A Russian missile strike kills 41 people and wounds 180 others in the Ukrainian city of Poltava

A Russian missile strike kills 41 people and wounds 180 others in the Ukrainian city of Poltava
Two Russian ballistic missiles struck an educational facility and nearby hospital in a central-eastern region of Ukraine, killing at least 41 people and wounding 180 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday. (Reuters/File)
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Updated 03 September 2024
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A Russian missile strike kills 41 people and wounds 180 others in the Ukrainian city of Poltava

A Russian missile strike kills 41 people and wounds 180 others in the Ukrainian city of Poltava
  • The strike occurred in the city of Poltava, the capital of the region of the same name, officials said
  • “One of the buildings of the Institute of Communications was partially destroyed,” Zelensky said

KYIV: Two Russian ballistic missiles struck an educational facility and nearby hospital in a central-eastern region of Ukraine, killing at least 41 people and wounding 180 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday.
The strike occurred in the city of Poltava, the capital of the region of the same name, officials said. Poltava is located about 110 kilometers (70 miles) from the border with Russia and about 350 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Kyiv.
The strike appeared to be one of the deadliest carried out by Russian forces since the war began more than 900 days ago on Feb. 24, 2022.
“One of the buildings of the Institute of Communications was partially destroyed. People found themselves under the rubble. Many were saved,” Zelensky said in a video posted on his Telegram channel.
“All necessary services are involved in the rescue operation,” he added. He said he had ordered “a full and prompt investigation” into what happened. Zelensky didn’t provide any further details.
The missiles hit shortly after the air raid alert sounded, when many people were on their way to a bomb shelter, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said, describing the strike as “barbaric.”
Rescue crews and medics saved 25 people, 11 of them dug out from the rubble, a Defense Ministry statement said.


Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri declines award over New York museum’s keffiyeh ban

Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri declines award over New York museum’s keffiyeh ban
Updated 52 min 18 sec ago
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Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri declines award over New York museum’s keffiyeh ban

Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri declines award over New York museum’s keffiyeh ban
  • Across the world, protesters demanding an end to Israel’s war in Gaza have worn the black-and-white keffiyeh head scarf, a symbol of Palestinian self-determination
  • Last month, the art museum announced a policy prohibiting employees from wearing anything that expressed “political messages, slogans or symbols”

WASHINGTON: Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri declined to accept an award from New York City’s Noguchi Museum after it fired three employees for wearing keffiyeh head scarves, an emblem of Palestinian solidarity, following an updated dress code.
“Jhumpa Lahiri has chosen to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy,” the museum said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We respect her perspective and understand that this policy may or may not align with everyone’s views.” Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her book “Interpreter of Maladies.”
The New York Times first reported the news.

A demonstrator wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh stands next to members of the police in Los Angeles, California, on Sept. 24, 2024 as people protest against Israel's attacks on Palestinians. (Reuters)

Across the world, in protesters demanding an end to Israel’s war in Gaza have worn the black-and-white keffiyeh head scarf, a symbol of Palestinian self-determination.
Anti apartheid South African leader Nelson Mandela was also seen wearing the scarf on many occasions.
Israel’s supporters, on the other hand, say it signals backing extremism.
In November, three students of Palestinian descent in Vermont were shot in an attack. Two were wearing the keffiyeh.
Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly everyone there. It followed a deadly attack by Palestinian Hamas militants on Israel on Oct. 7.
Last month, the art museum — founded by Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi — announced a policy prohibiting employees from wearing anything that expressed “political messages, slogans or symbols.” Three employees were sacked.
Other people in the United States have also lost their jobs due to their stance on the Israel-Gaza war.
A New York City hospital fired a Palestinian American nurse in May after she called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” during an acceptance speech for an award. Israel denies genocide charges brought by South Africa at the World Court.


New York Mayor Adams indicted following corruption probe, New York Times reports

New York Mayor Adams indicted following corruption probe, New York Times reports
Updated 26 September 2024
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New York Mayor Adams indicted following corruption probe, New York Times reports

New York Mayor Adams indicted following corruption probe, New York Times reports
  • The probe focused on whether Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign conspired with a Brooklyn construction company to funnel foreign money into the campaign through a straw-donor scheme, according to the Times

