Six In The Morning Saturday 25 June 2019

Tory leadership: Matt Hancock latest candidate to enter race

The race to become the next Conservative Party leader has begun, following Theresa May's announcement that she will step down next month.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock is the fifth Tory to enter the race.

He told the BBC that delivering Brexit was "mission critical" and Mrs May's successor must be more "brutally honest" about the "trade-offs" required to get a deal through Parliament.

The leadership contest will determine who is the UK's next prime minister.

Party bosses expect a new leader to be chosen by the end of July.

Dozens of Venezuelan prisoners killed in clashes with police

Authorities say incident in Portuguesa state was a failed escape attempt, but activists call it a massacre

Reuters

Sat 25 May 2019 04.46 BST

Twenty-nine detainees were killed and 19 police officers were wounded during a confrontation in a police cell block in north-western Venezuela.

The incident, which took place in the town of Acarigua in the state of Portuguesa, was described by state official as a failed escape attempt, but human rights groups have called it a massacre.

“There was an attempted escape and a fight broke out among [rival] gangs,” the Portuguesa citizen security secretary, Oscar Valero, told reporters. “With police intervention to prevent the escape, well, there were 29 deaths.” He said some 355 people were being held in the cell block.

Algeria police cordon off key protest site as thousands demonstrate

Algerian police on Friday threw up a tight cordon around a key protest site, arresting dozens of demonstrators in the biggest show of force in 14 weeks of mass demonstrations.

Protestors have rallied outside the Grand Post Office in Algiers every week since February, forcing veteran president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down in early April after two decades in power.

They have continued to stage mass demonstrations each Friday, demanding sweeping reforms and the departure of regime figures including army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah and interim President Abdelkader Bensalah.

But ahead of this week's protest, security forces erected fences in a bid to prevent demonstrators from accessing the site.

‘Absolutist of transparency’ or ‘enemy of freedom’?

Radical who refused to compromise

Julian Assange created WikiLeaks in 2006 and went on to publish the biggest leaks in history. From hero, he fell from grace and could now face extradition to the US.

by Juan Branco

When Donald Trump was elected president on 8 November 2016, Julian Assange had already been confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in central London for four years, surrounded by around 50 police officers and an unknown number of intelligence officers. That summer, the 45-year-old Australian had circumvented the surveillance and published thousands of emails revealing how the Democratic party leadership had manipulated the presidential primaries to favour Hillary Clinton over her leftwing challenger Bernie Sanders. Assange was instantly at the centre of global geopolitics: the world’s best-known political refugee, guilty of publishing verified information, had demonstrated he would not buckle.

Guatemalan village mourns teen who died in US custody

Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, 16, left his Guatemala village to help his family. He died in US custody weeks later.

by Sandra Cuffe & Jeff Abbott

 Rafael* fought back tears as he searched for words to describe his best friend, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, who died in US custody on Monday.

"He was like my brother," Rafael told Al Jazeera, sitting with his classmates in San Jose El Rodeo, an indigenous Maya Achi village 73km north of Guatemala City.

Black people are still suffering from police violence. Is America still listening?

Five years after the rise of Black Lives Matter, activists are still protesting. But national attention to police misconduct has waned.

By P.R. Lockhart 

It’s been nearly five years since several high-profile incidents of police violence spurred racial justice protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and chants of “black lives matter!” began to echo across the country.

The deaths of several black men and women, including Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, drew national attention to issues of race and policing and spurred on demands for police reform.

But recent developments in two high-profile cases raise questions about whether police violence is still a flashpoint issue — or if national attention to the problem has faded.