UNITED STATES
Mick Jagger in treatment
The Rolling Stones are postponing their latest tour so Mick Jagger can receive medical treatment. The band on Saturday announced that Jagger was told by doctors that “he cannot go on tour at this time.” Jagger “is expected to make a complete recovery so that he can get back on stage as soon as possible,” the band said. No more details about 75-year-old Jagger’s condition were provided. The Stones’ No Filter Tour was expected to start on April 20 in Miami. “I really hate letting you down like this,” Jagger tweeted. “I’m devastated for having to postpone the tour but I will be working very hard to be back on stage as soon as I can.”
NICARAGUA
Four hurt during protest
A day after the government pledged to restore the right to protest, at least four people were hurt and 10 detained during a demonstration calling for the release of prisoners, the opposition said on Saturday. One of the wounded was linked to the government, said Silvia Gutierrez of the UNAB opposition umbrella group, who provided the toll and the number of detainees. The clash came a day after President Daniel Ortega’s government and the opposition reached an agreement to restore protest and press freedom rights while disarming paramilitaries, following a year-long political upheaval that left hundreds dead. The injuries occurred at a commercial center in downtown Managua, where more than 150 people had gathered ahead of a march.
ITALY
Anti-gay meet protested
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched in the northern city of Verona to protest a meeting of the US-based anti-gay, anti-abortion World Congress of Families. However, while the Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini addressed the congress, coalition partners the Five Star Movement denounced the organization’s values. A colorful procession of feminists and LGBT advocates from several European countries marched through the city center to state their opposition to the ultra-conservative policies of the movement. Advocates came from as far afield as the UK, Croatia, Germany, Poland and Switzerland to protest.
UNITED STATES
Priest faces federal trial
A priest who was captured after fleeing the country decades ago is facing a federal trial on charges that he sexually abused a New Mexico boy in the early 1990s at an air force base and veterans’ cemetery. Arthur Perrault, a one-time pastor in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has pleaded not guilty to aggravated sexual abuse and others counts. His trial is set to begin today in Santa Fe with jury selection. The church sent Perrault to New Mexico in the 1960s for treatment at a center for pedophile priests. Federal authorities have said in court documents that he had as many as eight other victims.
BRAZIL
Coup celebrations allowed
A federal judge on Saturday overruled a lower court ruling that had banned celebrations called by President Jair Bolsonaro to mark the 55th anniversary of the coup that instituted the country’s 1964-to-1985 military regime. Judge Ivani Silva da Luz banned celebrations on Friday, saying they were not “compatible with the process of democratic reconstruction.” However, Judge Maria do Carmo Cardoso on Saturday overruled Da Luz and said there were no “objective reasons” for prohibiting the celebrations.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the