Can Brazil convict Bolsonaro and stand up to Trump?
Bus carrying mourners overturns in Kenya, killing 21 people
A bus carrying mourners back home from a funeral in southwestern Kenya has overturned and plunged into a ditch, killing at least 21 people, police said.
The bus was travelling from the western town of Kakamega to the city of Kisumu, where the accident happened.
The driver lost control of the bus as it approached a roundabout at high speed and plunged into a ditch, according to Peter Maina, a regional traffic enforcement officer for the province of Nyanza, where Kisumu is located.
“The vehicle lost control, veered, rolled onto the other side of the road”, he told reporters at the scene.
“Amongst the 21 who lost their lives were 10 women, and a girl aged 10, and 10 men”, he said.
Five people were seriously hurt in the incident, Maina said, among them an eight-month-old baby who was currently receiving care at a nearby hospital.
The cause of the crash was not clear and investigations were ongoing. Local media reported the incident took place on a notorious section of road where collisions are frequent.
The deadly accident follows an aircraft crash near the capital, Nairobi, on Thursday, when an air ambulance came down in a residential area, killing six people.
The same day, local media reported that a collision between a train and bus killed eight.
Road accidents are common in Kenya and the wider East African region, where roads are often narrow and in poor condition with many potholes.
Police often blame road accidents on speeding drivers.
In another accident on Thursday, nine people were killed in a bus crash in the town of Naivasha in the county of Nakuru. The victims were among 32 workers going to work when the bus crashed at a railway crossing, police said.
High-profile Chinese dealmaker Bao Fan released from detention: Report
Bao Fan, star dealmaker and founder of boutique investment bank China Renaissance Holdings, has been released more than two years after being detained by Chinese authorities, the Reuters news agency has reported, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.
Bao, widely regarded as one of China’s best-connected bankers, was released from detention earlier this week, the person said on Friday, declining to be identified , because , the information was not public.
China Renaissance sent shockwaves through the country’s financial sector in 2023 when it announced it was unable to contact Bao, who founded the bank in 2005 with two other men and still owns nearly 49 percent of the company’s issued shares.
He was one of the several high-profile executives in China, mostly from the finance industry, who went missing in recent years with little explanation amid a sweeping anticorruption campaign spearheaded by President Xi Jinping.
His disappearance rattled professionals in the financial industry in the world’s second-largest economy, as Beijing , pressed , its campaign to , rein in , the “lavish lifestyle” of the “financial elite”.
His release comes as Beijing , seeks , to boost business confidence, particularly among the country’s tech entrepreneurs, whose businesses have suffered from a years-long crackdown.
China is looking to boost confidence in the private sector, which has been reeling from weak domestic consumption and a prolonged debt crisis in the property sector,  , against a , broader backdrop of heightened trade tensions with the United States.
“This is certainly a positive signal, as Bao was the most high-profile financier detained in recent years”, said Christopher Beddor, deputy China research director of Gavekal Dragonomics.
“Still, it won’t change the fact that the anticorruption campaign continues to churn through the financial sector, and the common prosperity campaign has led to sweeping pay caps and even clawbacks”, said Beddor. “China’s financial sector remains a long way from its heyday only a few years ago”.
High-profile deals
Bao had been involved in high-profile deals, including the mergers of ride-hailing firms Didi and Kuaidi, food delivery giants Meituan and Dianping, and travel platforms Ctrip and Qunar.
Neither China Renaissance nor Bao responded immediately to Reuters’s requests for comment. Chinese media Caixin first reported Bao’s release, citing unidentified sources.
China Renaissance’s shares jumped 17 percent on Friday to close at 6.87 Hong Kong dollars ($0.8752) before the news of his release became public.
Bao, who previously worked at Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, went , missing , in February 2023.
Trade in China Renaissance shares was suspended in April 2023 after the bank delayed publication of its audited annual results as a result of mainland Chinese authorities , detaining , Bao , as part of an investigation.
A Chinese financial publication reported in May 2023 that he was detained by disciplinary and supervision officials. Authorities have as yet not given any explanation. On the day trading resumed last September, China Renaissance shares dropped 72 percent.
He was taken away to assist in an investigation into a former coworker, according to sources who previously told Reuters.
In February of last year, Bao was replaced as chairman by cofounder of China Renaissance, Xie Yi Jing.
US appeals court throws out Trump contempt ruling over deportation flights
A United States appeals court has thrown out a lower judge’s determination that the administration of President Donald Trump could face charges for acting in contempt of court during the early days of his mass deportation drive.
The ruling on Friday undid one of the most substantial rebukes to the Trump administration since the start of the president’s second term.
The appeals court, however, was split two to one. The majority included two Trump-appointed judges, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao. The sole dissent was Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee from former President Barack Obama.
In a decision for the majority, Rao ruled that the lower court had overstepped its authority in opening the door for Trump officials to be held in contempt.
“The district court’s order attempts to control the Executive Branch’s conduct of foreign affairs, an area in which a court’s power is at its lowest ebb,” Rao wrote.
But Pillard defended the lower court’s decision and questioned whether the appeals court was, in fact, eroding judicial authority in favour of increased executive power.
“The majority does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the judicial authority that is our shared trust,” she wrote.
Trump administration celebrates decision
The appeals court’s decision was hailed as a major victory by the Trump administration, which has long railed against the judicial roadblocks to its agenda.
