A court in Sweden has found American rapper A$AP Rocky guilty of assault but he will not serve any more jail time.
The court on Wednesday gave the rapper a suspended sentence.
A$AP Rocky, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, was arrested with three members of his team after a fight that took place in Stockholm June 30.
Prosecutors alleged that Mayers and two members of his entourage repeatedly punched and kicked the victim during an attack that lasted several minutes. Prosecutors also accuse the rapper of hitting the victim with a glass bottle.
The rapper, who said he was acting in self defense, spent nearly five weeks in detention but was released earlier this month, pending the verdict in his trial.
President Donald Trump attempted to intervene in the case and had urged the release of A$AP Rocky.
“We do so much for Sweden but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Sweden should focus on its real crime problem! #FreeRocky,” Trump said in a series of tweets about the matter.
India issued a fresh flood alert Wednesday for parts of the southern state of Kerala, as the nationwide death toll from the annual monsoon deluge rose to at least 244.
Authorities warned Kerala locals of heavy rainfall over the next 24-48 hours in some of the worst affected regions of the state popular with tourists.
Heavy rain in parts of four Indian states — Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat – has forced more than 1.2 million people to leave their homes, mostly for government-run relief camps.
Kerala was hit by its worst floods in almost a century last year, when 450 people died, and the state is still recovering from the damage to public infrastructure including highways, railways and roads.
The state’s death toll this monsoon season increased to 95 overnight, with at least 59 people missing, Kerala police told AFP on Wednesday.
At least 58 people have also lost their lives in neighbouring Karnataka state, where authorities have rescued around 677,000 people from flooded regions.
The situation is now improving in Karnataka, however, as waters start to recede, a government official told AFP.
In the western states of Gujarat and Maharashtra the death toll reached 91, with hundreds of thousands rescued from inundated regions.
“Our teams have recovered 49 bodies so far from different regions including Sangli, Kolhapur, Satara and Pune, and most deaths were caused due to drowning and wall collapses,” Deepak Mhaisekar, divisional commissioner of Pune told AFP.
“The situation is under control now,” he added, though the casualty count may increase slightly.
India has deployed the army, navy and air force to work with the local emergency personnel for search, rescue and relief operations.
The monsoon rains are crucial to replenishing water supplies in drought-stricken India, but they kill hundreds of people across the country every year.
The U.N. refugee agency warns that time is running out for more than 500 migrants stranded in the Mediterranean Sea as storm clouds gather and their rescue vessels are denied a safe port of entry in Europe.
Italy and Malta continue to refuse docking rights to two rescue vessels. This despite the deteriorating conditions for 356 refugees and migrants rescued August 9 by the Ocean Viking, a vessel run by the charity Doctors Without Borders, and another 151 people who have been on board the Spanish NGO Open Arms for nearly two weeks.
U.N. refugee agency spokesman Charlie Yaxley says the passengers are in urgent need of disembarkation. He tells VOA storms are coming, so time is running out for a solution to be found.
“The rough seas are expected to intensify during the course of today and into tomorrow. Really, this is a question of how much we are willing to turn a blind eye to the suffering of people who have fled war and violence,” he said.
Yaxley says many of the people aboard the rescue vessels come from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and other unstable countries. While many others have fled economic hardship rather than conflict, he says they too have suffered appalling abuse–many during their perilous journeys toward Europe and many more in Libya.
He says conditions for refugees and migrants are so abysmal that those rescued at sea should not be returned to Libya, which is not safe.
“People do not choose to risk their lives on these dangerous journeys unless they feel the desperation that their lives are in better hands on the water than on remaining on the land,” he said. “The intensifying fighting, the widespread reports of abuses including arbitrary detention means it cannot be considered to have a safe port. Nobody should be returned there.”
Yaxley says the UNHCR supports a system whereby European nations share the responsibility of hosting the refugees and migrants with the countries that provide a safe haven to those rescued at sea.
However, anti-immigrant governments in Italy and Malta accuse Europe of leaving them to deal with the refugee crisis on their own. To deter rescues at sea, Italy recently passed a law imposing fines of more than one million dollars on boats conducting these missions entering its waters.
China’s recent squeeze on the Taiwan economy and its international profile is expected to backfire by making Taiwanese ever angrier and endearing them to leaders who oppose Beijing.
Taiwanese will like China less for cutting off self-guided tourism and blocking its citizens from entering a Taipei-based regional film award, analysts and a government official said this week. People upset with China generally vote for anti-China leaders at home, frustrating Beijing’s goal of unifying someday with their self-ruled island.
“In the past, the impact of this sort of attitude [in China] has been very poor,” said You Ying-lung, chairman of the survey research body Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation. “The targets of its criticism would be elected president.”
FILE – Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen attends a ceremony to sign up for Democratic Progressive Party’s 2020 presidential candidate nomination in Taipei, Taiwan, March 21, 2019.
Taiwan’s incumbent president, an irritant to China, is running for a second four-year term against a candidate seen as friendlier to the Communist leadership.
Accumulation of pressure
In the latest cases, China’s culture ministry starting August 1 will cut off permits for mainland Chinese people to visit Taiwan as independent travelers. About 82,000 of those travelers normally visit Taiwan every month. Their absence will erode business for inns, eateries and local taxi services.
