment and leisure facilities. It's complete madness and residents deserve better".
'Moral compass'
Conservative councillor Alan Preest said infrastructure and engagement with the public had to be the defining factors before any further large scale development was permitted.
He said: "Fundamentally, the moral compass in the authority, pertaining to localism, empowering communities, respecting and listening to local residents/existing communities, should be minutely examined and changed. Then, with a bit of common-sense, you may have a fit for purpose plan."
Council leader Tim Gwilliam, of the Progressive Independents, told councillors last week the council wanted to examine the economic, social and environmental priorities and opportunities the new plan could bring.
He said Lydney had been let down by previous local plans and he viewed the latest one as an opportunity to build on the town's position and turn it into a "gateway to the Forest".
He responded to the Conservative group's concerns, saying: "I have great faith in both Lydney and the Forest of Dean in attracting business investment to deliver what's needed to make the plan work.
"If we can't, we will have to look again in the same way that the previous consultation told us to look at an alternative strategy."
James asked justices for a stay, noting the opposition of Hall's family and arguing that Alabama did not give inmates adequate notice of their right to select an alternate execution method.
He argued that Alabama officials, after lawmakers approved nitrogen hypoxia as a new execution method, gave inmates only a brief window of time to select the new method and inmates did not know what was at stake when they were handed a selection form without any explanation. Alabama is not scheduling executions for inmates who selected nitrogen. The state has not developed a system for using nitrogen to carry out death sentences.
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Three sources familiar with the offer confirmed to ABC News that the U.S. had proposed exchanging convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout in order to secure Griner and Whelan's release from Russia. (CNN was first to report this plan.)
Russia has not yet responded to the offer.
Neither Blinken nor White House spokesman John Kirby would confirm details -- only reiterating that such cases were delicate, requiring the balance of national security interests with the importance of protecting Americans abroad.
"[They] have been wrongly detained and must be allowed to come home," Blinken said. "We put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago to facilitate their release. Our governments have communicated repeatedly and directly on that proposal, and I'll use the conversation to follow up personally and I hope move us toward a resolution."
Asked repeatedly about the specifics of the proposal, Blinken declined to shed much more light.
You'll understand that I can't and won't get into any of the details of what we've proposed to the Russians over the course of some many weeks now," Blinken said. "Here's what I can say: First, as I mentioned, we've conveyed this on a number of occasions and directly to Russian officials. And my hope would be that in speaking to Foreign Minister Lavrov, I can advance the efforts to bring them home."
"My interest and my focus is making sure that, to the best of our ability, we get to yes," he said.
A potentially key figure in this is Bout -- the former Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year prison sentence, dubbed the "Merchant of Death" by the media, whom the U.S. offered to swap for both Griner and Whelan. Before Wednesday's proposal was announced, officials had indicated to ABC News that a Bout trade was one potential option.
Bout's attorney Albert Dayan told ABC News that he welcomed a deal: "I encourage both of the governments, United Sates and Russia, in these particular cases to agree to the exchange. Especially since Mr. Bout has already served more than the majority of his sentence." Dayan said his client had spend "much time in solitary confinement."
Blinken on Wednesday acknowledged there was precedent for prisoner trades.
"We demonstrated with Trevor Reed, who came home some months ago, that the president is prepared to make tough decisions if it means the safe return of Americans," Blinken told reporters, referring to the former Marine jailed in Russia before he was exchanged for Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was serving a 20-year sentence in the U.S. for drug smuggling.
Blinken said that President Joe Biden played an active role in crafting the proposal for Griner and Whelan.
Sections of a renowned peatland tropical forest in the Congo Basin that plays a crucial role in Africa’s climate system go up for oil and gas auction in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Thursday.
The DRC government will auction 30 oil and gas blocks in the Cuvette-Centrale Peatlands in the Congo Basin forest — the world’s largest tropical peatland. Peatland soils are known as ‘carbon sinks’ because packed into them are immense stores of carbon that get released into the atmosphere when the ecosystem is disturbed.
Some of the areas, or blocs, marked for oil leasing lie within Africa’s iconic first conservation area, the Virunga National Park, created in 1925 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to the last bastion of mountain gorillas.
The Congo basin covers 530 million hectares (1.3 billion acres) in central Africa and represents 70% of the continent’s forested land. It hosts over a thousand bird species and more primates than any other place in the world, including the great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees and Bonobos.
