Month: January 2023

Mr Torres was in charge of security for the capital city when thousands of rioters stormed Brazil’s Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court on Sunday 8 January.

Brazil’s Supreme Court issued an arrest warrant last week, accusing Mr Torres of alleged collusion with rioters behind attacks on government buildings.

Mr Torres denies any role in the riots.

The Supreme Court also accuses Mr Torres of omission – failure to act – in his role as the capital’s security chief.

According to Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes, Mr Torres’s “omission was amply proven by the predictability of the conduct of criminal groups and the lack of security that enabled the invasion of public buildings”.

In a statement, Brazil’s Federal Police said Mr Torres was arrested as he disembarked at the capital’s airport at 07:15 local time (10:15 GMT) and taken into custody.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused allies of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro of helping the attack on the presidential palace.

President Lula said people within the presidential palace were complicit in allowing rioters to enter government buildings and he vowed to screen employees to improve security.

Mr Torres – who was Mr Bolsonaro’s former justice minister – insists his conscience is clear.

On Friday, President Lula’s justice minister Flavio Dino said authorities would give Mr Torres until Monday to return to Brazil, or he would face extradition.

Police visited Mr Torres’s home and found a document reportedly trying to reverse October’s election result.

Mr Torres said the document was taken out of context – but did say he would return to Brazil to defend himself, calling last week’s riots the most bitter day of his personal and professional life.

He had been on holiday with his family in Miami when the storming took place, but left on Friday evening to fly back to Brasília.

Brazilian Senator Randolfe Rodrigues said Mr Torres’ arrest is “another reminder for those who have spent the past four years disrespecting the law and conspiring against the country”.

“Brazil is telling the world that it will not give room for coup d’etat,” Mr Rodrigues added in a tweet.

Following the riots, Brazil’s judicial authorities ordered the arrest of other top public officials and Fábio Augusto, the police commander, was dismissed from his role.

On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to include right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro in its investigation of 8 January’s riots.

Mr Bolsonaro, who has refused to concede defeat, posted a video days after the riots questioning the legitimacy of October’s presidential elections, which he lost to Mr Lula.

Prosecutors said the former president may have incited a crime by making such claims.

While the video was posted after Sunday’s riot and later deleted, the prosecutor general’s office argued its content was sufficient to justify investigating Mr Bolsonaro’s conduct beforehand.

Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes announced Mr Bolsonaro would be included in the probe into what the office of the prosecutor general said was the “instigation and intellectual authorship” of the rioting.

“Public figures who continue to cowardly conspire against democracy… will be held accountable,” Justice de Moraes added.

A crowd gathered in the capital Tunis to demand the end of his government.

Tunisians who supported Mr Saied since he came to power in 2021 have grown increasingly frustrated with the state of the economy.

The protests come 12 years to the day since former dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was forced into exile.

Tunisia’s uprising is often held up as the sole success of the Arab Spring revolts across the region – but it has not led to stability, either economically or politically.

With debts piling up, the country has struggled to import basic goods, including staples such as coffee, milk and sugar.

The government has so far unable to secure an international bailout leading one protester to tell the AFP news agency “the coup has brought us famine and poverty”.

In Tunis’ central Habib Bourguiba Avenue, a traditional site for demonstrations, Said Anouar Ali, 34, said: “Tunisia is going through the most dangerous time in its history.

“Saied took control of all authority and struck at democracy. The economy is collapsing. We will not be silent,” he added.

The protests in the capital were organised by two different opposition groups with a heavy police presence outside the Interior Ministry to prevent scuffles.

Separately, protesters also marched against Mr Saied’s seizure of near total power.

In 2021, the president sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and pushed through a constitution enshrining his one-man rule.

The new constitution replaced one drafted soon after the Arab Spring in 2011, which saw Tunisia overthrow late dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. It gave the head of state full executive control and supreme command of the army.

Mr Saied has justified his actions by saying he needed new powers to break a cycle of political paralysis and economic decay.

The reforms would make it easier for parliament to overturn Supreme Court rulings, among other things.

Protesters described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed changes as an attack on democratic rule.

It follows the instalment of the most religious and hardline government in Israeli history.

Rallies were also held outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and in the northern city of Haifa, local media reported.

