HELSINKI — Norway may put a fence along part or all the 198-kilometer (123-mile) border it shares with Russia, a minister said, a move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland.

“A border fence is very interesting, not only because it can act as a deterrent but also because it contains sensors and technology that allow you to detect if people are moving close to the border,” Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl said in an interview with the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK published late Saturday.

She said the Norwegian government is currently looking at “several measures” to beef up security on the border with Russia in the Arctic north, such as fencing, increasing the number of border staff or stepping up monitoring.

The Storskog border station, which has witnessed only a handful of illegal border crossing attempts in the past few years, is the only official crossing point into Norway from Russia.

Should the security situation in the delicate Arctic area worsen, the Norwegian government is ready to close the border on short notice, said Enger Mehl, who visited neighboring Finland this summer to learn about how the entire 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) Finnish-Russian land border was closed.

The Finnish government was prompted to close all crossing points from Russia to Finland in late 2023 after more than 1,300 third-country migrants without proper documentation or visas — an unusually high number — entered the country in three months, just months after the nation became a member of NATO.

To prevent Moscow using migrants in what the Finnish government calls Russia’s “hybrid warfare,” Helsinki is currently building fences with a total length of up to 200 kilometers (124 miles) in separate sections along the border zone that makes up part of NATO’s northern flank and serves as the European Union’s external border.

Finnish border officials say fences equipped with top-notch surveillance equipment — to be located mostly around crossing points — are needed to better monitor and control any migrants attempting to cross over from Russia and give officials time to react.

Inspired by Finland’s project, Enger Mehl said that such a fence could also be a good idea for Norway. According to NRK, her statement was supported by police chief Ellen Katrine Hætta in Norway’s northern Finnmark county.

“It’s a measure that may become relevant on all or part of the border” between Norway and Russia, Enger Mehl said.

The Storskog border station is currently surrounded by a 200-meter (660-foot) -long and 3.5-meter (12-foot) -high fence erected in 2016 after some 5,000 migrants and asylum-seekers had crossed over from Russia to Norway a year earlier.

Norway, a nation of 5.6 million, is a NATO member but isn’t part of the European Union. However, it belongs to the EU’s Schengen area, whose participants have abolished border controls at their mutual borders, guaranteeing free movement of citizens.
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Moscow — Russia announced Sunday that Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin will meet Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran on Monday.

The announcement came as Russia has condemned Israel’s “political murder” of Iran-backed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Mishustin will hold talks with Pezeshkian and First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref, the government statement said.

“It is planned to discuss the full range of Russian-Iranian cooperation in the trade and economic and cultural and humanitarian spheres,” Russia said.  

The talks will focus on “carrying out large joint projects in fields involving transport energy, industry and agriculture,” the statement added.  

Western governments have accused Iran of supplying both drones and missiles to Moscow for its war on Ukraine, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.

Pezeshkian is set to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Russia next month to attend the BRICS summit.

After leaving Iran, Russian Prime Minister Mishustin will attend a meeting in Armenia on Tuesday of the Eurasian Economic Forum, the government said Sunday, referring to a body within the framework of a grouping of former Soviet states.

The statement said the meeting would discuss digitalization, market operations and cooperation within the Eurasian Economic Union, made up of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

Russia often presents the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) as an alternative to Western political and economic groupings.
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Berlin — A man has been arrested after allegedly setting two fires in the western German city of Essen that left 30 people injured and driving a van into two shops, authorities said Sunday. 

Emergency services were alerted to two fires in residential buildings in quick succession shortly after 5 p.m. Saturday, police said. The injured people included eight children who were seriously hurt, and two of them were in a life-threatening condition after inhaling smoke. 

Shortly after the fires broke out, a van drove into two shops in the city, causing damage to property but no injuries. The suspect then allegedly threatened people with weapons, but several men managed to push him back with shovels and poles and hold him until police arrived. 

Police said the suspect was a 41-year-old Essen resident with Syrian citizenship. They said the man’s motive appeared to be that his wife had left him, and he targeted houses and shops where people who supported her lived. 

The fire service said that, when it arrived at the scene of the first blaze, smoke was billowing from the entrance of the building and people were calling for help from windows. Neighbors had put up ladders to help people escape, but they weren’t long enough to reach the upper floors. 

The suspect hasn’t commented so far on what happened Saturday but was previously known to authorities for threats and damage to property, police said. Prosecutors were seeking to have him kept in custody on suspicion of arson and attempted murder. 
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Puerto de la Estaca, Spain — Rescue teams on Sunday resumed searching for at least 48 migrants who went messing the day before when their boat overturned just as it was being rescued off Spain’s Canary Islands, killing at least nine people.

Hopes of finding survivors were slim as sea rescue teams searched the waters off El Hierro, an island in the Atlantic archipelago.

It is the latest in a series of such disasters off the coast of Africa.

“The search operation is resuming,” Spain’s maritime rescue organisation told AFP.

The 48 are “presumed dead,” Canaries regional president Fernando Clavijo told journalists on Saturday night.

More bodies will likely appear “over the next two, three days,” washed up by the current, he added.

Twenty-seven migrants were rescued and nine bodies recovered after the boat, which had set out from Nouadhibou in Mauritania, some 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) away, overturned off El Hierro.

