News in Brief

Date: 13 January 2023 - 23:03

News ID: ۱۱۱۲۶۲

MONTREAL, Canada (MB.com) — An Indigenous group in western Canada said Thursday it had discovered evidence of possible unmarked graves and a fragment of a child’s jawbone on the grounds of a former residential school. In Lebret, Saskatchewan, ground-penetrating radar has uncovered nearly “2,000 areas of interest” that need to be thoroughly investigated, the Star Blanket Cree community said. Over the past year and a half, more than 1,300 children’s graves have been found near government-run compulsory boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly assimilated. The grisly discoveries have sent shock waves through Canada and raised national awareness of the dark past of how Indigenous people were treated.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The stiffest penalty Donald Trump’s company could receive when it is sentenced by a New York judge for helping its executives dodge taxes is a $1.6 million fine — not even enough to buy a Trump Tower apartment. Neither the former president nor his children, who helped run and promote the Trump Organization, are expected to be in the courtroom for the sentencing hearing. The company will be represented by its lawyers.

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TOKYO (AP) — Japanese prosecutors formally charged the suspect in the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with murder, sending him to stand trial, a court said Friday. Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested immediately after allegedly shooting Abe with a homemade gun as the former leader was making a campaign speech in July outside a train station in Nara in western Japan. He then underwent a nearly six-month mental evaluation, which prosecutors said showed he is fit to stand trial. Yamagami was also charged with violating a gun control law, according to the Nara District Court.

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BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday that security force members were complicit in letting an anti-government mob ransack the seat of power in Brasilia, and promised to weed out hardcore supporters of his predecessor. The task of screening out those actors will be complex, his senior aides said, but investigations have begun to see who was responsible for letting backers of former President Jair Bolsonaro storm and vandalize the presidential palace. Lula has also stepped up criticism of the army for not doing anything to discourage the two-month-old encampment of Bolsonaro supporters outside its headquarters, where they have been clamoring for the military to overturn the result of the October elections.

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TOKYO (Reuters) - The Japanese government gave an estimation for when the water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant will be released into the sea, saying at a cabinet meeting held on Friday it could happen sometime “around this spring or summer.” In April 2021, the government approved the release of more than 1 million tonnes of irradiated water from the site after treatment into the ocean. It said the release would happen “in about two years” at the time. Japan’s foreign ministry said in July that regulators deemed it safe to release the water, which would be filtered to remove most isotopes but would still contain traces of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water.