United Kingdom
Prince Andrew’s daughter to marry
LONDON — Britain is set for another royal wedding. Buckingham Palace announced Friday that Queen Elizabeth II’s granddaughter Princess Beatrice will marry in London on May 29.
The palace says 31-year-old Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 37, will wed in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace. The chapel was the location for the wedding of Beatrice’s great-great-great-great grandmother Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in 1840.
The queen will host a reception afterwards at Buckingham Palace.
Beatrice, the elder daughter of Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, announced her engagement to real estate entrepreneur Mozzi last year. He is a Briton descended from a noble Italian family
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Dozens of sex assaults result in 15-year term
LONDON — A doctor who sexually assaulted two dozen female patients was sentenced to at least 15 years in prison Friday by a judge who accused him of wanting to “control and on occasions humiliate women.”
Manish Shah was convicted at two separate trials of committing 90 offenses between 2009 and 2013. He played on patients’ fears of cancer so he could perform unnecessary and invasive examinations of the 24 women, according to information presented at the trials.
On Friday a judge at London’s Central Criminal Court sentenced Shah to three life sentences with no chance of parole for 15 years.
“You were a master of deception and you abused your position of power,” said judge Anne Molyneux. “This was a horrible abuse of trust and caused incalculable harm.”
Republic of Ireland
Sinn Fein poll surge rattles bigger parties
DUBLIN — Ireland’s elections are usually two-horse races. But this time there’s a third contender, as a party with historic links to the Irish Republican Army soars in the polls.
As Irish voters prepare to choose a new parliament on Saturday, a restive electorate is rattling the two parties that have dominated the country’s politics since it won independence from Britain a century ago, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
Polls show a surprise surge — maybe even a lead — for Sinn Fein, the party historically linked to the IRA and its violent struggle for a united Ireland.
Sinn Fein is a major force in Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., but has long been a minor political player in the Republic, shunned by the bigger parties because of its ties to the IRA. But the party’s left-wing proposals for tackling Ireland’s housing crisis and creaking health-care system are striking a chord, especially with young voters.
Italy
American sculptor Beverly Pepper dies
MILAN — Beverly Pepper, a fixture of the Roman “Dolce Vita” and renowned American sculptor who made Italy her home and backdrop to many of her monumental steel creations, has died. She was 97.
Her son, John Pepper, made the announcement on Facebook, saying she died Wednesday. No cause was given.
Beverly Pepper and her husband, the late Curtis Bill Pepper, a longtime southern Europe bureau chief for Newsweek, were part of Rome’s “Dolce Vita,” of the 1950s and 1960s. Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Maselli were frequent visitors to their Rome apartment, along with Kirk Douglas and Gore Vidal.
“The Dolce Vita wasn’t so sweet,” John Pepper told the Italian newspaper Il Foglio in a story published Friday. “It’s true, Fellini, Antonioni and Maselli came over on Sundays. But it was very simple. They were all poor. My mother made spaghetti and meatballs, and ragout.”
Australia
Heavy rain helps douse
New South Wales fires
CANBERRA — Heavy rains lashed parts of the wildfire and drought-stricken east coast on Friday, bringing some flooding in Sydney and relief to firefighters still dealing with dozens of blazes in New South Wales.
New South Wales is the state hardest hit by wildfires that have killed at least 33 and destroyed more than 3,000 homes in an unprecedented fire season that began late in a record-dry 2019.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said he was optimistic the rain will help extinguish some blazes over the coming days. He said there were still 42 fires burning in the state, with 17 of those not contained.
“The rain is good for business and farms as well as being really good for quenching some of these fires we’ve been dealing with for many, many months,” he said.
Heavy rain and flash-flooding warnings extend across most of the New South Wales coast. Authorities say they rescued six people stranded from flood water in New South Wales since Wednesday.
Tunisia
President: Fired envoy overstepped authority
TUNIS — Tunisia’s ambassador to the U.N. has been abruptly called home and fired for lack of consultation on a Security Council resolution he helped draft responding to the U.S. Middle East peace initiative, authorities said Friday.
Moncef Baati was faulted for an “absence of coordination and consultation” with the foreign ministry and with representatives of Arab and Islamic countries at the United Nations, the official TAP news agency quoted the Tunisian president’s office as saying.
Baati is a career diplomat who came out of retirement to take the U.N. post in September,
The U.S. plan would allow Israel to annex all its settlements as well as the strategic Jordan Valley. The Palestinians want an independent state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem — territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war.
Baati’s dismissal raised questions as to whether the draft resolution had gone too far in countering the U.S., a longtime ally of Tunisia — even though the Tunisian president lambasted the peace plan just a week ago as “the injustice of the century.”
Wire reports