Pelosi rips Azerbaijan over deadly shelling against Armenia units
YEREVAN, Armenia — U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that the United States deplores recent attacks by Azerbaijan and called for a negotiated solution to the countries’ conflict.
Pelsoi’s visit to the Armenian capital, Yerevan, with a congressional delegation came just days after two days of shelling by both sides that killed more than 200 troops.
It was the largest outbreak of hostilities in more than two years.
The two ex-Soviet countries have been locked in a decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but was long under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.
During a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed broad swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories held by Armenian forces. More than 6,700 people died in that fighting.
Armenia and Azerbaijan each blamed the other for starting the shelling attacks last week.
Pelosi on Sunday met with Alen Simonyan, president of Armenia’s parliament, and told reporters afterward that “our meeting again had a particular importance to us because the focus was on security following the illegal and deadly attacks by Azerbaijan on the Armenian territory.
“We strongly condemn those attacks — we in our delegation on behalf of Congress — which threaten prospects for a muchneeded peace agreement,” she said.
The Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry criticized her comments.
“Pelosi’s baseless and unfair accusations against Azerbaijan are unacceptable,” it said in a statement.
WWII interment: The remains of a sailor from Massachusetts who died when the USS Oklahoma was struck by multiple torpedoes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 will be buried Monday at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
The interment comes more than 80 years after the attack that drew the U.S. into World War II and nearly four years after the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency announced that Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class Roman W. Sadlowski, of Pittsfield, had been accounted for using advanced DNA and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial and material evidence.
About 15 family members from Massachusetts, Texas and Florida are scheduled to attend the ceremony that was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, said Joe Makarski Jr., who is Sadlowski’s nephew and who supplied a DNA sample about a decade ago that was used to help identify the remains.
“It’s been a long time, and I am glad to be alive to finalize it,” Makarski, 81, said.
Sadlowski was among 429 USS Oklahoma sailors and marines who died.
Typhoon Nanmadol: A typhoon slammed ashore in southern Japan on Sunday as it pounded the region with strong winds and heavy rain, causing blackouts, paralyzing ground and air transportation and prompting the evacuation of thousands of people.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said Typhoon Nanmadol was heading north after making landfall
in Kagoshima city on Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu. It was packing maximum winds of 101 mph, and is forecast to reach Tokyo on Tuesday.
The weather agency predicted as much as 20 inches of rainfall by Monday night and warned of flooding and landslides.
China bus crash: A bus reportedly taking 47 people to COVID-19 quarantine in southwest China crashed in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, killing 27 and injuring 20 others, media said.
The bus overturned on an expressway in Guizhou province, a brief statement from the Sandu county police said. The injured were being treated, it said.
Chinese business news outlet Caixin said that Sandu officials confirmed that the passengers were “epidemic-related people” being taken from Guiyang, the provincial capital, to Lido county, which is 125 miles southeast.
Guiyang reported about 180 new cases Friday. China has maintained a strict “zero-COVID” policy that isolates infected people and close contacts to try to contain the spread of the disease.
Costa Rica bus crash: At least nine people were killed and 34 injured when a passenger bus fell off a 250-foot cliff on the Inter-American Highway in Costa Rica. Authorities attributed the accident to a landslide caused by heavy rain.
The accident occurred Saturday in an area known as Cambronero, some 45 miles west of San Jose, on the route that connects the Costa Rican capital to the Pacific coastal province of Puntarenas.
The Red Cross said the landslide pushed two vehicles into the bus, which plunged off the road.
Mediterranean rescues: The Spanish charity Open Arms has rescued 372 people
seeking to cross the central Mediterranean to Europe in unseaworthy smugglers’ boats and recovered the body of a man who had been shot by smugglers, officials said Sunday.
The rescue ship Open Arms Uno remained at sea and is seeking a safe port for the rescued people, including some who need medical attention and many who are suffering from dehydration, said Laura Lanuza, an Open Arms spokeswoman. She said they have made at least two requests for a safe port in Malta.
In all, the ship performed three rescues in 24 hours. In the largest rescue, the Open Arms picked up 294 people, mostly Egyptians, from an overcrowded barge in waters south of Malta in an nighttime operation that spanned nearly five hours before dawn Sunday. Those rescued said they had been at sea for four days.
Eritrean forces: Eritrea is mobilizing its armed forces and appears to be sending
them to Ethiopia to aid its neighbor’s war in the Tigray region, according to activists and international authorities.
Britain and Canada issued travel advisories asking their citizens in Eritrea to be vigilant.
Eritrea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, mandates military service for all its citizens between the ages of 18 and 40. Rights groups say the practice, which lasts indefinitely in most cases, is driving thousands of Eritrean youths into exile.
Eritreans make up a large number of the migrants attempting to cross to Europe, often dangerously by sea.
Eritrean forces fought on the side of Ethiopian federal troops in the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which shares a border with Eritrea, when that conflict broke out in November 2020. Eritrean forces were implicated in some of the worst atrocities committed in the war — charges they deny.