Month: April 2022

At least 23 people were in building when it collapsed and 39 others are uncontactable, authorities said.

A conviction for corruption that barred Lula from seeking another term in office was invalidated last year by Brazil’s top court

Brazilian authorities violated former President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva’s due-process rights during a corruption case that later barred him from seeking a third term in office, a UN panel has ruled.

The left-wing politician, widely known simply as Lula, has long claimed that his prosecution was politically motivated and was aimed at preventing him from running in elections.

“Although the Supreme Federal Court vacated Lula’s conviction and imprisonment in 2021, these decisions were not timely and effective enough to avoid or redress the violations,” Arif Bulkan, a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, said.

Lula governed Brazil between 2003 and 2010, having comfortably won elections twice, and left office with an approval rating of 80%. In 2017, he was sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted of corruption and money laundering amid Operation Car Wash, one of the biggest corruption investigations in Brazil’s history.

That sentence was later increased to 12 years, effectively barring Lula from competing in the 2018 presidential election, in which he was the frontrunner.

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Survey describes chances of ex-president becoming leader again

Three years later, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court annulled Lula’s conviction, ruling that former judge Sergio Moro, who oversaw the investigation against Lula and was later appointed justice minister, had no jurisdiction to investigate and try the case and could not be considered to have been impartial.

On Thursday, the UN panel confirmed that Moro had violated Lula’s right to privacy when he approved the request to tap the leader’s phone, the phones of his family and that of his lawyer, and then released the content of the wiretaps to the media before formally charging Lula with a crime. The panel also noted that a warrant to detain Lula for questioning had also been leaked to the media.

“The UN decision yesterday showed the shameful actions that were done to prevent me from becoming the president of the republic,” Lula tweeted in response to the UN’s ruling. “I don’t have to prove anything. Those who have invented lies against me have to prove it.”

Operation Car Wash was launched in 2014, after Lula had left office. The investigation began as a probe into graft and bribery within the state-run oil company Petrobras and was later expanded to include wider corruption in the highest echelons of power.

The ensuing scandal led to the impeachment of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff in 2016. She also denied all allegations, calling herself a “victim of a coup.”

Lula told RT in 2018 that there was “a conspiracy in Brazil between the media, the judiciary, the prosecution service and police” against him.

Investigative website The Intercept released a trove of documents in 2019, which appeared to show that Moro had broken the country’s judicial code of ethics by providing advice and tips to lead Car Wash prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol. Moro said the messages had been taken out of context, and that there was “no sign of any abnormality or directing of actions as a magistrate.” 

‘Tiger Meet’ war games are taking place in Greece

Turkey will not participate in NATO drills amid escalating tensions with Greece, Turkish media reported on Saturday, citing security sources. Ankara was scheduled to send its F-16 Fighting Falcon jets to the annual ‘Tiger Meet’ drill, which will be held at Araxos Air Base in western Greece from May 9 to May 22.

According to reports, Turkish Air Force Command considered that the wording used by Greece in technical documentation relating to the drills was contrary to international law and demanded that it be changed, but Greece refused to do so.

“Despite all of Turkey’s attempts and conciliatory efforts, Greece, which could not tolerate even its neighbor’s participation in an exercise in its country, moved the exercise away from the purpose of friendship and interoperability and tried to use it against Turkey’s rights and interests,” a security source claimed, as quoted by Sabah newspaper.

As a result, on April 22, Turkey made a decision not to participate in the drills and informed the host country of its withdrawal, according to Turkish media reports.

Meanwhile, some reports suggest it was actually Greece that decided not to allow Turkey to participate in the NATO exercises in retaliation for regular violations of Greek airspace by Turkish jets. According to the Voice of America’s report, Greece revoked Turkey’s planned participation in ‘Tiger Meet’, saying Turkey was “neither an ally, nor a friend.”

