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Egyptian TV presenter Mohamed al-Ghiety is sentenced to one year of hard labor and fined 3,000 Egyptian pounds ($167; £130) for "promoting homosexuality" by interviewing a gay man on the privately-owned LTC Egypt TV channel last year. | An Egyptian TV presenter has been sentenced to one year of hard labour for interviewing a gay man last year.
A court in Giza also fined Mohamed al-Ghiety 3,000 Egyptian pounds ($167; £130) for "promoting homosexuality" on his privately owned LTC TV channel.
The gay man, whose identity was hidden, had talked about life as a sex worker.
Homosexuality is not explicitly criminalised in Egypt, however, the authorities have been increasingly cracking down on the LGBT community. They routinely arrest people suspected of engaging in consensual homosexual conduct on charges of "debauchery", immorality or blasphemy.
The most recent case came about after lawyer Samir Sabry, who is well known in Egypt for taking celebrities to court, filed a lawsuit against Ghiety for his interview which took place in August 2018.
The TV host, who has voiced homophobic views on a number of occasions, spoke to a gay man who expressed regret over his sexuality and described life as a prostitute. The man's face had been blurred to conceal his identity.
Egypt's top media body, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, immediately took the channel off air for two weeks, citing "professional violations". The prosecuting lawyer, Mr Sabry, accused the TV host of revealing there to be financial gains of "practising homosexuality", state-owned al-Ahram newspaper reports.
In addition to the jail term and fine, the misdemeanours court also ordered Ghiety to be put under surveillance for one year after serving his sentence, Mr Sabry said. The verdict could be appealed against and suspended if Ghiety paid bail of 1,000 Egyptian pounds, pending the appeal's outcome, he added.
Egypt's media council banned homosexuals from appearing on any media outlet after a rainbow flag was raised at a concert in Cairo in 2017, in a rare public show of support for the LGBT community in the conservative, mainly Muslim country.
A crackdown was also launched on suspected homosexuals with dozens of people arrested, in a move decried by human rights groups.
The authorities rely on a 1961 prostitution law that criminalises "habitual debauchery" to charge people who they suspect of engaging in consensual homosexual conduct. Mr Sabry was also the lawyer who filed a case against Egyptian actress Rania Youssef on charges of "inciting debauchery" over a see-through outfit she wore at an awards ceremony last year. He later dropped the case after Ms Youssef apologised. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | January 2019 | ['(BBC)'] |
Khadim Hussain Rizvi, chief of Pakistani political party TehreekeLabbaik Pakistan , together with his party leaders, is arrested after TLP's refusal to postpone their call for a public rally planned for 25 November at Liaqat Bagh, Rawalpindi. Pakistan's Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry clarifies that the action has no connection with the Asia Bibi case. , | Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) chief Khadim Hussain Rizvi was taken into "protective custody" by police from Lahore as law enforcement agencies launched a massive crackdown against workers of TLP and Tehreek-i-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLYRA) on Friday night.
"Khadim Hussain Rizvi has been taken into protective custody by police and shifted to a guest house," said Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry late Friday night, confirming reports of the incendiary leader's arrest via Twitter. High/red alert had been generated to heighten the security in the provincial capital.
The crackdown came ahead of Rizvi's call to party members to observe martyrs’ day on November 25 (Sunday). He had asked workers and supporters to gather at Faizabad in the federal capital the same venue where the party had staged a weeks-long sit-in last year that had virtually paralysed the federal capital and led to several people losing their lives.
Law enforcement personnel on Friday night also took in custody TLYRA head Dr Asif Ashraf Jalali. Furthermore, according to security sources, TLP patron Pir Afzal Qadri was also arrested the same night from Gujrat.
Soon after the news of the arrest of the clerics spread, hundreds of activists of the two parties took to the streets and blocked many roads for traffic.
A constable was seriously injured at Multan Road where the violent activists clashed with police.
Following the unrest and severe clashes, Rangers reached Lahore, taking control of city’s major roads. Prior to the agitation, a police officer said, hundreds of trained police commandos and personnel of the anti-riot force were dispatched to the Multan Road after the information that violent activists of the TLP had held a senior police officer Iqbal Town SP Syed Ali hostage along with his guards.
The district authorities in Rawalpindi issued detainment orders for TLP divisional leader Inayatul Haq. According to the notification, Haq will be detained in a jail for 15 days.
According to a correspondent in Sialkot, police arrested Sufi Mohammad Rafiq, district emir of the TLP, and four main activists of the party, identified as Saleem Shahid, Mehbub Hassan, Nasir Dogar and Syed Kaleemul Hassan Shah.
On Saturday, security officials said that since last night, at least 30 of the party's workers have been arrested from various parts of the capital. Around 100 police personnel have been deployed at Faizabad interchange.
According to police sources, 143 TLP workers have so far been arrested from Rawalpindi, 18 from Attock, 55 from Jhelum and five from Chakwal, taking the total arrests from the four cities to 221. More than a hundred arrests were also made in Karachi, according to Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) East Azfar Mahesar, who visited Numaish Chowrangi to brief police officials. According to a senior police official, “a total of 154 TLP workers were apprehended from different areas of the city”.
Among them, 53 were arrested from district East, 34 from Korangi, 31 from Malir, 17 from Central and 19 from district West. At least 27 other workers were detained by Pakistan Rangers Sindh who were later on handed over to the police for further legal action.
"The action was prompted by TLP's refusal to withdraw its call for protest on November 25. It’s to safeguard public life, property and order," Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry shared on Twitter on Friday night. The arrest "has to do nothing with Asia Bibi case", Chaudhry said, adding the TLP had insisted on coming to Rawalpindi "refusing [the government's] proposal for alternative arrangements".
"The TLP has become a continuous threat to the life and properties of the citizens and is doing politics under the guise of religion ... the situation is fully under control, people should remain peaceful and fully cooperate with authorities," he said in a tweet in Urdu.
The minister said the government "did it[s] best" to convince the party against convening for the protest, "but they refused every offer and started to provoke violence".
"State is responsible to defend finality and respect of Holy Prophet PBUH. Law shall take its course and it cannot be left to individuals," Chaudhry concluded.
Prior to Chaudhry's tweets, a family member of Rizvi had confirmed to DawnNewsTV that the TLP chief had been taken into custody. “He was arrested from his hujra in Lahore,” a family member of Rizvi told Samaa TV.
Rizvi's son, Saad, while talking to 7 News said along with his father, all district leaders of TLP had been arrested.
The Punjab information and law ministers, however, had said they did not know about any such action being taken against Rizvi.
Examine: Is TLP here to stay?
TLP leader Pir Afzal Qadri in a video message had corroborated that police "was raiding [their] mosques in order to arrest leaders".
The reports of the arrests come weeks after the TLP led three-day protests across the country against the acquittal of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman whose blasphemy conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court at the end of last month.
The demonstrators during the protests had termed the chief justice “liable to be killed” and had called for a rebellion against the army chief “because he is a non-Muslim”.
This had led to Prime Minister Imran Khan issuing a stern warning to the agitators and telling them: "Do not clash with the state".
“Do not take us [to a situation] where we are compelled to take [strict] action,” the prime minister had said in a televised speech.
Two days later, however, the TLP had agreed to end the nationwide protest sit-ins after reaching an agreement with the federal and Punjab governments under which the latter agreed to initiate the legal process to put Aasia Bibi's name on the Exit Control List (ECL) and refrain from objecting to review of the court judgement.
The TLP, in turn, had only offered an apology "if it hurt the sentiments of or inconvenienced anyone without reason".
In November 2017, TLP workers demanding the resignation of then law minister Zahid Hamid had staged a weeks-long sit-in at the Faizabad interchange that had virtually paralysed the federal capital and led to several people losing their lives.
On November 21 of the same month, the apex court had taken notice of the sit-in and directed the defence and interior secretaries to submit a detailed report on the matter.
Days later, the then PML-N government had launched against the protesters an operation which, when failed, had forced the authorities to cave and Hamid to resign.
The Supreme Court on Thursday had reserved its verdict on the suo motu case over the Faizabad sit-in. The reserved verdict pertains to a variety of issues stemming from TLP's infamous sit-in, including its party registration as well as its violent protest. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Accuse | November 2018 | ['(TLP)', '(Dawn)', '(Pakistan Today)'] |
Julian Assange appears in London's High Court to begin his appeal against extradition to Sweden as his UK house arrest enters its 216th day. | He arrived in silence and was told by his lawyer to leave in silence. In between he was humbled. Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, appeared at the high court in London at the start of his latest fight against extradition to Sweden over sex allegations. He was armed with a new strategy and a new legal team aimed at winning his freedom after 216 days of house arrest.
On Sunday, he celebrated his 40th birthday at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk with "wiki cupcakes" and a party for 100 friends and supporters. But he was fighting an extradition request that he fears could pave the way to further extradition to America, and serious charges related to his leak of several hundred thousand classified US government documents.
The new approach demanded he fight his natural instinct to speak out, so he sealed his lips as he fought through a phalanx of photographers outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Once inside the vaulted and wood-lined courtroom four where he faced Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Ouseley, his new tactics became clear. In essence, his lawyers would admit, his sexual behaviour with two Swedish women he had met while on work in Stockholm last August might have been seen as "disrespectful, discourteous, disturbing" but it was not illegal.
His failed appeal against the same extradition order in February had been marked by grandstanding speeches and a combative legal approach that tore into the Swedish authorities who wanted him to face questioning over four allegations of unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape. Assange's side had also claimed there was no chance of a fair trial in Sweden because of the political heat around the case after WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US government documents in 2010.
His new legal team advanced none of these arguments, and his counsel, Ben Emmerson, spelled out the difference in approach. He told the court: "Nothing I say should be taken as denigrating the complainants, the genuineness of their feelings of regret, to trivialise their experience or to challenge whether they felt Assange's conduct was disrespectful, discourteous, disturbing or even pushing at the boundaries of what they felt comfortable with." He then laid out their evidence against his client with relentless and clinical frankness.
Referring to evidence of an encounter on the night of 13 August given by a woman known as AA who was putting Assange up at her apartment, Emmerson said: "The appellant's physical advances were initially welcomed but then it felt awkward since he was 'rough and impatient' ... AA was lying on her back and Assange was on top of her ... AA felt that Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina directly, which she did not want since he was not wearing a condom ... she did not articulate this. Instead she therefore tried to turn her hips and squeeze her legs together in order to avoid a penetration ...
"AA tried several times to reach for a condom which Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and try to penetrate her with his penis without using a condom. AA says that she felt about to cry since she was held down and could not reach a condom and felt this could end badly."
Assange, sitting among supporters including John Pilger, the campaigning investigative journalist, and Vaughan Smith, the owner of Ellingham Hall and founder of the Frontline Club for journalists, showed no emotion as these and other highly graphic personal details were recounted. Emmerson explained how "on one occasion he suddenly took all his clothes off on the lower part of his body and rubbed it and his erected penis against AA. AA says she felt it was very strange behaviour and awkward".
However, Assange's case against extradition does not hinge on whether he accepts these versions of events and testimonies relating to other incidents because there are no charges against him, the court heard. Rather Emmerson said it was a question of whether the arrest warrant in connection with the allegations is valid on "strict and narrow" legal grounds.
He said it was not because there are significant discrepancies between the allegations of sexual assault and rape in the European arrest warrant and the testimonies of two women.
The warrant was a misinterpretation of the evidence and it was "surprising and disturbing" that Swedish district judges who requested Assange's extradition had been misled, he said.
Emmerson told the court that there was no evidence that there was a lack of consent in the encounters, as suggested in the warrant, and that three of the allegations would not amount to criminal offences under English law.
Referring to the allegations in the warrant, Emmerson said: "The senior district judge found that those factual allegations would establish dual criminality on the basis that lack of consent, and lack of reasonable belief in consent, may properly be inferred from the conduct described, particularly the references to 'violence' and a 'design' to 'violate sexual integrity'. However, that description of conduct is not accurate. The arrest warrant misstates the conduct and is, by that reason alone an invalid warrant."
Mark Summers, also acting for Assange, said the European arrest warrant was not valid for several other technical reasons: under UK law it cannot be used to secure pre-prosecution interviews; Swedish prosecutors have not yet decided to press charges, and he could be interviewed by phone or Skype. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Accuse | July 2011 | ['(ABC News)', '(The Guardian)'] |
Uzbekistan dissident writer Nurulloh Muhammad Raufkhon is arrested on his return to the Central Asian country from exile. | ALMATY (Reuters) - The first prominent dissident to return to Uzbekistan since the death of its long-time leader was detained on arrival on Wednesday, his wife said, raising questions about the new president’s efforts to change the country’s image.
Uzbek police took writer Nurulloh Muhammad Raufkhon away in handcuffs after he landed at Tashkent airport, and sent him to jail after questioning, Gulnara Otakhonova told Reuters in tears.
Officers told her to bring him clothes and a lawyer but did not say what he was charged with, she added.
The interior ministry in mainly Muslim ex-Soviet state bordering Afghanistan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Raufkhon had been in self-imposed exile in Turkey since 2016, when he was placed on a security blacklist after publishing a book that criticized former leader Islam Karimov.
Karimov, held responsible by Western governments for systematic human rights violations during his 25 years in power, died last September.
His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has sought to present himself as a more liberal leader, and this month Raufkhon told Reuters in an interview that, despite harboring some misgivings, he would soon return home.
In an open letter to Mirziyoyev last week, Raufkhon said his safe return would “suit the country which is repackaging itself in front of the world community as free and fair since you came to power”.
Improving Tashkent’s image could help Mirziyoyev forge closer ties with the West and attract foreign investment to modernize the economy which has struggled to create enough jobs, forcing millions of Uzbeks to look for work abroad.
Raufkhon’s wife , said by telephone that she and their son had waited for several hours at the airport before seeing Raufkhon escorted outside in handcuffs, then taken to a police station.
As she waited outside the police station later in the day, a police officer told her to hire a lawyer.
In the evening, police told her they were taking Raufkhon to jail and instructed her to bring clothes for him, still without stating any charges, Otakhonova said.
Steve Swerdlow, Uzbekistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, called Raufkhon’s detention “troubling, particularly given reports authorities had informed him about his rehabilitation and the various steps President Mirziyoyev has taken to show this is a new political era in Uzbekistan”.
Mirziyoyev last month ordered the removal of 16,000 people, including Raufkhon, from the blacklist.
But some of his reforms announced since the December election have suffered from setbacks or delays caused, according to Uzbekistan-based foreign diplomats, by interventions of Karimov-era security boss Rustam Inoyatov with whom Mirziyoyev effectively shares power.
Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by John Stonestreet and Andrew Heavens
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Exclusive: Fed’s Neel Kashkari opposes rate hikes at least through 2023 as the central bank becomes more hawkish | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Arrest | September 2017 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Two car bomb blasts kill at least 12 people in northwestern Pakistan. | PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Two car-bomb blasts killed at least 16 people in northwestern Pakistan on Saturday, evidence militants still have power to strike despite the death of a top Taliban commander last month.
A suicide bomber sitting in an explosives-laden car threw a hand-grenade towards a crowd of people in the main northwestern city of Peshawar before detonating about 100 kg of explosives in the vehicle.
"Ten people have been killed and 71 wounded, five of them critically," Sahibzada Anis, the top government administrator of the city told Reuters.
The attack took place in the carpark of a commercial building close to a military hospital.
Television footage showed car parts and debris from nearby buildings scattered over the road. An elderly man wearing a blood-stained shirt was seen helping a wounded young woman walking away from the scene of the blast.
"It was terrible. My children are very frightened. All the windows of my house are broken. It was very frightening," Beenish Asad, a housewife living near the site of the blast told Reuters by telephone.
Police said they detained two suspects at the scene.
The Peshawar attack came hours after a Taliban suicide bomber crashed his explosives-laden truck into a police station in the town of Bannu in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), killing six people. Thirty people, most of them policemen, were wounded.
Bannu is gateway to North Waziristan, a volatile tribal region on the Afghan border and a major sanctuary for al Qaeda and Taliban militants fighting both in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Qari Hussain, a Taliban commander, called Reuters by telephone to take responsibility for the Bannu attack.
"The government was taking undue advantage of our silence. We will carry out more such attacks and these will be much more powerful," Hussain said.
Militant attacks have tapered off after the death of Pakistani Taliban chief and al Qaeda ally Baitullah Mehsud in a missile strike by a pilotless U.S. drone in August.
Pakistani forces have made significant gains against the militants after they launched an offensive in northwestern Swat valley in late April, which helped allay international fears about the stability of the nuclear-armed U.S. ally after militants made advances towards the capital, Islamabad.
But government and security officials say militants loyal to al Qaeda still pose a serious threat.
Mian Iftikhar Hussain, NWFP information minister, said the attacks were aimed at avenging the government offensive against the militants in Swat.
"We are not scared of these people and we have to extend our operations wherever these terrorists are operating," he told reporters.
President Asif Ali Zardari, who is in New York for the U.N. General Assembly session, condemned the twin attacks and said "terrorism and extremism would be rooted out from the country with full force". | Armed Conflict | September 2009 | ['(Reuters)', '(Al Jazeera)', '(Times of India)'] |
Major landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre are to shut down amid expected protests this weekend. | Tourist attractions and museums in central Paris have said they will not open on Saturday, when fresh gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests are planned, as French authorities prepared to deploy 89,000 security personnel across the country.
“The demonstrations announced on Saturday 8 December in Paris do not allow us to welcome visitors in safe conditions,” said the operator of the Eiffel Tower in a statement on Thursday. Police have also ordered about a dozen museums, including the Louvre and the Grand Palais, cultural sites such as the Opera and shops along the Champs-Élysées to close over fears of violence. “We cannot take the risk when we know the threat,” Franck Riester, the culture minister, told RTL radio. Several top-league football matches have also been cancelled.
As senior ministers sought to defuse public fury with conciliatory language on taxes, an official in Emmanuel Macron’s office risked provoking more anger by saying that intelligence suggested that some protesters would come to the capital “to vandalise and to kill”.
Despite capitulating this week over the plans for higher fuel taxes that inspired the nationwide revolt, the president has struggled to quell the anger that last weekend led to the worst street unrest in central Paris since 1968.
Rioters torched cars, vandalised cafes, looted shops and sprayed anti-Macron graffiti across some of Paris’s most affluent districts, even defacing the Arc de Triomphe. Scores of people were hurt and hundreds arrested in battles with police.
In a bid to end the three-week crisis, the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, told parliament late on Wednesday that he was scrapping the fuel-tax increases planned for 2019, having announced a six-month suspension the day before.
The finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, told a conference he was prepared to bring forward tax-cutting plans and that he wanted workers’ bonuses to be tax free.
But he added: “In this case, it must go hand-in-hand with a decrease in spending.”
He also said France would impose a tax on big internet firms in 2019 if there was no consensus on an EU-wide levy, seeking to appeal to anti-business sentiment among the protesters.
The threat of more violence poses a security nightmare for the authorities, who make a distinction between the peaceful gilets jaunes protesters and violent groups, anarchists and looters from the deprived suburbs who they say have infiltrated the movement.
On Facebook groups and across social media, the gilets jaunes are calling for an “act 4”, a reference to what would be a fourth weekend of disorder.
“France is fed up!! We will be there in bigger numbers, stronger, standing up for French people. Meet in Paris on Dec 8,” said one group’s banner.
The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, urged people to stay at home this weekend. Security sources said the government was considering using troops currently deployed on anti-terrorism patrols to protect public buildings.
The protests, named after the fluorescent jackets French motorists are required to keep in their cars, erupted in November over the squeeze on household budgets caused by fuel taxes. Demonstrations swiftly grew into a broad, sometimes violent, rebellion against Macron.
The protesters have no formal leader and their demands are diverse. They include changes to a tax system perceived as unfair and unjust, higher salaries and Macron’s resignation.
France’s hard-left CGT trade union on Thursday called on its energy industry workers to walk out for 48 hours from 13 December, saying it wanted to join forces with the gilets jaunes.
The fuel tax volte-face was the first major U-turn of Macron’s 18-month presidency.
The unrest has exposed deep-seated resentment among non-city dwellers with a perception that Macron is out of touch with the middle and working classes. They see the 40-year-old former investment banker as closer to big business and the rich.
Trouble is also brewing elsewhere for Macron. Teenage students blocked access to more than 200 high schools across the country on Thursday, burning garbage bins and setting a car alight in the western city of Nantes.
Farmers, who have long complained that retailers are squeezing their margins and are furious over a delay to the planned rise in minimum food prices, and truckers are threatening to strike from Sunday.
Le Maire said France was no longer spared from the wave of populism that had swept across Europe. “It’s only that in France, it’s not manifesting itself at the ballot box, but in the streets.” | Protest_Online Condemnation | December 2018 | ['(The Guardian)'] |
Ten men convicted for producing poisoned alcohol that killed more than 30 people in 2012 have been sentenced to prison by a court in the Czech Republic, including 2 life sentences. | Ten men convicted for producing tainted alcohol that killed more than 30 people in 2012 have been jailed by a court in the Czech Republic.
Two of the men, Tomas Krepela, 39, and Rudolf Fian, 43, were handed life sentences. The other eight were given terms of up to 21 years.
The verdict covers 38 deaths but more people have died since.
The poisonings shocked the nation and led to a temporary ban on the sale of hard alcohol in the Czech Republic.
As well as those who died after drinking the product, many more have been permanently blinded, the BBC's Rob Cameron reports from Prague.
The bootleg alcohol was diluted with the industrial chemical methanol, commonly used to make windscreen wiper fluid.
"The accused must have known they could seriously damage many people's health, or even kill them," judge Radomir Koudela said, according to AFP.
The deaths were described at the time as the Czech Republic's worst case of fatal alcohol poisoning in 30 years.
U | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | May 2014 | ['(BBC)'] |
Avi Gabbay, former minister of environmental protection in Benyamin Netanyahu's government, wins an upset victory in the primaries of the Israeli Labor Party, thus becoming leader of the opposition. | Millionaire businessman, who has little political experience, becomes party head after runoff with ex-leader Amir Peretz
Last modified on Mon 27 Nov 2017 20.23 GMT
A relative political unknown has swept to a shock victory to become head of Israel’s opposition Labour party and one of the main candidates to challenge the long serving rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in future elections.
The emergence of Avi Gabbay, 50, a nonchalant businessman who burst onto Israel’s political scene, immediately drew comparisons to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, from some commentators, while others suggested it was the latest chapter in the once dominant party’s long decline. Gabbay was elected leader on Monday night after two rounds of voting in which he defeated first the party’s incumbent head and official opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, and then former leader and favourite Amir Peretz, who had the backing of Israel’s main trade union body.
A self-made millionaire and former head of the Israeli telecoms company Bezeq, Gabbay is a Mizrahi – or eastern Jew – the child of Moroccan Jewish immigrants who grew up in a transit camp, overturning the long dominance in the Labour party of Ashkenazi Jews who resettled from Europe.
Gabbay will serve as the party’s head and candidate for prime minister but cannot be leader of the opposition as he is not a member of parliament.
His election comes amid dismal recent polling for the party that dominated Israel in its first decades of statehood, but has been largely eclipsed as the country’s electorate moved right under Netanyahu.
The high turnout surprised many, with commentators wondering whether Labour’s desire for a fresh face might be reflected more widely in an Israeli society that has become jaded by the scandals and moribund politics surrounding Netanyahu.
Gabbay has no high-level security experience, usually regarded as a prerequisite for high office in Israel. He has also flipped between membership of the centre-right Kulanu party and serving briefly – if almost invisibly – as an environment protection minister in Netanyahu’s coalition, before quitting and joining Labour.
However in his campaign, Gabbay managed to secure the support of former Labour leader and the party’s last prime minister Ehud Barak who hailed his victory as a “revolution” on his Facebook page, adding that Netanyahu would be “sweating tonight, with good reason”.
The question now is whether Gabbay can attract the support of working-class Mizrahi voters who Netanyahu and his Likud party have long counted on to stay in office.
Mizrahi Jews, many of whom arrived in Israel in 1950s, believe they were treated as second-class citizens by the Ashkenazi elite that dominated Labour, prompting them to vote Likud or other rightwing parties, even when Amir Peretz – also a Mizrahi – led Labour.
Although Gabbay and his often young supporters have presented his victory as a “revolution”, Gabbay’s policies appear less mould-breaking, favouring a resumption of talks with the Palestinians and halting construction outside the main Jewish settlement blocs.
Gabbay, however, is opposed to unilateral withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories, while his position on religions in schools and shabbat observance is equally middle of the road in an Israel that has become more right wing and observant.
Commenting on his win in Yedioth Ahornoth, veteran columnist Nahum Barnea said Israeli politics had “never known a victory such as this one” by an individual “unknown to most of the public just a few months ago.”
However, Ben Caspit, writing in Maariv, was more cautious: “Should Benjamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid be concerned? It is too soon to tell. Bibi has no real cause for concern.
“If Gabbay thinks that he will sweep Likud voters with talk about social democracy,” he is wrong. “If he believes that daydreams about ‘peace’ will bring the voters home, the same is true. Someone has to let him know that the people of Israel have taken a sharp right turn.” | Government Job change - Election | July 2017 | ['(Bloomberg Politics)', '(The Guardian)'] |
Junior officer Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, who was navigating when USS Fitzgerald when it collided with a civilian ship last year killing seven people, pleads guilty to dereliction of duty and is sentenced to half pay for three months and a punitive letter. | A junior officer who oversaw navigation of the destroyer Fitzgerald when it collided with a hulking merchant vessel on June 17, killing seven sailors, pleaded guilty to a dereliction of duty charge during a special court-martial Tuesday.
Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock received a punitive letter and will forfeit half a month’s pay for three months as part of her sentence, according to a Navy statement.
“The Navy will not accept complacency, negligence, or other behaviors contrary to its core values,” the release states.
As part of her pretrial agreement, Coppock waived her right to an administrative discharge board, where a panel would have decided whether she would stay in the Navy or not.
Navy spokesman William Speaks declined to say Tuesday what Coppock’s final fate in uniform will entail.
“As of right now, she remains on active duty,” he said.
The Navy has released the first details regarding three junior officers charged for their alleged roles in the destroyer Fitzgerald’s collision with a merchant vessel last summer, an incident that killed seven sailors.
Coppock was serving as officer of the deck, or OOD, at the time of the collision, and was accused of failing to follow the commanding officer’s standing orders, as well as international navigation rules. | Shipwreck | May 2018 | ['(Navy Times)'] |
A group of 26 ex–EU leaders has urged the union to impose sanctions on Israel for continuing to build settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. | A group of 26 ex-EU leaders has urged the union to impose sanctions on Israel for continuing to build settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.
In a letter sent on Monday, they said Israel "like any other state" should be made to feel "the consequences" and pay a price for breaking international law.
The signatories include the former EU foreign affairs chief, Javier Solana.
But in a written response Mr Solana's successor, Catherine Ashton, said the bloc's approach would remain unchanged.
An Israeli foreign ministry official said the proposal represented "a giant leap of bad faith".
The exchange came shortly before the US announced it was abandoning efforts to persuade Israel to renew a partial settlement construction freeze so that direct peace talks with the Palestinian Authority could resume.
The Palestinians suspended talks in September after a 10-month freeze on settlement in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, expired.
Israel has occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967, settling close to 500,000 Jews in more than 100 settlements. They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
The letter sent to European governments and EU institutions, asks EU foreign ministers to reiterate that they "will not recognise any changes to the June 1967 boundaries and clarify that a Palestinian state should be in sovereign control over territory equivalent to 100% of the territory occupied in 1967, including its capital in East Jerusalem".
It also asks ministers to set the Israeli government an ultimatum that, if it has not fallen into line by April 2011, the EU will seek an end to the US-brokered peace process in favour of a UN solution, according to the EUobserver website.
The EU should link its informal freeze on an upgrade in diplomatic relations with Israel to a settlement construction moratorium; ban imports of products made in settlements; and force Israel to pay for the majority of the aid required by the Palestinians, it adds.
It also urges the bloc to send a high-level delegation to East Jerusalem to support Palestinian claims to sovereignty and reclassify EU support for Palestine as "nation building" instead of "institution building".
"Time is fast running out", the letter warns, because "Israel's continuation of settlement activity... poses an existential threat to the prospects of establishing a sovereign, contiguous and viable Palestinian state."
In addition to Mr Solana, the letter was signed by 10 former leaders of European countries - including Romano Prodi and Giuliano Amato of Italy, Richard von Weizsaecker and Helmut Schmidt of Germany, Mary Robinson of Ireland, Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Norway's Thorvald Stoltenberg - 10 former ministers and two former EU commissioners.
In a letter of response to the former leaders, sent on Tuesday and seen by EUobserver, Baroness Ashton said the EU's approach to Jewish settlement expansion would remain unchanged for the time being.
She said the demand for a peace treaty based on pre-June 1967 borders was "commonly accepted" and that she supported the US-brokered negotiations.
"The European Union will continue to be at the forefront of efforts to advance the peace process and engage with both the Palestinians and the Israelis to find a way to resolve the conflict," her letter reportedly said.
In a statement following the US announcement, she said: "The EU position on settlements is clear: they are illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace. Recent settlement related developments, including in East Jerusalem, contradict the efforts by the international community for successful negotiations."
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told the BBC that he had not seen a copy of the former European leaders' letter, but believed their focus on the settlements issue seemed "strange and harmful".
"It is difficult to see how the call for sanctions and Israel's isolation will promote peace, but clearly this will diminish the EU's capability to play a constructive role in promoting peace in the region," he said.
| Diplomatic Talks _ Diplomatic_Negotiation_ Summit Meeting | December 2010 | ['(BBC)', '(EUobserver)', '(The Guardian)'] |
Opposition politician and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is arrested upon landing in Moscow, according to a statement from the prison service. The prominent Putin critic was arrested on charges of parole violations and terms of a suspended prison sentence and will be held in custody until a court makes a decision in his case. | He had spent the previous five months in Germany recovering from a nerve agent attack blamed on Vladimir Putin's regime.
Police officers stand guard in a terminal of Moscow's Vnukovo airport before the expected arrival of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Jan. 17. The plane was diverted elsewhere.
MOSCOW — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport after returning from Germany on Sunday, the prison service said.
The prison service said he was detained for multiple violations of parole and terms of a suspended prison sentence and would be held in custody until a court makes a decision in his case.
Navalny, who is President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent and determined foe, had spent the previous five months in Germany recovering from a nerve agent attack that he blamed on the Kremlin. Navalny decided to leave Berlin of his own free will and wasn’t under any apparent pressure to leave from Germany.
The prison service made the announcement after the flight carrying Navalny landed in the Russian capital, though at a different airport than had been scheduled. It was a possible attempt to outwit journalists and supporters who wanted to witness Navalny’s return.
Russia’s prison service last week issued a warrant for his arrest, saying he had violated the terms of suspended sentence he received on a 2014 conviction for embezzlement. The prison service has asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence into a real one.
After boarding the Moscow flight in Berlin on Sunday, Navalny said of the prospect of arrest: “It’s impossible; I’m an innocent man.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the opposition leader’s poisoning.
Navalny supporters and journalists had come to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, where the plane was scheduled to land, but it ended up touching down at Sheremetyevo airport, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away. There was no immediate explanation for the flight diversion.
The OVD-Info group, which monitors political arrests, said at least 37 people were arrested at Vnukovo Airport, although their affiliations weren’t immediately clear.
Vnukovo banned journalists from working inside the terminal, saying in a statement last week that the move was due to epidemiological concerns. The airport also blocked off access to the international arrivals area.
Police prisoner-detention vehicles stood outside the terminal on Sunday.
The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and opposition social media reported Sunday that several Navalny supporters in St. Petersburg had been removed from Moscow-bound trains or been prevented from boarding flights late Saturday and early Sunday, including the coordinator of his staff for the region of Russia’s second-largest city.
Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a Berlin hospital two days later.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no traces of poison and have challenged German officials to provide proof of his poisoning. They refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up. The FSB dismissed the recording as fake. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Arrest | January 2021 | ['(Politico)'] |
The government withdraws the controversial tax plan. Despite this, protests continue, with participants swelling to tens of thousands and them now calling for the downfall of the government. Prime Minister Saad Hariri gives his government 72 hours to resolve the country's worsening economic crisis. | Prime minister sets 72-hour deadline for leaders to resolve dire economic crisis as protests devolve into clashes.
Beirut, Lebanon – Prime Minister Saad Hariri has set a 72-hour deadline for his coalition partners to come up with solutions for Lebanon‘s economic crisis, as Friday’s protests against austerity measures devolved into violence for a second day.
The protests, which broke out over government plans for new taxes, are the most serious challenge to Hariri’s national unity government which came to power less than a year ago.
Hariri, in an address to the nation, blamed parties in his coalition for obstructing reforms to Lebanon’s debt-laden economy.
“I’m giving our partners in government a very short deadline – 72 hours that can give us a solution that can convince us, the people on the streets and our international partners,” he said, describing the country’s economic malaise as “unprecedented” and “difficult”.
As Hariri spoke, protesters waving Lebanese flags in Beirut’s Martyr Square continued to call for the resignation of the country’s political leadership, including Hariri, President Michel Aoun, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, and Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil.
Demonstrators, who are angry over plans to impose new taxes amid rising costs of living, chanted “Revolution! Revolution!” and “The people demand the fall of the regime”. They also accused Lebanon’s top leaders of corruption, and called for the country’s strict banking secrecy laws to be lifted so that state funds stolen over the decades can be returned to the treasury.
“Thief, thief, Michel Aoun is a thief,” some chanted, looking around nervously.
In Lebanon, insulting the president can land you in jail.
The peaceful demonstration devolved into clashes late on Friday, as police used tear gas to disperse protesters at the Riad al-Solh Square.
Protesters also took to the streets in the eastern Bekaa Valley and in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, where local media said that several protesters were wounded when a legislator’s bodyguards opened fire on a crowd.
Riots were also reported in the Roumieh and Zahle prisons.
Earlier on Friday, Bassil, the foreign minister and president’s son-in-law, in an address to protesters, also blamed other political parties for blocking reforms, but said that “any alternative to the current government would be far worse”.
The demonstrations began on Thursday after the cash-strapped government announced plans to impose new taxes, including on WhatsApp voice calls. Overnight on Friday, protesters blocked streets across the country by burning tyres, and in some areas set fire to buildings and vandalised shops.
Amid the unrest, banks, shops and schools closed operations on Friday, and Saudi Arabia said it was evacuating its citizens from the country.
“Everyone is tired of this, the situation is horrible, people have no money, the people are falling apart, and all they give us is taxes, taxes, taxes,” said Samir Shmaysri, a 39-year old hairdresser from Beirut.
“There’s no reform process to even hope for the situation to get better.”
The outpouring of anger prompted the Lebanese government to scrap plans for taxes on WhatsApp calls, but the measure did little to placate protesters.
“We want to change the situation in the country, that’s it,” said one protester who was blocking a road with a flaming rubbish bin near Beirut’s Ras al-Nabaa area, just outside downtown.