“@TheJusticeDept attorneys just secured a MAJOR victory defending President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport illegal alien terrorists,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media.
“We will continue fighting and WINNING in court for President Trump’s agenda to keep America Safe!”
The court battle began in March, when US District Court Judge James Boasberg, based in the District of Columbia, heard arguments about Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan men accused of being gang members.
That law allows for swift deportations of foreign nationals — and has, prior to Trump, only been used in wartime.
Boasberg ruled to pause Trump’s use of the law and ordered the administration to halt any deportation flights, including those that may already be in the air.
But two deportation flights carrying about 250 people nevertheless landed in El Salvador after the ruling.
The Trump administration maintained it was unable to safely reroute the flights and expressed confusion about whether Boasberg’s verbal order was binding.
It also questioned whether Boasberg had the authority to intervene. Trump went so far as to call for Boasberg’s removal, writing on Truth Social in March: “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”
Weighing penalties for contempt
In April, Boasberg determined that the Trump administration’s actions showed a “willful disregard” for his ruling. He concluded that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt”.
A contempt finding can result in various sanctions, including fines and prison time, although it remains unclear what penalties the Trump administration could have faced.
“The court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily,” Boasberg continued. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
Trump’s Department of Justice, for its part, maintained that Boasberg had tread on the president’s executive power in issuing the order.
Also in April, the US Supreme Court lifted Boasberg’s temporary restraining orders against using the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members.
But it nevertheless ruled that the targeted immigrants “are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal” before their deportations.
The Trump administration has faced persistent scrutiny over whether it was complying with that order, as well as other decisions from lower courts that interfered with its deportation campaign.
Critics have accused the president and his allies of simply ignoring rulings they disagreed with, raising questions of contempt in other cases, as well.
Inside Friday’s appeals court ruling
But the two Trump-appointed judges on the appeals court, Katsas and Rao, upheld the Trump administration’s position that Boasberg’s rulings had gone too far.
“The district court’s order raises troubling questions about judicial control over core executive functions like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of criminal offenses,” Katsas wrote.
He compared Boasberg’s order to recall the deportation flights to a district court’s order in July 1973 that sought to halt the US bombing of Cambodia. Within hours, however, the Supreme Court upheld a stay on that opinion, allowing the bombing to proceed.
“Any freestanding order to turn planes around mid-air would have been indefensible,” Katsas wrote, citing that 1973 case.
But Pillard — the Obama-appointed judge — offered a counterargument in her dissent, pointing out that the US is not currently at war.
She also noted that the Venezuelan men who were deported on the March flights had, by and large, not faced criminal charges. Yet, the US had chosen to deport them to El Salvador for imprisonment in a maximum-security facility with a history of human rights abuses.
“Whatever one might think about a Supreme Court Justice’s emergency order superintending an ongoing military operation, the authority of a federal district court to temporarily restrain government officials from transferring presumptively noncriminal detainees to a foreign prison without any pre-removal process is well recognized,” Pillard wrote.
The appeals court’s decision comes just days after the Department of Justice announced it had filed a formal complaint against Boasberg, accusing him of misconduct for public comments he made criticising the Trump administration’s approach to the judiciary.
Why is Israel moving to seize control of Gaza City?
Move would forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The Israeli government says it’s going to seize control of Gaza City, install a different administration and try to eliminate Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier said Israel planned to take over the entire Strip.
The Israeli military already controls about 80 percent of Gaza. The more-than-two-million people living there have been bombed, starved, repeatedly displaced and forced into temporary shelters.
So, why did Israel make this announcement now?
Is the prime minister trying to appease the right-wing members of his cabinet?
Or is he trying to detract international condemnation of the man-made hunger crisis?
Presenter: Adrian Finighan
Guests:
Dr Khamis Elessi – Neurorehabilitation and pain medicine consultant
Yossi Mekelberg – Senior consulting fellow at the MENA Programme of Chatham House
Longtime Belarus leader Lukashenko signals he may not seek another term
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has signalled he does not intend to seek another term in office, while rejecting speculation that he is lining up his son as successor.
The self-professed “last and only dictator in Europe” hinted at his intentions in an interview with TIME magazine, saying that whoever replaces him should “not break anything right away”, but keep developing the country in order to avoid any “revolutionary breakdown”.
The 70-year-old, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has led Belarus through more than three decades of authoritarian rule and was re-elected in January for a seventh five-year term.
Asked by TIME’s interviewer whether he would stand in the next election, he said he was “not planning” anything, though he did teasingly add that his United States counterpart, Donald Trump, was “looking decent” at nearly 80.
Lukashenko also rejected longstanding speculation that he might be grooming his son Nikolai to succeed him.
“No, he is not a successor. I knew you would ask that. No, no, no. Ask him yourself, he may be really offended”, he said in excerpts from the conversation, published in Russian by Belarusian state news agency BelTA.
Lukashenko , told TIME that he was actually ready to step down in the last election, but changed his mind after the public demanded he remain in his post because they were not ready for him to go.
But critics, including German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, said at the time that the vote was neither free nor fair, largely because all leading opposition figures had either been jailed or forced to seek exile abroad.
Lukashenko was also accused of rigging the 2020 election, which ended with nationwide protests and a sweeping security crackdown.
Several hundred people convicted of “extremism” and other politically related offences have been released since mid-2024, but rights groups say nearly 1, 200 are still behind bars.
Lukashenko , denies there are any political prisoners in the country.