Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Crash investigators say emergency brakes had been deactivated to avoid disruptions to service
The emergency brakes on a cable car that crashed in northern Italy on Sunday, killing 14 people, had been “tampered with”, prosecutors said as three people were arrestedon charges of suspected involuntary manslaughter and negligence.
The three, including the owner of the firm that manages the Stresa-Mottarone aerial tramway near Lake Maggiore in the Piedmont region, are alleged to have made a “conscious gesture” by “tampering” with the emergency brakes in order to “avoid disruptions” to the cable car service, Ansa reported, citing the chief public prosecutor, Olimpia Bossi.
Parents of Raman Pratasevich fear for his life, as mother of girlfriend Sofia Sapega says she was not involved in politics
The parents of Raman Pratasevich have pleaded for international help to free the Belarusian journalist as US president Joe Biden said sanctions against Alexander Lukashenko’s regime were “in play”, without revealing further details.
From their new home in Poland, Natalia Pratasevich, the blogger’s mother, told Agence France-Presse: “I’m asking, I’m begging, I’m calling on the whole international community to save him.
Friends describe arrest of influential opposition journalist as an act of ‘personal revenge’ by the country’s president
In an interview last November the 26-year-old opposition journalist Raman Pratasevich said he was not planning to spend his life in exile. “I would go back to Belarus immediately if my safety was guaranteed,” he said. “My intention is to return.”
Charities post photographs of dead babies and toddlers said to have left Libya in dinghies in recent days
Photographs have emerged of the bodies of babies and toddlers washed up on a beach in Libya, highlighting the human tragedy of the migration crisis on Europe’s borders.
According to one of the charities that posted the photos on Twitter, the children had been travelling with their parents on one of the many dinghies that set off from Libya in recent days.
Raman Pratasevich, seized from diverted Ryanair flight, appeared to have been beaten, says father
The father of the Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich said it was clear his son was acting under duress and had been beaten when he recorded a video “confessing” to organising mass protests against the regime.
Dmitry Pratasevich said Raman was “very nervous” and “spoke in a way that was unusual for him”.
Find out who is leading the polling to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor of Germany
Germans will vote on Sunday 26 September to elect a new Bundestag, or federal parliament. The result – after coalition negotiations likely to involve two or three parties – will decide who will succeed Angela Merkel, who is standing down after 16 years as chancellor.
Some recent polls have put Germany’s Green party in the lead, as Merkel’s successor at the conservative CDU, Armin Laschet, struggles to inherit her appeal. German federal elections are proportional, so the share of vote given by polling companies should be read as translating fairly directly into share of seats in the resulting parliament. Only parties with less than 5% of the national vote, or one directly elected constituency seat, are not awarded parliamentary seats.
Shutting Turów lignite mine would cause thousands of job losses, says development minister
Poland’s government has defied an injunction by the top European Union court that ordered the immediate closure of a major brown coalmine, with officials saying it would shake the nation’s energy system and lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.
The country’s development minister, Jarosław Gowin, said Poland would not shut the lignite mine in Turów, on the border with Germany and the Czech Republic, but instead was engaged in “very intensive diplomatic and law-related efforts” to secure undisturbed operation of the mine and connected power plant that generates 7% of Poland‘s energy.
Company founded by three Spanish friends hopes to tap into demand for new sources of protein
There are no gargantuan mastiffs or shepherds on quad bikes watching over the hundreds of thousands of newborn animals that tumble and crawl around an unlikely farm among the wind turbines, motorways and patchwork fields of this corner of Castilla-La Mancha, in central Spain.
Nor are there any fences to pen them in. Plastic tubs, shelves and the insulated walls of a unit on a windswept industrial estate do the job perfectly well. But whatever Origen Farms lacks in land, tradition and rural romance, it aims to make up for in innovation, enthusiasm and resilience.
With the Tokyo Olympics just weeks away, the US State Department has issued a “Level 4” warning against traveling to Japan, that’s now struggling through another surge in Covid cases.
A new wrinkle two months before Olympics. US State Department advises travelers not to visit Japan. https://t.co/Hrnfkwzayz
A Tokyo medical organization has joined calls to cancel Japan’s Olympic games this summer, citing a surge in #COVID19 cases in the country.
“Japan will bear the maximum responsibility” for deaths caused by the games, it said.
The Trump Administration, which forced families to separate at the border, also made migrant parents leave without their children according to a new Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report.
The agency watchdog found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) knowingly deported parents who had asked to be allowed to take their children back, the Associated Press reports.
That contradicted assertions by senior DHS officials that parents were choosing to leave their children in the U.S. to stay with family or for other reasons while they were deported in 2017 and 2018 as the administration sought to enforce a hard-line approach to immigration enforcement.