One group of protesters clashed with police while attempting to block a major road, Ayalon highway, in Tel Aviv.

Critics say the reforms would cripple judicial independence, foster corruption, set back minority rights and deprive Israel’s court system of credibility.

Banners referred to the new coalition led by Mr Netanyahu as a government of shame.Israeli security forces with left-wing protesters during the rallies in Tel Aviv

Among those opposed are Israel’s Supreme Court chief justice, Esther Hayat, and the country’s attorney-general.

The BBC’s Samantha Granville in Tel Aviv saw protesters draped in Israeli flags, carrying posters in Hebrew, and pictures of Mr Netanyahu with X’s over his mouth.

There was a group of young girls with red-painted hand prints over their mouths. They wanted to tell the government they won’t be quiet.

One woman, who asked not to use her name, said through her tears she was a second-generation Holocaust survivor.

“My parents immigrated from non-democratic regimes to live in a democracy,” she said. “They came from the totalitarian regime to live freely. So seeing that destroyed is heart-breaking.”

She and her friend said they expected Mr Netanyahu to try radical changes, but never thought they would come so fast.

These are the largest demonstrations since Mr Netanyahu’s new coalition government was sworn in, in December.

Opposition parties had called on Israelis to join the rallies to “save democracy” and in protest at the planned judicial overhaul.

Under the plans announced by Justice Minister Yariv Levin earlier this month, a simple majority in the Knesset (parliament) would have the power to effectively annul Supreme Court rulings. This could enable the government of the day to pass legislation without fear of it being struck down.

Critics fear the new government could use this to scrap Mr Netanyahu’s ongoing criminal trial, although the government has not said it would do that.

Mr Netanyahu is being tried on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – something he strongly denies.

The reforms would also give politicians more influence over the appointment of judges, with most members of the selection committee coming from the ruling coalition.

If it passes into law, the plan could make it easier for the government to legislate in favour of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank without worrying about challenges in the Supreme Court.

Israel has previously highlighted the power of the court to rule against it, as a way of blunting international criticism of such moves.

Several waterways have flooded, at least 19 people have died and thousands have been told to evacuate their homes.

In Montecito, a town 84 miles (135km) north-west of Los Angeles, locals say the rain aggravates their trauma.

A mudslide here killed 23 people in 2018 and many are afraid it could happen again.

Rita Bourbon credits Italian stone masons with saving her life. The craftsmen built her home more than a century ago and she says it’s like a fortress.

She survived the storm five years ago, crying inside with her daughter and some friends as they listened to the sound of boulders and other houses ripped from their foundations crashing into her home.

The next day, the neighbourhood up the coast from Los Angeles was wrecked and almost two dozen were dead, including her neighbour whom she found in her garden in the mud.

“It’s a sound I used to love,” she says of the creek burbling in her garden, which is now bursting with ripe citrus and persimmon trees, as a blue heron drinks from her muddy pool.

“Now I know what it can do. We all have a bit of PTSD.”

Montecito creek became a violent, raging flow again this past week, prompting fire officials to issue a “Leave Now!” warning to the entire community, which includes some of California’s most famous residents such as Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The evacuation order in Montecito has been lifted, but residents remain on edge. And with so much of the land already saturated, the risk of flooding and landslides is very real.

Abe Powell is the co-founder of the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade, formed in 2018 to mobilise volunteers to clean up after the deadly mudslide.

This week, Powell led volunteers around the community, filling sandbags and digging trenches. He took us on a perilous drive up a narrow mountain road where giant boulders and mud blocked access to some homes.

“We don’t want to hang around here,” he said, looking at the fresh boulders.

Film producer Steve McGlothen is one of the volunteers. He has lived in the area for half a century and in his cliff top home for 27 years.

Helping others, he said, takes his mind off the problems at his own property and the despair he feels as the rain keeps falling. Plastic sheets cover the hillside, which slid away for the first time this week – an attempt to stop this latest deluge from making the slide worse.

“We’re looking at earth that has never moved,” he said. “Close to 50 years – this has never moved. It’s never been a problem before.”

The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, joined the volunteers filling sandbags in Santa Barbara. He says the area is a “hot spot” he’s concerned about in the coming days.

