NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
Treason charge: A former journalist who worked as an adviser to the director of Russia’s state space corporation was detained Tuesday on charges of passing military secrets to a Western nation, accusations that many of his colleagues dismissed as absurd. Ivan Safronov, who had written about military and security issues for a decade before becoming an adviser to Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin, was detained outside his apartment in Moscow by agents of the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency. He pleaded innocent to the charges during a court hearing. Safronov’s detention sent shock waves across Russian media, with many journalists questioning the treason charges and his former newspaper openly rejecting them as “absurd.”
War crimes: Investigators commissioned by the U.N.’s top human rights body say Syrian government forces and their Russian allies bombarded civilian sites in Idlib province indiscriminately, while rebels tortured and executed civilians in recent months, acts amounting to war crimes on both sides. The findings of the latest report of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria span the period from November to June. It’s part of a nearly decadelong effort to chronicle human rights abuses and violations in hopes that perpetrators might one day be brought to justice over the country’s devastating nineyear civil war.
Afghan bombing: A suicide car bomber targeted an Afghan police convoy in eastern Nangarhar province on Tuesday, killing four officers, including a police commander, a local official said. Three other officers were killed in an attack in the country’s south. The suicide bombing, which struck at a market in the district of Khewa, also wounded 11 people — nine civilians and two members of the security forces, according to Attahullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor. He identified the slain commander as Mir Zaman; the other three officers were Zaman’s bodyguards.
Migrant children: Greek authorities say 25 unaccompanied migrant children are traveling from Athens to Portugal, where they will be given shelter as part of a relocation program worked out among several European Union countries. Nearly 75,000 migrants and refugees, about a third of them children, traveled from Turkey to Greece last year, most crossing to Greek islands, adding strain on the country’s reception system. Most children arrived with adult family members, but some 3,800 were unaccompanied, according to the Greek government. Greece has repeatedly appealed to other EU member nations to help ease the burden on the country’s strained migrant reception system by agreeing to take in relocated minors, Germany, Luxembourg, and Finland are among the countries that have agreed to help.
Depp lawsuit: Johnny Depp said Tuesday that his exwife Amber Heard had made “sick” claims of abuse and falsely branded him a monster, as the actor testified in a British libel case in London that hinges on who was the aggressor in the celebrity couple’s violent, toxic relationship. Depp is suing British tabloid The Sun over an April 2018 story headlined “Potty — How can JK Rowling be ‘genuinely happy’ casting wife beater Johnny Depp in the new Fantastic Beasts film?” The “Pirates of the Caribbean” star strongly denies Heard’s claims that he assaulted her during their tempestuous marriage, and sued The Sun’s publisher, News Group Newspapers, and its executive editor, Dan Wootton. Depp, 57, and Heard, 34, married in Los Angeles in 2015 and divorced in 2017.
Chronicle News Services