World

A Brazilian court has upheld the conviction of the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for corruption and money laundering, in a ruling that complicates his plans to run for a third term and marks an extraordinary change of fortune for the most popular leader in modern Brazilian history.

Three judges at the appeals court in Porto Alegre voted unanimously on Wednesday to uphold the sentence that Lula was handed by a lower court, and increased the penalty from nine and a half years to 12 years and one month.

The ruling prompted protests across Brazil, and protesters set fire to tyres and blocked streets in Porto Alegre and São Paulo.

Lula leads early polls for October’s presidential election, but the latest court decision means that he could be barred from running.

The former union leader says he is innocent and the process is politically motivated to stop him from standing for an election. His supporters have called it an attack on democracy.

Lula’s lawyers Cristiano Martins and Valeska Martins attacked the verdict and pledged to refer a complaint to the United Nations human rights committee.

“The whole process from the very beginning has been a legal farce masquerading as justice,” they said in a statement.

Lula served two mandates from 2003-2010, then helped his Workers’ party successor Dilma Rousseff win two more, before she was impeached for breaking budget rules in 2016 in a controversial process she denounced as a “coup”.

She joined leftists and jurists across the world in attacking the legal proceedings against Lula. Even Diego Maradona posted a selfie on Facebook holding a Brazil team shirt with “LULA and 18”, captioned: “Dear Lula, Diego is with you.”

The verdict confirmed a sentence handed to Lula in July by Sérgio Moro – a campaigning judge known for tough sentencing in corruption cases and increased jail time.

Lula was found guilty of receiving a seaside duplex apartment worth about £540,000 ($755,000) from a construction company called OAS. Prosecutors said the gift was part of a multibillion-dollar bribe scheme controlled by the former president at the state-run oil company Petrobras.

Lula’s lawyers argued that he never owned the apartment and said they would appeal against the decision.

João Gebran Neto, the judge leading the verdict, placed the apartment into the wider context of the graft network, which cost Petrobras billions of dollars.

“The defendant in truth was the guarantor of the bigger scheme, for which he acted behind the scenes, which aimed in a surreptitious way to increase the financing of parties,” he said.

The decision means Lula is legally ineligible to stand under a “clean slate” law, said Silvana Batini, a professor of electoral law at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.

Source : The Guardian

US President Donald Trump reportedly uses an accent to imitate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Senior administration officials told The Washington Post that Trump has been known to “affect an Indian accent” to quote Modi, who last year condemned U.S. activity in Afghanistan during a private meeting with Trump.

“Never has a country given so much away for so little in return,” Modi said at the time.

The U.S. Army is currently preparing to increase its presence in Afghanistan by as many as 1,000 more troops, according to the Post. Trump has already added at least 5,500 service members since taking office.
The Post's report about Trump using an accent to imitate Modi comes on the tails of his reported “shithole countries” remark during a private meeting with lawmakers to refer to immigration from Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations.

At an event honoring Native American Code Talkers in November, Trump referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas,” which many consider to be a racial slur, to refer to her claimed Native American heritage.

China on Thursday announced it successfully cloned world' s first macaques from somatic cells by method that made Dolly. It makes research with customizable populations of genetically uniform monkeys a possibility.

The two cloned macaques, named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, were produced at the non-human-primate research facility under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) at the end of 2017. A third is due this month and more this year, said scientists.

The initial research was published on the website of the scientific journal, Cell.

Since Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned from an adult cell in 1997, other mammals have also been cloned, but macaques, which are closely related to humans, have been a challenge.

Sun Qiang, director of the CAS non-human-primate research facility, led a group of researchers for three years to overcome the biological difficulties.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are the product of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the technique used to create Dolly the sheep over 20 years ago.

Researchers edited genes in vitro and accurately sifted and produced somatic cells with the same genotype. They removed the nucleus from an egg cell and replaced it with another nucleus from differentiated body cells.

The reconstructed eggs produced embryos, which were put into the wombs of surrogate female monkeys, producing a group of cloned monkeys with the same genetic background.

