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IMF staff reaches agreement with Ukraine for $15.6bn programme

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

The International Monetary Fund announced on Tuesday (21 March) that it had reached a staff level agreement with Ukraine to fund a four year financing package of approximately $15.6 billion. This will provide funds for Ukraine as it defends against Russian invasion.The IMF's board must still ratify the agreement. It takes into account Ukraine's path to joining the European Union following the war. According to the fund, its executive board would discuss approval within the next few weeks.Gavin Gray, an official at the IMF, stated that the programme's overarching goals were to maintain economic and financial stability under conditions of extraordinarily high uncertainty, restore debt sustainability and support Ukraine's recovery along the path towards EU accession in post-war periods.The IMF staff briefed the board members Tuesday about the agreement, which would be Ukraine’s largest loan package since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A source familiar with the matter sta...

Armenia: The caucasian ally of Russian aggression against Ukraine

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that Armenia is a post-Soviet democracy in the Caucasus oriented toward Western values.” This could have been the opening line in an article about Armenia in a better world, but it can hardly be said about Armenia in 2023. What concerns its Soviet past and geographic location is still relevant, but its commitment to democratic Western values and rule of law is highly questionable - writes James Wilson.The Russian aggression in Ukraine has exposed the ugly truth about Armenia and its participation in the conflict on the side of the aggressor.On November 23, Russia fired missiles at the maternity ward of the hospital in Volnyansk, Zaporizhia region (a newborn baby was killed), a residential house and a clinic in Kupyansk, Kharkiv region (two dead), residential buildings in Kyiv and Vyshgorod, Kyiv region (7 dead). More missiles targeted Poltava, Vinnitsa, Lviv regions, Odessa, Dnipro, and Mariupol. On the same day Prime Minister Pashinyan welcom...

Bay Area Hells Angels member gets 21 months for gun possession

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

A member of the Vallejo chapter of the Hells Angels, among four indicted last year and in 2023 on firearms or ammunition charges, was sentenced on Tuesday to 21 months in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearmJaime Alvarez, 52, of Vallejo, who pleaded guilty to the charge in December, heard U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd hand down the sentence in a federal courtroom in the Department of Justice’s Eastern District of California in Sacramento. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed the sentence.As of late Tuesday afternoon, Alvarez was not in custody, Sacramento County Jail records indicated.According to court documents, on Dec. 8, 2021, law enforcement officers served a search warrant at Alvarez’s home as part of an investigation into a brutal beating at the clubhouse for the Vallejo chapter of the notorious motorcycle club.Specifically, in October 2021, two different victims — both of whom were members of a different motorcycle club considered a “pupp...

Opinion: Americans’ health is a big reason for high COVID-19 death rate

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

For the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate in the future, that America is one of the unhealthiest countries in the industrialized world. Critics on the right and left harp on how the pandemic was handled, but in fact the dismal outcomes in the U.S. do not reflect management of the crisis so much as our underlying health as a country.With the caveat that the actual figures from China are unknown, in the past three years, the U.S. is the only country in the world that has suffered more than 1 million deaths from COVID-19. The U.S. death total exceeds that of every other country, except Brazil, by more than half a million. Even when normalized for population, the U.S. per capita death rate is just outside the top 10 in the world and rising steadily.This is not the result of the policies of President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden. Nor does the explanation for the high number of U.S. deaths lie in an abnormally high case total...

Marin mudslide triggered by ‘bomb cyclone’ closes road, threatens utilities

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

Marin picked up the pieces after another powerful storm slammed into Marin, triggering a mudslide in Novato that threatened water and gas lines that distribute throughout the county.The Tuesday night landslide destroyed a section of Redwood Boulevard north of the city that runs adjacent to Highway 101. The slide caused a large segment of the road to buckle, blocking access to Olompali State Park and bending a PG&E power pole.The “bomb cyclone” storm that ripped through the county on Tuesday resulted in downed trees into homes and widespread outages that left areas of Woodacre and Sausalito especially hard hit. The swirling low pressure system deepened quickly, increasing wind speed. Tuesday broke the all-time record for the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in March at San Francisco International Airport.The rare event killed three people in the Bay Area. Falling trees killed a homeless man in Oakland near Lake Merritt, an elderly man sitting in a car in the Walnut Creek ...

