US Business

Ukraine said Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky described a fight for “literally every metre”.

The twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk have been targeted for weeks as the last areas still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Lugansk region.

Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said Monday Russian forces control 70 to 80 percent of Severodonetsk but had not captured or encircled it.

“They destroyed all the bridges, and getting into the city is no longer possible. Evacuation is also not possible,” he told Radio Free Europe.

Ukrainian forces in the area had two choices, “to surrender or die”, said Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists.

The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road to Sloviansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in Moscow’s push to conquer Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.

Ukrainian forces were fighting for “every town and village where the occupiers came”, Zelensky said on Monday in a message to mark the eighth anniversary of the liberation of Mariupol in the earlier conflict.

In May, Russian troops captured the port city in southern Ukraine after a weeks-long siege.

“We are once again fighting for it and all of Ukraine,” Zelensky said.

– ‘War crimes’ –

On Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying that attacks on the northeastern city of Kharkiv — many using banned cluster bombs — had killed hundreds of civilians. 

“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report on Ukraine’s second-biggest city.

In Bucha, a town near Kyiv synonymous with war crimes allegations, local police said Monday they had discovered another seven bodies in a grave.

“Several victims had their hands tied and knees bound,” Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebytov said on Facebook.

Dozens of bodies in civilian clothing were found in the town in April after Russian troops withdrew from the area following a month-long occupation.

Elsewhere in northern Ukraine on Monday, Russian rocket strikes hit the town of Pryluky, local authorities said. 

Pryluky, which lies about 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of the capital, is home to a military airfield.

In Lysychansk, Russian bombardments killed three civilians in the last 24 hours, including a six-year-old boy, Lugansk governor Gaiday said Monday.

While in the city of Donetsk, separatist authorities said three people were killed and four wounded in Ukrainian shelling on a market.

– Weapons call –

Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has prompted Finland and Sweden to give up decades of military non-alignment and seek to join the NATO alliance. 

In terms of security, Sweden is now “in a better place now than before it applied”, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday, even though its application is in limbo with Turkey currently withholding its approval.

In a joint press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, Stoltenberg said NATO was working “hard and actively” to resolve Ankara’s concerns “as soon as possible” ahead of a meeting on June 15.

It was at the summit in Brussels that Kyiv said Monday it was hoping for a decision on further Western arms deliveries to support its war effort.

“Being straightforward — to end the war we need heavy weapons,” Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak said on Twitter.

Podolyak listed items he said the Ukrainian army requires, including hundreds of howitzers, tanks and armoured vehicles.

– WTO meeting –

Away from the battlefield, World Trade Organization members gathered in Geneva Sunday, with the threat posed to global food security by Russia’s war top of the agenda.

Tensions ran high during a closed-door session, in which around three dozen delegates “walked out” before a speech by Russia’s deputy economic development minister Vladimir Ilichev, WTO spokesman Dan Pruzin told journalists.

Ukraine’s deputy agriculture minister on Monday said a quarter of his country’s arable land had been lost but insisted national food security was not threatened.

On a farm near the southern Ukrainian city Mykolaiv, the harvest has been delayed by the need to undo the damage done by Russian troops that passed through the area in March.

“We planted really late because we needed to clear everything beforehand,” including bombshells, Nadiia Ivanova, 42, told AFP.

The farm’s warehouses currently hold 2,000 tonnes of last season’s grain but there are no takers.

The railways have been partially destroyed by the Russian army, while any ship that sails faces the threat of being sunk.

burs-sea/imm/pvh

Amber Heard said the “hate and vitriol” she suffered on social media during her libel trial against Johnny Depp was not “fair,” but insisted in an interview released Monday she did not blame the jury for largely siding with her ex-husband.

After a six-week legal tussle between the former Hollywood power couple, a US jury awarded Depp more than $10 million in damages for defamation, in contrast to just $2 million for Heard who had counter-sued.

The case, live-streamed to millions, featured lurid and intimate details about the celebrities’ private lives, and Heard was targeted by countless social media posts and internet memes throughout.

“I don’t presume the average person should know those things,” Heard told NBC in her first major interview since the verdict. “And so I don’t take it personally.”

“But even somebody who is sure I’m deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I’m lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation.”

“You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair,” she said in a clip from the interview, which airs in full on NBC News’ Dateline on Friday.

Depp sued Heard over a Washington Post op-ed in which she did not name him, but described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Heard counter-sued after Depp’s lawyer described her abuse claims as a “hoax.”

Online public opinion during the trial appeared to come down heavily on Depp’s side, and Heard’s lawyers accused his legal team of working to “demonize” her.

Heard’s attorney Elaine Bredehoft has said the “Aquaman” star wants to appeal the verdict.

“How could they make a judgement, how could they not come to that conclusion?” Heard asked in the interview.

“I don’t blame them. I actually understand he’s a beloved character. And people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor.

