News in Brief

Date: 21 September 2021 - 21:42

News ID: ۹۴۶۴۹

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) -- The White House said that footage appearing to show border patrol agents using whips against Haitian migrants coming into the United States from Mexico was unacceptable and not appropriate. “I have seen some of the footage. I don’t have the full context. I can’t imagine what context would make that appropriate,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters. “I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate,” she said.’

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PARIS (Reuters) -- French President Emmanuel Macron discussed on Tuesday cooperating over the IndoPacific region with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as France deals with the fallout from Australia’s cancellation of a $40 billion French submarine order. The two leaders held a phone conversation on Tuesday, said a statement from Macron’s office, during which they also discussed issues such as the crisis in Afghanistan. Last week, France recalled its ambassadors from the United States and Australia after Australia cancelled its previous nuclear submarine deal with France. China in turn denounced a new Indo-Pacific security alliance between the United States, Britain and Australia, warning of an intensified arms race in the region.

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SYDNEY/MELBOURNE (Reuters) -- Police in Melbourne fired pepper balls and rubber pellets on Tuesday to disperse about 2,000 protesters who defied stay-at- home orders to damage property, block a busy freeway and injure three officers, leading to more than 60 arrests. It was the second day of demonstrations in the locked-down Australian city after authorities shut construction sites for two weeks, saying workers’ frequent movement was spreading the coronavirus. During eight hours of downtown protests, demonstrators threw rocks, bottles and flares at police, as television and social media showed video of marchers chanting and attacking police cars, surrounded by mounted police and officers in riot gear. “This was a very, very large and very, very angry group,” Shane Patton, police commissioner in the southeastern state of Victoria, told reporters, adding that the protest breached COVID-19 lockdown rules.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Britain’s Prince Andrew has been served with a sexual assault lawsuit in the United States by lawyers for a woman who says she was forced to have sex with him at the London home of a friend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, court papers show. In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, lawyers for Virginia Giuffre said they sent the civil lawsuit to the prince’s Los Angeles-based lawyer Andrew Brettler by email and FedEx, and both copies had been received by Monday morning. Under federal rules, the Duke of York has 21 days to respond or could face a default judgment. Giuffre’s lawyers previously said they also served Andrew, who is Queen Elizabeth’s second son, in Britain. Giuffre, 38, accused Andrew of forcing her to have sex when she was underage at the London home of Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell. She also said Andrew abused her at around the same time in Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan and on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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DOUALA (Reuters) -- Separatist rebels have killed 15 Cameroonian soldiers and several civilians in two bomb attacks this month, the government said, marking a new phase of a conflict that has dragged on for nearly five years and cost more than 3,000 lives. Insurgents are seeking to form a breakaway state called Ambazonia in western Cameroon. They began fighting the military in 2017 after civilian protests calling for greater representation of the French-speaking country’s Anglophone minority were violently repressed. What began with occasional raids by secessionists on police and army outposts has turned into a protracted fight that has sucked the life from large parts of the forested oil- and coffee-producing region. The use of more sophisticated weaponry represented “a paradigm change” in the fighting, the defense ministry said in the statement, and suggested the militants were getting their hardware from “violent fundamentalist groups” outside Cameroon.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A CIA officer who was traveling with agency director William Burns to India this month reported symptoms consistent with Havana syndrome, CNN and the New York Times reported. The victim, who was not identified, had to receive medical attention, CNN reported, citing unnamed sources. Some 200 U.S. officials and family members have been sickened by Havana syndrome, a mysterious set of ailments that include migraines, nausea, memory lapses and dizziness. It was first reported by officials based in the U.S. embassy in Cuba in 2016. Last month, Vice President Kamala Harris delayed her arrival to Hanoi for three hours after the U.S. embassy there said someone had reported a health incident consistent with Havana syndrome.

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STRASBOURG, France (AFP) -- Europe’s top rights court on Tuesday ruled that Russia was responsible for the 2006 killing in London of the dissident former agent Alexander Litvinenko, a verdict swiftly rejected by Moscow. Litvinenko died after allegedly drinking tea laced with the radioactive isotope Polonium 210 at a London hotel, in a case that has weighed on relations between Britain and Russia ever since. “Russia was responsible for the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in the UK,” said the Strasbourg-based The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) . But in Moscow, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the claim. “There are still no results of this investigation, so making statements like these is at least unfounded... We are not prepared to accept this decision,” he said.