Tag: InternationalNews

{Marcelo Fabian Pecollo, a music teacher and trumpeter with the Moron city orchestra, was sentenced in 2010 to 30 years in prison for molesting five preschool children. He was freed in 2014 after a sentence reduction.}

A trumpeter has died after being badly beaten during a concert he was giving in a cathedral near Buenos Aires, attacked by parents from a preschool where he had allegedly molested children, a priest said Monday.

Marcelo Fabian Pecollo, a music teacher and trumpeter with the Moron city orchestra, was sentenced in 2010 to 30 years in prison for molesting five preschool children. He was freed in 2014 after a sentence reduction.

The attack took place on October 30 at the cathedral in Moron, a Buenos Aires suburb.

The group of parents barged into the cathedral yelling: “There is a pedophile and a rapist in the church and he is playing in this orchestra.”

Pecollo, 42, tried to get away but the group caught up with him and beat him, including one parent who hit the man with his own trumpet, according to witnesses.

“When I arrived, those people were leaving,” priest Jorge Oesterheld told local media. “He was in a very, very bad way, until the police and ambulance arrived. He was in a coma and died on Friday.”

The priest criticised the attackers.

“They say they took justice into their own hands, but it was revenge, it was murder.”

Pecollo was arrested in 2007 after a mother complained that her four-year-old child had been abused. Six other cases later came to light.

The court recognised five of the seven cases for trial.

{Prime Minister John Key resigns after eight years in power, calling it the hardest decision he has ever made.}

New Zealand’s popular Prime Minister John Key has unexpectedly announced his resignation, saying he was never a “career politician” and it was the “right time” to go after eight years in the job.

Key had been widely expected to contest his fourth general election next year. But he said he wanted to ensure he did not make the mistake that some other world leaders have done, and instead wanted to leave while he was on top of his game.

The former Merrill Lynch currency trader called it “the hardest decision I’ve ever made”, with no plans on what to do next other than spend more time with his family.

“Being leader of both the party and the country has been an incredible experience,” he told a regular weekly news conference.

“But despite the amazing career I have had in politics, I have never seen myself as a career politician.”

Key recently marked his eighth anniversary as prime minister and 10th year as leader of the centre-right National Party, which is set to meet next week to elect his successor. His deputy Bill English is widely seen as favourite to take over.

Opinion polls have consistently pointed to Key becoming the first political leader in New Zealand history to win four consecutive elections when the country votes next year, but he said records were not a consideration.

“If you’re staying for the record of the time you’re staying for the wrong reason,” Key said on Monday.

Key came into politics relatively late, entering parliament in 2002 and assuming leadership of the centre-right National Party four years later.

In 2008 he ended nine years of Labour Party rule, ousting then-prime minister Helen Clark.

He won plaudits for his leadership during a string of crises in his first term, including a devastating earthquake in Christchurch in February 2011 that claimed 185 lives.

The 55-year-old also steadied the economy after the global financial crisis without resorting to hardline spending cuts, instead taking a steady, pragmatic approach that saw the budget return to surplus in the 2015-16 financial year for the first time since 2008.

{{‘Say it ain’t so bro’ }}

When he heard the news, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sent Key a brief text message: “Say it ain’t so bro”, telling reporters in Melbourne he considered his close friend “one of the most outstanding national leaders in the world today”.

New Zealand opposition Labour Party leader Andrew Little acknowledged Key was popular but said he understood why he was walking away.

“Politics requires much sacrifice. We may all be politicians, but not all our lives are politics,” Little said.

“The prime minister has served New Zealand through times of considerable global instability, and will leave politics proud of his achievements.”

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters claimed Key was stepping down because the economy was not as strong as the government made out.

But the prime minister said he felt he was “going out on top”, pointing to spending more time with his wife Bronagh and children Stephanie and Max as a key consideration.

“It would be easy to say I have made this decision solely to rediscover the personal and family life I once had, and that is a factor, but it is one among many,” he said.

“Over the years I have observed many leaders who, in a similar position, fail to take this step. I can understand why. It is a hard job to leave.

“But, for me and the National Party, this is a good time to go. Party membership is high and the party is well funded.”

Meanwhile, New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister Bill English said that he is considering running for the leadership the ruling National Party after the surprise of Key.

“I’ll be talking to caucus and family today and tonight,” English, who is also the finance minister, told reporters in Wellington.

“I wouldn’t stand if there wasn’t strong caucus support for me standing.”

English is considered the frontrunner to replace Key as prime minister in a party vote planned for next week.

Key said he would vote for English if he decided to stand.

{Cuban leader’s ashes interred in a private ceremony in the city of Santiago, ending nine days of mourning.}

Fidel Castro’s ashes were interred on Sunday at a cemetery in the southeastern city of Santiago – the cradle of the Cuban revolution – with the military firing a 21-gun salute for their fallen leader.

