Personalities – THE NEWS

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan started yesterday and ends today his visit to Washington where he will have a meeting in the afternoon with his American counterpart Anthony Blinken. A statement from the Turkish Foreign Ministry states that the two ministers will discuss bilateral relations, as well as regional and global developments. One of the topics on the agenda is the process of the US supplying Turkey with 40 new F-16 Block-70s and the modernization of 79 existing F-16s of the Turkish fleet, as it enters the negotiation phase after the US sends the drafts of offer and acceptance letters.

American-Turkish relations entered a normalization phase after Turkey’s approval of Sweden’s accession to NATO. But there are also thorns. The Turkish side urgently raises the issue of American policy towards the Kurdish forces in Northern Syria, which Turkey characterizes as terrorists.

United Arab Emirates astronaut Nora al-Matroushi has become the first woman of Arab origin to complete NASA’s training program and is now ready to conquer Space. Al Matrousi, 30, remembers a class about space when she was in primary school, in which the teacher simulated a mission to the surface of the moon, with spacesuits made from craft supplies and a children’s tent in the shape of a rocket. “That’s when it all started,” he says. Al Matrousi, a mechanical engineer who has worked in the oil industry, was one of two female astronaut candidates selected in 2021 by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) to participate in a NASA training program.

Today, after two years of hard work, she is a fully certified astronaut and can participate in missions to the International Space Station or the Artemis program which involves manned space flights to explore the Moon.

Money for Donald Trump to pay the fines that fall one after the other. The former president will have to pay at least £300,000 in legal costs to the company of a former British agent he sued after a controversial report linking him to Russia was published. Former spy Christopher Steele’s report on Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow caused a political firestorm in 2017. The former US president – ​​and re-candidate for the presidency – appealed to the High Court in London, citing the Privacy Act .

Steele’s report contained raw, unverified information and also referred to a purported sex video. Trump was targeting Steele’s private intelligence agency and seeking punitive damages. But the British judiciary rejected his appeal and now Trump is required to pay the court costs.