BOSTON: A federal appeals court on Thursday directed a trial judge to assess whether two jurors in Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial were biased and should not have been seated, creating grounds potentially to overturn his death sentence.
The Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals stopped short of granting Tsarnaev’s latest bid to overturn his death sentence for his role in the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded 260 others.
But on a 2-1 vote, the panel concluded that a trial judge did not adequately investigate Tsarnaev’s claims of juror bias. Tsarnaev had argued that two jurors at his trial lied about whether they discussed the case on social media before being seated.
The US Supreme Court had not addressed that argument when it restored Tsarnaev’s death sentence in March 2022, after the 1st Circuit set it aside in an earlier ruling in 2020, prompting a new round of arguments before the appeals court.
Lawyers for Tsarnaev said one juror was told by a friend on Facebook to “get on the jury” and send Tsarnaev “to jail where he will be taken care of,” while the second juror retweeted a Twitter post that called Tsarnaev a “piece of garbage.”
US Circuit Judge William Kayatta, writing for the majority, said a trial judge’s earlier investigation into Tsarnaev’s plausible claims of juror bias “fell short of what was constitutionally required.”
He said that conclusion on its own does not necessarily mean a new trial was needed to determine whether Tsarnaev deserved the death penalty or life in prison for his crimes, but did necessitate an inquiry into whether either juror should have been excused.
“If and only if the district court’s investigation reveals that either juror should have been stricken for cause on account of bias, Tsarnaev will be entitled to a new penalty-phase proceeding,” Kayatta wrote.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the Boston Marathon’s finish line on April 15, 2013.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died four days later after a shootout with police.
Jurors found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty on all 30 counts he faced and said six warranted the death penalty, which was later imposed.
US appeals court directs probe of juror bias in Boston Marathon bomber’s case
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US appeals court directs probe of juror bias in Boston Marathon bomber’s case
- Tsarnaev had argued that two jurors at his trial lied
Chinese ship runs aground off Philippines-occupied island in the disputed South China Sea
When Filipino forces assessed that the Chinese fishing vessel appeared to have run aground in the shallows east of Thitu Island on Saturday because of bad weather, Philippine military and coast guard personnel deployed to provide help but later saw that the ship had been extricated, regional navy spokesperson Ellaine Rose Collado said.
No other details were immediately available, including if there were injuries among the crewmembers or if the ship was damaged, Collado said.
Confrontations have spiked between Chinese and Philippine coast guard and navy ships in the disputed waters in recent years.
“The alertness of our troops is always there,” Col. Xerxes Trinidad of the Armed Forces of the Philippines told reporters. But when they saw that a probable accident had happened, “we tried to provide assistance as professionals” in accordance with international law on helping distressed vessels at sea.
“We’re always following international law,” Trinidad said.
Filipino villagers living in a fishing village on Thitu, which they call Pagasa island, immediately informed the Philippine military and coast guard after seeing the Chinese ship lying in the shallows about 1.5 nautical miles (2.7 kilometers) from their village, said MP Albayda, a local Filipino official, told The Associated Press.
“They got worried because the Chinese were so close but it was really the strong wind and waves that caused the ship to run aground,” said Albayda, adding that other Chinese ships pulled the stricken vessel away.
The stricken ship resembled what the Philippine military had repeatedly said were suspected Chinese militia ships, which had backed the Chinese coast guard and navy in blocking and harassing Philippine coast guard and military vessels in the disputed waters, a busy conduit for global trade and commerce.
Thitu Island is home to a Philippine fishing village and Filipino forces and is the largest of nine islands and islets occupied by the Philippines. It lies about 26 kilometers (16 miles) from Subi Reef, which China transformed into an island base along with six other barren reefs to reinforce its claim to virtually the entire South China Sea.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan are also involved in the long-simmering territorial standoffs, an Asian flashpoint that many fear could pit China and the United States in a major conflict.
