News in Brief

Date: 15 September 2020 - 21:47

News ID: ۸۲۸۳۸

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday reaffirmed his willingness to be a part of President Donald Trump’s second administration if he were to be re-elected on Nov. 3, although did not specifically spell out what role he would be interested in. "There’s still a lot of work to do and I’d love to find a way to be a part of that,” Pompeo told a virtual event organized by the Atlantic Council.

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BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) -- Fifty-two inmates at a prison in the northeastern Congo city of Bunia have starved to death this year because of insufficient government funding, the United Nations and local authorities said. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s jails are among the world’s most overcrowded, according to the U.N., with inmates living in squalid conditions on meager rations. The Bunia prison operates at nearly 500% of capacity, U.N. figures show. "This situation is really worrying,” said Bunia mayor Ferdinand Fimbo, blaming sporadic government support for malnutrition in the prison. President Felix Tshisekdei told his cabinet this month he would personally ensure prisons across the country did not run out of food or medicine. But the head of the Bunia prison, Camille Zonzi, was quoted in a report by the UN peacekeeping force in Congo as saying that the government had still only promised at a meeting last week to cover three months of the prison’s expenses. Malnutrition is common in Congolese jails because food portions are allotted based on facilities’ nominal capacity, rather than their real populations, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

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GENEVA (Reuters) -- Two dozen migrants and refugees on board a rubber dinghy trying to cross from Libya to Europe are believed to have drowned after their boat capsized, the UN’s International Organization of Migration said on Tuesday. Three boats were thought to have departed from Libya’s Zawiyah on Sunday night. The Libyan coast guard found 45 people onboard two boats and brought them back but the third had capsized, the IOM’s Safa Msehli said at a Geneva briefing. "Two bodies were retrieved and very few survivors have reported to IOM staff at the disembarkation point last night so at least 22 others have perished,” she said. Hundreds die each year on the Mediterranean passage and last month 45 Africans perished off the Libyan coast in the biggest shipwreck this year.

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LESBOS, Greece (Reuters) -- Greek police have detained five migrants over a fire that razed the Moria refugee camp to the ground, the government said on Tuesday, as thousands of displaced people refused to move to a new facility and demanded to leave Lesbos island. Authorities were searching for one more person, Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrisohoidis said. More than 12,000 people, mostly refugees from Afghanistan, Africa and Syria, were left without shelter, proper sanitation or access to food and water after a fire tore through the overcrowded Moria migrant camp last Wednesday. Greek authorities believe the fire was deliberately lit by camp occupants after quarantine measures were imposed following the discovery of COVID cases on the site, but the incident has put the migrant issue firmly back on the European agenda.

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LONDON (Reuters) -- A former lawmaker from Britain’s governing Conservative Party was sentenced to two years in jail after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women. Charlie Elphicke, 49, whose wife Natalie succeeded him last year as the Member of Parliament for Dover in southern England, was convicted in July of assaulting his first victim, his children’s nanny, in 2007 and the second, a researcher, in 2016. "You are a sexual predator who used your success and respectability as a cover,” the judge Philippa Whipple said, adding that he had told a pack of lies to the jury, his wife, his party’s officials and the police. "You suggested to each woman that this was something they wanted, that they had encouraged, that they had enjoyed. That was not true. They had not encouraged you or led you on. Your behavior was also an abuse of power.”

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HOUSTON (Reuters) -- Hurricane Sally drew closer to the U.S. Gulf Coast on Tuesday morning, threatening historic floods, the National Hurricane Center said, with more than two feet (61 cm)of rain expected in some areas. The second strong storm in less than a month to threaten the region, Sally’s winds decreased to 85 miles per hour (140 kph), and early Tuesday was 60 miles (100 km) east of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the NHC said, moving at a glacial pace of two miles per hour. It could wallop the Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coasts on Tuesday with massive flash flooding and storm surges of up to 9 feet (2.7 meters) in some spots. Its slow speed recalls 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which brought several feet of rain over a period of days to the Houston area.