NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
1 Migrant plan: In Brussels, the European Union’s top migration official, Dmitris Avramopoulos, urged EU member states on Tuesday to back a temporary plan to quickly get migrants off boats in the Mediterranean Sea and distribute them among willing countries. Germany, France, Italy and Malta are seeking approval from their EU partners for a “fasttrack” process to screen migrants, relocate asylumseekers and return people who do not apply or qualify for asylum, all within four weeks. For more than a year, humanitarian ships that picked up migrants having left Libya in unseaworthy boats were blocked from docking or disembarking passengers in Italy or Malta. Well over a million migrants arrived in the EU in 2015, most of them refugees from countries at war like Syria or Iraq, sparking one of Europe’s biggest political crises as nations bickered over who should take them in.
2 Brexit talks: Britain and the European Union traded badtempered barbs Tuesday as the chances of a Brexit deal appeared to fade, with just over three weeks until the United Kingdom’s scheduled departure from the bloc. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office blamed EU intransigence for a breakdown in negotiations, sparking a warning from a top EU leader against playing a “stupid blame game.” French President Emmanuel Macron has said the EU will assess by Friday whether a deal is possible.
3 Elephant deaths: The bodies of five more wild elephants have been discovered below a steep waterfall in Khao Yai National Park in central Thailand, officials said Tuesday, bringing to 11 the number believed to have been swept away over the weekend after a calf slipped and the others tried to save it. Park officials discovered the additional bodies on Monday. This is the worst such episode for the park’s wild elephants in recent memory. A similar disaster killed eight elephants in 1992.
4 Priceless art: The Louvre opened a new sprawling art conservation center Tuesday some 120 miles from Paris to protect the museum’s priceless artworks from its floodprone storage reserves. The Louvre Conservation Center in Lievin, northern France, will help protect valuable works from the swelling Seine River as major floods grow more frequent and the riverside museum has found itself lacking safe storage space. Protecting the museum’s works — many of which are out of public view in the belly of the former palace — has taken on additional urgency in recent years after severe floods in 2016 and 2018 forced the Louvre to evacuate endangered artworks from basements and to close exhibits.
5 “Comfort woman”: A Japanese exhibit dedicated to censored art reopened Tuesday in Tokyo after being forced to close because of threats over a statue symbolizing World War II Korean “comfort women” sexually abused by Japanese soldiers. The exhibit, part of the Aichi Triennale 2019 art festival, features a “comfort woman” statue and other works previously censored because of themes considered taboo in Japan, such as wartime history and Emperor Hirohito’s role in the war. For Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his conservative supporters, the statue is an eyesore. They have campaigned to put embarrassing wartime history in the past, and complained about the growing number of “comfort women” statues built by South Korean activists in and outside South Korea, including the United States.