Russian missile turns Ukrainian market into fiery, blackened ruin strewn with bodies
KOSTIANTYNIVKA, Ukraine (AP) — The Russian missile that struck Wednesday in eastern Ukraine turned an outdoor market into a fiery, blackened ruin where weeping civilians looked for loved ones among the mangled, burned bodies scattered across the ground.
The blast in the town of Kostiantynivka killed 17 people and wounded at least 32 in one of Russia's deadliest strikes on civilians in months, Ukrainian officials said.
“There was no military target here. This is a peaceful neighborhood in the city center," Stefan Slovak, who lives in Kostiantynivka, said in a trembling voice.
Behind him were the remnants of the market, where charred bodies could be seen in the street, their clothes still burning, near cars engulfed in flames. Behind a market stall holding fresh parsley, rescuers found a women in civilian clothes with her head covered in blood.
Video taken by The Associated Press showed a chaotic scene, with charred bodies lying on the ground, some of them still burning. As firefighters tried to douse the flames, first responders rushed to apply tourniquets and load the wounded into emergency vehicles using stretchers and blankets. Posters or tarps were used to cover some of the dead. Onlookers cried and consoled one another.
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Mexico decriminalizes abortion, extending Latin American trend of widening access to procedure
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s Supreme Court threw out all federal criminal penalties for abortion Wednesday, ruling that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights in a sweeping decision that extended Latin American’s trend of widening abortion access.
The high court ordered that abortion be removed from the federal penal code. The ruling will require the federal public health service and all federal health institutions to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.
“No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker, will be able to be punished for abortion,” the Information Group for Chosen Reproduction, known by its Spanish initials GIRE, said in a statement.
Some 20 Mexican states, however, still criminalize abortion. While judges in those states will have to abide by the court's decision, further legal work will be required to remove all penalties.
Celebration of the ruling soon spilled out onto social media.
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Biden administration cancels remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska's Arctic Refuge
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — In an aggressive move that angered Republicans, the Biden administration canceled the seven remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday, overturning sales held in the Trump administration's waning days, and proposed stronger protections against development on vast swaths of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The Department of Interior's scrapping of the leases comes after the Biden administration disappointed environmental groups earlier this year by approving the Willow oil project in the petroleum reserve, a massive project by ConocoPhillips Alaska that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope. Protections are proposed for more than 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) of land in the reserve in the western Arctic.
Some critics who said the approval of Willow flew in the face of Biden’s pledges to address climate change lauded Wednesday's announcement. But they said more could be done. Litigation over the approval of the Willow project is pending.
"Alaska is home to many of America’s most breathtaking natural wonders and culturally significant areas. As the climate crisis warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, we have a responsibility to protect this treasured region for all ages," Biden said in a statement.
His actions “meet the urgency of the climate crisis” and will “protect our lands and waters for generations to come," Biden said.
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India's rising geopolitical clout will be tested as it hosts the G20 summit
NEW DELHI (AP) — Ahead of India’s hosting of the G20 summit of leading economies, its prime minister invited 125 mostly developing countries to a virtual meeting in January to signal New Delhi’s intention to be their champion on the world stage.
As the leaders logged onto Zoom, Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed major challenges he said could be better addressed if developing countries had a bigger share in the emerging global order: the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, terrorism, the war in Ukraine.
“The world is in a state of crisis,” Modi said. “Most of the global challenges have not been created by the Global South. But they affect us more.”
India has pledged to amplify the voice of the so-called Global South — a wide of expanse of mostly developing countries, many of them former colonies, in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Oceania and the Caribbean.
That pledge will be put to the test this week when world leaders arrive in New Delhi for this year’s G20 summit, which begins Saturday. But India has promoted itself not only as a bridge to the developing world, but as a rising global player and — importantly — a mediator between the West and Russia.
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Everyone's talking about the Global South. But what is it?
NEW DELHI (AP) — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says his country is “becoming the voice of the Global South,” and that at the upcoming Group of 20 meetings being held in New Delhi, that voice will be heard.
At the August summit of the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — current chair South Africa declared its goal was to "advance the agenda of the Global South.” And ahead of this May's summit of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies in Hiroshima, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stressed that the guest nations he had invited reflected the importance of the Global South.
The United Nations, the World Bank, U.S. President Joe Biden — everyone seems to be talking about the Global South these days. But what, exactly, is it?
Despite how it sounds, it's not really a geographical term. Many countries included in the Global South are in the northern hemisphere, such as India, China and all of those in the northern half of Africa. Australia and New Zealand, both in the southern hemisphere, are not in the Global South.
Most cite the so-called Brandt Line as the border; a squiggle across the globe running from the north of Mexico, across the top of Africa and the Middle East, looping around India and China before dropping down to encompass most of East Asia while avoiding Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The line was proposed by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1980s as a visual depiction of the north-south divide based upon per-capita GDP.
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In Southeast Asia, Harris says 'we have to see the future'
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — It took more than a day of flying, including two refueling stops, for Vice President Kamala Harris to reach this year’s summit of Southeast Asian countries. And once she arrived, she had less than eight minutes of public speaking time during two meetings.
