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Police to pay $1.9m to black family held at gunpoint in Colorado

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Aurora police have aologised for the arrests (file picture)

A black mother and four children, who were held at gunpoint by police in Colorado, have been awarded $1.9m (£1.5m) in a settlement.

Brittney Gilliam was wrongfully stopped in 2020 at a parking lot, along with her six-year-old daughter, nieces aged 14 and 17, and sister, 12.

The incident, which was caught on camera, drew outrage at the time. Ms Gilliam later sued the officers accusing them of “profound and systemic” racism.

Police in Aurora, Colorado, said they mistakenly believed Ms Gilliam’s car had been stolen and had been trained to perform a “high-risk stop”.

They also apologised for the incident and offered to cover therapy services for the children..

On the day of the arrest, Ms Gilliam and the young girls went to a nail salon and returned to their car after finding out the salon was closed. Officers then approached the vehicle with guns drawn as the family got into the car.

In footage posted by witnesses on social media, Ms Gilliam and all four girls lie face down in the parking lot.  Ms Gilliam, her 12-year-old sister and her 17-year-old niece were handcuffed. The children can be heard crying and calling for the mother as witnesses question police about the situation.

“Would your kids be okay after that? Having a gun pulled on them and laid on the ground. Especially a six-year-old,” Ms Gilliam told CBS soon after.

Police said the car’s licence plate had matched the number of a stolen vehicle but from a different state.

Officers immediately uncuffed everyone involved when they realised their mistake, according to Aurora’s police chief at the time, Vanessa Wilson.

On Monday, David Lane, a lawyer for the family, confirmed that a settlement has been reached with the city of Aurora. “All parties are very satisfied with this settlement,” he said in a statement.

The incident occurred amid a wider reckoning with the policing of black Americans in the US, and at a time when the Aurora police department was being criticised for the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old black man who died in police custody.

In 2023, a white former police officer was sentenced to 14 months in prison for the killing of McClain.

(BBC)



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Argentina canal turns bright red, alarming residents

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An aerial view shows an unusual reddish colour of the Sarandí on the outskirts of Buenos Aires [BBC]

A canal in a suburb of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires turned bright red on Thursday, alarming local residents.

Pictures and videos show the intensely coloured water flowing into an estuary, the Rio de la Plata, which borders an ecological reserve.

Local media reports suggest the colour may have been caused by the dumping of textile dye, or by chemical waste from a nearby depot.

The Environment Ministry said in a statement that water samples had been taken from the Sarandí canal to determine the cause of the colour change.

By late afternoon the colour of the water had lost some of its intensity, the AFP news agency reported.

Residents have claimed that many local companies dispose of toxic waste in the waterway, which runs through an area of leather processing and textile factories some 10km (6 miles) from the centre of the capital.

A resident, a woman called Silvia, told local news channel C5N that although it is has turned red now, “other times it was yellow, with an acidic smell that makes us sick even in the throat”. “I live a block from the stream. Today, it has no smell. There are not many factories in the area, although there are warehouses.”

Another resident, Maria Ducomls, told AFP industries in the region dump waste in the water, and said she had seen it coloured differently in the past – “bluish, a little green, pink, a little lilac, with grease on top”.

[BBC]

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Trump sanctions International Criminal Court, calls it ‘illegitimate’

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Trump previously sanctioned ICC officials during his first term in office in 2020. [BBC]

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order sanctioning the International Criminal Court, accusing it of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”.

The measure places financial and visa restrictions on individuals and their families who assist in ICC investigations of American citizens or allies.

Trump signed the measure as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visiting Washington.

Last November, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza, which Israel denies. The ICC also issued a warrant for a Hamas commander.

A White House fact sheet circulated earlier on Thursday accused the Hague-based ICC of creating a “shameful moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel by issuing the warrants at the same time.

Trump’s executive order said the ICC’s recent actions “set a dangerous precedent” that endangered Americans by exposing them to “harassment, abuse and possible arrest”.

“This malign conduct in turn threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States and undermines the critical national security and foreign policy work of the United States government and our allies, including Israel,” the order said.

It adds that “both nations [the US and Israel] are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war”.

The US is not a member of the ICC and has repeatedly rejected any jurisdiction by the body over American officials or citizens.

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India ‘engaging with US’ after shackled deportees spark anger

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The US military plane carrying Indian deportees landed in Amritsar on Wednesday [BBC]

India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has told parliament the government is working with the US to ensure Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.

His statement came a day after a US military flight brought back 104 Indians accused of entering the US illegally.

One of the deportees told the BBC they had been handcuffed throughout the 40-hour flight, sparking criticism.

But Jaishankar said he had been told by the US that women and children were not restrained. Deportation flights to India had been taking place for several years and US procedures allowed for the use of restraints, he added.

Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

BBC/Gurpreet Chawla A photo of Jaspal Singh
Jaspal Singh spent 11 days in the US before he was deported [BBC]

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

[BBC]

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