Walters: Should California referendum law become harder to use?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

Over the last decade, as Democrats achieved total control of the state government and their policies took a turn to the left, those who oppose the ideological trend have increasingly used the only avenue still available – ballot measures to overturn what legislators and governors have wrought.Recent elections have seen a spate of initiatives (to write new laws) and referenda (to block legislative laws) sponsored by business interests to overturn the Capitol’s decrees. Proponents have included the tobacco, bail bond and plastics industries, as well as ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft.Next year, voters are certain to face two other business-sponsored measures: referenda by the fast food and oil industries to block newly enacted regulations on their operations. Others could be added. For instance, were Gov. Gavin Newsom to succeed in imposing fines on gasoline refiners for exceeding profit limits, another oil industry referendum is likely.New laws being challenged by referen...

Singer Jackson Browne considers appeal to Santa Cruz County property court ruling

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

APTOS — Singer/songwriter Jackson Browne, who recently lost a legal land dispute with neighbors to his long-time Porter Gulch Road property, is considering an appeal, according to his legal team.Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Timothy Volkmann ruled earlier this month on a 2019 lawsuit regarding who is allowed use of a road stretching between the two properties.Jackson Browne performs at Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa in 2019. (Kelly A. Swift — Orange County Register Contributing Photographer) Plaintiffs Christopher Wheeler and Sarah Claus took Browne to court initially due to a fence set up between their undeveloped land and Browne’s paved driveway. They said Browne’s driveway had been granted in the 1960s as an easement allowing use of the shared point of ingress and egress. The suit later developed into a case where the judge was asked to interpret if a decades-old easement granted by an earlier owner actually referred to another logging road on the Wheeler-Claus ...

Santa Cruz County residents start to recover from damaging storm system

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

SANTA CRUZ — With powerful wind gusts reaching speeds up to 80 mph in the mountains Tuesday, and soil saturated from weeks of seemingly perpetual rainfall, trees fell all over Santa Cruz County — on powerlines, vehicles, houses and highways leading to a flurry of car accidents, road closures and power outages.According to PG&E communications representative Benjamin Spillman, as of Wednesday afternoon there were about 16,000 customers without power in Santa Cruz County, across 152 outages, with about 14,015 customers power having been restored since Tuesday when there were nearly 30,000 outages in the county.A massive fir tree on Tuesday sheared off a bedroom of Don Saputo and Dani Piserchio’s house off of Bear Creek Road in Boulder Creek. (Shmuel Thaler/Santa Cruz Sentinel) Spillman said that there are approximately 277 crews working to restore power system-wide, with 52 crews in the South Bay and Central Coast. In the mountainous areas of Santa Cruz County, crews are conte...

Accused killer of California Bishop David O’Connell pleads not guilty to murder charge

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

An exhibit honoring the life, ministry and legacy of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles Auxiliary, Bishop David O’Connell on display at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, Friday, Mar 17, 2023. Bishop O’Connell was shot and killed on February 18. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)The Funeral Mass begins for Bishop David O’Connell at Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, CA Friday, March 3, 2023. O’Connell was found shot at his Hacienda Heights home on February 18. The suspect in the shooting, 61-year-old Carlos Medina, has been charged with the murder. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)Archbishop Gomez walks to the altar for Bishop David O’Connell’s Vigil Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles on Thursday evening, March 2, 2023. O’Connell was shot and killed at his Hacienda Heights home on Feb. 18. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)Flowers at the entrance for the viewing for...

Authorities find body of missing 20-year-old man after search of storm-swollen California creek

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:58:01 GMT

Authorities on Wednesday found the body of a 20-year-old man after a search of the rain-swollen San Diego Creek in Irvine.Police said the man, who was developmentally disabled, had been dropped off at an L.A. Fitness gym at Culver and Barranca by his mother around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. When she went to pick him up three hours later, he wasn’t there, they said.Police and other law enforcement agencies in Orange County, including heavy rescue personnel, responded in force Wednesday, and eventually ended up a few miles down the creek, near UC Irvine, in search of the missing man.Loud, low-flying sheriff’s helicopters hovered over the area near the intersection of Harvard and University, which is close to the Rancho San Joaquin Golf Course. OC Fire Authority crews, and police and sheriff’s rescue vehicles, could be seen parked on the banks of the creek, as curious onlookers watched a crew of about a dozen rescue workers positioned in the creek’s flowing water, near an inflatable boat.Relat...