The first author Liu Zhen, a postdoctoral fellow, spent three years practicing and optimizing the SCNT procedure. He tested various methods to quickly and precisely remove the nuclear materials from the egg cell and promote the fusion of the nucleus-donor cell and enucleated egg.

"The SCNT procedure is rather delicate, so the faster you do it, the less damage to the egg you have, and Dr. Liu has a green thumb for doing this," said Sun.

This success means China will pioneer in disease and brain science research by taking cloned macaques as animal models, said Muming Poo, a co-author on the study who directs the Institute of Neuroscience of CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology.

"This is a key development in studying primate biology and making models of non-human primates," said Bai Chunli, president of the CAS.

The models designed for brain diseases will shed light on their study, intervention and even treatments.

At present, the lack of treatments for most brain diseases can be attributed to the fact that the mice widely used in labs have a noticeable gap with humans in genome types. Medicines coming out of the labs are often inefficacious or cause side-effects. But cloned monkey models will make a difference.

Researchers agree that primate research models have a major role to play in many fields. "For the Ebola virus, therapies based on monkey model studies have proved effective and the ongoing study of the Zika virus could prove similar," said Poo.

China has listed the brain science program as a key project for the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020) and is working to become a world leader in primate research.

Central and local governments have supported the development of high-tech primate facilities in cities like Suzhou, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Kunming over the past decade.

The cloned monkey models will advance non-human primate model making in China, said Poo. In future, China will be a hub for pharmaceutical research centers where companies will test new treatments for brain diseases, immunodeficiency or tumors on non-human primate models.

"We plan to produce more cloned monkeys designed for gene-related brain diseases, such as the Alzheimer' s, Parkinson's disease and autism. It will give us an international edge in the research of primate brains," Poo added.

The clone babies are currently bottle-fed and are growing normally compared to monkeys their age. The lab is following strict international guidelines for animal research set by the US National Institutes of Health.

"We are very aware that future research using non-human primates anywhere in the world depends on scientists following very strict ethical standards. That' s why cloned monkey models are valuable, but production also needs monitoring," said Poo. "Any abusive use could cause trouble."

Source : Xinhua

At least 18 civilians have been killed in the Turkish military campaign against Syria's Kurdish-held Afrin enclave in northern Syria, a monitor group reported Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths occurred in Afrin and surrounding villages, as Turkey started its offensive on Saturday by airstrikes and shelling and commenced its ground incursion on Sunday to drive out the Kurdish forces from border areas between Syria and Turkey.

Kurdish activists said 11 civilians, including six children and women, were killed and 16 others wounded on Sunday in Afrin by the Turkish fire.

The Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, said four of its fighters were killed as well as 10 fighters of the Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) since Saturday when the Turkish-backed forces attempted to storm several border villages of Afrin.

An official in the YPG, Mahmoud Bardakhan, declared on Sunday the beginning of a "revolutionary campaign against the Turkish enemy" and FSA, which is involved in the Turkish campaign against Afrin.

Kurdish activists said the Kurdish fighters took several FSA fighters as captives during the military showdown in Afrin.

Meanwhile, Kurdish activists said Intense battles raged between the YPG and the Turkish army on the outskirts of the Adama town in the countryside of Afrin after the attempt of the Turkish army to advance int the town.

For his part, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Sunday that the "Turkish aggression on Afrin cannot be separated from the Turkish policies undertaken since the first day of the Syrian crisis to support terrorism and the terrorist groups in Syria."

Earlier in the day, Ankara said it had begun the ground incursion into Afrin, a day after intense shelling and airstrikes that marked the beginning of the Turkish campaign against the Kurdish fighters in Syria.

Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged on Sunday that the military campaign in Afrin would be over in a "short time," describing the military campaign as a "national struggle."

Turkey's military operation in Afrin aims to deal a strong blow to the Kurdish fighters and weaken their growing influence in northern Syria near Turkey.

