News in Brief

Date: 18 January 2022 - 21:30

News ID: ۹۹۰۲۸

LONDON (AP) -- Britain’s Conservative government has suffered a setback in Parliament in its attempt to give authorities stronger powers to curb peaceful but disruptive protests. Parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, late Monday rejected some of the most contentious provisions in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The defeated measures would give police officers the right to stop and search people at demonstrations without suspicion, allow courts to bar named individuals from attending protests and empower police to curb protests that are judged to be too noisy. Civil liberties groups say the proposed measures violate long-held freedoms of assembly and speech. Thousands of people attended “Kill the Bill” protests across Britain in recent months to oppose the legislation. Brian Paddick, a Liberal Democrat member of the Lords and former senior police officer, said the government plans were “reminiscent of Cold War eastern bloc police states.” The move to put noise limits on protests has drawn particular criticism. Labour Lords member Vernon Coaker said “making a noise is a fundamental part of the freedom to protest properly in a democracy.”

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Crews made railroad repairs in Los Angeles Monday after a train derailed near the location where thieves have been raiding cargo containers, leaving the tracks littered with emptied boxes of packaged good sent by retailers. It wasn’t immediately clear if the derailment that happened Saturday was caused by the debris left behind by thieves in the Lincoln Heights area near downtown Los Angeles. Union Pacific said the cause of the derailment was under investigation. The derailment caused 17 train cars to go off the tracks, Union Pacific said in a statement. No injuries were reported. Cargo containers aboard trains have been targeted by thieves for months, authorities said. The stolen packages are from retailers including Amazon, REI and others, the CBSLA television newscast reported last Thursday. Union Pacific said in a statement to CBSLA that the railroad was concerned about increased cargo thefts in California.

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OSLO (AFP) -- Right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik made a Nazi salute and held up racist messages on Tuesday as he asked for parole, a request widely expected to be denied just 10 years after carrying out Norway’s deadliest peacetime attack.
Wearing a black suit, white shirt and beige tie, Breivik, 42, appeared before the district court in the southern region of Telemark, convened for security reasons in the gymnasium of the Skien prison where he is incarcerated. He lifted his arm in a Nazi salute to the three judges as they entered the room. The families of his victims had expressed fears Breivik would use the three-day hearing, which is being broadcast almost live, as a platform for his political views, and have called for him to be deprived of the attention he is seeking. In 2012 Breivik, who killed 77 people during the massacre, got 21 years in prison, which can be extended indefinitely as long as he is considered a threat to society.

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PARIS (AP) -- French far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was convicted of inciting racial hatred over the 2020 comments he made about unaccompanied migrant children. A Paris court ordered Zemmour to pay a fine of 10,000 euros (more than $11,000) and several thousand euros in damages to anti-racism groups. Samuel Thomas, president of the Maisons des Potes (“Homes of Friends”), a network of anti-racism associations, said the sentence is “very light. The case against Zemmour focused on September 2020 comments that he made on French news broadcaster CNews about children who migrate to France without parents or guardians. “They’re thieves, they’re murderers, they’re rapists. That’s all they are. We must send them back,” he said. “These people cost us money.” Zemmour is a descendant of Berber Jews from Algeria. He was born in France in 1958 to parents who came from the North African country, then a French colony, a few years earlier.

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SYDNEY/WELLINGTON (Reuters) -- All the homes on one of Tonga’s small outer islands were destroyed in the massive volcanic eruption and tsunami, with three people so far confirmed dead, the government said on Tuesday in its first update since the disaster hit. With communications severely hampered by an undersea cable being severed, information on the scale of the devastation after Saturday’s eruption, causing waves up to 15 meters high, has so far mostly come from reconnaissance aircraft. But the office of Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said in a statement that every home on Mango island, where around 50 people live, had been destroyed, only two houses remained on Fonoifua, and Namuka island had suffered extensive damage. Tonga’s deputy head of mission in Australia, Curtis Tu’ihalangingie, earlier said pictures taken by the New Zealand Defense Force (NZDF) showed “alarming” scenes of a village destroyed on Mango and buildings missing on Atata island, which is closest to the volcano.