BEIJING (Reuters) - China ordered on Wednesday the suspension of six more U.S. flights in coming weeks after a surge in passengers testing positive for COVID-19, rising to 70 cancellations mandated this year in a schedule that had already been cut back drastically.
The aviation regulator said it would suspend two additional United Airlines flights from San Francisco to Shanghai, after seven passengers tested positive on a recent flight.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prince Andrew failed to persuade a U.S. judge to dismiss Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit accusing the Duke of York of sexually abusing her when she was underage, and being trafficked by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In a decision made public on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said Giuffre, 38, was entitled to pursue claims that Andrew battered her and intentionally caused her emotional distress.
The judge said it was premature to consider Andrew’s efforts to “cast doubt” on those claims, though the 61-year-old prince could do so at a trial.
Kaplan said it was also too soon to decide whether Giuffre and Epstein “clearly and unambiguously” intended to release people like Andrew through a 2009 settlement agreement resolving Giuffre’s lawsuit against the late financier.
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MOSCOW (AP) — Kazakh authorities said Wednesday they detained 1,678 more people in the past 24 hours over their alleged participation in the violent unrest that rocked the former Soviet nation last week, the worst since Kazakhstan gained independence three decades ago.
The additional detentions, reported by authorities in Almaty, the country’s largest city that was hit the hardest by the turmoil, brought the total number of arrests to about 12,000. More than 300 criminal investigations into mass unrest and assaults on law enforcement officers have been opened.
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BRASILIA (Reuters) - Former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva retains a clear lead for this year’s presidential election in Brazil, where inflation and the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic most worry voters, a poll published on Wednesday showed.
Lula would get 45% of the votes against 23% for the country’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro if the election were held today, according to the Banco Genial/Quaest Pesquisas survey.
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ROME (AP) — Police in Italy have arrested a nurse on charges that he faked giving coronavirus vaccinations to at least 45 people so they could get a health pass fraudulently, ditching vaccines in a bin and even putting bandages on his “patients” so no one would suspect the scam.
Police in Ancona, on Italy’s eastern coast, also placed four alleged accomplices under house arrest, accusing them of finding anti-vaccine customers who were willing to pay for a health pass rather than get the shots. Forty-five people who allegedly received the passes as part of the scam are under investigation, required to check in daily with police and prevented from leaving their cities, a police statement said.