News in Brief
ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian medical student Oduola Adebowale said he and some friends were trying to get on a train to flee Ukraine when the soldiers pointed guns at them and ordered them back. The Ukrainian troops told him they were only letting pregnant woman on the service from the city of Lviv to the Polish border, but he said he saw them stop some pregnant African women from getting on board. “When we asked why they were doing this, the soldiers pointed guns at us, endangering our lives,” he told Reuters days later after he finally managed to complete his journey and landed at Nigeria’s Abuja airport on Friday. Scores of foreign students have echoed his complaints in social media posts, saying they were treated badly as they queued up with the crowds trying to escape Russia’s opertaion.
***
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - A Catholic bishop accused of sexually abusing young men studying to be priests, was found guilty by a court in northern Argentina on Friday, capping over a week of often graphic testimony in the latest sex crimes criminal case to hit the global church. Pope Francis, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires and the first Latin American pontiff, has repeatedly apologized for past crimes by priests and pledged to end cover-ups while ensuring that priestly sexual abuse be “erased from the face of the earth”. The latest Argentine case centers on accusations that Gustavo Zanchetta, who served as bishop of Oran in the northern province of Salta, preyed on young men studying for the priesthood at a seminary he founded in 2016.
***
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A plainclothes Philadelphia police officer fatally shot a 12-year-old boy in the back, moments after a bullet was fired into an unmarked car, police said. Police identified the youth as Thomas Siderio Jr., saying officers took him to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center where he was pronounced dead a few minutes after the shooting. The police statement described Siderio as white. One of the four officers in the car was struck by shattered glass in the face and eye, and was treated and released, police said.
***
PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron has formally announced that he will seek a second term in April’s presidential election. Elected in May 2017, with little political experience, the centrist politician quickly took on his new role of president when meeting with other world leaders. He faced major crises at home and in the world.
***
TORONTO (Reuters) - A three-week occupation of the center of Canada’s capital last month resulted in part from police underestimating anti-government protesters by assuming they would leave within days, according to police sources and police leadership testimony. That miscalculation was compounded by a reluctance to crack down on the demonstrators once they had become entrenched in downtown Ottawa, partly out of fear of escalation, a police source and multiple observers told Reuters. Police in riot gear using pepper spray and stun grenades cleared the “Freedom Convoy” participants from Ottawa the weekend of Feb. 20, days after Trudeau invoked unprecedented emergency powers.
***
TOKYO (AFP) - A Tokyo court has handed Nissan Motor executive Greg Kelly a sixth month suspended sentence for helping Carlos Ghosn hide pay from financial regulators, but also blamed a key prosecution witness for his role in the alleged failure to disclose $80 million of income over eight years. “The court finds the existence of unpaid remuneration” and the failure to disclose “the grand total” amounted to “false” reporting, the chief judge told Kelly in court.