A Minnesota judge on Monday warned that he’s likely to move the trials of four former police officers charged in George Floyd’s death out of Minneapolis if public officials, attorneys and family members don’t stop speaking out about the case. Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill stopped short of issuing a gag order against attorneys on both sides, but he said he likely will if public statements continue that make it hard to find an impartial jury. Cahill said that would also make him likely to grant a change-of-venue motion if one is filed, as he anticipates. “The court is not going to be happy about hearing comments on these three areas: merits, evidence and guilt or innocence,” Cahill said. In this courtroom sketch, former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao, right, watches as his defense attorney, Robert Paule, second from right, and Prosecutor Matthew Frank stand before Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill in Minneapolis, June 29, 2020.It was the second pretrial hearing for the officers, who were fired after Floyd’s May 25 death. Derek Chauvin, 44, is charged with second-degree murder and other counts, while Thomas Lane, 37, J. Kueng, 26, and Tou Thao, 34, are charged with aiding and abetting Chauvin. Floyd died after Chauvin, a white police officer, pressed his knee against the handcuffed 46-year-old Black man’s neck for nearly eight minutes. The officers were responding to a call about a man trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby store. Floyd’s death sparked protests around the world. Former Minneapolis Police officer J. Alexander Keung exits the Hennepin County Public Safety Facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 29, 2020.Thao’s attorney, Robert Paule, cited remarks from a variety of public officials saying they thought the officers were guilty, including President Donald Trump, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Mayor Jacob Frey. Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has called Floyd’s death “murder” and said Chauvin knew what he was doing because of his training. Gov. Tim Walz and Frey have also called it murder. Former Minneapolis policeman Thomas Lane and his attorney exit the Hennepin County Public Safety Facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 29, 2020.Cahill asked Assistant Attorney General Matthew Frank to use his influence to keep public officials silent, warning that if they continue to discuss it publicly, he likely would “have to pull (the trials) out of Hennepin County and they need to be aware of that.” But he also made it clear that he wants defense attorneys and Floyd family members to stay out of the press, too. Cahill set a March 8 trial date for the former officers if they are tried together, though he said he expects motions to be filed to separate their trials. If they’re tried separately, those still in custody — currently Chauvin and Thao — would most likely go first. The next court date is Sept. 11. The defendants have not entered pleas. Chauvin’s attorney has not commented publicly on the charges, while Lane’s and Kueng’s attorneys have sought to minimize their clients’ roles and deflect blame to the more senior Chauvin in Floyd’s death. Kueng’s attorney said in a court filing Monday that he intends to plead not guilty and that he will argue it was self-defense, a reasonable use of force and an authorized use of force. Chauvin remains in custody on $1 million bail and Thao is being held on $750,000 bail. Lane and Kueng are free on bond. In this courtroom sketch, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin appears on closed-circuit television from a maximum security prison in Oak Park Heights, Minn., June 29, 2020, during a hearing in Minneapolis.Cahill rejected a defense request to reconsider his earlier decision to prohibit cameras in the courtroom during pretrial proceedings. Defense attorneys asked for the cameras, saying it would help balance what the public has heard about the case, but prosecutors objected. The judge has not ruled on whether to allow cameras for the trial itself, but has said he is open to it. The charges against Chauvin are unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Second-degree murder carries a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison, third-degree murder carries up to 25 years and manslaughter up to 10. The other three former officers are charged with aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Those charges are legally tantamount to the counts against Chauvin and carry the same penalties.  
 