The findings, issued by Trump-appointed Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, provide new insight into a policy that became a significant political crisis for the previous administration and a continuing challenge for the current one, which is working to reunite children who remain separated even now.
EU’s 27 heads of state call for the immediate release of opposition blogger Roman Protasevich
EU leaders triggered new economic sanctions against Belarus and punitive measures against its national airline as a dissident taken from a “hijacked” Ryanair flight was paraded on the country’s television news apparently confessing to crimes against the state.
Italy’s worst cable car disaster in more than 20 years has left people questioning what went wrong
Two Sundays before fourteen people fell to their deaths in Italy’s worst cable car disaster in more than 20 years, hundreds of marathon runners had raced up a mountain path behind Lake Maggiore. After reaching the summit of Monte Mottarone, they made their way back down in cable cars, departing every 20 minutes for the return to the lakeside resort of Stresa below.
“It’s difficult to believe that just two weeks ago so many people – maybe 800 – ran up the mountain and all came down safely by cable car,” said Rinaldo Piraccini, who was sitting outside L’Idrovolante, a bar and restaurant next to the entrance of the funicular, with his friend Daniele Sacchi on Monday afternoon.
Pedro Sánchez condemns ‘misogynist scourge’ after deaths of women at hands of partners or ex-partners
The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has denounced as “unacceptable” a surge in domestic violence in which five women were killed in the past week by their partners or ex-partners.
Among the victims was a 42-year-old Barcelona woman who was stabbed to death by her husband who then killed himself, and a pregnant Moroccan woman who was killed by her partner, who called police to confess.
Analysis: ‘Air piracy’ is just latest act of Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal campaign against his opponents
Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, has unleashed a brutal campaign against his opponents. More than 35,000 people have been arrested, thousands have been tortured or abused, and 400 political prisoners are currently behind bars. Earlier this week a 50-year-old opposition activist, Vitold Ashurok, died in a penal colony. The official cause of death was “heart attack”. His widow believes he was murdered.
It is against this dark and repressive backdrop that the extraordinary events of Sunday took place. According to state media, Lukashenko personally authorised the forced downing of a Ryanair plane as it flew over Belarusian airspace between Greece and Lithuania – a real-time hijacking. He even dispatched a MIG-29 fighter jet to ensure the pilot complied after being informed of a fake bomb threat.
Passengers onboard a Ryanair a plane that was forced to divert from its Athens-Vilnius route and make an emergency landing in Minsk, where officials arrested a dissident journalist, have described being tired and uncomfortable.
Belarus has faced international condemnation after forcing a Ryanair flight carrying an opposition activist to land in the Belarusian capital in order to arrest him. Some European leaders have called it an 'act of state terror and kidnapping'
Britons have been urged not to travel to Spain after the country opened its doors to tourists from the UK.
Spain has lifted its restrictions on holidaymakers from the UK but the business minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan has urged people not to go there unless there is an urgent reason.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says ‘hijacking must be sanctioned’ ahead of EU leaders’ meeting on Monday
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has joined European leaders in condemning Belarus for forcing a Ryanair flight carrying an opposition activist to land in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
European leaders – some of whom have already denounced the move to arrest blogger Roman Protasevich as an “act of state terror and kidnapping” – will meet on Monday to discuss what action could be taken against Belarus, for forcing the plane’s diversion during its flight from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
Casualties reported after cable car with 15 passengers collapsed near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy
Italy was in shock on Sunday after a cable car crashed to the ground in a northern Italian beauty spot, killing 14 people including a nine-year-old child.
The cable car is believed to have been carrying 15 people on the 20-minute ridebetween the resort town of Stresa and the Mottarone mountain in the Piedmont region when it plummeted into the woods near Lake Maggiore shortly after midday.
Experts warn of a ‘huge ecological disaster’ after blaze in the Geraneia mountains
Hundreds of firefighters battled Greece’s first major forest fire of the summer on Saturday, as experts warned of a “huge ecological disaster” in a nature conservation area near Athens.
The fire, which broke out late on Wednesday in the Geraneia mountains 55 miles (90km) west of the capital, is “one of the biggest in the past 20 to 30 years, and has come early in the season”, fire chief Stefanos Kolokouris told ANT1 television.
More than 700 people have died in the Mediterranean this year. But Sea-Eye, a German charity, is fighting hard to save lives
Amani clutches her son, Mohammed, as she is pulled from an unstable wooden boat in the Mediterranean. “Please help. My baby is soaked in water and freezing,” says the 23-year-old Syrian refugee.
It’s shortly before 2am, last Monday and about 80 miles (130km) from the Libyan coast a group of maritime emergency responders from the Sea-Eye 4 are on patrol.