Day: October 2, 2023

The death toll caused by the collapse of a church roof during a Sunday Mass in northern Mexico has risen to 10, and another 60 people were injured, officials said on Monday, as local authorities began wrapping up search and rescue efforts.

Five women, two men and three children were among those killed at the church in the Gulf Coast city of Ciudad Madero in Tamaulipas state, state governor Americo Villarreal said.

Footage posted on social media showed the moment the church roof caved in, puffs of gray smoke billowing into the air, followed by the toppling of yellow brick outer walls.

Mexican media reported that several children were baptized during the Sunday Mass at the church.

All of the people attending the service are now believed accounted for, governor Villarreal said, as military personnel and emergency services used rescue dogs and heavy machinery to sift through the ruins.

The governor added that 23 people remained hospitalized, with two in a serious condition.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered his condolences to the families of the victims during his regular morning press conference.

Bishop Jose Armando Alvarez from the Roman Catholic Diocese of nearby Tampico said the church roof crumbled as worshippers were receiving communion and asked others to pray for survivors.

“We still don’t know what caused (the collapse),” diocese spokesman Nestor Javier Lopez told newspaper Reforma. “We hope that authorities do their job and let us know what happened.”

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Donald Trump gained more than $1 billion by lying about the value of his assets to banks and insurers, lawyers for the New York state attorney general told a judge on Monday in a civil fraud case that could deal a major blow to the former president’s real estate empire.

Kevin Wallace, a lawyer in state Attorney General Letitia James’ office, said in his opening statement in a downtown Manhattan courtroom that Trump described his finances to banks and insurers in a “materially inaccurate way” for a decade.

Wallace said Trump did this to get better loan terms and lower insurance premiums, illegally generating more than $1 billion of financial benefits.

“This isn’t business as usual, and this isn’t how sophisticated parties deal with each other,” Wallace said. “These are not victimless crimes.”

Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Trump, countered in his opening statement that the financials for Trump and the Trump organization were entirely legal.

“It is one of the most highly successful brands in the world, and he has made a fortune literally being right about real estate investments,” Kise said. “There was no intent to defraud, there was no illegality, there was no default, there was no breach, there was no reliance from the banks, there were no unjust profits, and there were no victims.”

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is accused by James of inflating his assets and his own net worth from 2011 to 2021.

James is seeking at least $250 million in fines, a permanent ban against Trump and his sons Donald Jr and Eric from running businesses in New York and a five-year commercial real estate ban against Trump and the Trump Organization.

Before entering the courtroom, Trump called the case “a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.

“We have a great company. I built a great company. It’s tremendous,” he continued. “It’s got some of the greatest real estate assets in the world. And now I have to go in before a rogue judge.”

Trump wore a dark blue suit, a brighter blue tie and an American flag pin on his lapel.

He again called James, who is Black, “racist,” and said the Democrat had a vendetta against him.

James said her office was ready to prove its case.

“The law is both powerful and fragile,” she said before entering the courtroom. “No matter how much money you think you may have, no one is above the law.”

Trump’s trial is overseen by Justice Arthur Engoron, who will hear evidence without a jury.

It largely concerns penalties that Trump, his adult sons and 10 of his companies must face after Engoron last week found them liable for fraud.

Before opening arguments, Engoron described himself as a generalist on the law. “One thing I know a lot about is the definition of fraud,” he said.

In his Sept. 26 decision, Engoron described in scathing terms how the defendants made up valuations.

That included Trump calculating the value of his apartment in Trump Tower as if it were three times its actual size.

Engoron canceled business certificates for companies controlling pillars of Trump’s empire, and said he would appoint receivers to oversee their dissolution.

The ruling covers some of his most valuable properties Trump Tower, his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, his family estate in Westchester County, New York, and various office buildings and golf clubs.

Specifics for implementing the order have not been decided, but the loss of those prized assets would be a major blow to Trump’s finances.

James accused Trump of “grossly” inflating the values of his assets, and inflated own net worth by as much as $2.2 billion.

She said that inflated financials included listing Mar-a-Lago as being worth up to $739 million though deed restrictions capped it at $28 million.

Wallace played an excerpt from a deposition where Michael Cohen, who had been Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer but has since turned against his former boss, said the goal was “to attain the number that Mr. Trump wanted.”

