A top Ukrainian official said that Russian troops have destroyed 43 religious building in Donetsk, most of which belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, since the war began on February 24.

In a social media statement on Sunday, Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk Oblast Military Administration, said: “Yesterday the All-Holy Skete (hermitage) of the Sviatohirsk Lavra (monastery) burned down as a result of the shelling of Sviatohirsk, but this is not the first religious building that the Russians have destroyed,” Ukrayinska Pravda reported.

He went on to say that in Sviatohirsk itself, which contains three heritage monuments, the “Russians have damaged the historical and architectural museum and destroyed the church, two hermitages and two cell buildings in the Sviatohirsk Lavra, killing four monks”.

“In total, the Russians have already destroyed or damaged at least 43 religious buildings in the region, the majority of which belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate,” Kyrylenko added.

On Saturday, a huge fire engulfed the All-Holy Skete of the Sviatohirsk Lavra of the Holy Dormition in Donetsk.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate stated that this happened “as a result of military operations”, reports Ukrayinska Pravda.

Since Russia launched its ongoing invasion, cultural centers such as the Mariupol Museum and the Makarivska Public Library in Kiev that contain unique art and literature have been destroyed.

Historic buildings and monuments dedicated to Ukraine’s fight against Nazism in World War II, including the Drobitsky Yar Holocaust Memorial, have also been damaged.

There are seven Unesco World Heritage sites in Ukraine, including St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Lviv’s entire historic city district and the Struve Geodetic Arc.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on the UN and UNESCO to expel Russia as a terrorist state for destroying historical monuments and social infrastructure in Ukraine.

The BBC reports that Johnson will announce his decision to resign as Tory leader during the day.

An election for the leader of the Conservative Party will be held this summer, and a new prime minister will be in place by the Tory conference planned for October.

Dozens of British ministers and aides have previously resigned over the scandals rocking Boris Johnson’s cabinet, calling on him to step down, which he has refused to do.

More than 50 ministers and aides resigned in just 24 hours, and they were joined by Helen Whatley, the British Treasury Secretary, Brandon Lewis, who heads the department for Northern Ireland, and Chris Philip, the Culture Secretary.

One of the prime minister’s closest associates, Michael Gove, was fired after telling Johnson that he should resign.

A series of departures from Johnson’s cabinet started Rishi Sunak, the finance minister and Sajid Javid, the health minister, resigned within just ten minutes of each other.

Johnson then announced that he planned to remain in office and immediately appointed new ministers.

Their example was followed by the Vice President of the Conservative Party, Bim Afolami, saying that Boris Johnson no longer has the support of the country.

The recent European move against the Russian foreign minister, in which airspace closures forced him to cancel a visit to Belgrade, shows how isolated Serbia has become on the world stage, according to analysts.

Sergey Lavrov was scheduled to visit Belgrade on Monday for talks with top officials, including President Aleksandar Vucic, on a two-day visit.

But the trip was halted after Serbia’s neighbors, all of which are NATO members – Montenegro, North Macedonia and Bulgaria – closed their airspace to his plane.

“An unthinkable thing has happened,” Lavrov said during an online news conference Monday.

“A sovereign state has been deprived of its right to conduct foreign policies. The international activities of Serbia on the Russian track have been blocked.”

Lavrov blamed NATO for devising the flight ban. He said the move showed that the US-led alliance’s main purpose was to isolate Russia.

“From the Western point of view, Serbia mustn’t have any choice, any freedom in choosing its partners,” he said. “The West clearly shows that it would use any base means to apply pressure.”

Political scientist Jasmin Mujanovic told Al Jazeera that Lavrov’s failed visit was “a stark illustration of how isolated Serbia has become within the region”.

“Despite the meeting not having taken place, it was already announced by Vucic and was only prevented by a joint action of regional NATO states. It’s a huge fiasco and diplomatic scandal for Serbia,” Mujanovic said.

Lavrov was also due to meet his counterpart Nikola Selakovic and Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Porfirije.

In an interview with Serbian broadcaster RTS on Monday evening, Vucic said he has not seen “this amount of hysteria towards one small country in a long, long time”.

“This small country isn’t allowed to exist. The hysteria showed what they want. They see that they can’t do anything to Russia, and then it gets to the point where they’re taking it out on a small country.”

Despite formally seeking EU membership, Serbia is the only European country aside from Belarus that has refused to sanction Russia since its war on Ukraine began on February 24.

While Belgrade has condemned Russia’s military action in Ukraine, officials in the West have accused Serbia of sitting on the fence.

Many in Serbia view Russia as a close ally. The two Orthodox Christian nations share cultural ties as well as military and economic partnerships. Russia – with its veto power at the UN – has also backed Serbia in the Kosovo dispute.

