Climate activists clash with police as German ghost town set to be engulfed by coal mine
CBSN
Berlin — Police clashed Tuesday with climate change activists occupying a tiny town in Germany that's set to be engulfed by a large coal mine. Several hundred activists moved into the town of Luetzerath weeks ago, after its residents moved out and energy giant RWE took ownership of all of its buildings and land. RWE has been approved to demolish the hamlet to expand a nearby mine and extract the lignite (brown coal) reserves under the town.
The activists have resisted efforts to clear them from homes and makeshift shelters, including tents and treehouses, in the town, but when police started trying to push them out Tuesday to make way for demolition equipment, some refused to go.
Videos posted to social media showed large numbers of police and activists, locked arm-in-arm, pushing and shoving, and the clashes grew serious enough that police resort to tear gas on a couple occasions. Police could be seen detaining people on the ground, but there was no immediate word on the number of arrests.
Collville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France — The word "hero" is overused. But if not for the courage of the few remaining D-Day survivors and their friends who fell as they launched the fight to oust Adolf Hitler's Nazi German forces from France 80 years ago, there would have been no celebrations this week in Normandy.
France's domestic intelligence agency has detained a 26-year-old Russian-Ukrainian man on suspicion of planning a violent act after he injured himself in an explosion, prosecutors said on Wednesday. The news came hours before world leaders gathered in the nation to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy.
A British-Mexican man who says he was targeted for being gay and arrested on false drug charges in Qatar has been given a suspended six-month jail sentence, a fine amounting to about $2,700, and a deportation order by a court in the Arab nation, which is a vital U.S. ally in the Middle East, according to his family and Mexican officials.
An Israeli strike early Thursday on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory. The hospital treating victims said it had received the bodies of at least "37 martyrs" from the strike, according to Agence France-Presse. But a U.N. official tells the Reuters news agency the death toll is between 35 and 45, though it still can't confirm any numbers.
Jerusalem — Thousands of Israeli nationalists marched Wednesday through east Jerusalem as authorities deployed police with tensions sky-high nearly eight months into the Gaza war. That war appeared to be intensifying in Gaza and the far-right nationalists staged their annual march – long deemed a provocation by Palestinians – in Jerusalem.