Initially the act at the cemetery was due to be carried live on television, but hours before official media announced it would be “solemn and private”.

An urn containing Castro’s ashes was brought by soldiers to the cemetery of Santa Ifigenia in Santiago, 800km south-east of Havana. Thousands of people lined the road, waving Cuban flags and shouting “Long live Fidel!”.

The remains of the man who ruled Cuba for a half-century left the Plaza of the Revolution in the eastern city at 6:39am local time, more than 20 minutes ahead of their scheduled departure.

Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from Santiago, said members of Castro’s family and top government officials close to the former leader attended the private ceremony.

“This is very much a state affair, but the funeral itself is not a state funeral,” Newman said.

Castro died on November 25 at age 90. His final resting place is near the mausoleum of 19th century independence icon Jose Marti and other national heroes.

After two days of events in Havana, Castro’s funeral cortege departed on a three-day journey east, retracing the route that the triumphant rebels took upon overthrowing US-backed Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

On Saturday evening, President Raul Castro, his brother and successor, said “millions” had come out to pay tribute.

In keeping with his wishes, Castro’s image will not be immortalised with statues nor will public places be named after him, his brother said on Saturday.

Crowds have greeted the caravan along the whole route, with volunteers sprucing up bridges and houses

With his brother at his side, Castro began his revolution on July 26, 1953, with a failed assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago.

He went on to build a Soviet-sponsored communist state 145km from the United States and survived a half century of US attempts to topple or kill him.

{Oakland warehouse gutted by blaze during a rave party as rescue officials say search on to retrieve those still missing.}

The death toll from a blaze that gutted a California warehouse during a rave party has climbed to 30 and is expected to rise, officials said.

The fire erupted at about 2330 local time on Friday (0730 GMT on Saturday) during the party featuring electronic dance music that dozens of people attended.

Authorities said they did not suspect arson, but investigators want to find out if the building, which was partitioned into artists’ studios, had a history of code violations.

The party was taking place on the second floor of the building, which had just two exits, officials said. There was no evidence of any smoke detectors or sprinklers, officials said.

“We have confirmed that the count of the deceased at 30. That is an astronomical number,” Sergeant Ray Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department told reporters.

Authorities had only searched a small part of the two-story building.

“We are still not done … they are working and pulling this building apart and dissecting it. And so we’re really starting to get deeper into the building. As we do that, we continue to find more victims. In regards to the amount of people that are still missing, yes, it’s a significant number.”

The recovery operation had been delayed for hours until workers could enter safely. The roof had collapsed onto the second floor and in some spots, the second story had fallen onto the first.

Firefighters have gone through the building searching the debris, “bucket by bucket”, according to battalion chief at the Oakland Fire Department Melinda Drayton.

“It was quiet, it was heartbreaking,” she said, referring to the search. “This will be a long and arduous process.”

The warehouse, which served as a base for the Ghost Ship Artists Collective, was one of many converted lofts in the city’s Fruitvale district, a mostly Latino area where rents are generally lower than in the rest of Oakland.

“It was too hot, too much smoke, I had to get out of there,” Bob Mule, a photographer and artist who lives in the building and suffered minor burns, told the East Bay Times.

“I literally felt my skin peeling and my lungs being suffocated by smoke. I couldn’t get the fire extinguisher to work.”

Many of the victims were believed to be in their 20s and 30s, and the fire sent ripples of anxiety through the Bay Area’s large art and music community.

“I am still in disbelief, but I hope my friends who were in the Oakland Ghost Ship fire and are still unaccounted for are okay,” Joanna Blanche Lioce, a bartender at Bottom of the Hill, a popular music venue in San Francisco, wrote on Facebook.

{Green Party-backed voters who filed the case say they cannot afford the $1m bond ordered by the court.}

The Green Party says it is switching strategy in its bid to force a statewide recount of Pennsylvania’s presidential election, won by Republican Donald Trump.

Hours after dropping a state court case, it said late Saturday night that it will go to federal court instead.

A statement from the lead lawyer for the recount campaign said that it will seek an emergency federal court order for the recount. It said barriers to a recount in Pennsylvania are pervasive and the state court system is not equipped to address the problem.

Green Party leader Jill Stein later tweeted that “The Stein campaign will fight for a statewide recount in PA. We are committed to protecting the civil and voting rights of all Americans.”

Stein’s lawyer Lawrence M Otter had earlier said the party withdrew the lawsuit filed with the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, due to the cost associated with the recount request.

“Petitioners are regular citizens of ordinary means. They cannot afford to post the $1m bond required by the Court,” read the filing.

Stein plans to hold a rally on Monday, across the street from Trump Tower in New York “vowing to fight tooth and nail to verify the accuracy, security and fairness of the vote,” a statement read.

