AP – An avalanche in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains in the United States (US) killed two backcountry skiers, authorities said.
The Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that its search-and-rescue unit recovered two bodies west of Bend in Happy Valley, near Broken Top peak.
The couple had been skiing when an avalanche happened on Monday at 2,042 metres on a south-facing slope, the Central Oregon Avalanche Centre said in a social media post.
“We extend our deepest condolences to all who loved the couple who tragically lost their lives while doing what they loved,” the post said. “As longtime residents of Central Oregon, they have touched many lives, and their legacy will continue to live on in our community.”
The names of the two people killed have not yet been released.
Earlier, the sheriff’s office said it had responded overnight to reports of people possibly buried in an avalanche in the area.
Avalanche danger in the Central Cascades is currently “considerable,” a three on a scale of zero to five, according to the Avalanche Centre forecast.
A view of four of the central Oregon Cascade Mountain Range peaks, Broken Top, South Sister, Middle Sister and North Sister, as seen from near Sisters, Oregon in the United States. PHOTO: AP
BRASILIA (AFP) – Brazil’s attorney general formally charged far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro and 33 others over an alleged coup attempt after his 2022 election loss.
Bolsonaro, 69, and his co-accused were hit with five charges over the alleged bid to prevent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after a bitter election race.
Attorney General Paulo Gonet Branco filed the charges at the Supreme Court “based on manuscripts, digital files, spreadsheets and exchanges of messages that reveal the scheme to disrupt the democratic order,” his office said in a statement.
“They describe, in detail, the conspiratorial plot set up and executed against democratic institutions.”
One of the charges is for the crime of “armed criminal organisation,” allegedly led by Bolsonaro and his vice-presidential candidate Walter Braga Netto. “Allied with other individuals, including civilians and military personnel, they attempted to prevent, in a coordinated manner, the result of the 2022 presidential elections from being fulfilled,” read the statement. The prosecutor’s office based its decision on a federal police report of over 800 pages, released last year after a two-year investigation which found Bolsonaro was “fully aware and actively participated” in the plot to cling to power.
Bolsonaro has denied the accusations and said he was the victim of “persecution”.
“The attempted coup d’etat… has become an empty accusation, which has absolutely no evidence against Bolsonaro,” his son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, wrote on X.
According to the statement from Branco’s office, the plot began in 2021, with “systematic attacks on the electronic voting system, through public statements and on the internet.”
During the second round of the presidential election in October 2022, security agencies were mobilised to “prevent voters from voting for the opposition candidate”, said the statement.
Those involved at this stage worked to facilitate “the acts of violence and vandalism on January 8, 2023,” when Bolsonaro supporters stormed the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court in Brasilia.
The attorney general’s office said the criminal organisation headed by Bolsonaro had pressured army chiefs “in favour of forceful actions in the political scene to prevent the elected president from taking office”.
Investigations also showed a plot to assassinate Lula, vice-president Geraldo Alckmin and a high-profile judge with “the approval of” Bolsonaro. According to the statement, the January 8 riots by Bolsonaro supporters urging the military to intervene were “the final attempt”.
Former Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro arrives at the Federal Senate in Brasilia, Brazil.
PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Trump administration stopped support for legal representation in immigration court for children who enter the United States (US) alone, a setback for those fighting deportation who can’t afford a lawyer.
The Acacia Center for Justice said it serves 26,000 migrant children under its federal contract. The Interior Department gave no explanation for the stop-work order, telling the group only that it was done for “causes outside of your control” and should not be interpreted as a judgement of poor performance. The halt remains in effect until further notice.
The Interior Department and Health and Human Services Department, which oversees unaccompanied migrant children, did not respond to requests for comment.
Acacia said it runs the legal aid programme through a network of 85 organisations nationwide that represent children under 18.
The halt comes shortly after the Justice Department briefly stopped support for other contacts to provide legal information and guidance to people facing deportation. It restored funding after being sued by advocacy groups.
People fighting deportation may hire attorneys at their own expense, but the government does not provide them. Groups that rely on federal support to represent children said the most vulnerable would suffer most under the decision to halt work on the USD200 million contract.
“Expecting a child to represent themselves in immigration court absurd and deeply unjust,” said director of training and technical assistance at the Centre for Gender and Refugee Studies Christine Lin.
An immigration advocate signs guardianship papers for United States-born children whose parents are in the country illegally. PHOTO: AP
ATHENS (AP) – Authorities in Greece said they detained 107 migrants in two separate operations near the island of Crete, as an official attributed an increase in people trying to cross the eastern Mediterranean to conflicts in the Middle East.
