World News

LIMA (Reuters) – After a long legal battle in Peru for the right of an assisted death, Ana Estrada said she now feels free to avoid suffering from an incurable and debilitating illness that has plagued her for three decades.

The Peruvian Supreme Court this week confirmed a prior ruling that allows Estrada, a 44-year-old psychologist, to end her life after a five-year legal battle and years of illness.

Under Peruvian law, assisting someone’s suicide and killing a terminally ill patient are punishable with prison time.

In a deeply Roman Catholic country where abortion and gay marriage remain illegal, the court’s decision is seen as a milestone in the debate over euthanasia. In Latin America, only Colombia allows the procedure, but under certain conditions.

“This victory will help me better cope with this imminent, inevitable deterioration of the disease. It will give me peace of mind and calm,” she told Reuters.

Estrada suffers from polymyositis, a rare disease that attacks her muscles with a degenerative deterioration. She has spent most of her life lying prostrate in a bed connected to a mechanical respirator and with almost daily assistance from a nurse.

The Supreme Court ruling issued this week ratifies a previous court decision requiring Peru’s state health insurance to provide “all the conditions” for Estrada’s euthanasia, which must be executed within a period of 10 days from the date she expresses her will to end her life.

The Supreme Court exempted the doctor who eventually supplies a drug intended to end Estrada’s life from any punishment.

“Why death with dignity? Because I want to avoid suffering, I want to avoid pain, but above all because this is about life and it is about freedom,” Estrada said, lying in bed after her nurse placed a pillow on her.

“Establishing the right to death is a fundamental precedent. It is the first case and it is irrevocable, and it allows Ana Estrada to be able to make a decision to end her life at a certain time,” said Walter Gutierrez, Estrada’s lawyer and a former ombudsman.

(Reporting by Carlos Valdez of Reuters Television and Marco Aquino; Writing by Carolina Pulice; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden said he raised the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

He said he a “good series of meetings” with Saudi leadership, making significant progress on security and economic issues, but that human rights was also a major topic.

“I made clear that the topic was vitally important to me and the United States,” Biden told reporters at a news conference.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Trevor Hunnicutt, Editing by Franklin Paul)

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reputation as a brazen leader who has ruthlessly silenced critics and dissent will cast a shadow over his meeting on Friday with U.S. President Joe Biden.

The royal has sidelined top princes who could pose a threat and overseen Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul still looms large — though the prince is credited with pushing through once-unthinkable changes, allowing women to drive and travel freely, permitting concerts, opening movie theaters and de-fanging the once-feared religious police.

Biden initially adopted a tough line with Saudi Arabia, describing it as a “pariah” on the campaign trail. After becoming president, he refused to speak directly with the crown prince and ordered the release of a U.S. intelligence report that implicated Prince Mohammed in Khashoggi’s slaying.

He’s changed his tone since, with the administration now focused on isolating Russia, hedging against China and grappling with high oil prices.

“I always bring up human rights,” Biden told reporters on the eve of his Saudi visit but stressed the purpose of his trip is “broader” and designed to “reassert” U.S. influence in the Middle East.

Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, said Biden’s decision to visit Saudi Arabia is “heartbreaking” and accused the U.S. president in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday of backing down from his pledge of prioritizing human rights.

Even after the harsh international criticism over the Khashoggi killing, the prince did not change course. Despite legal reforms to curb the death penalty, only four months ago the kingdom carried out its largest mass execution in recent memory of 81 men convicted on broad terrorism charges, around half of whom were minority Shiites.

“It’s never been a country where you can speak freely, but what we’ve seen in the past five years is a total shutdown of the space for any public criticism or any hint that you might disagree with the authorities,” said Adam Coogle, deputy director for the region at Human Rights Watch.

Here’s a look at some of the people targeted in the prince’s sustained clampdown:

MOTHER AND SON

Aziza al-Yousef, a mother of five, grandmother and former professor, is a women’s rights activist who often hosted Saudi intellectuals at her home.

She was arrested in mid-2018 with other women’s rights activists, including Loujain al-Hathloul, just weeks before the kingdom lifted its ban on women driving. They were branded traitors by state-linked media and faced vague charges connected to their rights work.

Some of the women said they were abused while in detention by masked interrogators, beaten, forcibly groped and threatened with rape. Al-Yousef and several others were released after 10 months but they face travel bans. Her husband and several grandchildren reside in the United States.

Her son, Salah al-Haidar, is a dual Saudi-U.S. national who lobbied for his mother’s release during her imprisonment. He was arrested in 2019 with a group of writers who quietly supported greater social reforms and had ties to the women’s rights activists. He was released only after Biden took office, but remains under travel ban.

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CHILDREN OF AN EX-SECURITY OFFICIAL

Omar and Sarah al-Jabri, both in their early 20s, were detained in March 2020. Their father, former senior security official Saad al-Jabri helped oversee joint counter-terrorism efforts with the U.S. and now lives in exile in Canada. He has sued the prince in a U.S. federal lawsuit and accuses the royal of trying to kidnap, trap and kill him.

Omar was sentenced to nine years and Sarah to six-and-a-half for money laundering and unlawfully attempting to flee Saudi Arabia. The family also says al-Jabri’s son-in-law, Salem al-Muzaini, was abducted from a third country, forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia, tortured and detained.

Rights groups say the arrests are aimed at pressuring al-Jabri to return to the kingdom, where his former boss, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, apparently remains under some form of detention.

Al-Jabri told “60 Minutes” last year that Prince Mohammed will not rest until “he sees me dead” and described him as “a psychopath, killer.”

Al-Jabri’s son Khalid, who resides in North America, says Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia reflects “an incoherent, no-consequence policy that is unlikely to yield any practical wins for the United States.”

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AID WORKER WHO TWEETED CRITICISM

In March 2018, plain clothes officers snatched Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who had recently graduated from college in the U.S., from his work at the Red Crescent office. It would be two full years before his family would hear from him. During that period, his family claims he was subjected to beatings, electrocution, sleep deprivation, verbal and sexual assault.

He’s serving a 20-year prison sentence followed by a 20-year travel ban for satirical tweets he had posted critical of the Saudi government.

His sister, Areej al-Sadhan, an American citizen living in California, says he was not an activist but was keenly aware as an aid worker of the economic challenges facing young Saudis.

The case against him may have roots in an elaborate ploy that sparked a federal case against two Twitter employees accused of spying for Saudi Arabia. The men allegedly accessed the user data of thousands of Twitter accounts, including nearly three dozen usernames the kingdom had wanted disclosed.

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POPULAR RELIGIOUS FIGURE

In September 2017, another Saudi wave of arrests targeted moderate clerics, academics and writers, including Salman al-Odah, an influential religious figure who was once a leader of the Islamist Sahwa Movement.

Al-Odah, also a former TV show host with 13 million followers on Twitter, had long called on the public to focus less on issues such as beards and dress length, and more on fighting corruption and misuse of power.

He has been in detention for nearly five years, and has yet to be convicted. His family says he faces 37 charges, some connected to his alleged ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Spring uprisings. The prosecutor is seeking the death penalty.

His brother, Khaled, was sentenced to five years on charges that rights groups say include “sympathizing with his brother.”

Still, al-Odah remains respected among religious Saudis because he’s not been ”paid out” by the government, said his son, Abdullah Alaoudh, a leading figure at DAWN rights group in the U.S.

“For the government he’s dangerous because he has that religious authority … that religious background,” Alaoudh said. “He educated generations of scholars and students.”

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THE REFORMER

Abdulziz al-Shubaily, 38, is among a group of intellectuals and activists imprisoned for belonging to the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights, known by its Arabic acronym HASEM. They have been convicted on charges such as “incitement against public order,” “insulting the judiciary” and “participating in an unlicensed association.”

Al-Shubaily is serving an eight-year prison sentence and has an equally long travel ban upon release. He was sentenced in mid-2016 by the Specialized Criminal Court, which was established to try terrorism cases but has been used to try rights activists deemed a national security risk.

In 2013, prominent founding HASEM activists, Mohammed al-Qahtani and Abdullah al-Hamid, were sentenced to 10 and 11 years, respectively. Around a dozen members of the group are serving prison terms.

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Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

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Follow Aya Batrawy on twitter at http::/twitter.com/ayaelb

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JULY 8- JULY 14, 2022

From the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, to Novak Djokovic winning his seventh Wimbledon tennis championships in London, to cost-of-living protests in Nairobi, this photo gallery highlights some of the most compelling images made or published in the past week by The Associated Press from Europe and Africa.

The selection was curated by AP photographer Ben Curtis in Nairobi.

Follow AP visual journalism:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apnews

AP Images on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AP_Images

AP Images blog: http://apimagesblog.com

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BEIJING (AP) — Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited the northwestern Xinjiang region this week amid concerns over China’s detention of a million or more members of primarily Muslim ethnic native minorities.

Xi called Xinjiang a “core area and a hub” in China’s program of building ports, railways and power stations connecting it to economies reaching from Central Asia to Eastern Europe, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday.

Under Xi, authorities have carried out a sweeping crackdown on Xinjiang’s native Uygur and Kazakh communities following an outburst of deadly separatist violence.

Critics have described the crackdown that placed thousands in prison-like indoctrination camps as cultural genocide. The U.S. and others have placed officials responsible under visa bans for their part in extra-legal detentions, separation of families and incarcerating people for studying abroad or having foreign contacts.

Xi met with leaders of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a supra-governmental body that operates its own courts, schools and health system under the military system imposed on the region after the Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949.

Xi “learned about the history of the XPCC in cultivating and guarding the frontier areas,” Xinhua reported.

Xinjiang borders Russia, Afghanistan and volatile Central Asia, which China has sought to draw within its orbit through economic incentives and security alliances.

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ROME (Reuters) – Mario Draghi said he would resign as Italian prime minister on Thursday, after a party in his ruling coalition did not participate in a confidence vote.

“I will tender my resignation to the president of the republic this evening,” Draghi told the cabinet, according to a statement released by his office.

“The national unity coalition that backed this government no longer exists,” he added.

(Reporting By Gavin Jones and Angelo Amante)

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GENEVA (Reuters) – Spain should offer reparations to a woman who underwent a caesarean section without her consent with her arms strapped down, a United Nations committee found on Thursday.

Madrid was found to be responsible for “obstetric violence” against an unnamed Spanish woman who said medics at a public hospital in Donostia, Spain induced her labour prematurely, without her consent, the committee said.

They then proceeded with a C-section without her husband present and did not allow her to immediately hold her newborn boy since she was still strapped down, it added.

Spain’s health ministry declined to comment on the case, but said a draft law approved in May would help promote good childbirth practices through a series of national and international guidelines.

Such violence against women in childbirth is widespread, systematic in nature, ingrained in health systems and can cause physical and psychological damage, the U.N. body found.

However, public investigations into cases are rare and one of the only precedents is another case where the same U.N. body also found against Spain in 2020. In a further case, Hungary was held responsible in 2004 for a woman’s forced sterilization after a miscarriage.

In the Donostia case, the woman suffered physical and mental trauma, the committee said. She was told by a Spanish court that doctors should decide on C-sections and that her psychological harm was simply a matter of perception.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women monitors states parties’ adherence to a convention on women’s rights which to date has 189 signatories. It is made up of 23 independent human rights experts.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; additional reporting by Christina Thykjaer, Editing by William Maclean)

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By Rupam Jain and Tanvi Mehta

MUMBAI (Reuters) -Half a world away from the political drama in London, many Indians are closely following the twists and turns of who replaces Boris Johnson as British prime minister, curious to see how two candidates with Indian ancestry fare.

Rishi Sunak, the bookmakers’ favourite to prevail, and Suella Braverman are campaigning for the Conservative party leadership and have made reference to the opportunities Britain gave members of minorities like them.

If either were to win the race for the premiership, they would be the first prime minister of Indian origin in the United Kingdom.

In both cases, their Indian families migrated to Britain in the 1960s in search of better lives. Britain ruled India for about 200 years before the South Asian country gained independence in 1947 after a prolonged freedom struggle.

“It will be a great feeling to see an Indian as the PM of a country which very ruthlessly ruled India for a very long time!” said a Twitter user named Emon Mukherjee.

There are around 1.4 million Indians in Britain, making them its single largest ethnic minority, and the two countries enjoy friendly relations. Bilateral trade stood at 21.5 billion pounds ($25.55 billion) in 2020-21.

Leading Indian industrialist Anand Mahindra joined a steady stream of social media reaction to the possibility of a British prime minister with Indian heritage.

He shared a digitally altered photograph of 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence, with its famous black door adorned with marigolds and mango leaves, symbols of an auspicious beginning in the Hindu religion.

Some Twitter users have run pictures of Sunak under the slogan “The Empire Strikes Back”, while Indian newspapers have covered the contest unusually closely.

Sunak, 42, is the son-in-law of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, founder of Indian outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd.

CONTROVERSY

That connection threatened to dent his popularity in Britain after it was revealed that his wife, Murthy’s daughter, had not been paying British tax on her foreign income through her “non-domiciled” status, which is available to foreign nationals who do not regard Britain as their permanent home.

Akshata Murthy later said she would start to pay British tax on her global income.

Murthy is an Indian citizen and owns a 0.9% stake in Infosys. She and Sunak entered The Sunday Times UK Rich List at number 222 with a reported net worth of 730 million pounds, the Sunday Times newspaper reported in May.

Murthy’s family, based in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru, has largely avoided discussing Sunak’s political journey, and did not respond to a request for comment.

Sunak’s colleague Braverman, currently Britain’s attorney general and also in the race to succeed Johnson, was born into a Christian family of Indian origin. Her parents migrated to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius.

She has previously spoken about her parents, saying they came to Britain with nothing.

In 2017, Braverman posted on Facebook that her mother was awarded the British Empire Medal for 45 years of service in the National Health Service as a nurse and for voluntary work abroad.

“It was Britain that gave them hope, security and opportunity and this country has afforded me incredible opportunities in education and my career, and I owe a debt of gratitude to this country,” Braverman said in a recent speech.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is another recent example of a politician of Indian origin who made it big abroad. Residents of her ancestral village in southern India celebrated her inauguration with firecrackers and gifts of food.

(Additional reporting by Ashish Chandra in Bengaluru; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China reported 366 new COVID-19 infections on July 13, of which 121 were symptomatic and 245 were asymptomatic, the National Health Commission said on Thursday.

That compared with 338 new cases a day earlier, 98 symptomatic and 240 asymptomatic infections, which China counts separately.

There were no new deaths, same as a day earlier, keeping the nation’s fatalities at 5,226.

As of Wednesday, mainland China had confirmed 227,030 cases with symptoms.

China’s capital Beijing reported no new local symptomatic cases, compared with none a day earlier, and zero local asymptomatic cases versus zero the previous day, the local government said.

Shanghai reported five new local symptomatic cases, compared with five a day earlier, and 42 local asymptomatic cases versus 50 the previous day, local government data showed.

All Shanghai cases were reported in quarantined areas.

(Reporting by Shanghai newsroom; Writing by Bernard Orr; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)

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ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A prominent Greek stage actor and director has been found guilty of raping two men when they were minors.

Dimitris Lignadis, 57, was found guilty by an Athens court Wednesday in two out of four cases of rape.

Lignadis was acquitted for insufficient evidence in a third case, while the fourth accuser never appeared in court to testify, despite a court decision ordering him to. He had provided a false address.

The two rapes Lignadis was convicted of occurred in 2010 and 2015.

Following the guilty verdict, the court heard Lignadis’ lawyer, who argued for mitigating circumstances. The prosecutor then rebutted the lawyer’s arguments and the court decided not to accept them. The prosecutor proposed a sentence of 12 years for each count of rape. The court has adjourned to decide on the sentence.

Lignadis can appeal the conviction and appears certain to do so, since he has denied the charges.

Lignadis had been ordered jailed when the accusations surfaced in February 2021. A few days earlier, he had resigned from his post of artistic director of Greece’s National Theater which he had held since 2019.

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