The US does not lay any claim to the South China Sea but has repeatedly warned that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines, it’s longtime treaty ally, if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.
Restive Indian state orders curfew after fresh violence
- The latest violence was triggered Saturday after reports of the arrest of five members, including a commander, of Arambai Tenggol, a radical Meitei group
IMPHAL: An Indian state riven by ethnic tensions imposed an Internet shutdown and curfew after protesters clashed with security forces over the arrest of some members of a radical group, police said Sunday.
Manipur in India’s northeast has been rocked by periodic clashes for more than two years between the predominantly Hindu Meitei majority and the mainly Christian Kuki community that have killed more than 250 people.
The latest violence was triggered Saturday after reports of the arrest of five members, including a commander, of Arambai Tenggol, a radical Meitei group.
Incensed mobs demanding their release stormed a police post, set fire to a bus and blocked roads in parts of the state capital Imphal.
Manipur police announced a curfew in five districts, including Imphal West and Bishnupur, due to the “developing law and order situation.”
“Prohibitory orders have been issued by District Magistrates. Citizens are requested to cooperate with the orders,” the police said in a statement.
Arambai Tenggol, which is alleged to have orchestrated the violence against the Kuki community, has also announced a 10-day shutdown in the valley districts.
The state’s home ministry has ordered all Internet and mobile data services in volatile districts to be shut off for five days in order to bring the latest unrest under control.
Internet services were shut down for months in Manipur during the initial outbreak of violence in 2023, which displaced around 60,000 people from their homes according to government figures.
Thousands of the state’s residents are still unable to return home owing to ongoing tensions.
Long-standing tensions between the Meitei and Kuki communities revolve around competition for land and public jobs.
Rights activists have accused local leaders of exacerbating ethnic divisions for political gain.
Travel ban may shut door for Afghan family to bring niece to US for a better life
- Trump suspended refugee resettlement on his first day in office
IRMO: Mohammad Sharafoddin, his wife and young son walked at times for 36 hours in a row over mountain passes as they left Afghanistan as refugees to end up less than a decade later talking about their journey on a plush love seat in the family’s three-bedroom suburban American home.
He and his wife dreamed of bringing her niece to the United States to share in that bounty. Maybe she could study to become a doctor and then decide her own path.
But that door slams shut on Monday as America put in place a travel ban for people from Afghanistan and a dozen other countries.
“It’s kind of shock for us when we hear about Afghanistan, especially right now for ladies who are affected more than others with the new government,” Mohammad Sharafoddin said. “We didn’t think about this travel ban.”
President Donald Trump signed the ban Wednesday. It is similar to one in place during his first administration but covers more countries. Along with Afghanistan, travel to the US is banned from Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
Trump said visitors who overstay visas, like the man charged in an attack that injured dozens of demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this month, are a danger to the country. The suspect in the attack is from Egypt, which isn’t included in the ban.
The countries chosen for the ban have deficient screening of their citizens, often refuse to take them back and have a high percentage of people who stay in the US after their visas expire, Trump said.
The ban makes exceptions for people from Afghanistan on Special Immigrant Visas who generally worked most closely with the US government during the two-decade war there.
Thousands of refugees came from Afghanistan
Afghanistan was also one of the largest sources of resettled refugees, with about 14,000 arrivals in a 12-month period through September 2024. Trump suspended refugee resettlement on his first day in office.
It is a path Sharafoddin took with his wife and son out of Afghanistan walking on those mountain roads in the dark then through Pakistan, Iran and into Turkiye. He worked in a factory for years in Turkiye, listening to YouTube videos on headphones to learn English before he was resettled in Irmo, South Carolina, a suburb of Columbia.
His son is now 11, and he and his wife had a daughter in the US who is now 3. There is a job at a jewelry maker that allows him to afford a two-story, three-bedroom house. Food was laid out on two tables Saturday for a celebration of the Muslim Eid Al-Adha holiday.