A cargo ship assisted in the rescue of 42 male migrants from a boat in distress that was abandoned and later broke up after hitting rocks, according to the coast guard and officials from the Ministry of Maritime Affairs. Survivors later told authorities they had departed from the Libyan port of Tobruk. Authorities arrested two men on smuggling charges. In the second incident, 65 migrants were found on the island of Gavdos south of Crete. One man required medical assistance and was taken to a nearby hospital.
Speaking in Parliament, the Deputy Minister of Maritime Affairs, Stefanos Gikas, said authorities have been dealing with a surge in illegal migration since late 2023.
Government officials have attributed it to conflicts in the Middle East.
File photo shows rescued refugees and migrants aboard a boat at the town of Paleochora, southwestern Crete island in Greece. PHOTO: AFP
PARIS (AFP) – The French judiciary is investigating the 2012 deaths of reporters in Syria as a possible crime against humanity, anti-terror prosecutors told AFP.
Prominent United States (US) journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed by an explosion in the east of the war-torn country in what a US court later ruled was an “unconscionable” attack that targeted journalists on the orders of the Syrian government.
The French judiciary had been treating the alleged attack as a potential war crime, but on December 17 widened the investigation to a possible crime against humanity, a charge for which French courts claim universal jurisdiction regardless of locations or nationalities involved.
The anti-terror prosecutors’ office told AFP that new evidence pointed to “the execution of a concerted plan against a group of civilians, including journalists, activists and defenders of human rights, as part of a wide-ranging or systematic attack”.
Colvin – a renowned war correspondent whose career was celebrated in a Golden Globe-nominated film A Private War – was killed in the Syrian army’s shelling of the Baba Amr Media Centre in Homs on February 22, 2012.
The federal court in the US capital, which in 2019 ordered Syria to pay USD302.5 million over her death, said in its verdict that Syrian military and intelligence had tracked the broadcasts of Colvin and other journalists covering the siege of Homs to the media centre.
They then targeted it in an artillery barrage that killed Colvin and Ochlik. French investigators also believe that both were “deliberately targeted”. In addition, they extended the probe to cover suspected Syrian government “persecution” of civilians, including Colvin and Ochlik.
LONDON (AFP) – A new law introduced after a spate of high-profile knife crimes will make it harder for young people to purchase knives online, the United Kingdom (UK) government announced yesterday.
The stricter regulation follows several fatal knife crimes involving young people, including the 2024 murder of three girls by teenager Axel Rudakubana, who was able to purchase the blade he used on Amazon, bypassing age verification rules.
“Ronan’s Law”, named after a 16-year-old murdered in 2022, will require retailers to report “suspicious” and bulk blade purchases to authorities, as well as bolster age verification checks.
The jail terms for retailers who sell knives to under-18s will also be increased from six months to up to two years under the new law.
The punishment “could apply to an individual who has processed the sale or a Chief Executive Officer of the company”, according to a Home Office press release.
“It is horrifying how easy it is for young people to get hold of knives online even though children’s lives are being lost, and families and communities are left devastated as a result,” Interior Minister Yvette Cooper said in a statement.
The current law states that retailers must verify the age of the customer before selling a knife and, for those bought online, at the point of collection or delivery.
Under the new rules, online sellers will be required to verify photo identities and ages at the point of sale and delivery.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has pledged to halve knife crime in the next decade and has banned zombie-style knives and machetes.
While Britain has some of the strictest gun controls in the world, rampant knife crime has been branded a “national crisis” by Starmer.
In the year leading up to March 2024, there were 262 murders in England and Wales using a knife or sharp instrument, according to the Ben Kinsella Trust, an anti-knife crime charity.
Of those murdered, 57 were under the age of 25.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer meeting with police officers in London, England. PHOTO: AFP
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Sweden’s Supreme Court threw out a class action lawsuit yesterday brought against the state by 300 young people, including climate activist Greta Thunberg, accusing it of climate inaction.
The first of its kind in the Scandinavian country, the case demanded that Sweden take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to within the limits of what is “technically and economically feasible”.
“The Supreme Court has now concluded that the case cannot be taken up for review,” it said in a statement.
“This is because a court cannot decide that the Riksdag (Parliament) or the government has to take any particular action.”
“The political bodies decide independently which specific climate measures Sweden should take,” it added.
However, the Supreme Court said it did not rule out that a climate case could be tried by the courts if it were “designed differently” – highlighting that it was filed by a group of individuals rather than an association.