The trial is scheduled to run through early December. While more than 150 people could testify, much of the trial may be a battle of experts opining on financial documents.

Trump faces several other legal headaches, and while they have been a financial drain, none has dented his commanding lead over rivals for the Republican nomination.

Trump, the first sitting or former U.S. president to be criminally charged, is under indictment in four separate cases.

He has been charged in Florida over his handling of classified documents upon leaving office, in Washington over his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 presidential election, in Georgia over moves to reverse election results there, and in New York over hush money payments to a porn star.

Trump has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in all four cases.

Rescuers searching for people unaccounted for after blaze hits row of nightclubs popular for birthday celebrations.

US president reassures allies and Kyiv after last-minute budget deal in Congress axes funding for the war-torn country.

A fire broke out at a nightclub in the southeastern Spanish city of Murcia early on Sunday morning, killing at least 13 people and injuring four others, authorities said.

The fire started around 6 a.m. local time (4 a.m. GMT) at the Teatre nightclub, also known as Fonda Milagros, which was hosting a birthday party, according to local media reports.

Firefighters arrived at the scene and managed to extinguish the blaze by 8 a.m., but faced difficulties in accessing the building due to the risk of collapse and the presence of smoke, Murcia’s mayor José Ballesta said.

The mayor said that there were still bodies to be pulled out from the rubble and that he could not rule out the possibility of finding more victims

The injured were two women aged 22 and 25 and two men aged 41 and 45, who were all taken to the hospital due to smoke inhalation, the Murcia emergency services website said.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation by forensic and judicial police experts, the national police service said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez expressed his solidarity with the victims and relatives of the tragedy and thanked the emergency services for their work.

The city’s town hall declared three days of mourning and set up a reception base for the relatives of victims, where a team of psychologists will provide assistance.

This is one of the deadliest nightclub fires in Spain’s history. In 1990, 43 people died in a fire at a nightclub in Zaragoza, and in 2017, 40 people were injured when a floor collapsed at a nightclub in Tenerife.

US is facing a precarious situation as the US budget crisis puts its vital military and humanitarian aid at risk. The war-torn country, which has been fighting against Russian relies heavily on the US support.

The US has been the largest donor to Ukraine, providing more than $113 billion in assistance since the war began. However, the domestic political fight in Washington has jeopardized the continuation of this support, as Congress failed to approve a new funding package that included $24 billion for Ukraine.

President Joe Biden has reassured Kyiv and its allies that the US will not walk away from Ukraine, and urged Congress to stop playing games and get the aid done as soon as possible. He said there is an overwhelming sense of urgency, as the funding bill lasts only until mid-November.

However, some Republicans have expressed doubts about the accountability and effectiveness of the US aid to Ukraine, and questioned whether it is in the national interest.

The uncertainty over the US aid comes at a critical time for Ukraine, which is trying to make progress in its counteroffensive against Russia before winter sets in. The country also faces challenges from its neighbors, such as Poland, which announced this week that it would no longer arm Ukraine due to its own political and economic issues.

Ukraine has appealed to the international community for more support and solidarity, as it fears that losing the US backing could embolden Russia and other adversaries in the future. Zelensky said that Ukraine is not only fighting for its own freedom, but also for the values and security of the democratic world.

Forty days after the head of Wagner died, there are reports that the private military company has been bequeathed to Prigozhin’s son, who is already negotiating the group’s future.

EU foreign ministers convened in Kyiv for their first ever meeting outside the bloc on Monday, broadcasting their support after a pro-Russian candidate won an election in Slovakia and the U.S. Congress left Ukraine war aid out of a spending bill.

Kyiv brushed off the wobbles on both sides of the Atlantic, especially the prospect that the U.S. Congressional vote, which excluded aid to Ukraine from an emergency bill to prevent a government shutdown, represented a deeper change in policy.

“We don’t feel that the U.S support has been shattered… because the United States understands that what is at stake in Ukraine is much bigger than just Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters as he greeted the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell.

As for the election victory of pro-Russian Slovakian former Prime Minister Robert Fico, Kuleba said it was “too early to judge”, noting that a new leader there would still have to form a coalition.

Monday’s meeting in Kyiv was touted by Borrell as an historic first, and provided striking photo opportunities for a succession of ministers in front of EU flags in the war-time capital.