“We’ve tried being peaceful, it hasn’t worked.”
The man had a wooden club with one charred end in his right hand. Next to him, another young man was busy reblocking a road with smouldering rubbish bins and burning tyres, after a Lebanese army vehicle briefly opened it to pass through.
Randa, who brought her young nephew to Friday’s protest, said it was her first time on the streets.
“It’s not a matter of whether it’s fitting or not for a child his age,” the university teacher said, as the Lebanese national anthem rang out from speakers being her.
“Everyone needs to come down,” she said. “I feel that there is no partisan inclination to the protests. The intentions are pure.”
Cutting across sects and walks of life, Lebanese have hit the streets demanding an overhaul of government institutions.
Leader of a major party suggests prime minister should join him in resigning as massive demonstrations rock the country.
The government changed its stance on taxing voice-over-internet calls after demonstrations against the proposal.
Tear gas was fired as some demonstrators clashed with police in the early hours on Friday.
| Protest_Online Condemnation | October 2019 | ['(Al-Jazeera)'] |
Queen Elizabeth II starts her first state visit to the Republic of Ireland, the first visit of a British monarch since Ireland's independence from the United Kingdom in 1921. Elizabeth is also the first British monarch to visit Ireland since George V's state visit in 1911. (RTÉ) | The tightest security measures in the history of the State are in place as Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh begin their four-day State visit to Ireland. Her first official stop was at Áras an Uachtaráin where she was greeted by President Mary McAleese. British Queen's itinerary | Diplomatic Visit | May 2011 | ['(BBC)', '(The Guardian)'] |
Two overcrowded boats carrying migrants capsize off the coast of Djibouti, leaving at least 28 people dead and over 130 others missing, according to the International Organization for Migration. | Coastguard warns death toll will rise, as UN reveals six migrants die at sea each day
First published on Wed 30 Jan 2019 11.11 GMT
Scores of people are feared to have drowned off the coast of Djibouti after two migrant boats capsized, amid new warnings from the UN that six people a day die on maritime smuggling routes to Europe and elsewhere.
According to the International Organization for Migration, the alarm was raised over the latest incident after two survivors were recovered. As the search for more survivors continued, the IOM said on Wednesday that 38 people had been confirmed dead.
Hopeful of finding work in rich Gulf countries, thousands of people from the Horn of Africa region set off every year from Djibouti to cross the Bab al-Mandab Strait for the Arabian Peninsula.
“This tragic event demonstrates the risks that vulnerable migrants face as they innocently search for better lives,” said Lalini Veerassamy, the IOM chief of mission in Djibouti.
According to local witnesses, the missing people were loaded into two overfilled boats that capsized about 30 minutes after setting sail.
According to the IOM, an 18-year old survivor said he had boarded the first boat with 130 people on it. The teenager said he did not have any information about the fate of the second boat.
The latest incident took place as the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, issued a new report detailing the alarming death toll in the Mediterranean last year.
According to the agency, six lives were lost on average every day as an estimated 2,275 people died or went missing crossing the Mediterranean in 2018, despite a major drop in the number of arrivals reaching European shores.
In total, 139,300 refugees and migrants arrived in Europe, the lowest number in five years.
“Saving lives at sea is not a choice, nor a matter of politics, but an age-old obligation,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees. “We can put an end to these tragedies by having the courage and vision to look beyond the next boat, and adopt a long-term approach based on regional cooperation, that places human life and dignity at its core.”
The report describes how shifts in policy by some European states have led to numerous incidents where large numbers of people were left stranded at sea for days on end, waiting for permission to dock. NGO boats and their crews faced growing restrictions on their search and rescue operations.
On routes from Libya to Europe, one person died at sea for every 14 who arrived in Europe – a sharp rise on 2017 levels. Thousands more were returned to Libya, where they faced appalling conditions inside detention centres.
The report also reveals significant changes in the routes being used by refugees and migrants.
For the first time in recent years, Spain became the primary entry point to Europe as roughly 6,800 people arrived by land (through the enclaves in Ceuta and Melilla) and a further 58,600 people successfully crossed over the perilous western Mediterranean. As a result, the death toll for the western Mediterranean nearly quadrupled, from 202 in 2017 to 777 last year.
An estimated 23,400 refugees and migrants arrived in Italy in 2018, a fivefold decrease compared with the previous year. Greece received a similar number of sea arrivals, about 32,500 compared with 30,000 in 2017, but experienced a near threefold increase in the number of people arriving via its land border with Turkey.
Elsewhere in Europe, Bosnia and Herzegovina recorded an estimated 24,000 arrivals as refugees and migrants transited through the western Balkans. Cyprus received several boats carrying Syrian refugees from Lebanon, while small numbers crossed from France to the UK towards the end of the year. | Shipwreck | January 2019 | ['(The Guardian)'] |
At least three people die and 45 are injured in Indonesia following earthquakes off the coast of Sumatra and Sumbawa. | Two strong earthquakes jolted Indonesia Sunday and early Monday, killing three people and injuring at least 45 others.
The first quake, a magnitude 6.1 temblor, struck late Sunday off the coast of Sumatra island at a depth of 20 kilometers.
Hours later, just after midnight, a second earthquake hit 45 kilometers west of Raba, a town on Sumbawa island, at a depth of 30 kilometers. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake off the Indonesian coast at preliminary magnitude of 6.4.
Indonesian Health Ministry official Rustam Pakaya said one child was among those killed by the quake. Dozens of buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The Indonesian archipelago is prone to earthquakes and is located in a belt of intense seismic activity known as the Ring of Fire.
Location of the Sumatra earthquake, 26 Sep 2007In September, 23 people were killed when an 8.4 magnitude quake hit the Bengkulu area in west Sumatra.
In December 2004, a tsunami triggered by an underwater earthquake killed an estimated 230,000 people near Indian Ocean coastlines, including more than 160,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province. | Earthquakes | November 2007 | ['(VOA)'] |
A Palestinian terrorist fatally stabs a 21-year-old Israeli woman at the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank; the attacker is shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. | Hadar Buchris, a 21-year-old Israeli woman from Safed, was seriously wounded and later declared deceased after a stabbing attack at the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank on Sunday afternoon. IDF troops from the Kfir Brigade shot and killed her attacker.
The young woman suffered stab wounds to her head and was taken to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in very serious, unstable condition where doctors were unable to save her life.
Young Israeli woman seriously wounded in Gush Etzion stabbing attack
The attack happened at a hitchhiking station where two terrorists who tried to commit a stabbing attack were shot to death three weeks ago.
On Sunday morning, two stabbing terror attacks were thwarted in the West Bank when a 16-year-old Palestinian girl tried to stab Israelis near Itamar and a Palestinian taxi driver tried to stab an Israeli man after failing to run over pedestrians near Jerusalem. Both terrorists were shot dead, while an Israeli was lightly wounded.
A Palestinian taxi driver tried to run over Israelis at the Kfar Adumim junction near Jerusalem. When he was unsuccessful, he got out of the taxi and tried to stab an Israeli driver.
Attempted stabbing and vehicular attack at Kfar Adumim junction
Shmuel Shapira, 51, from Eilat, was lightly wounded in his hand and taken to the Hadassah Medical Center at Jerusalem's Mount Scopus for treatment. Another civilian who was on the scene shot the terrorist dead.
The terrorist was identified as Shadi Hassib, 32, from al-Bireh near Ramallah.
Less than an hour before that, the former head of the Samaria regional council, Gershon Mesika, helped thwart a stabbing attack at the Samaria junction, at the southern entrance to Nablus in the West Bank.
Attempted stabbing at Samaria junction near Itamar
Mesika, who saw a female terrorist trying to stab civilians at the entrance to the Samaria territorial brigade's military base, ran her over with his car.
"I was at the hitchhiking stop picking up passengers, when all of a sudden I saw a big woman chasing after another woman wielding a knife. I veered to the right and ran into her," Mesika told Ynet.
Another civilian, who was driving behind Mesika and noticed what was happening, exited his car and opened fire at her, along with IDF troops who were on the scene, shooting her dead.
She was identified as Ashraqat Qatanani, 16, from Nablus.
Following the foiled attack near Itamar, a Twitter page associated with Fatah posted a picture of Gershon Mesika with a target on his face, inciting to violence against him.
Some 300 settlers from Kiryat Arba, including young students, protested outside the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday morning, demanding more is done to improve the security situation.
They called on the government to close roads used by both Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, and slammed Bayit Yehudi ministers for not doing more for their voters.
"We are facing terrorism by individuals. This is not the terrorism of organisations, this is terrorism by individuals, sometimes with knives, incited mainly by social media," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of the cabinet meeting.
"It is very difficult to hermetically prevent the arrival of such knife-wielding, or other, terrorists to this or that place," he said, calling on citizens to be on high alert.
"I instructed the security agencies to coordinate their efforts in the Hebron district, from which most or all of the attacks are originating. We are carrying out inter alia arrests and roadblocks there and are boosting our forces. We did this in Jerusalem from which most of the attacks had originated," the prime minister continued.
The attacks on Sunday morning came a day after a Palestinian attacker stabbed four people in southern Israel. Following hours of an extensive manhunt, police forces found the 18-year-old Palestinian hiding late Saturday in the yard of a home close to where he carried out his stabbing spree in the southern town of Kiryat Gat. | Armed Conflict | November 2015 | ['(Ynet News)', '(Times of Israel)'] |
German convicted serial killer and former nurse Niels Högel begins his third trial , this time in Oldenburg, for additional patient murders by administering fatal doses of medication between 1999–2005 which may include his assignment as one of Germany's worst serial killers since World War II. At the beginning of the trial, Högel confesses to the murder of 100 of his patients. , | In a case that has horrified Germany, nurse Niels Högel has admitted to killing scores of patients in several hospitals. Högel is believed to be the most prolific serial killer in Germany's postwar history.
Already serving a life sentence for two murders, nurse Niels Högel went on trial again on Tuesday on charges that he killed another 100 patients.
When asked by the presiding judge whether the charges against him were accurate, Högel replied: "Yes."
The massive trial opened in the northern German city of Oldenburg with a minute of silence in memory of the victims. Court proceedings had to be held in a nearby festival hall instead of in Oldenburg's regional court to accommodate the 126 plaintiffs in the case and the high level of public interest.
"The plaintiffs want to look the defendant in the eye," lawyer Gaby Lübben said on Tuesday.
Presiding Judge Sebastian Bührmann said that the goal of the trial was to reveal the full scope of the murders that were allowed to go unchecked for years.
"We will do our utmost to learn the truth," he said. "It is like a house with dark rooms — we want to bring light into the darkness."
The 41-year-old nurse is already serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2015 of killing two patients. Investigators later determined that the total number of his victims was likely much higher — making him one of the most prolific serial killers in German postwar history.
Intentionally causing cardiac arrest
According to the indictment, Högel is accused of carrying out the murders between February 2000 and June 2005 in two hospitals in the northern German cities of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst.
The youngest of his victims was 34-years-old and the oldest was 96.
Prosecutors say Högel injected patients in order to demonstrate his medical skills or out of boredom
Prosecutors argue that Högel randomly selected patients and injected them with a cocktail of drugs that caused them to go into cardiac arrest or to suffer other complications so that he could revive them.
"The prosecutor's office assumes that he did this in order to create a life-threatening situation in order to demonstrate his resuscitation skills to colleagues and superiors," the indictment states. Prosecutors have also said he may have done it out of boredom.
He was caught in the act by a nurse in Delmenhorst in the summer of 2005, but it took years for the full extent of the killings to be revealed.
Investigators looked into 200 suspicious cases and have exhumed 130 bodies for tests — including two bodies in Turkey. However, many of the patients who died at the hospitals while Högel was there were cremated and their remains didn't offer any evidence.
German police have said that Högel likely would have been stopped earlier if local health officials hadn't hesitated to inform the authorities. Criminal cases are currently also being pursued against former staff at the two hospitals where Högel worked.
The trial is expected to run until May of next year, with dozens of witnesses expected to testify.
Karle Denke murdered and cannibalized at least 42 people, mostly villagers, between 1903 and 1924 in his Münsterberg apartment in then Prussia (pictured). It is thought that he even sold the flesh of his victims at the Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) market as pork. A victim was able to escape and later police found cured human flesh in his home. Denke hung himself in his jail cell two days later.
Fritz Haarmann is thought to have sexually assaulted, murdered, mutilated and dismembered at least 24 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924.The full extent of his crimes were revealed after 500 pieces of human bone, some with knife marks, were found by Hanover residents worried about the disappearance of children in the area. Haarmann, who was once a police informant, was beheaded in 1925.
Karl Grossmann killed his victims and sold their meat on the black market and at his hot dog stand. After neighbors heard screaming, police burst into his home to find a dead young woman on his bed. It's unclear how many lives Grossmann took, but he was suspected of dismembering 23 women and involvement in up to 100 missing cases in Berlin. He hanged himself in 1922.
Friedrich Schumann was a locksmith who raped, murdered and stole from 1918 to 1920. After a confrontation with a local forester — whom he shot — Schumann was arrested and charged with the murder of six people and attempted murder of 11 others. He was sentenced to death six times. The night before his execution at aged 28, he admitted to killing 25 people, including his first victim — his cousin.
Paul Ogorzow was convicted of 31 sexual assaults, the murder of eight women and attempted murder of six others in Nazi-era Berlin between 1940 and 1941. Ogorzow worked for the German commuter rail system and would threaten, stab or bludgeon his rape victims before sometimes throwing them off the moving train. He was sentenced to death and beheaded two days later.
In 1946 and 1947, Rudolf Pleil worked as a border guard in the Harz Mountains and illegally trafficked people, mostly women, from East to West Germany. For a while, he had two accomplices who would help trap victims. Pleil was convicted of killing a salesman and nine women but he claimed to have killed 25 people. Sentenced to life in prison in 1950, Pleil committed suicide eight years later.
Joachim Gero Kroll was a serial killer, rapist, child molester and cannibal. Between 1955 and 1976 he murdered up to 14 people, mainly women and young girls. When he was arrested in 1976, human remains were packed in his refrigerator and he was in the process of cooking the arms and hands of a 4-year-old girl he had just killed. Imprisoned for life in 1982, Kroll died of a heart attack in 1991.
Fritz Honka was notorious for killing at least four women between 1970 and 1975. He strangled prostitutes in his apartment and cut up their corpses. Firefighters found hidden body parts in his apartment after a fire broke out while he was gone. Honka was sentenced to 15 years in a psychiatric institution. After his release in 1993, he lived in a retirement home until his death five years later.
Werner Pinzner was a for-hire killer for pimps in Hamburg's red light district. He is thought to have killed between seven and 10 people. Pinzner gained nationwide fame in 1986 when he was brought to the Hamburg police department for interrogation with his wife and lawyer. He suddenly pulled out a gun and shot the investigating prosecutor before turning the gun on his wife and himself. Marianne Nölle, a nurse from Cologne, killed patients in her care by poisoning them with an anti-psychotic drug between 1984 and 1992. Police believe she actually killed 17 people and attempted a further 18 murders, but she was only convicted of killing seven patients. She has never confessed to any of her crimes. Since 1993, Nölle has been serving a life sentence.
Volker Eckert was a German trucker who murdered at least nine women, most of them between 2001 and 2006. According to police, there were probably four others. His first victim was a classmate whom he strangled aged 15. Most of his victims were prostitutes he picked up across Europe, and he kept trophies like his victims' hair. Eckert hanged himself in his cell during his trial in 2007.
Stephan Letter is a former nurse responsible for the death of at least 29 patients by lethal injection at a Bavarian hospital between 2003 and 2004. Arrested for drug theft, Letter confessed to some of the killings, insisting that he was trying to relieve suffering. He is serving a life sentence and until recently, his acts were described as Germany's worst killing spree since World War II.
Keen to impress colleagues with his life-saving skills, Niels Högel would inject patients with cardiovascular medication to induce heart failure or circulatory collapse. He was convicted of killing two people and was jailed for life in 2015. However, after a multiyear probe, investigators now believe the former nurse was responsible for 100 more deaths, making him Germany's most prolific killer. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | October 2018 | ['(previous convictions were in 2008 and 2015)', '(BBC)', '(Deutsche Welle)'] |
Residents in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu grapple with the aftermath of the worst deluge in decades, a disaster that claimed 280 lives, according to the official death toll. More than half of Chennai's 859 city areas remain under water in the flat, coastal city of six million. The National Disaster Response Force's Rekha Nambiar said, “Rescue work is over. We are focused on relief now." , | CHENNAI (India): India deployed hundreds of extra soldiers and relief workers to the flooded city of Chennai on Saturday, as criticism mounted that the government has been slow to respond to the heaviest rains in a century. The runway at Chennai airport was partly opened after being shut for the past four days, officials said, aiding the relief effort in a disaster that has claimed 280 lives across the state, according to the official death toll. Large parts of India's fourth largest city were inundated by up to eight feet (2.5 metres) of water after torrential rains on Dec.1, leaving many residents trapped on rooftops or upper floors without power or communications. Chennai has boomed as a centre for vehicle factories and IT outsourcing, but trash-filled drains and building on lake beds in the rush to industrialisation and prosperity has made it more prone to flooding. While the rains have paused, more than half of Chennai's 859 city areas remain under water, officials, said raising the threat of disease and squalor in the flat, coastal city of six million. "We are asking for more help from the army, the national disaster relief team," said Atulya Mishra relief commissioner of Tamil Nadu of which Chennai is the capital. "It has been a monsoon unlike anything we have seen in history, we need all the help we can get." Ten columns of the army, about 1,000 soldiers in all, were being flown into the city to add to the nine columns already engaged in relief and rescue work, Mishra said. The National Disaster Response Force, a specialist federal unit set up to handle emergencies, would send 20 more teams in addition to the 28 already on the ground, making it the force's largest deployment to a flood disaster. The runway at Chennai airport had been cleared of water and planes that had been stranded for the past five days were being flown out for technical checks at nearby centres such as Bengaluru, officials said. Passenger flights had not yet started as the airport terminal was waterlogged, and it could be two more days before it was fully operational. Some communications had been restored following the floods. Indian test cricketer Ravichandran Ashwin reached his parents in Chennai after he was unable to contact them for a day when telephone networks went down, local media quoted him as saying in Delhi, where he was playing in a match against South Africa. On the Old Mahabalipuram Road, home to many IT firms, people were still trapped by high floodwaters. M. Vijaykumar, a deputy director at the Tamil Nadu fire service, said residents in the area were refusing to leave even though the water level had dropped slightly. "Some have old parents, they don't want to take chance," she said, with many too scared to wade through floodwaters. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi who visited the city this week announced 10 million Indian rupees ($150,000) of extra assistance for relief operations. Reuters | Floods | December 2015 | ['(The Malay Mail)', '(The Gulf Today)'] |
The United States Coast Guard says that 25 people died, nine went missing and five crew members have been rescued after a fire on a diving boat near Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of California. | Twenty-five bodies have been found after a boat was destroyed by fire off the coast of California, officials say.
Citing the US Coast Guard, media reports said nine people were missing, while five crew members had survived.
The fire started in the early hours of Monday, while the boat was anchored metres off Santa Cruz Island, about 90 miles (145km) west of Los Angeles.
Search teams worked throughout Monday night. The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear.
At a news conference, Sheriff Bill Brown confirmed 39 people were on board the vessel when fire broke out. The Conception - a 75-foot-long (23m) commercial diving boat - is now completely submerged.
Coast Guard services overheard a mayday call at 03:30 local time (10:30 GMT) on Monday, saying that the boat was engulfed in flames. Those killed are thought to have been trapped below deck.
The Associated Press news agency and CBS news cited Coast Guard officials as saying 25 people are confirmed dead.
Those who escaped the fire may have been sleeping in the main cabin of the boat rather than below. They were awake and had jumped off the boat's bridge, making their way to another vessel called the Grape Escape.
The Grape Escape was moored a few hundred feet away, according to the New York Times.
The owner of the Grape Escape, Bob Hansen, told the Times he and his wife were woken up by the crewmen - soaked and shivering - frantically knocking on their vessel.
Mr Hansen said when he stepped out of his cabin, he could see the Conception was engulfed in flames, "from stem to stern".
"I could see the fire coming through holes on the side of the boat," he said. "There were these explosions every few beats. You can't prepare yourself for that. It was horrendous."
Sheriff Brown said that oxygen or propane tanks could have exploded during the fire, but there was no sign this sparked the blaze. "Nothing in the [mayday] broadcast from the vessel... indicated there was an initial explosion," he said. In the mayday call, a man is heard frantically telling the operator "I can't breathe". He describes the boat ablaze with "no escape hatch for any of the people on board".
Capt Rochester said the boat was "fully in compliance" with safety regulations, and had no prior violations. The owner of a Santa Cruz diving company, Kristy Finstad, was reportedly one of the Conception's passengers, according to CBS San Francisco.
Ms Finstad was named by her brother, who posted on Facebook: "Please pray for my sister Kristy!! She was leading a dive trip on this boat."
None of the victims have been named by officials.
Sheriff Brown said the fire was "probably the worst case scenario you could possibly have" on a vessel, as it was in open water at night with most people asleep below decks.
"Fire is the scourge of any ship," he said. "Of all scenarios... you couldn't ask for a worse situation."
The Conception sank 20 yards (18m) off the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, at the depth of 64ft (20m). Run by a diving company called Truth Aquatics, which has a 4.5 rating on Trip Advisor, Conception was used for chartered trips in the Channel Islands National Park. It was on the final day of a three day scuba diving excursion for the Labor Day weekend.
The boat's layout shows three rows of double bunks with a shower room at the front of the boat. "Pillows, blankets, reading lights, privacy curtain and personal storage are provided," the company's website said. | Fire | September 2019 | ['(BBC)'] |
Marvel Comics editor and comic book writer Stan Lee dies at the age of 95. | Actor Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Winston Duke, and Seth Rogen among those who hailed the creator of Marvel comics
Last modified on Tue 12 Feb 2019 15.51 GMT
Tributes poured in from fans and celebrities hailing the comic creator Stan Lee on Monday, who died at the age of 95.
“There will never be another Stan Lee. For decades he provided both young and old with adventure, escape, comfort, confidence, inspiration, strength, friendship and joy,” Captain America actor Chris Evans said on Twitter. “He exuded love and kindness and will leave an indelible mark on so, so, so many lives. Excelsior!!”
There will never be another Stan Lee. For decades he provided both young and old with adventure, escape, comfort, confidence, inspiration, strength, friendship and joy. He exuded love and kindness and will leave an indelible mark on so, so, so many lives. Excelsior!!
Lee was the co-creator of characters including Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the X-Men.
“He felt an obligation to his fans to keep creating,” his daughter JC Lee said. “He loved his life and he loved what he did for a living. His family loved him and his fans loved him. He was irreplaceable.”
The Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr said of Lee: “I owe it all to you.” Mark Ruffalo, who plays the Hulk, was among a host of other Marvel actors who paid their respects, and tweeted: “You let us be extra human … superhuman even.” Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, said: “No one has had more of an impact on my career and everything we do at Marvel Studios than Stan Lee. Stan leaves an extraordinary legacy that will outlive us all.”
Marvel rival DC Comics wrote on its Twitter account: “He changed the way we look at heroes, and modern comics will always bear his indelible mark. His infectious enthusiasm reminded us why we all fell in love with these stories in the first place.”
Lee created the Marvel Universe that stretched across comic books, movies and TV, and revitalized the comic industry with superheroes who had complex emotional lives to go along with their action adventures.
This video has been removed. This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason.
Mark Hamill, who portrayed Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films, wrote that Lee’s “contribution to pop culture was revolutionary and cannot be overstated. They say you should never meet a childhood idol. They are wrong.”
Director Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wrote: “Thanks for so much of my life. You’ll never not be in it.”
Another Marvel actor, Winston Duke, credited Lee with creating “characters that continue to stand the test of time and evolve with our consciousness”.
“You taught us that there are no limits to our future as long as we have access to our imagination. Rest in power!” he tweeted.
THANK YOU, @TheRealStanLee. You gave us characters that continue to stand the test of time and evolve with our consciousness. You taught us that there are no limits to our future as long as we have access to our imagination. Rest in power! #EXCELSIOR #StanLee #rip pic.twitter.com/hnSmnHIDln
“Thank you Stan Lee for making people who feel different realize they are special,” wrote actor Seth Rogen.
Wolverine star Hugh Jackman weighed in: “We’ve lost a creative genius. Stan Lee was a pioneering force in the superhero universe. I’m proud to have been a small part of his legacy and .... to have helped bring one of his characters to life.”
We’ve lost a creative genius. Stan Lee was a pioneering force in the superhero universe. I’m proud to have been a small part of his legacy and .... to have helped bring one of his characters to life. #StanLee #Wolverine pic.twitter.com/iOdefi7iYz
“Damn... RIP Stan. Thanks for everything,” said Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds.
Singer Josh Groban said: “Thank you for making my childhood, teen years and adulthood so fun, especially during darker days.”
This article was amended on 13 November 2018 to remove a quote that was incorrectly attributed to Scarlett Johansson. | Famous Person - Death | November 2018 | ['(The New York Times)', '(The Guardian)'] |
Seán Ó Fearghaíl of Fianna Fáil is re-elected as Ceann Comhairle. No candidate for Taoiseach attains the 80 votes required to form a government. The Dáil adjourns until March 5. (RTÉ) | Four party leaders have failed to win enough support to be elected Taoiseach in the first sitting of the 33rd Dáil, with Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald winning the most votes.
In the first vote of the evening, TDs voted against Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar being re-appointed as leader of the country.
The result was 36 votes in favour, 107 against, with 16 abstentions.
TDs also voted against Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin's bid to become Taoiseach, as 41 voted in favour, 97 against and 19 abstained.
Ms McDonald was the third candidate, but she too failed to win enough support, with 45 votes in favour, 84 in opposition and 29 abstentions.
TDs then voted on Green Party leader Eamon Ryan's attempt to become Taoiseach, but he only received the support of his party's 12 TDs, with 115 votes against and 28 abstentions.
As Mr Varadkar failed to win enough support to be re-appointed, he travelled to Áras an Uachtaráin to offer his resignation to President Michael D Higgins.
He will continue in the role in a caretaker capacity and will travel to the EU leaders' summit in Brussels tonight.
The Dáil has adjourned for two weeks until Thursday 5 March and the talks seeking to agree a programme for government are set to intensify next week.
'Today the Dáil failed to agree on the nomination of Taoiseach': Leo Varadkar says he will tender his resignation to the President tonight, but continue in a caretaking roleThe leaders of Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party were nominated by their parties for the office.
However, Ms McDonald did get the most votes with the help of support from outside the ranks of her own party.
Independent TD Catherine Connolly said she would support her for Taoiseach subject to a closer examination of Sinn Féin's policies.
The five Solidarity-People Before Profit TDs committed to voting for Ms McDonald, but Richard Boyd Barrett warned that it was not a blank cheque.
TDs Thomas Pringle and Joan Collins also supported the Sinn Féin leader.
Róisín Shortall of the Social Democrats confirmed that her party would not be supporting any candidate for Taoiseach.
She said it was meaningless to do so in the absence of a negotiated and agreed programme for government.
Earlier, Seán Ó Fearghaíl was re-elected as Ceann Comhairle. It means that Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin both have 37 Dáil seats.
The clerk of the house, Peter Finnegan, said Mr Ó Fearghaíl reached the quota with 130 votes, beating Independent TD Denis Naughten, who received 28 votes.
Mr Ó Fearghaíl was given his gown and declared that he would execute the office without fear or favour and apply the rules of the house in accordance with the standing orders.
He went on to commiserate with Mr Naughten and said he was a parliamentarian of very considerable standing and that it was an honour to compete with him.
Addressing TDs, Mr Ó Fearghaíl said the Dáil must work together.
He added: "We must work carefully and intelligently and as urgently as possible because the problems that remain to be confronted are substantial."
Leaders address government formation talks
The four leaders addressed the Dáil after the votes, with government formation the main topic of their speeches.
Mr Varadkar told the Dáil: "The responsibility is on all of us to ensure we provide good government, and indeed good opposition.
"I think the onus is on those who have made enormous promises of change to the people during this election who are entrusted with that mandate to bring a programme of government for approval.
"If they cannot, they should say so and be upfront and honest about their failures and the empty promises they made."
He said he will travel to Washington DC for the traditional St Patrick's Day events.
Mr Martin accused Ms McDonald of using "populist tropes" as she accused them of failing to speak to her in government formation talks.
He said: "Every party and deputy elected to this house has a right and a duty to represent the mandate they received.
"In order to deliver functioning government, compromises have to be made and this is something we have been attacked for.
"Demanding that others stay quiet as others abandon their core beliefs in order to grab power is not something we agree with.
"Whether or not you agree with Fianna Fáil, we fought this election based on a clear set of principles and policies and that includes legitimate behaviour in a democratic republic."
Micheál Martin says compromise is required to deliver a functioning govt, but rejects idea "that there is no limit to be set to the compromises you should take"
Mr Martin said he rejected Sinn Féin's manifesto promises of increasing taxes on businesses and too many incompatibilities exist between the two parties.
Ms McDonald said: "Today for the first time a nominee other than Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael has garnered the greatest number of votes. Perhaps that makes us winners again.
"I still we still live rent free in Micheál Martin's narrow and bitter mind.
"Change means a secure roof over people's heads, not having their adult children living in the box rooms.
"Change means you know you have enough to get by. Changes means dealing with the climate emergency. Change means the old order must pass.
Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald: 'I think it only appropriate to note that today for the first time a nominee from a party other than from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael has managed to garner the greatest number of votes’ A vote for Sinn Féin was for a different government that would have the courage and energy to actually do things differently."
Mr Ryan said he respected the mandate for Sinn Féin and respected those who voted for the party.
He also said he respected Fianna Fáil and that he would say the same to Fine Gael, as well as other groupings in the Dáil.
'I respect the mandate of Sinn Féin and I respect the people who voted for you', Green Party leader Eamon Ryan said, speaking earlier in the Dáil | Government Job change - Election | February 2020 | [] |
A retired policeman is killed after firing over a dozen rounds at the Wheeling Federal Building in Wheeling, West Virginia. | Police in West Virginia killed a retired police officer armed with an assault weapon and a handgun who fired two dozen shots at a U.S. courthouse.
WHEELING, W.Va. A retired police officer armed with an assault weapon and a handgun fired up to two dozen shots at a U.S. courthouse in West Virginia on Wednesday before police returned fire and killed him, authorities said.
Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger identified the gunman as Thomas J. Piccard, 55, of Bridgeport, Ohio. He was a retired Wheeling police officer.
Schwertfeger did not say whether Piccard used both weapons during the assault on the Wheeling Federal Building or speculate on a motive. Officials said they had no knowledge of any sort of note left behind by Piccard.
Three on-duty security officers were injured by flying debris during the onslaught, he told a news conference.
Mayor Andy McKenzie said police who briefed him earlier Wednesday told him that Piccard was a 20-year-plus veteran of the force who retired 13 years ago.
Investigators were seeking a search warrant for Piccard's home in hopes of determining a motive and if he acted alone, said Chief Deputy Mike Claxton of the U.S. Marshals Service in northern West Virginia.
Asked if the gunman had any beef with the U.S. government, Claxton said, "We're really digging hard at this point to find out."
Claxton said a man later identified as Piccard began firing from a parking lot across from the federal building. "He was observed in the parking lot very quickly after the first shots were fired," he said.
The building houses a variety of courtrooms and related offices, including those for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement.
Officials said it was too early to tell whether Piccard was targeting anyone in the building or what his motive may have been.
"That's still trying to be determined," said Bob Johnson, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Pittsburgh office.
People inside the building ducked under desks as the shots struck the building and shattered windows.
U.S. Attorney Bill Ihlenfeld said shots were fired into at least three rooms in his office on the building's second floor. He described hearing gunshots, then panic among staff.
"Members of my staff were crawling on the floor or running from office to office telling people to get away from the windows," he said.
Ihlenfeld said he knew Piccard from 1997 when he started working in the city prosecutor's office until the officer retired in 2000. He said he had no reason to believe his office was targeted, and that Piccard was not under any sort of investigation by federal authorities.
"There was nothing about my relation with him or anything that I observed in dealing with him ... to cause me to think anything like this would happen," he said.
About 40 percent of Ihlenfeld's staff was furloughed because of the federal government shutdown, so many weren't working on Wednesday.
"To be honest, the security plans in place to deal with a situation like this don't work when we don't have everybody there," he said, without elaborating.
Carla Webb Daniels told media outlets she was in her attorney's office nearby when she heard loud gunshots. She saw the gunman fire from a bank parking lot across the street.
"I was so nervous, I couldn't believe it," Daniels said. "People were scared and were banging on the doors asking to be let in."
Piccard's body will be sent to the Medical Examiner's Office in Charleston for an autopsy. Meanwhile, officials continued to search his four-door sedan that he drove to the scene and his trailer across the river in Bridgeport, Ohio.
Johnson said a bomb squad would clear the home before investigators go in as a precaution.
The three-story gray federal building remained cordoned off Wednesday night, surrounded by a heavy police presence in the city along the Ohio River in West Virginia's northern panhandle about 60 miles southwest of Pittsburgh.
Most people were going about their evenings, eating at local restaurants in the small city of about 28,000 with an older downtown with stone buildings, banks and coffee shops. Only a few stopping to gaze at the courthouse.
Wheeling has been hit by layoffs in the steel industry and its population dropped by 9.3 percent from 2000 to 2010 to about 28,500 people. | Armed Conflict | October 2013 | ['(MSN)'] |
At least 15 people, mostly Bulgarians, drown in Lake Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia, as a tourist boat sinks. | At least 15 people have died after a sightseeing boat sank in Lake Ohrid in south-western Macedonia.
The Ilinden sank about 200m from the shore - reportedly within four minutes. About 40 passengers have been rescued. The Bulgarian government says the dead were all its nationals. The captain of the boat said there was a "loud crack" before the boat sank, police say. Police have described the incident as "an enormous tragedy". Lake Ohrid is Macedonia's best known tourist resort. Earlier reports said 19 people had died and indicated that the cause could have been overcrowding, with 73 passengers on board, when the boat only had a permit for a maximum of 45. Rescuers search the waters of Lake Ohrid
However, later on Saturday Macedonian officials lowered the death toll to 15 and said there had been about 57 passengers on board. In neighbouring Bulgaria, the government information office said the dead included one child. "The 23-year-old skipper and his deputy have been questioned about the incident," Macedonian police spokesman Ivo Kotevski told the Associated Press news agency. "In their first statements they said that a loud crack was heard toward the rear before the boat sunk rapidly." Cries of help
The tourists had been on their way to the St Naum monastery complex when the 30m (98 feet) vessel broke in two and sank at about 1100 (0900 GMT), according to witnesses. "We were in a speed boat and we saw the boat sinking. We just turned around and we saw people crying for help," an eyewitness told BBC Macedonian. "When we got there, 10 were already dead. We took seven with us, we thought we could save more but it was too late." Another witness told the BBC: "Around 1030 I went to the beach, and all of a sudden, I heard cries of 'Help! Help me, help me!' and we saw how the forward part of the boat had sunk in the water. "I have a small dinghy and with a friend we went towards the boat, then two more small boats came along. "It was lucky that there were other small boats who came along, and threw life-saving vests and took the survivors on board. Police divers are on the scene. A BBC correspondent in the region says accidents like this on Lake Ohrid are extremely rare. Macedonia's transport minister had offered his resignation. | Shipwreck | September 2009 | ['(MIA)', '(BBC)', '(Makfax)'] |
In Russia, explosion and fire in an oil depot near Moscow kills two | At least one other person was seriously injured when the blast started a fire that spread to a number of tanks at the facility in the town of Noginsk.