Sharafoddin’s wife, Nuriya, said she is learning English and driving — two things she couldn’t do in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
“I’m very happy to be here now, because my son is very good at school and my daughter also. I think after 18 years they are going to work, and my daughter is going to be able to go to college,” she said.
The family wants to help a niece
It is a life she wanted for her niece too. The couple show videos from their cellphones of her drawing and painting. When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, their niece could no longer study. So they started to plan to get her to the US at least to further her education.
Nuriya Sharafoddin doesn’t know if her niece has heard the news from America yet. She hasn’t had the heart to call and tell her.
“I’m not ready to call her. This is not good news. This is very sad news because she is worried and wants to come,” Nuriya Sharafoddin said.
While the couple spoke, Jim Ray came by. He has helped a number of refugee families settle in Columbia and helped the Sharafoddins navigate questions in their second language.
Ray said Afghans in Columbia know the return of the Taliban changed how the US deals with their native country.
But while the ban allows spouses, children or parents to travel to America, other family members aren’t included. Many Afghans know their extended families are starving or suffering, and suddenly a path to help is closed, Ray said.
“We’ll have to wait and see how the travel ban and the specifics of it actually play out,” Ray said. “This kind of thing that they’re experiencing where family cannot be reunited is actually where it hurts the most.”
The Taliban criticize the travel ban
The Taliban have criticized Trump for the ban, with their top leader Hibatullah Akhundzada saying the US was now the oppressor of the world.
“Citizens from 12 countries are barred from entering their land — and Afghans are not allowed either,” he said on a recording shared on social media. “Why? Because they claim the Afghan government has no control over its people and that people are leaving the country. So, oppressor! Is this what you call friendship with humanity?”
Raising school fees torments many Africans. Some expect the Catholic Church to do more to help
- The Catholic Church is the region’s largest nongovernmental investor in education
- Catholic schools have long been a pillar of affordable but high-quality education, especially for poor families
KAMPALA: A crying parent with an unpaid tuition balance walked into the staff room of a Catholic private school and begged the teachers to help enroll her son.
The school’s policy required the woman pay at least 60 percent of her son’s full tuition bill before he could join the student body. She didn’t have the money and was led away.
“She was pleading, ‘Please help me,’” said Beatrice Akite, a teacher at St. Kizito Secondary School in Uganda’s capital city, who witnessed the outburst. “It was very embarrassing. We had never seen something like that.”
Two weeks into second term, Akite recounted the woman’s desperate moment to highlight how distressed parents are being crushed by unpredictable fees they can’t pay, forcing their children to drop out of school. It’s leaving many in sub-Saharan Africa — which has the world’s highest dropout rates — to criticize the mission-driven Catholic Church for not doing enough to ease the financial pressure families face.
Legacy of Catholic education across Africa
The Catholic Church is the region’s largest nongovernmental investor in education. Catholic schools have long been a pillar of affordable but high-quality education, especially for poor families.
Their appeal remains strong even with competition from other nongovernmental investors now eying schools as enterprises for profit. The growing trend toward privatization is sparking concern that the Catholic Church may price out the people who need uplifting.
Akite hopes Catholic leaders support measures that would streamline fees across schools of comparable quality. Firm fee ceilings need to be set, she said.
Kampala’s St. Kizito Secondary School, where Akite teaches literature, was founded by priests of the Comboni missionary order, known for its dedication to serving poor communities. Its students come mostly from working-class families and tuition per term is roughly $300, a substantial sum in a country where GDP per capita was about $1,000 in 2023.
Yet that tuition is lower than at many other Catholic-run schools in Kampala, where many students report later in the term because they can’t raise school fees in time, Akite said.
Late starts, long lines, extension requests
One of the most expensive private schools in Kampala, the Catholic-run Uganda Martyrs’ Secondary School Namugongo, maintains a policy of “zero balance” when a child reports to school at the beginning of a three-month term. This means students must be fully paid by the time they report to school.
