Month: April 2019

An Italian Catholic magazine has likened Italy’s far-Right interior minister Matteo Salvini to Satan after his pledges to halt migrant arrivals to the country and promises to speed up deportations of illegal immigrants.

It came as a close adviser to Pope Francis criticised legislation proposed by Mr Salvini’s anti-migrant League party to require ports and other public institutions to display a crucifix, saying that the religious symbol isn’t "a team emblem" to be shown for political ends.

"If you remove the (religious) symbolism from the crucifix … it becomes a parody," the Rev Antonio Spadaro, editor of the Jesuit magazine Civilta Cattolica, said during a Rome conference on the pope.

A tweet Spardaro posted earlier in the day with a blunt "Hands off!" went viral. The crucifix, he wrote, "screams love to the enemy and unconditional welcome."

"Vade Retro Salvini," (Go back, Salvini) read the headline in the Famiglia Cristiana magazine, in a play on the Medieval Catholic phrase used to repel evil "Vade Retro Satana" (Go back Satan).

"The bishops’ conference, individual bishops, religious groups: the Church is reacting to the aggressive tone of the Interior Minister," the publication said.

"Nothing personal or ideological, it is just the Gospel," it added.

The unflattering association immediately drew the ire of Salvini.

The minister and leader of Italy’s far-Right League party, who was often seen carrying a rosary or a bible on the campaign trail, used social media to denounce the paper.

"Famiglia Cristiana even likens me to Satan, he wrote.

"I do not pretend to lecture anyone, I am not a perfect Christian, but I do not think I deserve that.

"I am comforted by the fact that I receive the support every day of so many men and women of the church."

Police in Rome on Thursday cleared nearly 400 people, including dozens of children, from a shanty camp inhabited for years by members of the minority Roma community, despite a European Union court ruling halting demolition.

The move followed Mr Salvini’s calls for a census of Roma.

Grieving relatives described the panicked phone calls they received as fires closed in on their California neighbourhood and their desperate two-day search for an elderly woman and her two great-grandhildren, before discovering they died when flames engulfed their home.

The death toll from California’s summer wildfires rose to five at the weekend when fire crews said they had found human remains at a charred home on the outskirts of Redding in the north of the state.

More than 38,000 people remain under evacuation orders from a fire that has destroyed more than 500 buildings and continued to rage unchecked into a seventh day yesterday.

Ed Bledsoe described how he left his home with the family’s only car to run errands on Thursday leaving his wife Melody, 70, and two great-grandchildren – James Roberts, 5, and Emily Roberts, 4 – behind.

He told Capital Public Radio his wife telephoned an hour later.

“She said, ‘You need to come home right now. The fire’s right next to our house,’” he said.

Mr Bledsoe tried to race home but was turned back at roadblocks.

The children were “screaming for their lives,” Jason Decker, the boyfriend of another of the Bledsoes’ granddaughters, told the New York Times. “The kids were saying: ‘Papa, papa, come home. The fire’s at the back door.’”

Then the line went dead.

For two days they searched hospitals and refuges after being told the three had been rescued. But on Saturday, officials said three bodies had been found at what was left of their home.

"My babies are dead," Sherry Bledsoe said through tears after she was given the news by sheriff’s deputies.

Her children had been in the care of their great-grandparents while she had spent the past four months incarcerated at the county jail.

Two fire service personnel also died last week.

President Donald Trump declared the fire an emergency at the weekend, freeing federal funds for disaster relief efforts.

Almost 90 fires are burning across western states – stretching from Texas to Oregon – but the most destructive so far is the Carr Fire which has blackened almost 90,000 acres of parched land in California since erupting last Monday. Cal Fire, the state fire brigade, says it was caused by the mechanical failure of a vehicle but has offered no further details about how it began.

Since then, low humidity, high temperatures and gusting winds have accelerated it into a blazing, unpredictable storm.

More than 5000 buildings are at risk as 3,500 firefighters and a squadron of 17 water-dropping helicopters try to contain its flames by carving buffer zones around its advancing fronts. By yesterday(SUN), they said they had managed to contain just 5 percent of the fire’s perimeter.