The tragedy hit when rescuers arrived to assist the migrants after they themselves called emergency services, Spanish officials said.

Migrants rushed to one side of the precarious boat, causing it to tip.

The migrants “had gone two days without food or water”, which may have fueled their panic, Anselmo Pestana, head of the Canary Islands prefecture, told journalists in the port of La Estaca.

Spanish government sources said the boat may have been carrying up to 90 people, instead of 84 as originally announced, which could put the number of missing at more than 50.

This disaster follows the death of 39 migrants in early September when their boat sank off Senegal while attempting a similar crossing to the Canaries, from where migrants hope to reach mainland Europe.

Thousands of migrants have died in recent years setting off from west Africa to reach Europe via the Atlantic aboard overcrowded and often dilapidated boats.

 
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brussels — Pope Francis’ burdensome trip through Belgium reached new lows Saturday when defiant Catholic university women demanded to his face a “paradigm change” on women’s issues in the church and then expressed deep disappointment when Francis dug in. 

The Catholic University of Louvain, the Francophone campus of Belgium’s storied Catholic university, issued a scathing statement after Francis visited and repeated his view that women are the “fertile” nurturers of the church, inducing grimaces in his audience. 

“UC Louvain expresses its incomprehension and disapproval of the position expressed by Pope Francis regarding the role of women in the church and society,” the statement said, calling the pope’s views “deterministic and reductive.” 

Francis’ trip to Belgium, ostensibly to celebrate the university’s 600th anniversary, was always going to be difficult, given Belgium’s legacy of clerical sexual abuse and secular trends that have emptied churches in the once staunchly Catholic country. 

Francis got an earful Friday about the abuse crisis starting with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander Croos and continuing on down to the victims themselves. 

But it’s one thing for the pope to be lambasted by the liberal prime minister for the church’s mishandling of priests who raped children. It’s quite another to be openly criticized by the Catholic university that invited him and long was the Vatican’s intellectual fiefdom in Belgium. 

Church needs ‘paradigm shift,’ say students

The students made an impassioned plea to Francis for the church to change its view of women. It is an issue Francis knows well: He has made some changes during his 11-year pontificate, allowing women to serve as acolytes, appointing several women to high-ranking positions in the Vatican, and saying women must have greater decision-making roles in the church. 

But he has ruled out ordaining women as priests and has refused so far to budge on demands to allow women to serve as deacons, who perform many of the same tasks as priests. He has taken the women’s issue off the table for debate at the Vatican’s upcoming three-week synod, or meeting, because it’s too thorny to be dealt with in such a short time. He has punted it to theologians and canonists to chew over into next year. 

In a letter read aloud on stage with the pope listening attentively, the students noted that Francis’ landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no women theologians and “exalts their maternal role and forbids them access to ordained ministries.” 

“Women have been made invisible. Invisible in their lives, women have also been invisible in their intellectual contributions,” the students said. 

“What, then, is the place of women in the church?” they asked. “We need a paradigm shift, which can and must draw on the treasures of spirituality as much as on the development of the various disciplines of science.” 

Francis said he liked what they said, but repeated his frequent refrain that “the church is woman,” only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus, and that men and women were complementary. 

“Woman is fertile welcome. Care. Vital devotion,” Francis said. “Let us be more attentive to the many daily expressions of this love, from friendship to the workplace, from studies to the exercise of responsibility in the church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to the service of others and the building up of the kingdom of God.” 

Louvain said such terminology had no place in a university or society today. It emphasized the point with the entertainment for the event featuring a jazz rendition of Lady Gaga’s LGBTQ+ anthem “Born This Way.” 

“UC Louvain can only express its disagreement with this deterministic and reductive position,” the statement said. “It reaffirms its desire for everyone to flourish within it and in society, whatever their origins, gender or sexual orientation. It calls on the church to follow the same path, without any form of discrimination.” 

The comment followed a speech Friday by the rector of the Dutch campus of the university in which he ventured that the church would be a much more welcoming place if women could be priests. 

The university’s back-to-back criticism was especially significant as Francis was long held up in Europe as a beacon of progressive hope following the conservative papacies of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. 

Pope prays at king’s tomb

Yet Francis toed the conservative line earlier in the day too. 

He went to the royal crypt in the Church of Our Lady to pray at the tomb of King Baudouin, best known for having refused to give royal assent, one of his constitutional duties, to a parliament-approved bill legalizing abortion. 

Baudouin stepped down for one day in 1990 to allow the government to pass the law, which he would otherwise have been required to sign, before he was reinstated as king. 

Francis praised Baudouin’s courage when he decided to “leave his position as king to not sign a homicidal law,” according to the Vatican summary of the private encounter, which was attended by Baudouin’s nephew, King Philippe, and Queen Mathilde. 

The pope then referred to a new legislative proposal to extend the legal limit for an abortion in Belgium, from 12 weeks to 18 weeks after conception. The bill failed at the last minute because parties in government negotiations considered the timing inopportune. 

Francis urged Belgians to look to Baudouin’s example in preventing such a law and added that he hoped the former king’s beatification cause would move ahead. 
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