Around the world
North America The city of Cleveland has reached a settlement with the US Justice Department over a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations by the police department, according to a senior federal law enforcement official. The specifics of the settlement were not available yesterday. News of the settlement comes two days after a white Cleveland police officer was acquitted of manslaughter for firing the final 15 rounds of a 137-shot police barrage through the windshield of a car carrying two black, unarmed suspects in 2012. Latin America A volcano atop one of the Galapagos Islands has erupted for the first time in 33 years. Ecuador’s Galapagos National Park administration said the 1.7km-high Wolf volcano began spewing fire, smoke and lava. The volcano lies on the northern tip of Isabela Island, the archipelago’s largest. It’s 115km from the only population centre, Puerto Villamil. Authorities said no tourist activity was affected. Authorities said lava flowing in the southwest direction for now poses no risk to the world’s only population of pink iguanas, which live on the island’s northwest tip.
Nine people died, one of them decapitated, in a prison mutiny in Brazil which ended with the release of 70 hostages at Feira de Santana, 100km from the northeastern city of Salvador de Bahia. Police said prisoners killed eight fellow inmates after the mutiny began during family visits. A ninth died yesterday of his injuries. Prisoners demanded to speak to local human rights commission officials about conditions. The jail houses 1467 prisoners, more than double its official capacity of 644. Asia/Oceania A fire at a home for the elderly in central China has left 38 people dead and six injured. The fire broke out in an apartment building of the privately owned rest home in Pingdingshan city in Henan province. Two of the injured were in serious condition. The cause of the fire was unclear. With a rapidly ageing population and underresourced social security net, China faces increasing pressure to provide safe and affordable care for the elderly.
Australia secretly held a group of 46 Vietnamese asylum seekers on a warship at sea for almost a month and rejected their refugee claims during interviews that took as little as 40 minutes before returning them all to Vietnam last month, officials said. The Vietnamese men, women and children were intercepted by an Australian border security vessel on March 20 and the asylum seekers were returned to the Vietnamese port of Vung Tau on April 18, Immigration Department secretary Michael Pezzullo told a Senate committee.