MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor said on Tuesday it wanted Wikipedia to remove “material with inaccurate information of public interest” about the situation in Ukraine. The regulator accused Wikipedia of hosting false information on what Russia calls its “special operation” in Ukraine and on the actions of Russia’s military too. According to Russian law, the owner of an Internet resource that does not delete illegal information when asked to do so by Roskomnadzor can be fined up to 4 million roubles ($48,120.30), the regulator said.

 

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BUDAPEST (AFP) -- Five people died in a train crash in Hungary on Tuesday when a van drove onto the rails at a crossing, causing the train to derail, police said.  All of the victims were passengers in the van which was carrying workers to work, police said in a statement. “Five people died at the scene and more than 10 were injured”, the statement said. The accident happened near Mindszent, 140 kilometers (86 miles) southeast of Budapest just before 7 am (0500 GMT). According to Hungarian state railway MAV, the van entered the level-crossing despite the stop sign showing. “There were 22 passengers on the train, two were seriously injured, eight suffered minor injuries, several of the van’s passengers were killed,” said the MAV statement.

 

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BERLIN (Reuters) -- A man and a woman were found dead in Hamburg on Tuesday in an apparent murder-suicide, a police spokesperson in the northern German city said. “We have no indication whatsoever that this it was in anyway linked to political violence,” the spokesperson said. “We are treating it as a murder-suicide based on what we know. The investigation continues.” Several streets were closed to traffic and pedestrians due to a large deployment of officers.

 

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BISHKEK (AFP) -- Kyrgyzstan has reached an agreement with the Canadian company Centerra Gold to gain full control over the long-contested Kumtor gold mine, the ex-Soviet country’s president and the firm said. “Kumtor has fully passed into Kyrgyzstan’s ownership,” President Sadyr Japarov said in a televised national address that came almost a year after Kyrgyz authorities seized control of the gold mine, prompting Centerra to file for international arbitration. The Kumtor gold mine accounts for around 12 percent of the economy of Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked, mountainous country of nearly seven million people. But successive disputes over the mine have helped spoil the investment climate and fuel infighting between political factions in the country. Centerra said in a statement Monday that it had agreed with Kyrgyzstan “to effect a clean separation of the parties” and to resolve all their disputes.

 

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THE HAGUE (Reuters) -- An alleged Janjaweed militia leader on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to dozens of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the first ever trial at the International Criminal Court dealing with Sudan’s Darfur conflict of nearly two decades ago. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, is accused of overseeing thousands of pro-government Janjaweed fighters responsible for persecution, murder, rape and torture during the 2003-2004 height of the violence in which hundreds of thousands were killed. Abd-Al-Rahman, whom prosecutors say was also known as Ali Kushayb, voluntarily surrendered to The Hague-based court in June 2020 after 13 years on the run. He has denied the charges. Decades after the worst of the fighting, 1.6 million people are still internally displaced in Darfur, the United Nations estimates.

 

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LIMA (AFP) -- Peruvian President Pedro Castillo announced a curfew for Tuesday in the capital Lima and neighboring port city Callao, after demonstrations across the country over fuel prices caused roadblocks and “acts of violence”. Protests had erupted across Peru in recent days due to a hike in fuel prices and tolls, during a time of rising food prices. In an attempt to appease protesters, the government eliminated the fuel tax over the weekend. But truckers and other transport workers took to the streets again Monday in Lima, as well as several regions in the north -- from the coastal city Piura to the densely forested Amazonas. Castillo announced late Monday that Peru’s Council of Ministers had approved a curfew for the following day.

 

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SAN SALVADOR (AFP) -- More than 6,000 gang members have been detained in the first nine days of a state of emergency in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele said, after imposing the measures to stamp out a soaring homicide wave. The Central American country declared the emergency measures -- allowing the arrest of gang members without a warrant -- last week after 87 reported killings from March 25 to 27. And on Monday the president said the 6,000 detained in a little over a week added to the 16,000 gang members already incarcerated in El Salvador’s prisons. Speaking at a police barracks in the capital San Salvador, Bukele addressed public concerns of gangs “taking revenge” on the population due to the massive arrest operations.  If they commit an act of revenge, “there will not be even one meal in the prisons,” the president said.  “I swear to God that they will not eat a single grain of rice, and we will see how long they last, and I don’t care what international organizations say,” he added.