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A Parisian court Monday found former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon guilty of using public money to pay his wife more than $1 million for work she never performed.Fillon was sentenced to five years in prison — three years suspended — and fined more than $423,000. He is also barred from running for public office for 10 years. His wife, Penelope, was convicted as an accomplice. She was given a three-year suspended sentence and was also fined more than $423,000. Both are free pending appeal, which their lawyers say they will do.  ”Naturally, this decision, which is not fair, is going to be appealed. … The ludicrous conditions under which this investigation was triggered, the scandalous conditions in which the discovery was opened, the surprising conditions in which the investigation was then run,” Fillion’s attorney Antonin Levy said. Penelope Fillion’s attorney, Pierre Cornut-Gentille, says prosecutors failed to determine whether her activities were simply traditional help and support a politician’s wife gives her husband.  She said her duties included writing reports about local issues, reading mail, preparing speeches and meeting with voters — work she said allowed her to have a flexible schedule and still raise her children.  Prosecutors argued that there was little evidence that Penelope Fillion ever worked and said her salary was excessive.  Fillion’s lawyers argued that the state cannot interfere with how a politician sets up his office.  The scandal broke shortly before the 2017 French presidential election where Fillon went from being the front-runner to finishing in third place.
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The White House is on the defensive about President Donald Trump not being briefed on reports that a Russian military intelligence unit offered bounties to Taliban militants in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers.  “It was not verified,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Monday when reporters asked why the president was not told of the information. “There were dissenting opinions within the intelligence community,” she added. The White House did conduct a Monday afternoon briefing for eight House Republicans about the matter amid bipartisan calls by members of Congress for transparency.   House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to give the full 435-member House of Representatives a briefing on the issue.  “Congress needs to know what the intelligence community knows about this significant threat to American troops and our allies and what options are available to hold Russia accountable,” Pelosi said in a statement.  
 FILE – House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill, April 12, 2018.In the Senate, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said he wants all 100 senators briefed by the heads of the CIA and the director of national intelligence.  “We need to know whether or not President Trump was told this information, and if so, when,” Schumer said in a statement.  Trump tweeted Sunday he was not briefed.  FILE – U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks in Washington, March 22, 2020.”Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP,” the president said on Twitter, referencing Vice President Mike Pence.  The New York Times was the first to report that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and covert operations in Europe aimed at destabilizing the West, had carried out the mission in Afghanistan last year and that he had been briefed about it in late March.  According to The Washington Post, U.S. forces suffered 28 deaths from 2018 to 2020. An additional number of service members also died in attacks by members of the Afghan security forces, which may have been infiltrated by the Taliban, the newspaper reported.  The intelligence originated with U.S. Special Operations forces in Afghanistan and was verified by the CIA, the Post said.  According to a former National Security Council spokesman, Ned Price, “Only infrequently would the president be briefed on raw, uncorroborated intelligence” but according to the reports that is not the case with this information “gleaned from site exploration in Afghanistan, corroborated by detainee briefings and further corroborated by broader all-source collection and analysis.” Price was among those who provided then-President Barack Obama with his daily intelligence briefing. Price also noted to VOA that various senior administration officials, including Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan reconciliation, “had staked out positions on how to respond to Russia. If this truly were raw, uncorroborated reporting, there wouldn’t have been high-level policy discussions regarding a response.”  Both Russia and the Taliban deny the reports of the bounties, with the Kremlin calling them “baseless and anonymous accusations.”Reaction from TalibanA spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, rejected the report that the insurgents have “any such relations with any intelligence agency” and called the newspaper report an attempt to defame them.   FILE – Members of a Taliban negotiating team enter the venue hosting U.S.-Taliban talks in the Qatari capital Doha, Aug. 29, 2019.”These kinds of deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless — our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own resources,” he said. “That changed after our deal with the Americans, and their lives are secure, and we don’t attack them.”   Earlier this year, the United States and Taliban signed an “agreement for bringing peace” to Afghanistan after more than 18 years of conflict. The U.S. and NATO allies have agreed to withdraw all troops by next year if the militants uphold the deal.  A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, Mick Mulroy, terms as disturbing the reports about Moscow paying a bounty to the Taliban, noting Russia is deemed an enemy of the United States in the U.S. national security strategy.   “We do not want a war with Russia and we do not want to start killing each other’s soldier, but there are some actions you can’t accept,” Mulroy, also a former CIA paramilitary officer, and currently an ABC News national security analyst, told VOA. “If we have solid evidence that this is being done and our forces are being killed, the gloves should be hitting the floor.” VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
 