Hundreds of nearby residents - including mothers and babies from a maternity hospital - were evacuated.
An investigation is now under way, with some reports suggesting a violation of safety regulations was to blame.
The explosions ripped through a chemical laboratory on the site at around 0550 (0150 GMT), Sergei Vlasov, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry, said.
Two tanks of petroleum products inside the lab caught fire and the blaze spread to four nearby railway cars containing oil products, he was quoted as saying.
With the fire threatening nearby homes and buildings, some 800 residents - including 194 mothers and 60 new born babies from the nearby hospital - had to be moved to safety.
More than 20 firefighting crews, along with a helicopter and specially-equipped firefighting train, tackled the blaze, which was contained by around 0930 (0530GMT).
Russia's Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu later announced the fire had been extinguished, saying: "There is no threat to the town or its population."
An investigation is now under way, with some unnamed officials blaming a technical problem for the blast at the site, which is around 60 km (35 miles) east of Moscow. Earlier, Moscow regional police were quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying they thought workers had failed to follow the correct safety procedures while emptying a fuel tank. | Fire | June 2005 | ['(RIA Novosti)', '(Russia Journal)', '[permanent dead link]', '(BBC)'] |
Former Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti is sentenced to 15 years and 6 months in prison for fraud in a system to clean the polluted Lake Amatitlán. Baldetti still has four pending lawsuits and extradition to the United States. | Roxana Baldetti was found guilty of fraud for involvement in a bogus multimillion-dollar scheme to clean up a contaminated lake
Last modified on Wed 10 Oct 2018 09.55 BST
Guatemala’s former vice-president Roxana Baldetti has been jailed for more than 15 years on corruption charges linked to a multimillion-dollar fraud over a bogus scheme to clean up a contaminated lake, thanks to an investigation backed by the UN crime fighting force.
Public prosecutors backed by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig) uncovered a criminal network run by Baldetti which conspired to award an $18m government contract to an Israeli company for a clean-up potion that turned out to be sea water.
Tuesday’s verdict was hailed by anti-impunity campaigners battling to save the commission from expulsion by the current president who is fighting impeachment arising from multiple corruption allegations.
President Jimmy Morales argues that his decision to end the commission’s mandate next September was not personally motivated, and used a speech at the UN last month to claim Cicig was a threat to peace.
Morales, who was elected in 2015 on an anti-corruption platform, is facing charges of illegal campaign financing and fraud thanks to investigations backed by Cicig. His brother, son and political party also face corruption charges.
The standoff between the beleaguered president and popular anti-impunity commission has escalated in recent months. Morales has blocked the Cicig chief, Iván Velásquez, from re-entering Guatemala in defiance of court orders ruling the ban unconstitutional. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | October 2018 | ['(The Guardian)'] |
Two people are killed and four are hospitalized in a shooting in a library in the U.S. town of Clovis, New Mexico. | SANTA FE, N.M. (Reuters) - A teenager who killed two people and wounded four others in a shooting at a small-town New Mexico library had a troubled past but appeared to have turned his life around after joining a local church, his pastor said Tuesday.
Police seek motive in deadly NM library shooting
01:14
Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Jouett had been baptized this summer and was helping the church raise money to send teen members to youth camp just days before he opened fire Monday afternoon at the Clovis-Carver Public Library, Pastor David Stevens said in a telephone interview.
“Before Christ came into his heart, he was just crying, broken,” said Stevens of the Living Word Church of God in Clovis. “He said, ‘Now I got something to smile about.’ We had no indication of anything wrong with him.”
Two library employees, Krissie Carter, 48, and Wanda Walters, 61, were killed in the shooting, in which Jouett used two handguns, Clovis police Chief Douglas Ford said Tuesday.
Among the wounded was at least one child, a 10-year-old boy, Noah Molina, who was airlifted along with three other people to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas and was in satisfactory condition on Tuesday, said Eric Finley, spokesman for University Medical Center in Lubbock.
Also wounded were Noah’s sister, Alexis Molina, 21, and Howard Jones, 53. Alexis Molina and Jones were in serious condition Tuesday, Finley said. The fourth surviving victim was identified by Ford as Jessica Thron, 30. All are expected to recover, Ford said in a news release.
Authorities plan to initially charge Jouett as a juvenile with two counts of first degree murder, four counts of assault, four counts of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and one count of child abuse, the news release said. Prosecutors would then seek to try Jouett as an adult, Ford said.
Stevens said Jouett was being held in seclusion since his arrest at the library on Monday. He said his daughter, who had been dating the teen for the past three-and-a-half months, received a text message from friends Monday saying there had been a shooting and that Nathan, as he was called by friends, was there.
Jouett was on suspension from Clovis high school for fighting at the time of the shooting, Stevens said.
“My daughter thought Nathan had been shot,” Stevens said. “So my wife and daughter went downtown to the library, and he had been arrested. He was the shooter.”
Clovis, with a population of about 40,000, is around 190 miles (300 km) east of Albuquerque.
Reporting by Zelie Pollon in Santa Fe, Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee, Keith Coffman in Denver, Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, Jonathan Allen in New York; Writing by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Andrew Hay
| Armed Conflict | August 2017 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Twelve people are killed and dozens more injured when a passenger grabs the steering wheel of a bus in West Java, Indonesia, causing it to crash. | Twelve people were killed and dozens more injured when a passenger grabbed the steering wheel of a bus in West Java, Indonesia, causing it to crash.
Witnesses said the passenger was embroiled in a row with the driver and tried to wrest control of the bus on a toll road in Majalengka on Monday.
The bus swerved into the path on oncoming traffic, colliding with two cars and causing a lorry to overturn.
Police have appealed for information from witnesses and survivors.
"In the middle of the journey, a passenger attempted to forcibly take control of the steering wheel... and the bus then lost control," police spokesman Atik Suswanti told AFP news agency.
The driver was among those killed and the passenger who grabbed the wheel was one of more than 40 people injured, officials said.
It was not clear how many of the casualties were on the bus.
Serious road accidents are common in Indonesia.
In February 2018, 25 people were killed when a tourist bus ran off a road and overturned in West Java.
The previous July, 10 people were killed when a bus travelling from Bali to a town in East Java collided with the back of a lorry. | Road Crash | June 2019 | ['(BBC)'] |
The President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni and the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Joseph Kabila meet in Tanzania to discuss the future of oil-rich Lake Albert. | The deal to withdraw troops immediately was signed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and DR Congo President Joseph Kabila as they held talks in Tanzania.
The leaders agreed to co-operate on oil exploration in Lake Albert and to lay a joint pipeline to distribute any oil.
Uganda has twice invaded DR Congo, saying it was harbouring rebels.
In the past month alone, skirmishes along the border have killed at least four people - three Ugandans and a British oil contractor.
Border lines
At the meeting in the north-eastern Tanzanian town of Arusha, Mr Museveni and Mr Kabila agreed to move their troops 150km (90 miles) from their mutual border.
We are determined to see long-term peace reign among the two countries. Next time we meet, we won't discuss about border problems, but we will be discussing developmental issues
Joseph KabilaDR Congo president
They will also move refugee camps 150km from the border to improve security, Ugandan Foreign Affairs Minister Sam Kutesa said.
A joint team will draw up borders within contested areas of the lake as part of the deal. Mr Museveni and Mr Kabila agreed to meet once a year to improve bilateral ties.
"Black Africans are always at each other's throats," Mr Kabila said.
"We are determined to see long-term peace reign among the two countries. Next time we meet, we won't discuss about border problems, but we will be discussing developmental issues."
In October, Mr Museveni announced Uganda had found oil in the lake area, saying production could begin in 2009 with initial output of up to 10,000 barrels a day.
Relations between the two countries remain fraught - Uganda has twice invaded Congo, claiming it wanted to flush out Ugandan rebels. The second invasion sparked a 1998-2003 war that drew in five other countries.
Rebel integration
Meanwhile, the United Nations has urged dissident DR Congo troops to re-join the country's army.
Thousands of DRC refugees have entered Uganda amid rebel clashes
The eastern part of DR Congo remains unstable amid recent fighting between rogue Congolese Gen Laurent Nkunda and government forces.
Maj-Gen Bikram Singh, commander of the UN DR Congo peacekeeping mission (Monuc), encouraged Gen Nkunda's troops to reintegrate into the army and help restore peace to the country.
An earlier attempt to reintegrate the rebels a few months ago failed.
Though a ceasefire is in place, there are real doubts whether it can hold, says the BBC's Karen Allen in Goma.
There have been reports of skirmishes near Virunga national park, home to Congo's famous mountain gorillas, and the army and Monuc are watching developments closely, our correspondent says.
Up to 35,000 DR Congo refugees have entered Uganda since Monday due to the fighting, the UN has said. | Diplomatic Talks _ Diplomatic_Negotiation_ Summit Meeting | September 2007 | ['(BBC)'] |
His Eminence, Edward Cardinal Egan, the immediate past Archbishop–Emeritus of New York, dies in New York City at the age of 82. | Edward Michael Egan was born in Oak Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb, on April 2, 1932. He graduated in 1951 from Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago, earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Ill., and then completed four years of theological studies at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he was ordained on Dec. 15, 1957.
The Rev. Edward M. Egan during his consecration to bishop in Rome in 1985. From 1971 to 1985, he was in Rome, first as a law professor and later as a judge of the Sacred Roman Rota, part of the Vatican’s court system.
In 1985, he was named auxiliary bishop of New York and vicar of education for the archdiocese under Cardinal John O’Connor, left.
In 1988, he was named bishop of Bridgeport, a diocese with a diverse population of 360,000 Catholics, masses in 20 languages and a reach that encompassed blighted urban streets, working-class neighborhoods and affluent suburbs. Here, he attended the burial service for Cardinal O’Connor in 2000.
Along with his elevation to the College of Cardinals in 2001, his appointment by Pope John Paul II to lead the Archdiocese of New York — to many the most prominent Catholic pulpit in the nation — crowned a career of more than five decades in his church. He greeted Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani during his installation ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Bishop Egan waved to the crowd after his installation Mass in New York City in June 2000. His tenure in New York had mixed reviews. His priority was to restore financial stability to the deficit-ridden archdiocese, and he did it by closing or merging parishes and schools and by raising millions from corporations and wealthy laymen. But he also drew bitter complaints from affected parishioners and priests.
In his first six months, Cardinal Egan surveyed churches, schools, hospitals and other institutions in the archdiocese, which encompassed the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island in New York City, and seven counties to the north. He spoke at St. John the Baptist Church in Yonkers in 2001.
Cardinal Egan greeted city officials during a Mass of Supplication at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Sept. 16, 2001. Admirers said his finest hour perhaps came in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. As the nation seethed with anger, the cardinal urged levelheaded caution. “I am sure,” he said, “that we will seek justice in this tragedy as citizens of a nation under God, in which hatred and desires for revenge must never have a part.”
The archdiocese said in a statement that under Cardinal Egan “the number of registered parishioners increased by 204,000, the budget of Catholic Charities more than doubled, enrollment of Catholic elementary and secondary schools grew by 15,400, the archdiocesan newspaper became the largest in the nation, and the archdiocese and its various agencies were made debt-free.”
Cardinal Egan attended the Spring meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Chicago in 2005. The most contentious issue of the cardinal’s tenure was the scandal of priests accused of molesting children. Like bishops across the nation, he set up a lay review board to evaluate accusations and make recommendations. The cardinal suspended more than a dozen priests and gave their files to prosecutors, who generally found the cases too old to be prosecuted.
Cardinal Egan escorted Pope Benedict into St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the Pope’s historic visit in 2008.
Cardinal Egan wrote columns for Catholic publications, hosted a weekly satellite radio program on church affairs, and delivered stentorian lessons from the pulpit on abortion, contraception, homosexuality, priestly celibacy and other matters. He hosted his last radio show on April 2, 2009.
Cardinal Egan distrusted the news media and rarely gave interviews. But he reached out to constituents, visiting parishes, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, day care centers and other institutions. He visited students at St. Stephen of Hungary Catholic School in Manhattan in 2009.
In 2007, when he turned 75, Cardinal Egan submitted to the pope his resignation; it was not accepted until 2009. The pope then appointed Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was the archbishop of Milwaukee at the time, to replace him. Cardinal Egan was the first archbishop in the 200-year history of the archdiocese to retire; all the others died in office.
Cardinal Egan believed he accomplished what he had set out to do. “When I came here, I told everyone what I would do, and quite frankly I did it,” the cardinal said in a 2007 interview with The New York Times. “I had to deal with the sex scandal, and I did. I had to realign, and I did. I wanted peace in my diocese, and it’s peaceful.”
He smiled — it was more flint than mirth — and added, “It’s all been a colossal success.”
By Robert D. McFadden
Cardinal Edward M. Egan, a stern defender of Roman Catholic orthodoxy who presided over the Archdiocese of New York for nine years in an era of troubled finances, changing demographics and an aging, dwindling priesthood shaken by sexual-abuse scandals, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 82.
Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the cause was cardiac arrest. Cardinal Egan’s successor, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, said in a statement that Cardinal Egan “had a peaceful death, passing away right after lunch” in his home at the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. He was pronounced dead at NYU Langone Medical Center.
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This is an offer for a Basic Digital Access Subscription. The Basic Digital Access Subscription does not include e-reader editions (Kindle, Nook, etc.), NYT Games (the Crossword) or NYT Cooking. Mobile apps are not supported on all devices. These offers are not available for current subscribers. Other restrictions and taxes may apply. Offers and pricing are subject to change without notice. | Famous Person - Death | March 2015 | ['(The New York Times)'] |
An earthquake strikes Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, and is felt 50 kilometres away. | An earthquake that shook Adelaide rattled enough residents to flood emergency phone lines late at night.
Triple-zero operators received about 250 calls, while another 300 people rang the police assistance line after a 3.8-magnitude tremor struck the city's northeast at about 11.30pm (CST) yesterday.
Geoscience Australia seismologist David Jepsen says the quake was felt as far as 50km away from its epicentre but no one was injured and it is not believed to have caused any significant damage.
"The event would have lasted two to three seconds and would have been felt as strong shaking, the severity depending on what they were doing at the time," he said.
"This is the earth doing its normal stuff ... when the stress of the plates exceeds the strength of the rocks underneath it releases energy."
Friday night's tremor was strong by Adelaide's standards, but a 5.4-magnitude earthquake in 1954 occurred near the heart of the city and caused the equivalent of $6 million in damage to property, Mr Jepsen said.
Earthquakes between three and four magnitude are often felt, with shaking occurring, but rarely cause serious damage. | Earthquakes | April 2010 | ['(The Sydney Morning Herald)'] |
Mozambique announces it will build a new bridge across the Zambezi to allow for a giant coal project in Tete Province. | It will allow access to the inland province of Tete, and some of the world's largest coal deposits.
Construction of the bridge by a consortium of Brazilian and Portuguese firms is expected to start next week.
At present trucks have to cross the existing Samora Machel bridge one at a time, leading to peak time tailbacks of several miles.
Mozambique has launched a series of huge construction projects as the country recovers from a devastating civil war that ended in 1992. This week, the transport minister said there were also plans to build a fourth deep-water port - to be bigger and deeper than the three existing ports of Maputo, Beira and Nacala.
Last year, the government said it had secured money to build a new railway linking mines in the north with Nacala by 2015.
Announcing the new bridge, government spokesman Alberto Nkutumula said that with coal reserves of an estimated 2.4bn tonnes, several international mining companies were already working in Tete province.
The new bridge will cross the Zambezi River at Benga, about six kilometres downstream from the Samora Machel Bridge.
Mr Nkutumula said the new bridge would allow traffic to move between Zimbabwe and Malawi, without going through Tete city.
"Our country is a corridor to and from landlocked countries for the circulation of people and goods," he said.
"This project will allow the rapid development of both our country and those of the hinterland." | Government Policy Changes | July 2010 | ['(Afrol News)', '(BBC News)'] |
Xi Jinping delivers his first speech as General Secretary in a "plain-spoken" style very different from that of his predecessor, Hu Jintao. | Full text of speech by new Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping at the Politburo Standing Committee Members' meeting with the press at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
"Good day, ladies, gentlemen, and friends. Sorry to have kept you waiting. I am very happy to meet with you, friends of the press. Yesterday, the 18th CPC [Communist Party of China] National Congress victoriously concluded. During these days, friends of the press have made lots of coverage on the congress and conveyed China's voice in abundance to every country around the world. Everyone has been very dedicated, professional and hardworking. For this, on behalf of the Secretariat of the 18th Party Congress, I would like to express sincere gratitude to you. Just now, we have conducted the first plenary meeting of the 18th CPC Central Committee and elected the new central leadership organisation during the meeting. The plenary meeting election has produced seven Standing Committee members of the Political Bureau and elected me as the CPC General Secretary. Here, let me introduce to you my colleagues, the other six Standing Committee members. They are: Comrade Li Keqiang, Comrade Zhang Dejiang, Comrade Yu Zhengsheng, Comrade Liu Yunshan, Comrade Wang Qishan, and Comrade Zhang Gaoli. Comrade Li Keqiang served as a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee while other comrades served as members of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee. You have known them well. Here, on behalf of the members of the new central leadership organisation, I sincerely thank all comrades of the party for their trust in us. We will live up to the great trust placed on and the mission assigned to us. The great trust of all members of the party and the expectations of people of all ethnic groups around the country are not only a tremendous encouragement to our doing the work well, but also a heavy burden on our shoulders. This great responsibility is the responsibility to our nation. Our nation is a great nation. During the civilisation and development process of more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation has made an indelible contribution to the civilisation and advancement of mankind. | Famous Person - Give a speech | November 2012 | ['(BBC)', '(BBC Transcript)'] |
One person is killed and ten are injured by a tornado in north west Poland | One person died and 10 were wounded as heavy storms swept through the north-western part of Poland on Saturday evening.
Two tornadoes hit counties in Kujawy-Pomorze and Wielkopolska provinces.
More than 100 houses were destroyed and about 400 hectares of trees were felled in Bory Tucholskie national park.
Power lines were also brought down leaving homes cut off and train services disrupted.
The BBC's Adam Easton reports from Warsaw.
Tornadoes cause chaos in Poland.
Up Next. 'I was beating the crocodile on its snout' Video, 00:02:43'I was beating the crocodile on its snout' | Hurricanes_Tornado_Storm_Blizzard | July 2012 | ['(BBC)'] |
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspectors conclusively identify mustard gas as the toxic agent used in the battle between Islamic State insurgents and an anti-Assad rebel group in the Syrian town of Mare' in the northern Alleppo province on August 21, 2015. This is the first confirmation of its use by non-state actors in Syria’s four-year-old conflict. | BEIRUT — Inspectors have conclusively identified mustard gas as the toxic agent used in an attack by insurgents in northern Syria this summer, according to a statement released Friday by an international chemical-weapons watchdog.
The findings by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are the first confirmation that non-state actors have used mustard gas in Syria’s four-year-old conflict. They also are the first confirmation of the use of the toxin since the Syrian government agreed two years ago to destroy its stockpile of chemical weapons. Since then, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have been accused of carrying out many attacks using chlorine gas, a choking agent.
The OPCW did not specify which group used mustard gas in the attack, which the organization said killed at least one person, an infant, on Aug. 21 in the village of Marea. Doctors and an aid organization in the village north of Aleppo blamed the attack on Islamic State militants who for months have been battling rebel groups in the area.
The use of mustard gas by either the Islamic State or rebels, or both, is a significant escalation in a conflict that has killed 250,000 people and displaced millions.
“In this case, the team was able to confirm with utmost confidence that at least two people were exposed to sulfur mustard, and that it is very likely that the effects of this chemical weapon resulted in the death of an infant,” the OPCW statement said.
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council said U.S. officials are “very concerned” about the OPCW findings. The spokeswoman said the United States is “continuing to investigate these allegations very closely and to be proactive about the threat from chemical weapons, or other similar threats.”
Mustard gas, formally known as sulfur mustard, is a banned chemical weapon that can cause severe blistering of the skin and mucous membranes, as well as other symptoms such as wheezing and severe itching. After the Marea attack, doctors in the area reported dozens of residents exhibiting such symptoms.
It is unclear how non-state forces in Syria could obtain and weaponize chemical toxins such as mustard gas.
The Assad government says its 1,300-ton stockpile of chemical weapons was destroyed as part of an agreement between the United States and Russia. Weapons inspectors and U.S. intelligence officials question that assertion, suspecting that the Syrian government concealed some of the original stock.
[Last of Syria’s chemical weapons handed over for destruction] In its statement, the OPCW said another team of investigators found that chlorine gas had “likely” been involved in an attack in the northwestern province of Idlib. The rebel-held province is regularly targeted by government aircraft that indiscriminately attack with chlorine-gas weapons, opposition groups allege.
The OPCW also said its investigators could not find evidence that rebels in August targeted government forces in a Damascus suburb with chemical agents.
Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report. Read more: Russia halts Egypt flights amid widening probes into Sinai crash Syrian government accused of profiting from abductions, detentions Diplomats call for cease-fire in Syria We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
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U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, dies at the age of 87. | Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — here in her chambers during a 2019 interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg — died on Friday at the age of 87. Shuran Huang/NPR
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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — here in her chambers during a 2019 interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg — died on Friday at the age of 87. Follow NPR's coverage of Ginsburg's death and the political aftermath here. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas. The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by family. She was 87. "Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice." Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign. Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed." She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the court about to open a new term, the chief justice no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases. Though Roberts has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones this year, casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to protect at least temporarily the so-called DREAMers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes. Upcoming political battle
Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012, the high court upheld the law in a 5-4 ruling, with Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different. That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another appointment by President Trump so conservatives would have 6-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others. At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016, he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee. Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately to push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg's liberal shoes, even if Trump were to lose his reelection bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances such as these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it." So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice John Paul Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did — until age 90. "My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did," she said in an interview in 2019. "Tough as nails"
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She didn't quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless a historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution. That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court's 7-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, Ginsburg said, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands. "Reliance on overbroad generalizations ... estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote. She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was "tough as nails." By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her "Notorious RBG" moniker, a Time magazine cover and regular Saturday Night Live sketches. On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Trump. But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself. Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely "sober judge" and kept nodding off. The road to law
Born in Brooklyn, Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student — and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future justice would graduate from high school. Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell University on a full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka "Marty") Ginsburg. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she said. After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job. Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that "should go to a man." At Harvard, she was the academic star, not her husband. The couple were busy juggling schedules and their toddler when Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed. "So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me," Marty Ginsburg said in a 1993 interview with NPR. The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of her husband's illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to her. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. "Then I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day." Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn't even interviewed. It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried she would be diverted by her "familial obligations." A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn't do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was "the carrot," Ginsburg would say later. "The stick" was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn't take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61. Ginsburg's next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn't fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Bruzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia University School of Law Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Bruzelius co-authored a book. In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers Law School, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law's clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her baby was born. While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination. The "mother brief"
Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married. The tax court concluded that the Internal Revenue Code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as "preposterous." The two Ginsburgs took on the case — he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional one. According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the "mother brief." She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts. "Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers. Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade." In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband. The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male Supreme Court: no. It was the first time the court had struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender. And that was just the beginning. Ginsburg (left) joins the only three other women to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in a celebration of O'Connor, the first woman justice, at the Newseum in Washington in 2012. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
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Ginsburg (left) joins the only three other women to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in a celebration of O'Connor, the first woman justice, at the Newseum in Washington in 2012. By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning. Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits. "This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued. Over the years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities but to women as well. In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court. "The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause — 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said. During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble. The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.' "
After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about. The Supreme Court's second woman
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. | Famous Person - Death | September 2020 | ['(NPR)'] |
British racing driver Lewis Hamilton wins Formula One's 2012 United States Grand Prix ahead of Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso. | Last updated on 18 November 201218 November 2012.From the section Formula 1
Lewis Hamilton won the United States Grand Prix after a tight battle with Sebastian Vettel as Fernando Alonso kept the title fight alive.
Hamilton's McLaren tracked Vettel's Red Bull throughout the race and finally passed him with 14 laps to go. Alonso's third place means he is 13 points behind Vettel in the standings.
The title will now be settled in the final race of the season in Brazil next weekend,external-link with 25 points available for victory.
For Alonso to win the drivers' crown, he needs a victory in Brazil with Vettel finishing lower than fourth. Second place for Alonso would mean he would only win the title in the event of Vettel not finishing in the top seven, while third spot for Alonso would require Vettel to finish lower than ninth.
One title was settled in Austin, Texas, though - Red Bull have won the constructors' championship.
"To be able to beat Red Bull and Sebastian is definitely a tough challenge but we managed to do it," said Hamilton. Ferrari's Felipe Massa held off McLaren's Jenson Button to take fourth.
The Brazilian fought his way up from 11th place after Ferrari gave him a deliberate five-place penalty in order to help team-mate Alonso.
By starting the race from seventh on the grid, rather than eighth, Alonso would be on the cleaner side of circuit, where there is significantly more grip.
The Spaniard made good use of the strategy, making a superb start to climb into fourth place by the time the field had rounded the first corner.
Ahead of him, Red Bull's Mark Webber had passed Hamilton to take second as Vettel converted pole into a lead.
The German, though, was unable to pull his usual gap on his pursuers and Hamilton chased him throughout the first stint.
Vettel eked out a three-second lead by the time of their only pit stops, but after that Hamilton closed in again.
The Briton spent several laps within a second of Vettel but not quite close enough to pass before taking advantage of the leader being held up by an HRT to pass him down the straight into Turn 12 on lap 42.
Vettel stayed within two seconds of the McLaren right until the end of the race, but was never close enough to attempt a pass.
"I wasn't too happy to send a nice big invitation to Lewis when I had to go through [Narain] Karthikeyan [of HRT]," said Vettel. "[Lewis] was right behind in the DRS zone. He took that opportunity, fair enough, down the straight and he passed me. I tried to defend but I knew he would have so much more speed. I was obviously not too happy. "Lewis had one chance and he took it. After that I tried to stay with him but there wasn't much between us."
Hamilton said: "Traffic usually catches me [rather than my opponents] out so I was glad it worked slightly in my favour." Alonso was promoted to third place when Webber retired with an alternator failure on lap 17.
The Spaniard looked like he might face a challenge from Lotus's Kimi Raikkonen, but a slow pit stop meant the Finn rejoined just behind the Ferrari, which then pulled away.
"We know that our championship [hopes stay] alive maybe thanks to the first laps," said Alonso. "We are always qualifying around seventh or eighth and we finish the first lap in first three or four positions, and after that the race becomes easier. "Today we knew there was a good chance [to] try to overtake people in the first corner. If we are in the leading group we can always keep the pace. Today was not possible to keep the pace with these two guys. This podium is like a victory for us."
Raikkonen, much slower on the 'hard' tyres the leaders had to use in the second stint, dropped back and slipped behind Massa and McLaren's Jenson Button to finish sixth ahead of team-mate Romain Grosjean.
Button drove a strong race to climb up from 12th on the grid, using a reverse strategy from the leaders.
He started on the 'hard' tyre and ran a long first stint, by the end of which he was up to third place.
His stop on lap 36 dropped him back behind Grosjean, but he managed to pass both Lotus cars before the end as Massa never let him get closer than five seconds.
Force India's Nico Hulkenberg finished eighth, holding off Pastor Maldonado, who won a private battle with Williams team-mate Bruno Senna to take ninth ahead of the Brazilian.
1. Lewis Hamilton - McLaren 1:35:55.269 2. Sebastian Vettel - Red Bull +0.675 3. Fernando Alonso - Ferrari +39.229 4. Felipe Massa - Ferrari +46.013 5. Jenson Button - McLaren +56.432 6. Kimi Raikkonen - Lotus +1:04.425 7. Romain Grosjean - Lotus +1:10.313 8. Nico Hulkenberg - Force India +1:13.792 9. Pastor Maldonado - Williams +1:14.525 10. Bruno Senna - Williams +1:15.133 | Sports Competition | November 2012 | ['(BBC)'] |
An investigation is opened into U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and violated federal sex trafficking laws by allegedly paying her to travel with him. Gaetz denied the allegations. | An inquiry into the Florida congressman was opened in the final months of the Trump administration, people briefed on it said.
By Michael S. Schmidt, Katie Benner and Nicholas Fandos
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said. A variety of federal statutes make it illegal to induce someone under 18 to travel over state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases, and offenders often receive severe sentences.
It was not clear how Mr. Gaetz met the girl, believed to be 17 at the time of encounters about two years ago that investigators are scrutinizing, according to two of the people.
The investigation was opened in the final months of the Trump administration under Attorney General William P. Barr, the two people said. Given Mr. Gaetz’s national profile, senior Justice Department officials in Washington — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — were notified of the investigation, the people said.
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[Read more on what we know about the investigation of Matt Gaetz.]
The three people said that the examination of Mr. Gaetz, 38, is part of a broader investigation into a political ally of his, a local official in Florida named Joel Greenberg, who was indicted last summer on an array of charges, including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl.
Mr. Greenberg, who has since resigned his post as tax collector in Seminole County, north of Orlando, visited the White House with Mr. Gaetz in 2019, according to a photograph that Mr. Greenberg posted on Twitter.
No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.
Mr. Gaetz said in an interview that his lawyers had been in touch with the Justice Department and that they were told he was the subject, not the target, of an investigation. “I only know that it has to do with women,” Mr. Gaetz said. “I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.”
Mr. Gaetz called the investigation part of an elaborate scheme involving “false sex allegations” to extort him and his family for $25 million that began this month. He said he and his father, Don Gaetz, had been cooperating with the F.B.I. and “wearing a wire” after they were approached by people saying they could make the investigation “go away.” Mr. Gaetz claimed the disclosure of the sex trafficking inquiry was intended to thwart an investigation into the extortion plot.
In a second interview later Tuesday, the congressman said he had no plans to resign his House seat and denied that he had romantic relationships with minors. “It is verifiably false that I have traveled with a 17-year-old woman,” he said.
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Representatives for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Central Florida.
Mr. Greenberg pleaded not guilty last year and was sent to jail this month for violating the terms of his bail. He is scheduled to go on trial in June in Orlando.
A frequent presence on Fox News and other conservative media, Mr. Gaetz has recently mused with confidants about quitting elected politics and taking a full-time job with the conservative television channel Newsmax or another network, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Axios first reported on Tuesday that Mr. Gaetz was considering leaving Congress.
Mr. Greenberg maintained ties to controversial figures who have supported Mr. Trump, an examination of court records, social media posts and far-right websites showed. A website run by a member of the far-right group the Proud Boys and a network of fake social media accounts linked to Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. have promoted false accusations about Mr. Greenberg’s rivals similar to rumors that prosecutors accused Mr. Greenberg of secretly trying to spread.
It was not clear how Mr. Greenberg knew either Mr. Gaetz or Mr. Stone. He posted a selfie with both in 2017, tweeting, “Great catching up.” The following year, Mr. Gaetz expressed support for Mr. Greenberg’s successful bid for local office, predicting he would someday make a great member of Congress.
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Gaetz has embraced the role of villain to the left as much as he has served as one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders and enablers, often with theatrical flair. He wore a gas mask on the House floor last year in the early days of the pandemic, insisting he was demonstrating concern for public safety amid accusations he was mocking the seriousness of the spread of the coronavirus.
Mr. Gaetz was first elected to Congress in 2016. As a member of the Florida State Legislature and the scion of a Republican political family, he had initially backed former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in the Republican presidential primary that year before hitching his political fortunes to Mr. Trump.
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It paid off. He won a seat in Congress representing part of the Florida Panhandle, and as one of Mr. Trump’s most flamboyant supporters on Capitol Hill and on cable television, his profile skyrocketed.
Mr. Gaetz invited a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union address in 2018, and attended an event last year where he said the Proud Boys had provided security, though he has distanced himself from the group on his podcast. When Democrats moved in 2019 to impeach Mr. Trump for the first time, Mr. Gaetz and a phalanx of Republicans following him barged past Capitol Police into the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee to briefly break up the investigation into the president.
After Mr. Trump’s defeat last year, Mr. Gaetz once again rallied to his side, defending the president’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud. Mr. Gaetz helped organize efforts among lawmakers to challenge President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory during Congress’s certification of it on Jan. 6 that was disrupted for hours by a pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol. Mr. Gaetz later traveled to Wyoming to hold a rally against Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican leader who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the riot.
In 2017, Mr. Gaetz was the only member of Congress to vote against a law that gave the federal government more power and money to fight human trafficking.
“Voters in Northwest Florida did not send me to Washington to go and create more federal government,” Mr. Gaetz said in a local television interview at the time. “If anything, we should be abolishing a lot of the agencies at the federal level.”
Mr. Gaetz’s personal life has gained attention before. Last summer, he announced that he had a son, Nestor Galban, 19, though Mr. Gaetz said he was not Mr. Galban’s biological father, nor had he adopted him. Mr. Galban had been 12 when they met and had come to the United States from Cuba; Mr. Gaetz was at the time dating Mr. Galban’s sister.
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“He is a part of my family story,” Mr. Gaetz told People magazine in June. “My work with Nestor, our family, no element of my public service could compare to the joy that our family has brought me.”
Mr. Gaetz is now engaged to an analyst named Ginger Luckey, 26, whom he proposed to at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club on Dec. 30.
It was unclear how investigators in the Greenberg case began examining Mr. Gaetz’s conduct. Last June, federal prosecutors secured an indictment against Mr. Greenberg, accusing him of stalking a political rival.
Around that time, federal authorities seized Mr. Greenberg’s phone and laptop, according to court records. They discovered evidence that Mr. Greenberg, whose job responsibilities included issuing licenses, was creating fake identification cards for himself and a teenage girl, and was experimenting with holograms used on permits for concealed firearms, according to court documents.
Two months later, he was indicted on the sex trafficking charge. From May to November 2017, prosecutors said, Mr. Greenberg targeted the girl, who was between 14 and 17, saying he “recruited” and “solicited” her for sex acts in exchange for unspecified perks or favors.
Mr. Greenberg worked in advertising before running successfully at the age of 31 in 2016 for tax collector in Seminole County.
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Within days of taking office, he fired three employees who had supported his predecessor and began spending more than $1.5 million in taxpayer money on personal expenses, including guns, ammunition, body armor and a drone, as well as on computers for his own cryptocurrency venture, a county audit later revealed.