NEW YORK: New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted after a federal corruption investigation, but the indictment is sealed and it is unclear what charges he will face, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
It was not immediately clear whether Adams would be arrested or voluntarily surrender. The charges are likely to be unsealed on Thursday, when Adams may appear in court.
The charges come after the FBI last November searched Adams’ electronic devices, and in the wake of a slew of resignations by top city officials in recent weeks as multiple federal corruption investigations entangle his administration.
A spokesman for the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan, which brought the charges, declined to comment. Adams’ lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One of his lawyers has said that the mayor, a Democrat, was cooperating with an investigation but did not say what it was about.
The case is likely to complicate any Adams bid for re-election in 2025. Other Democratic politicians, including New York City comptroller Brad Lander, plan to challenge Adams — once a key ally of Democratic President Joe Biden — for the party’s nomination.
The Times, citing a search warrant, reported in early November 2023 that federal authorities were investigating the possible acceptance by Adams’ 2021 campaign of illegal donations, including by the Turkish government.
The probe, conducted by the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan, focused on whether Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign conspired with a Brooklyn construction company to funnel foreign money into the campaign through a straw-donor scheme, the Times said.
Authorities have also sought information about Adams’ interactions with Israel, China, South Korea and Uzbekistan, according to the Times.
Adams, a former police officer, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and said he is cooperating with the probe. His lawyers said in a statement on Aug. 15 that they had conducted their own investigation into the matters prosecutors were probing and had not found evidence of illegal conduct by Adams.
“To the contrary, we have identified extensive evidence undermining the reported theories of federal prosecution as to the Mayor, which we have voluntarily shared with the US Attorney,” said the lawyers, Brendan McGuire and Boyd Johnson.
The largest US city has been in a state of political upheaval for the past month. Police Commissioner Edward Caban resigned on Sept. 12, a week after FBI agents seized his phone. Days later, Adams’ chief legal adviser resigned, saying she could “no longer effectively serve” in the position.
On Wednesday, the city’s public schools chancellor David Banks said he would retire at the end of the year, weeks after the Times reported his phones were seized by federal agents.


Russia’s adaptability to US sanctions stymied their effectiveness, economists say

Russia’s adaptability to US sanctions stymied their effectiveness, economists say
Updated 26 September 2024
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Russia’s adaptability to US sanctions stymied their effectiveness, economists say

Russia’s adaptability to US sanctions stymied their effectiveness, economists say
  • The report says that “while the count of sanctions is high, the tangible impact on Russia’s economy is less clear,” and “global cooperation is indispensable”

WASHINGTON: Waves of sanctions imposed by the Biden administration after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine haven’t inflicted the devastating blow to Moscow’s economy that some had expected. In a new report, two researchers are offering reasons why.
Oleg Itskhoki of Harvard University and Elina Ribakova of the Peterson Institute for International Economics argue that the sanctions should have been imposed more forcefully immediately after the invasion rather than in a piecemeal manner.
“In retrospect, it is evident that there was no reason not to have imposed all possible decisive measures against Russia from the outset once Russia launched the full scale invasion in February 2022,” the authors state in the paper. Still, “the critical takeaway is that sanctions are not a silver bullet,” Ribakova said on a call with reporters this week, to preview the study.
The researchers say Russia was able to brace for the financial penalties because of the lessons learned from sanctions imposed in 2014 after it invaded Crimea. Also, the impact was weakened by the failure to get more countries to participate in sanctions, with economic powers like China and India not included.
The report says that “while the count of sanctions is high, the tangible impact on Russia’s economy is less clear,” and “global cooperation is indispensable.”
The question of what makes sanctions effective or not is important beyond the Russia-Ukraine war. Sanctions have become critical tools for the United States and other Western nations to pressure adversaries to reverse actions and change policies while stopping short of direct military conflict.
The limited impact of sanctions on Russia has been clear for some time. But the report provides a more detailed picture of how Russia adapted to the sanctions and what it could mean for US sanctions’ effectiveness in the future.
The paper will be presented at the Brookings Institution next week.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US has sanctioned more than 4,000 people and businesses, including 80 percent of Russia’s banking sector by assets.
The Biden administration acknowledges that sanctions alone cannot stop Russia’s invasion — it has also sent roughly $56 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the 2022 invasion. And many policy experts say the sanctions are not strong enough, as evidenced by the growth of the Russian economy. US officials have said Russia has turned to China for machine tools, microelectronics and other technology that Moscow is using to produce missiles, tanks, aircraft and other weaponry for use in the war.
A Treasury representative pointed to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s remarks in July during the Group of 20 finance ministers meetings, where she called actions against Russia “unprecedented.”
“We continue cracking down on Russian sanctions evasion and have strengthened and expanded our ability to target foreign financial institutions and anyone else around the world supporting Russia’s war machine,” she said.
Still, Russia has been able to evade a $60 price cap on its oil exports imposed by the US and the other Group of Seven democracies supporting Ukraine. The cap is enforced by barring Western insurers and shipping companies from handling oil above the cap. Russia has been able to dodge the cap by assembling its own fleet of aging, used tankers that do not use Western services and transport 90 percent of its oil.
The US pushed for the price cap as a way of cutting into Moscow’s oil profits without knocking large amounts of Russian oil off the global market and pushing up oil prices, gasoline prices and inflation. Similar concerns kept the European Union from imposing a boycott on most Russian oil for almost a year after Russia invaded Ukraine.
G-7 leaders have agreed to engineer a $50 billion loan to help Ukraine, paid for by the interest earned on profits from Russia’s frozen central bank assets sitting mostly in Europe as collateral. However, the allies have not agreed on how to structure the loan.


