Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Video footage challenges official claims that the cause of death was unrelated to man’s arrest
Video footage of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a Romany man who later died in an ambulance is being shared among Czechs on social media, leading many to compare his treatment to that of George Floyd.
The video, shot on 19 June, shows three police officers in Teplice, a town in the north of the Czech Republic, detaining a Romany man on the floor. As one officer holds the man’s feet, another appears to kneel on his neck, and a third tries to handcuff him. Voices of several Roma bystanders are heard in the video.
Law calls into question the church’s ‘freedom of organisation’ and threatens ‘freedom of thought’, letter claims
The Vatican has made an unprecedented intervention urging the Italian government to change a proposed law that would criminalise homophobia over concerns it will infringe upon the Catholic church’s “freedom of thought”.
A letter delivered by British archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary of relations with states, said parts of the legislation violated a treaty made between Italy and the Catholic church in the 1920s that secured the freedoms and rights of the church, Corriere della Sera reported.
German chancellor Angela Merkel is hoping for better coordination on pandemic travel rules among the bloc’s 27 member states. She said it was problematic to have a patchwork of regulations.
“I regret that we haven’t managed yet to have completely uniform action among the member states on travel guidelines - that is coming back to haunt us,” she told reporters after a meeting with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, according to AFP.
Eight members of the Ugandan Olympic team have been quarantined in Japan until early July, a local official has said, after a coach tested positive for coronavirus on arrival last week.
The country’s delegation arrived on Saturday just over a month before the pandemic-postponed Games. But despite being vaccinated and testing negative before travel, a coach tested positive during screening at Tokyo’s Narita airport, AFP reports.
Since the first Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 was injected into the arm of a British woman in December 2020, hundreds of millions of vaccine doses have been administered worldwide.
Dozens of countries now have advanced vaccination campaigns as they rush to protect their people and get their economies back up and running. Many are in a position where the most vulnerable people are fully vaccinated, raising hopes that the pandemic’s worst effects may be over.
Good morning, live blog readers. Yesterday may have been the longest day of the year but today may feel longer for Democrats as tension builds in Washington towards the big vote on whether to advance legislation on massive voting rights reforms. It’s going to be a lively day, so let’s get started.
Rights activists say country has built one of world’s most far-ranging systems of forced disappearance
China has ramped up its use of secret detention without trial, creating one of the most far-ranging systems of forced disappearance in the world, human rights activists warn in a report.
Tens of thousands of people have been subjected to “residential surveillance at a designated location” (RSDL), an anodyne, bureaucratic name for an Orwellian system, the group Safeguard Defenders said in the report, Locked Up.
Authorities deny reports that inmates were beaten after a 10-day sit-in over concerns about virus spread and lack of medical care
In early April, inmates at Bahrain’s Jau prison crowded into the corridors to protest. They were angry about a lack of medical treatment and fearing for their lives after the death of another inmate. Their sit-in at building 13 lasted 10 days, and spread to other blocks in Jau, an infamous prison complex in the south of the kingdom.
Inmates claim authorities regularly delay or deny vital medical care to prisoners – especially prisoners of conscience. The concern has grown since late March when Covid-19 began to tear through the prison system. Prisoners and rights groups claim authorities failed to prevent the outbreak and have denied some inmates their choice of vaccine.
The serious anti-poaching message of this savanna-set family drama gets lost in the comic register of a US sitcom
The days of Africa-set films featuring white protagonists using glowing savannas as set dressing for first-world problems seemed to be numbered, but hold on: here is a fist-bitingly self-regarding family drama with Philip Winchester and X-Men’s Rebecca Romijn as Jack and Lauren Halsey, a seemingly dream couple off on a dream safari with son Noah and daughter Zoe, and her pothead boyfriend Billy. “Penny for them,” Lauren actually says to Jack, as they are Cessna-ing in. What is on this buff oilman’s mind, though, is that he has just been put on extended leave following an industrial accident.
His secret soon spills too, and Jack is so desperate to please his wife that he ignores safari-park protocol and lets them get too close to the fauna: a female rhinoceros and calf. “Wait, we shouldn’t be getting between them, right?” says Billy, a brief lapse into sensible ideas. One upended van later, with Jack’s leg gored, no mobile phone reception or water, and diabetic Lauren’s insulin levels running on empty, the Halseys find themselves in a world of hurt.
Kim Yo-jong’s intervention appears to have thwarted any prospects for early resumption of negotiations
Kim Jong-un’s influential sister appears to have dismissed hopes for a breakthrough on nuclear talks with the US, warning Washington that it faced “disappointment” if it believed engagement with North Korea was a possibility.
Kim Yo-jong, a senior figure in the ruling party who is considered one of the North Korean leader’s closest confidantes, said any US expectations for a resumption of talks were “wrong”, according to the state-run KCNA news agency.