Tuition at the school was once as high as $800 but has since dropped to about $600 as enrollment swelled to nearly 5,000, said deputy headmaster James Batte. On a recent morning, there was a queue of parents waiting outside Batte’s office to request more time to clear tuition balances.
Daniel Birungi, an electrical engineer in Kampala whose son enrolled this year at St. Mary’s College Kisubi, a leading school for boys in Uganda, said the emerging risk for traditional Catholic schools is to cater only to the rich.
There is hot water in the bathrooms, he said, describing what he felt was a trend toward levels of luxury he never imagined as a student there in the 1990s. Now, students are prohibited from packing snacks and instead encouraged to buy what they need from school-owned canteens, he said.
That has “put us under a lot of pressure,” he said.
Tuition at St. Mary’s College Kisubi is roughly $800 per term, and Birungi doubts he will be able to regularly pay school fees on time. “You can go there and see the brother and negotiate,” he said, referring to the headmaster. “I am planning to go there and see him and ask for that consideration.”
The effects of a private education system
The World Bank reported in 2023 that 54 percent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa rank the issue of paying school fees higher than medical bills and other expenses. That’s partly because education is largely in private hands, with the most desirable schools controlled by profit-seeking owners.
Schools run by the Catholic Church are not usually registered as profit-making entities, but those who run those schools say they wouldn’t be competitive if they were run merely as charities. They say they face the same maintenance costs as others in the field and offer scholarships to exceptional students.
Regulating tuition is not easy, said Ronald Reagan Okello, a priest who oversees education at the Catholic Secretariat in Kampala. He urges parents to send their children to schools they can afford.
“As the Catholic Church, also we are competing with those who are in the private sector,” said Okello, the national executive secretary for education with the Ugandan bishops conference. “Now, as you are competing, the other ones are setting the bar high. They are giving you good services. But now putting the standard to that level, we are forced to raise the school fees to match the demands of the people who can afford.”
Across the region, the Catholic Church has built a reputation as a key provider of formal education in areas often underserved by the state. Its schools are cherished by families of all means for their values, discipline and academic success.
In Zimbabwe, the Catholic Church operates about 100 schools, ranging from dozens in impoverished areas where annual tuition is as low as $150 to elite boarding schools that can charge thousands of dollars.
But a legacy of inclusion is under pressure in the southern African nation due to fee increases at boarding schools and efforts by Catholic leaders to fully privatize some schools. Many boarding schools already charge tuition fees between $600 and $800, prohibitive for the working class in a country where most civil servants make less than a $300 per month.
Privatization will raise tuition fees even higher, warned Peter Muzawazi, a prominent educator in Zimbabwe.
Muzawazi, who attended Catholic schools, once was the headmaster of Marist Brothers, a top Catholic school for boys in Zimbabwe. That school in Nyanga is among those earmarked for privatization.
“I know in the Catholic Church there is a lot of space for reasonable fees for day scholars, but for boarders there is need to be watching because the possibility that they would be out of reach for the vulnerable is there,” he said.
The church needs to be actively engaged, he said. “How do we continue to guarantee education for the poor?”
Efforts to privatize church-founded schools have sparked debate in Zimbabwe, which for years has been in economic decline stemming in part from sanctions imposed by the US and others. Authorities say privatizing these schools is necessary to maintain standards, even as critics warn Catholic leaders not to turn their backs on poor people.
“Schools have now turned into businesses,” Martin Chaburumunda, president of the Zimbabwe Rural Teachers’ Union, told The Manica Post, a state-run weekly. “Churches now appear only hungry for money as opposed to educating the communities they operate in.”
Rather than privatizing old mission schools, the church should invest in building new ones if it’s useful to experiment with different funding models, said Muzawazi, a lay Catholic who serves on the governing council of the Catholic University of Zimbabwe.
“The bright people who advance the cause of countries are not the rich ones,” he said. “We want every church and every nation to tap the potential of every person, regardless of economic status.”