The following year, according to The Orlando Sentinel, Mr. Greenberg posted a photograph of himself on social media with Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing personality who has a history of making racist remarks. The newspaper also detailed Mr. Greenberg’s own misogynist and anti-Muslim comments on Facebook.
In his bid for re-election, Mr. Greenberg turned in late 2019 to clandestine tactics to undermine a possible rival, according to court papers. Prosecutors said he sent an anonymous letter to the school where one potential candidate worked that made unfounded accusations of sexual misconduct with a student and making similar claims on a fake Facebook account.
As the primary race intensified last summer, similar messaging began appearing on fake social media accounts that have been tied to Mr. Stone.
“Watch out Seminole county,” said someone named April Goad on Facebook, warning Floridians “don’t open your door” to the rival candidate, according to Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media.
The post linked to an article about the rival published on Central Florida Post, a website controlled by Mr. Stone’s associates that had written favorable articles about Mr. Greenberg. The website was founded by a member of the Proud Boys who has been linked to security providers for Mr. Stone on Jan. 6 in Washington in the lead-up to the insurrection at the Capitol.
Mr. Greenberg’s re-election efforts quickly evaporated when he was first indicted last June, and he resigned a day later.
Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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If you have a critical piece of feedback for us, you can always reach the newsroom via the Reader Center. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Investigate | March 2021 | ['(R–FL)', '(The New York Times)'] |
A Tibetan activist sets himself on fire at a demonstration in India's capital New Delhi ahead of a visit by the President of China Hu Jintao later in the week. | A Tibetan exile lit himself on fire and ran shouting through a demonstration in the Indian capital Monday, just before a visit by China's president and following dozens of self-immolations done in China in protest of its rule over Tibet.
Indian police swept through the New Delhi protest a few hours later, detaining scores of Tibetans.
The man apparently had doused himself with something highly flammable and was engulfed in flames when he ran past the podium where speakers were criticizing China and President Hu Jintao's visit.
Fellow activists beat out the flames with Tibetan flags and poured water onto him. He was on fire perhaps less than two minutes, but some of his clothing had disintegrated and his skin was mottled with black, burned patches by the time he was driven to a hospital.
About 30 such protests have occurred over the past year in ethnic Tibetan areas of China, and a Tibetan self-immolated last year in India, where many exiles reside. Beijing has blamed the Dalai Lama for inciting them and called the protesters' actions a form of terrorism.
Tibetans inside China and exiles say China's crackdown on Tibetan regions is so oppressive, those who choose such a horrific form of protest feel they have no other way to express their beliefs.
Activists said the exile who self-immolated Monday is Jamphel Yeshi, 27, who escaped from Tibet in 2006 and has been living in New Delhi for two years.
He was burned on 98 percent of his body and his condition is critical, according to the Association of Tibetan Journalists.
Protesters initially prevented police from taking him to the hospital, but officers eventually forcibly took him away.
While activists had been whispering Monday morning that something dramatic was expected at the protest, organizers insisted they were not behind the self-immolation.
"We have no idea how this happened, but we appreciate the courage," said Tenzing Norsang, an official with the Tibetan Youth Congress.
Hu is expected to arrive in India on Wednesday for a five-nation economic summit. Norsang called on the summit participants to discuss Tibet.
"If you care about peace you should raise the issue of Tibet," he said. "Hu Jintao is responsible for what is happening there."
At the protest site, a large poster of Hu — with a bloody palm print over his face — said: "Hu Jin Tao is unwelcome" at the summit.
More than 600 demonstrators marched across New Delhi to a plaza near the Indian Parliament. Some carried posters saying "Tibet is burning" or "Tibet is not part of China."
"This is what China faces unless they give freedom to Tibet," said Tenzin Dorjee, a young onlooker.
China says Tibet has always been part of its territory. Tibetans say the Himalayan region was virtually independent for centuries.
Many of the protesters who have self-immolated in China are Buddhist monks or nuns, often in their teens or early 20s. They have done so while calling for the return to Tibet of the Dalai Lama and to protest Chinese rule over their homeland. Security forces have taken many away, and it's unknown how many survived.
The origin of this form of protest is unclear. Some activists see inspiration from the Arab Spring protests, set off by a Tunisian fruit seller's self-immolation. Others see historical examples among Buddhist monks: those who protests Vietnam's crackdowns in the 1960s and Chinese in the last imperial dynasty.
The economic summit Hu will be attending this week involves the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, who form a grouping known as BRICS.
Police in New Delhi were already bracing for protests by the tens of thousands of Tibetan exiles who live in India. Security around the summit location has been tightened, and roads leading to the hotel will be closed to the public a day ahead of the meeting.
Rajan Bhagat, a spokesman for the Delhi police, did not know how long the protesting Tibetans would be held, or how many had been taken into custody.
Tibetan protesters normally are held for anywhere from a few hours to one day — often to stop them from further embarrassing Indian authorities during Chinese visits — though detainees legally can be held for up to one week. | Protest_Online Condemnation | March 2012 | ['(AP via ABC News America)'] |
The Taliban's Qatar office confirms its leaders are in Pakistan to talk about Afghan refugees and the release of prisoners. The representative did not say if the delegation will discuss the peace process. | ISLAMABAD: Afghan Taliban on Wednesday confirmed a visit of its leaders to Pakistan but said they are discussing the issue of Afghan refugees, the release of a senior leader and other prisoners.
The Taliban Qatar office did not say whether the delegation will discuss peace process.
A three-member delegation had arrived in Islamabad from its Qatar-based office on Monday to discuss with Pakistan the possibility of the peace talks, diplomatic and official sources had said.
Afghan officials in Kabul had earlier stated they are aware of the visit but no meeting with the Taliban in Pakistan is planned.
“Since the Afghan people have close relations, long border and commercial transactions with neighboring country Pakistan and a large number of our countrymen are living there as refugees, therefore, the Political Office of the Islamic Emirate has decided to send a high level delegation to Islamabad,” the Taliban Qatar office said. The Taliban use the name of Islamic Emirate they had used during their rule (1996-2001).
“The esteemed leader of Islamic Emirate has instructed the delegation to discuss issues regarding Afghan refugees, some problems about frontier areas and particularly to discuss the release of Mullah Bradar Akhund and some other prisoners with the officials of the government of Pakistan.”
Mullah Baradar, the former second-in-command in the Taliban hierarchy, was arrested in Karachi in 2010; and the Taliban say he has not yet been freed. Pakistan had said in 2013 that he had been released along with some 50 senior Taliban leaders in 2013 on the request by then Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
A Taliban statement said the visit to Pakistan “would be in the interest of both countries and would have fruitful results.”
Although the Taliban statement did not mention the delegation will discuss the possibility of the group’s participation in the peace negotiations, sources say it is one of the topics they are discussing in Pakistan. Some sources say that a meeting between the Taliban and the representatives of the Afghan gov’t was scheduled in Islamabad on April 27; however, the Afghan diplomatic sources said. “Kabul is not in the loop about the visit.”
Pakistan had hosted the first face-to-face meeting between the Taliban and the Afghan government in July last year near Islamabad. The talks – dubbed as Murree Peace Process – broke down after the death of Mullah Omar was confirmed in late July.
The delegation includes Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar, a former diplomat in Islamabad and Jan Muhammad Madni, who has served as Afghan ambassador to UAE during the Taliban and Maulvi Nek Muhammad a member of the Taliban’s leadership council and long time member of their negotiation team.
| Diplomatic Talks _ Diplomatic_Negotiation_ Summit Meeting | April 2016 | ['(The Nation PK)', '(Pakistan Today)'] |
Police in Allen County, Indiana arrest a suspect in the 1988 murder of the 8-year-old April Tinsley. |
FORT WAYNE, Ind. -- Police have arrested a man in the 1988 slaying of an 8-year-old Indiana girl. Authorities say John Miller of Grabill agreed to speak with police Sunday in Fort Wayne and made incriminating statements about abducting, assaulting and killing April Tinsley.
An affidavit released by the Allen County prosecutor says investigators have DNA evidence linking Miller to the girl. A recent search of Miller's trash helped police make a DNA match.
Miller, 59, was arrested on preliminary murder, child molesting and criminal confinement charges in Tinsley's death. A judge gave prosecutors until Thursday to formally charge him.
Miller was being held without bond. It wasn't clear if he has a lawyer who could speak on his behalf.
According to the affidavit, Miller's DNA was matched to DNA recovered from Tinsley's underwear in 1988, CBS affiliate WANE reports.
Tinsley was abducted as she walked to a friend's home to pick up an umbrella, the station reports.
Tinsley's body was found in a ditch, about 20 miles from her Fort Wayne neighborhood, three days after she disappeared in April 1988. The first-grader's body was found by a jogger, WANE reports.
Police say the alleged killer continued to torment the residents of Fort Wayne years after the crime. He surfaced several times, police say, posting notes about his involvement with the Tinsley slaying, and handing others to local children.
Tinsley's family left Fort Wayne in 1991 but returned five years ago.
First published on July 16, 2018 / 7:55 AM
| Famous Person - Commit Crime - Arrest | July 2018 | ['(CBS News)'] |
Three ETA militants, including one of its top leaders, Ibon Gogeascoechea, on the run since 1997, are detained in a FrenchSpanish raid in Cahan, Orne. | The suspected leader of the Basque separatist group Eta was arrested by police in north-western France today, the Spanish government has said.
Ibon Gogeascoechea and two other suspected Eta members were taken into custody by French police in the village of Cahan following a surveillance operation on a cottage that had been rented using false identity papers, Spanish interior ministry officials said.
Gogeascoechea, 54, is wanted for allegedly helping to place 12 explosive devices around the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, northern Spain, on the eve of the gallery's inauguration by the country's king in 1997.
The plot was discovered before the bombs exploded, but Gogeascoechea's brother, Eneko, shot and killed a Basque regional policeman at the gallery.
Gogeascoechea is the fifth suspected Eta leader to be arrested in Spain or France since November 2008.
Eta, a nationalist and separatist organisation, has killed more than 825 people since launching a violent campaign aimed at carving out an independent Basque homeland in the 1960s.
Spain, France, the EU and the US consider Eta to be a terrorist group.
About 30 suspected Eta members have been arrested this year. In February, a bomb-making base in Portugal was raided by police.
During today's raid, French police found bomb-making equipment, a stolen car that had been falsely registered in France in January and documents and computer equipment, the interior ministry said.
The other two Eta members were identified by the ministry as Beinat Aguiagalde, 26, and Gregorio Jimenez, 55.
All three men are wanted by Spain's national court on suspicion of involvement in terror attacks.
Aguiagalde is wanted in connection with the murders of the former Basque regional politician Isaias Carrasco in March 2008 and the businessman Ignacio Uria Mendizabal in December that year.
Jimenez is wanted for his links with a foiled rocket attack on the former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar in 2001. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Accuse | February 2010 | ['(BBC)', '(The Guardian)', '(The Daily Telegraph)'] |
The Supreme Court of Indonesia orders TIME magazine to pay US$106 million in damages to former President of Indonesia Suharto. The magazine had reported in 1999 that the former President and his family had accumulated $73 billion dollars fraudulently during his time in office. The case had previously been rejected by two lower courts. | Indonesia's highest court overturned the decision of two lower courts and ruled that the Time article, published in 1999, defamed the former ruler.
The article alleged $73bn had passed through the Suharto family's hands during the president's 32-year reign. A lawyer for Mr Suharto welcomed the ruling, but there was no immediate word from Time magazine.
The magazine's only legal avenue is a judicial review, which requires fresh evidence or a procedural dispute, the BBC's Kate Hamann in Jakarta reports.
Four-month investigation
A spokesman for Indonesia's Supreme Court said the ruling was made by a panel of judges on 30 August.
They had ordered the magazine to pay $106m in damages and publish an apology in various Time editions as well as Indonesian publications, the spokesman, Nurhadi, said.
The court "found the article has damaged the reputation and honour of the grand general of the Indonesian armed forces and former president of Indonesia", he said.
Time published the article in its Asian edition a year after President Suharto was forced to resign after public protests.
It said the evidence was gathered during a four-month probe involving correspondents in 11 countries.
The article alleged that the Suharto family had amassed some $73bn "in revenues and assets" during his rule, but lost much of it during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
The article, entitled "Family Firm", claimed the Suharto family still had $15bn in 1999.
Mr Suharto filed a defamation suit against the magazine, originally seeking more than $27bn in damages.
His case was rejected by Jakarta's District Court in 2000 and then the Appeal Court in 2001, before succeeding with the Supreme Court.
Civil case
Mr Suharto has long faced allegations of amassing a fortune while in power - claims he has always denied.
A criminal case against him was blocked by the courts last year on the grounds of the 86-year-old's ill health.
He has had a number of strokes and last year underwent stomach surgery.
Prosecutors have since tried to bring a civil case against the former president, seeking $440m they claim disappeared from a state scholarship fund, and $1.1bn in damages.
They said they are set to return to court after failing to reach an out-of-court settlement with the defence lawyers as requested by the judge at the hearing last month. | Organization Fine | September 2007 | ['(BBC)'] |
The Mars 2020 mission carrying the Perseverance rover and Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully launches atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral SLC-41 | The Perseverance rover will hunt for signs of ancient life and cache samples for future return to Earth. NASA's Perseverance rover isn't just exploring the Red Planet. The life-hunting robot will also help a little bit of Mars make it to Earth a decade or so from now, if all goes according to plan. Perseverance, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, touched down inside the Red Planet's Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Once it's fully up and running, the car-sized robot will search for evidence of past microbial life and collect several dozen samples for future return to Earth, among other ambitious tasks. "I don't think we've had a mission that is going to contribute so much to both science and technology," NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk told Space.com shortly before Perseverance touched down. "It's going to be truly amazing." More: Where to find the latest Mars photos from Perseverance
Join our forums here to discuss the Perseverance rover on Mars. What do you hope finds? If Perseverance looks familiar, that's because the robotic explorer is largely based off its predecessor, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover, which landed in August 2012 and is still going strong today. Like Curiosity, the Perseverance rover was built by engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Roughly 85% of Perseverance's mass is based on Curiosity "heritage hardware," saving NASA time and money and reducing risk considerably, agency officials have said. Perseverance is about 10 feet long (not including its robotic arm), 9 feet wide, and 7 feet tall (about 3 meters long, 2.7 meters wide and 2.2 meters tall). At 2,260 lbs. (1,025 kilograms), Perseverance weighs less than a compact car. Like Curiosity, Perseverance has a rectangular body, six wheels, a robotic arm, a drill for sampling rocks, cameras and scientific instruments. But those instruments are quite different than the gear aboard Curiosity, because the two rovers have divergent goals. Curiosity's main task involves assessing the habitability of ancient Mars, whereas Perseverance will hunt for evidence of ancient Martians. Perseverance's seven instruments "build on the success of MSL, which was a proving ground for new technology," said George Tahu, NASA's Perseverance program executive. "These will gather science data in ways that weren't possible before." Perseverance also used the same entry, descent and landing (EDL) strategy as Curiosity. Both rovers hit the Mars atmosphere at tremendous speeds, deployed a supersonic parachute after friction slowed them down enough, and were finally lowered gently to the red dirt on cables by a rocket-powered "sky crane." But Perseverance had some EDL upgrades that Curiosity did not enjoy. For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the Mars 2020 mission, developed new landing technology called terrain-relative navigation. As the rover descended through the Martian skies, it used a computer to compare the landscape with pre-loaded terrain maps, guiding itself to a safe landing site and making corrections on the way down. Another new feature, known as range trigger, used location and velocity information to determine when to open the supersonic parachute, narrowing the landing ellipse by more than half. "Terrain-relative navigation enables us to go to sites that were ruled too risky for Curiosity to explore," said JPL's Al Chen, Perseverance's EDL lead. "The ranger trigger lets us land closer to areas of scientific interest, shaving miles — potentially as much as a year — off a rover's journey." Perseverance rover's Mars landing: Everything you need to know
Perseverance boasts nearly five times more cameras than the first Mars rover. Sojourner, which landed in 1997, carried only five cameras, and the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which hit the red dirt in 2004, had 10 cameras apiece. Curiosity has 17. Perseverance has 23 cameras. Several of them filmed the rover's Mars arrival, capturing its landing in historic and unprecedented detail. The epic EDL video shows Perseverance's parachute snap open in the Martian sky, for example, and documents the moment the robot's six wheels hit the red dirt. "For those who wonder how you land on Mars, or why it is so difficult, or how cool it would be to do so — you need look no further," Jurczyk said in a statement a few days after touchdown. "Perseverance is just getting started and already has provided some of the most iconic visuals in space exploration history," he added. "It reinforces the remarkable level of engineering and precision that is required to build and fly a vehicle to the Red Planet." Some of Perseverance's cameras provide more color and 3D imaging than Curiosity can collect, according to Jim Bell of Arizona State University, the principal investigator for Perseverance's Mastcam-Z camera system. "Z" stands for "zoom," one of the improvements on Curiosity's high-definition Mastcam. Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity have all captured 1-megapixel images in black and white with their engineering cameras, which assist in drive planning and hazard avoidance. But Perseverance's engineering cameras acquire high-resolution, 20-megapixel color images. Their wider field of view means that, instead of spending time taking multiple images to be stitched together on the ground, the new cameras capture the same view in a single snapshot. The cameras also reduce motion blur, so they can take photos while the rover is traveling. More detailed images mean more data to beam through space. "The limiting factor in most imaging systems is the telecommunications link," said Perseverance imaging scientist Justin Maki of JPL, the instrument operations team chief. "Cameras are capable of acquiring much more data than can be sent back to Earth." Related: Perseverance rover snaps gorgeous HD panorama of Mars
Smarter rover cameras are helping to reduce the load. On Spirit and Opportunity, photo compression was done using the onboard computer. On Perseverance, as on Curiosity, compression is performed by electronics built into the camera. Perseverance's data is beamed back to Earth via several spacecraft orbiting Mars: NASA's Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), and the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter. Odyssey was the first orbiter to send rover data home from Spirit and Opportunity. "We were expecting to do that mission on just tens of megabits each Mars day, or sol," Bell said, referring to Spirit and Opportunity's work. "When we got that first Odyssey overflight, and we had about 100 megabits per sol, we realized it was a whole new ballgame." Mastcam-Z is one of Perseverance's seven science instruments. Another, known as SHERLOC ("Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals"), will be the first instrument on Mars to use Ramen and fluorescence spectroscopies, techniques familiar to forensics experts. When an ultraviolet light shines over certain carbon-based chemicals, they glow much like material beneath a black light. The glow can help scientists detect chemicals that form in the presence of life. SHERLOC will photograph the rocks it studies, then map the chemicals it detects across the images. "This kind of science requires texture and organic chemicals — two things that our target meteorite will provide," Rohit Bhartia of JPL, SHERLOC's deputy principal investigator, said in a statement. The space rock mentioned by Bhartia is the Martian meteorite Sayh al Uhaymir 008 (SaU008), which the team will use to help calibrate SHERLOC. Previous rovers have included calibration targets, but none of them have ever relied on Martian meteorites. (A meteorite has, however, ridden to Mars aboard the Mars Global Surveyor, which ceased operations in January 2007.) More: 5 weird things NASA's Perseverance rover took to Mars
Another Perseverance instrument, called PIXL ("Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry"), will determine the composition of Martian materials at a very fine scale using a high-resolution camera and X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. The rover's SuperCam instrument, an evolution of Curiosity's ChemCam, will zap target rocks with lasers and determine the chemical composition of the resulting vapor. Perseverance also carries a ground-penetrating radar instrument called RIMFAX ("Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment"). RIMFAX will be the first rover instrument ever to look under the surface of Mars, mapping layers of rock, water and ice up to 33 feet (10 m) deep. Also aboard the rover is a weather station known as MEDA ("Mars Environmental Data Analyzer") and a technology demonstration called MOXIE ("Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment"). MOXIE is designed to generate oxygen from the Red Planet's atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide by volume. Such gear, if scaled up, could help humanity get a foothold on the Red Planet in the future, NASA officials have said. (The agency aims to put boots on Mars in the 2030s.) SHERLOC, PIXL and Perseverance's rock drill sit at the end of the rover's 7-foot-long (2.1 m) robotic arm, which can move with five degrees of freedom. MEDA, MOXIE and RIMFAX are on Perseverance's body, and Mastcam-Z and SuperCam are on the rover's headlike mast. Perseverance also carries two microphones, to relay the sounds of the Red Planet back to Earth. One is part of the EDL camera system, and the other is built into SuperCam. The mission team hoped the EDL mic would record sound during Perseverance's touchdown. That didn't happen, but the instrument did switch on shortly after landing, collecting the first-ever true audio on the surface of Mars. (Two other NASA Mars missions, the Mars Polar Lander and Phoenix lander, carried microphones, but neither of them returned any audio data. Mars Polar Lander crashed in December 1999, and Phoenix's mic was never turned on, out of concern that it could interfere with the spacecraft's May 2008 touchdown.) Listen to the Mars wind blow in these 1st sounds from the Perseverance
Hearing these otherworldly sounds helps bring Mars down to Earth for all of us, making the Red Planet a more accessible place, mission team members have said. And Mars audio has more than just gee-whiz appeal. "There's a lot of good science that can be done by having a microphone on Mars," SuperCam team member Sylvestre Maurice, a planetary scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in France, told Space.com. For example, once SuperCam comes online, the mic should help reveal how hard target rocks are and whether or not they have a coating. Martian audio will also improve our understanding of the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, by providing data to plug into models, mission team members have said. It's possible that Perseverance will even gather stereo sound on the Martian surface, by operating the EDL and SuperCam mics in concert. Perseverance also carried a tiny hitchhiker to Mars — a 4-lb. (1.8 kg) helicopter named Ingenuity, which will attempt to make the first-ever rotorcraft flights on a world beyond Earth. Like MOXIE, Ingenuity is a technology demonstration; it carries a high-resolution camera but no science instruments. If the little chopper does manage to get off the Martian ground, helicopters could become a staple of Red Planet exploration in the future, gathering a variety of data on their own and/or serving as scouts for rovers, NASA officials have said. Ingenuity will get its chance soon. Once Perseverance gets fully up and running, the mission team will find a suitable airfield and let the helicopter fly. The rover will attempt to document these flights from a safe distance, using its cameras and microphones. Spirit and Opportunity were solar powered. Both rovers far outlived their three-month warranties, roaming the red desert for years. But they both ultimately succumbed to the elements, freezing to death after finding themselves in situations where their solar panels couldn't soak up enough sun. (NASA declared Spirit and Opportunity dead in 2011 and 2019, respectively.) Curiosity and Perseverance don't have to worry about Martian sunlight levels. The big rovers are nuclear powered, each sporting a roughly 100-lb. (45 kg) Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG). These MMRTGs convert to electricity the heat naturally produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238. And they keep doing so for a long time; the MMRTG has an operational life of 14 years, according to NASA's Mars 2020 information page. Curiosity is still going strong inside Mars' Gale Crater, more than eight years after touching down. So there's every reason to believe that Perseverance's power source, and its other vital components, will allow the robot to keeping roaming beyond the rover's prime mission duration of one Mars year, or about 687 Earth days. Perseverance launched from Florida's Space Coast on July 30, 2020, hurtling into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Getting off Earth is never easy, and Perseverance had a particularly challenging path. The mission team had to conduct the final assembly and testing procedures, and the launch itself, while the coronavirus pandemic raged around them. Like the rest of us, many Perseverance team members had to adapt to working from home; key rover prep was done from living rooms, kitchens and backyard patios. And getting the robot to the launch pad on time — a high priority, since launch windows for Mars missions open for just a few weeks once every 26 months — was far from a foregone conclusion. "In March and early April [2020], we weren't sure we were going to be able to make it," Jurczyk told Space.com. (Back then, the NASA administrator was Jim Bridenstine, and Jurczyk led the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate.) "But we were able to work through the planning and get there. It's a real credit to the dedication and hard work of the team." Perseverance's deep-space journey went smoothly, and the rover arrived at Mars as planned, 6.5 months after liftoff. The pandemic was still an issue on landing day, however; rover team members assembled at mission control at JPL to oversee EDL on Feb. 18, but they wore masks and practiced social distancing to the extent possible. In a harrowing "seven minutes of terror," the rover plunged into the Martian atmosphere, jettisoned its heat shield and deployed the largest parachute ever built for Mars to slow its descent to the Martian surface. Cameras on the rover, its sky crane and backshell captured the descent down to the ground, including the moment the sky crane, hovering over the Martian surface, lowered Perseverance to the ground for a picture perfect landing. The Perseverance rover landed safely on Mars and began surveying its Jezero Crater home. In February 2017, a team of scientists narrowed the Mars 2020 landing-site candidates down to three finalists: Columbia Hills, Northeast Syrtis and Jezero Crater. One site had been explored before. Starting in 2004, the Spirit rover roamed through Gusev Crater and Columbia Hills, where the robot discovered evidence of past water, the only place it found water in the enormous crater. Later data analysis suggested that the crater may have once hosted a shallow lake. | New achievements in aerospace | July 2020 | ['(Space.com)'] |
Tens of thousands of people protest in the Yemeni capital Sana'a calling for an end to the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. | Tens of thousands of Yemenis have demonstrated in the capital Sanaa, calling on Ali Abdullah Saleh, president for 30 years, to step down.
This comes after mass protests in Egypt and a popular uprising in Tunisia that ousted its long-time leader.
Yemeni opposition members and youth activists gathered in four parts of the city, including Sanaa University, chanting anti-government slogans.
They also called for economic reforms and an end to corruption.
Yemenis complain of mounting poverty among a growing young population and frustration with a lack of political freedoms.
The country has also been plagued by a range of security issues, including a separatist movement in the south and an uprising of Shia Houthi rebels in the north. There are fears that Yemen is becoming a leading al-Qaeda haven, with the high numbers of unemployed youths seen as potential recruits for Islamist militant groups.
Protesters gathered in several locations of the city on Thursday morning, chanting that it was "time for change", and referring to the popular uprising in Tunisia that ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali earlier this month.
Opposition MP Abdulmalik al-Qasuss, from the al-Islah (Reform) party, echoed the demands of the protesters when he addressed them. "We gather today to demand the departure of President Saleh and his corrupt government," he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
Counter-protests have also been staged by the party of President Saleh, the General People's Congress.
Government supporter Saleh al-Mrani said the dissident protesters were a threat to the country's stability.
"We are against whoever wants to trouble the country's interests. All Yemeni people are against that, and we will prevent any kind of disturbance," he said.
President Saleh, a Western ally, became leader of North Yemen in 1978, and has ruled the Republic of Yemen since the north and south merged in 1990. He was last re-elected in 2006.
Yemenis are angry over parliament's attempts to relax the rules on presidential term limits, sparking opposition concerns that Mr Saleh might try to appoint himself president for life.
Mr Saleh is also accused of wanting to hand power to his eldest son, Ahmed, who heads the elite presidential guard, but he has denied the claims.
"We are a republic. We reject bequeathing [the presidency]," he said in a televised address on Sunday.
The editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post newspaper, Hakim al-Masmari, told the BBC World Service that Yemenis were no longer prepared to put up with widespread poverty.
He said the protests were likely to continue because people felt that "all chances of a dialogue with the ruling party are vanishing".
There have been a series of smaller protests in the lead-up to Thursday's mass demonstrations.
On Saturday, hundreds of Sanaa University students held competing protests on campus, with some calling for President Saleh to step down and others for him to remain in office.
Over the weekend, Yemeni authorities arrested a prominent rights activist, Tawakul Karman, accusing her of organising the anti-government protests. Her arrest sparked further protests in Sanaa.
After her release from prison on Monday, she told CNN that there was a revolution taking place in her country inspired by Tunisia's so-called Jasmine Revolution. Protests in Tunisia ended 23 years of President Ben Ali's rule and ignited unrest elsewhere in the region, including Algeria and Egypt. | Protest_Online Condemnation | January 2011 | ['(Al Jazeera)', '(BBC)'] |
Seamus Daly, a suspect in the Omagh bombing of 1998 in Ireland, is remanded without bail and will face 29 counts of murder. | A man accused of murdering 29 people in the 1998 Omagh bombing has been remanded in custody. Seamus Daly, 43, from Culloville, County Monaghan, in the Republic of Ireland, faced 29 counts of murder and two charges linked to the explosion in Omagh, at Dungannon Magistrates' Court.
The Real IRA attack was the worst single atrocity of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The victims included a woman who was pregnant with twins. It happened just four months after the Good Friday peace agreement was signed.
Andy Martin, BBC Ireland correspondent, said there was a light security presence outside the court as Seamus Daly was led into the dock. Mr Daly also faced two charges related to an attempted bomb attack in Lisburn, County Antrim, that took place in the same year as the Omagh bomb.
Bail was refused because of police concerns that he may flee the jurisdiction.
Seamus Daly has been connected to the bombing of Omagh before. Fourteen years ago the BBC's Panorama programme named him as a suspect in the case, and a civil action brought by the relatives of some of the victims found him and three others liable for the attack, and ordered them to pay more than 1.5m damages. He has also previously pleaded guilty in the Republic of Ireland to membership of the IRA.
He was remanded in custody to appear again in May.
| Famous Person - Commit Crime - Accuse | April 2014 | ['(BBC)'] |
Two people are reported to be dead following the aftermath of Hurricane Delta in Louisiana. | Back-to-back hurricanes in the space of six weeks left parts of Louisiana blanketed Sunday with tarpaulins, mangled metal and downed power lines — but not necessarily despair.
Utility crews fanned out across the battered southwestern part of the state to restore electricity in the wake of Hurricane Delta, and residents began returning home along roads lined with debris and houses missing roofs. Some were grateful that the damage was not as bad as it could have been.
A 70-year-old woman in Iberia Parish died in a fire likely caused by a natural gas leak following damage from Hurricane Delta, the Louisiana Department of Health said Sunday.
Louisiana officials also blamed the death of an 86-year-old man on the hurricane. The St. Martin Parish resident died in a fire that erupted after he refuelled a generator in a shed, Gov. John Bel Edwards said. He said it didn’t appear the generator had cooled down before the man refilled it.
A third storm-related death was reported in Florida, where a 19-year-old tourist from Illinois drowned after getting caught in a rip current caused by the storm off Destin, authorities said.
Roughly 350,000 customers in Louisiana remained without power two days after Delta blew ashore near the town of Creole with winds of 100 mph (155 kph), slamming a part of the state still recovering from Hurricane Laura’s 150 mph (241 kph) onslaught on Aug. 27. Laura was blamed for 32 deaths, many of them caused in the storm’s aftermath by carbon monoxide poisoning from generators.
The remnants of Delta, meanwhile, dumped heavy rain on parts of Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.
The storm was also blamed for washing out a railroad track and causing the derailment of a freight train in the Atlanta area that sparked a small fire and briefly forced some residents from their homes. Two crew members were taken to a hospital for observation and later released.
Clair Hebert Marceaux lost her home in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, during Hurricane Laura and said the community was hard at work on rebuilding when Delta struck.
“We can’t lose our momentum,” she said, though she added there was “utter devastation” in the area.
Read more: Louisiana prepares a 6th time this year for hurricane impacts as Delta closes in
Marceaux, who was born and raised in Cameron Parish, is the director of the community’s busy port, which hosts fleets of shrimp and crab boats and serves as a key link in the region’s oil and gas industry.
Vessel traffic was halted until port authorities and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers could take stock of the damage. Sunken boats, utility poles and other flotsam filled waterways.
“We are still in an assessment phase,” Marceaux said, “but we will be limping along as best as we can.”
Lynn Nguyen and her four children fled to Fort Walton, Florida, ahead of the storm and returned home to Abbeville, Louisiana, on a circuitous route to avoid flooded roads. Her home was spared major damage, though a fence was flattened.
“For the most part, I’m just glad I still have a job and a roof over my head,” said Nguyen, who works at a seafood market.
Earnestine and Milton Wesley had decided to ride out Delta in their Lake Charles home, damaged by Laura. As the wind rustled the roof tarp above them, they grabbed it through the hole in the ceiling and held on tight. Water poured in, flooding their den.
“We fought all night long trying to keep things intact,” Milton said. “And with God’s help we made it.”
After blowing ashore, Delta moved over Lake Charles, a city where Laura damaged nearly every home and building. More than 8,000 Louisiana residents who evacuated because of Laura were still in shelters as of Sunday, Edwards said. Roughly 850 people were in shelters because of Delta.
Before Friday’s storm, the streets of Lake Charles were already lined with mountains of debris from the previous hurricane — soggy insulation, mouldy mattresses, tree limbs, twisted metal siding, ruined family treasures. Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter estimated hundreds of already damaged homes took on water from Delta, which dumped more than 15 inches (38 centimetres) of rain on the city over two days.
Delta, the 25th named storm of an unprecedented Atlantic hurricane season, was the 10th to hit the mainland U.S. this year, breaking a record set in 1916, Colorado State University researcher Phil Klotzbach said.
The floodwaters surged up the Wesley family’s front yard, and they were terrified it would pour inside, but it stopped short of the door. It carried with it bags of trash and muck, swept up from their neighbours’ piles of debris from the prior storm.
“The water was something else last night,” Milton said. “We’ve never seen it flood so bad out here, to the point I could have swam out here last night, that’s just how deep it was.”
Calvan reported from Tallahassee, Florida; Associated Press contributors include Sudhin Thanawala and Sophia Tulp in Atlanta; Gerald Herbert in Lake Charles; Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge; Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland. | Hurricanes_Tornado_Storm_Blizzard | October 2020 | ['(CNN)', '(Global News)'] |
U.S. President Donald Trump confirms that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation. | World’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter will remove itself from global treaty as Trump claims accord ‘will harm’ American jobs
Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.59 GMT
Donald Trump has confirmed that he will withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, in effect ensuring the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases will quit the international effort to address dangerous global warming.
The US will remove itself from the deal, joining Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries not party to the Paris agreement. There will be no penalty for leaving, with the Paris deal based upon the premise of voluntary emissions reductions by participating countries.
“In order to fulfil my solemn duty to the United States and its citizens, the US will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accords or a really entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States,” the US president told press in the White House rose garden on Thursday.
“We will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair,” Trump said. “If we can, that’s great. If we can’t, that’s fine.”
But Italy, France and Germany issued a joint statement shortly after Trump’s speech saying they believed the treaty could not be renegotiated. Trump told the crowd outside the White House: “The fact that the Paris deal hamstrings the United States while empowering some of the world’s top polluting countries should expel any doubt as to why foreign lobbyists should wish to keep our beautiful country tied up and bound down … That’s not going to happen while I’m president, I’m sorry.”
He added: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, issued a rare statement saying the new administration had joined “a small handful of nations that reject the future”. But he said that US states, cities and businesses “will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got”.
