Closing summary
This blog will be closing shortly. Here is an overview of today’s events.
France’s caretaker prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has said his talks with various party leaders had revealed a “willingness” to pass a budget by the end of the year and that snap parliamentary elections were now looking less likely.
“This willingness creates a momentum and a convergence, obviously, which make the possibilities of a dissolution more remote,” he said in a brief address on Wednesday from the courtyard of Matignon Palace, the prime minister’s residence, in Paris.
Lecornu, who resigned on Monday after 27 days in office but was given 48 hours by Emmanuel Macron to try to rally support for the new government, said he would deliver his conclusions to the French president as planned later on Wednesday.
You can read more on the topic in Jon Henley’s piece here: Outgoing French PM hopeful for concessions to avoid snap elections
In other developments:
Lecornu clarified on Wednesday that outgoing ministers from his government would not be entitled to compensation. The resigning prime minister noted in his speech that the topic of compensation for such ministers had upset “a certain number of French people”.
The outgoing prime minister also noted ongoing efforts to establish New Caledonia as a new state, but said political tensions in the country had halted the process. New Caledonia is an overseas territory that was rocked by deadly separatist violence last year. The territory, home to about 270,000 people, has faced a deadlock between forces loyal to France and those wanting independence.
Spanish emergency workers on Wednesday recovered the bodies of two missing construction workers in the rubble of a building that collapsed in central Madrid a day earlier. The recovery brought the death toll to four.
German federal police will soon be allowed to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles, interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Wednesday, after a spate of drone sightings believed to be Russian efforts to spy and intimidate. Unveiling a draft law, Dobrindt said police would be authorised “to take state-of-the-art technical action against drone threats, for example with electromagnetic pulses, jamming, GPS interference, but also with physical means”.
Gisèle Pelicot, who became a feminist hero in a mass rape trial last year, testified in court on Wednesday, telling the one man who still denies raping her that she “never” gave him her consent. Husamettin Dogan, 44, has maintained his innocence, drawing the woman who publicly defied her abusers back into court.
Russia seriously damaged one of Ukraine’s thermal power plants in an overnight attack, authorities said on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Ukrainian rockets killed three people and wounded one more in Russia’s Belgorod border region, where previous attacks have brought power outages, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Wednesday.
Russia will shoot down Tomahawk cruise missiles and bomb their launch sites if the United States decides to supply them to Ukraine and find a way to retaliate against Washington that hurts, a senior Russian lawmaker said on Wednesday. The comments came as Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday that momentum towards reaching a peace deal in Ukraine after the presidential meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Anchorage, Alaska, had largely “gone”.
Russia’s lower house of parliament on Wednesday approved a move to withdraw from a landmark agreement with the United States aimed at reducing vast stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium left over from thousands of cold war nuclear warheads. The Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA), signed in 2000, committed the United States and Russia to dispose of at least 34 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium each, which US officials said would have been enough for as many as 17,000 nuclear warheads. It came into force in 2011.
Russia seriously damaged one of Ukraine’s thermal power plants in an overnight attack, authorities said on Wednesday, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
The move came as Moscow pursued its campaign to deny Ukrainians heat, light and running water as winter approaches
Two workers were injured in the attack, according to DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest electricity operator. It provided no further information, including the plant’s location.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that its air defenses overnight intercepted 53 Ukrainian drones over nine Russian regions.
The Ukrainian town of Shostka, in the north-eastern Sumy region, has been hard hit by the Russian onslaught against the power supply, officials say.
Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted or jammed 154 out of 183 Russian strike and decoy drones fired at the country overnight.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian rockets killed three people and wounded one more in Russia’s Belgorod border region, where previous attacks have brought power outages, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Wednesday.
