Month: April 2023

Relatives and friends cried next to coffins Sunday as they buried children and others killed in a Russian missile attack on this central Ukrainian city, while fighting claimed more lives elsewhere. Almost all of the 23 victims of the attack Friday died when two missiles slammed into an apartment building in Uman. Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said six children were among the dead. Mykhayl Shulha, 6, cried and hugged relatives next to the coffin of his 11-year-old sister Sofia Shulha during Sunday’s funeral, while others paid respects to a 17-year-old boy. As mourners held candles, crossed themselves and sang, …

READ MORE

Pope Francis said Sunday the Vatican was willing to help facilitate the return of Ukrainian children taken to Russia during the war. He said, the Holy See had already helped mediate some prisoner exchanges and would do “all that is humanly possible” to reunite families. “All human gestures help. Gestures of cruelty don’t help,” Francis said during an airborne news conference en route home from Hungary. Francis also revealed a secret peace “mission” was underway. However, he gave no details when asked whether he spoke about peace initiatives during his talks in Budapest this weekend with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor …

READ MORE

A large high-powered Russian delegation of 36 legal and human rights experts has failed to persuade a United Nations watchdog committee that the government has complied with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Russia was one of six state parties to the convention whose record came under review by the 18-member Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, CERD, during its latest three-week session, which ended Friday. The committee, which monitors member states’ implementation of the convention, expressed deep concern about “the grave human rights violations committed during the ongoing armed conflict by the …

READ MORE

China’s Ding Liren was crowned on Sunday as the 17th world chess champion in a tense match against Russian-born Ian Nepomniachtchi in Astana, Kazakhstan, in the last chapter of an odds-defying sequence of events. Thirty-year-old Ding won the rapid chess playoff by 2.5 points to 1.5, capitalizing on Nepomniachtchi’s mistakes in time trouble in the last of the shorter-format games, following the pair’s 7-7 tie in a psychological battle across 14 longer “classical” games. “One Ding to rule em all,” fellow grandmaster Anish Giri wrote on Twitter in honor of the new champion. Ding’s triumph means China holds both the …

READ MORE

On his third and final day of his Hungary trip, Pope Francis celebrated Mass on Sunday in Budapest before tens of thousands of people in the historic Kossuth Lajos Square. Hungarian President Kataline Novak and Prime Minister Viktor Orban were among the attendees. Throughout his trip in Hungary, Francis has urged Hungarians to remember and take in refugees from Ukraine and also refugees from the Middle East and Africa who are arriving on Europe’s shores in record numbers. While Europeans have not always been charitable or receptive to the migrants from Africa and the Middle East, they have been more …

READ MORE

Copies of a climate change petition along with photos of the signatories lay at the foot of the altar. Meters away, a dozen activists were undergoing street protest training. Other members of the Letzte Generation (Last Generation) group were having a vegan brunch buffet in the pews, minutes before they were to march out through the imposing doors of Berlin’s St. Thomas Church for their latest demonstration to press the government to do more for the climate.     The Protestant church has become the unlikely staging point for the climate activists in their latest two-week campaign to bring Berlin’s …

READ MORE

It will be a coronation of many faiths and many languages. King Charles III, keen to show that he can be a unifying figure for everyone in the United Kingdom, will be crowned in a ceremony that will for the first time include the active participation of faiths other than the Church of England. Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh leaders will take part in various aspects of the coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office said Saturday, as it revealed details of a service it described as an act of Christian worship that will reflect contemporary society. The ceremony also …

READ MORE

Russia on Saturday promised it would respond harshly to what it said was Poland’s illegal seizure of its embassy school in Warsaw, an act it called a flagrant violation of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations. Polish state-run news channel TVP Info earlier reported that police showed up outside the Russian embassy school in Warsaw on Saturday morning. When asked about the incident, a Polish foreign ministry spokesperson told Reuters the building housing the embassy school belonged to the Polish state. Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the Polish authorities had entered the embassy school’s grounds with the …

READ MORE

Turkey’s first astronaut will travel to the International Space Station by the end of the year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday. Air force pilot Alper Gezeravci, 43, was selected to be the first Turkish citizen in space. His backup is Tuva Cihangir Atasever, 30, an aviation systems engineer at Turkish defense contractor Roketsan. Erdogan made the announcement at the Teknofest aviation and space fair in Istanbul, the president’s first public appearance since falling ill during a TV interview on Tuesday. He appeared alongside Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and Libya’s interim prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh. “Our friend, who will …

READ MORE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy carries a pistol and would have fought to the death with his inner circle had the Russians stormed his Kyiv headquarters at the start of the war, he said in an interview shown on Saturday.  “I know how to shoot. Could you imagine (a headline like) ‘The President of Ukraine is taken captive by Russians?’ This is a disgrace. I believe this would be a disgrace,” he told the 1+1 television channel.  In the first days after the February 24, 2022, invasion, Ukrainian officials said Russian intelligence units tried to break into Kyiv but were defeated …

READ MORE

“We thought we could die.” The Russian invasion had just begun when Nancy Pelosi made a surprise visit to Ukraine, the House speaker then the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to lead a congressional delegation to Kyiv. Pelosi and the lawmakers were ushered under the cloak of secrecy into the capital city, an undisclosed passage that even to this day she will not divulge. “It was very, it was dangerous,” Pelosi told The Associated Press before Sunday’s one-year anniversary of that trip. “We never feared about it, but we thought we could die because we’re visiting a serious, serious war zone,” …

READ MORE

A walrus that became a global celebrity last year after it was seen frolicking and basking in a Oslo fjord before it was euthanized by the authorities has been honored with a bronze sculpture in Norway.  The life-size sculpture by Norwegian artist Astri Tonoian was unveiled Saturday at the Oslo marina not far from the place where the actual 600-kilogram (1,300-pound) mammal was seen resting and relaxing during the summer of 2022.  The walrus, named Freya, quickly became a popular attraction among Oslo residents but Norwegian authorities later made a decision to euthanize it — causing public outrage — because …

READ MORE