The operation came particularly after the Kurdish forces defeated the Islamic State in Syria's northern province of Raqqa, and when the U.S. is forming 30,000-strong border forces from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and other Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

Source : Xinhua

A packed commuter train has derailed near the northern Italian city of Milan, leaving at least three people dead and around 10 seriously injured.

Several people were rescued from the wreckage of the carriages that derailed next to the Pioltello Limito station in the morning rush hour.

A problem with a track point is being investigated as a possible cause, police say.

Witnesses said the train trembled for a few minutes before the accident.

The Trenord train, carrying some 100 people, was heading to Milan's Porta Garibaldi station from Cremona when it derailed at about 07:00 local time (06:00 GMT).

The train was travelling at normal speed when the accident happened, a spokesperson for Trenord told Reuters news agency.

Source : BBC News

The Taliban’s bloody, 14-hour siege on a major hotel in Kabul ended on Sunday, after six assailants terrorized much of the city with explosions and gunfire.

 The exact number of casualties remained unclear, and the authorities said it might take days to determine the extent of the material damage. Najib Danish, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said that 14 foreigners and four Afghans had been killed in the attack, and that 10 others, including six members of the security forces, had been wounded. Local news outlets put the number of dead at 43.

 The siege capped a violent 24 hours across Afghanistan, where about 50 people were killed in four provinces as the 16-year war continues to spiral more violently, with no tangible signs of a resolution.

 A guest, Abdul Rauf, 48, said he had run through the halls of the hotel as an armed man was firing and had then taken cover in his room.

 “I don’t know if he was the police or a suicide attacker, but he was shooting,” he said by cellphone while hiding under the bed of his hotel room. “Two rooms were on fire and smoke came into my room. I couldn’t breathe until I broke a window with my chair.”

 The attack was the second in eight years at the 200-room Intercontinental Hotel, located on top of a hill. The Afghan carrier Kam Air said that six of its employees from Ukraine were killed, along with two from Venezuela.

 Source : The New York Times

A shooting at a southwest Kentucky high school on Tuesday morning has left two students dead and 17 injured, said Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin.

Bevin told a press conference at Marshall County Board of Education that the shooter was a 15-year-old male student, who was taken into custody and would be charged with murder and attempted murder.

He urged people to be patient for more details and not to jeopardize the ongoing investigation.

"Fourteen people were wounded, two of them fatally, after a shooter opened fire Tuesday morning at Marshall County High School," Bevin said, adding another five people sustained other injuries.

A female student was shot dead at the scene while another male student died in hospital, said the governor.

Local police have started to search the home of the suspect, trying to find the motive for the shooting.

In a statement the governor issued earlier, he said "this is a tremendous tragedy and speaks to the heartbreak present in our communities. It is unbelievable that this would happen in a small, close-knit community like Marshall County."

Local police responded to the shooting around 8:00 a.m. (1400 GMT) and the scene was soon secured. The suspect was arrested without resistance.

Students at the high school were later bussed to a nearby middle school for parents to pick them up.

Amid the chaos following the shooting, many students had no time to take their cell phones from backpacks during the evacuation, which made parents very anxious to contact with their kids, local television channel WPSD-6 reported.

Helicopters were seen landing at the school to treat the wounded.

Source: Xinhua

The U.S. government is shutting down as from Saturday as lawmakers failed to reach a deal to fund the government against the background of fierce partisan political fights.

After the immigration reform and budget talks fell apart, the Senate on Friday failed to pass a stopgap spending bill that would fund the government through Feb. 16. The bill was already approved by the House of Representatives on Thursday.

The move forces the government to shut down as from Saturday as current spending measures expired on Friday midnight. The shutdown begins on the first anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration as president, a political blow to the Republican president.

Outlook uncertain

The initial impact of a shutdown may be muted, because most of the federal agencies are closed on the weekend.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director (OMB) Mick Mulvaney said at a press briefing on Friday that government employees, including those dealing with public safety and national security, will keep working but without pay.

After the Senate failed to pass the four-week short-term spending bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed to vote on a three-week bill that would fund the government through Feb. 8 in order to halt the shutdown.

