Tag Archives: WorldNews

US House passes Democratic police reform bill

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The US House of Representatives has approved a sweeping Democratic bill on police reform. Lawmakers passed the legislation largely along party lines, and the bill faces opposition when it reaches the Senate.

Call to block key Bolsonaro ally from World Bank job

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Abraham Weintraub is under investigation for alleged racism and spreading fake news, reports say

The World Bank is facing growing pressure to block Brazilian attempts to hand one of Jair Bolsonaro’s most notorious allies a plum £210,000-a-year job at its headquarters in Washington.

Abraham Weintraub, who until last week was the Brazilian president’s hard-right education minister, flew to the US, possibly using a diplomatic passport to skirt a Covid-19 ban on travellers from Brazil.

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Virus-free Vietnam not ready to welcome international tourists

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HANOI • Despite successfully containing its Covid-19 outbreak, Vietnam has no plans to open up to international tourists yet, fearing that doing so could lead to a second wave of infections, the Prime Minister has said.

Thanks to an aggressive, targeted testing programme and a centralised quarantine system, the South-east Asian country has contained its infection numbers to a relatively low 352 cases, most of whom have recovered. There have been no reported deaths.

“There is no story of rushing to open the doors,” Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said in a statement posted to the government website on Wednesday.

He added: “Vietnam is not yet ready to welcome back international tourists. Foreign experts, high-level workers and investors in Vietnam are welcomed but will be closely monitored.”

Moves allowing Vietnamese people to work abroad will also be watched closely.

Highly-skilled foreign experts such as engineers have been allowed to enter Vietnam on special flights and quarantine at hotels in a bid to keep the economy afloat throughout the global pandemic.

Mr Phuc said the frequency of such flights should be increased.

For more than two months, Vietnam has reported no community transmission of the coronavirus.

Earlier this month, Vietnam said it was planning to resume flights to some virus-free countries that had registered no cases of coronavirus for 30 days or more.

Other South-east Asian countries with slowing rates of infection, such as Malaysia and Thailand, are also considering travel bubble arrangements in the months ahead. Countries included in these arrangements are China, South Korea and Japan.

Thailand, which has gone 31 days without a domestic transmission, will allow entry of some short-term business travellers and medical tourists from next month.

However, Vietnam’s aviation authority has cautioned against the gradual resumption of international flights until the fourth quarter.

NO RUSH

There is no story of rushing to open the doors. Vietnam is not yet ready to welcome back international tourists. Foreign experts, high-level workers and investors in Vietnam are welcomed but will be closely monitored.

VIETNAM’S PRIME MINISTER NGUYEN XUAN PHUC

  • 352

  • Number of infections in Vietnam, most of whom have recovered.

REUTERS, BLOOMBERG

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Brazil registers 39,483 new cases of coronavirus, 1,141 deaths

Brazil recorded 39,483 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the past 24 hours as well as 1,141 deaths, the Health Ministry said on Thursday.

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FILE PHOTO: Workers of the Rio Pax funeral home remove the body of Maria do Perpetuo Socorro Lavareda, 77, who died from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), from a hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil June 23, 2020. REUTERS/Pilar Olivares/File Photo

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Brazil recorded 39,483 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the past 24 hours as well as 1,141 deaths, the Health Ministry said on Thursday.

Brazil has registered more than 1.2 million cases since the pandemic began, while cumulative deaths total 54,971, according to the ministry.

Reporting by Pedro Fonseca and Jake Spring; editing by Grant McCool

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

San Jose mayor releases extensive police reform plan to investigate officers, audit spending

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Following through on a promise to reform the city’s police department while resisting activists’ demands to gouge its budget, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo on Wednesday unveiled a nine-point plan to strengthen oversight and accountability of the force.

Liccardo’s plan calls for conducting a full audit of the police department’s $449 million budget so officials can identify where potential cuts could be made without severely reducing services. The proposed reforms would include creating a public demographic database of everyone stopped and detained within the city, banning the use of rubber bullets entirely and transferring the authority to investigate police misconduct from the department’s Internal Affairs unit to an outside party, such as the independent police auditor.

