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BUSAN, South Korea, Sept 23 (Reuters) - A U.S. aircraft carrier arrived in South Korea on Friday for the first time in about four years, set to join other military vessels in a show of force intended to send a message to North Korea. USS Ronald Reagan and ships from its accompanying strike group docked at a naval base in the southern port city of Busan ahead of joint drills with South Korean forces. Its arrival marks the most significant deployment yet under a new push to have more U.S. "strategic assets" operate in the area to deter North Korea. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-aircraft-carrier-arrives-south-korea-warning-north-korea-2022-09-22/

KYIV, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Russia launched referendums on Friday aimed at annexing four occupied regions of Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Kyiv and Western nations who dismissed the votes as a sham and pledged not to recognise their results. Ukrainian officials said people were banned from leaving some occupied areas until the four-day vote was over, armed groups were going into homes, and employees were threatened with the sack if they did not participate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a nightly address that the votes would be "unequivocally condemned" by the world, along with the mobilisation Russia began this week, including in Crimea and other areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-marches-farther-into-liberated-lands-separatist-calls-urgent-referendum-2022-09-19/

In the last 24 hours, Uganda has recorded four confirmed cases of Ebola, bringing the cumulative number of confirmed cases to 11, the country’s health ministry reported Friday in a statement. The Ugandan Health Ministry considers a “probable case” as any person who died from suspected EVD (ebola) and had an epidemiological link to a confirmed case but was not tested and did not have lab confirmation. The ministry considers “confirmed cases” for those with positive lab results. Around 25 patients are being admitted at a health facility in the East African country’s Mubende district where the Ebola outbreak was detected, the ministry said, while also stating that six of the cases had been confirmed to be infected while 19 were suspected of having the virus. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/23/africa/ebola-deaths-uganda-intl/index.html

Iranian women are burning their hijabs and cutting their hair short in protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died after being arrested in Tehran by Iran's notorious "morality police," who enforce the country's rules on hijabs and other conservative Islamic modes of dress and behavior. Here's what we know so far about Amini's death and the public furor it ignited, and the questions that remain: Amini was arrested for allegedly breaking hijab rules Amini, 22, died on Friday in northern Tehran. She had been arrested on Tuesday and reportedly was taken to a hospital shortly afterward. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/21/1124237272/mahsa-amini-iran-women-protest-hijab-morality-police

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LONDON, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Russia will on Friday begin its plan to annex around 15% of Ukrainian territory via referendums in four regions controlled by Russian forces, a move the West says is a gross violation of international law that significantly escalates the war. After nearly seven months of war, and a critical battlefield defeat in northeastern Ukraine earlier this month, President Vladimir Putin explicitly backed the referendums after the Russian-controlled regions lined up to ask for swift votes to join Russia. The self-styled Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People's Republics (LPR), which Putin recognised as independent just before the invasion, and Russian-installed administrations in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions will hold votes. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-begin-annexation-votes-ukrainian-regions-2022-09-22/

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Evading Military service is not grounds for refugee status.

VAALIMAA, Finland, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Finland said on Thursday it was considering barring most Russians from entering the country as traffic across the border from its eastern neighbour "intensified" following President Vladimir Putin's order for a partial military mobilisation. Finnish land border crossings have remained among the few entry points into Europe for Russians after a string of Western countries shut both physical frontiers and their air space to Russian planes in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Thursday the government was assessing risks posed by individuals travelling through Finland, and was considering ways to sharply reduce Russian transit. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finlands-border-guard-says-traffic-border-with-russia-increasing-2022-09-22/

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LONDON, Sept 22 (Reuters) - The Bank of England raised its key interest rate to 2.25% from 1.75% on Thursday and said it would continue to "respond forcefully, as necessary" to inflation, despite the economy entering recession. The BoE estimates Britain's economy will shrink 0.1% in the third quarter - partly due to the extra public holiday for Queen Elizabeth's funeral - which, combined with a fall in output in the second quarter, meets the definition of a technical recession. Economists polled by Reuters last week had forecast a repeat of August's half-point increase in rates, but financial markets had bet on a three-quarter-point rise, the biggest since 1989, barring a brief, failed attempt in 1992 to support sterling. https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/bank-england-raises-rates-225-despite-likely-recession-2022-09-22/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=reuters-business&utm_term=Business News - 2021 - Master List