It is still uncertain whether the proposal could draw enough votes to help the government resume operations.

The last government shutdown occurred in 2013 when Republican lawmakers unsuccessfully tried to defund the Affordable Care Act. It lasted more than two weeks and led to more than 800,000 government employees receiving temporary unpaid leave.

Economic impact likely limited

"Partial federal government shutdowns have occurred in the past and this shutdown does not have a direct impact on the sovereign's 'AAA' /Stable rating," Fitch said in a statement on Friday.

As one of the top three world ratings agencies, Fitch said that if the the stabilization of the U.S. budget policy making and the brinkmanship continue over the federal debt limit debate in February, it could hurt the country's sovereign creditworthiness.

According to estimates by Goldman Sachs, each week of the shutdown would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the first quarter by 0.2 percentage point, while shutdowns tend to have modest effects on financial markets, as experience shows.

"With the debt limit deadline farther away, we would expect a muted initial reaction in financial markets to a shutdown," said Goldman Sachs.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, told local media that the good news is that business and consumer confidence is much stronger today than it was during the 2013 shutdown, but he pointed out that there could be less confidence due to the shutdown.

The economist also warned that if the lawmakers and the White House continue to play brinkmanship with the debt limit, the economy would face a problem.

Source : Xinhua

Tokyo experienced its heaviest snowfall in four years this week and other parts of Japan will see sea-effect snow pile up through this week.

An area of low pressure tracked just south of Japan and brought heavy snowfall to the Tokyo area to start this week. This system has now pulled away from Honshu.

Dry and mostly sunny conditions developed Tuesday, but slippery travel remained a concern.

Chilly temperatures will be in place in the Tokyo area Thursday and Friday with highs just above freezing.

Tokyo picked up 23 centimeters, about 9 inches, of snowfall on Monday, making it the heaviest snowfall there since February 2014 when 27 centimeters, or 10.6 inches, was measured. That was also the last time a heavy snow warning was issued for the city.

 The heaviest snowfall fell late Monday afternoon into Monday night and impacted the evening commute.

Temperatures reached the upper 40s Fahrenheit, or almost 10 degrees Celsius, on Tuesday, allowing some of the snowfall to melt.

More Snow Ahead?

Locations near the Sea of Japan will continue to experience sea-effect snowfall over the next week. This sea-effect snowfall will be locally heavy at times and will likely result in feet of snow in many spots.

Sea-effect snowfall is similar to lake-effect snowfall. In this case, cold temperatures from Siberia spread toward Japan with northwesterly winds and the Sea of Japan is the moisture source. The higher elevations of the mountains near the coast of the Sea of Japan also enhance snowfall due to upslope flow.

Through Wednesday, 2 feet of snow is possible in the prefectures of Niigata and Toyama, while up to 30 inches may accumulate during this period in Ishikawa prefecture, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. The chance of snow will continue into early next week, which will add to these snowfall totals.

Heavy snow and snow storm warnings have been issued for much of the coastal areas of Honshu near the Sea of Japan, from Ishikawa prefecture northward, through Wednesday. Portions of western Hokkaido are also under snow storm warnings until at least early Wednesday.

Japan's Sea of Japan side typically sees heavy snowfall in the winter, so this snowy forecast is not unusual.

But snow is more unusual in the Tokyo area due to its location closer to the Pacific Ocean and on the east side of the mountains, as well as its lower elevation. In fact, accumulating snow does not occur here every year.

The average annual snowfall for Tokyo is less than 2 inches. The most common time of the year for snow is January into February when average low temperatures are close to the freezing mark.

Source : weather.com

Haitians will no longer be eligible for U.S. visas given to low-skilled workers, the Trump administration said on Wednesday, bringing an end to a small-scale effort to employ Haitians in the United States after a catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the change less than a week after President Donald Trump reportedly questioned in an Oval Office meeting why the United States would want to take in immigrants from Haiti and African nations, referring to them as “shithole” countries. Trump has denied using that word.