Kurt Bassuener, senior associate at the Berlin-based Democratization Policy Council, told Al Jazeera the incident “shows how out of step Serbia is with its neighbors, and with the West”.

“I think that Vucic has gotten so accustomed to being catered to by the West and indulged that maybe it skewed his sense of the possible, that he thought: ‘I could conduct my independent, non-aligned diplomacy and no one would challenge me because they’re afraid of losing me,’” Bassuener said.

“Both the announced visit and the airspace that was denied by Serbia’s neighbors is a clear demonstration that Serbia is out of step with the rest of the democratic world and its relationship with Russia.”

He added that the incident did not mark the first time Lavrov has been blocked from travelling, as he was prevented “early on” from going to Geneva by the EU.

On February 27, four days after the Russian invasion began, the EU confirmed it had shut down airspace to Russia in response to its aggressive operation.

“Our airspace will be closed to every Russian plane. And that includes the private jets of oligarchs too,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen

Lavrov had been due to attend a UN session in Geneva the following day.

“Russian FM #Lavrov’s visit to #Geneva for the session of the @UN_HRC and the Conference on Disarmament has been canceled due to an unprecedented ban on his flight in the airspace of a number of EU countries that have imposed anti-Russian sanctions,” the Russian Mission in Geneva tweeted at the time.

The latest trials in Argentina follow last week’s report by Colombia’s Truth Commission, following decades of bloody internal conflict in the South American country.

The sentences handed down by a federal court in Buenos Aires include convictions for enforced disappearances, murder, torture, child abduction, crimes committed against some 350 victims during the military regime that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983.

Human rights groups say that 30,000 people disappeared during that period, although determining the precise numbers is still a matter of debate, reports Reuters.

Former General Santiago Riveros, previously convicted in other proceedings for human rights violations, is among those convicted.

Riveros was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of more than a hundred crimes, including kidnapping, rape and murder, according to the verdict.

The convictions included allegations that military forces, with the support of company executives, kidnapped seven workers at the Mercedes Benz factory in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, beginning in 1976.

According to the charges, according to Reuters, the executives complained to military authorities that the abducted employees were either union members or that they were seeking to organize workers.

The kidnapped workers were taken to the infamous Campo de Mayo military compound, a secret facility that functioned as a camp, and six of them are officially missing, although all are presumed dead, the agency reports.

Almost 6,000 detainees are believed to have passed through Campo de Mayo, which is located not far from Buenos Aires, and many of them are classified as missing.

Reuters reports that a local Mercedes Benz representative did not immediately respond to the agency’s request for comment.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Elon Musk arrived in Brazil for his first-ever visit, not knowing his cachaca from his churrasco, and within hours had a prestigious medal draped around his neck as he clasped the hand of President Jair Bolsonaro.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was the first foreign civilian without a government position to receive the Defense Ministry honor since its 2002 creation, according to an Associated Press review of recent records.

But it came as a little surprise given Bolsonaro’s benevolence in decorating ideological allies, ministers, loyalists and family — sometimes on questioned grounds. Bolsonaro himself has received six medals from his own administration.

In Bolsonaro’s cabinet, a medal has practically come with the job. The nation’s three medals are regarded as the most prestigious are the Order of Defense Merit, Order of Rio Branco and the Medal of Victory, and Bolsonaro awarded more than three-quarters of current or former ministers at least one.

He has distributed at least 76 of the three top medals to ministers since 2019, more than any of his three elected predecessors throughout their two terms.

Bolsonaro also gave three medals of various sorts to his wife Michelle and senator son Flávio. His son Eduardo, a lawmaker, got at least six.

The awards are meant “to forge the appearance of being surrounded by people with merit, of high caliber,” said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University. “One or another could be, but you can’t say that for all of them.”

In a November article titled “The Farce of the Medals,” Istoe magazine wrote that Bolsonaro had transformed the government into a medal dispensary. The presidential palace didn’t respond to AP questions about motives for the medals.

Heads of state often bestow awards on controversial grounds. Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received Mexico’s highest honor, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, for helping to renegotiate the North American trade agreement. Barack Obama gave out more Presidential Medals of Freedom than any US leader since its creation, including one for billionaire Warren Buffett and another for then-Vice President Joe Biden.

But it’s rarer for presidents to decorate themselves. The same medal the Defense Ministry awarded to Musk was given to Bolsonaro on his first day in office, Jan. 1, 2019. The former army captain has accumulated others of varying importance in the three years since, mostly from the armed forces. In March, he got two medals from his Justice Ministry, one of which honors altruistic service for Indigenous peoples.

That scandalized environmentalists, human rights activists and indigenous groups who see the president’s push for development within indigenous territories as profoundly damaging.

Veteran ethnographer Sydney Possuelo, who once headed the nation’s Indigenous agency and demarcated Indigenous territories nationwide, was shocked when he heard the news. He protested by returning his own medal, which he received 35 years prior.