On Thursday, the Greek Foreign Ministry expressed to the Turkish ambassador its strong protest over “the unprecedented number of violations of Greek airspace and overflights of Greek territory, including over several inhabited areas, carried out within one day.”

The statement did not specify an exact number of violations but, according to the media, 125 unauthorized flights were reported within 24 hours.
The ministry underlined that “these actions create a climate of particular tension in the relations between the two countries, which runs contrary to the efforts undertaken to improve this climate.”

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‘Unnecessary’: Greece protests Turkey’s deployment of survey vessel in disputed waters

Turkish authorities claim they are taking retaliatory measures for the violation of Turkish airspace by Greek planes. Ankara claimed on Thursday that Athens had violated its airspace “30 times in three days.”

These mutual accusations constitute just one of several points of contention between Ankara and Athens. Last year, Greece put its military on high alert because of seismic exploration by Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean region, which Athens considers its continental shelf.

Last month’s meeting of Greek Prime Minister Kiryakos Mitsotakis with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was considered by many as a promising event but, since then, Greece has reportedly suspended ‘confidence-building’ negotiations with Turkish officials, which were planned for May.

As animals migrate to new habitats, they’ll bring new diseases with them, the research claims

At least 15,000 new species-to-species viral transmissions could take place over the next 50 years, as global warming drives wild animals to migrate toward human territory, according to a study published on Thursday. Researchers warned that these animals could spread diseases like SARS, Ebola, or Zika to humans, with Africa and Asia most at risk.

While some argue that the Covid-19 pandemic likely began in a laboratory, many scientists believe that the coronavirus first jumped to humans at a “wet market” in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Such markets – where live animals and meat are sold alongside each other – have long been condemned as hotspots of animal-to-human viral transmission, but scientists are now warning that climate change could replicate the conditions of a wet market on a global scale.

The study, published in the ‘Nature’ journal on Thursday, predicts that a rise in global temperatures of even less than two degrees Celsius will shift the habitats of some wild animals closer to those of people, potentially introducing humans to tens of thousands of viruses currently restricted to the wild.

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Covid pandemic over – Fauci

“The closest analogy is actually the risks we see in the wildlife trade,” said lead author Colin Carlson, a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center. “We worry about markets because bringing unhealthy animals together in unnatural combinations creates opportunities for this stepwise process of emergence — like how SARS jumped from bats to civets, then civets to people. But markets aren’t special anymore; in a changing climate, that kind of process will be the reality in nature just about everywhere.”

Bats, the study predicted, will drive the majority of transmission. This is because they are known reservoirs of viruses, make up around 20% of all mammal species and can fly long distances. As a “global hotspot of bat diversity,” Southeast Asia will be a flashpoint for new transmission, the researchers warned. However, more than 3,000 species of mammal will likely migrate to new habitats, and densely-populated areas like Africa’s Sahel region, India and Indonesia, will also be at risk, the researchers wrote.

The study rests on several assumptions: that the world will continue getting hotter, that animals will migrate as predicted, and that the pathogens they carry will find a way to infect humans. 

“It’s unclear exactly how these new viruses might affect the species involved,” co-lead author Gregory Albery said, “but it’s likely that many of them will translate to new conservation risks and fuel the emergence of novel outbreaks in humans.”

Even if global warming is kept under the 2 degrees threshold, described as a “worst-case scenario” in the Paris Agreement, future viral spillovers may happen anyway, Carlson’s team warned. 

“When a Brazilian free-tailed bat makes it all the way to Appalachia, we should be invested in knowing what viruses are tagging along,” Carlson said. “Trying to spot these host jumps in real-time is the only way we’ll be able to prevent this process from leading to more spillovers and more pandemics.”

Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare of the Solomon Islands called Australia’s protests over its security pact with China “hysterical”

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has accused Australia of being hypocritical in its opposition to the Pacific country’s recent security pact with China. He argued that Canberra had not consulted with its other partners last year when it unveiled a security deal with the US and Britain, known as AUKUS, which paves the way for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

“I learned of the AUKUS treaty in the media. One would expect that as a member of the Pacific family, Solomon Islands and members of the Pacific should have been consulted to ensure this AUKUS treaty is transparent,” Sogavare told his country’s parliament on Friday.

He added: “I realize that Australia is a sovereign country, which can enter into any treaty it wants to, transparently or not, which is exactly what they did with AUKUS.”

When Australia signed up to AUKUS we did not become theatrical and hysterical on the implications this would have for us. We respected Australia’s decision.

A tiny archipelago state, the Solomon Islands sit roughly 2,000km (1,242 miles) northeast of Australia.

China and the Solomon Islands signed a security and cooperation treaty late last month. Frank Sade Bilaupaine, an adviser to the islands’ government, said the arrangement had been devised after the recent unrest in his country’s capital Honiara. In November 2021, a mob torched the parliament building and burned down the local Chinatown district.

The treaty had drawn ire in Australia, as well as in the US and New Zealand, all of which regularly trade diplomatic jabs with Beijing.

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Australia accuses China of election meddling

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said last week that a Chinese military base on the islands would be a “red line.” Daniel Kritenbrink, a senior US diplomat responsible for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, similarly said that Washington would have “significant concerns” over a new Chinese base in the region.

The Chinese Defense Ministry, however, denied that it had plans to set up an outpost in the Pacific country.

Asked about Sogavare’s recent statement on Friday, Morrison argued that there was “a remarkable similarity between those statements and those of the Chinese government.”

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng said on Thursday that the pact with the Solomon Islands was “not targeted at any third party.” He added that Australia had no right to meddle in Beijing’s relations with other states. “If this is not a violation of other countries’ sovereignty, an interference in other countries’ internal affairs and violation of international rules, [then] what is?” he said.

Beijing has argued that AUKUS undermines peace and stability in the region.

President Bashar Assad’s decree does not, however, pardon anyone involved in killings

Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a decree on Saturday granting amnesty to Syrians for terrorist crimes up to the end of April, except those leading to death. Assad has extended similar olive branches to deserters, criminals and opposition fighters before, often to the displeasure of the US.

Assad’s decree, first reported by Syrian state media on Saturday, “grants a general amnesty for terrorist crimes committed by Syrians before [Saturday], except for those that led to the death of a person.” 

While the pardon frees terrorists from criminal prosecution, it does not exempt them from civil lawsuits brought by those they may have harmed.

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Assad makes first visit to Arab nation since Syria war began

Those pardoned would have been prosecuted under a 2012 anti-terrorism law and a 1949 provision of Syria’s legal code, and as such will affect the various terrorist groups fighting in Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011. Assad, with the help of Russian forces, has broadly succeeded in maintaining control of Syria against a collection of opposition militias and terrorist groups like Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Nusra Front.

Throughout more than a decade of war, Assad has periodically offered pardons to his opponents. Military deserters who didn’t take up arms with terrorists were given amnesty in 2018 and allowed to return to Syria, while a general amnesty for misdemeanors and juvenile crimes was granted in 2021.

However, at the outset of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, Assad attempted to offer opposition fighters amnesty in exchange for surrender. This offer was rejected by the United States, with State Department official Victoria Nuland advising the opposition to ignore Assad’s offer and continue fighting.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry at the time accused Washington of “inciting sedition” with this advice and “supporting acts of killing and terrorism.” The war would continue, and Nuland would go on to oversee the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, and is currently shaping US policy on Ukraine as President Biden’s under secretary of state for political affairs.

Dock workers union accuses Russia of financing the war in Ukraine with the cargo of diesel.

The outages come before the Eid al-Fitr holiday which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Tehran and cities across Iran undergo a number of changes during Ramadan, as streets are abuzz with people during night.

The Tory MP being investigated for allegedly watching pornography in the Commons is expected to resign later.