News in Brief

Date: 24 May 2021 - 22:22

News ID: ۹۰۵۶۴

BRUSSELS (Dispatches) -- European leaders threatened on Monday to limit international air traffic over Belarus and possibly restrict its ground transport, after a Ryanair passenger plane was forced to land. Western leaders reached for the strongest language to condemn Sunday’s incident, in which a Belarusian warplane intercepted a flight between Greece and Lithuania and forced it down in Minsk, where a dissident journalist was arrested. Countries called for the release of 26-year-old Roman Protasevich. The French presidency said a request had been sent to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to suspend international flights over Belarusian air space. Russia accused the West of hypocrisy. It noted that in 2013 a flight from Moscow carrying Bolivia’s president had been diverted to Austria after reports fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden might be on board.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a case over whether to make it easier to hold municipalities liable for civil rights violations committed by their police, rejecting an appeal involving a man fatally shot by an officer in Ohio. The justices turned away the appeal filed by the mother of a 23-year-old man named Luke Stewart of a lower court ruling that threw out her claims made under federal law in a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Euclid and an officer involved in the 2017 incident. Matthew Rhodes, the officer who shot Stewart in the chest and neck at close range, avoided liability for those claims through a legal defense called qualified immunity, even though the lower court determined that a jury might find that he unlawfully used excessive force. The lawsuit filed by Mary Stewart accused Rhodes and another officer of using excessive force in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. The suit also accused Euclid police of a pattern of unconstitutional practices, particularly against Black people. Her son was Black. The officers are white.

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DUBLIN (Reuters) -- The Scottish government is facing a new legal challenge over its February rejection of a motion to investigate former U.S. President Donald Trump’s all-cash purchases of two golf courses, reviving an effort to force Trump to disclose how he financed the deals. Avaaz, a global human rights group, filed a petition in Scotland’s highest civil court seeking a judicial review of the government’s decision not to pursue an “unexplained wealth order” on Trump’s business. In February, Parliament voted 89-to-32 against the motion, which was brought by the minority Scottish Green Party and would have sought details on the source of the money the Trump Organization used to buy the courses in 2006 and 2014. The Avaaz petition, which has not been previously reported, was served on Scotland’s government on Monday. Trump, after decades of buying properties with debt, spent more than $300 million in cash purchasing and developing the Scottish courses, neither of which has turned a profit.

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LIMA (Reuters) -- Socialist candidate Pedro Castillo continued to regain ground among voters, a poll showed, boosting his lead over conservative contender Keiko Fujimori two weeks ahead of Peru’s presidential election. Castillo, an elementary school teacher seeking to implement new taxes and royalties on the mining sector, obtained 44.8% support in the survey of the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP), while Fujimori, a business-friendly conservative, netted 34.4%. The poll of 1,208 people was conducted for Peru’s La Republica newspaper on May 20-21 and had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points. Castillo, who had begun to flounder in polls earlier in May, has gained significant ground since the same IEP survey in mid-May, in which he obtained 36.5% among intended voters and Fujimori 29.6%. On Saturday, protesters marched in Lima and other major Peruvian cities toting banners and shouting the slogan “Fujimori never again.” Fujimori’s father, the former president Alberto Fujimori, is in prison over corruption charges.

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NEW DELHI (Reuters) -- Indian authorities began evacuating thousands of people from coastal areas in two states on Monday as a powerful cyclone bore down on the country’s east coast, complicating efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Cyclone Yaas, the second storm to hit the country in a week, is set to turn into a “very severe cyclonic storm” with wind speeds of up to 110 miles per hour (177 kph), the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said. The storm, brewing in the Bay of Bengal, will likely come ashore near the border between Odisha and West Bengal states early on Wednesday, accompanied by storm surge of around four meters (13 ft) that could reach up to 7 km (4 miles) inland, according to the IMD.

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GENEVA (Dispatches) -- At least 115,000 health and care workers have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, the chief of the World Health Organization says, calling for a dramatic scale-up of vaccination in all countries. At the opening of the World Health Organization’s main annual assembly, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the sacrifices made by health workers around the world to battle the pandemic. “For almost 18 months, health and care workers all over the world have stood in the breach between life and death,” he said. “Many have themselves become infected, and while reporting is scant, we estimate that at least 115,000 health and care workers have paid the ultimate price in the service of others.”