Italians vote on citizenship and job protections amid low awareness and turnout concerns
- Referendum to make it easier for children born in Italy to foreigners to obtain citizenship
- Supporters say reform to bring Italy’s citizenship law in line with many other European countries
ROME: Italians vote over two days starting Sunday on referendums that would make it easier for children born in Italy to foreigners to obtain citizenship, and on providing more job protections. But apparent low public awareness risks rendering the vote invalid if turnout is not high enough.
Campaigners for the change in the citizenship law say it will help second-generation Italians born in the country to non- European Union parents better integrate into a culture they already see as theirs.
Italian singer Ghali, who was born in Milan to Tunisian parents, urged people to vote in an online post, noting that the referendum risks failure if at least 50 percent plus one of eligible voters don’t turn out.
“I was born here, I always lived here, but I only received citizenship at the age of 18,’’ Ghali said, urging a yes vote to reduce the residency requirement from 10 to five years.
The new rules, if passed, could affect about 2.5 million foreign nationals who still struggle to be recognized as citizens.
The measures were proposed by Italy’s main union and left-wing opposition parties. Premier Giorgia Meloni has said she would show up at the polls but not cast a ballot — an action widely criticized by the left as antidemocratic, since it will not help reach the necessary threshold to make the vote valid.
“While some members of her ruling coalition have openly called for abstention, Meloni has opted for a more subtle approach,” said analyst Wolfango Piccoli of the Teneo consultancy based in London. ”It’s yet another example of her trademark fence-sitting.’’
Rights at stake
Supporters say this reform would bring Italy’s citizenship law in line with many other European countries, promoting greater social integration for long-term residents. It would also allow faster access to civil and political rights, such as the right to vote, eligibility for public employment and freedom of movement within the EU.
“The real drama is that neither people who will vote ‘yes’ nor those who intend to vote ‘no’ or abstain have an idea of what (an) ordeal children born from foreigners have to face in this country to obtain a residence permit,” said Selam Tesfaye, an activist and campaigner with the Milan-based human rights group “Il Cantiere.”
“Foreigners are also victims of blackmail, as they can’t speak up against poor working conditions, exploitation and discrimination, due to the precariousness of the permit of stay,” she added.
Activists and opposition parties also denounced the lack of public debate on the measures, accusing the governing center-right coalition of trying to dampen interest in sensitive issues that directly impact immigrants and workers.
In May, Italy’s AGCOM communications authority lodged a complaint against RAI state television and other broadcasters for a lack of adequate and balanced coverage.
“This referendum is really about dignity and the right to belong, which is key for many people who were born here and spent most of their adult life contributing to Italian society. For them, a lack of citizenship is like an invisible wall,” said Michelle Ngonmo, a cultural entrepreneur and advocate for diversity in the fashion industry, who has lived most of her life in Italy after moving as a child from Cameroon.
“You are good enough to work and pay taxes, but not to be fully recognized as Italian. This becomes a handicap for young generations, particularly in the creative field, creating frustration, exclusion and a big waste of potential,” she said.
The four other referendums aim to roll back labor reforms, making it harder to fire some workers and increase compensation for those laid off by small businesses, reversing a previous law passed by a center-left government a decade ago. One of the questions on the ballot also addresses the urgent issue of security at work, restoring joint liability to both contractors and subcontractors for workplace injuries.
Many expected to abstain from voting
Opinion polls published in mid-May showed that only 46 percent of Italians were aware of the issues driving the referendums. Turnout projections were even weaker for a vote scheduled for the first weekend of Italy’s school holidays, at around 35 percent of around 50 million electors, well below the required quorum.
“Many believe that the referendum institution should be reviewed in light of the high levels of abstention (that) emerged in recent elections and the turnout threshold should be lowered,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco, political analyst and pollster at YouTrend.
Some analysts note however that the center-left opposition could claim a victory even if the referendum fails on condition that the turnout surpasses the 12.3 million voters who backed the winning center-right coalition in the 2022 general election.