On Twitter, Stein said “How odd is it that we must jump through bureaucratic hoops and raise millions of dollars so we can trust our election results?”

State election officials said on Friday that Trump now leads Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton by 49,000 votes in Pennsylvania, down from 71,000 as provisional and absentee ballots from overseas are recorded.

Stein, who won about one percent of the presidential vote nationally, has sought recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The left-wing candidate’s fundraising efforts for recounts in these states have obtained nearly $7m so far, according to her website.

Her recount request in Pennsylvania was complicated by opposition from Trump. Michigan’s attorney general filed suit to halt Stein’s recounts efforts in the state. In Wisconsin, Trump supporters have tried to stop the recount there, as well.

Stein has claimed that voting machines used in some parts of Wisconsin and other states are vulnerable to hacking and could have been manipulated.

Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan are all industrial heartland states where Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had been expected to win, but lost to Trump, the nominee of the Republican Party.

Clinton led the national popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes, but lost in the decisive electoral vote, in which states are weighted by population.

Stein has sought a recount in Michigan and filed a lawsuit to force a recount in Pennsylvania. Recounting started across Wisconsin on Thursday, following payment this week of $3.5m in recount costs by Stein’s presidential campaign.

Trump has denounced Stein’s effort as a fundraising “scam” for the Green Party. But Clinton’s campaign said last week that they would participate in the recounts initiated by the Green Party.

Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign counsel, said the campaign had not planned to seek a recount, since its own investigation had failed to turn up any sign of hacking of voting systems.

“But now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Elias said in a post on the website, Medium.

{President Raul Castro pledges to defend the socialist legacy of his brother Fidel Castro, who died last week aged 90.}

President Raul Castro has led tens of thousands of Cubans in a pledge to defend the socialist legacy of his brother Fidel Castro, who died last week aged 90 and will be interred in the city where the Cuban Revolution was launched.

“This is the unconquered Fidel who calls us with his example,” the president, dressed in his four-star general’s uniform, told a crowd that had burst into chants of “I am Fidel” on Saturday night.

“Yes, we will overcome any obstacle, turmoil or threat in the building of socialism in Cuba,” Raul Castro, 85, said in a speech before Santiago’s packed central plaza.

Castro’s ashes will be entombed near the remains of Cuba’s independence hero Jose Marti in a private ceremony beginning on Sunday at 7am (12:00 GMT), concluding nine days of national mourning.

Raul Castro was joined on the stage by leftist foreign dignitaries and the Cuban political leadership to bid farewell to the man known to most Cubans as “El Comandante” – the commander – or simply “Fidel”.

After two days of events in Havana, Castro’s funeral cortege departed on a three-day, 800km journey east, retracing the route that the triumphant rebels took upon overthrowing the US-backed Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

{{Rejecting the ‘cult of personality’
}}

Raul Castro said “millions” had come out to pay tribute. Crowds have greeted the caravan along the whole route, with volunteers sprucing up bridges and houses with fresh paint in Castro’s honour.

Although billboards with Castro quotes stand throughout the country and his portrait hangs from numerous government buildings and in private homes, Fidel Castro’s image will not be immortalised with statues and public places will not be named after him, Raul Castro said.

“The most interesting thing that he [Raul Castro] announced was that Fidel Castro before dying had specifically asked that there will be no statues built of him,” said Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from the ceremony in Santiago.

“Raul Castro said that his brother did not believe in the cult of the personality. So he says that he will send legislation to the national assembly to make Fidel Castro’s wishes law.”

With his brother at his side, Castro began his revolution on July 26, 1953, with a failed assault on the Moncada barracks in the eastern city of Santiago.

He went on to build a Soviet-sponsored Communist state 145km from the United States and survived a half century of US attempts to topple or kill him.

“He defeated the empire and defended his country,” Alvin Bailey, a social activist who lived in Cuba and met Castro many times, told Al Jazeera.

“Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Chili… humble people of all shades knew he stood for the common man wherever on the planet.”

Castro’s socialist government survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but at the cost of more than a decade of great economic hardship that was relieved by the largesse of his political disciple, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

“In the unipolar world, the one of transnationals that arose after the fall of the socialist bloc, the permanent lesson of Fidel is that, yes, it can done, man is capable of overcoming the most difficult conditions,” Raul Castro said.

Over the past two decades a clutch of leftist governments rose to power in Latin America inspired by his ideas and fierce opposition to the US. Several have now been defeated at the ballot box.

High-profile friends of Castro, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and former Brazilian Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, arrived for the evening sendoff.

Lula was a close ally of Cuba when he was president from 2003 to 2010, as was his successor Rousseff until she was impeached this year.