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India has banned the use of 59 Chinese-owned apps, including TikTok, citing security concerns Monday, as relations between the two neighbors worsen. In a statement, India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT said it “has decided to block 59 apps since in view of information available, they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order.” TikTok, a popular video application owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, counts India as its biggest market. It was not immediately clear how the “ban” would be enforced and whether mobile companies were expected to comply. As of Monday evening, the banned apps were still available on Google’s Play store and the Apple App store in India, according to Tech Crunch.The announcement from Delhi comes amid rising tension between the two countries, weeks after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in clashes with Chinese forces along the border in the region of Ladakh. The Chinese government did not release figures on how many of its own soldiers were injured or killed. 
 
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The Italian Coast Guard has released video of a team of divers who successfully freed a ten-meter long sperm whale that had become trapped in an illegal fishing net in the Mediterranean Sea, off Italy’s southwestern coast. 
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President Vladimir Putin has compared Russian doctors to heroic Red Army soldiers battling the Nazis during World War II. Last week, the Russian leader signed decrees honoring doctors with special awards for their coronavirus efforts.
 
Many Russian medics, however, have voiced dismay at what they say is poor public appreciation for their sacrifices and are expressing anger with a government they say is failing them and their patients. They question the official figures the government has published for new cases and the death tally exacted by COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel virus which first emerged last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
 
The country’s poorly resourced medical staff are generally guarded when speaking out about the shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE, specialists and overstretched facilities. Russia’s Supreme Court has ruled it illegal to discuss “fake news” about the deadly coronavirus pandemic in public and say doing so is punishable by up to five years in prison.
 
Even so, some appear prepared to court the wrath of the authorities. From across the country, raw medial testimonies echo each other in their grievances and descriptions. In the early stages of the pandemic, some tried to raise the alarm at the casual mixing in wards of suspected COVID-19 patients with those suffering from other illnesses.  
 
And they have warned of a devastating lack of PPE and scant safety measures being observed in hospitals. A midwife from Ufa, a town in the Volga region, explained recently to Novaya Gazeta, an independent investigative newspaper, that large numbers of doctors are falling sick. “Doctors just take some of the drugs they have and continue to work because there is no one to replace us,” she said.FILE – Doctors perform a tracheal intubation on a coronavirus patient for artificial lung respiration at an intensive care unit of the Filatov City Clinical Hospital in Moscow, Russia, May 15, 2020.Dmitry Belyakov, a paramedic in the city of Zheleznodorozhny in the Moscow region, cast doubt to the same newspaper about official coronavirus figures, saying they are deceptive and that the authorities are fudging the death toll. “I don’t believe the official figures. If a person tests positive for coronavirus but dies of heart failure, what did they die from? It can be recorded as either. All our data gathering is built on this [flawed] principle,” he said.
 
Russia’s first officially recorded virus-related fatality — an elderly woman who died on March 19 — was reclassified, it emerged, as having died from a blood clot.
 
According to Russian authorities, the cumulative nationwide tally of infections is 640,246. The country’s coronavirus response center says the death toll is at 9,152. Russian officials say the ratio of fatalities to confirmed cases is much lower than many more advanced European countries because the country’s state of readiness was already high. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says Russia has managed to keep fatalities low because tough decisions were made quickly about self-isolation and the country quickly built new facilities to add additional hospital beds.
 
Medics paint a different picture. And there are reports of at least one doctor driven to suicide because of despair. Natalya Lebedeva, head of emergency medical services for Zvyozdny Gorodok, a town in Moscow region, died in April after falling from a window. Lebedeva had been hospitalized with a suspected case of COVID-19. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that colleagues were skeptical of the official cause of death, which was ruled an accident. Her colleagues say she committed suicide.FILE – A woman reacts as she walks past photos of St. Petersburg’s medical workers who died from the coronavirus after being infected at work, at a makeshift memorial at a local health department in St. Petersburg, Russia, May 20, 2020.Few doubted the Russian health care system would be stretched thin as the coronavirus emerged. Last year, nurses, doctors, ambulance staff as well as paramedics across Russia had been increasingly vocal about the deteriorating state of the public health service, staging strikes and coordinating a wave of resignations in more than 20 regions.
 
Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Alliance of Doctors, told reporters in October 2019 that the system was broken, and that strikes and industrial action by medical professionals were spreading from Siberia to Moscow, with her alliance’s support, as well as the backing of anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny.  
 
In Moscow, a team of pediatric oncologists quit their jobs at one of the country’s best cancer clinics to protest overcrowded wards, pay cuts and an “optimization reform.” They told VOA it was impacting their ability to treat desperately sick patients. The doctors at the Blokhin Cancer Research Center said the system was falling into disrepair amid mismanagement.
 
In May, Irina Shikhman, a popular YouTube-based journalist, posted a series of interviews with doctors and other medical staff. Nina Klishina, a nurse from Solnechnogorsk, told Shikhman she felt naked when treating patients because of the absence of PPE.  
 
“What choice do I have? No one is talking about heroism, like we run to the rescue. It is our job. The person is dying, you can’t do anything, you have to help. I can’t leave her,” she said.FILE – Medical personnel wearing protective gear move what appears to be a bag containing a human body, outside a hospital for coronavirus patients, on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia May 12, 2020.She explained that the hospital’s laundry woman had been given pieces of gauze to sow into makeshift masks. “Of course, we don’t take them much. But they are reported [as PPE] on the check lists.” She and others complained that top managers had all but disappeared, determinedly avoiding danger.  
 
Irina Vaskyanina, a doctor from the town of Reutov, described the testing equipment they were given along with the wrong spatulas for conducting nasal or throat swabs. Her own test came back negative, but she explained she didn’t believe it. “I was called and told that I tested negative but I don’t believe it because I was very sick. Two weeks with a fever and cough,” she said.
 
Anastasia Vasilyeva with the Alliance of Doctors says management at some hospitals has been blocking PPE supplies the alliance has been donating. “We try to explain peacefully, ‘We are a charity, we have all documents, we have donation agreements. Please take it.’” She says they have to smuggle the equipment into hospitals.
 
Vladimir Perlukhin, a doctor from Kletnya in the Bryansk region, told Irina Shikhman that doctors and medical staff have become one of the main sources for spreading the coronavirus because of the lack of safety measures and testing. “We are forced into silence, they insult us, yell at us, forcing us to keep silent. We work for pennies,” he said.  
 