“The European Court of Justice has recently ruled in a judgment that an association that meets certain requirements may have the right to bring a climate lawsuit.”
While a group named Aurora is behind the Swedish lawsuit, it was filed in the name of one individual, with some 300 other people joining it, according to the Supreme Court.
The court noted there are “very high requirements for individuals to have the right to bring such a claim” against a state.
“It is a fundamental principle to not allow a lawsuit by individuals with the aim of protecting public interests, and climate change affects everyone.”
“Individuals only have the right to judicial review if the state’s failure has had sufficiently imminent and certain effects on their individual rights.”
However, if the lawsuit were instead filed by an association, “which meets certain requirements regarding, among other things, representativeness and suitability, these high requirements are not applied.”
The Supreme Court said it had not addressed how the issue would be assessed if the lawsuit had been brought by an association and if it were limited to the question of whether the state violated their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, Jonas Malmberg, one of the judges in the case, said in a statement.
In recent years, a growing number of organisations and citizens have turned to the courts to criticise what they say is government inaction on the climate.
In December 2019, the Dutch supreme court ordered the government to slash greenhouse gases by at least 25 per cent by 2020 in a landmark case brought by an environmental group.
FAR’A REFUGEE CAMP (AP) – By car and on foot, through muddy olive groves and snipers’ sight lines, tens of thousands of Palestinians in recent weeks have fled Israeli military operations across the northern West Bank – the largest displacement in the occupied territory since the 1967 Mideast war.
After announcing a widespread crackdown against West Bank militants on January 21 – just two days after its ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza – Israeli forces descended on the restive city of Jenin.
But unlike past operations, Israeli forces then pushed deeper and more forcefully into several other nearby towns, including Tulkarem, Far’a and Nur Shams, scattering families and stirring bitter memories of the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.
During that war, 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in what is now Israel. That Nakba, or “catastrophe”, as Palestinians call it, gave rise to the crowded West Bank towns now under assault and still known as refugee camps.
“This is our nakba,” said Abed Sabagh, 53, who bundled his seven children into the car on February 9 as sound bombs blared in Nur Shams camp, where he was born to parents who fled the 1948 war.
TACTICS FROM GAZA
Humanitarian officials said they haven’t seen such displacement in the West Bank since the 1967 Mideast war, when Israel captured the territory west of the Jordan River, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, displacing another 300,000 Palestinians.
“This is unprecedented. When you add to this the destruction of infrastructure, we’re reaching a point where the camps are becoming uninhabitable,” said Director of West Bank affairs for the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency Roland Friedrich. More than 40,100 Palestinians have fled their homes in the ongoing military operation, according to the agency.
Experts said that Israel’s tactics in the West Bank are becoming almost indistinguishable from those deployed in Gaza. Already, United States (US) President Donald Trump’s plan for the mass transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza has emboldened Israel’s far-right to renew calls for annexation of the West Bank.
“The idea of ‘cleansing’ the land of Palestinians is more popular today than ever before,” said head of the Institute for the Study of Civil-Military Relations at Britain’s Open University Yagil Levy.
The Israeli army denies issuing evacuation orders in the West Bank. It said troops secure passages for those wanting to leave on their own accord.
Residents of the West Bank refugee camp of Nur Shams, near Tulkarem, evacuate their homes as the Israeli military continues its operation in the area. PHOTO: APIsraeli soldiers are seen operating inside the Far’a refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Tubas. PHOTO: AP
SEVEN MINUTES TO LEAVE HOME
Over a dozen displaced Palestinians interviewed in the last week said they did not flee their homes out of fear, but on the orders of Israeli security forces. Associated Press (AP) journalists in the Nur Shams camp also heard Israeli soldiers shouting through mosque megaphones, ordering people to leave.
Some displaced families said soldiers were polite, knocking on doors and assuring them they could return when the army left. Others said they were ruthless, ransacking rooms, waving rifles and hustling residents out of their homes despite pleas for more time.
“I was sobbing, asking them, ‘Why do you want me to leave my house?’ My baby is upstairs, just let me get my baby please,’” Ayat Abdullah, 30, recalled from a shelter for displaced people in the village of Kafr al-Labd. “They gave us seven minutes. I brought my children. Nothing else.”
Told to make their own way, Abdullah trudged 10 kilometres on a path lighted only by the glow from her phone as rain turned the ground to mud. She said she clutched her children tight, braving possible snipers that had killed a 23-year-old pregnant woman just hours earlier on February 9.
Her five-year-old son, Nidal, interrupted her story, pursing his lips together to make a loud buzzing sound.