Harris attacks ‘biggest loser’ Trump on US economy

Harris attacks ‘biggest loser’ Trump on US economy
Updated 26 September 2024
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Harris attacks ‘biggest loser’ Trump on US economy

Harris attacks ‘biggest loser’ Trump on US economy
  • Warns that Trump’s plans to bring back huge tariffs on foreign imports would hurt middle class Americans in their wallets
  • Vowed to “chart a new way forward” in a speech in Pittsburgh, with her rhetoric focusing on lowering prices for Americans

PITTSBURGH: Kamala Harris blasted Donald Trump as the “biggest loser” on the economy and a friend of billionaires Wednesday as the election rivals laid out competing plans on the top issue for many US voters.
In a speech on the economy and then again in her first major solo interview, the Democrat warned that Trump’s plans to bring back huge tariffs on foreign imports would hurt middle class Americans in their wallets.
Republican Trump for his part doubled down on his protectionist vision — but spent as much time on threatening to blow Iran to “smithereens” after US intelligence warned of threats from Tehran against his life.
The vice president and the former president are neck-and-neck in the polls and are both reaching out to undecided voters on key issues like the economy with less than six weeks until election day.
Harris vowed to “chart a new way forward” in a speech in Pittsburgh, an industrial city in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, with her rhetoric focusing on lowering prices for Americans.
“For Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers. Not those who actually build them. Not those who wire them. Not those who mop the floors,” she said.
She said nearly 200,000 factory jobs moved abroad during Trump’s time in the White House, “making Trump one of the biggest losers ever on manufacturing.”
In her interview with the left-leaning MSNBC, Harris then criticized the tariff plans that Trump has laid out over the past two days, which would be a return to the policies of the Republican’s first term in office.
“You don’t just throw around the idea of tariffs across the board,” said Harris. “He’s just not very serious.”
The interview was Harris’s first on her own since replacing US President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in July. She gave a joint interview with running mate Tim Walz in August.

Trump’s campaign said her speech was “full of lies” and that she had already had three and a half years as part of the Biden administration to tackle problems like low prices.
The Republican is making similar pledges to boost American manufacturing, based largely on his plans to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports.
“You’re going to have protection from them coming in, because we’re going to put on from 50 to 200 percent tariffs,” Trump told supporters in Mint Hill, North Carolina — another crucial battleground state.
But the ex-commander-in-chief spent a good part of his speech talking about the threats to his life — from the two assassination attempts he has escaped in the space of two months to threats by Iran.
“If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” Trump said.
Trump meanwhile plans to return on October 5 to the Pennsylvania town of Butler where a gunman made an attempt on his life at a rally in July, his campaign said Wednesday.
A gunman accused of planning to kill Trump at his Florida golf course just over a week ago, Ryan Routh, was indicted Tuesday for the attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate.
The twin assassination attempts came amid one of the most dramatic US election campaigns in modern political history, in a dizzying chain of events since a disastrous debate in June led to Biden quitting the White House race over concerns about his age.
Biden told ABC talk show “The View” on Wednesday that he was now “at peace with my decision” — even if he insisted he could still have beaten Trump.
The outgoing president criticized Trump, saying there was “not a social redeeming value” to the Republican, and said his advice to Harris to win was to “be herself.”
 