“If I’d seen it the same day, I would have rushed down and thrown the medal at the entry of the presidential palace,” Possuelo, 83, told the AP by phone. “How can a president who promises to ignore a Supreme Court ruling on demarcation of Indigenous lands give himself that accolade?”

There aren’t public records to show whether former presidents received as many medals from their own administrations. The AP filed freedom of information requests to president’s office and several ministries for year-by-year information on medals awarded since the country’s 1988 return to democracy, but received scanned response.

Former Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso accepted the same medal as Musk while in office. Dilma Rousseff won it before her election, while a minister. The medal was created in 2002, replacing a similar honor.

José Chrispiniano, the spokesperson for da Silva, said his boss “doesn’t have the slightest idea” how many medals he received from his own government. “He never cared much about that,” the spokesperson said. Da Silva leads all polls to win October elections, in which Bolsonaro is seeking a second term.

History Professor Ruth Ben-Guiat, a specialist on authoritarian leaders at New York University, said she wasn’t aware of other presidents receiving so many medals from their own administrations.

“Behaviors like this often correspond to leaders’ fears about their political future, and they start to try and buy people off with honors and other things to keep their loyalty,” she said by email. “I would imagine that these behaviors will increase as the election gets closer.”

In at least one instance, Bolsonaro overruled expert recommendations on granting awards, cutting two scientists from a technical committee’s list of recipients: One had worked on improving the health of transgender people and the other published a study showing the anti-malarial drug chloroquine was ineffective against COVID-19. Bolsonaro had insistently touted it as a cure.

The Brazilian Academy of Sciences issued a statement calling the snub “unprecedented in the country and typical of authoritarian regimes.” And 21 other intended recipients refused the accolade, long seen as a major professional honor. Among them was Carlos Gustavo Moreira, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

“His intervention was a step beyond,” Moreira said. “Many of us were uncomfortable receiving it from this administration. After he took the two names off, it was easy to decide.”

Bolsonaro didn’t make explicit why Musk got the Defense Ministry medal, but within days SpaceX launched two satellites for the Brazilian Air Force from Cape Canaveral. At the event in Brazil’s countryside, Bolsonaro said the billionaire’s plans to conduct satellite monitoring of the Amazon rainforest would debunk lies about environmental destruction, called his prospective purchase of Twitter a “breath of hope” and deemed the man “the legend of freedom.” Many of Bolsonaro’s boosters see Musk as a champion against social media speech restrictions.

“Bolsonaro supporters want to see him give a medal to someone they believe is in favor of what they call liberty, freedom of speech,” João Martins Filho, former head of the Brazilian Association of Defense Studies, told the AP by phone. “So he gladly does it.”

___ Álvares reported from Brasilia

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Harika and Ajra are responsible for the safe flight of the plane at the Belgrade airport – two hawks whose task is to guard the planes from uninvited guests.

Biological protection of airplanes has proven to be the most effective form of defense against birds that cause problems for airplanes, but also for airplane hangars.

“It is a natural way of protection and it is the most effective, especially in such specific facilities as hangars of A technique, where there is an urban environment, where there are obstacles such as metal structures, and there the hawk, as a perfect flyer, manages very well and successfully scatters birds,” said Hani Girgis, a professional falconer.

He emphasized that a big problem is created by bird urine on airplanes, especially if the airplanes are freshly painted, the damage is great.

“It happened that crow-like birds picked up and took metal objects because they were shiny, so they were attracted to them, then they threw them, nuts, screws… They also broke through the fuselage of the plane,” Girgis added.

Jastreb, as Girgis says, keeps all that as “in a pharmacy”. Sokolar explains that the training procedure is long-term, but for him – routine.

The birds are now scattered, they are not caught as before. Hawks know how to protect the hangar, but they also operate in the immediate area. Hawks do not attack, but only disperse unwanted birds.

Girgis has been doing this business for 11 years, and says he is satisfied with the results. He points out that falconers are present at many world airports with the same task, to ensure safety.

He says that biological protection is also used for other purposes, on borders, in the protection of ponds, agricultural areas, and the advantage is that there is no risk of poisoning.

Sweden’s Malmo recorded a triumph in the first game of the first round of Champions League qualification, defeating Iceland’s Vikingur 3:2.

Malmo was a big favorite before this duel, but in the end it recorded a minimal victory before the rematch in Iceland.

The home team took the lead through Olsen, but Ingason equalized for Vikingur in the 38th minute. Malmo took the lead again through Toivonen at the end of the first half, and then Veljko Birmančević, a member of the Serbian national team, scored a two-goal lead.

However, Gudjonsson gave the “Vikings” the hope that they could pull off a surprise in the rematch in the last moments of the match.

Ludogorets defeated the Sutjeska team 2:0 on their home field in Razgrad and gained a nice advantage before the rematch in Montenegro.