But it comes at an awkward time for the Western alliance that has supported Kyiv. The summer is coming to a close after a slower-than-expected Ukrainian military counter-offensive, without the major success that Western leaders had hoped to see before autumn mud clogs the treads of their donated tanks.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called for efforts to prepare Ukraine for the coming winter, including through air defence and guaranteed energy supplies, after Russia bombed Ukraine’s energy infrastructure last year.

“Last winter, we saw the brutal way in which the Russian president is waging this war,” said Baerbock. “We must prevent this together with everything we have, as far as possible.”

Public opinion in most Western countries is still largely behind Ukraine. But political leaders are worried about calls on both the far right and the far left of the political spectrum challenging the consensus that has held so far.

Elections are looming in several European countries, and above all next year in the United States, where right-wing Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump have increasingly called for funding of Ukraine to be halted.

Republicans control the House of Representatives, one of the two houses of the U.S. Congress, where speaker Kevin McCarthy might need to rely on Democrats to support any bill to fund Ukraine. Right wingers have threatened to try to remove him.

President Joe Biden’s administration says it expects the House to pass a measure to keep aid to Ukraine flowing. Biden on Sunday pressed congressional Republicans to back the aid, saying he was “sick and tired” of the political brinkmanship that had nearly shut the government.

Kuleba said he believed the move over the weekend to pass a bill excluding aid was “an incident” rather than “a system”, and Kyiv expected aid to continue.

“We have a very in-depth discussion with both parts of the Congress – Republicans and Democrats,” he said.

Moscow, for its part, also saw little change in U.S. policy, for now at least.

“They will continue their support,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, according to state news agency TASS. “We should not think that anything has changed: it’s just a show for the public, it’s just noise.”

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said public opinion on the Ukraine issue in the West was fragmenting, despite the position of governments.

In Europe, pro-Russian former prime minister Fico won the most votes in an election in Slovakia on Sunday and will get a first chance to form a government. His campaign had called for “not a single round” of ammunition from Slovakia’s reserves to be sent to Ukraine.

“We are not changing that we are prepared to help Ukraine in a humanitarian way,” Fico said at a news conference after his victory. “We are prepared to help with the reconstruction of the state but you know our opinion on arming Ukraine.”

To form a government, Fico would have to establish a coalition with at least one other party that does not publicly share his position on Ukraine.

Russia’s Peskov defended Fico, saying it was “absurd” that politicians who support their country’s national interest were labelled “pro-Russian”.

“Of course, we would like to see more experienced politicians, sober politicians, politicians who tend to soberly assess the situation. We’ll watch what happens next,” he told a regular Kremlin news briefing.

Slovakia, a NATO state with a small border with Ukraine, has taken in refugees and, under the outgoing government, has provided a disproportionately major supply of weapons, notably being among the first to send fighter jets.

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The new head of the UN migration agency on Monday voiced concern that the deaths of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean were being “normalised” and vowed to work with governments to provide options for economic migration to address the crisis.

U.S. former White House adviser Amy Pope started as head of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Oct. 1 at a time of record forced displacement around the world and high political tensions over irregular immigration.

In recent days, an Italian minister and billionaire Elon Musk have criticised Germany for backing charities helping distressed migrants on the world’s most dangerous route, the Mediterranean, where 22,000 people have died or gone missing since 2014. Germany’s foreign ministry defended its policies.

Asked to comment on the debate, Amy Pope said: “Our biggest concern is that the deaths in the Mediterranean have been normalised and that people take for granted that this is just a cost of human movement.”

“If we’re really going to stop people crossing the Mediterranean on rickety boats and dying as they do so, we need to approach the situation far more comprehensively,” she said. She declined to comment directly on Musk’s remarks.

Pope, who wants to build partnerships with private companies to better manage migration, won a tense election in May against her then-boss, becoming the first female head of the U.N. agency since it was created in 1951. IOM seeks to ensure humane and orderly migration and intervenes where needed.

In her first press conference, she vowed to work with countries that want to renew their labour forces like Spain.

“The evidence is fairly overwhelming that migration actually benefits economies,” she said, saying this was especially true in wealthy countries with ageing populations and low birth rates.

Pope said her first trip will be to east Africa to meet with the African Union Commission in Ethiopia and then to Brussels where she will meet with senior European officials as they search for a deal on handling irregular migration.