1. Brazilians Protest Against Rousseff in Second Big Demonstration of 2015
Brazilians took to the streets in over 100 cities in the second major protest of the year against President Dilma Rousseff, blaming her for a sputtering economy and a widening corruption scandal at state-run oil company Petrobras. While the crowds shrank significantly from around a million protesters on March 15, organisers said the dozens of major demonstrations in every corner of Brazil showed the extent of anti-government sentiment that has taken hold of the country.
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2. Egypt Muslim Brotherhood Verdicts “Blatantly Unjust”: Human Rights Watch
An Egyptian court’s decision to sentence 14 men to death and jail 37 others accused of ties to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood was “politically motivated” and “blatantly unjust”, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Sunday. The court condemned Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and 13 other senior members of the group to death on Saturday. American Egyptian Mohamed Soltan, the son of a Brotherhood preacher who received a death sentence at the same hearing, was among those sentenced to life in jail.
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3. Turkey Recalls Vatican Ambassador over Pope’s remarks on Armenian Killings
Turkey has recalled its ambassador and accused Pope Francis of spreading hatred and “unfounded claims” after the Pope sparked a diplomatic row by calling the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians 100 years ago “the first genocide of the 20th century”. Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies that hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.
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4. Kerry Says he Stands by Presentation of Iran Nuclear Deal
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry defended his presentation of a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme after a different interpretation was offered by Iran’s supreme leader, and a prominent U.S. senator said Kerry was “delusional”. “I will stand by every fact that I have said,” Kerry told ABC’s ‘This Week’.
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5. South Korea‘s President to Skip Russia World War II Event that North’s Kim will Attend
South Korean President Park Geun-Hye will not attend an event in Moscow to mark the end of World War II in Europe and instead send an envoy, an official said on Monday, dashing the possibility for a rare summit with the leader of North Korea. Russia has said that the North’s Kim Jong Un would attend the May 9 celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the war’s end, which would be his first trip overseas since taking power in 2011 after the death of his father.
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6. Yemen‘s Exiled President Appoints Conciliatory Figure as Deputy
Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi appointed his former prime minister as vice president on Sunday, a move apparently aimed at improving the chances of a peaceful settlement to the civil war that forced Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia. “The president issued an order today appointing Khaled Bahah as his deputy,” a presidential advisor told Reuters.
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7. History Now Made, U.S. and Cuba Face Bumpy Road Ahead
Cuba and the United States just made history. Now comes the hard part. In the first meeting of its kind in nearly 60 years, U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro sat down together for over an hour on Saturday at a regional summit in Panama, moving a step closer to restoring diplomatic ties.
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8. Germanwings Plane Evacuated After Bomb Scare
A Germanwings flight bound for Italy from Germany was evacuated late on Sunday due to a bomb threat, the airline said. Germanwings, a budget unit of German airline Lufthansa, has been in the spotlight since one of its planes crashed into a mountain in the French Alps last month, killing everyone on board.
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9. Islamic State Militants Claim Attacks on Embassies in Libya
A bomb exploded at the gate of the Moroccan embassy in the Libyan capital early on Monday, causing some damage but hurting nobody, a security official said, only hours after gunmen attacked South Korea’s mission in Tripoli. Militants claiming loyalty to the Islamic State said on Twitter that they were responsible for both attacks, the latest strikes against foreigners, embassies or oilfields in Libya. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the claims.
More details here.
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