Month: April 2023

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar pledged Sunday to intensify efforts with his British counterpart Rishi Sunak to restore power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and hopes to break the deadlock there in the next few months. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has said it will not drop a yearlong boycott of the devolved assembly in protest at post-Brexit trade rules without further changes to a deal struck by the United Kingdom and the European Union in February to ease the trade barriers. London has said it will not renegotiate any part of its new agreement. “We put a huge amount of …

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The residents of the German city of Hamburg have been warned that toxins from  a warehouse fire in the city of Rothenburgsort, a few kilometers southeast of Hamburg are headed their way. Reuters reports that despite not knowing just how toxic the fumes may be, authorities have decided to evacuate 140 Hamburg residents, while other Hamburg residents have been instructed to stay home with their doors and window closed.   The fire erupted early Sunday and continued to burn Sunday afternoon, despite scores of firefighters battling the blaze. The warehouse contents were not immediately clear. Some information in this report …

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Pope Francis opened a celebration of Mass on Easter Sunday joined by dozens of prelates and tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square, where spring flowers made the vast space bright. made bright by spring flowers. Orange-red tulips, yellow sprays of forsythia and daffodils, and other colorful seasonal blooms were transported in trucks from the Netherlands on Saturday and set up in planters to decorate the Vatican square, which quickly filled up Sunday with Rome residents and Holy Week visitors to the city. Some 45,000 people had gathered by the start of the mid-morning Mass, according …

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A missile fired from Ukrainian-held territory was shot down over the Black Sea town of Feodosia in Russian-controlled Crimea, the Moscow-installed head of Crimea’s administration said Saturday. Russia’s campaign to “severely degrade” Ukraine’s energy system this winter has probably failed, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a post on Twitter Saturday. Thirty-one children “kidnapped by the Russians from Kherson and Kharkiv regions” are back in Ukraine after being separated from their parents for several months. One day after 31 children were returned to Ukraine, the head of Presidential Office of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, emphasized in a phone call with Amal Clooney, a …

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Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He turned 103 in March. Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. “Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted. Born …

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Millions of Christians around the world are celebrating Easter Sunday, the most holy day on the Christian calendar, commemorating Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead. At the Vatican, Pope Francis is set to deliver his twice-annual blessing, known by its Latin name “Urbi et Orbi” — “to the city and the world” — from St. Peter’s Basilica. During the blessing, which will begin at noon on the basilica’s outdoor central balcony, the Roman Catholic leader will address Christians around the world. Last year, the pope made a plea for an end to the “senseless” war in Ukraine, a conflict that …

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More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war. Mothers hugged sons and daughters as they crossed the border from Belarus into Ukraine Friday after a complex rescue mission involving travel across four countries. Dasha Rakk, a 13-year-old girl, said she and her twin sister had agreed to leave the Russian-occupied city of Kherson last year because of the war and go to a holiday camp in Crimea for …

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Joe Blewitt is just about the busiest man in Ballina. His phone rings constantly with calls from locals and the world’s media as he prepares to welcome a relative — U.S. President Joe Biden.  Biden is scheduled to travel to Ireland next week, with a stop in Ballina, the town from which one of his great-great grandfathers left for the United States in 1850. Blewitt, a distant cousin who first met Biden when he came to town as vice president in 2016, said the U.S. leader pledged to return once he’d won the presidency.  “He said, ‘I’m going to come …

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