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Communities of color in Boston are disproportionately affected by evictions in the city, with some of the highest rates in Black communities, according to a new report released Sunday.  Seventy percent of market-rate eviction filings occur in neighborhoods where a majority of residents are people of color, though only about half of rental housing is in these neighborhoods, according to three years of data by MIT researchers and a housing justice organization. The problem has only been exasperated by the coronavirus, which saw a spike in eviction filings before the state issued a moratorium in April. Almost 80% of those suspended cases were in communities of color.  “The COVID crisis acts as an accelerator. It exposes the fault lines in our housing system,” said Lisa Owens, the executive director City Life/Vida, whose group helped produce the report. “This is what you get when you don’t address generations of systemic racism.”  The racial disparity in Boston evictions is part of a nationwide trend and mirrors findings in cities across the country and in Washington state. Much of the research has found that the racial composition of a neighborhood is the most important factor in predicting neighborhood eviction rates, even more than poverty and other neighborhood characteristics.   “The Boston study really reflects what we found in Richmond as well as other urban regions in Virginia,” Ben Teresa, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who has studied eviction rates and co-directs an eviction lab, said. “When we start looking at it in these different places, I’ve seen that race continues to be one of the most, if not the most important, factors in high eviction rates.”  Boston has other characteristics that increase eviction risks especially in communities of color. It has one of the country’s most expensive rental markets, a shortage of affordable housing and a history of segregation and racial discrimination. Neighborhoods, like Roxbury and Dorchester, Mattapan, have some of highest rates of poverty in Boston.  “The results are very troubling,” said Justin Steil, an associate professor of law and urban planning at MIT who authored the report with MIT researcher David Robinson.    “It suggest that above and beyond income, housing cost measures that race continues to play a significant role in evictions,” he said. “We see white supremacy and anti-blackness functioning in the housing markets as well as other areas of social life.”  Housing advocates said the high rates of evictions in these communities only adds the challenges already facing families. Many of those evicted, according to the report, often cannot finding stable housing, are driven into worse neighborhoods and can end up homeless.  To combat evictions in these communities, the report calls for a number of reforms including limits on annual rent increases and expanding legal representation for low-income tenants in housing court — only 8% have legal representation compared to 85% for landlords.  The city of Boston has set aside $8 million in federal funds to help renters affected by the coronavirus and last year came out with a plan to reduce evictions by a third in the next five years and build more affordable housing. It also created a program to provide rental assistance to low-income tenants, including homeless families.  “The City of Boston tracks eviction data every year and the data has clearly shown that evictions rates are higher in affordable housing and neighborhoods of color,” Sheila Dillon, the chief of housing for the city, said in a statement. “The Walsh administration is committed to reducing the number of evictions in Boston and has put forth a plan to guide this work.”    But housing advocates said more needs to be done and they are focusing efforts on a bill that is expected to be introduced Tuesday and would help renters impacted by the coronavirus. It would ban evictions for a year after the moratorium lifts later this summer and freeze rents at pre-coronavirus levels among other things. There is also a separate push for lifting a ban on rent control.    “Legislators that say the care about racial justice, that they say they are on the side of Black Lives Matter, can prove that is true by working for immediate COVID-19 recovery and long-term housing stability,” Owens said.  
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When a nine-year old girl, the daughter of an unemployed hotel chambermaid fainted from hunger at a bakery shop on the island Rhodes this week, shockwaves were felt across the country. Several media outlets broke into scheduled programming to report the incident, while leading government ministers were left glued to their television sets, gripped by harrowing tale. Thanassis Stamoulis, president of the association of hotel employees in Rhodes explains. 
 
The young girl was in line, he says, waiting to get some bread. But she collapsed from starvation. This, unfortunately, is the grim reality here on the island of Rhodes, Stamoulis says. But it is just a small example of the human toll this crisis is exacting on society. With its breathtaking vistas, sandy beaches and spectacular medieval architecture, Rhodes has long been a top vacation destination. Last year alone, the island attracted more than two million British, German and American tourists. But today, weeks into Greece’s tourism relaunch, not a single hotel has managed to open, inflicting huge losses and devastating despair across the local community according to Stamoulis. 
 
The scenes that are unravelling here are like we are emerging from a war, he says. Every day people gather at a main square selling their personal possessions to make some money. Rhodes is dead. Almost all shops are closed. There is just no business at all. Everything is dead. 
 
For a country heavily reliant on tourism, such scenes of despair could spell another recession for Greece, just years after it managed to steer out of an exhausting 10-year financial crisis. In a recent report, the country’s central bank said travel revenue was down by 99 percent in April. And this after, travel to Greece had dropped by more than 50 percent between January and March the previous year. The government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis says it is confident that some losses can be recovered with the re-opening of travel. But even Yiannis Retsos, the head of Greece’s Tourism Confederation, the umbrella agency guiding the country’s top industry is pessimistic. 
 
At this point, he said, I’ll be surprised if tourism revenues exceed four to five billion euros. 
 
That’s just a fraction of the nearly 18 billion euros the country raked in from tourism last year, providing jobs to one in five workers here. 
 
From the start of the pandemic, the government injected more than 10 billion euros into the economy to keep businesses operating, mainly in the tourism trade. But that appears to be too little. Finance Minister Christos Staikouras recently announced that the government expected the country to suffer a contraction of 8% of gross domestic product in 2020 with a whopping 16% downturn in the second quarter of the year. Greece had originally expected its economy to grow by nearly three percent this year and workers like the now unemployed chambermaid in Rhodes had hoped for better rather than tougher times. 
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