“You’re right, my love,” she replied. “That’s the sound the drones made when we left home.”
HOSPITALITY, FOR NOW
In the nearby town of Anabta, volunteers moved in and out of mosques and government buildings that have become makeshift shelters – delivering donated blankets, serving bitter coffee, distributing boiled eggs for breakfast and whipping up vats of rice and chicken for dinner.
Residents have opened their homes to families fleeing Nur Shams and Tulkarem.
“This is our duty in the current security situation,” said mayor of Anabta Thabet A’mar.
But he stressed that the town’s welcoming hand should not be mistaken for anything more.
“We insist that their displacement is temporary,” he said.
STAYING PUT
When the invasion started on February 2, Israeli bulldozers ruptured underground pipes.
Taps ran dry. Sewage gushed. Internet service was shut off. Schools closed. Food supplies dwindled. Explosions echoed.
Ahmad Sobuh could understand how his neighbours chose to flee the Far’a refugee camp during Israel’s 10-day incursion. But he scavenged rainwater to drink and hunkered down in his home, swearing to himself, his family and the Israeli soldiers knocking at his door that he would stay.
The soldiers advised against that, informing Sobuh’s family on February 11 that, because a room had raised suspicion for containing security cameras and an object resembling a weapon, they would blow up the second floor.
The surveillance cameras were not unusual in the volatile neighbourhood, Sobuh said, as families can observe street battles and Israeli army operations from inside.
But the second claim sent him clambering upstairs, where he found his nephew’s water pipe, shaped like a rifle.
Hours later, the explosion left his nephew’s room naked to the wind and shattered most others. It was too dangerous to stay.
“They are doing everything they can to push us out,” he said of Israel’s military, which, according to the UN agency for refugees, has demolished hundreds of homes across the four camps this year.
A CHILLING RETURN
The first thing Doha Abu Dgehish noticed about her family’s five-storey home 10 days after Israeli troops forced them to leave, she said, was the smell.
Venturing inside as Israeli troops withdrew from Far’a camp, she found rotten food and toilets piled with excrement. Pet parakeets had vanished from their cages.
Israeli forces had apparently used explosives to blow every door off its hinges, even though none had been locked.
Rama, her 11-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, screamed upon finding her doll’s skirt torn and its face covered with more graphic drawings.
AP journalists visited the Abu Dgehish home on February 12, hours after their return.
Nearly two dozen Palestinians interviewed across the four West Bank refugee camps this month described army units taking over civilian homes to use as a dormitories, storerooms or lookout points.
The Abu Dgehish family accused Israeli soldiers of vandalising their home, as did multiple families in Far’a.
The Israeli army blamed militants for embedding themselves in civilian infrastructure.
Soldiers may be “required to operate from civilian homes for varying periods”, it said, adding that the destruction of civilian property was a violation of the military’s rules and does not conform to its values.
It said “any exceptional incidents that raise concerns regarding a deviation from these orders” are “thoroughly addressed”, without elaborating.
For Abu Dgehish, the mess was emblematic of the emotional whiplash of return. No one knows when they’ll have to flee again.
“It’s like they want us to feel that we’re never safe,” she said.
AP – Harris Dickinson was nervous to approach Nicole Kidman.
This would not necessarily be notable under normal circumstances, but the English actor had already been cast to star opposite her in the erotic drama Babygirl, as the intern who initiates an affair with Kidman’s buttoned-up CEO. They’d had a zoom with the writer-director Halina Reijn, who was excited by their playful banter and sure that Dickinson would hold his own. And yet when he found himself at the same event as Kidman, shyness took over. He admitted as much to Margaret Qualley, who took things into her own hands and introduced them.
“She helped me break the ice a bit,” Dickinson said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
On set would be an entirely different story. Dickinson might not be nearly as “puckishly audacious” as his character Samuel but in the making of Babygirl, he, Kidman and Reijn had no choice but to dive fearlessly into this exploration of power dynamics, going to intimate, awkward, exhilarating and meme-able places. It’s made the film, in theatres on Christmas Day, one of the year’s must-sees.
“There was an unspoken thing that we adhered to,” Dickinson said. “We weren’t getting to know each other’s personal lives. When we were working and we were the characters, we didn’t veer away from the material. I never tried to attach all of the history of Nicole Kidman. Otherwise it probably would have been a bit of a mess.”
PHOTO: APHarris Dickinson arrives at the 4th annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles. PHOTO: APPhotos show Harris Dickinson and Nicole Kidman in scenes from ‘Babygirl’. PHOTO: AP
His is a performance that reconfirms what many in the film world have suspected since his debut seven years ago as a Brooklyn tough questioning himself in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats: Dickinson is one of the most exciting young talents around.