Anna Noland, 49, is among those staying at a shelter in Redding. She said she had been forced to flee twice in three days, before learning from video footage that her home had been destroyed.

“I think I’m still in shock,” she told the Associated Press. “It’s just unbelievable knowing you don’t have a house to go back to.”

Julian Assange’s six-year self-imposed imprisonment inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London appears to be drawing to a close, with the countries in talks and the Wikileaks founder reportedly pondering his next move. 

Lenin Moreno, Ecuador’s president, has confirmed a July 15 report in London’s Sunday Times that Ecuador and Britain were in talks to try to end Mr Assange’s stay at the embassy where he has been holed up since successfully seeking asylum in 2012.

Mr Moreno said on Friday any eviction of Mr Assange from the embassy had to be carried out correctly and through dialogue, but he displayed no sympathy for the Wikileaks founder’s political agenda as a leaker of confidential documents.

"I have never been in favour of Mr Assange’s activity," Mr Moreno said at an event in Madrid. 

"I have never agreed with the interventions in people’s private emails in order to obtain information, however valuable it may be, to bring out certain undesirable acts of governments or people, not in that way.

"There are correct and legal ways to do it."

Julian Assange rape allegations: a timeline

One of Mr Assange’s team said plans were being drawn up in the event of him being evicted in “hours, days or weeks”, the Times reported. 

“I expect [Mr Assange] to lose his asylum status imminently," a source told newspaper. "This means he will be expelled from the embassy. When this will happen is impossible to say.”

Australian-born Assange sought refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about allegations of sex crimes which he has always denied.

Profile | Julian Assange

Those allegations have since been dropped but Mr Assange would be arrested by British police, should he leave the embassy, for breaching bail conditions.

Mr Assange believes that would pave the way for extradition to the United States for the publication of a huge cache of US diplomatic and military secrets on the WikiLeaks website.

Mr Moreno made his comments in Madrid where he had met King Felipe and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez after a three-day visit to Britain.

When asked if he had spoken to the British government about Mr Assange on his recent visit, Mr Moreno said the two countries were in permanent contact about the matter.

About | WikiLeaks

"The only person I have never spoken to is Mr Assange," he added.

"What we want is for his life not to be in danger," Mr Moreno said. 

The diplomatic impasse over Mr Assange’s stay in Ecuador’s embassy is coming to a head, a source close to the Wikileaks founder said on Monday.

Ecuadorean and British government sources have played down suggestions of any imminent movement to break the stalemate.

A leader of the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has poured cold water on plans by Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former political strategist, to forge a wide populist alliance to undermine the European Union.

"We’re not in America," Alexander Gauland, one of two co-leaders of the anti-immigrant party, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain in an interview published on Saturday.

"The interests of the anti-establishment parties in Europe are quite divergent," he added in comments that amounted to a blunt rebuff to Mr Bannon from one of Europe’s most influential far-Right parties.

The former Trump strategist last month announced he had created a Brussels-based political organisation called The Movement to rally nationalist and populist voters in European Parliament elections next May, with a goal of undermining and paralysing the bloc.

But Mr Gauland said that while his co-leader Alice Weidel had met once with Mr Bannon, he saw no possibility of cooperating with him. "Mr Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections."

At a glance | AfD

He said the AfD only had close contacts with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), junior party in Austria’s coalition government. Former AfD leader Frauke Petry had always wanted to work with France’s National Front, but that had not worked out.

Mr Gauland said his party was polling at 17 to 20 percent in recent surveys, and its support could grow beyond that as long as Chancellor Angela Merkel remained in power.

The party won 12.6 percent of the vote in national elections last September, making it the third largest party and catapulting it into the German parliament for the first time.

Mr Gauland said the AfD needed to grow stronger, but he expected it to be ready to take on a governing role in the medium-term.

Political experts say the party could become the strongest party in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year, which will raise the question of whether mainstream parties will reverse course and agree to form coalitions with it.

India will launch its first manned space mission by 2022 and roll out a health insurance scheme from September, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday in his last Independence Day speech ahead of next year’s general election.