Pope Francis expels a bishop and 9 other people from a Peru movement over ‘sadistic’ abuses

Pope Francis expels a bishop and 9 other people from a Peru movement over ‘sadistic’ abuses
Updated 26 September 2024
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Pope Francis expels a bishop and 9 other people from a Peru movement over ‘sadistic’ abuses

Pope Francis expels a bishop and 9 other people from a Peru movement over ‘sadistic’ abuses
  • Last month, the pope expelled Luis Figari, founder of the group called Sodalitium of Christian Life, after probers found that he had sodomized his recruits
  • Pedro Salinas, in the 2015 book “Half Monks, Half Soldiers” that he co-authored by with journalist Paola Ugaz, detailed the twisted practices of the Sodalitium

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis took the unusual decision Wednesday to expel 10 people – a bishop, priests and laypeople — from a troubled Catholic movement in Peru after a Vatican investigation uncovered “sadistic” abuses of power, authority and spirituality.
The move against the leadership of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, followed Francis’ decision last month to expel the group’s founder, Luis Figari, after he was found to have sodomized his recruits.
It was announced by the Peruvian Bishops Conference, which posted a statement from the Vatican embassy on its website that attributed the expulsions to a “special” decision taken by Francis.
The statement was astonishing because it listed abuses uncovered by the Vatican investigation that have rarely if ever been punished canonically — such as hacking someone’s communications — and cited the people the pope held responsible.
According to the statement, the Vatican investigators uncovered physical abuses “including with sadism and violence,” sect-like abuses of conscience, spiritual abuse, abuses of authority, economic abuses in administering church money and the “abuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism.”
The latter was presumably aimed at a Sodalitium journalist who has attacked critics of the movement on social media.
Figari founded the SCV, as it is known, in 1971 as a lay community to recruit “soldiers for God,” one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America, starting in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru.
Victims of Figari’s abuses complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011, though other claims against him reportedly date to 2000. But neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until one of the victims, Pedro Salinas, wrote a book along with journalist Paola Ugaz detailing the twisted practices of the Sodalitium in 2015, entitled “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.”

Front page of the Lima-based Spanish-language newspaper Peru 21 featuring the expulsion of Solidatium founder Luis Figari from the Roman Catholic church. The main story says, "The fall of the abuser". (X: @valienteslatam)

An outside investigation ordered by Sodalitium later determined that Figari was “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation” of Sodalitium’s members.

The investigation, published in 2017, found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another. He liked to watch them “experience pain, discomfort and fear,” and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them, the report found.
Still, the Holy See declined to expel Figari from the movement in 2017 and merely ordered him to live apart from the Sodalitium community in Rome and cease all contact with it. The Vatican was seemingly tied in knots by canon law that did not foresee such punishments for founders of religious communities who weren’t priests. Victims were outraged.
But according to the findings of the latest Vatican investigation, the abuses went beyond Figari. They included Sodalitium clergy and also involved harassing and hacking the communications of their victims, all while covering up crimes committed as part of their official duties, according to the statement.
The investigation was carried out by the Vatican’s top sex crimes investigators, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, who traveled to Lima last year to take testimony from victims.
The highest-ranking person ordered expelled was Archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren, whom Francis already forced to resign as bishop of Piura in April over his record, after he sued Salinas and Ugaz for their reporting.
In addition to Figari’s own abuses, their reporting had exposed the alleged forced eviction of peasants on lands in Eguren’s diocese by a Sodalitium-linked real estate developer.
Ugaz, the journalist, welcomed the expulsions and said the reference to Sodalitium hacking referred to her: She said her communications had been hacked in 2023 after she reported on the Sodalitium’s off-shore holdings and other financial dealings, and said she believed the group was trying to identify her sources.
“It is a demonstration that in Peru, the survivors would never have found justice and reparation (without Bertomeo and Scicluna) because the Sodalitium is an organization with a lot of political, social and economic power,” she said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Salinas, for his part, repeated that the group should be dissolved entirely and that some key figures were not included on the list.
“It’s very good news after 24 years of impunity,” he said in a message to AP. “It is to be hoped that this historic and memorable news is only the first of more, perhaps more impactful than what we know today.”
The release of such detailed information by the Vatican was highly unusual for an institution that is known more for secrecy, opacity and turning a blind eye to even obvious church crimes.
It is unclear how exactly the expulsions can be enforced or what they will mean in practical terms, especially for the laypeople involved. But at a minimum, the very public announcement would suggest that at least for this particular group, Francis was willing to take an unorthodox approach to interpreting the church’s in-house laws to send a message.
“To take such a disciplinary decision, consideration was given to the scandal that was produced by the number and gravity of the abuses that were denounced by victims, which are particularly contrary to the balanced and liberating experience of the evangelical councils,” the Vatican embassy statement said in explaining the rationale for the punishments.
The Vatican statement said the Peruvian bishops joined Francis in “seeking the forgiveness of the victims” while calling on the troubled movement to initiate a journey of justice and reparation.
There was no immediate response to a request for comment from the Sodalitium.