{Fire officials say there were as many as 70 people inside the warehouse after the blaze struck during a dance party.}

At least nine people have been killed after a fire broke out inside a warehouse holding a rave party in northern California with many people still unaccounted for.

The blaze started on Friday at about 11pm local time (07:00 GMT Saturday) inside the two-story building in the city of Oakland.

“It was too hot, too much smoke, I had to get out of there,” Bob Mule, a photographer and artist who lives at the building and suffered minor burns, told the East Bay Times. “I literally felt my skin peeling and my lungs being suffocated by smoke. I couldn’t get the fire extinguisher to work.”

Sergeant Ray Kelly, of the Alameda County Sheriff’s department, told reporters the death toll is expected to jump significantly.

“We are prepared for several dozen fatalities. We are prepared to deal with 30, 40 deceased people,” said Kelly.

Fire officials were still trying to determine how the fire started, said Oakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach-Reed, who described the building as “huge.” She said the roof had collapsed, complicating efforts to recover bodies.

“There is a large majority of that building that has not been searched,” Deloach-Reed said during a press briefing.

“We are hoping that the number nine is what there is and that there are no more,” the fire chief said, referring to the number of known fatalities. “But we have not done a complete search of the building.”

A Facebook event page showed 176 people planned to attend the party.

The San Jose Mercury News newspaper quoted fire officials as saying they were told up to 70 people were at the warehouse.

The fire was brought under control by early morning with crews sifting through the rubble searching for victims, fire officials said.

Oakland is a major California city about 19km east of San Francisco.

{Kabul Polytechnic university student was accused by the group of killing a senior Taliban official.}

Taliban fighters publicly hanged a university student after accusing him of killing a senior intelligence officer.

The militia took Faizul Rehman, a fourth-year student at Kabul Polytechnic university, from his car as he traveled home to visit his family in the Chak district of Maidan Wardak province, about 60km west of the capital Kabul on Thursday.

“They hanged him on Friday in front of [the] public. Local elders tried to mediate to release him, but they failed,” Abdul Rehman Mangal, a spokesman for the governor of Maidan Wardak, told AFP news agency on Saturday.

“They accused him of killing Mullah Mirwais, the head of their intelligence in the area,” he said.

The Afghan interior ministry confirmed the execution and said they had launched an investigation “to arrest and punish the perpetrators of this criminal act”.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said they were investigating the case.

Since their ouster in 2001, the Taliban have executed people they accuse of spying for foreign or Afghan forces, and have staged public stonings or lashings of those found to have committed adultery, or had sex outside marriage.

{Cuban leader’s final acts was to order a football field built for youth in Jaimanitas, where he often stopped to talk.}

Fidel Castro is remembered around the world as a charismatic revolutionary or a ruthless tyrant, but in his neighbourhood he was also a friendly old man who used his influence to build a football field for kids two weeks before his death.

Castro, who led Cuba’s 1959 revolution and for five decades defied US efforts to topple him, died on November 25 at age 90, a decade after ceding power to his brother Raul Castro.

The revolutionary leader’s ashes arrived in his hometown of Santiago on Saturday. He will be laid to rest at 7am local time on Sunday in Santiago’s cemetery next to Cuba’s independence hero Jose Marti.

Castro lived on the western edge of Havana in a large complex hidden from view by trees and adjacent to a typical Cuban neighbourhood called Jaimanitas.

Horse-drawn carts pass through occasionally and people socialise outside the dispensary for basic goods on the government’s ration card. The modest homes are a little worn.

One of Castro’s final acts was to order a football pitch built for youth in Jaimanitas, where he periodically stopped his car to talk with the people, according to neighbours.

On the surface, support for Castro seems particularly strong in Jaimanitas, where two women who spoke to Reuters news agency teared up when asked about him a week after his death.

On November 9, Castro stopped his car in the neighbourhood to greet kids playing football in the street, according to several neighbours.

“There’s no other place to play. He was interested in this, asking, ‘What do you mean there’s nowhere to play soccer?’ And the next day they were clearing the field,” said Rafael Sierra, 56, a veteran of Cuba’s 1980s involvement in the war in Angola, who said he worked for Castro in logistics.

Jennifer Diaz, a 14-year-old ninth-grader, was able to get a picture of Castro. She proudly displayed the image on her iPad of Castro seated in the back seat of his car alongside his wife, Dalia Soto del Valle.

Yossiel Calvo, a 13-year-old eighth-grader, grew excited when talking about his brush with Castro.

“I spoke with him about a month ago,” he said. “He said he was going to make a soccer field for us, and he did it. They’re working on it now.”

Interior Ministry officials cut short a Reuters visit to the neighbourhood, saying the area was off limits to journalists, but not before neighbours could express appreciation for one last order from “El Comandante”.

“And just like that it was done,” said Miriam LaValle, 62, a retired telecommunications worker. “He kept his word.”