News in Brief

Date: 24 January 2022 - 21:45

News ID: ۹۹۲۴۲

BERLIN (AP) — A lone gunman wounded several people at a lecture hall in the southwestern German city of Heidelberg on Monday, police said. Police said in a brief statement that the perpetrator was dead, but didn’t give details of how that happened. They had earlier asked people on Twitter to avoid the Neuenheimer Feld area of Heidelberg, where the city’s university campus is located. Police didn’t specify how many people were wounded, or how seriously. The university’s press office declined to give any details on the shooting and referred all inquiries to police. German news agency dpa cited unidentified security sources as saying that the gunman killed himself. It also reported, without citing sources, that the gunman is believed to have been a student himself, and that security officials say initial indications are that he didn’t have any political or religious motive. Police said the weapon used in the shooting was a long-barreled firearm. Heidelberg is located south of Frankfurt and has about 160,000 inhabitants. Its university is one of Germany’s best-known.

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VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -- Former Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged on Monday he had been at a 1980 meeting over a sexual abuse case when archbishop of Munich, saying he mistakenly told German investigators he was not there. A report released last week on abuse in the archdiocese from 1945 to 2019 said then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger failed to take action against clerics in four cases of alleged abuse when he was its archbishop between 1977-1982. At Thursday’s news conference in Munich, lawyers who investigated the abuse contested an assertion by Benedict in an 82-page statement that he did not recall attending a meeting in 1980 to discuss the case of an abuser priest. They said this contradicted documents in their possession. In a statement on Monday, the former pope’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, said Benedict did attend the meeting but the omission “was the result of an oversight in the editing of the statement” and “not done out of bad faith.” Benedict, 94, infirm and living in the Vatican, resigned the papacy in 2013.

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KHARTOUM (AFP) – Sudanese security forces fired tear gas Monday at crowds calling for civilian rule and demanding justice for the scores killed in crackdowns since a military coup nearly three months ago. Thousands of protesters in the capital Khartoum chanting slogans against the army headed toward the presidential palace, an area which security forces had sealed off ahead of the march. Police forces later fired tear gas to disperse the protesters, according to an AFP correspondent. Protests were also held in cities including Wad Madani, south of the capital, the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, and the eastern state of Gedaref, according to witnesses. “No, no to military rule,” and “civilian (rule) is the people’s choice” protesters shouted in Wad Madani, according to witness Emad Mohamed. Sudan has been rocked by regular protests since the October 25 military power grab led by general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The coup derailed a civilian-military power-sharing deal, that had been painstakingly negotiated after the 2019 ouster of autocrat Omar al-Bashir, stalling a planned for transition to civilian rule. Anti-coup demonstrations have left at least 73 people killed and hundreds wounded, according to medics.

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PARIS (AP) -- People who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19 are no longer allowed in France’s restaurants, bars, tourist sites and sports venues unless they recently recovered from the virus. The new law came into effect Monday requiring a “vaccine pass” that is central to the government’s anti-virus strategy. France is registering Europe’s highest-ever daily coronavirus infection numbers, and hospitals are continuing to fill up with virus patients, though the number of people in intensive care units has dropped in recent days. The government has imposed few other restrictions amid the surge in the omicron variant, focusing instead on the vaccine pass, approved by France’s parliament and Constitutional Council last week.Omicron is less likely to cause severe illness than the previous delta variant, according to studies. Omicron spreads even more easily than other coronavirus strains, and has already become dominant in many countries. It also more easily infects those who have been vaccinated or had previously been infected by prior versions of the virus.

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ISLAMABAD (AFP) -- Pakistan swore in Ayesha Malik as its first female supreme court judge on Monday, a landmark occasion in a nation where activists say the law is often wielded against women. Malik attended a ceremony in the capital Islamabad where she now sits on the bench alongside 16 male colleagues at Pakistan’s highest court. “I want to congratulate Justice Ayesha Malik on becoming the first woman judge of the Supreme Court,” Prime Minister Imran Khan said. Lawyer and women’s rights activist Nighat Dad said Malik’s promotion is “a huge step forward”. Malik was educated at Harvard University and served as a high court judge in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore for the past two decades. She has been credited with rolling back patriarchal legal mores in her Punjab province jurisdiction. Last year she outlawed a deeply invasive and medically discredited examination used to determine a woman’s level of sexual experience.