SWEDEN: Hours after a court fined Greta Thunberg the equivalent of £190 for disobeying police during an environmental protest at an oil facility last month, the climate activist once again attempted to block access to the facility and was removed by police.
“If the court sees our actions of self-defence as a crime, that’s how it is,” said Reclaim the Future spokeswoman Irma Kjellstrom, who was also present at the June protest. She added that activists “have to be exactly where the harm is being done.”
YEMEN: An international team began siphoning oil out of a decrepit tanker off the coast today, the United Nations said, a crucial step in a complex salvage operation aiming to prevent a potential environmental disaster.
The vessel, moored 3.7 miles from Yemen’s Red Sea ports of Hodeida and Ras Issa, has had no maintenance for eight years and its structural integrity is compromised.
It carries four times as much oil that spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska, one of the world’s worst ecological catastrophes, according to the UN.
KENYA: Opposition parties said today that they were filing charges against the government at the International Criminal Court over “police atrocities” that left 30 people dead.
Opposition coalition leader Raila Odinga announced that his party was “assembling more evidence” of police brutality against protesters.
He also said they were gathering evidence to prove “the targeting of people” from his Luo ethnic community living in western Kenya, where protesters were admitted to hospital with bullet-related injuries.
SPAIN: The chances of Spain’s conservative Popular Party (PP) forming a government dwindled today after two small regional parties refused to lend their support due to the potential participation of the far-right Vox party.
The PP won the most votes in Sunday’s ballot and finished with 133 seats, far short of the 176 majority figure in the 350-seat lower house.
The focus has shifted to Catalan secessionist party Junts and whether it will ally with acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to form another left-of-centre coalition government.
