News in Brief

Date: 21 May 2023 - 22:30

News ID: ۱۱۵۲۷۰

NEW YORK (Ruptly) – More than a thousand tenants and union members have marched across New York’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge, calling on elected officials to address the city’s housing crisis in the face of skyrocketing rent prices. Brass instruments, banners, and signs with slogans such as ‘The rent is too damn high’ and ‘Housing could be free’ were prominently displayed as huge crowds of demonstrators made their way across the bridge. “Politicians have me sick and disgusted with their lies, their deceit,” shouted a protester through a megaphone. “They keep blaming us for violence. They’re the ones guilty of violence out here. They’re causing us trauma every day,” she continued. “I think it’s really important that everybody shows up and shows support in this way. To be visible and to show the power of a collective that is in support of housing justice,” added a second protester. According to local media, the demonstrators were calling on officials to pass new legislation that would protect tenants from unfair evictions and sudden rent increases. They also demanded a program to provide vulnerable tenants with rental assistance vouchers.

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ATHENS (Al Jazeera) – Voting was under way in Greece’s parliamentary election on Sunday, the first since the country’s economy ceased to be subject to strict supervision and control by international lenders who had provided bailout funds during its nearly decade-long financial crisis. The two main contenders in Sunday’s vote were conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, 55, a Harvard-educated former banking executive, and 48-year-old Alexis Tsipras, who heads the left-wing Syriza party and served as prime minister during some of the most turbulent years of the financial crisis. Although Mitsotakis has been steadily ahead in opinion polls, a newly introduced electoral system of proportional representation makes it unlikely that whoever wins the election will be able to garner enough seats in Greece’s 300-member parliament to form a government without seeking coalition partners. The winner of Sunday’s election will have three days to negotiate a coalition with one or more other parties. If that fails, the mandate to form a government is then given to the second-largest party. But deep divisions between the two main parties and four smaller ones expected to enter parliament mean a coalition will be hard to come by, making a second election likely on July 2.

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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – At least 10 people were killed and nine injured in a shootout at a car show in northern Mexico’s Baja California on Saturday, the municipal government reported. The attack occurred during an all-terrain car racing show in the San Vicente area of the city of Ensenada. Around 2:18 p.m. (2118 GMT) people with long guns got out of a gray van and began shooting at participants at a gas station, according to reports of 911 calls. Municipal and state police, the Marines, the Fire Department and Mexican Red Cross, among other agencies arrived at the scene. Mayor Armando Ayala Robles said state Attorney General Ricardo Ivan Carpio Sanchez commissioned a special group to investigate the shooting.

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ROME (AP) – Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, was erupting on Sunday, spewing ash on Catania, eastern Sicily’s largest city, and forcing a suspension of flights at that city’s airport. Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, or INGV, which closely monitors Etna with instrumentation on the slopes, noted that cloud cover on a rainy day was impeding views of the eruption, which often serves up a spectacular display of flaming lava during the volcano’s not infrequent eruptions. The institute said that ash had fallen on Catania and at least one town on Mount Etna’s inhabited slopes. Catania airport said due to ashfall, flight operations were temporarily suspended. INGV indicated that monitoring had recorded evidence of a stepping up in tremor activity in recent days. People in the towns of Adrano and Biancavilla reported hearing loud booms emanating from the volcano on Sunday, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

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MARSEILLE (AFP) – Three men were shot dead with assault rifles on Sunday in the French port city of Marseille, which has seen a surge of drug-related gang murders, police said. The trio were part of a group of five men in their 20s who left a nightclub shortly after 5:00 am (0300 GMT) and were driving away when their car was attacked by unknown assailants with Kalashnikov rifles, they said. The two survivors were unharmed after the attack in a residential neighborhood of Marseille, France’s second-biggest city. One of them fled the scene, as did the shooters, police said. Police found the getaway car burning nearby, a modus operandi consistent with previous drug-related killings in Marseille where the perpetrators often torch their vehicles to destroy evidence. Early indications were that the men who were attacked lived in a council estate with a high incidence of drug trafficking and some of them were known to police, according to departmental police prefect Frederique Camilleri.

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LONDON (The Guardian) – Asylum seekers staying at Home Office hotels in and around Liverpool have been harassed, humiliated and subjected to verbal and emotional abuse from senior hotel staff, according to an investigation for the Observer. Sources working for the Home Office subcontractor Serco have described what they believe is a culture of “institutional abuse” at five Merseyside hotels, including the Suites hotel in Knowsley, where violent far-right protests took place in February. Sources include current and former contractors recruited to work in Home Office hotels for Serco. On one occasion, sources said that senior Serco staff chased an asylum seeker diagnosed with schizophrenia into his hotel room, rattled the handle and shouted abuse at him from behind the locked door. It is understood that the managers were aware of his condition. A source said, “You’ve got someone with paranoid schizophrenia being told: ‘If I see you outside, you’d better run’, then kicking his door to intimidate him and laughing about it when he got distressed.” The source added that they were not aware that any senior managers working at the five hotels had received training in mental health and trauma support, and claimed that the provision of medication, including for the man with schizophrenia, is not carefully managed.