Former vice-president Al Gore called the move “reckless and indefensible”, while among the business leaders to express regret over the move was Jeff Immelt, chair and CEO of General Electric, who said “climate change is real” and “industry must now lead”. Trump, who spoke after being introduced by a warm-up band playing the George Gershwin classic Summertime, argued that the Paris agreement disadvantaged the US to the benefit of other countries, leaving workers and taxpayers to absorb the costs and suffer job losses and factory closures. As of today, he said, the US will cease implementation of the nationally determined contribution and green climate fund, “which is costing the US a vast fortune”.
In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent the runaway climate change that would occur should temperatures spiral 2C or more above the pre-industrial era.
Trump’s decision risks destabilizing the Paris deal, with remaining participants faced with the choice of trying to make up the shortfall in emissions cuts or following the US’s lead and abandoning the agreement. The US emissions reduction pledge accounts for a fifth of the global emissions to be avoided by 2030, with an analysis by not-for-profit group Climate Interactive showing that a regression to “business as usual” emissions by the US could warm the world by an additional 0.3C by 2100. This would help push the global temperature rise well beyond 2C, causing punishing heatwaves, sea level rise, displacement of millions of people and the loss of ecosystems such as coral reefs. The US withdrawal would not, though, derail global efforts to fight climate change, said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who delivered the Paris agreement. “States, cities, corporations, investors have been moving in this direction for several years and the dropping prices of renewables versus high cost of health impacts from fossil fuels, guarantees the continuation of the transition.”
The US will be the loser from its withdrawal, said Prof John Schellnhuber, a climate scientist and former adviser to the EU, Angela Merkel and the pope. “It will not substantially hamper global climate progress but it will hurt the American economy and society alike,” he said. “China and Europe have become world leaders on the path towards green development already and will strengthen their position if the US slips back. The Washington people around Trump fail to recognise that the climate wars are over, while the race for sustainable prosperity is on.”
“President Trump is putting his country on the wrong side of history,” said Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate ambassador during the negotiation of the Paris deal. John Kasich, the governor of Ohio and a frequent critic of Trump, said he shared concerns about “flaws” in the treaty. “I’m convinced we can correct them and improve the agreement, however,” he said, “by showing leadership and constructively engaging with like-minded nations, not by joining the ranks of holdouts like Syria and Nicaragua.”
Bernie Sanders, the leftwing senator and former Democratic presidential hopeful, called the move an “international disgrace” and an “abdication of American leadership”.
But House speaker Paul Ryan, the most senior Republican in Congress, threw his support behind Trump’s decision, saying the Paris accord was “simply a raw deal for America”.
“In order to unleash the power of the American economy, our government must encourage production of American energy,” Ryan said in a statement. “I commend President Trump for fulfilling his commitment to the American people and withdrawing from this bad deal.”
Trump followed through with his campaign pledge to “cancel” US involvement in the Paris accord following months of conflicting signals over whether he would do so or just scale back the US ambition to cut emissions. The withdrawal represents a victory for the nationalist elements in Trump’s administration, such as his strategist Steve Bannon, who have argued the Paris deal undermines an “America first” approach, harms domestic coal production and hinders efforts to repeal Barack Obama-era regulations such as the Clean Power Plan. On Tuesday, Trump met with Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency head who has called Paris a “bad deal” that should be discarded.
In his speech, Trump sought to frame his decision as part of this nationalist agenda. “The Paris agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense,” he said. “They don’t put America first. I do, and I always will.”
A group of 22 Republican senators, headed by majority leader Mitch McConnell, backed the anti-Paris view in a letter to Trump that urged a “clean exit” from the Paris deal, which they said added a “regulatory burden” upon the US.
The anti-agreement faction had jockeyed for Trump’s favour over a rival school of thought, including secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, that argued the US should remain in the Paris deal in order to preserve its diplomatic influence.
Hundreds of large businesses, including Apple, Google and Walmart, also threw their weight behind the deal, with even fossil fuel firms such as ExxonMobil, BP and Shell supporting the accord as the best way to transition to a low-carbon economy and stave off the perils of climate change.
In a bid to calm the frayed nerves of countries most at risk from rising temperatures, the EU and China announced an alliance to stay the course earlier on Wednesday. Their joint declaration called climate change a “national security issue” and a “multiplying factor of social and political fragility.” The Paris pact is a “historic achievement” and “irreversible”, the document says.
“It is absolutely essential that the world implements the Paris agreement,” said UN secretary general António Guterres. “If one country decides to leave a void, I can guarantee someone else will occupy it.”
Environmental groups were scathing of Trump’s decision, with more than 20,000 members of the Sierra Club calling the White House within hours of reports that the president had opted to exit the deal. “Donald Trump has made a historic mistake which our grandchildren will look back on with stunned dismay at how a world leader could be so divorced from reality and morality,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, said he will sign an order committing the city to the Paris deal due to the “destructive power” of disasters like Hurricane Sandy.
Additional reporting by Tom McCarthy, David Smith and Sabrina Siddiqui
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Early results indicate Kuczynski has a slight lead over Fujimori, 50.59 percent to 49.41 percent, with about 52% of the votes counted. | LIMA (Reuters) - Center-right economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski had a slight lead over Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of an imprisoned former president, as early results came in from Peru’s presidential election on Sunday.
Peruvians vote in tight election
The 77-year-old Kuczynski had 50.59 percent support while Fujimori had 49.41 percent with about 52 percent of votes counted.
Earlier, polling firm Ipsos said its quick count of a sample of votes gave Kuczynski, known in Peru as PPK, about 50.5 percent and Fujimori 49.5 percent, a technical tie.
Another pollster, GfK, gave Kuczynski 50.8 percent of votes to Fujimori’s 49.2 percent.
“The most likely scenario is that PPK wins the election and becomes the next president of Peru,” said Alfredo Torres, an analyst with Ipsos, although he cautioned it was too early to call the election because it was so close.
Kuczynski, a former prime minister and investment banker, portrayed himself as an honest and experienced leader and has promised to clean up corruption and revive sluggish economic growth.
“We take this preliminary verdict with optimism, but with modesty,” a grinning Kuczynski told cheering supporters from a balcony at his Lima campaign headquarters.
He told the crowd to be vigilant until the final official results were announced.
Fujimori, 41, a former congresswoman, had a big lead in the first round of voting in April and was ahead in most opinion polls a week ago. But her lead melted away in the final days of campaigning in Peru’s fourth democratic election since the end of her father Alberto Fujimori’s decade-long rule in 2000.
Fujimori, who narrowly lost her first presidential bid against left-leaning Ollanta Humala in 2011, said in an upbeat speech on Sunday evening that rural votes from “deep Peru” still needed to be counted.
“This is a tight vote without a doubt ... what we’re seeing is the vitality of democracy in our country, and that fills me with pride,” Fujimori said in front of her orange-clad supporters at her campaign headquarters in Lima.
Seeking to be the South American country’s first female president, she has spent the past five years trying to broaden her appeal beyond loyalists to her controversial father.
Alberto Fujimori was credited with defeating violent Shining Path guerrillas and building schools and hospitals in rural areas but his authoritarian style divided Peru and he is serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and human rights abuses.
‘BETTER OFF’
In this year’s campaign, Keiko Fujimori ousted her father’s staunchest defenders from her party’s congressional ticket and stepped up campaigning in provinces she lost to Humala.
Still, many voters remained wary after scandals linked her new associates to money laundering and drug trafficking. Fujimori has defended her team and said her party was the victim of a smear campaign.
“Peru will be much better off with PPK. I’m very proud that Peru remembered what happened years ago. I have family members who had to leave the country because of Fujimori,” said Alexandra Gamarra, a 25-year-old student who celebrated the early results at Kuczynski’s campaign headquarters.
If he wins, Kuczynski will have to reckon with a solid majority of Fujimori’s party in Congress and a leftist party that has promised not to align with either of them.
While both candidates are fiscal conservatives who would maintain a free-market model in the resource-rich Andean economy, their styles and approaches differ widely.
The campaign pitted the Fujimori family’s brand of conservative populism against Kuczynski’s elite background and stiff technocratic style, which has curbed his appeal in poor provinces and working-class districts.
Fujimori repeatedly promised to respect democratic institutions and waged a more energetic campaign than her rival, performing regional dances in far-flung villages where she promised to deliver tractors and portrayed her rival as out of touch with struggling Peruvians.
| Government Job change - Election | June 2016 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Vanuatu's former prime minister, Charlot Salwai, is referred to the Supreme Court to stand trial for alleged corruption. His lawyer says he is confident they will win the case. | The lawyer for former Vanuatu prime minister Charlot Salwai says his client is confident of winning a corruption trial in the Supreme Court.
The court of Wednesday committed Mr Salwai, two former ministers and a former MP to stand trial next month.
Daniel Yawah said Wednesday's decision was not a surprise.
All were facing corruption and bribery charges while Mr Salwai had also been charged with perjury.
The charges stem from a complaint by former opposition leader and now deputy prime minister, Ishmael Kalsakau.
Kalsakau claimed that in November 2016, the defendants bribed MPs to sign an ultimately failed motion of no confidence.
But Yawah was confident they would beat the charges.
"Our case in the Supreme Court will be very strong because the prosecution has to establish that there is a corrupt element and so without saying much we will wait for the Supreme Court to come and we will have our day in court."
Yawah said the men simply used "parliamentary democracy" and operated within the law.
"The issue we will be fighting more on is they were charged with offering positions in relation to Parliament Secretaries as well as ministers in the Cabinet. We do not think that is something of a corrupt nature."
The case was scheduled to begin on 1 September.
| Famous Person - Commit Crime - Accuse | August 2020 | ['(RNZ)'] |
In retaliation to a rocket attack on Southern Israel, Israel Defence Forces destroy a Hamas weapons manufacturing facility located within the Gaza Strip. | Hamas weapons factory targeted by Israel Air Force; rocket launched from Gaza explodes in open area, causing no damage.
The Israel Air Force attacked a Hamas site in the Gaza Strip early morning on Thursday, after a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip earlier exploded in Israeli territory, causing no damage.
The Israeli aircraft struck a Hamas weapons factory in the central Strip, a statement by the Israel Defense Forces said, adding that the IDF considers Hamas as the "sole accountable party to what transpires in the Gaza Strip."
| Armed Conflict | August 2015 | ['(Haaretz)'] |
A bus carrying US tourists crashes near Los Ramones, Mexico. One person dies and at least 20 are injured. | LOS RAMONES, Mexico — At least one person was killed and 20 were injured when a bus from Houston overturned on the Reynosa-Monterrey Highway, according to reports.
The bus owned by Pegasso Tourism was headed from Houston to Monterrey when it crashed near Los Ramones.
Some passengers were thrown from the bus, according to the Dallas Morning News. .. Mexico bus crash update: one dad here at Pegasso Tours had 2 sons on board. They’re okay. One took this pic of wrecked bus.
The injured victims were rushed to area hospitals.
They include Luis and Gloria Rodriguez of Houston. The couple was on their way to a home they own in Mexico.
Two of their children showed up at the Pegasso bus station in Houston to buy bus tickets after hearing about the crash. A daughter, also named Gloria, will leave Tuesday night to go see about her parents.
"I want to see my mom and my dad," Gloria said. "I'm too attached to them, they're my whole life."
She said her mother was the most seriously injured.
Frantic father Fernando Garcia also rushed to Pegasso in Houston because his sons were on the bus.
Fortunately, his sons, 11-year-old Mario and 16-year-old Fernando, Junior, survived the crash
“They were asleep – the little one remembers someone laying on top of him – and my older son was looking for him – they were some of the first to get out," Garcia said.
Initial reports out of Mexico suggest the bus driver may have fallen asleep at the wheel. That hasn't been confirmed by investigators. | Road Crash | April 2018 | ['(WFAA)'] |
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dies at the age of 85 after spending eight years in a coma following a stroke. | Ariel Sharon played a central role in the shaping of modern Israel, attracting praise and loathing in equal measure. Polarising, bold, defiant, Sharon spent his life fighting the Arabs to ensure total security for Israel on his terms.
A strong, lifelong supporter of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, Sharon abruptly broke with his past by pulling Israel out of Gaza in the epilogue of his political career. This unexpected act caused shockwaves among supporters – with some extremists even reciting a Kabbalistic curse (Pulsa DiNura) asking the Angel of Death to kill him. Six months later, a succession of strokes left him in a coma.
Arik, king of Israel Sharon fought in all Israel's wars since its founding in 1948. In the 1950s he led the infamous Unit 101, which engaged in brutal raids on Palestinians in reprisals for cross-border attacks.
His actions during the 1967 war – when his division assaulted the Sinai and played an important part in capturing the entire peninsula – and the encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army in the Yom Kippur War earned him the nickname of "Arik, king of Israel" and the "Lion of God".
But Sharon was not only a brave strategist and reckless soldier. After retiring from the army, he was elected to the Israeli parliament as an MP of the new right-wing Likud party in 1973. He was re-elected to the Knesset in 1977 and appointed minister of defence in Menachem Begin's government.
The Butcher of Beirut In such a powerful post, Sharon masterminded Israel's invasion of Lebanon of 1982, which proved to be a disaster and tainted the reputation of Israel in the Middle East.
In response to the shelling of northern Israel by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation - whose headquarters was in Lebanon - Sharon sent the Israeli army into Beirut to crush the Palestinian liberation movement and force it to accept Israeli hegemony.
Begin was not explicitly informed about the move, which ultimately led to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres in which between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Lebanese Maronite Christian militia of the Phalanges.
An Israeli tribunal investigating the invasion concluded that Sharon had "personal responsibility" for the bloodshed. The IDF was not held directly responsible but its troops had surrounded the camps, blocking the exits and providing logistical support.
Sharon was nicknamed "the Butcher of Beirut" for his role and the former Jewish hero almost fell in disgrace.
At the height of power He made a comeback in the 1990s as housing minister, presiding over the biggest building drive in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
After the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks, Sharon exploited an Israeli public movement against then prime minister Ehud Barak over the status of Jerusalem.
"Barak does not have the right to give up Jerusalem, which the people received as a legacy,'' Sharon said.
Sharon's controversial visit to Jerusalem's sacred compound of Haram al-Sharif, where the al-Aqsa mosque is located, was blamed for sparking the second Palestinian intifada or uprising.
He became prime minister in February 2001, pledging to achieve "security and true peace". The rightwinger's tough policy in response to Palestinian suicide bombings – including incursions into Jenin and the building of a "security wall" – seemed to change when he announced the disengagement from Gaza.
The growing dissent within Likud forced him to leave the party and form Kadima. He was seeking to return as prime minister in 2005, when his first stroke hit, at the height of his power. | Famous Person - Death | January 2014 | ['(BBC News)', '(ABC NEWS)', '(International Business Times)'] |
According to officials, at least 11 people, mostly police officers, are killed outside a mosque in Jowzjan Province in an ambush by militants. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. | Afghan officials say 10 police officers and the wife of a police commander have been killed in an attack in the northern province of Zawzjan.
Mohammad Reza Ghafori, spokesman for the provincial governor, said the officers were ambushed on February 24 as they were coming out of a mosque in the Darzab district. A local police commander was among the dead and his wife was also killed when she rushed to the scene, Ghafori added.
Brigadier General Rahmatullah Turkistani, the provincial police chief, said four militants were killed and six others wounded in retaliatory firing.
Ghafori blamed the attack on Islamic State (IS) militants, but the Taliban claimed responsibility.
IS-linked militants have been active in eastern Afghanistan, but have recently begun operating in the north of the country as well. The Taliban frequently target officials and security forces across Afghanistan. | Armed Conflict | February 2017 | ['(Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)'] |
Announcement of first animals that spent their entire lives without oxygen were discovered in depths of Mediterranean Sea. They belong to three new species from phylum Loricifera. | Several unicellular organisms (prokaryotes and protozoa) can live under permanently anoxic conditions. Although a few metazoans can survive temporarily in the absence of oxygen, it is believed that multi-cellular organisms cannot spend their entire life cycle without free oxygen. Deep seas include some of the most extreme ecosystems on Earth, such as the deep hypersaline anoxic basins of the Mediterranean Sea. These are permanently anoxic systems inhabited by a huge and partly unexplored microbial biodiversity. During the last ten years three oceanographic expeditions were conducted to search for the presence of living fauna in the sediments of the deep anoxic hypersaline L'Atalante basin (Mediterranean Sea). We report here that the sediments of the L'Atalante basin are inhabited by three species of the animal phylum Loricifera (Spinoloricus nov. sp., Rugiloricus nov. sp. and Pliciloricus nov. sp.) new to science. Using radioactive tracers, biochemical analyses, quantitative X-ray microanalysis and infrared spectroscopy, scanning and transmission electron microscopy observations on ultra-sections, we provide evidence that these organisms are metabolically active and show specific adaptations to the extreme conditions of the deep basin, such as the lack of mitochondria, and a large number of hydrogenosome-like organelles, associated with endosymbiotic prokaryotes. This is the first evidence of a metazoan life cycle that is spent entirely in permanently anoxic sediments. Our findings allow us also to conclude that these metazoans live under anoxic conditions through an obligate anaerobic metabolism that is similar to that demonstrated so far only for unicellular eukaryotes. The discovery of these life forms opens new perspectives for the study of metazoan life in habitats lacking molecular oxygen. More than 90% of the ocean biosphere is deep (average depth, 3,850 m) and most of this remains unexplored [1]. The oceans host life at all depths and across the widest ranges of environmental conditions (that is, temperature, salinity, oxygen, pressure), and they represent a huge reservoir of undiscovered biodiversity [2, 3]. Deep-sea ecosystems also contain the largest hypoxic and anoxic regions of the Biosphere. The oxygen minimum zones (OMZ) are widely distributed across all of the oceans, at depths generally from 200 m to 1,500 m, and cover approximately 1,150,000 km2. These are characterised by very low oxygen availability (O2 < 0.5 mM) and high sulphide concentrations in the bottom sediments (>0.1 mM in the surface centimetre) [4]. These environments are inhospitable to most marine species [5], except host prokaryotes, protozoa and some metazoans that can tolerate these environmental conditions [4, 6]. Permanently anoxic conditions in the oceans are present in the subsurface seafloor [7], and among other areas, in the interior of the Black Sea (at depths >200 m) [8] and in the deep hypersaline anoxic basins (DHABs) of the Mediterranean Sea [9, 10]. All of these extreme environments are assumed to be exclusively inhabited by viruses [11], Bacteria and Archaea [7–10]. The presence of unicellular eukaryotes (for example, protozoan ciliates) in anoxic marine systems has been documented for decades [12] and recent findings have indicated that some benthic foraminifera can be highly adapted to life without oxygen [13]. For limited periods of time, a few metazoan taxa can tolerate anoxic conditions [6, 14]. However, so far, there is no proof of the presence of living metazoans that can spend their entire life cycle under permanently anoxic conditions [12]. Metazoan meiofauna (multi-cellular organisms of size ranging from a few micrometres to 1 mm) [15] represent 60% of the metazoa abundance on Earth, and have a long evolutionary history and high phyletic diversity. They include 22 of the 35 animal phyla, six of which are exclusive of the meiofauna (Gnathostomulida, Micrognathozoa, Gastrotricha, Tardigrada, Kinorhyncha, and Loricifera, the most recently described animal phylum) [16]. These phyla lack larval dispersal in the water column and spend their entire life cycle in the sediment. All of these characteristics make meiofauna the ideal organism for investigating metazoan life in systems without oxygen [17, 18]. The six DHABs of the Mediterranean Sea are extreme environments at depths >3,000 m that have been created by the flooding of ancient evaporites from the Miocene period (5.5 million years before the present) [19]. Among these, the L'Atalante basin displays a 30 to 60 m thick hypersaline brine layer with a density of 1.23 g cm-3 [9], which represents a physical barrier that hampers oxygen exchange between the anoxic sediments and the surrounding seawaters. This basin is therefore completely oxygen free, rich in hydrogen sulphide, and hosts an incredibly diverse and metabolically active prokaryotic assemblages that have adapted to these conditions [9]. In 1998, 2005 and 2008 we carried out three oceanographic expeditions to search for the presence of living fauna in the sediments of the anoxic L'Atalante basin (Additional file 1). In all of the sediments collected from the inner part of the anoxic basin, we found specimens belonging to three animal Phyla: Nematoda, Arthropoda (only Copepoda) and Loricifera. The presence of metazoan meiofauna under permanently anoxic conditions has been reported previously also from the deep-sea sediments of the Black Sea, although these records were interpreted as the result of a rain of cadavers that sunk to the anoxic zone from adjacent oxygenated areas [20]. Our specimens collected from the L'Atalante basin were initially stained with a protein-binding stain (Rose Bengal) and examined under the microscope; here, all of the copepods were empty exuviae, and the nematodes were only weakly stained (suggesting that they had been dead for a while, Figure 1a, b), whereas all of the loriciferans, if stained, were intensely coloured (Figure 1c, d). Differences in the colour intensity between live and dead metazoans were confirmed by additional experiments on deep-sea nematodes and copepods (Additional file 2). The taxonomic analysis revealed that the loriciferans collected in the anoxic sediments belong to three species that are new to science and belong to the genera Spinoloricus (Figure 1c, similar to the new species of Spinoloricus turbatio, which was recently discovered in the deep-sea hydrothermal vents of the Galápagos Spreading Centre) [21], Rugiloricus (belonging to the cauliculus-group; Figure 1e) and Pliciloricus (Figure 1f) [22]. Metazoans retrieved from the deep hypersaline anoxic L'Atalante basin. (a) Light microscopy (LM) image of a Copepod exuvium (stained with Rose Bengal); (b) LM image of dead nematode (stained with Rose Bengal); (c) LM image of the undescribed species of Spinoloricus (Loricifera; stained with Rose Bengal); (d) LM image of the undescribed species of Spinoloricus stained with Rose Bengal showing the presence of an oocyte; (e) LM image of the undescribed species of Rugiloricus (Loricifera, stained with Rose Bengal) with an oocyte; (f) LM image of the undescribed species of Pliciloricus (Loricifera, non stained with Rose Bengal); (g) LM image of moulting exuvium of the undescribed species of Spinoloricus. Note the strong staining of the internal structures in the stained loriciferans (c and d) vs. the pale colouration of the copepod and nematode (a, b). The loriciferan illustrated in Figure 1e was repeatedly washed to highlight the presence of the internal oocyte. Scale bars, 50 μm. The permanent reducing conditions of anoxic sediments can preserve dead organisms and their protein for a long time, so that microscopic analyses do not provide proof of the viability of an organism. However, the abundance of these loriciferans was the highest reported so far world-wide per unit of surface sediment investigated (range: 75 to 701 individuals m-2). This finding is per se surprising, as only two individuals of the phylum Loricifera have been found in the deep Mediterranean Sea over the last 40 years [23–25]. Deep-sea oxygenated sediments in the neighboring of the L'Atalante basin were also investigated at the time of sampling as well as in several other occasions since 1989, and we never found one single individual of the phylum Loricifera in the entire Ionian basin. Moreover, the analysis of the oxygenated deep-sea sediments surrounding the L'Atalante basin revealed the dominance of nematodes and copepods (>95% of the total meiofaunal abundance; Additional file 3) and the absence of loriciferans. The density of the Loricifera extracted from the sediment of the L'Atalante basin (determined by density gradient) was 1.15 to 1.18 g cm-3, whereas the density of the brines above the sediment is significantly higher (1.23 g cm-3). Moreover, the presence of laminated sediment layers along with the lack of turbidites in the L'Atalante basin [26] indicates the lack of lateral transport from adjacent systems. These independent evidences make very unlikely the sedimentation or transfer of Loricifera or their carcasses from the oxygenated sediments surrounding the anoxic basin. Specimens of the undescribed species of both genera Spinoloricus and Rugiloricus had a large oocyte in their ovary, which showed a nucleus containing a nucleolus (Figure 1d, e). This is the first evidence of Loricifera reproducing in the entire deep Mediterranean basin. Microscopic analyses also revealed the presence of empty exuviae from moulting loriciferans (Figure 1g), suggesting that these metazoans did grow in this system. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy confirmed the perfect integrity of these loriciferans (Figure 2), while all of the other meiofaunal taxa were largely damaged or degraded. Morphological details of the undescribed species of Spinoloricus (Loricifera). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of (a) ventral side of a whole animal with the introvert out (note the loricated abdomen with eight plates); (b-c) anterior edge of the lorica showing the genus character of the genus Spinoloricus (additional spikes); and (d) posterior lorica with honey-comb structure. No prokaryotes are evident on the surface of the bodies of the loriciferans. Scale bars, as indicated. A second expedition was dedicated to the demonstration of the viability of these loriciferans of the L'Atalante basin, through independent experimental approaches. All of the experiments were conducted on deck (101,325 Pa), under anoxic conditions (in a N2 atmosphere), in the dark and at the in-situ temperature (ca 14°C) immediately after sample retrieval. In the first investigations, intact and undisturbed sediment cores were injected with (3H)-leucine (Table 1) to investigate the ability of these loriciferans to take up this radiolabelled amino acid. Following multiple and replicated incubations and controls (that is, loriciferans killed before radiolabelled substrate injection), it was revealed that over a short time scale (four hours), the loriciferans incorporated amounts of this radioactive substrate that were significantly higher than in the controls (that is, killed loriciferans). Decompression can alter significantly metabolic activities of deep-sea organisms during their recovery. However, in our experiments this potential bias was the same for both the controls and the samples containing live Loricifera. Moreover, the ultra-structural analyses did not show any evidence of cell lysis related to the decompression. To test the reliability of the approach utilized we sampled living nematodes from oxygenated sediments and made incubations with (3H)-leucine of both living and killed nematodes. Thanks to this experiment we demonstrated the presence of significant differences in the incorporation of radio-labelled compounds and proved the linearity between the number of nematodes and the incorporated radioactivity (Table 1). These results, per se, are sufficient to provide compelling evidence of the activity of the organism from the anoxic systems, but we further investigated the viability of the Loricifera collected from the L'Atalante basin by incubating intact and undisturbed sediment cores containing the loriciferans with 5-chloromethylfluorescein diacetate (Cell-Tracker™ Green, CMFDA: Molecular Probes, Inc., Eugene, Oregon, US) which has been previously used to identify living unicellular eukaryotes in anoxic sediments [6]. This fluorogenic probe labels hydrolytically active (that is, live) cells [6]. Comparative analyses conducted on anoxic sediments by confocal laser microscopy on Loricifera kept alive and others that were killed prior to incubation revealed, on average, 40% higher fluorescence intensity in the living Loricifera than in recently killed specimens and the intense fluorescence increased from the outer to the inner parts of the organism (Figure 3a, b). The treatment for the preparation of the controls (that is, Loricifera killed prior to incubation by deep freezing) did not inhibit completely the enzymatic activities present in the body of the animals and therefore we expected the presence of some fluorescence also in the body of the pre-killed animals. This effect has been tested also on different species of living nematodes collected from oxygenated sediments by means of repeated (n = 5) incubation experiments with CellTracker™ Green CMFDA. The differences between living and recently killed nematodes analyzed by confocal laser microscopy were in the same order of the differences encountered between alive and recently killed Loricifera. Incorporation of Cell-Tracker™ Green CMFDA by loriciferans from the anoxic sediments of the L'Atalante basin. Series of confocal laser microscopy images across different sections of the body volume of the loriciferans. Sections 1-21 represent the progressive scanning of the loriciferans (undescribed species of Spinoloricus) from the outer to the inner part of the body. (a) Cell-Tracker™ Green CMFDA treated loriciferans; and (b) Loriciferans killed by freezing prior to Cell-Tracker™ Green CMFDA treatment and used as a control. All of these findings provide the first evidence that the anoxic sediments of the L'Atalante basin are colonised by natural populations of loriciferans, and that these metazoans are metabolically active and able to reproduce. The adaptations to permanently anoxic conditions associated with high density/salinity and high hydrogen sulphide concentrations imply that these organisms have developed specific mechanisms for: (i) tolerating an enormous osmotic pressure (due to the high salinity and hydrostatic pressure); (ii) detoxifying highly toxic compounds (due to the high hydrogen sulphide concentrations); and (iii) living without oxygen. Quantitative X-ray micro-analysis and Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy on the body composition of the loriciferans collected from the anoxic sediments revealed significant differences with the loriciferans collected in the oxygenated deep Atlantic Ocean (Additional files 4, 5 and 6). Loriciferans from the L'Atalante basin had a Ca content (expressed as percentage) that was nine-fold lower than in specimens inhabiting oxygenated sediments, on average, and showed Mg, Br and Fe, which were absent in the loriciferans from oxygenated sediments. Moreover, loriciferans from both oxic and anoxic sediments had similar concentrations of Na and S, in spite of the much higher salinity and sulphide concentration present in the deep-anoxic sediments of the L'Atalante basin (Additional files 4 and 5). Moreover, Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy analyses indicated that the lorica of the loriciferans inhabiting oxygenated deep-sea sediments was apparently made of chitin, which was replaced by a chitin derivative, similar to chitosan, in the loriciferans inhabiting anoxic sediments (Additional file 6). These results suggest the presence of chemical/structural adaptations of these loriciferans that can inhabit these anoxic sediments of the L'Atalante basin. Scanning electron microscopy revealed the lack of prokaryotes attached to the body surface of the loriciferans (Figure 2). Ultra-structural analyses carried out by transmission electron microscopy revealed the lack of mitochondria, which are replaced by hydrogenosome-like organelles (Figure 4a, b, c). The hydrogenosome-like structures showed a perfect integrity of their membranes as well as the presence of a marginal plate (Figure 4b). These organelles have been previously encountered in various unrelated unicellular eukaryotes [27, 28], but have never been observed so far in multi-cellular organisms (including the facultative anaerobes that face extended periods of aerobiosis during their life cycle) [14]. Moreover, the Loricifera retrieved from anoxic sediments contained hydrogenosome fields (Figure 4c) similar to those reported in anaerobic ciliates [29, 30]. Previous studies have reported the ability of multi-cellular organisms to survive in oxygen-free environments, but only for limited periods of time or for a part of their life cycle [14]. The very high abundance of hydrogenosomes within the Loricifera of the L'Atalante basin and the presence of hydrogenosomes fields represent the first discovery for multicellular organisms. Since the hydrogenosomes do not coexist with mitochondria and they are present only in obligate anaerobic eukaryotes (type II anaerobes) [31], these data exclude the possibility that the Loricifera encountered in the anoxic basin are carcasses of organisms inhabiting oxygenated sediments and transported/sedimented into the anoxic basin. Moreover, the transmission electron microscopy also revealed the presence of rod-shaped structures (Figure 4d, e, f), likely prokaryotes, in close proximity to the hydrogenosome-like organelles (Figure 4d). These structures and their spatial distribution resemble the association between hydrogenosomes and methanogenic Archaea, documented so far only in protozoans living in permanently anoxic conditions [29, 30]. Electron micrographs of the internal body of loriciferans from the deep hypersaline anoxic L'Atalante basin. Illustrated are: (a) a hydrogenosome-like organelle; (b) hydrogenosome-like organelle with evidence of the marginal plate; (c) a field of hydrogenosome-like organelles; (d) the proximity between a possible endosymbiotic prokaryote and hydrogenosome-like organelles; (e-f) the presence of possible endosymbiotic prokaryotes; H = Hydrogenosome-like organelles, P = possible endosymbiotic prokaryotes, m = marginal plate. Scale bars, 0.2 μm. The results reported here support the hypothesis that the loriciferans inhabiting the anoxic sediments of the L'Atalante basin have developed an obligate anaerobic metabolism and specific adaptations to live without oxygen. Although the evolutionary/adaptative mechanisms leading to the colonisation of such extreme environments by these metazoans remain an enigma, this discovery opens new perspectives for the study of metazoan life in habitats lacking molecular oxygen. The L'Atalante deep hypersaline anoxic basin (DHAB) was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea in 1993 during an expedition that was a part of the European funded project "Mediterranean Ridge Fluid Flow". The bottom of the L'Atalante basin is a relatively flat area bounded to the southwest by the Cleft Basin and it is characterised by a morphological escarpment that is several hundreds of metres high, which is the sea-bottom expression of the main back thrust of the accretionary ridge. These characteristics originated from the dissolution of buried salt deposits (evaporitic deposits), which remained from the hypersaline waters of the Miocene period (5.5 My before present). The L'Atalante basin is characterised by the presence of a thick brine layer (ca. 40 m) with high density (1.23 g cm-3) and high contents of Na+ (4,674 mM), Cl- (5,289 mM) and Mg+ (410 mM) [9]. This layer limits the mixing with the overlying oxic deep-waters to only the upper 1 m to 3 m of the brine, and it additionally acts as a physical barrier for particles settling to the bottom sediments. As a result, the inner part of the L'Atalante basin is completely anoxic since 53,000 yrs before present [32] and is characterized by elevated methane (0.52 mM) and hydrogen sulphide (2.9 mM) concentrations [9]. Undisturbed sediment samples (down to a depth of 30 cm) were collected using a USNEL type box corer (surface ca. 0.2 m2), in 1998, 2005, 2006 and 2008. The samples from the DHAB sediment were collected in December 1998 (at 3,363 m depth, 35°18.20'N, 21°23.33'E), August 2005 (at 3,600 m depth, 35°18.23'N, 21°23.33'E), and June 2008 (at 3,450 m depth, 35°18.18'N, 21°23.35'E). In 1998 and 2008 additional sediment samples were collected outside the L'Atalante basin (ca. 10 miles from the DHAB; 35°11.84'N, 21°24.75'E) at ca. 3,250 m depth, for investigation of the characteristics of meiofaunal metazoans from the oxygenated adjacent systems (three sampling sites per period with three to five replicated deployments per site). In the northern-eastern Atlantic Ocean, oxygenated deep-sea sediment samples (55°29.87'N, 15°48.61'W at 600 m depth) were collected during the 2006 expedition. Loriciferans retrieved from these sediments were used for the comparison of their body composition with loriciferan specimens collected in the anoxic sediments of the L'Atalante basin. Sediments retrieved from the deep anoxic basin were immediately processed under strict anaerobic conditions. For the extraction of metazoan fauna from the sediments, the samples (top 15 to 20 cm of the sediment cores) were pre-filtered through a 1,000-μm mesh (to remove larger debris), and a 20-μm mesh was used to retain all of the multi-cellular organisms. The fraction remaining on this latter sieve was re-suspended and centrifuged three times with Ludox HS40 (density 1.31 g cm-3) [33]. All of the organisms isolated were counted and classified according to standard protocols [34, 35]. Only the organisms collected during the first expedition were stained with Rose Bengal (0.5 g L-1), a stain commonly used to highlight the body structures under light microscopy. | New wonders in nature | April 2010 | ['(BMC Biology)', '(Nature)'] |
The California State Legislature passes a bill which would enact a state requirement for the vaccination of children enrolled in schools. The bill is now pending Governor Jerry Brown's approval before going into law. | Karman Willmer, left, and Shelby Messenger protest against SB 277, a measure requiring California schoolchildren to get vaccinated, at a Capitol rally on June 9 in Sacramento. Gov. Jerry Brown must now decide whether to sign into law a bill that would require mandatory vaccinations for nearly all California schoolchildren.
