Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Investigators examining letter from group claiming to be behind fire at Grünheide ‘Gigafactory’ site
German police are investigating whether a fire that broke out overnight at the construction site of Tesla’s first European Gigafactory had a political motive, after far-left activists claimed responsibility.
The fire at the site in Grünheide in the eastern state of Brandenburg early on Wednesday morning damaged several power cables, said a spokesperson for the LKA state criminal investigation office.
Analysis: Raman Pratasevich and Sofia Sapega are just the latest to be forced into the widespread tactic
The videos are formulaic: Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, each sit alone in front of a camera in a police station and deliver their “confessions” as though a loaded gun is pointed at their heads.
“I’m also the editor of the Telegram channel Black Book of Belarus that publishes personal information about employees of the interior ministry,” said Sapega, quickly repeating a memorised statement in a video released late on Tuesday that could lead to years in jail.
The European Commission has demanded an urgent court order requiring AstraZeneca to deliver millions more vaccines to the bloc or face a hefty fine, in a case that may reflect its anger more than its need for doses.
“AstraZeneca did not even try to respect the contract,” the EU’s lawyer, Rafaël Jafferali, told a court in Brussels on Wednesday, saying the EU wanted €10 per dose for each day of delay as compensation for the company’s alleged non-compliance.
France will impose a compulsory quarantine on travellers arriving from the UK amid mounting concern over the rapid spread of the coronavirus variant first found in India, the government’s spokesperson has said.
Gabriel Attal told reporters after a weekly ministerial meeting on Wednesday that the government would announce “in the coming hours” exactly when the decision, which was widely expected, would come into effect.
Belarusian authorities have released a video of Sofia Sapega, the girlfriend of the detained journalist Raman Pratasevich. The video appears to show Sapega confessing to being the editor of an anti-government channel on the social media site Telegram.
Family members have
said her and Pratasevich's confessions
were clearly coerced. An earlier video showed Pratasevich saying police were treating him well and confessing to organising anti-government protests in Minsk
European Commission proposes more factchecking and algorithm changes to tackle disinformation
A “massive anti-vaccination campaign” has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation.
Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked.
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'