High-profile cases turn spotlight on domestic violence in Russia
AFP, Moscow
Natalia Tunikova’s partner pushed her towards the open balcony in their high-rise Moscow flat, before punching her to the floor. Fearing she would die, she reached for their kitchen table and “grabbed the nearest object”. It was a knife.
Tunikova, 47, said she was subjected to regular beatings, but in 2014 she was the one who spent a night in a prison cell facing a heavy sentence for stabbing her boyfriend.
Ebola still an ‘urgent’ global health
emergency: WHO
AFP, Geneva
The deadly Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains an “urgent” global health emergency, The World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday at its Emergency Committee meeting.
DRC’s latest Ebola epidemic, which began in August 2018, has killed 2,144 people, making it the second deadliest outbreak of the virus, after the West Africa pandemic of 2014-2016.
Jury recommends death sentence for ‘Hollywood Ripper’
AFP, Los Angeles
A jury in California recommended the death sentence on Friday for a man dubbed the “Hollywood Ripper” who was earlier found guilty in the gruesome killings of two women at their homes.
Michael Gargiulo, 43, was convicted in August on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder by a Los Angeles jury. A judge is set to sentence Gargiulo, also described as the “boy next door killer,” on February 28.
13 people die in dam failure at Russian gold mine
AP, Moscow
Thirteen people were killed as a result of a dam failure at a gold mine in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk early Saturday, the Russian emergencies ministry said. “As of now, there’s information about 13 dead,” the ministry said in a statement. Investigators said separately 14 workers were hospitalised. The workers died when a dam on the Seiba River collapsed in the early hours of Saturday and flooded several cabins where they lived, authorities said.