But in Jakarta’s cavernous convention center, adorned with billowing flowers and tropical plants for the occasion, Harris saw an opportunity to shape the future of United States foreign policy.
In an interview with The Associated Press, the vice president said that Washington must "pay attention to 10, 20, 30 years down the line, and what we are developing now that will be to the benefit of our country then.”
For her, that means working in Southeast Asia. Two-thirds of its population is under 35 years old. It's the fourth-largest market for U.S. exports. One-third of global shipping travels through the South China Sea.
“Think about it,” Harris said.
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A lawsuit seeks to bar Trump from the primary in Colorado, citing Constitution's insurrection clause
DENVER (AP) — A liberal group on Wednesday filed a lawsuit to bar former President Donald Trump from the primary ballot in Colorado, arguing he is ineligible to run for the White House again under a rarely used clause in the U.S. Constitution aimed at candidates who have supported an “insurrection.”
The lawsuit, citing the 14th Amendment, is likely the initial step in a legal challenge that seems destined for the U.S. Supreme Court. The complaint was filed on behalf of six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
It will jolt an already unsettled 2024 primary campaign that features the leading Republican candidate facing four separate criminal cases.
Liberal groups have demanded that states’ top election officials bar Trump under the clause that prohibits those who “engaged in an insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from holding higher office. None has taken that step, looking for guidance from the courts on how to interpret a clause that has only been used a handful of times since the 1860s.
While a few fringe figures have filed thinly written lawsuits in a few states citing the clause, the litigation Wednesday was the first by an organization with significant legal resources. It may lead to similar challenges in other states, holding out the potential for conflicting rulings that would require the Supreme Court to settle.
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Hundreds of military promotions are on hold as Republican senator demands end to abortion policy
WASHINGTON (AP) — Top defense officials are accusing Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville of jeopardizing America's national security with his hold on roughly 300 military promotions, raising the stakes in a clash over abortion policy that shows no signs of easing.
Tuberville brushed off the criticism, vowing he will not give in. “We're going to be in a holding pattern for a long time,” he said, if the Pentagon refuses to end its policy of paying for travel when a service member goes out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care.
It's a classic Washington standoff with rippling effects across the country, placing the lives of servicemembers effectively on hold as they await what has traditionally been routine Senate approval for their promotions.
Frustration mounting, the secretaries of the Navy, Air Force and Army wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post this week saying Tuberville's efforts were not only unfair to the military leaders and their families but also “putting our national security at risk.”
They noted that three military branches — the Army, Navy and Marine Corps — have no Senate-confirmed chiefs in place. Those jobs are being performed without the full range of legal authorities necessary to make decisions that will sustain the U.S.'s military edge, they wrote.
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Greek shipper pleads guilty to smuggling Iranian crude oil and will pay $2.4 million fine
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A Greek shipping company has pleaded guilty to smuggling sanctioned Iranian crude oil and agreed to pay a $2.4 million fine, newly unsealed U.S. court documents seen Thursday by The Associated Press show.
The now-public case against Empire Navigation, which faces three years of probation under the plea agreement, marks the first public acknowledgement by U.S. prosecutors that America seized some 1 million barrels of oil from the tanker Suez Rajan.
The saga surrounding the ship further escalated tensions between Washington and Iran, even as they work toward a trade of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets in South Korea for the release of five Iranian Americans held in Tehran. The court filings also shed light on the covert world of Iranian crude oil smuggling in the face of Western sanctions since the collapse of its 2015 nuclear deal — an operation that has only grown in scale over this year.
The U.S. and its allies have been seizing Iranian oil cargoes since 2019. That's led to a series of attacks in the Mideast attributed to the Islamic Republic, as well as ship seizures by Iranian military and paramilitary forces that threaten global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world's oil passes.
Attention began focusing on the Suez Rajan in February 2022, when the group United Against Nuclear Iran said it suspected the tanker carried oil from Iran’s Khargh Island, its main oil distribution terminal in the Persian Gulf. Satellite photos and shipping data analyzed at the time by the AP supported the allegation.
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The Catholic Church defended human rights during Chile’s dictatorship. An archive tells the story
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Lined up like soldiers guarding a nation’s treasures, dozens of shelves preserve an archive that gives account of a painful episode in Chile’s history: 47,000 instances of human rights violations during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The documents were gathered between 1976 and 1992 by workers of the Vicariate of Solidarity, a human rights organization founded by Chilean Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez. Led by social workers, lawyers, archivists and physicians, it provided support to those harmed by the regime.
“The archive gives an account of how the repression occurred,” said María Paz Vergara, executive secretary at the foundation created to preserve the documents after the Vicariate was closed.
The protection that Silva Henríquez provided for Pinochet's victims had no precedent in Latin America. In neighboring Argentina, where the military also took power in the 1970s, the Catholic Church distanced itself from the general public and remained close to the government and upper-class sectors.
“In Chile the response to help the victims was immediate,” said Chilean historian María Soledad del Villar. “And not only from the Catholic Church, but from other churches as well.”
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