The measure, spawned by an outbreak of measles at Disneyland that ultimately infected more than 150 people, cleared its final legislative hurdle Monday in the state Senate. Brown has not said publicly whether he would sign it.
The measure — one of the toughest vaccination bills in the nation — would require children enrolling in school or day care to be immunized against diseases including measles and whooping cough.
Parents would no longer be able to cite personal or religious beliefs to decline the vaccinations, although children with certain medical problems, such as immune system deficiencies, would be exempt.
Those who decline the vaccinations would have to enroll their children in a home-based private school or public independent study program based off campus.
The bill was one of the most contentious taken up by the Legislature this year, attracting large, vocal crowds of parents during a series of legislative hearings on the measure.
Those in favor of the proposal argued that it was needed to boost statewide immunization rates.
“The science remains unequivocal that vaccines are safe and vaccines save lives,” said Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), a pediatrician and an author of the bill.
Some Republican senators said the bill was government overreach. Sen. Joel Anderson (R-Alpine) called it “a direct attack on our liberty and a violation of our parental rights.”
After the vote, opponents rallying at the Capitol turned their attention to Brown, calling for him to veto the measure and vowing to hold a constant vigil until he acts.
“I am asking you to protect his health,” said participant Julianna Pearce, referring to her son, Nathan, who she said suffered a severe reaction to a vaccine at 23 months old. “If there is a risk, there must be a choice.”
At a news conference held by the bill’s authors, Hannah Henry, a supporter, said she saw public health benefits in higher immunization rates.
“The return of preventable infectious disease to our schools and to our communities is too frightening to bear,” said Henry, a Napa mother who co-founded the advocacy group Vaccinate California.
Brown has until July 13 to act on the measure. Evan Westrup, a spokesman for the governor, said Brown “believes that vaccinations are profoundly important and a major public health benefit and this bill will be closely considered.”
The state Senate, which first approved the measure in May, voted 24 to 14 Monday in favor of minor amendments to the legislation, SB 277 by Pan and Democrat Benjamin Allen of Santa Monica. It passed the Assembly last week. | Government Policy Changes | June 2015 | ['(Los Angeles Times)'] |
At least 27 people are killed and more than 180 hospitalized with injuries after a fire in a nightclub in the Romanian capital Bucharest. Officials say a heavy metal band's pyrotechnical show sparked a fire inside the Colectiv nightclub. | A blast in a Bucharest club has left 27 dead and at least 180 injured, according to Interior Minister Gabriel Oprea. Bucharest hospitals are running out of space to treat the wounded, according to local media, and health officials are asking locals to donate blood to meet the demand.
The explosion was confirmed early Saturday by Romania's Interior Minister Gabriel Oprea and Health Secretary Raed Arafat, though its cause is not yet known. Reports indicate that the incident occurred at a club known as Colectiv, in downtown Bucharest.
"It is a great tragedy, 25 are dead," Oprea said, according to EVZ portal.
More than 60 ambulances and fire trucks were on the scene, according to a press release from the Interior Ministry. A mobile hospital has been set up to treat wounded, but witnesses say on-site medical professionals have insufficient supplies to meet the demands of the situation.
"There was a stampede of people running out of the club," one witness told Reuters.
According to BBC, the blast resulted in a large fire.
"I want to give you the official data, there is a crisis, everyone was mobilized and try to do everything we can," Health Minister Nicolae Banicioiu told reporters. "We are bombarded with the number of severe cases. Victims were sent to the hospital emergency in the capital."
25 are confirmed to have died in a club in Bucharest, Romania. 88 said to be submitted to hospital. pic.twitter.com/kzw93UqjrJ
Floreasca Hospital is reportedly filled to capacity, with victims being transported elsewhere, according to Antena 3. Between 300 and 400 individuals were inside the club at the time of the incident, and many are still unaccounted for.
"It is a very sad day for all of us, for our nation and for me personally," Romanian President Klaus Iohannis wrote on his Facebook page, adding that he was "deeply grieved by the tragic events that happened this evening in downtown."
The Romanian TV channel also suggested that the explosion could have been caused by fireworks, though authorities have not released any details at this time. One witness also described a pyrotechnic display around the stage that which led to the fire.
According to scheduling, the band "Mantras of War" played an album launch concert at Colectiv on Friday night.
| Fire | October 2015 | ['(Sputnik News)', '(BBC)', '(Fox News)'] |
French historian Dominique Venner shoots himself dead inside the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. | A man has killed himself inside the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris in the French capital, causing its evacuation.
The man pulled out a shotgun and shot himself through the mouth beside the main altar shortly after 16:00 (14:00 GMT) - in front of some 1,500 people.
He was later named by police as 78-year-old Dominique Venner, an award-winning far-right historian.
Mr Venner had recently been involved in the campaign against the government's decision to legalise gay marriage.
On Saturday, President Francois Hollande signed the bill into law.
The police said Mr Venner had made no statement before killing himself, although a note was found next to his body. They did not disclose its contents.
Earlier on Tuesday, he had written on his blog a critique of the same-sex marriage bill.
"New spectacular and symbolic actions are needed to wake up the sleepwalkers and shake the anaesthetised consciousness," he wrote.
"We are entering a time when acts must follow words."
Mr Venner is also a former member of the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), which opposed Algerian independence in the early 1960s and tried to assassinate Charles De Gaulle.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader, paid tribute to Mr Venner, describing his suicide as a political gesture aimed at "waking up the people of France".
The BBC's Christian Fraser in Paris says Notre-Dame is the most visited landmark in France, attracting more than 13 million visitors each year, but security is relatively relaxed. It would not be difficult to conceal a weapon in a shoulder bag, he says. The cathedral is celebrating its 850th year, and at the time of Mr Venner's death.
Police said the evacuation began immediately, that there were no further problems, and that the cathedral for the moment remained closed. "It's unfortunate, it's dramatic, it's shocking," the rector of Notre-Dame, Monsignor Patrick Jacquin, told the Associated Press news agency.
This was the first suicide in decades at the cathedral, he said. A few people had jumped to their deaths from Notre-Dame's twin towers, but no-one was thought to have killed themselves at the altar before, he added.
"We will pray for this man, as for so many others at their end."
Last Thursday, a 50-year-old man with a history of mental problems killed himself with a sawn-off shotgun in front of a dozen children at a private Catholic school next to the Eiffel Tower. Obituary: Dominique Venner
Paris Notre Dame cathedral turns 850
New bells for Notre Dame anniversary
Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris
Setback for EU in legal fight with AstraZeneca
But the drug-maker faces hefty fines if it fails to supply doses of Covid-19 vaccine over the summer. | Famous Person - Death | May 2013 | ['(BBC)'] |
At least 69 people are reported dead from flooding caused by Tropical Depression Usman in the Philippines. | Fifty-six people have been killed in landslides and floods in the eastern Philippines and 11 are still missing.
Fifty of the victims were killed in five provinces in the eastern region of Bicol, which bore the brunt of heavy rains brought by a tropical depression, authorities say.
Most victims died in landslides, including a family of three asleep when their house was buried in Legazpi City, 336 kilometres southeast of Manila, police said on Sunday.
Six people were drowned or were buried in landslides in the two provinces in the Eastern Visayas region, police said.
*
More than 22,000 people have been displaced in six provinces.
A tropical depression weakened into a low pressure area after making landfall over the province of Eastern Smar on Saturday, and brought in heavy rains in the days before. | Floods | December 2018 | ['(Stuff.co.nz)', '(The Guardian)'] |
Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years, and is ordered to forfeit US$12.6 billion. He accused the U.S. government of "torture and corruption" during his sentencing hearing in the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York. He will likely be sent to ADX Florence in Colorado to serve his sentence. | The Mexican drug lord known as “El Chapo” was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison plus thirty years at a hearing where he accused the U.S. government of corruption and of torturing him during his confinement.
El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, also was ordered to forfeit $12.6 billion during his sentencing in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York.
Judge Brian Cogan, who cited what he called Guzman’s “overwhelming evil” in announcing the mandated sentence, will determine later how much he must pay in restitution.
The kingpin, who had twice escaped maximum security prisons in Mexico, was convicted earlier this year of presiding over a vast criminal operation, the Sinaloa Cartel, which funneled immense quantities of narcotics, including heroin and methamphetamine, into the United States.
Guzman did not testify during the three-month trial, but broke his silence Wednesday.
He claimed, in a tear-choked statement, that he had been denied justice during his trial and confinement in New York City.
“Since the government will send me to a jail where my name will not ever be heard again, I take this opportunity to say: There was no justice here,” El Chapo told Cogan, according to the New York Daily News.
“I drink unsanitary water, no air or sunlight, and the air pumped in makes my ears and throat hurt. In order to sleep, I put toilet paper in my ears. My wife had not been allowed to visit, and I can’t hug my daughters,” he said, according to NBC News. “This has been psychological, emotional and mental torture 24 hours a day.”
“My case was stained and you denied me a fair trial when the world was watching. What happened here is the U.S. is not better than any other corrupt country,” Guzman added.
Guzman spoke in Spanish. His comments were translated by one of his lawyers.
The defense indicated to Cogan that they plan to appeal on the grounds of juror misconduct, according to Vice News, which was at the hearing. A juror told that news outlet in February that jurors violated the judge’s orders barring them from following the case in the media.
“What occurred here was not justice. How we treat our most reviled is a measuring stick for our own society,” defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said, according to NBC News.
But prosecutors said that Guzman was “uniquely deserving” of the harsh sentence.
“There were countless victims of his orders to kill,” prosecutor Gina Parlovecchio said. “He has shown no remorse.”
One of Guzman’s alleged victims, Andrea Velez Fernandez, spoke at the sentencig.
“Today I come here a miracle of god,” Velez Fernandez said. “Mr. Guzman used me as bait to kidnap someone in Ecuador. He offered one million dollars to Hells Angels to end my life. Fortunately I found out and escaped with the help of the FBI. Guzman’s earned billions of dollars while serving as the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, which government researchers have called the “most powerful drug trafficking syndicate in the Western Hemisphere.”
And he became a legend for his evasion of authorities.
One of Guzman’s notorious prison escapes, in 2015, was made through a mile-long tunnel.
His first escape, in 2001, came when he hid in a prison laundry cart.
That slippery reputation, coupled with the violent nature of his crimes, means Guzman is likely to serve his time in the “supermax” U.S. prison known as ADX Florence, located in Colorado. It is the highest-security federal prison in the country.
“You can bury Joaquín Guzman under tons of steel in Colorado but you’re never going to erase the stink of” his trial, Lichtman told reporters after the sentencing.
Prosecutors had argued that the $12.6 billion figure was a “conservative” estimate of the amount of drug money Guzman generated as chief of the Sinaloa Cartel.
The Sinaloa Cartel remains a dominant drug trafficking organization in Mexico and maintains distribution hubs in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | July 2019 | ['(CNBC)'] |
Gotye featuring Kimbra win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year for "Somebody That I Used To Know". | Australian artist Gotye has won three Grammy awards, including the coveted record of the year for his global smash hit Somebody That I Used To Know.
Gotye and Kimbra also won best pop duo performance for the song, while the Melbourne singer-songwriter also won best alternative album for Making Mirrors.
Somebody That I Used To Know has peaked at number one in 18 countries and has been the top iTunes single in 46 countries.
The only other Australian to win record of the year was Olivia Newton-John with I Honestly Love You in 1975.
For a full list of winners, click here
Gotye said he was humbled by the honour, saying he felt "unworthy" to receive it.
"I just have to say there are so many incredible songs in this category, not only in the Grammys more generally, but also so many artists and pieces of music that aren't recognised by the Grammys this year," he said.
"So I just want to say thank you for everybody who puts great energy into the world of making music.
"I feel unworthy to be up here receiving this, but thank you to all musicians and people who listen to music." Somebody That I Used To Know beat Lonely Boy by The Black Keys, Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You) by Kelly Clarkson, We Are Young by fun., Thinkin Bout You by Frank Ocean and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together by Taylor Swift.
Babel by British folk band Mumford & Sons won album of the year, while Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Rihanna, Jay-Z and Kanye West also won gongs as winners in more than 60 categories were announced.
Country-pop singer Swift won a Grammy for her collaboration with T-Bone Burnett and The Civil Wars on the song Safe and Sound from The Hunger Games movie soundtrack.
Jay-Z and Kanye West picked up two awards - best rap performance and best rap song for their collaboration N****s in Paris.
Jay-Z's wife Beyonce won best traditional R&B performance for Love on Top.
DJ Skrillex, who won three Grammy awards last year, picked up three more this year, including best dance/electronica album for Bangarang.
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys picked up a Grammy for best historical album for The Smile Sessions.
Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crowe Medicine Show have won best long form music video for Big Easy Express - a documentary which followed the bands as they travelled together by train from San Francisco to New Orleans in the spring of 2011.
| Awards ceremony | February 2013 | ['(ABC News Australia)'] |
Suspected militants from the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram killed 26 people in attacks on two villages on Lake Chad, Chad. | Police forces and soldiers in front of the police headquarters in N'Djamena, in which 23 were killed along with a simultaneous attack, June 15, 2015. AFP/BRAHIM ADJI
N'DJAMENA, Chad: Suspected militants from the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram killed 26 people in night attacks on two villages on Lake Chad over the weekend, Chadian officials said.Boko Haram has stepped up assaults in recent weeks across the region in what appears to be a fight back against an offensive mounted by soldiers from Nigeria and its neighbors, Chad, Cameroon and Niger."The two villages were attacked by surprise on Saturday and Sunday night. There were 13 dead in each attack," said a Chadian official who declined to be named.Merom village was attacked on Saturday by armed men who slit the throats of their victims and burned houses before fleeing, the source said. Other local officials gave similar accounts.Militants also attacked a group of camel herders at the village of Tiskra, cutting 13 people's throats before fleeing when guards of the village chief opened fire, the source said.Boko Haram, fighting to carve out an Islamist state in northeast Nigeria, has also launched a string of cross border raids.Last week, more than 200 people died in a string of attacks inside Nigeria, piling pressure on new President Muhammadu Buhari.
N'DJAMENA, Chad: Suspected militants from the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram killed 26 people in night attacks on two villages on Lake Chad over the weekend, Chadian officials said.
Boko Haram has stepped up assaults in recent weeks across the region in what appears to be a fight back against an offensive mounted by soldiers from Nigeria and its neighbors, Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
"The two villages were attacked by surprise on Saturday and Sunday night. There were 13 dead in each attack," said a Chadian official who declined to be named.
Merom village was attacked on Saturday by armed men who slit the throats of their victims and burned houses before fleeing, the source said. Other local officials gave similar accounts.
Militants also attacked a group of camel herders at the village of Tiskra, cutting 13 people's throats before fleeing when guards of the village chief opened fire, the source said.
Boko Haram, fighting to carve out an Islamist state in northeast Nigeria, has also launched a string of cross border raids.
Last week, more than 200 people died in a string of attacks inside Nigeria, piling pressure on new President Muhammadu Buhari.
| Armed Conflict | July 2015 | ['(Daily Star via Reuters)'] |
An earthquake kills at least seven people and damages buildings in Java, Indonesia. | A 6.0 magnitude quake hits off Java, killing at least seven people in the second disaster to strike the nation this week.
A strong earthquake killed at least seven people and damaged buildings on Indonesia’s main island of Java and shook the tourist hotspot of Bali without prompting tsunami warnings.
The US Geological Survey said the magnitude 6.0 quake struck on Saturday off the island’s southern coast at 2pm local time (07:00 GMT).
It was centred 45km (28 miles) south of Sumberpucung town of Malang District in East Java province, at a depth of 82km (51 miles).
“Our latest data shows that seven people died, two are seriously injured and 10 others sustained minor injuries,” said National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Raditya Jati.
Rahmat Triyono, the head of Indonesia’s earthquake and tsunami centre, said in a statement the undersea earthquake did not have the potential to cause a tsunami.
Still, he urged people to stay away from slopes of soil or rocks that have the potential for landslides.
He said dozens of homes were damaged across the district, and rescuers had retrieved two bodies from the rubble of collapsed homes in the district’s Kali Uling village.
Two people were also confirmed killed in an area bordering Lumajang and Malang districts, while one person was found dead under rubble in Malang.
“I had just finished praying and was changing my clothes when suddenly the quake struck,” Malang resident Ida Magfiroh told the AFP news agency.
“It was pretty strong and went for a long time. Everything was swaying … My heart was racing.”
Television reports showed people running in panic from malls and buildings in several cities in East Java province.
Authorities were still collecting information about the full scale of casualties and damage in the affected areas.
It was the second deadly disaster to hit Indonesia this week. On Sunday, a downpour triggered by Tropical Cyclone Seroja killed at least 165 people and damaged thousands of houses.
Some were buried in either mudslides or solidified lava from a volcanic eruption in November, while others were swept away by flash flooding.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 270 million people, is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire”, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
In January, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed at least 105 people and injured nearly 6,500, while more than 92,000 displaced, after striking Mamuju and Majene districts in West Sulawesi province.
In 2018, a 7.5-magnitude quake and a subsequent tsunami in Palu on Sulawesi island left more than 4,300 people dead or missing.
On December 26, 2004, a devastating 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, including around 170,000 in Indonesia.
It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.
| Earthquakes | April 2021 | ['(Al Jazeera)'] |
Voters in the Central African Republic go to the polls for the second round of voting in the presidential election, a runoff between former prime ministers Anicet-Georges Dologuélé and Faustin-Archange Touadéra . | People in the Central African Republic have voted to elect a new president in a run-off contest between two former prime ministers.
Final results in the poll - seen as a step towards restoring peace - are not expected for several weeks.
The seizure of power by a mainly Muslim rebel group in 2013 led to prolonged bloodshed. Candidates Faustin Touadera and Anicet Dologuele have pledged to restore security and boost the economy. Both Mr Touadera, portrayed by supporters as a peacemaker who can bridge the Christian-Muslim divide, and Mr Dologuele, who has promised a break from the country's violent past, expressed hope for a high turnout.
Mr Dologuele even referenced St Valentine's Day as he exhorted citizens to vote "as an act of love for their country", Radio Centrafrique reported.
But a BBC correspondent in the region said there was less enthusiasm among voters than during the first round in December, although election officials said the voting had gone smoothly.
Prime Minister Mahamat Kamoun echoed this, telling Radio Centrafrique that he was "not entirely satisfied" with voter turnout.
Voters were also choosing a new parliament following the annulment of a poll in December due to irregularities.
Nearly 80% of the electorate voted in December's first round, which observers saw as a rejection of violence.
Communal reconciliation and reigniting the country's sluggish economy featured prominently as campaign themes. CAR is one of the world's most unstable countries and was thrown into political chaos three years ago when mostly Muslim Seleka fighters toppled President Bozize.
Christian militias responded to Seleka abuses, with attacks carried out against the Muslim minority community. After regional pressure, an interim administration took charge in January 2014 and later that year a 10,000-strong UN force took over the peacekeeping mission.
The north-east of the country is now mostly under the control of Muslim rebels while Christian militias hold sway the south-west.
Thousands died in the fighting and roughly a fifth of the population is thought to have been displaced. Africa Today podcast | Government Job change - Election | February 2016 | ['(1999–2001)', '(2008–13)', '(BBC)'] |
The corruption trial of the former President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, resumes in Cairo. | The trial of the former Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, has resumed after a delay of almost two months.
State TV showed the 83-year-old being stretchered into the court, at the police academy in the capital, Cairo.
Mr Mubarak is accused of corruption, and of ordering the killing of protesters during the uprising which forced him to step down last February. His two sons, Alaa and Gamal, the former interior minister and six senior police officers are also in the dock.
All the defendants have denied the charges against them.
State TV carried live footage of Mr Mubarak's arrival at the court on Wednesday. Wearing a black tracksuit and covered with a blanket, he was taken on a stretcher from an ambulance to a waiting room.
He was earlier flown to the police academy by helicopter from a Cairo military hospital, where he has received treatment for a heart condition. Proceedings were delayed because lawyers representing the families of the nearly 840 protesters killed during the 18-day uprising demanded that the presiding judge, Ahmed Refaat, and two other judges be replaced. Their request was rejected earlier this month.
In mid-August, Judge Refaat angered the lawyers when he banned live TV coverage of the trial, saying he was exasperated by them showing off for the cameras.
Some of Egypt's most powerful figures have testified since the trial began in August.
The head of the ruling military council, former Defence Minister Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, told a closed-door session in September that Mr Mubarak had never given orders to shoot protesters. The former president could face the death penalty if found guilty.
More than 5,000 policemen will be deployed on Wednesday to secure the police academy, according to the interior ministry. Riot police have often had to separate anti- and pro-Mubarak crowds, who have fought outside. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | December 2011 | ['(BBC)'] |
General elections are held in Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bosnia's political structure remains divided along ethnic lines, with a rotating presidency comprising a Muslim, a Serb and a Croat.
The international community has largely run the country since the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.
Voters cast ballots for the presidency, parliament and local government.
Preliminary results in the presidential race indicate that the front-runner for the Muslim seat is the wartime Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic.
He is seeking to unify Bosnia's two largely autonomous regions - the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic.
The Serb position is likely to go to Nebojsa Radmanovic, whose party opposes Mr Silajdzic's idea.
The race for the Croat place on the presidency is said to be too close to call.
Despite poverty and high unemployment, issues of ethnicity and nationalism have dominated the election campaigns, says the BBC's Nicholas Walton in Sarajevo.
The office of the International High Representative, which oversees the peace process, will close in mid-2007.
But if it judges that Bosnia's politicians are unable to take on the responsibility for taking the country forward, the international community has warned that it might not hand over power after all, our correspondent adds. | Government Job change - Election | October 2006 | ['(BBC)'] |
$1.8 billion in fines are imposed on S.A.C. Capital Advisors by the United States for insider trading violations. | A US court has accepted a $1.8bn (£1.07bn) settlement for insider trading by US hedge fund group SAC Capital Advisors.
As part of a plea deal, SAC Capital and related companies will cease operating as investment advisers, the FBI said.
The firms, plus any successors, must put measures in place to identify insider trading.
The deal includes $1.184bn in financial penalties, on top of $616m that SAC Capital will pay US regulators.
"Today marks the day of reckoning for a fund that was riddled with criminal conduct," Manhattan US attorney Preet Bharara said on Thursday.
Between 1999 and 2010, a number of SAC employees traded on inside information for more than 20 companies, the FBI said.
Eight employees have previously either pleaded guilty or been found guilty of insider trading. For example, in December 2013, portfolio manager Michael Steinberg of SAC company Sigma Capital Management was found guilty of insider trading in the securities of technology firms Dell and Nvidia.
SAC Capital Advisors was founded by billionaire Steven A Cohen.
SAC trader guilty of insider dealing
SAC Capital 'set to plead guilty'
| Organization Fine | April 2014 | ['(BBC)'] |
Leader of the Opposition Kyriakos Mitsotakis, from New Democracy, wins an absolute majority and is expected to be sworn in Prime Minister as incumbent Alexis Tsipras falls to second place. Far-right Golden Dawn loses all the seats they had in the Parliament. | ATHENS — Four years ago almost to this day, Greece came a breath away from leaving the euro. People formed quiet, somber lines outside banks to take out small amounts of cash, as a lockdown on the financial system barred them from accessing their savings. They stockpiled tinned food and toilet paper.
On Sunday, the leader who rallied Greeks to confront international creditors, but then reversed himself and gave in to their demands for austerity, was voted out of office. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, a former firebrand leftist, was defeated in a landslide. | Government Job change - Election | July 2019 | ['(The New York Times)'] |
Israel kills a member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade following a raid into the Palestinian town of Nablus. Palestinians maintain that a special unit disguised as Arabs carried out the act. Israeli Defence Forces say the man was a "ticking bomb" and that soldier shot only after he opened fire on them. Witnesses from the Balata camp, however, say the Israelis opened fire without warning and then took the body away. | JERUSALEM, April 14 - Israeli troops shot dead a suspected Palestinian militant on Thursday in the West Bank city of Nablus, and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, called it a "serious violation" of the two-month-old truce.
The truce has been holding for the most part, but Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been trading increasingly sharp words in recent days. | Armed Conflict | April 2005 | ['(BBC)', '(Haaretz)', '(NY Times)'] |
The United States Senate passed by an overwhelming majority a bill ramping-up sanctions against Russia and against Iran. Language in the measure also reaffirms United States' commitment to NATO. | The Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill Thursday that would step up sanctions against Iran and Russia, in the process delivering a rebuke to President Trump’s policies toward Russia and Europe with a veto-proof majority. The measure, which senators passed by a vote of 98 to 2, includes new sanctions against Moscow over its continued involvement in the wars in Ukraine and Syria and for its alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Senators struck a deal this week to include the language stiffening measures against Russia’s intelligence, defense, energy, metals, mining and railway sectors in an underlying bill introducing new measures to punish Tehran for ballistic missile tests and the engagements of the country’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps.
Critically, the Russia language also included provisions codifying all existing sanctions against Russia and giving Congress the power to block the president if he tries to scale back existing ones.
[Senate votes to curtail Trump’s power to ease Russia sanctions] That includes preventing the president from giving the Kremlin control over two properties on U.S. soil that the government seized late last year, accusing Russia of using them for intelligence-gathering purposes, while expelling 35 Russian operatives from the country. The Washington Post has reported that the Trump administration was considering giving the compounds back to Russia.
On Thursday, the Senate added one more tacit criticism of Trump’s foreign policy to the bill: an amendment reaffirming the commitment of the United States to NATO and its mutual defense obligations to other countries in the alliance. The measure, drafted by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), stands in sharp contrast to the recent posture of Trump, who attended a NATO summit last month as part of his first foreign trip and did not reaffirm the United States’ commitment to NATO’s mutual defense pact in his remarks.
The amendment passed the Senate by a vote of 100 to zero.
The strong bipartisan vote for sanctions reflects lawmakers’ common frustration with aggressive activities by Iran and Russia. It also is unique because it is the first major piece of foreign policy legislation the Senate has considered this year to command so much support from both sides of the aisle.
The underlying bill outlining new sanctions against Iran came about after months of negotiations, much of it playing out between Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), ranking Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.) and senior member Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). It took the better part of a year for senators to iron out their differences and produce a compromise bill.
Similarly, senators tussled over Russia sanctions for several months as lawmakers filed competing measures while others wondered whether Congress should be stepping ahead of a new president with unorthodox ideas about how to engage with Moscow.
Corker was one of those senators who wanted to give the administration a chance, but only to a point. Late last month, he said he would give Secretary of State Rex Tillerson one more chance to convince him that the administration was making enough progress in cooperating with Russia over Syria that it was worth holding back on sanctions.
Tillerson did not, and thus Corker declared himself ready to move ahead with a sanctions bill, entering final negotiations with Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and ranking Democrat Sherrod Brown (Ohio); as well as Cardin and Menendez; Foreign Relations Committee members Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and members Graham and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.); and others.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also were involved in the multiparty negotiations to draft Russia sanctions that could secure a commanding majority of the Senate. Tillerson warned Wednesday against passing anything that might tie the administration’s hands. But support for the bill is easily enough to overcome a presidential veto.
The House has yet to take up the legislation or attempt to draft similar sanctions on its own.
| Government Policy Changes | June 2017 | ['(The Washington Post)'] |
The Obama administration rescinds most of a regulation designed to protect health care workers who refuse to provide a service that they find objectionable but retains protections against performing abortions when you have strong anti–abortion convictions. | After two years of struggling to balance the rights of patients against the beliefs of health-care workers, the Obama administration on Friday finally rescinded most of a federal regulation designed to protect those who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds.
The decision guts one of President George W. Bush's most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.
Friday's move was seen as an important step in countering that trend, which in recent years had led pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B, doctors in California to reject a lesbian's request for infertility treatment, and an ambulance driver in Chicago to turn away a woman who needed transportation for an abortion.
"Without the rescission of this regulation, we would see tremendous discrimination against patients based on their behavior and based just on who they are," said Susan Berke Fogel of the National Health Law Program, an advocacy group based in the District. "We would see real people suffer, and more women could die."
The new rule leaves intact only long-standing "conscience" protections for doctors and nurses who do not want to perform abortions or sterilizations. It also retains the process for allowing health workers whose rights are violated to file complaints.
Calling the Bush-era rule "unclear and potentially overbroad in scope," the new, much narrower version eliminates language that had triggered alarm among reproductive health advocates, women's groups, stem cell scientists and proponents of honoring end-life-life wishes of terminally ill patients.
"We've had conscience protections on the books in some cases for more than 30 years," said Rima Cohen, the counselor for health policy to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "When the Bush administration put these rules out, they really contained overly broad language that was confusing to people. We didn't think that was necessary."
Friday's decision was condemned by proponents of stronger protections, who say doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other workers regularly face discrimination, firing and other punitive measures because of their deeply held convictions.
"Any weakening of conscience protections opens the door that much further to discrimination against life-affirming health-care professionals and institutions," said Jonathan Imbody, vice president for government relations at the Christian Medical Association. "With many areas already facing critical shortages of professionals and institutions, this is no time to be risking the further loss of health-care access for poor patients."
The new rule, which goes into effect in 30 days, is likely to fuel the intensifying debate over abortion and related issues. House Republicans have introduced several pieces of legislation containing provisions that would replicate many of the effects of the Bush rule.
"Today, the Obama administration demonstrated exactly why we need to have strong conscience protection for health workers written into our laws," said Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), who is sponsoring the Protect Life Act, which would write more protections into the health overhaul legislation. "Without legal protection, we can certainly expect even more bureaucratic assaults on the conscience of medical workers."
The Bush regulation, which was implemented during his final days in office, would have cut off federal funding for thousands of entities, including state and local governments, hospitals, health plans and clinics, if they did not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists or other employees who refused to participate in care they felt violated their personal, moral or religious beliefs. It also would have required all those entities to formally detail how they were complying.
Conservative groups said the rule was necessary because of the long failure to enforce a variety of federal laws providing protections for the "right of conscience." These laws have been on the books for decades, most notably the so-called Church and Weldon amendments.
But some argued that the regulation extended protections far beyond doctors and nurses and could essentially allow any worker in a health-care entity to refuse to participate in any services they object to, including enabling receptionists to refuse to make appointments for abortions, sterilizations, infertility treatments and other care that they find objectionable, and janitors refusing to clean up operating rooms where abortions were performed.
Soon after Obama assumed office, administration officials said they agreed the regulation was too broad and announced plans to rescind it. But officials indicated that instead of simply invalidating the rule, they would seek to replace it with a compromise. The announcement triggered more than 300,000 comments, which officials have spent months reviewing. The Federal Register notice announcing the decision cites concerns raised by both sides in the comments but concludes that most of the provisions were unnecessary and potentially problematic.
The rule will retain a provision that empowers the HHS Office of Civil Rights to investigate any complaints by workers who believe their rights under existing federal law were being violated. The office is currently investigating a complaint from a nurse who claims she was forced to perform an abortion in New York.
That office also will launch "a new awareness initiative for our grantees . . . to ensure they understand the statutory conscience protections," according to an HHS statement.
"The final conscience protection rule being issued today by HHS reaffirms the department's commitment to long-standing federal conscience statutes by maintaining and building upon provisions of the Bush administration rule that established an enforcement process for federal conscience laws, while rescinding the definitions and terms of the previous rule that caused confusion and could be taken as overly broad," according to the statement.
The decision comes as the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is investigating a complaint that religiously affiliated hospitals are violating federal law by refusing to provide certain types of care on religious grounds. | Government Policy Changes | February 2011 | ['(Washington Post)'] |
A man detonates a bomb in a government building in Guangzhou, China, killing four people and himself, along with injuring five others. | (Reuters) - A man detonated explosives in the outskirts of China’s southern Guangzhou city on Monday, killing himself and four others, police said.
Five more people were injured by the blast at a building in the Mingjing area at 10 a.m. (0200 GMT), local police said in a statement on their official Weibo account.
“All the injured have been sent to hospital for treatment and the case is under further investigation,” police said, adding that preliminary findings showed the suspect was a 59-year-old local man surnamed Hu, who died at the scene.
Local media reports described the building as housing a community committee.
Official news agency Xinhua described the explosion as an act of sabotage.
Reporting by Tom Daly; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
| Armed Conflict | March 2021 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Donald Trump, still disagreeing with the election results that resulted in a victory for President-elect Joe Biden, said through spokesperson Dan Scavino, "Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th." | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday there will be an orderly transition when Joe Biden takes office as president in less than two weeks, after Congress certified the Democrat’s victory in the Nov. 3 election.
“Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th,” Trump said in a statement posted on Twitter by White House spokesman Dan Scavino. | Government Job change - Election | January 2021 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Three judges are shot dead at a court in Hunan, China; the gunman later kills himself. | Three judges have been shot dead at a court in China's southern Hunan province by a man armed with a submachine gun, reports say.
Three other judges were injured before the man, who was also carrying two more weapons, killed himself.
Officials told the BBC the attacker was a 46-year-old local man who worked as head of security at a post office.
Correspondents say shootings are relatively rare in China, as few people have access to firearms.
The shooting happened during just before 1000 (0200 GMT) at the Lingling District People's Court, said Xinhua.
The BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says the man, named by officials as Zhu Jun, had reportedly borrowed his weapons from a colleague saying he needed to inspect them.
He barged into an office at the courtroom and opened fire on the officials. A spokesman for the local propaganda department told the Associated Press news agency the judges had been discussing a case unrelated to the gunman.
Xinhua said the man had been motivated by revenge - he was reported to have divorced his wife three years ago and was unhappy at the way the court divided their wealth.
China has seen a series of knife attacks in school in recent weeks which have left 17 people dead and dozens injured. The country has in the past had a comparatively low rate of violent crime, meaning the recent violence has been all the more shocking.
| Armed Conflict | June 2010 | ['(China Daily)', '(BBC)'] |
The U.S. Supreme Court allows, by a 5–4 vote, the Trump administration to begin implementing the policy that prohibits transgender persons who require or have undergone gender transition from serving. Unresolved challenges remain in lower courts. | The United States Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to enforce his policy of banning certain transgender people from the military.
The court voted 5-4 to grant a Trump administration request to lift injunctions blocking the policy while challenges continue in lower courts.
The four liberal judges on the court opposed the ruling.
The policy prohibits "transgender persons who require or have undergone gender transition" from serving.
The top court's ruling is not a mandate, but it has opened up the option for the military to enforce the ban.
The Trump administration had also appealed for an expedited ruling on the case, which the Supreme Court declined to take up.
The president announced on Twitter in 2017 that the country would no longer "accept or allow" transgender Americans to serve in the military, citing "tremendous medical costs and disruption".
The then defence secretary Jim Mattis refined the policy to limit it to individuals with a history of gender dysphoria, or when a person's biological sex and identity does not match. He said the new policy would make exceptions for several hundred transgender people already serving openly or willing to serve "in their biological sex".