Modi, a powerful speaker who will seek re-election in the world’s biggest democracy early next year, used the speech to broadcast his government’s achievements, amid concerns about lack of jobs and rising violence against the Muslim minority.

Wearing a flowing saffron turban, the Hindu nationalist leader also announced the plan to take the "Indian tricolour to space" in a manned mission that would make India the fourth nation to launch one, after the United States, Russia and China.

"India is proud of our scientists, who are excelling in their research and are at the forefront of innovation," Modi said from the ramparts of the Mughal-era Red Fort in Delhi to a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands.

"In the year 2022 or, if possible, before, India will unfurl the tricolour in space."

Months after Modi’s election in 2014, India became the first Asian nation to reach Mars when its first mission to the red planet entered orbit, at a cost of $74 million, or less than the budget of the Hollywood space blockbuster "Gravity".

Modi said his government would launch from Sept. 25 a previously announced medical insurance scheme, dubbed ‘Modicare’, to give about 500 million poor people annual health cover of 500,000 rupees ($7,200) to treat serious illness.

Critics say that while Modi has adopted several initiatives, his tenure has been marred by violence against Muslim cattle traders and economic jolts through a countrywide ban on high-value notes and the botched launch of a unified taxation system.

Businesses have embraced the unified Goods and Services Tax after initial hiccups, Modi said in his speech.

In his 80-minute speech, Modi said the pace of building highways, electrifying villages and building toilets has increased since his landslide 2014 election win that devastated the main opposition Congress party.

Congress, which had ruled India for decades, is now trying to unify the opposition to challenge Modi, whose personal ratings remain high despite recent election setbacks.

"We want to progress more. There is no question of stopping or getting tired on the way," Modi said. 

More women than ever will contest November’s mid-term elections with record numbers winning party nominations for America’s highest offices.

After primary races in four states on Tuesday, there are around 182 female nominees for the House of Representatives and 11 women named as candidates for state governors. 

The results in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington mean female candidates have now broken records for gubernatorial and House nominations.

Victories for Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Laura Kelly in Kansas mean 11 states will have women on the ballot in governorship races – one more than the previous 1994 record.

Ms Whitmer, who beat Abdul El-Sayed – a physician hoping to become America’s first Muslim governor – is leading an all-women ticket for the Democrats at state level in Michigan.

Governors are the state’s highest executives and have control over huge spending budgets.

At least 182 female major party nominees will run for the House of Representatives, Congress’ lower chamber, beating the record of 167 from 2016. 

A record number of women have also run for the Senate this year, with 42 women –  24 Democrats and 18 Republicans – registering to be candidates as of June 1, according to figures from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP).

Midterms

Debbie Walsh, director of CAWP, said: "This has been an election season of records for women candidates, and [Tuesday night] continues that story."

One candidate –  Rashida Tlaib – is certain to become the first Muslim woman in Congress.  Ms Tlaib won the Democratic nomination and will not be opposed by the Republicans in November’s election. 

She will also be the first Palestinian-American congresswoman.

Sharice Davids won a tightly fought Democratic primary in Kansas to becoming the state’s first Native American and gay nominee for Congress.

There will be two all-female races in Washington state. Democrat Lisa Brown faces Cathy McMorris Rodgers for a seat in the House, while Republican Susan Hutchison will take on incumbent Senator Maria Cantwell.

Earlier this year, Stacey Abrams made headlines as she became the Democratic candidate for Georgia’s governorship with  75 per cent of the vote in the Democratic primary. 

If she wins on November 6, Ms Abrams will be the state’s first black female governor.

Ms Abrams has already made history as both the first black candidate and the first woman to be nominated by a major party in the southern state. 

However the 44-year-old lawyer faces a tough battle – a Democrat has not been elected governor in the deeply conservative state since 2003.

Ms Abrams, who won  in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, said:  “We are writing the next chapter of Georgia’s history, where no one is unseen, no one is unheard and no one is uninspired”.

Three other southern states –  Kentucky, Arkansas and Texas – also elected female nominees in their May Democratic primaries.