WORLD - The African Mirror

Jul

15

2023

Russia’s Putin snubs Prigozhin, Biden jokes about poison

WORLD

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin offered Wagner mercenaries the opportunity to keep fighting at a meeting just days after their failed mutiny but suggested Yevgeny Prigozhin be moved aside in favour of a different commander, the Kommersant newspaper said. Putin initially said he would crush the June 23-24 mutiny, comparing it to the wartime turmoil that ushered in the revolutions of 1917, but hours later a deal was clinched to allow Prigozhin and some of his fighters to go to Belarus. Mystery surrounds the fate of that deal as well as the future of Wagner, one of the world's most battle-hardened mercenary…

Jul

15

2023

By JAMES OLIPHANT

Trump a no-show at Iowa evangelical forum, leaving opening for 2024 rivals

WORLD

REPUBLICAN contenders for president will address a gathering of social conservatives in the early nominating state of Iowa, but the event will be most notable for the 2024 candidate who will not be there: the front-runner, Donald Trump. Trump’s absence has rankled the organizers of the forum, the Christian advocacy group The Family Leader, who argue that the former president is blowing off an opportunity to court Iowa’s evangelicals, a key Republican voting bloc. Iowa will hold the first Republican nominating contest on January 15, when voters will select their preferences to take on Democratic President Joe Biden in November…

Jul

15

2023

By SAM TOBIN

Kevin Spacey tells London court sexual assault accusation is ‘absolute bollocks’

WORLD

KEVIN Spacey described an allegation he grabbed a man's crotch as "absolute bollocks", in combative exchanges with prosecutors at the Oscar-winning actor's sexual assault trial. Spacey, 63, has pleaded not guilty at London's Southwark Crown Court to 12 charges of sexual offences allegedly committed against four men in Britain between 2001 and 2013. The offences allegedly took place at a time when he was mainly living and working in Britain, including from 2003 as artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London. The four accusers have said Spacey aggressively groped them and, in the case of one complainant, performed oral sex…

Jul

14

2023

By GUY FAULCONBRIDGE

Russian general says top military brass betrayed soldiers fighting in Ukraine

WORLD

A Russian general said he had been dismissed as a commander after telling the military leadership about the dire situation at the front in Ukraine, where he said Russian soldiers had been stabbed in the back by the failings of the top military brass. After the June 24 mutiny by Wagner mercenaries, the biggest domestic challenge to the Russian state in decades, President Vladimir Putin has so far kept Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov in their jobs. Major General Ivan Popov, who commanded the 58th Combined Arms Army, said in a voice message…

Jul

14

2023

By LISA RICHWINE

Hollywood actors poised to strike, join writers on picket lines

WORLD

NEGOTIATORS for Hollywood's actors' union unanimously recommended a strike after talks with studios broke down, setting the stage for performers to join writers on picket lines as early as Thursday and disrupt scores of shows and movies. The SAG-AFTRA union said its national board would vote on a strike order on Thursday morning. If approved, Hollywood studios would face their first dual work stoppage in 63 years and be forced to shut down productions across the United States. Both SAG-AFTRA — Hollywood's largest union, with 160,000 members — and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are demanding increases in base pay…

Jul

14

2023

By The African Mirror

Syrians still endure poverty despite relative calm and renewed Arab ties

WORLD

NESMA Daher survived years of war in a Damascus suburb that was on the frontlines of Syria's conflict. But well after the guns fell silent in her area and even as her country's regional isolation thaws, she says life only gets harder. A widow from Douma, a rebel-held town until 2018 when government forces took it back, Daher says sometimes she can only feed her four children one meal a day. The family survives on cash assistance from an NGO equivalent to about $7 a month. Her youngest son, 12, has quit school to work at a factory. "From the…

Jul

13

2023

By JONATHAN STEMPEL

US says it no longer deems Donald Trump immune from E. Jean Carroll lawsuit

WORLD

DONALD Trump suffered a legal defeat as the U.S. government reversed its earlier position that the former president could be immune from the writer E. Jean Carroll's $10 million defamation lawsuit against him. In a letter to Trump's and Carroll's lawyers, the U.S. Department of Justice said it no longer believed Trump acted within the scope of his office and employment as president in June 2019, when he denied having raped Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. The department late in Trump's presidency had reached an opposite conclusion, which the Biden administration adopted to the…

Jul

13

2023

By GUY FAULCONBRIDGE and FILIPP LEBEDEV

Exclusive: Russia is rotting in absurdity and repression, veteran rights campaigner says

WORLD

RUSSIA is decaying in a potent brew of absurdity and repression that is comparable to the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union, Oleg Orlov, one of Russia's most respected human rights campaigners, told Reuters. Orlov, 70, is on trial in Russia for articles he published last year which cast Russia as a "fascist" state seeking revenge for the perceived humiliations of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. He faces up to three years in prison. One of the leaders of the Memorial rights group, which won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 a year after…

Jul

13

2023

By ROBERT MULLER and JAN LOPATKA

Milan Kundera, author of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, dies at 94

WORLD

CZECH-BORN writer Milan Kundera, the author of the novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" who lived nearly five decades in Paris after emigrating in disillusionment from his Communist-ruled homeland, has died at the age of 94. The Moravian Library (MZK) in the Czech city of Brno, which houses Kundera's personal collection, said he died in his Paris apartment on Tuesday after a long illness. Kundera won global accolades for the way he depicted themes and characters that floated between the mundane reality of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his works "reached…

Jul

12

2023

By THE AFRICAN MIRROR

North Korea condemns US plan to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as ‘criminal’

WORLD

NORTH Korea condemned U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as a "criminal act" and demanded an immediate withdrawal of the plan. The fact that Biden had admitted it was a difficult decision showed he was aware of the disastrous consequences of the use of cluster munitions, North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency. "I, on behalf of the DPRK government, vehemently denounce the U.S. decision to offer WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to Ukraine as a dangerous criminal act to bring a new calamity…