Egypt: Islamists want Morsi to return
CAIRO – Islamist lawmakers in Egypt’s disbanded upper house of parliament demanded Saturday the army reinstate ousted President Mohammed Morsi, and called on other legislatures around the world not to recognize the country’s new military-backed leadership.
Morsi’s supporters, including his Islamist allies, remain steadfast in their rejection of the military coup that toppled the president nearly two weeks ago after millions took to the street to demand his ouster. They have staged a series of mass protests in Cairo to push their demands, and are vowing to stay in the streets until he is returned to office.
Speaking at a mass rally staged by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, the two dozen former parliamentarians, all Islamist members of the Shura Council that was dissolved by court order after the coup, accused the military of attempting to restore a “corrupt and dictatorial” regime.
Deadly train wreckage to be cleared in Franceh
BRETIGNY-SUR-ORGE, France – A powerful crane will start lifting smashed train cars over buildings Saturday to clear a railway line after a derailment killed six people and injured nearly 200 people south of Paris in what investigators believe may have been a case of equipment failure, authorities said.
Human error has been ruled out by France’s transport minister and the focus of the investigation is on a detached piece of metal in a switching joint on the tracks. The national rail company, SNCF, has already taken blame for Friday evening’s crash at Bretigny-Sur-Orge station, which occurred at the start of a busy holiday weekend.
The packed train, carrying about 385 passengers, was traveling below the speed limit at 85 mph when it derailed, skidded and slammed into the station platform in the small town outside the capital.
UK agency: 787 fire not caused by battery fault
LONDON – A fire on an empty Boeing 787 plane at London’s Heathrow Airport didn’t appear to be caused by faulty aircraft batteries, a British investigative agency said Saturday.
Investors in Boeing, which calls its newest plane a Dreamliner, had feared that Friday’s blaze meant that a battery overheating problem that grounded the whole fleet of such planes in January had not been fixed. News of the fire on the Ethiopian Airlines plane sent Boeing shares down 4.7 percent on Friday.
But Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch said there was “no evidence of a direct causal relationship” between the Dreamliner’s batteries and the fire.
18 dead in Moscow truck-bus crash
MOSCOW – Eighteen people are dead after a truck carrying stones used for pavement ran into a passenger bus in an outlying area of Moscow.
The Emergency Services Ministry says in a statement that 25 other people were injured in the Saturday crash. The severity of the injuries wasn’t stated.
The accident occurred when the truck plowed into the side of the bus near Oznobishino, a settlement in the Moscow municipality about 25 miles south of the city center.
Russian news reports say the drivers of both vehicles are among the hospitalized.
Twitter gives France data in anti-Semitic posts
PARIS – Twitter has given French authorities information that can help identify the authors of a series of racist and anti-Semitic tweets that carried French hashtags, and the social media site also has agreed to work with a Jewish student group that sued for the data on other ways to fight hate speech.
The president of the Union of Jewish Students of France said Saturday that his organization, known as UEJF, was withdrawing a $50 million lawsuit against San Francisco-based Twitter Inc., which was originally filed as a means to pressure the company to comply and “end Twitter’s indifference.”
“We got Twitter to respect the laws of our country,” Jonathan Hayoun said in a telephone interview. Propagating racial and anti-Semitic hatred is against French law.
Herald Staff
