A trustee for the family of George Floyd, a Black man who died on May 25 after a Minneapolis policeman knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, has sued the city and four police officers in federal court, seeking monetary damages. The lawsuit was filed at U.S. District Court in Minneapolis by Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney who has represented other families in high-profile police killings of Black men, and co-counsel Antonio Romanucci. Crump, speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, described it as a "wrongful death, civil rights lawsuit." Floyd's death triggered nationwide street protests against police brutality…

ZOE TABARY ALMOST one billion people around the world fear losing their homes or land within five years, with owners and tenants in Burkina Faso and the Philippines the most concerned, a survey of 140 nations showed on Wednesday. About one in five adults (19%) worry that their housing, fields or other land could be taken away from them in the near future, hampering their ability to invest or plan, according to the Prindex global property rights index. "Land and housing insecurity is a huge issue hiding in plain sight," said Malcolm Childress, executive director of the Global Land Alliance,…

RICHARD COWAN AMERICAN President Donald Trump on Tuesday praised U.S. police departments and downplayed police violence against Black people, saying "more white people" are killed by police officers. During a CBS News interview, the Republican president was asked why Black people were still dying at the hands of law enforcement. "And so are white people, so are white people. What a terrible question to ask. So are white people. More white people, by the way. More white people," Trump responded. The May 25 death of African-American George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis sparked protests across the United States…

SONIA ELKS AID agencies are facing calls to deal openly with racism within their ranks, as almost one-third of leading humanitarian organisations refused to give details about complaints against staff to an exclusive Thomson Reuters Foundation survey. Organisations globally are facing pressure from staff to do more to confront racism amid global protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in the United States. The Thomson Reuters Foundation asked 24 non-government organisations (NGOs), charities and United Nations agencies how many racism complaints they received in the past year, and if staff had faced disciplinary action in the…

GAYLE ISSA GLOBAL coronavirus infections passed 13 million on Monday, according to a Reuters tally, marking another milestone in the spread of the disease which has killed more than half a million people in seven months. The first case was reported in China in early January and it took three months to reach one million cases. It has taken just five days to climb to 13 million cases from 12 million recorded on July 8. The number of cases is around triple that of severe influenza illnesses recorded annually, according to the World Health Organization. There have been more than…

STEVE HOLLAND  PRESIDENT Donald Trump, who has avoided wearing a mask in public even as the coronavirus pandemic spread, has donned at a military medical facility outside Washington where he was to meet with wounded soldiers and front-line health-care workers. The visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center marked Trump's first public appearance with a face-covering since the virus began sweeping across the United States earlier this year. Trump had previously refused to wear a mask in public or ask other Americans to do so, saying it was a personal choice, although he had said he would if he…

SARAH N LYNCH, STEVE HOLLAND  and ERIC BEECH US President Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of his longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone, sparing him from prison after he was convicted of lying under oath to lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump's decision to commute Stone's sentence days before he was due to report to prison marked the Republican president's most assertive intervention to protect an associate in a criminal case and his latest use of executive clemency to benefit an ally. Democrats condemned Trump's action as an assault on the rule of law. "Roger…

FACED with sliding poll numbers and multiple national crises, President Donald Trump is set to hold his latest rally on Saturday in New Hampshire, a state he narrowly lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hopes to flip this year. The rally will take place at an airport hangar in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as coronavirus cases surge across the country and public health and state officials advise against large gatherings. A rally Trump held last month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, likely contributed to a rise in the number of rising coronavirus cases there, a local health official said on Wednesday.…

ERIC M JOHNSON BOEING Co has reached settlement agreements in more than 90% of the wrongful death claims filed in federal court after the 2018 crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX in Indonesia that killed all 189 people on board, a court filing on Tuesday said. The fatal crash, followed within five months by another 737 MAX jetliner in Ethiopia, led to the worldwide grounding of the best-selling model and a corporate crisis that has included hundreds of lawsuits alleging the jet was unsafe and separate probes by the Justice Department and U.S. lawmakers. Boeing has been racing to…

ZOFEEN T EBRAHIM  MARRIED as a child and wrongly imprisoned for nearly 20 years over the murder of her husband in Pakistan, Rani Bibi is now free and fighting for compensation in a test case for thousands of other false convictions. Bibi was only 13 when police arrested her for killing her husband whom she remembers "as a good man". Her parents and her brother were also arrested and jailed as they all were the last people to be seen with her husband when the couple was visiting her family's home. But his body - with a head injury from…