The move by the Congo-Kinshasa Ministry of Hydrocarbons has angered environmentalists and climate activists who say that oil drilling will pose significant risks to a continent already inundated by harsh climate effects. The Centre for International Forest Research puts the massive Cuvette-Centrale carbon sink at 145,000 square kilometers (56,000 square miles) and said it stores up to 20 years’ equivalent of the carbon emissions emitted by the United States.
Other blocs the DRC plans to auction include some located on Lake Kivu, Lake Tanganyika, and one in a coastal region alongside the Albertine-Grabben region, the western side of the Eastern African Rift Valley system.
“These are the last refuges of nature biodiversity,” and our last carbon sinks, said Ken Mwathe, of BirdLife International in Africa. “We must not sacrifice these valuable natural assets for damaging development.”
The auction of part of the Congo Basin rainforest, which represents 5% of the global tropical forests, comes barely a week after the International Union for the Conservation of Nature hosted the inaugural Africa Protected Areas Congress in Kigali, Rwanda. There, attendees resolved to strengthen protection of Africa’s key biodiversity hotspots.
The DRC is one of 17 nations in the world classified as “megadiverse.” In September last year, at the World Conservation Congress meeting in France, 137 resolutions dubbed the “Marseille Manifesto” highlighted the significant role the Congo Basin is expected to play in the global commitment to protect 30% of the Earth by 2030.
Last year at the U.N. climate conference COP26, a dozen donors dubbed the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use, pledged some $1.5 billion “to working collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.”
The Democratic Republic’s carbon sponge is also at risk from large-scale logging, expansion of agriculture and the planned diversion of the Congo River’s waters into the shrinking Lake Chad.
A former KGB comrade of Vladimir Putin's could be next in line to take the Russian president's place in power, the former head of British intelligence predicted.
Speculation over a possible Putin replacement has surged in recent months amid conflicting reports that the Russian leader's health could be in decline. Kremlin insiders have even quietly begun discussing potential successors in case Putin is forced out over the Ukrainian invasion or succumbs to a hypothetical illness, according to reports.
Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as head of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service from 1999 to 2004, asserted this week that the most likely heir candidate is Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia's Security Council and a longtime Putin ally known to be one of exceedingly few officials to have the president's trust.
"I'm almost certain it would Patrushev," Dearlove said on a Thursday episode of the podcast "One Decision," which he co-hosts, during a discussion about the ongoing impacts of Putin's war in Ukraine, more than five months after Russian forces invaded.
The former MI6 chief has previously theorized about Putin's likely longevity. In May, Dearlove on his podcast predicted that Putin will be out of power by 2023 and forced into a medical facility for long-term illness in an effort to remove the president without a coup.
The Kremlin has denied that Putin is suffering from any health issues, and Putin himself said in June that such claims were "greatly exaggerated." CIA Director William Burns this month also dispelled rumors about the state of Putin's health, saying "as far as we can tell, he's entirely too healthy."
But questions remain, and Patrushev's emergence as a dependable frontman and frequent, public promoter of Russia's war in recent months has prompted questions about his personal aims and whether or not he may be seeking Putin's power for himself.
A Kremlin spokesperson told The Washington Post earlier this month that Patrushev's role had not significantly changed and brushed off suggestions that the security secretary had amassed new powers. Similarly, a spokesperson for the Security Council denied to the outlet that Patrushev is seeking any advancement.
GenSight Biologics (Euronext: SIGHT, ISIN: FR0013183985, PEA-PME eligible), a biopharma company focused on developing and commercializing innovative gene therapies for retinal neurodegenerative diseases and central nervous system disorders, today reported its interim financial results for the first half of 2022. The full interim financial report is available on the Company’s website in the Investors section. The 2022 half-year financial statements were subject to a limited review by the Company’s statutory auditors and approved by the Board of Directors on July 27, 2022.
"We continue to focus our efforts and resources in 2022 on addressing our manufacturing challenges while getting ready for the successful commercial launch of LUMEVOQ in 2023," commented Thomas Gidoin, Chief Financial Officer of GenSight Biologics. "With a current cash runway to early Q1 2023, we have been assessing several financing options, non or as little dilutive as possible, over the past few months, and are now wrapping up discussions aiming at closing a transaction in favorable terms in the Fall."