New Zealand case adds terror charge
WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- New Zealand police on Tuesday filed a terrorism charge against the man accused of killing 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.
Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, was already facing murder and attempted-murder charges from the March 15 shootings.
The new charge comes with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment upon conviction and will be a test case for New Zealand's terrorism law, which was put on the books in 2002 after the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001.
The New Zealand law defines terrorism as including acts that are carried out to advance an ideological, political, or religious cause with the intention of inducing terror in a civilian population.
Just before the attacks, Tarrant emailed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and others a manifesto outlining his white-supremacist beliefs and his detailed plans for the shootings.
A judge last month ordered that Tarrant undergo mental-health assessments to determine if he's fit to stand trial.
His next court hearing has been scheduled for June 14, and the mental-health findings could determine whether he is required to enter a plea at that point.
Ukrainian leader calls July election
KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's new president on Tuesday formally ordered Ukraine's parliament to dissolve and called an early election for July, hoping to get his supporters into parliament.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a 41-year-old TV comedian who won 73% of the presidential vote last month, announced his intention to disband parliament in his inauguration speech Monday, saying that current lawmakers were too focused on self-enrichment and lacked public trust.
He quickly fulfilled the promise in Tuesday's decree, which set a parliamentary election for July 21.
Zelenskiy's landslide victory reflected Ukrainians' exasperation with the country's economic woes, rampant official corruption and the country's political elite.
The election to Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada legislature was originally scheduled for Oct. 27. That would have left Zelenskiy facing a parliament dominated by supporters of the man he beat, former President Petro Poroshenko, for months.
His foes in parliament had sought to push Zelenskiy's inauguration past Monday's deadline by which the parliament could be dissolved, but eventually had to submit to public pressure.
Russian warns on massing militants
MOSCOW -- Russia's top security chief on Tuesday raised alarm about Islamic extremists massing on Afghanistan's northern border.
Alexander Bortnikov, chief of the main Russian intelligence agency FSB, said on a visit to Tajikistan that some 5,000 fighters of an Islamic State affiliate have gathered in areas bordering on former Soviet states in Central Asia, saying that most of them fought alongside the Islamic State group in Syria.
Bortnikov, in comments carried by Russian news agencies, called for tighter border control to prevent a spillover.
Russia has a significant presence in Central Asia including several military bases.
The Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan emerged in 2014 and refers to itself as the Khorasan Province, an ancient term for an area that includes parts of Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. It has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria but consists mainly of disgruntled former Taliban and other insurgents from South and Central Asia.
A Section on 05/22/2019