As party girl Marissa in The OC, Barton found fame at a time when young female stars were being hounded by the press. She talks about strength, resilience and her battle against revenge porn
For some actors, the roles they have played stick to them like shadows, long after they should have been left behind. Just ask Mischa Barton. It is 15 years since she starred as Marissa Cooper in the teen drama The OC, and yet still she can’t shake her off. When Barton appeared in the reality show The Hills in 2019 – inspired by The OC’s privileged young Californians but featuring real-life people – she was supposed to be herself, but the producers expected Cooper. “It is the constant mistake,” she says wryly. “They were even calling me by my character name. Seriously? Like, this far down the line they can’t get my name right?”
The parallels, though, are irresistible. Marissa was a troubled party girl with a love of fashion who met a tragic end. Mischa (even their names are similar) was also a troubled party girl with a love of fashion, whose life at times seemed out of control. There was the extreme fame, the breakdown, the reported threats of suicide, estrangement from her parents and a “revenge porn” court case. Barton has weathered it all with a sense of humour and now, at 35, a bit of perspective.
Marisol Bejarano, an intensive care unit doctor at El Tunal hospital in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, has watched people die – slowly and far from family – since the pandemic began.
As the two countries crack down on smuggling, those forced to cross the border ‘for survival’ face a perilous journey
Karim Jan* spent the festival of Eid al-Fitr sitting in the scorching May sun as he had spent the previous five days, waiting in a long queue of traffic to get into Iran. Like hundreds of other drivers, Jan came to this desolate town of Mand, on the Pakistan border with Iran, from across Balochistan.
As they waited, some drivers slept in their Iranian pickup trucks , known as Zamyads, while others slept out under the open sky.
Carrie Lam denies arrest of senior editorial figures at pro-democracy paper and seizure of its assets was an attack on press freedom
Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has refused to clarify how journalists can avoid breaking the vaguely defined national security law following the raid and prosecution of journalists at a pro-democracy newspaper.
At a regular press conference on Tuesday the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, defended the arrest of senior Apple Daily executives under the national security law (NSL) – two of whom have been charged with conspiracy to commit collusion with a foreign country – as well as the raid of its newsroom and freezing of assets.
Overwhelmed labs struggle to process DNA tests after Nagorno-Karabakh war leaves 5,000 dead
Eight months after the end of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh that left more than 5,000 people dead, many soldiers are still missing. In Armenia, families are desperately looking for news about their loved ones. There is a growing lack of trust around DNA tests and a lack of information, leading to mounting pressure on the government.
Larissa Dureyan has been looking for her 20-year-old son Mxitar since October. He began his mandatory military service in July 2019 and was serving in Fizuli when war broke out in September last year.
Indonesian health authorities are battling a new surge in coronavirus infections, as the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB) reported the highest one-day total, with 14,535 cases confirmed in the 24 hours to Monday.
Daily case totals are reaching levels last seen in January, the peak of Indonesia’s fight against the virus.
New York City’s contentious mayoral primary campaign is coming to a close, with voters heading to the polls tomorrow to choose the Democratic nominee, who is expected to become the next mayor in the November general election.
The former presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, was initially a frontrunner in the race to be New York’s next mayor, but recent polls have shown that he has slipped.
The Biden administration plans to support criminal justice reform legislation that would end the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine, according to a report in the Washington Post.
Biden admin plans to endorse specific legislation Tues that would end disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine offenses that Pres. Biden helped create decades ago, according to ppl with knowledge of the situation. https://t.co/zcWzdRRVdD
The current disparity is not based on evidence yet has caused significant harm for decades, particularly to individuals, families, and communities of color. The continuation of this sentencing disparity is a significant injustice in our legal system, and it is past time for it to end. Therefore, the administration urges the swift passage of the ‘Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law Act’.
Rights chief calls for concerted global action, citing recent violations in China, Russia and Ethiopia
The UN rights chief has called for concerted action to recover from the worst global deterioration of rights she had seen, highlighting the situation in China, Russia and Ethiopia among others.
“To recover from the most wide-reaching and severe cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes, we need a life-changing vision, and concerted action,” Michelle Bachelet told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council’s 47th session.
President: 15 victims were innocent bystanders in Reynosa
Other four were suspected gunmen who fired indiscriminately
Fear has invaded the Mexican border city of Reynosa after a weekend of violence in which 19 people were killed, including taxis drivers, workers and a nursing student, and security forces responded with operations that left four suspects dead.
This city across the border from McAllen, Texas, is a key trafficking point, and has long been accustomed to cartel violence. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Monday that evidence indicated that 15 of the victims were innocent bystanders. The other four dead were suspected gunmen from a group that drove into the northern border city of Reynosa and opened fire indiscriminately.
The system would also have very little impact on the environment, in contrast to livestock farming, scientists say
Combining solar power and microbes could produce 10 times more protein than crops such as soya beans, according to a new study.
The system would also have very little impact on the environment, the researchers said, in stark contrast to livestock farming which results in huge amounts of climate-heating gases as well as water pollution.