There are currently some 8,980 active duty transgender troops, according to Department of Defence data analysed by the Palm Center, a public policy nonprofit. Gen Mattis in his memo argued that "by its very nature, military service requires sacrifice," and that those who serve "voluntarily accept limitations on their personal liberties".
The move is a reversal of an Obama administration policy that ruled transgender Americans could serve openly in the military as well as obtain funding for gender re-assignment surgery.
Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, told the BBC: "We had an inclusive policy for almost three years. What today's ruling enables is the whipsawing of policy, back and forth."
This is just one Supreme Court action - and it's a procedural move, not a formal court opinion - but it may be a sign that a conservative majority sympathetic to presidential powers and prerogatives is flexing its muscles.
The Trump administration, frustrated that lower-court judges had again blocked implementation of one of its policy decisions, asked the justices to step in and clear the path. The White House wanted a quick ruling because, it said, allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military presented "too great a risk to military effectiveness". By a bare majority, the court complied. Although the justices did not entirely bypass the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which the president has tried to paint as a bastion of liberal judges, they did the next best thing for the president. They permitted the transgender ban to go into effect while the legal fight, which could last years, grinds on.
For the past two years, the president's opponents - locked out of national power until recently - have looked to the judicial system as a last line of defence. As Tuesday clearly showed, however, those defences are only as strong as a majority of the Supreme Court says they are.
Several trial judges around the country had issued injunctions blocking the ban.
One injunction was reversed in a federal appeals court earlier this month, with a three-judge panel ruling the policy was not a "blanket ban" on transgender troops, and so the courts should defer to the executive branch's military decisions.
While Mr Trump's rationale for banning transgender troops was financial, according to estimates by the RAND Corporation, a policy think tank working with the US Armed Forces, transition-related healthcare costs are between $2.4m (£1.8m) and $8.4m per year.
In 2017, defence data viewed by the Palm Center indicates that cost was in fact lower, at $2.2m.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco had described the transgender ban in his fast-track appeal as "an issue of imperative public importance" regarding the military's authority "to determine who may serve". Mr Belkin told the BBC: "This is not a financial issue, it's not a disruption issue - it's an issue of emotion, tolerance and politics."
The Supreme Court "had no business weighing in" at this point, he added.
"Not only is there no policy emergency, but there is not even a policy problem."
Pentagon spokeswoman Lt Col Carla Gleason said in a statement that the military treats "all transgender persons with respect and dignity" and the new policy was "based on professional military judgement".
She said the "proposed policy is NOT a ban on service by transgender persons. It is critical that [the defence department] be permitted to implement personnel policies that it determines are necessary to ensure the most lethal and combat effective fighting force in the world."
Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the administration was "pleased" that the top court was "clearing the way for the policy to go into effect".
"Our military had been forced to maintain a prior policy that poses a risk to military effectiveness and lethality for over a year."
The top court's ruling has sparked outrage and frustration online.
Charlotte Clymer, a transgender Army veteran, tweeted: "This is a hateful and cowardly policy."
Others, however, said the ban just meant transgender troops must "conform to dress code/physical standards like everyone else". | Government Policy Changes | January 2019 | ['(BBC)'] |
Thousands of schools open in Nepal after the devastating earthquake of April 2015 which destroyed more than 25,000 classrooms and killed more than 8,000 people. | Thousands of schools damaged during April's devastating earthquake in Nepal have begun to re-open. More than 25,000 classrooms in some 8,000 schools were destroyed in the 7.8 magnitude quake and its aftershocks, and more than 8,000 people died.
Many have only been rebuilt on a temporary basis using materials such as bamboo, wood and tarpaulin. Classes will initially focus on group activities to help children recover from the trauma of the disaster.
Earlier this week, the United Nations said that one month on from the quake, the world needed to provide more food and shelter for those left homeless.
Meanwhile, the Nepalese government - which has been criticised for being slow to respond - has called for more direct aid funding.
The government closed all schools in the Kathmandu region for the month of May, amid continuing aftershocks in the aftermath of the 25 April tremor.
Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless, and many are still struggling to rebuild their lives.
In the worst-hit districts of Gorkha, Sindhupalchok and Nuwakot, it is estimated that more than 90% of schools were destroyed.
In all, the government is planning to open 15,000 temporary learning centres, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Education ministry official Lavadeo Awasthi told the Times of India newspaper that the temporary classroom structures "will have to do for the next two years, in which time the buildings should be restored". Many children will be attending lessons in classrooms built on school playing fields or in buildings marked "safe" after inspections.
School days will be short and focus on game playing and cultural activities. The United Nations has distributed educational kits which include puzzles and picture books aimed at having an impact on children's psychology.
"The children are very happy here to engage themselves with different kinds of playing materials," said Unicef early childhood development specialist, Shiva Bhusal. But many parents are still concerned about their children's safety.
"Aftershocks are still continuing. It is difficult not to be nervous about sending the children back to school again," Mina Shrestha, mother of eight-year-old pupil Sahaj, told AFP news agency.
"But the teachers have assured us that it is safe here, and at least his mind will be fresh if he meets his friends and studies," she added.
However, a number of schools remain closed.
"It is impossible for me to re-open right now," Lila Nanda Upadhyay, head teacher of Kathmandu's Rupak Memorial International School, was quoted as saying by AFP.
According to Unicef, Nepal's high-school dropout rate was already a major concern before the earthquake. About 1.2 million Nepalese children between the ages 5 and 16 have either never attended school or have dropped out. | Earthquakes | May 2015 | ['(BBC)'] |
The United Nations calls for action to end renewed hostilities between ethnic Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar's western Rakhine State that have killed dozens and displaced more than 22,500. | World body says more than 22,000 people have been displaced after a flare-up in fighting between Muslims and Buddhists.
The UN has called for “urgent action” to prevent the spread of intercommunal violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, after recent clashes killed dozens ofpeopleand left thousands homeless.
The organisation said a teamlead by Ashok Nigam,its Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator, had visited the state and seen “large scale destruction of houses”.
The government estimates that more than 22,500 people have been displaced from their homes in the last week and more than 4,600 houses have been burnt.
The latest violence between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslimsbegan on October 21 and has left at least 84 people dead and 129 injured, accordingto the government.
Human rights groups believe the true toll could be farhigher.
Violence erupted in Rakhine stateafter Muslims were blamed for therape and murder of a Buddhist woman in June, setting off deadly clashes that displaced tens of thousands of people. “There’s always been tension between the Muslim community and the Buddhists, particularly the monks, but in Rakhine it’s particularly rife because the Buddhists fear the Rohingyas because… [their] population has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the Rakhine Buddhists believe the Muslims are trying to overpopulate and push them out,” Asia analyst Larry Jagan told Al Jazeera.
Security forces have been deployed to areas where clashes between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya erupted on October 21.
“The Rakhine Buddhist monks have been agitating, I’ve seen pamphlets put out in the past by these extremists monks that say look at Malaysia; Malaysia was a Buddhist country a century ago and now it’s an Islamic country. We do not want the same to happen here,” Jagan said.
“In some places, the Rohingya have also initiated the violence. It’s a reflection of how tense the situation is… but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s ethnic cleansing,” Jagan told Al Jazeera.
‘Set fire to homes’
The total number of displaced is now estimated to be about 100,000, with most of them living in campsaroundSittwe, the state capital.
“The Rakhines came to attack us with knives. They set fire to our homes, even though we have nothing there for them. I left in only the clothes I am wearing,” a63-year-old woman in one of the camps said.
“I can’t go back.”
Buddhist Rakhine in Kyaukpyugave a different accountwhen contacted by the Reuters news agency.
He said Rakhines and Muslims had fought each other with knives, swords, sticks and slingshots. Overwhelmed, the Muslims then “set fire to their own houses as a last resort and ran away,” he said.
Many of those affected by the clashes belong to the Muslim Rohingya minority, which has long complained of discrimination.
The estimated 800,000 stateless Rohingya are seen as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh by the government and many Burmese,who call them “Bengalis”.
But other Muslims in Rakhine state have also been swept up in the latest violence.
Near the camps in Sittwe, someof the displaced peoplesaid they were Kaman, a Muslim minority recognised as one of Myanmar’s more than 130 ethnic groups.
“My father is Muslim and my mother is Buddhist… They attacked us by defining us as ‘Rohingya,’ Aye Kyaw, a Kaman who fled the unrest in Kyaukpyu, told the AFP news agency.
“We are not Rohingya. We did not migrate from other countries.”
The 30-year-old, who said his community had lived in Rakhine for centuries, said the Rakhine had “tortured us cruelly” and appealed for protection.
| Armed Conflict | October 2012 | ['(Al Jazeera)'] |
A magnitude 6.2 earthquake strikes the central Mexican state of Oaxaca killing at least five people and damaging housing and infrastructure already damaged by Tuesday's 2017 Central Mexico earthquake. , , | MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A magnitude 6.2 aftershock that shook Mexico on Saturday was blamed for five deaths, spreading fear among anxious residents reeling from a string of natural disasters and interrupting the search for survivors from a bigger tremor earlier this week.
The Popocatepetl volcano south of Mexico City sent a column of ash into the sky, capping an intense period of seismic activity including two powerful tremors this month that have killed more than 400 people and caused damage of up to $8 billion.
Mexico’s capital was shattered by Tuesday’s magnitude 7.1 quake that flattened dozens of buildings and killed at least 307 people. The government’s response to the disaster is under close scrutiny ahead of a presidential election next year.
Although the latest quake was not as destructive, fear is running high among the population. Terrified residents ran into the streets, where they crouched and prayed as earthquake sirens went off. Two women died of heart attacks as the ground shook, the city government said.
Tents were set up in different parts of the city where psychologists offered mental health support to survivors and rescuers traumatized by the natural disasters. Acts of solidarity came from all corners of Mexican society.
Tuesday’s quake hit on the anniversary of a 1985 tremor that, by some estimates, killed 10,000 people.
Roxana Trani, a 30-year-old banker, was one of the thousands of young Mexicans who turned to social media to find out how to help. She joined one of the aid collection centers that popped up in Mexico City and traveled to Puebla state in one of many convoys flooding from the city to more isolated communities.
“I never understood why the people who suffered the ‘85 quake were so afraid of the slightest tremors. Now I get it,” Trani said.
“Being at a funeral and seeing all the pain that one minute caused has changed me,” she said.
Concern that the aftershock could cause further collapses paralyzed rescue efforts at a housing complex in the Tlalpan neighborhood of Mexico City, frustrating first responders who believed people were alive under the rubble.
By the evening, hard-hatted first responders were again digging for bodies or survivors in a dwindling number of rubble heaps. Their work barely skipped a beat elsewhere when earthquake alarms twice rang out across the city.
The United States Geological Survey said the latest quake was relatively shallow with an epicenter near Juchitan, a tropical region of Oaxaca state hard hit by a massive 8.1 magnitude tremor that struck on Sept. 7.
Three people died in Oaxaca during Saturday’s tremor, including a man who was attacked by a swarm of wild bees, authorities said.
Mexico’s seismological authorities said it was an aftershock of the Sept. 7 tremor, which was the strongest to hit the country in 85 years and killed at least 98 people.
The Popocatepetl volcano, which is visible on a clear day to the approximately 20 million people who live in the Mexico City metropolitan region, spewed vapor and ash-filled gas after two small eruptions on Saturday.
Dozens of buildings were brought to the ground by Tuesday’s earthquake, while an army of trained rescuers helped by droves of volunteers frantically removed rubble in a day-and-night search for survivors.
Apartment buildings, offices, a school and a textile factory were among the structures flattened, leaving thousands homeless. The search had wound up at many sites by Saturday.
Officials said there could be some 30,000 badly damaged homes in the adjacent states of Morelos and Puebla. RMS, a risk modeling company, estimated economic losses of $4 billion to $8 billion.
Mexican volunteers, professionals and soldiers backed by teams from the United States and countries as far away as Japan and Chile have saved 69 people from the rubble after several days of searching. But in the past 48 hours rescuers have found more corpses than survivors, and frustration was mounting.
A government response seen as lacking in the disastrous 1985 temblor severely damaged the credibility of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Mexico is now better prepared to deal with the aftermath of earthquakes, thanks to disaster planning, civic groups, a stringent building code and communication technology.
The government has run a massive search-and-rescue operation involving thousands of soldiers and police, but victims in outlying areas of the city and surrounding villages complained that aid has been slow to arrive.
“Here we have no help, everything is in the center (of the city),” said Justina Gonzalez, 55, a shopkeeper in the Xochimilco district in the far south of the city whose two-bedroom house fell down on Tuesday. She now lives in a tent and said neighbors were bringing her family food.
“We lost everything, we don’t even have a way to cook,” Gonzalez said.
| Earthquakes | September 2017 | ['(Sky News)', '(Time and AP)', '(Reuters)'] |
Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. announces that it will purchase Peloton Therapeutics Inc. for $1.05 billion in cash. The catalyst for the deal is Peloton's recent progress in the development of a kidney cancer treatment. | (Reuters) - U.S. drugmaker Merck & Co Inc on Tuesday agreed to buy Peloton Therapeutics Inc for $1.05 billion in cash, gaining access to the privately held company’s lead kidney cancer drug candidate.
The acquisition can strengthen Merck’s presence in the field of renal cell carcinoma and bolster its cancer drug portfolio.
Merck’s blockbuster immunotherapy Keytruda was approved last month in the United States for treating renal cell cancer.
“This is a classic bolt-on deal. Peloton has a drug that looks promising in renal cell carcinoma, and there’s actually been a lot of success in the field in recent years,” said Brad Loncar, who runs the Loncar Cancer Immunotherapy ETF.
Peloton expects to start studying its lead drug, a kidney cancer treatment code named as “PT2977”, in a late-stage trial in the second half of this year.
In an older mid-stage trial testing patients whose cancer had spread even after treatment with at least one therapy, 24% of patients treated with Peloton’s drug showed an at least 30% shrinkage of targeted lesions.
Confident of its pipeline, Peloton was earlier looking to go public and had given a pricing range of $15 to $17 per share for its initial public offering last week.
At the upper limit of that range, the company would have been valued at $903.6 million, including underwriters’ option and other outstanding shares.
With the Merck deal now in place, Peloton shareholders would be eligible to receive a further $1.15 billion on achieving certain sales and regulatory milestones.
“The deal announced today should also underscore the opportunity for other small and mid cap biotech names in the cancer biology space,” said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Louise Chen.
Credit Suisse was financial adviser for Merck and Centerview Partners was to Peloton.
Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli
| Organization Merge | May 2019 | ['(Reuters)'] |
American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology company Monsanto rejects an unsolicited $62 billion takeover bid by German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, saying the price was too low but adding that it remained “open to further talks.” | (Reuters) - Monsanto Co, the world’s largest seed company, turned down Bayer AG’s $62 billion acquisition bid as “incomplete and financially inadequate” on Tuesday, but said it was open to engage further in negotiations.
Monsanto’s decision, first reported earlier on Tuesday by Reuters, puts pressure on Bayer to decide whether to raise its bid, even as the company faces criticism from some shareholders that its $122-per-share cash offer is already too high.
Monsanto shares ended trading up 3.1 percent at $109.3 in New York, substantially below Bayer’s bid price, underscoring some investor skepticism that a deal can be done. Bayer shares rose 3.23 percent at 87.15 euros in Frankfurt.
“We believe in the substantial benefits an integrated strategy could provide to growers and broader society, and we have long respected Bayer’s business,” Monsanto Chief Executive Hugh Grant said in a statement.
“However, the current proposal significantly undervalues our company and also does not adequately address or provide reassurance for some of the potential financing and regulatory execution risks related to the acquisition,” he added.
Bayer responded that its $122 per share offer represents “full and certain value” for Monsanto shareholders, but that it looks forward to engaging in constructive discussions with Monsanto.
“We are confident that we can address any potential financing or regulatory matters related to the transaction. Bayer remains committed to working together to complete this mutually compelling transaction,” Bayer Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann said in a statement.
It was not clear what price Monsanto would be willing to sell for but several analysts have suggested Bayer would have to pay much more than the current offer to clinch a deal.
“We believe it is unlikely that the deal gets done at $122 and still believe $135 is a more likely price,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a research note last week.
Manning & Napier Advisors LLC, an investment management firm that is Monsanto’s 14th largest shareholder according to Thomson Reuters data, agreed with Monsanto’s decision to seek a higher offer.
“Monsanto’s assessment that the initial offer was inadequate is valid, as we believe it does not appropriately value the company’s existing product portfolio,” said Michael Knolla, a managing director at Manning & Napier.
Global agrochemicals companies are racing to consolidate, partly in response to a drop in commodity prices that has hit farm incomes. Seeds and pesticides markets are also increasingly converging. This has driven Monsanto to consider a tie-up to build strength.
Monsanto approached Bayer in March to express interest in its crop science unit, Reuters reported at the time. Among the possibilities discussed were an outright acquisition of the crop science unit and a joint venture, or other type of partnership between the two companies.
Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Additional reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago, Mike Stone in New York, Patricia Weiss in Frankfurt and Pamela Barbaglia in London; Editing by Tiffany Wu, Bernard Orr
| Organization Merge | May 2016 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Rioting hits other English cities including Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham, though London is largely quiet. | Sporadic violence has broken out in several cities around England, although London stayed largely quiet overnight.
There was unrest in cities including Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham, with shops being looted and set alight. Three men died when they were hit by a car in Birmingham - locals claimed they were protecting their neighbourhood.
Greater Manchester Police's assistant chief constable said officers had faced "unprecedented levels of violence".
London Mayor Boris Johnson urged the government to reconsider its plans to cut police numbers, saying the argument had been "substantially weakened" by the riots.
GMP's ACC Garry Shewan said he had seen "the most sickening scenes" of his career, and said the force had been overwhelmed.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday morning he said GMP was "absolutely intent" on bringing the rioters to justice and officers were already studying CCTV.
"Hundreds and hundreds of people, we have your image, we have your face, we have your acts of wanton criminality on film. We are coming for you, from today and no matter how long it takes, we will arrest those people responsible," he said.
Some 113 people have been arrested so far over the trouble in Manchester and Salford, where hundreds of youths looted shops and set fire to cars and buildings.
In the West Midlands, 109 have been arrested and 23 charged following scenes of disorder in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and West Bromwich - where vehicles were set on fire. Meanwhile, West Midlands Police have started a murder inquiry after the deaths of the three pedestrians hit by a car.
In Birmingham, riot police surrounded the Mailbox, the city's upmarket shopping centre, following the disturbances seen in the area on Monday night. In other developments: Scotland Yard drafted in special constables and community support officers in London to ensure five times the usual number of officers for a Tuesday - 16,000 - were on duty. They made 81 arrests. Downing Street said the increased level of policing would remain in place "as long as necessary" to prevent a repeat of the violence.
It said while there was "no complacency," police tactics in London had "clearly worked". It followed three nights of rioting in the city which saw shops looted, property set alight and police attacked, with some 111 Met officers suffered injuries including serious head and eye wounds, cuts and fractured bones after being attacked by rioters wielding bottles, planks, bricks and even driving cars at them. Five police dogs have also been hurt.
The Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Stephen Kavanagh said London deserved "some resilience and sustainability from police".
David Cameron, who is chairing a meeting of the cabinet's emergency committee Cobra for the second day running, met officers in the Met Police's Gold command in Lambeth on Tuesday afternoon, before speaking to emergency service personnel in Croydon.
He condemned the "sickening scenes of people looting, vandalising, thieving, robbing".
He told rioters: "You will feel the full force of the law. And if you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment."
Parliament was being recalled on Thursday, which would allow MPs to "stand together in condemnation of these crimes and to stand together in determination to rebuild these communities", he said.
The prime minister returned early from his holiday in Tuscany to discuss the unrest, which first flared on Saturday after a peaceful protest in Tottenham over the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, 29, by police.
London has seen a wave of "copycat criminal activity" since the initial disturbance, the Met Police said.
DAC Kavanagh said the use of plastic bullets - never before fired to deal with riots in England - would be "considered carefully" in the event of further disorder.
But he added: "That does not mean we are scared of using any tactic."
Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin had earlier ruled out calling in the Army.
Officers believe some rioters have used Blackberry Messenger - a service allowing users to send free real-time messages - to organise violence.
Referring to proposed police cuts, London Mayor Boris Johnson said: "That case was pretty frail and it's been substantially weakened. This is not a time to think about making substantial cuts in police numbers."
Labour leader Ed Miliband called for a "rapid response" from the government to help affected communities. He urged the government to work with the insurance industry "to put in place fast-track procedures with immediate effect so that individuals and businesses making claims do not have to wait for the money they need to start putting things right".
The Association of British Insurers says the damage is likely to cost insurers "tens of millions of pounds".
Monday's disturbances included: The Association of British Insurers says the damage is likely to cost insurers "tens of millions of pounds".
Monday's violence started in Hackney, north London, at about 16:20 BST after a man was stopped and searched by police, who found nothing.
Groups of people began attacking officers, wrecking cars with wooden poles and metal bars, and looting shops. Violence then flared separately in other parts of the capital.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who also cut short a holiday to return, was heckled by the members of the public while viewing damage in Clapham Junction on Tuesday.
Some people have complained there have been too few police to deal with the violence.
Mr Johnson told those gathered that those responsible for the violence "face punishment they will bitterly, bitterly regret".
However, when challenged to do more for communities, Mr Johnson rejected "economic or social justifications" for the violence. | Riot | August 2011 | ['(BBC)'] |
The city of Nuoro, on the island of Sardinia, Italy, is affected by flooding and subsequent mudflows caused by heavy rains, killing at least three people. | At least three people have been killed on the Italian island of Sardinia after flooding caused by heavy rains. Dramatic footage posted on social media shows rivers of mud flowing through the town of Bitti in Nuoro province.
Italian media say the three who have died there include an older man who drowned at home and a man killed in his vehicle. Strong winds and rain have battered the island since Friday, cutting off power and forcing some people to evacuate.
Andrea Soddu, mayor of the province's main town of Nuoro, warned of "particularly heavy" rainfall in the area and asked citizens to exercise "maximum caution" in a post on Facebook. One reporter from local newspaper La Nuova Sardegna posted footage of the flooding in Bitti.
There are also fears of flooding in the nearby towns of Torpè and Galtellì with further rains expected on Saturday. Emergency services have moved some 150 residents of Galtellì to municipal facilities, Mayor Giovanni Santo Porcu told ANSA news agency.
"We are monitoring the situation but first of all we are trying to protect public safety," he reportedly said.
In 2013, heavy flooding caused by Cyclone Cleopatra killed at least 18 people in Sardinia. | Floods | November 2020 | ['(BBC)'] |
The Taliban kill 20 policemen in an attack in Helmand, Afghanistan. | KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) - Taliban fighters overran multiple checkpoints in a nighttime raid in Afghanistan's volatile southern Helmand province, killing at least 20 police officers as the battle raged into Saturday, authorities said.
The assault came as Afghanistan's military acknowledged the Taliban controls at least four districts across the country.
The attacks in Helmand hit police checkpoints in the Musa Qala district, said Mohammad Ismail Hotak, the head of the province's joint coordination of police and military operations.
He said the attacks wounded at least 10 officers, though the Taliban also seemed to have suffered high casualties.
The spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Sediq Sediqqi, said fighting ended Saturday afternoon with around 30 insurgents killed, including a group leader he named as Abdul Hadi.
Saqi Jan, the head of police logistics in Musa Qala, said area checkpoints were manned by officers from the neighboring district of Baghran who had been forced out by earlier Taliban attacks.
"Baghran has been under Taliban control since last year, so these police came to Musa Qala and built themselves a small compound and some checkpoints," he said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks. The militants have been targeting vulnerable police checkpoints across the country since launching their summer offensive in April. Last month, a Taliban attack in Helmand's Naw Zad district killed at least 19 police officers.
Afghan army Gen. Afzel Aman, the head of the Defense Ministry's operational department, told journalists Saturday that four districts are now under Taliban control in the country: Nawa in Ghazni province, Baghran and Dishu in Helmand province and Khak-e Afghan in Zabul province.
"Fighting is going on almost everywhere compared to last year, and many places are under threat of enemy attack," Aman said.
Afghan forces are fighting alone this year as the U.S. and NATO have ended their combat mission and their casualties are soaring. Between Jan. 1 and May 7, 2,322 army, police and local police personnel were killed, 53 percent more than the same period in 2014, according to NATO.
By comparison, a total of 2,217 American service members have been killed since the 2001 invasion. | Armed Conflict | June 2015 | ['(WTVM)'] |
Iraqi insurgency: Car bombings in and around Baghdad kill 15 and injure 33 others. | Car bomb kills 13 Shia Mulsims in north Baghdad hours after twin bombs leave two dead in market outside capital.
Bombings in and around Baghdad have killed at least 15 people, just a day after a wave of attacks during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha resulted in Iraq’s highest death toll this month.
The latest violence on Sunday targeted Shia Muslims, much like the shootings and bombings a day earlier, with the spate of attacks shattering a relative calm despite announcements by authorities that they would boost security during the four-day Eid break which began on Friday.
On Sunday evening,a car bomb exploded in the mostly Shia Muslim district of Kabhumiyah in northern Baghdad, killing 13 people and wounding 28 as they were outside celebrating Eid, officials said.
Earlier on Sunday,twin bombings near a market southeast of Baghdadalso killed at least two people and wounded five others.
Police officials saythe simultaneous attacks on Sunday morning took place in Mada’in, locatedabout 20kmsoutheast ofthe capital,as shoppers started to arrive.
Medics in a nearby hospital confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the media.
The blasts followed a string of attacks across the countrythat killed nearly 40 people and wounded almost100. Saturday was the deadliest day in nearly six weeks.
Theexplosions come just a day after a wave of attacks during the Islamicfestival of Eid al-Adha resulting in Iraq’s highest death toll this month.
| Armed Conflict | October 2012 | ['(Al Jazeera)'] |
Christine Lagarde officially starts as managing director of the International Monetary Fund . (RTÉ) | Christine Lagarde, France's former finance minister, takes over as head of the International Monetary Fund later.
The first woman to head the IMF, she was picked by its 24-member board. Taking the post filled until last month by her compatriot Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she will begin her five-year term amid the escalating debt crisis in Europe and intensive efforts to avoid a Greek default. Ms Lagarde’s victory over Mexico’s central bank governor Agustin Carstens was assured after the United States made its support clear and emerging economic powers China, Brazil and Russia did the same. Perhaps the first task of her five-year term will be to deal with the efforts of the IMF and European Union to resolve the Greek debt crisis and prevent contagion to other Eurozone economies. In a television interview after her appointment, Ms Lagarde pressed Greece to move quickly to push through unpopular austerity measures that the IMF and EU had said were a prerequisite for further aid. Greece subsequently approved the measures. | Government Job change - Appoint_Inauguration | July 2011 | ['(IMF)', '(The Irish Times)', '(BBC)'] |
Maoist rebels kill 14 Central Reserve Police Force members in an ambush in Chhattisgarh, Central India. | Maoist rebels have killed at least 14 paramilitary policemen in an ambush in central India, officials say.
The rebels attacked members of the Central Reserve Police Force in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh state, 450km (280 miles) from state capital Raipur.
The officers were reportedly surrounded and attacked while raiding a rebel hideout in a forested area.
The Maoists say they are fighting for communist rule and greater rights for tribal people and the rural poor.
Their insurgency began in the eastern state of West Bengal in the late 1960s, spreading to more than one-third of India's 600-plus administrative districts.
A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) spokesman in the area of the attack told the AFP news agency that the rebels had used human shields.
"[They] were using local villagers as shields, hence our force couldn't retaliate with full force as that would also have cost villagers' lives," Zulfikar Hasan said.
At least 11 CRPF men were also injured in the attack, police say.
Chhattisgarh is often hit by Maoist violence. At least 15 policemen were killed in a similar attack in the state in March.
In May 2013, rebels targeted a convoy carrying state Congress leaders and party workers in Sukma, killing 27 people, including some top state politicians. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described India's Maoist insurgency as its "greatest internal security challenge".
Major military and police offensives in recent years have pushed the rebels back to their forest strongholds and levels of violence have fallen.
But hit-and-run attacks are still common, killing hundreds of people every year. | Armed Conflict | December 2014 | ['(BBC)'] |
Two separate bombings take place in Pakistan, killing at least seven people. A suicide bomber kills five people at the administrative headquarters in the Mohmand Agency tribal district while the other kills two people at a hospital in Peshawar. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claims responsibility for the first attack. | Two separate explosions have killed at least seven people in northwestern Pakistan. A suicide bomber killed five people and injured seven in an attack targeting the administrative headquarters of the Mohmand tribal district in Ghalani Tehsil, officials said. The Pakistani Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the attack.
The breakaway faction is based in the Mohmand area -- part of rugged, lawless regions along the Afghan border that have long served as safe havens for local and Al-Qaeda-linked foreign militants.
Hospital officials told RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal that three of those killed were members of the tribal police, known locally as Levies. In a separate attack, two people were killed in the northwestern city of Peshawar when a bomb exploded near a hospital.
Local media cited police sources as saying the bomb went off near the Hayatabad Medical Complex in a wealthy neighborhood of Peshawar. No group has immediately claimed responsibility. Pakistan's main opposition leader Imran Khan was due to visit the hospital on February 15, but it was not immediately clear whether he was there at the time of the blast.
The attacks come two days after a suicide bombing claimed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar killed 13 in the eastern city of Lahore on February 13.
Pakistan has waged several offensives against Islamic militants in recent years.
| Armed Conflict | February 2017 | ['(Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)'] |
Voters in Belarus go to the polls for the Belarusian parliamentary elections. According to election officials, allies of President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko will win all 110 seats renewing concerns about the process. |
Belarusian election officials say the opposition won no seats in Sunday's parliamentary election which President Alexander Lukashenko promised would be fair.With votes from all but a few districts counted, officials say Lukashenko allies are set to win all 110 seats.Hundreds of European election monitors are in Belarus to watch the voting and ballot counting.Mr. Luksahenko said it will be very hard for monitors to say the election was unfair.Belarusian opposition activists protest in Minsk against the parliamentary elections, 28 Sep 2008The European Union has said it would reconsider trade and travel sanctions against Belarus depending, in part, on whether monitors certify the election as meeting international standards. But several hundred opposition supporters are condemning the election as another rigged vote.Two hundred sixty three candidates, including 70 opposition members, competed for the parliamentary seats.The United States has also said it will consider improving ties with Belarus after authorities freed former opposition presidential candidate Alexander Kozulin. Kozulin was sentenced to more than five years behind bars in 2006 for openly protesting President Lukashenko's re-election in what Kozulin and much of the West denounced as a rigged vote.Washington has called Mr. Lukashenko Europe's last dictator for suppressing human rights and free speech and fixing elections. The president has denounced what he calls Western interference in Belarusian affairs. But he has also expressed the desire for better ties with Europe and the United States. | Government Job change - Election | September 2008 | ['(Reuters via The Globe and Mail)', '(Voice of America)'] |
Voters in Venezuela participate in an election for members of a new Constitutional Assembly, devised by President Nicolás Maduro to amend the constitution following a legislative takeover in March. Many Venezuelans question the election's legitimacy, resulting in boycotts and ongoing protests. | Despite polls showing that a majority of Venezuelans think a new constitution is unnecessary or undesirable, voters head to the ballot box Sunday to elect members of a new constitutional assembly.
Opposition leaders see it as yet another move to sideline dissident voices, and international leaders have repudiated the move by President Nicolas Maduro as undemocratic.
The U.S. announced Wednesday that it is imposing a new set of economic sanctions against 13 government figures, saying the vote is an abuse of power. Anticipating possible violence — Maduro’s government banned protests in days leading up to the vote — the U.S. State Department ordered families of diplomatic personnel out of the country.
The vote comes amid nationwide protests that as of Friday had claimed at least 108 lives, left 3,000 injured and led to 4,500 arrests. A majority of Venezuelans blame Maduro for food scarcities, rising crime and an increasingly autocratic government.
Venezuelans will elect 537 members of a new constitutional assembly that will be charged with drafting a new magna carta for the once prosperous nation. The last such assembly in 1999 took six months to complete its work. During that time, the sitting congress, the National Assembly, was shut down. Maduro has not made clear whether the new charter will be put to a nationwide vote.
The turnout is likely to be low, as the opposition is boycotting the election, saying it is rigged to ensure Maduro loyalists control the body. Voters at large will select 364 members, while the remainder will be elected by seven discrete social groups, including retirees, indigenous groups, peasants, students, farmers and the disabled.
The last constitutional redraft was pushed through by the late President Hugo Chavez. In that case, voters approved an “authorizing” referendum, which allowed work on the constitution to proceed. Maduro has not sought such a referendum, probably fearing rejection, further diminishing the new assembly’s legitimacy in the eyes of many Venezuelans. Maduro’s approval rating is currently 20%.
The election is clearly illegitimate
— David Smilde, Venezuelan expert at Tulane University
Maduro insists he needs a new charter to provide stability and end the protests that have convulsed the nation since March 30. A new constitution, he says, will help him fight drug trafficking, guarantee the sustainability of the social projects — called “missions” — launched by Chavez, and create a “post-petroleum economy” modeled after Cuba’s communal system.
The new constitution would provide a fresh start in combating an economic crisis caused by low oil prices, triple-digit inflation, plummeting productivity and an “economic war” waged by the opposition with help from the United States, Maduro says. Maduro was a protégé of Chavez, and the Chavistas — those who supported Chavez’s socialist vision and policies — remain a dominating presence in the government and in parts of Venezuelan society.
While Maduro blames outside forces for Venezuela’s cratered economy, which is expected to shrink by as much as 12% this year, many economists blame his mismanagement and that of his predecessor, Chavez, for crippling domestic industry by nationalizing many businesses and inhibiting much-needed investment.
Polls show a majority of Venezuelans see the new constitutional assembly as an illegal seizure of power — the latest and most serious attempt by Maduro to marginalize the opposition while perpetuating his tenure as president. Critics fear the new assembly will replace the democratically elected National Assembly, which is controlled by opposition deputies.
The constitutional assembly, which only has candidates put forward by the government, “would mark the end of whatever is left of Venezuela's democracy and rule of law," said Francisco Monaldi, an economist and fellow in Latin American energy policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
The existing National Assembly already has been neutered by a series of decisions by the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court, including the declaration that the assembly is in contempt and thus all laws it passes are null and void. Efforts to mount a recall election to boot Maduro from office have been blocked by loyalists on the National Electoral Council.
The opposition demonstrated its disgust with Maduro with its own unofficial plebiscite on July 16 in which 98% of 7.6 million voters rejected the new assembly while favoring the formation of a new government of “national unity.”
“This election is clearly illegitimate,” said David Smilde, a sociology professor and Venezuela expert at Tulane University, citing a “stacked” electoral scheme and “coerced voting” of government employees. “The 1999 constitution says only the people have the right to call a constituent assembly, presumably through a referendum, and Maduro is assuming that power for himself.”
Yes, quite a few.
