Tag Archives: WorldNews

Germany rebukes Trump over criticism of Nato spending

4500.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Defence minister’s comments at Munich conference reflect deepening transatlantic rift

The Nato alliance is about decency and dependability, not just cash and contributions, Germany’s defence minister has said in a rebuke to Donald Trump over his insistence that European countries rapidly increase their defence spending.

Ursula von der Leyen told a gathering of defence ministers in Munich the alliance was about fairness in collective decision-making, and not just during military missions.

Continue reading…

El Salvador supreme court overturns 30-year sentence for a teen rape victim

4320.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz, 19, was found guilty in July 2017 of aggravated homicide after having a stillbirth

El Salvador’s supreme court has overturned a 30-year sentence for a teenage rape victim who was convicted of aggravated homicide after having a stillbirth.

Related: El Salvador teen rape victim sentenced to 30 years in prison after stillbirth

Continue reading…

German minister calls for ban on conversion therapy

4500.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

‘Homosexuality is not an illness,’ says health minister Jens Spahn

The German health minister, Jens Spahn, has said that he will seek to ban “conversion therapies” that claim to change sexual orientation. “Homosexuality is not an illness, which is why it does not need to be treated,” Spahn, who is gay himself, told the left-leaning Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung.

Related: ‘I still have flashbacks’: the ‘global epidemic’ of LGBT conversion therapy

Continue reading…

Paul Manafort should be sentenced to up to 24 years in prison, Mueller says

yesssssssss

2024.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Trump’s former campaign manager found guilty in August on eight counts of tax fraud, bank fraud and a foreign bank account

Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, should be sentenced to up to 24 years in prison, the special counsel Robert Mueller said on Friday.

Mueller’s team said in a court filing that Manafort should face a prison term of 235 to 292 months, or between 19 and a half and 24 and a half years, for “serious, longstanding, and bold” financial crimes.

Continue reading…

Revealed: Facebook enables ads to target users interested in ‘vaccine controversies’

Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in “vaccine controversies”, the Guardian has found.

2658.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Social media platforms under pressure by US congressman to crack down on anti-vaccine propaganda, citing Guardian investigations

Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in “vaccine controversies”, the Guardian has found.

Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in “Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines”, which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and “informed consent”, which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws.

Continue reading…

How a Slovakian neo-Nazi got elected

3000.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

In 2013, the far-right politician Marian Kotleba won a shock victory in regional elections. Four years later, he was voted out in a landslide. But now he’s running for president. By Shaun Walker

More from this series: The new populism

In December 2013, Marian Kotleba, a former secondary school teacher who had become Slovakia’s most notorious political extremist, arrived to begin work at his new office – the governor’s mansion in Banská Bystrica, the country’s sixth-largest city. Kotleba venerated Slovakia’s wartime Nazi puppet state, and liked to dress up in the uniforms of its shock troops, who had helped to round up thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Now, in the biggest electoral shock anyone could remember in the two decades since Slovakia’s independence, the people of Banská Bystrica and the surrounding region had voted for the 37-year-old Kotleba to be their governor. The four-storey mansion, with its vaulted ceilings and gilded pillars, would be his workplace for the next four years.

Banská Bystrica is a tranquil kind of place, with a genteel Mitteleuropa charm: the centre has pavement cafes, neat rows of burgher houses and a number of handsome baroque churches. At eight minutes to every hour, a clock in the central square plays a dainty jewellery-box jingle. And now, it had the dubious distinction of being the first place in modern Europe to have elected a person widely regarded as a neo-fascist to a major office.

Continue reading…

Home Office apologises to man, 90, told to fly to US to renew visa

4953.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Authorities refused spousal visa for over two years despite 25-year marriage to UK woman

A 90-year-old man with serious physical and mental health issues who was informed he had to return to the US to apply for a visa to live with his British wife in the UK has been told it was all a mistake.

Albert Dolbec, a US citizen, has been married to his wife Dawn, 84, for 25 years. For the past two and a half years, however, the Home Office had refused to issue him a spousal visa because, it said, he had entered the UK on a visitor’s visa and could not convert it inside the country.

Continue reading…

‘Executed by firing squad’: Video shows police firing a dozen shots at man

814.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=format

Cellphone footage sparks outrage days after six California officers fired at Willie McCoy, who had been asleep in his car

Video footage of police killing a 20-year-old California man in his car shows a group of officers firing more than a dozen shots at him, prompting his family to say he was “executed by a firing squad”.

Blurry cellphone footage of six officers shooting Willie McCoy, an aspiring rapper who had been sleeping in his car outside a Taco Bell, also revealed that multiple police officers shouted commands at the young man after hitting him with a barrage of bullets.

Continue reading…