When interviewer Savannah Guthrie suggested it was the jury’s duty to not be swayed by Depp’s A-list status, Heard responded: “Again, how could they (not be) — after listening to three and a half weeks of testimony about how I was a non-credible person, not to believe a word that came out of my mouth?”

Donald Trump ignored repeated warnings from top aides against claiming the 2020 election was stolen, according to testimony unveiled Monday by the congressional panel probing the 2021 assault on the US Capitol.

The second of a series of June hearings was shown videotaped accounts from the former president’s aides, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, saying they advised him not to declare victory on election night because he hadn’t won — but that Trump went ahead anyway.

“He thought I was wrong, he told me so, and that they were going to go in a different direction,” Stepien said.

Monday’s hearing followed a prime-time session last week in which the panel began making its case that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was the culmination of a conspiracy by Trump and his aides to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden.

“This morning, we will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost the election — and knew he lost the election — and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy,” Democratic panel chairman Bennie Thompson said in his opening remarks.

Trump’s closest campaign aides, his attorney general Bill Barr and White House officials revealed in video testimony shown to the hearing how they had repeatedly warned Trump his election voting fraud narrative was bogus.

“I told him that it was crazy stuff,” Barr said.

– ‘Far flung conspiracies’ –

Thompson’s Republican deputy Liz Cheney said Trump instead listened to the advice of “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and one of the former president’s closest allies, “to just claim he won, and insist that the vote counting stop — to falsely claim everything was fraudulent.”

After crucial swing states were called for Biden, Giuliani and his associates pushed a campaign of debunked theories about massive voter fraud that put them at odds with the White House lawyers that Stepien referred to as “Team Normal.”

“The Trump campaign legal team knew there was no legitimate argument — fraud or irregularities or anything — to overturn the election,” said Cheney.

The Wyoming congresswoman highlighted “far-flung conspiracies” — pushed by Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell, but dismissed as “nonsense” by Barr — of fraud involving voting machines “with a deceased Venezuelan Communist allegedly pulling the strings.” 

The claims are the subject of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

The committee had planned to hear in-person testimony from Stepien but he canceled an hour before the hearing after his wife went into labor. 

Trump started pushing what came to be known as his “Big Lie” around 2:30 am on November 4, 2020, making baseless allegations of fraud and prematurely declaring victory on the night of an election he ultimately lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes.

Barr told the committee in previously unseen video testimony that Trump claimed there was major fraud underway “right out of the box on election night… before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”

– Conspiracy –

The committee says that initial claim grew quickly into a conspiracy to cling to power by Trump and his inner circle — and a fundraising campaign that raised $250 million between election night and the insurrection.

The panel hopes to demonstrate that the clips from Stepien, Barr and others prove Trump should have known that what he was being told by Giuliani and Powell wasn’t true. 

But legal analysts are split on whether that is sufficient to argue intent, as Trump would likely argue in his defense that he took extreme measures to cling to power because still genuinely believed he had won.

Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic committee member, said the defeated president laid the groundwork for spreading his false allegations about the election months in advance.

“As early as April 2020, Mr Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election would be as a result of fraud,” she said.

“We’ll also show that the Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts but the Trump campaign didn’t use the money for that,” Lofgren added.

“The big lie was also a big rip-off.”

The US Supreme Court dealt a setback to the rights of undocumented migrants detained after crossing into the country in cases that pitted the administration of President Joe Biden against immigration advocates.

The high court ruled that migrants do not have a constitutional right to a bond hearing that could permit their release after spending six months in detention.

Two cases decided in tandem by the court Monday addressed the bond hearing requests of Mexican citizens who had been arrested by US officials after illegally crossing the southern border.

In both cases, the men had been previously deported from the United States and attempted to reenter the country.

The detainees argued against being sent back to Mexico on grounds that they faced threats of persecution or torture, and in one of the cases sought asylum.

US authorities, holding the men for months ahead of official removal proceedings, opposed a bond hearing on the grounds that it could lead to the men’s release and disappearance.

But their attorneys argued that denying them a bond hearing after lengthy detention was unjust and unconstitutional.

In 2019 lower courts ruled they had rights to such hearings after being held for six months.

But the high court ruled Monday that US law in these cases does not guarantee migrants like them that right. 

The original case was brought to the Supreme Court by the administration of president Donald Trump, who, as part of his fight against immigration, took a hard line against rights for undocumented migrants.

The case was inherited by the Biden administration, which although more sympathetic to migrants, continued to pursue it.

The American Civil Liberties Union criticized Biden at the time as being “decidedly on the wrong side of this fight.”

The ACLU noted that one of the men after being sent back to Mexico the first time had been kidnapped by police officers and held for ransom.

Another was tortured by gang members “because of his sexual orientation,” the ACLU said.

The Supreme Court justices said their ruling applied only to the claim of a right to a bond hearing, and not to the broader issue of constitutional protection against indefinite detention.

Ukraine said Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky described a fight for “literally every metre”.

The cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which are separated by a river, have been targeted for weeks as the last areas still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Lugansk region.

Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said Monday Russian forces were “gathering more and more equipment” to “encircle” Severodonetsk.

Moscow’s troops had “pushed our units from the centre and continue to destroy our city”, he said.

Severodonetsk had been “de facto” blocked off after Russian forces blew up the “last” bridge connecting it to Lysychansk on Sunday, Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists, said Monday.

Ukrainian forces in the area had two choices, he said, “to surrender or die”.

The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road for Moscow to Slovyansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in their push to conquer the whole of Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.

Ukrainian forces were fighting for “every town and village where the occupiers came”, Zelensky said on Monday in a message to mark the eighth anniversary of the liberation of Mariupol in the earlier conflict.

In May, Russian troops captured the port city in southern Ukraine after a weeks-long siege.

“We are once again fighting for it and all of Ukraine,” Zelensky said.

– ‘War crimes’ –

On Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying that attacks on the northeastern city of Kharkiv — many using banned cluster bombs — had killed hundreds of civilians. 

“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report on Ukraine’s second biggest city.

In Bucha, a town near Kyiv synonymous with war crimes allegations, local police said Monday they had discovered another seven bodies in a grave.

“Several victims had their hands tied and knees bound,” Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebytov said on Facebook.

Dozens of bodies in civilian clothing were found in the town in April after Russian troops withdrew from the area following a month-long occupation.

Elsewhere in northern Ukraine on Monday, Russian rocket strikes hit the town of Pryluky, local authorities said. 

Pryluky, which lies about 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of the capital, is home to a military airfield.

In Lysychansk, Russian bombardments killed three civilians in the last 24 hours, including a six-year-old boy, Lugansk governor Gaiday said Monday.

While in the city of Donetsk, separatist authorities said three people were killed and four wounded in Ukrainian shelling on a market in the Budonivskyi district of the city.

– Weapons call –

Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has prompted Finland and Sweden to give up decades of military non-alignment and seek to join the NATO alliance. 

In terms of security, Sweden was “in a better place now than before it applied”, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday, even though its application is in limbo with Turkey currently withholding its approval.

In a joint press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, Stoltenberg said NATO was working “hard and actively” to resolve Ankara’s concerns “as soon as possible” ahead of a meeting on June 15.

It was at the summit in Brussels that Kyiv said Monday it was hoping for a decision on further Western arms deliveries to support its war effort.

“Being straightforward — to end the war we need heavy weapons,” Ukrainian presidential advisor Mikhaylo Podolyak said on Twitter.

Podolyak listed items he said the Ukrainian army requires, including hundreds of howitzers, tanks and armoured vehicles.

Russian forces said Sunday they had struck a site in the town of Chortkiv in western Ukraine storing US- and EU-supplied weapons. 

The strike — a rare attack by Russia in the relatively calm west of Ukraine — left 22 people injured, regional governor Volodymyr Trush said.

– WTO meeting –

Away from the battlefield, World Trade Organization members gathered in Geneva Sunday, with the threat posed to global food security by Russia’s war top of the agenda.

Tensions ran high during a closed-door session, in which around three dozen delegates “walked out” before a speech by Russia’s deputy economic development minister Vladimir Ilichev, WTO spokesman Dan Pruzin told journalists.

On a farm near the southern Ukrainian city Mykolaiv, the harvest has been delayed by the need to undo the damage done by Russian troops that passed through the area in March.

“We planted really late because we needed to clear everything beforehand,” including bombshells, Nadiia Ivanova, 42, told AFP.

The farm’s warehouses currently hold 2,000 tonnes of last season’s grain but there are no takers.

The railways have been partially destroyed by the Russian army, while any ship that sails faces the threat of being sunk.

burs-sea/spm

Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey has been formally charged with sexual assault and will appear before a court in London later this week, police said on Monday.

The Metropolitan Police said the 62-year-old actor would appear at Westminster Magistrates Court at 0900 GMT on Thursday to face four counts of sexual assault against three men.

Prosecutors announced last month that they had authorised charges against the two-time Oscar winner, who was artistic director of The Old Vic theatre in London between 2004 and 2015.

Spacey said in response he was “disappointed” with the decision, but promised to voluntarily appear in the UK to defend himself.

He said in a statement to the Good Morning America TV show that he was confident of proving his innocence.

Allegations against Spacey first emerged in the wake of the #MeToo movement that saw numerous claims of sexual assault and harassment in the movie industry.

That prompted an investigation by the Met and a review by The Old Vic of Spacey’s time in charge there.

Reporting restrictions are in place that prevent the media going into detail about the charges to avoid prejudicing a jury at any trial.

The Met has said that the first two charges of sexual assault date from March 2005 in London, and concern the same man, who is now in his 40s.

The third is alleged to have happened in London in August 2008 against a man who is now in his 30s. 

Spacey has also been charged “with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent” against the same man.

The fourth sexual assault charge is alleged to have occurred in Gloucestershire, western England, in April 2013 against a third man, who is now in his 30s.

None of the alleged victims can be identified under English law.