Last week the Chinese government-controlled China Film News blog said domestic actors and films could no longer compete in the Taiwan-based Golden Horse Awards, an annual Oscars-like event for films from Chinese-speaking Asia. The awards in their 56th year have helped boost the fame of stars such as Jackie Chan.
“The authorities in mainland China must take full responsibility for causing this step backward in people-to-people exchanges,” said Chiu Chui-cheng, spokesman for the Taiwan government’s Mainland Affairs Council. “This incident will make Taiwanese citizens recognize again all the more that China is exerting political pressure on the essence of normal exchanges.”
China-Taiwan ties have weakened since 2016, when President Tsai Ing-wen took office in Taipei. Her government won’t negotiate on Beijing’s condition that both sides belong to a single China. China regards self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, to be unified by force someday if needed. Most Taiwanese prefer autonomy, a Taiwan government survey found in January.
Also during Tsai’s term, officials in Taipei say, China has sent military aircraft near Taiwan and persuaded five Taiwanese diplomatic allies to switch allegiance to Beijing.
Common Taiwanese are talking about the film awards and tourism suspension flaps, ruling party lawmaker Lee Chun-yi said. People are getting more upset with China, he added. “The more they push the Taiwanese, the further away they’ll get,” he said.
Cycle of anger
Actions in Beijing that are aimed at warning Taiwan by squeezing its economy or international reputation sometimes have an opposite effect, You said.
Beijing tested missiles in the Taiwan Strait from late 1995 until just before the 1996 Taiwan election, for example. Lee Teng-hui, who advocated keeping a political distance from China, won the election.
The Chinese government said ahead of Taiwan’s 2000 presidential that it would use force if the island’s leaders declined to discuss unification. Chen Shui-bian, another anti-China firebrand, won that race.
By taking action aimed at Taiwan now rather than later, China may avoid influencing the island’s January presidential and parliamentary elections, said Joanna Lei, CEO of the Chunghua 21st Century Think Tank in Taiwan. The campaign is likely to crest in November and December.
“This has got to be carefully weighted,” Lei said. “So even if people are unhappy, by the time November comes, there will be other things and they’re just trying to minimize the potential negative impacts to the extent possible.”
Tsai should get 45% of the presidential election vote, leading her closest rival by nearly five percentage points, the survey research foundation discovered in a July 22 survey.
The man who was Britain’s top finance official until three weeks ago accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government on Wednesday of steering the country toward a damaging no-deal Brexit that isn’t backed by Parliament or the voters.
Philip Hammond, a Conservative legislator who stepped down as Treasury chief just before Johnson became prime minister last month, said “leaving the EU without a deal would be just as much a betrayal of the referendum result as not leaving at all.”
Hammond told the BBC that Johnson had moved from a tough negotiating stance to a “wrecking” one by insisting on changes to the withdrawal agreement between Britain and the EU that the bloc would not accept.
He said that while he believed Johnson wanted a deal, “there are other people around him whose agenda is different” _ an apparent reference to advisers such as Dominic Cummings, one of the architects of the country’s 2016 decision to leave the EU.
Johnson has vowed that Britain will leave the EU on the scheduled date of Oct. 31, with or without a divorce deal. He is demanding the EU agree to major changes to the agreement the bloc made with his predecessor, Theresa May. The EU refuses to renegotiate, so a no-deal Brexit appears increasingly likely.
Many economists say that will trigger a recession and cause economic mayhem, with shortages of fresh food and other goods likely as customs checks snarl Britain’s ports.
Johnson and other Brexit supporters argue that any short-term turbulence will be outweighed by new economic opportunities once Britain leaves the 28-nation bloc and can strike trade deals around the world _ notably with the United States. Critics note that the EU accounts for almost half of Britain’s trade and argue that any new trade deals are likely years away.
Hammond criticized the government for perpetuating “myths” that the British people voted for a no-deal Brexit and that leaving the EU without a negotiated settlement would be painless.
“There is no mandate for leaving with no deal,” Hammond said. “It is absurd to suggest that the 52% of people that voted to leave the European Union, all voted to leave with no deal when, in fact … during the referendum campaign there was virtually no mention made by the leaders of that campaign at all of the possibility of leaving with no deal.”
“A no-deal exit will cause significant harm to the U.K. economy and, potentially, irreparable damage to the union of the United Kingdom,” he added.
A parliamentary showdown over Brexit is looming when lawmakers return from their summer break in early September. Opposition legislators hope to take action to block a no-deal departure _ either by passing legislation or by bringing down the government and triggering an early election. To succeed they will need to persuade Conservatives like Hammond to vote against the government.
Johnson has refused to rule out suspending Parliament if legislators try to delay or prevent Brexit. Hammond said that would “provoke a constitutional crisis.”
House of Commons Speaker John Bercow, who controls the day-to-day business of Parliament, said he would seek to prevent the prime minister from overriding Parliament.
“If there is an attempt to circumvent, to bypass or God forbid to close down Parliament, that is anathema to me,” Bercow told an audience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in comments reported by the Herald newspaper. “I will fight with every breath in my body to stop that happening.”