“This isn’t the final word on meaningful reform in San Jose,” Liccardo said in an interview about the plan. “This is just part one of the conversations that we know will last many weeks and months.”

The mayor’s new proposal comes about three weeks after San Jose residents took to the streets to join nationwide protests over police killings and racism in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Citing a need to crack down on incidents of violence and burglary during the first few days of demonstrations, city officials instituted a citywide curfew order and officers clad in riot gear fired rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds — at times without distinguishing between peaceful protesters and passive bystanders and those potentially committing crimes.

The officers’ hostile response to protesters — marked by Officer Jared Yuen’s taunts of “Let’s get this motherf—er” and “Shut up bitch” — prompted many San Jose residents to join a growing nationwide chorus demanding that elected officials defund law enforcement agencies and divert the money toward community-led interventions and programs.

In contrast to city officials in Los Angeles and Minneapolis who heeded those calls, Liccardo rebuffed the outcry from hundreds of residents to defund San Jose’s police department, noting the force is already so small that some residents have been asking for more cops on the streets over the years. He said he favors reforms over slashing budgets.

In particular, the mayor cited data from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer showing that San Jose has less than half the ratio of officers to residents than both Los Angeles and San Francisco and less than a fifth than New York and Chicago.

Liccardo acknowledged that he’s “fairly confident” some residents will not think the plan goes far enough, but he said, “this is not about making everyone happy.”

“This is about taking significant steps forward on a path of reform that will put us well ahead of nearly every other city in the nation,” he said.

A summary of the mayor’s nine-point plan includes the following steps:

  1. Negotiate changes to the city’s contract with the Police Officers Association to improve transparency in the arbitration process for police accountability
  2. Conduct external, independent investigations of police misconduct
  3. Expand authority of the independent police auditor over use-of-force allegations
  4. Expand opportunities for the city’s children of color, including offering college scholarships to those who commit to serving as a police officer for several years
  5. Explore options for separating SJPD’s responsibilities between criminal and non-criminal matters
  6. Ban the use of rubber bullets and conduct a full review of the police department’s use-of-force policy
  7. Update the city charter to expand the mayor’s authority to oversee actions of the police chief and city manager
  8. Leverage data for better recruiting, training and early intervention
  9. Conduct a public audit of the police department’s budget and spending

The San Jose Police Department attempted to quell the concerns of some residents earlier this month by quickly instituting a ban on rubber bullets to disperse crowds and updating crowd-control training. But the department still allows rubber bullets to be fired in crowds, such as at protests, when an aggressor threatens to harm others.

Liccardo said dozens of accounts from journalists and non-violent protesters earlier this month showed that the projectiles are “a very imprecise tool, with a high probability of inaccuracy,” which is why he wants the city council to ban them entirely.

Liccardo’s proposal aims to serve as a road map for the city’s police department and city administrators to follow as they develop city policies and implement the reforms. Some measures in the nine-step plan, including further analysis of city policing data and exploring options to separate non-criminal and criminal response protocol, could be achieved with funding set aside in the city’s 2020-2021 budget that was finalized Tuesday night and a newly established Office of Racial Equality.

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The San Jose City Council next week is already expected to move forward with a November ballot measure that would expand the purview of the city’s independent police auditor to review complaints made within the department and enable largely unfettered access to police records. The IPA currently reviews citizen and community complaints made directly to them or internal affairs, but their scope does not cover incidents where police officers and employees initiate complaints against each other.

But other reforms, such as changes to the arbitration and investigation processes of police misconduct claims, may require additional funding sources not yet pinned down, as well as negotiations with the union that represents the city’s police force, the Police Officers Association.

“Given where we are today, we need to rethink the model and that’s going to take some time,” Liccardo said. “It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s going to require a lot of negotiation and community engagement.”

This story will be updated.