Both goals were scored in the second half, and Santana and Tisera brought victory to Anto Šimudža’s team.

Macedonian Skupi was convincing against Gibraltarian Lincoln 3:0, and the goals were scored by Danfa and Adetunji, while the final result was set by Cippolina with an own goal.

On Tuesday, seven more duels of the first round will be played, and the return matches are scheduled for the following week.

Results of the first qualifying round for the Champions League:

Tuesday:

Pyunik (Armenia) – Cluj (Romania) 0:0

Malmo (Sweden) – Vikingur (Iceland) 3:2

Ludogorets (Bulgaria) – Sutjeska (Montenegro) 2:0

Balkani (Kosovo) – Žalgiris (Lithuania) 1:1

Lech (Poland) – Karabagh (Azerbaijan) 1:0

TNS (Wales) – Linfield (Northern Ireland) 1:0

Shamrock (Ireland) – Hibernians (Malta) 3:0

Skupi (North Macedonia) – Lincoln (Gibraltar) 3:0

Wednesday:

Tobol (Kazakhstan) – Ferencvaros (Hungary)

Bodo (Norway) – Klaksvik (Faroe Islands)

HJK (Finland) – RFS (Latvia)

Dudelange (Luxembourg) – Tirana (Albania)

Zrinjski (BiH) – Sherif (Moldova)

Maribor (Slovenia) – Shakhtyor (Belarus)

Slovan (Slovakia) – Dinamo (Georgia)

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Montenegrin Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic said in separate social media posts that they discussed regional cooperation during their meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

This was their first meeting since Abazovic took over as Prime Minister.

“Excellent opportunity to discuss bilateral issues with Dritan Abazovic at the World Economic Forum and to invite him again to join us at the Open Balkan Initiative meeting in Ohrid,” Vucic wrote on his Instagram account. That meeting is scheduled to be held on June 7-8 in North Macedonia.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aleksandar Vučić (@buducnostsrbijeav)

Abazovic wrote on his Twitter account that Montenegro is investing a maximum effort to promote regional cooperation, reconciliation and better economic ties. “Relations with Serbia are a priority – we are prepared for intensive cooperation in all areas of mutual interest,” he wrote after the meeting with Vucic.

#MNE ulaže maximum napore da se na Zapadnom Balkanu promoviše politika regionalne saradnje, pomirenja, suživota, bolje ekonomske povezanosti.

Odnosi sa prioritetni – spremni smo na intezivnu saradnju u svim oblastima od zajedničkog interesa. Sastanak na @wef sa @avucic. pic.twitter.com/QhCu7EA8uV

— Dr Dritan Abazovic (@DritanAbazovic) May 25, 2022

In an earlier post Vucic said that he took part in a difficult debate about the future of Western Balkans behind closed doors.

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The action to prevent child trafficking was carried out across Europe, at maritime, land and air borders, as well as on established smuggling routes, Europol announced.

According to reports, 133 suspects were arrested, and the identities of 11,130 children were checked. About 130 potential victims were discovered.

Europol points out that children are still the most vulnerable group among people who are the subject of trafficking and exploitation.

“Many become victims of sexual exploitation, forced begging or various types of forced crime, including petty crime and drug trafficking. They also become victims of labor exploitation and domestic slavery,” Europol said.

The action was carried out from June 6 to 13 in coordination with Frontex.

Interpol and the police of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, North Macedonia participated in the arrest. , Serbia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Jaipur, May 31 (IANS): With the Congress fielding three candidates from outside the state for the Rajya Sabha polls scheduled on June 10, dissent is brewing within the party in Rajasthan.

Both the Independent MLAs supporting the party as well as some Congress legislators are questioning the party high command’s decision to nominate candidates from outside the state to contest from Rajasthan.

Congress has fielded Mukul Wasnik (Maharashtra), Randeep Singh Surjewala (Haryana) and Pramod Tiwari (Uttar Pradesh) as Rajya Sabha nominees from Rajasthan.

Congress MLA Bharat Singh on Monday wrote to Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot saying: “All three Congress candidates are from outside the state. It is a matter of satisfaction for the Congress that the BJP has fielded Ghanshyam Tiwari as its candidate. Tiwari was a member of the Congress for some time. It is also true that the big leaders no longer show the courage to contest Lok Sabha or Assembly elections. They only want to survive through the Rajya Sabha.”

Singh added: “As a Congress MLA, it is painful to see these leaders become ‘Lat Sahab’ after winning elections. They have neither the time nor the inclination to meet the party MLAs or the workers.”

Independent MLA Sanyam Lodha, who’s an advisor to the Chief Minister, also questioned the move to field three candidates from outside the state. Other Independent MLAs are also reportedly not happy with the move.

The three Congress nominees have reached Jaipur and will file their nominations at 11 am on Tuesday.

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