Hours after Vladimir Putin shocked Russia by announcing the first mobilisation since the second world war, Oleg received his draft papers in the mailbox, ordering him to make his way to the local recruitment centre in Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan republic. As a 29-year-old sergeant in the Russian reserves, Oleg said he always knew that he would be the first in line if a mobilisation was declared, but held out hope that he would not be forced to fight in the war in Ukraine. “My heart sank when I got the call-up,” he said. “But I knew I had no time to despair.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/22/my-heart-sank-with-news-of-draft-russians-flee-in-droves

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UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Liz Truss met in person for the first time on Wednesday and said they want to ensure the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland is protected. Biden and Truss, meeting only days after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, sat down for discussions that also covered Ukraine on the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. "We both are committed to protecting the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-says-us-uk-are-committed-protecting-good-friday-agreement-2022-09-21/

A federal appeals court is allowing the Justice Department to continue looking at documents marked as classified that were seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort. The emergency intervention upends a trial judge’s order over those documents that blocked federal investigators’ work on the documents, and is a strong rebuke of the Trump team’s attempt to suggest without evidence that materials were somehow declassified. A special master’s review of that subset of about 100 records, which would’ve allowed Trump’s legal team to see them, is now partially stopped. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/21/politics/appeals-court-mar-a-lago-criminal-classified-documents/index.html

WASHINGTON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell vowed on Wednesday that he and his fellow policymakers would "keep at" their battle to beat down inflation, as the U.S. central bank hiked interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point for a third straight time and signaled that borrowing costs would keep rising this year. In a sobering new set of projections, the Fed foresees its policy rate rising at a faster pace and to a higher level than expected, the economy slowing to a crawl, and unemployment rising to a degree historically associated with recessions. Powell was blunt about the "pain" to come, citing rising joblessness and singling out the housing market, a persistent source of rising consumer inflation, as being likely in need of a "correction." https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/fed-set-big-rate-hike-waters-get-choppy-worlds-central-banks-2022-09-21/

The New York state attorney general filed a sweeping lawsuit Wednesday against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. In the more than 200-page lawsuit, Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, alleges the fraud touched all aspects of the Trump business, including its properties and golf courses. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals. “This conduct cannot be brushed aside and dismissed as some sort of good-faith mistake,” James said at a news conference in New York. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/21/politics/trump-new-york-attorney-general-letitia-james-fraud-lawsuit/index.html

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Early on in the pandemic, there were a number of quite elderly people -- as in the over the century mark -- who survived Covid. There was some speculation that they had an immunity conveyed by some other infection, such as Spanish Flu or Smallpox. I don't know if it was ever followed up on. I suspect that one of things that gave otherwise healthy older people some protection was the fact that their immune system didn't go into overdrive. A lot of the deaths and serious illnesses were in part our immune system attempting to fight the virus. It's a rather small group for any kind of study.

At least six children were killed and 17 wounded when army helicopters shot at a school in Myanmar, media reports and residents said on Monday, as the military said it opened fire because rebels were using the building to attack its forces. Myanmar’s military junta on Tuesday admitted striking the school in the central Sagain Region, but rejected the accusations made by the country’s pro-democracy shadow government, known as the National Unity Government (NUG), that it had killed children during the strike last Friday. A spokesperson for the military said government forces entered the village of Let Yet Kone to clear rebel “terrorists” and accused the Kachin Independence Army, a rebel group, and the People’s Defence Force (PDF), an umbrella organization of armed guerrillas, of using children as “human shields.” https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/19/asia/myanmar-army-junta-helicopter-school-attack-intl-hnk/index.html

CNN — Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master overseeing the seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago, signaled on Tuesday to lawyers for former President Donald Trump that if they don’t make a case that any of the documents were declassified, he would determine that they’re classified. Out of court, Trump has pushed the claim he declassified all the documents, and his lawyers have raised that possibility in court papers, though they have never explicitly argued that anything was declassified. Federal prosecutors have argued for weeks that documents seized from Mar-a-Lago that contain classification markings – like “top secret” – should be treated as if they are classified.