Dickinson, 28, grew up in Leytonstone, in East London – the same neck of the woods as Alfred Hitchcock. Cinema was in his life, whether it was Christopher Nolan’s Batman films at the local multiplex or venturing into town to see the more social realist films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.
“Working class cinema interested me,” he said. “People around me that represented my world.”
Appropriately, his entry into making art started behind the camera, with a comedy web series he made as a kid, which he now describes as “really bad spoofs” of films and shows of the time. But things started to really click when he began acting in the local theatre.
“I remember feeling invigorated by it and accepted,” he said. “I felt myself for the first time and felt able to express myself in a way where I didn’t feel vulnerable and I felt alive and ignited by something.”
At around 17, someone suggested that he should give acting a try professionally.
He hadn’t even fully understood that it was a career possibility, but he started auditioning.
At 20, he was cast in Beach Rats and, he said, just “kept going.” Since then, he’s gotten a wide range of opportunities in films both big, including The King’s Man, and small.
He’s captivated as a male model in Ruben Östlund’s Cannes-winning Triangle of Sadness, an estranged father to a 12-year-old in Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper, an actor bringing an ex-boyfriend to life in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II, the charismatic, tragic wrestler David Von Erich in Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw and a soldier in Steve McQueen’s Blitz.
But Babygirl would present new challenges and opportunities with a character who’s almost impossible to define.
“He was confusing in a really interesting way. There wasn’t loads of specificity to it, which I enjoyed because it was a bit of a challenge to sort of pinpoint exactly what it was that drove him and made him tick,” Dickinson said.
“There was a directness that unlocked a lot for me, like a fearlessness with the way he spoke, or a social unawareness in a way – like not fully realising what he’s saying is affecting someone in a certain way. But I didn’t make too many rules for him.”
Part of the allure of the film is the ever-shifting power dynamics between the two characters, which could change over the course of a scene.
As Reijn said, “It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you suppress your own desires.” She was especially in awe of Dickinson’s ability to make everything feel improvised and the fact that he could look like a 12-year-old boy in one shot and a confident 45-year-old man in the next.
Since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, the film has led to some surprisingly direct conversations with audiences spanning generations. But that, Dickinson understood, was what Reijn wanted.
Dickinson recently stepped behind the camera again, directing his first feature film under the banner of his newly formed production company. Set against the backdrop of homelessness in London, Dream Space is about a drifter trying to assimilate and understand his cyclical behaviour.
The film, which wrapped earlier this year, has given him a heightened appreciation for just how many people are indispensable in the making of a film. He’s also started to understand that “acting is just being able to relax.”
“When you’re relaxed, you can do stuff that is truthful,” he said. “That only happens if you’ve got good people around you: The director that creates the good environment. The intimacy coordinator facilitating a safe space. A coworker in Nicole encouraging that kind of bravery and performance with what she’s doing.” – Lindsey Bahr
AP – Inflation in the United Kingdom (UK) rose to a 10-month high in January, official figures showed yesterday, an increase that will likely diminish expectations of rapid interest rate reductions from the Bank of England (BOE).
The Office for National Statistics said inflation, as measured by the consumer prices index, rose to three per cent in the year to January, up from the equivalent 2.5 per cent rate the month before.
The spike, which took inflation further above the bank’s target of two per cent, was largely due to increases in airfares, food casts and private school fees in the wake of the new Labour government’s decision to impose a sales tax.
Economists had anticipated an increase to 2.8 per cent but the scale of the spike has come as a big surprise and will likely cause concern among rate-setters at the central bank at a time when they are voicing worries about the UK’s tepid economic growth.
Earlier this month, the bank cut its main interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.50 per cent, its third reduction in six months, as it halved its 2025 growth forecast for the UK to 0.75 per cent.
If growth remains that modest, it will be hugely disappointing news for the UK’s new Labour government, which has made growth its number one mission as it will boost living standards and generate funds for cash-starved public services. With growth proving elusive, the party’s popularity has fallen sharply since its election victory in July.
The government will no doubt be hoping that the central bank helps it out by cutting interest rates further as it will contribute to lower mortgage rates and cheaper loans, though reducing the returns offered to savers.
Most economists think that inflation will rise further in the coming months as a result of higher domestic energy bills but start to trend lower in the second half of the year, which will give – policymakers room to cut interest rates again – but maybe not as many times as previously thought.
A man in front of the Bank of England in London, United Kingdom. PHOTO: AP