DHS said in a regulatory filing that it was removing Haiti from lists of more than 80 countries whose citizens can be granted H-2A and H-2B visas, given to seasonal workers in agriculture and other industries.

It cited what it said were “high levels of fraud and abuse” by Haitians with the visas, and a “high rate of overstaying the terms” of their visas.

A DHS report published last year stated that Haitians on a variety of non-immigrant visas, including H-2As and H-2Bs, had a roughly 40 percent visa overstay rate in the 2016 fiscal year.

Belize and Samoa were also removed from the lists, for risks stemming from human trafficking and not taking back nationals ordered removed from the United States, respectively.

Just a few dozen Haitians entered the United States on the visas each year since they were given permission to do so in 2012 by the Obama administration, according to DHS data.

Sixty-five Haitians entered the United States on H-2A visas, given for agricultural work, in the 2016 fiscal year, according to DHS data, and 54 Haitians were granted H-2A visas by the State Department between March and November 2017. The number of Haitians entering in 2016 on H-2B visas, which are for non-agricultural seasonal work, was more than zero but too low to report, according to DHS.

Supporters of the visas say they gave Haitians a rare opportunity to work legally in the United States, contribute to the U.S. economy, and help fund the recovery of Haiti after the earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people.

Demonstrators hold up Haitian flags and shout as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

“They’re just cutting off the most economically beneficial visa for the Haitian people,” said Sarah Williamson, founder of PTP Consulting, a Virginia-based consultancy that ran a pilot program to bring Haitians to the United States on the visas. “Even though not many people have been able to avail themselves of it, it’s been hugely transformational for those who have participated.”

The Haitian embassy in the United States did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Officials in Haiti were not immediately available for comment.

(Reuters)

Russian presidential candidate and former reality TV star Ksenia Sobchak has called for the legalization of marijuana, saying it was less dangerous for society than vodka.

Sobchak is running on an "against all" platform from the Civic Initiative Party in Russia’s presidential elections next March. She is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically-elected mayor of St. Petersburg and a former mentor of President Vladimir Putin.

 At a meeting with supporters in Kaliningrad on Monday, Sobchak said that the legalization of marijuana could help solve "the narcotics epidemic" in Russia.

"I myself don't use it, but I don't drink vodka by the bottle, either," Lenta.ru reported her as saying, citing the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

"I don't really understand why drinking vodka in enormous quantities is considered normal in our country, but using marijuana is not, though it has far fewer consequences, even from the perspective of crime statistics," she added.

Andrei Khrapov, the chief of narcotics control at Russia’s Interior Ministry, said the government opposed such legalization and saw neither advantages nor medical benefits from drugs such as cannabis.

The world’s governments have spoken. Germany’s citizens are the travelers most welcome to cross their borders.

The Henley Passport Index, an annual ranking of passport power by the citizenship planning firm, came out today for 2018. Germany is at the top for the fifth year in a row, with visa-free or visa-upon-arrival access to 177 countries, up from 176 last year. (In February 2017, Belarus introduced a five-day visa-free visit available to citizens of 80 countries, including Germany.)

A separate ranking called Passport Index is published by the global financial advisory company Arton Capital, and is updated in real time. Last October, Passport Index briefly put Singapore at the top of the world’s power passports. According to its count, updated after Paraguay relaxed its visa requirements for Singapore, its citizens could access 159 countries with no application, meaning no visa would be required or a visa could be obtained upon arrival.

In December, Arton’s Passport Index put Germany back on top, consistent with Henley’s ranking.

For the most part, it has been a good year for travelers’ international access. Since last year, most countries have retained the same levels of access or gained some. Seven passports, though, lost visa-free access to one other country: Azerbaijan, New Zealand, Antigua and Barbuda, Algeria, Laos, North Korea, and Syria, according to Henley. The Georgian passport gained the most access of any country, with new visa-free access to 32 countries, including those of the Schengen zone.

Here’s Henley’s top 10 for the year 2018:

And here are the countries with the least freedom of movement, according to Henley: