By Hannah Confino and Rami Amichay Tel Aviv (Reuters) – Esther Paran navigated her way in a wheelchair through the throngs of Israelis marching through Tel Aviv in protest at government plans to overhaul the country’s judicial system. She was pushed by an aide. She did not bang on drums or yell along with the…
DAMASCUS (Reuters) -Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan in Damascus on Tuesday in the most significant step yet towards ending Syria’s decade-long regional isolation, and at a time of wider rapprochement in the region. It was the first visit of a top diplomat from Arab powerhouse Saudi Arabia to…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Republicans will block Democrats’ plans to temporarily replace Senator Dianne Feinstein on the committee that approves federal judges, the chamber’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, said on Tuesday. That would make it harder for Democrats to confirm President Joe Biden’s appointments to the federal judiciary until Feinstein, 89, returns to the…
By Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Britain on Tuesday played down the impact from the leaks of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents online, saying some of the information being circulated from them was untrue and manipulated, without offering specific examples. A 21-year-old member of the U.S. Air National Guard accused of leaking top secret military…
By Andrew Osborn MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia’s Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S., British and Canadian ambassadors for a dressing down on Tuesday after they condemned the conviction of an opposition politician on treason charges. A Moscow court jailed Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza – who holds Russian and British passports – for 25 years on Monday after…
(Reuters) – Russian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to introduce life sentences for those convicted of treason, part of a concerted drive since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine to step up punishment of dissenters and perceived traitors. The lower house of parliament, the State Duma, also voted to increase maximum sentences for a range of terrorism and…
By Dan Peleschuk and Guy Faulconbridge KYIV/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has met his commanders in two regions of Ukraine that Moscow claims to have annexed, while Russian forces stepped up heavy artillery bombardments and air strikes on Tuesday on the devastated Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, meanwhile, visited troops…
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, faces the prospect of new criminal charges after in effect being forced to break the rules of the maximum security penal colony where he is being held, one of his lawyers said on Tuesday. Vadim Kobzev said on Twitter that a foul-smelling inmate with poor hygiene…
By Jack Queen (Reuters) – One of the most closely watched U.S. media trials in decades kicks off in a Delaware court on Tuesday as Fox Corp and Fox News face a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s coverage of false claims that the ballot-counter company rigged the 2020 presidential…
By Hyunjoo Jin and Sheila Dang SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google. He criticised Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has…