In addition to support from the U.S. government, the opposition is backed by the Organization of American States, the European Parliament and numerous civil society groups, including Amnesty International. Several Latin American leaders have called on Maduro to cancel the vote. Mexico last week said it would support U.S. economic sanctions against Venezuela.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s Roman Catholic bishops declared the new assembly “unconstitutional, as well as unnecessary, inappropriate, and damaging to the Venezuelan people.”
Efforts by foreign governments and the Vatican to mediate dialogue between the deeply antagonistic sides so far have come to naught.
Demonstrating Venezuela’s polarization, Maduro will proceed with plans to reform the state, while the opposition has announced plans for an indefinite strike similar to one staged this week. The strike was observed by 90% of the private sector, according to labor unions, and brought much of this country of 31 million to a standstill.
Assuming Maduro wins on Sunday, the constitutional assembly will convene Aug. 30 to begin drafting a new charter. But few expect any overnight improvement in Venezuelans’ daily lives, which have been marked by scarcities of basic foodstuffs. Near-term uncertainty and the probability of ongoing violence prompted Venezuelans to empty supermarket shelves of what little household items were available in recent days.
The uncertainty caused the black market value of the U.S. dollar to skyrocket Friday to as high as 10,300 bolivars, the national currency, a 90% loss in value from 1,010 bolivars a year ago, according to Caracas traders.
More chaos could be in store. With the price of oil expected to remain low for the foreseeable future, Venezuela’s economy could remain on life support. Monetary reserves are running low, and the nation is at risk of defaulting on foreign debt.
The next presidential election is scheduled for late next year. Although Maduro’s low popularity would seem to make him a long shot for reelection, his government has thinned the field of opponents by disqualifying several potential candidates from running, including Henrique Capriles, who narrowly lost to Maduro in 2013, and Maria Corina Machado.
His attorney general, Luisa Diaz Ortega, normally a supporter of the socialist government, has in recent weeks become its most prominent critic. She has described the Sunday vote as illegal and the Supreme Court, which Maduro stacked with 13 new loyalist members in December 2015, as illegitimate.
Other Chavistas rejecting the new assembly include assembly deputy German Ferrer, who is Diaz Ortega’s husband, ex-Youth Minister Maripili Hernandez and public defender Gabriela Ramirez.
Colombia has expressed fears that increasing violence exacerbated by Sunday’s vote could lead to a massive influx of Venezuelan refugees.
According to Colombian media reports, some 25,000 Venezuelans cross the border daily to buy food and household items that are unavailable or unaffordable at home. On Friday, Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos said he supported U.S. sanctions and that a new constitution would be “spurious.”
President Trump is reportedly considering applying additional sanctions to Venezuela, including a possible ban of its oil imports or prohibiting the use of U.S. dollars in any transactions by the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Either measure would result in “extreme economic duress,” according to RBC Capital Markets investment firm. | Government Job change - Election | July 2017 | ['(The Los Angeles Times)'] |
Children's TV presenter Holly Walsh breaks bones and dislocates a shoulder whilst leaping from a pier during a festival in Worthing, West Sussex, England, UK; the festival is briefly halted. | A CBBC presenter has been injured after leaping from a pier during the annual Worthing International Birdman festival.
Holly Walsh was rescued from the water by a safety boat at the event and placed on a spinal board before being taken to hospital by ambulance.
Her injuries included a suspected dislocated shoulder and fractured arm.
Competitors try to "fly" the furthest off the West Sussex town's pier.
Some 10,000 spectators were thought to have attended the second day of the two-day event, which was suspended for about 20 minutes as Ms Walsh was rescued from the water.
Ms Walsh, who was raising money for Rainbows Children's Hospice, had leapt from the pier in a mock helicopter.
Shoreham lifeboat spokesman Dave Cassan said: "We can confirm we were tasked to get a person out of the water.
"It appears she entered the water wrong."
Competitors - or so-called "fun flyers" - dress in elaborate costumes.
Entrants included a pair dressed as the Owl and the Pussycat complete with rowing boat, and Batman and Robin.
Birdman 'cheated' of £30,000 win
Crowds flock to birdman contest
Resorts compete to stage Birdman
CBBC
Rainbows
Hardliner Raisi set to be new Iran president
Cleric Ebrahim Raisi - Iran's top judge - has received most of the votes counted so far.
| Famous Person - Sick | August 2010 | ['(BBC)', '(Press Association via Google News)', '(Daily Mail)'] |
Chelsea F.C. advances to the semi–finals of the 2012–13 FA Cup defeating Manchester United 1–0 with Demba Ba's winning goal. | Last updated on 1 April 20131 April 2013.From the section Footballcomments994
Demba Ba's winner ended Manchester United's quest for the domestic Double and secured holders Chelsea an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester City at Wembley.
Ba's athletic finish early in the second half leaves United concentrating on winning the Premier League title - with a 20th title all but secured as they currently hold a 15-point advantage.
Chelsea's interim manager Rafael Benitez, meanwhile, was able to celebrate victory over old adversary Sir Alex Ferguson and remains in contention to win the FA Cup and Europa League.
The Blues are just one match away from their fifth FA Cup final in seven seasons. They lifted the trophy in 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2012.
Chelsea are now unbeaten in 29 FA Cup games (excluding penalty shootouts). It is the longest ever run without defeat by a single side.
Benitez attracted criticism for fielding a weakened side in defeat at Southampton on Saturday as they search for the top-four place that would assure Champions League football next season - but will feel a measure of vindication as this was still a win of some significance.
United were without Wayne Rooney because of a groin injury sustained on England duty and lacked some of their usual menace but it still took a save of the highest class from Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech to keep out Javier Hernandez's header as they pressed for an equaliser.
They were left to rue the carelessness that saw them cast aside a two-goal lead in the first game and will now focus on next Monday's derby with Manchester City at Old Trafford.
Chelsea's agenda shifts to the Europa League quarter-final against Rubin Kazan at Stamford Bridge on Thursday.
Inevitably, after playing only 48 hours previously, there was a somewhat unfamiliar look to both sides. As well as being without Rooney, United left Robin van Persie on the bench, although Rio Ferdinand returned in defence.
John Terry, Frank Lampard and Fernando Torres were among the Chelsea substitutes - with attacking duties entrusted to Ba.
Eyes were trained on the respective technical areas before kick-off to see if the managers would shake hands after Benitez claimed his old rival Ferguson ignored the pre-match ritual in the Ferguson pointedly waited at the tunnel entrance and, when Benitez emerged, he took a sharp right for a brief handshake.
The quick turnaround in fixtures may have gone some way to explaining a lifeless first half, the monotony only broken by a hamstring injury to Ashley Cole, sustained in a touchline race with Danny Welbeck.
United goalkeeper David De Gea saved with his feet from Ba and Chelsea counterpart Cech did the same to deal with Hernandez's swerving effort from 25 yards.
The deadlock was broken four minutes into the second half in a moment of real quality. Juan Mata demonstrated vision to pick out Ba, who escaped from Ferdinand to hook a fine finish beyond De Gea.
United responded and it took a world-class save from Cech to deny Hernandez an equaliser. Welbeck picked out the Mexican at the far post and his header looked in all the way until Cech showed stunning reflexes to make a remarkable one-handed stop.
Manchester United failed to score for the first time in 23 matches in all competitions.
Van Persie was already waiting to come on and arrived seconds later for the subdued Tom Cleverley. He was soon joined by Ryan Giggs for Nani.
It was Chelsea, however, who had the next big opportunity as Eden Hazard ran through on goal following Michael Carrick's mistake. The Belgian only had De Gea to beat but pulled his finish inches wide.
Van Persie's big chance arrived from Patrice Evra's cross three minutes from time but the striker's usually sure touch deserted him and he hit a poor finish over the top.
United could not muster another clear opening and it is Chelsea who take their place at Wembley on 14 April. | Sports Competition | April 2013 | ['(BBC)', '(ESPN)'] |
The President of Catalonia vows to continue on with the vote despite objections from Spain. | Carles Puigdemont intends to become leader of the world's newest independent state next week. Instead, he may spark a violent confrontation with Spanish authorities and wind up in jail.
Puigdemont, 54, a former journalist and president of Spain's semi-autonomous region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, vowed Thursday to press ahead with an independence referendum on Sunday despite efforts by the national government to block it.
"It's very clear to me that if I go to prison over this it's only because of my political beliefs. That would leave Spanish democracy in a very weak position," Puigdemont told USA TODAY in a phone interview Thursday. "As president, I have the right to call a referendum based on a law that the Catalan parliament has approved. The vote will go ahead."
The central government in Madrid insists the vote is illegal and has taken steps to block it. It has seized millions of ballots, detained 14 senior officials organizing the vote, shut down election websites and deployed thousands of police to bar access to voting stations.
The vote is the most serious political crisis facing Spain since it returned to democracy following the death of longtime military dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
The independence drive is fueled by the belief that Catalonia and its tourist-mecca capital, Barcelona, give more than they get from Madrid and that the region's unique culture and language are not respected by the Spanish state, according to Puigdemont.
The wealthy region, where 7.5 million of Spain's 46 million people live, accounts for approximately one-fifth of the country's economy. It is one of 17 semi-autonomous Spanish regions.
If the vote takes place, and passes convincingly, Puigdemont has said he would announce a split from Spain within 48 hours. Two years ago, 80% of Catalan voters backed independence in a symbolic vote, but turnout was less than 40%, muddying its conclusiveness.
An opinion poll from July showed 49% of Catalans oppose independence to 41% in favor. Nationally, most Spaniards, who aren't eligible to vote, oppose a separate state.
The United Kingdom's government allowed Scotland to hold an independence referendum in 2014 and the measure lost, with 55% of Scots preferring to remain part of Britain.
By contrast, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy insists the Catalonia vote "won't happen." Speaking alongside President Trump at the White House on Tuesday, he said it would be "ridiculous" if Catalonia declares independence. Trump agreed. "I think the people of Catalonia should stay with Spain. I think it would be foolish not to," Trump said.
Jose Manuel Maza, Spain's top public prosecutor, said if the vote does occur, Puigdemont could be charged with civil disobedience and for misusing public funds. The latter offense carries a prison sentence of up to eight years.
Catalonia's push for independence gained momentum during the country's financial crisis, said Neil Davidson, a political scientist at the University Glasgow who studies independence movements. Spain's economy has recovered about a third of the 3 million jobs it lost during the depth of the 2008 recession, but its unemployment rate is still at 18%.
"Catalans have this feeling that they would simply be better off on their own," he said.
In the interview, Puigdemont said he is concerned the Madrid government might deliberately inflame tensions with a provocative action. It would be "highly suspicious" if "somehow, at a time when Madrid has put thousands of police on our streets, an incident happens," he said.
Alex Ramos, a doctor and vice president of Catalan Civil Society, an organization against independence, said there is little difference between Catalonians and Spaniards, and the referendum is not a realistic solution to economic or cultural grievances.
"Spain's different regions are like a family. And families don't split up by tossing a coin in the air and seeing how it lands," he said
Antonio Barroso, a Spanish national who analyzes European economic and political affairs in London for the consulting firm Teneo Intelligence, questioned whether the real purpose of the vote is to gain concessions from Madrid.
"We know that independence won't happen," he said. "Even if Puigdemont and his allies declare independence unilaterally, nobody — not Spain, not the European Union — will recognize Catalonia as an independent state. He knows that. This is the reality."
Puigdemont expressed frustration that the EU has not done more to support what he called the "violation of fundamental rights in Catalonia." He said Madrid's crackdown on the vote means Catalans are being "deprived of the freedom of speech," but the EU is "not saying anything about this at all."
Earlier this month, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said the Spanish government's decisions should be respected.
On Thursday, two United Nations rights experts criticized the Spanish authorities.
"Regardless of the lawfulness of the referendum, the Spanish authorities have a responsibility to respect those rights that are essential to democratic societies," David Kaye and Alfred de Zayas said in a statement. "The measures we are witnessing are worrying because they appear to violate fundamental individual rights, cutting off public information and the possibility of debate at a critical moment for Spain’s democracy."
Puigdemont said that he did not know of any country, including the United States, that had exercised the right to self-determination and then regretted it. | Government Job change - Election | September 2017 | ['(USA Today)'] |
Association of Southeast Asian Nations members sign their first charter at the 13th ASEAN Summit in Singapore. | The document, agreed by the 10 member states at a summit in Singapore, sets out Asean's principles and rules for the first time in its 40-year history.
But the signing ceremony took place amid continued condemnation of the rights record of Asean member Burma.
Critics say the charter will not rein in Burma's military regime.
Of course there has been some watering down
Ali AlatasEx-foreign minister of Indonesia
Asean's Burma dilemma
Profile: Asean
The generals sparked international outrage when they violently suppressed anti-government protests in September - killing at least 15 people and imprisoning thousands more. The controversy continued at the summit, where host nation Singapore had invited the UN's special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, to make a speech.
Burmese officials objected, and gained the support of the eight other member nations, blocking Mr Gambari's briefing.
Earlier, a senior US official had warned that Asean's credibility was at stake over its handling of the crisis in Burma.
'Momentous step'
One of the most significant pledges in the charter is to set up a regional human rights body.
But critics say it will have limited impact as it will not be able to punish governments that violate the human rights of their citizens.
Negotiators rejected some more radical plans for the charter - such as enabling sanctions and possible expulsions against member states which seriously breached agreements.
"Of course there has been some watering down," former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, who helped draft the charter, told the Associated Press. But he said the document still represented a "momentous step forward".
After the signing ceremony, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was similarly upbeat, saying the charter would pave the way for closer ties between member states.
"To make Asean strong and relevant, we must accelerate and deepen regional integration," he said.
"The Asean charter is a crucial step in this process."
The Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) is composed of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. | Diplomatic Talks _ Diplomatic_Negotiation_ Summit Meeting | November 2007 | ['(BBC)'] |
Former President Hissène Habré is sentenced to death in absentia by a Chadian court for a military assault on the capital. | A court in Chad has sentenced to death former President Hissen Habre for planning to overthrow the government.
Mr Habre was sentenced in absentia along with several rebel leaders, who launched an assault on the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, earlier this year.
Mr Habre, sometimes dubbed "Africa's Pinochet", was deposed in 1990 and lives in exile in Senegal.
He is unlikely to leave Senegal which has been asked by the African Union to try him for alleged rights crimes.
Mr Habre was deposed after eight years in power in an uprising led by current President Idriss Deby, and denies knowledge of the alleged murder and torture of political opponents.
A commission of inquiry said Mr Habre's government was responsible for some 40,000 politically motivated murders and 200,000 cases of torture.
The court in N'Djamena also tried a number of rebel leaders in absentia, which it heard had been working with Mr Habre to overthrow the government.
Mr Deby has been fighting a sporadic rebellion in the east along Chad border with Sudan's Darfur region. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | August 2008 | ['(BBC News)'] |
The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court releases a plea bargain testimony from JBS S.A., revealing that the company paid 500 million reais in bribes to politicians, including current President Michel Temer and his predecessors Dilma and Lula. | SAO PAULO/BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil’s top court released plea-bargain testimony on Friday accusing President Michel Temer and his two predecessors of receiving millions of dollars in bribes, the most damaging development yet in a historic political corruption probe.
The testimony made public by the Supreme Court is from executives of the world’s largest meatpacking company, and raises serious doubts about whether Temer can maintain his grip on the presidency.
The scandals that have engulfed Brazil’s political class and many business elites reduce the chances that Temer, a conservative who took office after leftist former President Dilma Rousseff was impeached last year, can push through economic reforms crucial for Latin America’s biggest country to recover from its worst recession on record.
The Supreme Court on Thursday said it approved an investigation of Temer for corruption and obstruction of justice. Calls for his resignation intensified, including an editorial in the O Globo newspaper, which is normally criticized by leftists for backing conservative politicians.
“This is easily the worst moment in Brazil since we returned to democracy,” said Claudio Couto, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a top university, calling the claims “the mother of all plea bargains.”
“This testimony is hitting everyone, all the major political players and, most importantly, a sitting president,” he added.
The revelations came from testimony given by executives at JBS SA JBSS3.SA. Once a small meat producer, JBS grew exponentially during 13 years of government by former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Rousseff's Workers Party, primarily through acquisitions funded by low-cost loans from Brazil's development bank. The JBS executives said they made about 500 million reais ($154 million) in illegal payments to politicians and bureaucrats in recent years in exchange for winning contracts, getting easy credit from state-run banks and resolving tax and other disputes with the government.
Temer’s office denied in a statement that he obstructed justice by interfering in the probe and also denied accusations he took bribes. Lawyers for Lula said he was innocent. Rousseff denied any wrongdoing in a statement.
In addition to the three presidents, congressmen, ministers and several governors and mayors of major cities were named in the testimony. It implicates ruling and opposition parties alike.
According to the testimony, JBS paid Temer 15 million reais ($4.6 million) in bribes. It also alleges that Lula, who is already facing five corruption trials, received $50 million in bribes in offshore accounts from JBS, while Rousseff took $30 million in bribes, also in offshore accounts.
The corruption scandals that have polarized Brazil center on political kickbacks in exchange for firms winning contracts at state-run enterprises, especially at oil company Petrobras PETR4.SA. They have led to over 90 convictions of businessmen and politicians and prompted the investigation of dozens of sitting congressmen and a third of Temer’s cabinet.
Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin wrote this week that an immediate investigation into Temer was required because the alleged criminal practices “are underway or about to occur.”
Temer on Thursday, in a terse address, said he would not resign from the presidency.
His defiance came as the Supreme Court released an audio tape of him speaking with JBS Chairman Joesley Batista.
In the recording, secretly made by Batista in a March visit to Temer, the president appeared to condone the payment of hush money to former lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, who last year orchestrated Rousseff’s impeachment and was later convicted for corruption.
Many politicians fear that if Cunha should turn state’s witness, his testimony could implicate scores of congressmen and members of the executive branch.
The constant march of indictments and new scandals has led to near paralysis in Brasilia, the capital, and led to widespread calls among Brazilians for new elections.
But new elections would require a constitutional amendment.
If Temer resigns or is forced from office, the constitution at present says Congress must choose a caretaker president and vice president to govern until the next election, scheduled for late next year.
The JBS testimony also tainted one other prominent politician - Aecio Neves, a senator. Suspended from the chamber in the wake of the allegations, Neves led the chief opposition to Workers Party governments and placed a close second behind Rousseff in 2014 presidential elections.
Executives said JBS had paid Neves 80 million reais in illegal funding for that campaign as well as 2 million recently to support a new “abuse of authority” law that seeks to make it easier for suspects and defendants to sue investigators, prosecutors and judges.
The measure, which passed the Senate last month, must still be approved by the lower house. It has been sharply criticized by those leading Brazil’s crackdown on corruption.
Prosecutors wrote in the document released on Friday that they had proof Neves collaborated with Temer in attempts to slow or halt anti-corruption investigations.
($1 = 3.2560 reais) | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Accuse | May 2017 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Militants open fire on an army checkpoint in Araman, Lebanon, killing two members of the security forces. A militant is also killed in the attack. It is the third of a spate of attacks by Islamic Statelinked militants in the country since August. | BEIRUT (Reuters) - Two members of the Lebanese Security Forces were killed in an exchange of gunfire with militants in the north of the country late on Saturday, the army said.
They were killed when militants opened fire on an army checkpoint in the northwest area of Araman, the army said on Sunday. One militant was killed, while several fled.
In a separate incident on Saturday, Lebanese security forces killed at least six militants during a heavy exchange of fire with an armed group in northeast Lebanon, close to the Syrian border, security sources said.
Three members of the Lebanese security forces were wounded in the clash, which began after Lebanese forces raided a house in the Wadi Khaled area, where the group that was suspected of planning attacks was holed up, the sources said.
Security incidents across the country have increased in recent weeks, as the country has been pushed to breaking point by a financial meltdown and a political vacuum following the resignation of the caretaker government over an Aug. 4 port blast, which left nearly 200 people dead.
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab strongly condemned the attacks in a statement on Sunday, and called for the feuding political blocs to rapidly form a new government capable of addressing Lebanon’s myriad problems.
Related Coverage
The country is on edge amid fears violence could escalate and compound the country’s crises.
Sources told Reuters that the group in Wadi Khaled included Syrians and Lebanese, adding that the scale of the clash, in which militants fired rocket-propelled grenades, prompted the Lebanese army to cordon off the area.
The sources said the group included people linked to the militant Khaled al-Talawi who was killed this month in a shootout with security forces.
Talawi was described as a former member of Islamic State and leader of a cell behind the killing in August of three people in north Lebanon.
Writing by Edmund Blair and Raya Jalabi; Editing by Alison Williams and Nick Macfie | Armed Conflict | September 2020 | ['(Reuters)'] |
Catherine Pugh, Mayor of Baltimore, resigns under investigation for alleged financial improprieties. Baltimore City Council president Jack Young has been serving as acting mayor since April 2. | Mayor Catherine Pugh offers background on her Healthy Holly book business during a City Hall news conference in March.
Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images
Mayor Catherine Pugh offers background on her Healthy Holly book business during a City Hall news conference in March.
After weeks of growing pleas for her to step down, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh has resigned, her attorney said Thursday.
"I am sorry for the harm that I have caused to the image of the city of Baltimore and the credibility of the office of the mayor," she said in a letter read by her lawyer Steve Silverman.
"Baltimore deserves a mayor who can move our great city forward," the statement continued. Pugh, who has been suffering from health issues, did not appear at the news conference with her attorney.
In recent weeks, federal agents raided her two homes, her City Hall office and other locations. She has been on an indefinite paid leave of absence from her job as Baltimore's top elected official since April 1, citing health reasons. Pugh, a Democrat, is under investigation for alleged "self-dealing" in connection to the sale of thousands of copies of a self-published children's book series. Many of those sales went to entities that she had influence over or that sought to do business with the city. Maryland's Office of State Prosecutor and the city's ethics board have launched probes into whether any laws or ethics rules have been violated. At this time, no local, state, or federal authorities have charged her with any crime.
The mayor, who was elected in 2016, has been on leave to "recuperate from this serious illness," which her office said stemmed from a bout of pneumonia. She was hospitalized for five days in late March. Baltimore City Council President Bernard "Jack" Young has been serving as acting mayor since April 2. He has said that he does not want the position on a permanent basis. Pugh's leave came as the book scandal was heading toward a full-blown crisis, one that she was unable to tamp down. At issue is how Pugh handled the sales of the Healthy Holly books, about a young black girl who promotes the benefits of nutrition and exercise. The Baltimore Sun reported she has received roughly $800,000 over the years from the sale of the books. Some of the biggest benefactors include the University of Maryland Medical System. UMMS is a private nonprofit for which Pugh served as a board member until mid-March, when she resigned from the position. It paid Pugh roughly $500,000 for copies of the books spread out in five payments from 2012-2018, according to the Sun. A separate payment by health giant Kaiser Permanente of more than $100,000 for some 20,000 copies of the book between 2015 and 2018 was also reported by the Sun. The payouts for the books came at a time when the company was seeking to provide coverage to city employees. The city's spending panel, which Pugh sat on, eventually awarded the company a $48 million contract with the city in 2017. Pugh had been defiant in resisting calls for her resignation. Her office sent out a statement a week into her leave saying that "she fully intends to resume the duties of her office." But a turning point for the mayor came on April 26, when FBI and IRS agents were seen carrying off boxes of paperwork from early morning raids — a clear sign that mayor's actions had piqued the interest of federal authorities. As NPR reported at the time, an IRS spokesperson confirmed to NPR that the raid had been carried out at Pugh's homes, City Hall office and the Maryland Center for Adult Training, where Pugh previously chaired the board. The IRS official, however, would not say whether the raids were related to the book deals. Hours after the raid, Maryland's Republican Gov. Larry Hogan issued a statement urging her resignation, saying, "Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust. She is clearly not fit to lead." That same day, Pugh's legal team confirmed federal agents also visited their offices seeking "original financial records belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh," attorney Silverman said in a statement. As member station WYPR's Emily Sullivan reported, Pugh's lawyers told reporters that evening that she was "becoming lucid" but not yet well enough to decide whether to resign. It appears she has convalesced enough to realize her support as the city's top leader has all but evaporated. NPR thanks our sponsors | Government Job change - Resignation_Dismissal | May 2019 | ['(Baltimore Sun via MSN.com)', '(NPR)'] |
Włodzimierz Umaniec, who daubed a Mark Rothko painting with black paint in the name of yellowism, is jailed for two years in the UK. | A man who vandalised one of Tate Modern's most cherished Mark Rothko paintings has been jailed for two years for actions the judge described as "entirely deliberate, planned and intentional".
Wlodzimierz Umaniec, also known as Vladimir Umanets, a 26-year-old Polish national who lives in Worthing, West Sussex, pleaded guilty at a previous hearing to criminal damage in excess of £5,000. In this case it was well in excess, with estimates suggesting it will cost more than £200,000 and 20 months to restore.
Judge Roger Chapple, at Inner London crown court, said it was "abundantly clear" that Umaniec was "plainly an intelligent man" who regarded Rothko as a "great painter".
The incident happened at around 3.25pm on 7 October this year, when Umaniec approached one of Rothko's Seagram murals, Black on Maroon, took out a brush and some black paint and wrote his name along with 'A Potential Piece of Yellowism' in the corner of the work.
He later claimed it was an artistic act, comparing himself to Marcel Duchamp, whose appropriation of a urinal in 1917 led to him being regarded as the father of conceptual art. Umaniec had told the BBC: "Art allows us to take what someone's done and put a new message on it."
But Chapple, on the subject of "yellowism", said it was "wholly and utterly unacceptable to promote it by damaging a work of art".
Rothko's Seagram murals, originally planned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, were a gift to the Tate by the artist in 1969 and are regarded as some of Tate Modern's most important works.
The court heard that Umaniec went to the gallery intending to put his "signature" on a picture, but decided to damage the Rothko painting only at the time he saw it on display.
After it was discovered, the gallery was put into "operation shutdown" with people prevented from leaving or entering the building.
Chapple said the incident had led to galleries reviewing security arrangements at a cost to themselves and the taxpayer. "The effects of such security reviews is to distance the public from the works of art they come to enjoy," he said.
Gregor McKinley, prosecuting, said: "Sotheby's has given Tate Modern a verbal estimate of pre-damage value of approximately between £5m to just over £9m."
The restoration will be long and difficult, not least because Rothko often used unusual materials, including eggs and glue, to create his works. | Famous Person - Commit Crime - Sentence | December 2012 | ['(The Guardian)'] |
The tornado in Putnam County, Tennessee, is upgraded to an EF4, becoming the strongest tornado of the outbreak. | Follow NBC News The deadly tornado that hit a Tennessee county early Tuesday was an EF-4 storm with 175 mph winds, the National Weather Service said Wednesday, and officials lowered the number of missing from 20 to three.
Two tornadoes hit the region: One took aim at parts of Nashville and Wilson and Smith counties, and the second EF-4 was in Putnam county, the weather service said Thursday.
Eighteen of the 24 deaths from the tornado outbreak happened in Putnam County, which is about 60 miles east of Nashville, officials said.
Three people remain unaccounted for, Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter said Wednesday evening.
"The good news is, our death count has not risen, we still remain at 18," Porter said at a news conference late Wednesday afternoon.
A second search of damaged areas was expected to be completed by noon Thursday.
During the search Wednesday, skeletal remains were found but they are not believed to be related to the severe weather, Porter said. The remains appear to have been there for around a year.
All of the 18 dead in Putnam County have been identified, Porter said.
Around 150 to 200 structures in Putnam County suffered damage in Tuesday’s tornado, officials said.
Six other tornado deaths were reported: three in Wilson County, two in Davidson County where Nashville is located, and one in Benton County, according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.
The tornado that hit Davidson, Wilson and Smith counties was an EF-3 with 165 mph winds and had had a path of around 53 miles.
It began in western Davidson County and intensified into an EF-2 as it went across North Nashville and the Germantown area as it moved east, and then strengthened to an EF-3 as it went into East Nashville, the weather service said.
It weakened and then intensified again before dissipating near Gordonsville in Smith County.
The tornado was the first violent twister to hit the Nashville area since April 10, 2009, the weather service’s Nashville office tweeted.
The "Good Friday Tornado Outbreak," on April 10, 2009, involved 10 tornadoes that swept across parts of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, according to the weather service.
The most violent of those storms was also an EF-4 tornado that hit in and near Murfreesboro, a city southeast of Nashville, which killed two people and injured 58. The deaths were a mother and her infant daughter. | Hurricanes_Tornado_Storm_Blizzard | March 2020 | ['(NBC News)'] |
Indonesia restricts the exports of coal to the Philippines after the abduction of Indonesian sailors by the Abu Sayyaf. | JAKARTA/MANILA (Reuters) - Indonesia said on Friday a halt on coal shipments to the Philippines will remain in place until Manila can secure its waters after seven Indonesian sailors were kidnapped, the latest in a string of abductions.
Philippine authorities could not immediately confirm the hostage-taking but said a Filipino woman held since September was freed on Friday by Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist militant group that has amassed tens of millions of dollars from kidnappings for ransom.
It was unclear whether the sailors were taken by Abu Sayaff, which has beheaded two Canadian nationals in recent weeks after ransom deadlines passed. The group is still holding men from Japan, the Netherlands and Norway.
Indonesia is concerned that piracy in the Sulu Sea area, a major sea traffic corridor for the world’s top thermal coal exporter, could reach levels previously seen in Somalia.
“The moratorium on coal exports to the Philippines will be extended until there is a guarantee for security from the Philippines government,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told reporters.
Indonesia supplies 70 percent of the Philippines’ coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around $800 million, last year.
Analysts say $40 billion worth of cargo passes through the Sulu Sea area a year, including supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait.
Marsudi said earlier the seven Indonesians were kidnapped by two different armed groups in attacks on a tugboat towing a coal-carrying barge and that the government would “try all options to free the hostages”.
Fourteen Indonesians were abducted in two separate assaults on tugboats in March and April but were freed in May. In April, the Indonesian navy instructed all commercial vessels to avoid piracy-prone waters near the southern Philippines.
Filipino captive Marites Flor, abducted from an upscale resort in September along with Canadian Robert Hall, was freed at dawn on Friday on Jolo, an army spokesman said. Hall was beheaded on June 13.
In Davao City, President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said they were “able to negotiate” for the release of two captives, a Norwegian man and Filipino woman.
“The kidnapped Norwegian could not get out yet because he could not cross because of the rough seas,” Duterte said, adding “there will be time that I will have to confront the Abu Sayyaf”.
Alarmed at the frequency of attacks, port authorities in some areas of Indonesia, particularly Kalimantan on Borneo, have stopped issuing permits to ships taking coal to the southern Philippines.
| Government Policy Changes | June 2016 | ['(Reuters)'] |
U.S. federal authorities arrest militia leader Ammon Bundy and several of his followers following an exchange of gunfire at a traffic stop on U.S. Route 395 in Harney County, Oregon. One person, LaVoy Finicum, a rancher from Arizona and spokesman for the militia, was killed in the shootout. , | BURNS - Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed and other leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation were arrested Tuesday after the FBI and state police stopped vehicles about 20 miles north of Burns.
Authorities did not release the name of the person who died at the highway stop, but Finicum's daughter confirmed it was Finicum, 54, of Cane Beds, Arizona, one of the cowboy-hat wearing faces of the takeover.
"My dad was such a good good man, through and through," said Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, one of Finicum's 11 children. "He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."
Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound in the confrontation about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395. He was treated and released from a local hospital and was in FBI custody, authorities said.
Also arrested during the stop were his brother, Ammon Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho, Ryan W. Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont., Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada, and Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah. They were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony.
Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said that Ammon Bundy called his wife, Lisa Bundy, from the back of a police car on Tuesday night.
Gov. Kate Brown called for calm late Tuesday night. "The situation in Harney County continues to be the subject of a federal investigation that is in progress," she said in a statement. "My highest priority is the safety of all Oregonians and their communities. I ask for patience as officials continue pursuit of a swift and peaceful resolution."
Little detail was available about the dramatic finish to the free-roaming ways of the militant leaders. State police said troopers were involved in the shooting and that one person died, another suffered non-life-threatening injuries and no police were hurt.
The militants seized the wildlife refuge on Jan. 2, insisting they wouldn't leave until their demands were met, including the freeing of two Harney County ranchers jailed on federal arson charges.
One militant on Tuesday afternoon posted a video of Ammon Bundy talking earlier in the day with an FBI negotiator identified only as "Chris." The two have been negotiating since last week, with Bundy dictating the circumstances under which he would talk and what the group wanted.
The leaders were on the highway bound for John Day, where they were scheduled to participate in an evening community meeting set up by local residents. A crowd of several hundred had gathered at the John Day Senior Center and were subsequently told the the "guest speakers" would not be appearing.
The highway was blocked for a 40-mile stretch between Burns and John Day. Police were stationed near Seneca, a small city of 200 south of John Day, with long guns. They said they didn't know how long the roadblock would be place. Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer was there.
Palmer two weeks ago had met with Payne and Ritzheimer. He later publicly declared that Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, should be freed from federal prison to help end the standoff. Palmer also has recommended that the FBI leave the Harney County scene and turn the matter to local police.
The armed militants took over the vacant headquarters compound at the refuge. They have been using refuge buildings for meetings and lodging, posting armed security guards.
The occupiers have been moving without police interference between the refuge and Burns, even attending a county-sponsored community meeting at the Burns High School a week ago. Police estimated at least 50 militants scattered through the crowd of about 400 people.
The dramatic event came days after local and state officials had publicly complained about the apparent inaction by federal law enforcement. The governor had complained directly to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey as well as the White House. On Monday, Harney County Judge Steve Grasty, who chairs the county commission, also publicly urged police to resolve the occupation.
Payne and Bundy have been in and out of Harney County since November, aroused by the sentencing of the Hammonds. In October, they were ordered back to federal prison to finish five-year terms for deliberating starting fires that burned federal land in 2001 and 2006. Bundy and his followers had demanded that Harney County Sheriff David Ward protect the ranchers from having to surrender, a demand Ward rejected.
Gallery: Oregon standoff in Harney County overview
Payne and other militia met local residents in an informal meeting on New Year's Day in Burns, vowing they had peaceful intentions. The next day, about 300 people - a mix of militia and local residents - paraded in protest through downtown Burns, stopping at the sheriff's office and then stopping at the home of Dwight Hammond and his wife Susan.
That afternoon, a splinter group of militants drove out to the refuge, left vacant after federal authorities warned employees to stay away over safety concerns. Later, Payne confirmed in interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive that the group had long planned to seize the refuge.
Besides demanding freedom for the Hammonds, the Bundy group wanted the refuge turned over to prior private owners and to the county. They insist that the federal government has no constitutional authority to control land in Harney County, a county that measures 10,000 square miles. The federal government controls 76 percent. The Bundy group also has encouraged ranchers to renounced their federal grazing permits, showcasing a New Mexico rancher Saturday at the refuge who did just that.
| Famous Person - Commit Crime - Arrest | January 2016 | ['(CNN)', '(Oregon Live)'] |
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