UNITED STATES
Trump booed at baseball
President Donald Trump was booed by baseball fans as he attended a World Series game with his wife, Melania, in Washington on Sunday. The Trumps attended the tie-breaking Game 5 of the series. After the game’s third inning, the stadium’s video display showed military members in attendance and then cut to Donald Trump. The cheering crowd immediately switched to loud and sustained boos. When the display cut back to the soldiers, the booing died down, but fans soon took up a chorus of “Lock him up!” — a play on the chant frequently heard at Donald Trump rallies against former secretary of state Hilary Rodham Clinton. Demonstrators sitting behind the home plate also unfurled “veterans for impeachment” banners during the game, in reference to the House of Representatives investigation into whether Donald Trump abused power by withholding military aid to Ukraine.
UNITED STATES
California official resigns
Representative Katie Hill on Sunday announced her resignation amid an ethics probe, saying that explicit photographs of her with a campaign staffer had been “weaponized” by her husband and political operatives. The California Democrat, 32, had been hand-picked for a coveted leadership seat, but in recent days, compromising photos of Hill and purported text messages from her to a campaign staffer surfaced online and in a British tabloid. The House Ethics Committee also had launched an investigation into whether Hill had an inappropriate relationship with an aide in her congressional office, which is prohibited under House rules. Hill has denied that and vowed to fight a “smear” campaign waged by a husband she called abusive. However, her relationship with the aide became a concern for House Democrats who have made equality in the workplace a particular priority. After apologizing for the relationship with a subordinate, Hill announced she was stepping aside. “It is with a broken heart that today I announce my resignation from Congress,” she wrote in a statement. “Having private photos of personal moments weaponized against me has been an appalling invasion of my privacy.”
UNITED STATES
Geena Davis honored
Actress Geena Davis on Sunday urged Hollywood filmmakers to take new steps to address a gender imbalance in media as she accepted an honorary Oscar for her work to promote more women on screen. While equality for women lags throughout US society, it is even worse in film and television, said Davis, the Thelma and Louise star who founded a nonprofit research group called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. “However abysmal the numbers are in real life, it’s far worse in fiction — where you make it up!” Davis said as she accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “We make it worse.”
COLOMBIA
Bogota elects female mayor
Bogota on Sunday elected its first female mayor in what is being hailed as an important advancement for women’s right. Claudia Lopez won the race for mayor of Bogota on a platform promising to combat corruption and advance equal rights for minority communities. The Alianza Verde candidate captured more than 1.1 million votes, or about 35 percent of the vote, defeating runner-up Carlos Galan by 2.7 percentage points.
Australian scientists have raised questions over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca and University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine in establishing herd immunity, calling for a pause on its widespread rollout as the country recorded one new case of the virus yesterday. Opposition to the vaccine casts a cloud over Australia’s immunization plans, with 53 million doses of the AstraZeneca jab already on hand. “The question is really whether it is able to provide herd immunity. We are playing a long game here. We don’t know how long that will take,” Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology president Stephen Turner said. Turner added
A racing pigeon has survived an extraordinary 13,000km Pacific Ocean crossing from the US to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it. Kevin Celli-Bird yesterday said he discovered that the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 last year had disappeared from a race in the US state of Oregon on Oct. 29. Experts suspect the pigeon that Celli-Bird has named Joe — after US president-elect Joe Biden — hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific. Joe’s feat has attracted the attention
China has possibly committed “genocide” in its treatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China said in a report on Thursday. The bipartisan commission said that new evidence had last year emerged that “crimes against humanity — and possibly genocide — are occurring” in Xinjiang. It also accused China of harassing Uighurs in the US. China has been widely condemned for setting up complexes in Xinjiang that it describes as “vocational training centers” to stamp out extremism and give people new skills, which others have called concentration camps. The UN says that
The Polish Supreme Court on Friday quashed a lower court’s green light for the extradition of a businessman to China for alleged fraud, a charge he has denied, saying that he is being targeted for supporting Falun Gong. Polish authorities took Chinese-born Swedish citizen Li Zhihui, now 53, into custody in 2019 on an international warrant issued by China for alleged non-payment in a business deal, Krzysztof Kitajgrodzki, his Polish lawyer, told reporters. Following the Supreme Court ruling, the case would return to a lower appellate court for review. Kitajgrodzki told reporters that it was still not a given that his client
RSS