Category: World News

World News

Pope Francis gives women historic right to vote at meeting

The Pope will for the first time allow women to vote at an influential global meeting of bishops in October – a move that has been welcomed as a historic first.

The new rules announced on Wednesday will give five religious sisters voting rights at the synod, which is a papal advisory body.

In the past, women were only allowed to attend the gathering as observers.

Men will still cast the majority of the votes at the influential gathering.

Nevertheless, the reforms are seen as a significant shift for the Roman Catholic Church, which has been male-dominated for centuries.

The US-based Women’s Ordination Conference, which advocates for women priests, has called the reform “a significant crack in the stained glass ceiling”.

“For years Vatican representatives and bishops resisted, moving the goalpost with every synod as to why women were not allowed to vote,” the group wrote on Twitter. “The unspoken reason was always sexism.”

“In the near future, we hope that the synod continues to develop into a fully representative body of the people of God.”

In a further break with tradition, Pope Francis announced that voting rights would also be extended to 70 hand-picked non-clerical members of the religious community, moving the synod away from being a meeting solely of the Church hierarchy.

The Pope, who has championed reform, has said that he hopes half of these will be women and there has also been an emphasis on including young people.

“It’s an important change, it’s not a revolution,” said Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, a top organizer of the synod.

Christopher Lamb, Vatican correspondent for the Catholic news publication The Tablet, told BBC World Service’s Newshour program that the changes were “highly significant” and an attempt by the Pope to make decisions about the Church’s future more inclusive.

He added that the reforms concerning women reflected an “unprecedented” dialogue over the issue of female representation that had been happening for some time.

But Mr Lamb predicted the Pope would face “significant resistance” from some parts of the Church over this latest decision.

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Ukraine war: Russian warplane accidentally bombs own city

The defence ministry in Moscow says a Russian fighter jet accidentally bombed the city of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine.

Regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said the blast had left a huge crater about 20 metres (60 ft) wide in the city centre.

Three people were injured and several buildings were damaged, he said.

A Su-34 fighter-bomber jet accidentally discharged aircraft ordnance, the ministry said.

The defence ministry said the bomb fell at 22:15 local time (19:15 GMT) on Thursday. There was no explanation for the bombing other than what it described as an “abnormal descent of aviation ammunition”.

The bomb landed at an intersection of two roads not far from the city centre and next to residential buildings.

Two women were taken to hospital for treatment and a nine-storey apartment block was evacuated because of potential structural damage, Mr Gladkov said.

An investigation is underway.

Belgorod Mayor Valentin Demidov visited a resident affected by the blast

Photos and videos on social media show apartments damaged by the blast, and one car ended up on the roof of a local shop next door to a block of flats.

The regional governor said Belgorod’s residents had endured a difficult night but would get through it.

Belgorod – a city of 370,000 – is around 25 miles (40 km) from the Ukrainian border. It lies just north of Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, and people there have been living in fear of Ukrainian shelling since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.

Russian jets also regularly fly over the city on their way to Ukraine.

Donald Trump awarded legal fees in Stormy Daniels defamation lawsuit

The former porn star at the heart of Donald Trump’s historic indictment in New York has been ordered to pay him more than $121,000 (£96,965) towards legal fees in an unrelated case.

Stormy Daniels, alleged to have had an affair with Mr Trump in 2006, lost her defamation case over a 2018 tweet written by the former US president.

An appeals court judge in California dismissed Ms Daniels’ case, and awarded Mr Trump a payment for legal fees.

Mr Trump has denied the affair.

The civil defamation lawsuit brought by Ms Daniels was entirely separate from the 34 charges filed against Mr Trump in Manhattan on Tuesday.

While both cases involve Ms Daniels, the New York indictment relates to a payment made to her during the 2016 presidential election – alleged to have been “hush money” to keep quiet but not properly recorded.

Ms Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, sued Mr Trump after he called an allegation by Ms Daniels a “total con job” in a tweet on 18 April 2018.

In the tweet, Mr Trump dismissed an allegation by Ms Daniels that an unknown man had threatened her in a parking lot to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Mr Trump.

The case was dismissed after 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge Samuel James Otero said Mr Trump’s statement was protected by the First Amendment.

Ms Daniels, 44, was then ordered to pay Mr Trump’s legal fees in the amount of $293,000, CNN reported.

She appealed, arguing the legal fees were too high, but lost.

The court found that her “argument that the fee request is unreasonable and excessive is not well-founded,” BBC’s US media partner CBS reported.

Ms Daniels was ordered to pay another $245,000 in fees after losing that appeal.

And on Tuesday – as Mr Trump was fingerprinted, escorted by police into a Manhattan courtroom and listened to a judge read him charges of 34 felony counts – Ms Daniels was ordered to pay Mr Trump the $121,972.

Mr Trump’s lawyer Harmeet Dhillon celebrated the judgement in California, writing on Twitter: “Congratulations to President Trump on this final attorney fee victory in his favour this morning.

“Collectively, our firm obtained over $600,000 in attorney fee awards in his favour in the meritless litigation initiated by Stormy Daniels.”

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