“We’ve experienced some 24 trillion gallons of water falling on this state in the last 16 days in the middle of a mega drought,” Governor Newsom told the BBC. He says California needs to reimagine the way it manages water, because the infrastructure here was built for a time which no longer exists.

Californians are used to extreme weather – wildfires, drought and the threat of earthquakes, with many awaiting the “Big One” that so many experts predict. But the “storm parade” pummelling California is new.

At least 19 people have died in these storms, which began in late December. A five-year-old boy is still missing after he was ripped from his mother’s arms in fast-moving flood water in central California, when they got trapped while driving to school.

In Northern California, vineyards are under water. In Capitola, the historic wharf has been destroyed and the beach town battered. In the storied Salinas Valley, the river is rising and threatening California’s famed agricultural heartland.

US President Joe Biden has now ordered federal aid for Sacramento, Merced and Santa Cruz counties.

Nasa climate scientist Kimberley Rain Miner says the challenge with having this many huge storms, back to back, is that the ground is already saturated and can’t absorb the amount of water falling quickly.

“If we are unable to slow the warming of the atmosphere, we can expect to see more and more extreme events happening more and more frequently,” Miner told the BBC, while surveying storm damage on a beach in Ventura. “And that’s global. That’s not just in California.”

In California everyone is watching their phones, waiting to hear if they should evacuate and wondering where it might be safe to go if they do need to leave town.

For Rita Bourbon, she decided not to wait. Even though she’s confident her house will survive, she doesn’t want to relive the trauma of another landslide. She opted to visit friends in Los Angeles this weekend.

“I just don’t want to go through another mudslide,” she said, adding that she would be a “nervous wreck” if she stayed. “Just hearing the creek and the cracking together of boulders. It’s better for everyone if I just go.”

The party says its first choice is still for the UK government to agree to a referendum.

But if that is not possible it could use the general election as a vote.

The second option would be to treat the UK election result as a mandate for the party to contest the 2026 Holyrood election as an independence vote.

The UK government said now was a time to focus on “shared challenges” such as the cost of living crisis.

The SNP’s national executive committee met on Saturday to agree the motion.

It will now be put to members at a special party conference in March.

Leader Nicola Sturgeon said the second option had been included in the motion in the interests of having a “full and open debate”.

She said: “Given the significance of this decision for both the party and the country, it is important that this debate is a full, free and open one – which is what the draft resolution seeks to enable.

“It sets out – as I did last June – the option of contesting the next Westminster election as a de facto referendum.

“However, in the interests of a full and open debate, it also sets out the alternative option of contesting the next Scottish Parliament election on this basis.”

She added: “While this will be a debate on the process of securing independence, it is one that will be guided by a fundamental principle – that the future of Scotland must and will be decided by the people of Scotland, not by Westminster politicians.”

In November, the first minister announced the SNP intended to use the next general election as an attempt to show that a majority of people in Scotland supported independence.

She spoke after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled she did not have the power to hold a referendum this year.

Ms Sturgeon said she respected the ruling but admitted it was a “tough pill to swallow”.

She also said the independence movement would now have to find a new way forward.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had welcomed the “clear and definitive ruling” from the Supreme Court.

On Saturday, a UK government spokeswoman said: “People in Scotland want both their governments to be concentrating on the issues that matter most to them – like growing our economy, getting people the help they need with their energy bills, and supporting our NHS.

“As the prime minister has been clear, we will continue to work constructively with the Scottish government to tackle our shared challenges.”

When Nicola Sturgeon first raised the possibility of using an election as a substitute referendum last June, she clearly targeted the next UK general election.

When she returned to the idea in her SNP conference speech in October, she talked about using “an” election without specifying which one.

When I pointed this out on social media and raised the potential flexibility in her wording, a senior SNP source told me I was “over interpreting”. Maybe not.

While the SNP still describe using the next Westminster vote to test opinion on independence as the “principal” alternative to the referendum they really want, party members are to be given a choice.

They can either opt for Westminster in (presumably) 2024 or for the Holyrood election planned for 2026 or even suggest further possibilities of their own.

The SNP say using either election to judge support for independence would be “credible and deliverable” but their opponents refuse to accept this is a legitimate route to Scottish statehood.