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Serbia is seeking to further strengthen its armed forces by purchasing more warplanes, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said Sunday. Vucic made the statement while visiting an army tank brigade in Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia’s autonomous province of Vojvodina. “We cannot keep track of the gifts and donations that certain NATO counties in the neighborhood are getting from the United States, Germany and other countries and therefore we must fight alone to preserve the peace alone and to preserve our future alone,” Vucic said. Vucic did not specify what warplanes Belgrade plans to buy but said the intention is the safety of his country and the stability and peace in the Balkan region. “We, as a military neutral country, want to preserve our military neutrality, which means that we look after our sky alone, to look after our country alone. We will invest money and I believe that we, by not wanting to participate in any sort of race, will always be able to guarantee safety, stability but also peace,” Vucic continued. Pro-government media reported that Serbia had officially asked the United States for 20 fighter-bombers, but Washington had not responded to the request.  The report, however, speculated that in case of a U.S. refusal, Serbia was likely to purchase “Sukhoi-25” attack aircraft from Russia. “The Americans, Turks and Germans are taking care of their beloved child,” Vucic said, referring to Kosovo. He said Washington had recently equipped Kosovo’s security forces with armored vehicles. Although claiming Serbia’s military neutrality, Belgrade has recently received a sophisticated anti-aircraft system from Russia, including fighter jets, attack helicopters, and armored vehicles. Serbia has also obtained military drones from another ally, China. The U.S. has said that it would impose sanctions against Serbia if Moscow sends more arms to the country, which could threaten the security of neighboring NATO members. 
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Many Roman Catholic churches in Mexico City, including its main cathedral, celebrated the first Mass Sunday after three months of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Restrictions, however, are still in place, including mandatory face masks, shortened services, and church occupancy not more than 20%. “We are filled with joy to be able to receive our faithful and to be with them at this time when it has been so hard for them not to participate in the celebrations,” Auxiliary Bishop Salvador Gonzalez Morales said. Observing the sanitary measures to protect themselves from COVID-19, parishioners were nevertheless happy to attend Mass. “I felt very happy because I had been wanting to come for a long time and I couldn’t.  The Church wasn’t open. And now I was very pleased to be able to visit the Blessed Sacrament, to talk to him,” Maria Juana Flores, a church attendee, said. Another parishioner felt spiritually empowered to be able to go to church. “Peace and quiet. The spirit, one receives a spiritual force that lifts us up, right?” Hugo Perez, a church attendee, said. Mexican federal authorities left the decision on opening places of worship to state governments and city councils. The Mexican clergy has been hit hard by the coronavirus, with 46 priests, six deacons and three nuns dead as of July 15, according to data provided by the Catholic Multimedia Center of Mexico. The country now has over 385,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 43,000 deaths. 
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Australia’s competition regulator has launched court proceedings against Alphabet’s Google for allegedly misleading consumers about the expanded use of personal data for targeted advertising.The case by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in Federal Court said Google did not explicitly get consent nor properly inform consumers about a 2016 move to combine personal information in Google accounts with activities on non-Google websites that use its technology.The regulator said this practice allowed the Alphabet Inc unit to link the names and other ways to identify consumers with their behavior elsewhere on the internet.Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The move by the ACCC comes amid heightened attention in much of the world on data privacy. U.S. and European lawmakers have recently stepped up their focus on how tech companies treat user data because of privacy concerns.”We are taking this action because we consider Google misled Australian consumers about what it planned to do with large amounts of their personal information, including internet activity on websites not connected to Google,” ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement.The regulator alleges Google used the combined data to boost targeted advertising – a key source of income – and that it did not make clear to consumers about changes in its privacy policy.The regulator did not say what it wanted the court to do, adding that it has filed the claim on a “confidential basis pending claims by Google.”
 
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Protests took a violent turn in several U.S. cities over the weekend with demonstrators squaring off against federal agents outside a courthouse in Portland, Oregon, forcing police in Seattle to retreat into a station house and setting fire to vehicles in California and Virginia.A protest against police violence in Austin, Texas, turned deadly when police said a protester was shot and killed by a person who drove through a crowd of marchers. And someone was shot and wounded in Aurora, Colorado, after a car drove through a protest there, authorities said.The unrest Saturday and early Sunday stemmed from the weeks of protests over racial injustice and the police treatment of people of color that flared up after the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd, who was Black and handcuffed, died after a white police officer used his knee to pin down Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes while Floyd begged for air.In Seattle, police officers retreated into a precinct station early Sunday, hours after large demonstrations in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Some demonstrators lingered after officers filed into the department’s East Precinct around 1 a.m., but most cleared out a short time later, according to video posted online.At a late-night news conference, Seattle police Chief Carmen Best called for peace. Rocks, bottles, fireworks and mortars were fired at police during the weekend unrest, and police said they arrested at least 45 people for assaults on officers, obstruction and failure to disperse. Twenty-one officers were hurt, with most of their injuries considered minor, police said.In Portland, thousands of people gathered Saturday evening for another night of protests over George Floyd’s killing and the presence of federal agents recently sent to the city by President Donald Trump. Protesters breached a fence surrounding the city’s federal courthouse building where the agents have been stationed.Police declared the situation to be a riot and at around 1:20 a.m., they began ordering people to leave the area surrounding the courthouse or risk arrest, saying on Twitter that the violence had created “a grave risk” to the public. About 20 minutes later, federal officers and local police could be seen attempting to clear the area and deploying tear gas, however protesters remained past 2:30 a.m., forming lines across intersections and holding makeshift shields as police patrolled and closed blocks abutting the area. Multiple arrests were made, but it wasn’t immediately clear how many.In the Texas capital of Austin, 28-year-old Garrett Foster was shot and killed Saturday night by a person who had driven through the march against police violence.Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said a car turned onto the block where protesters stood and honked its horn. The driver and several witnesses told police that Foster approached the driver and pointed an assault rifle at them.In video streamed live on Facebook, a car can be heard honking before several shots ring out and protesters start screaming and scattering for cover. Police could then be seen tending to someone lying in the street.Manley said the driver called 911 to report the incident and was later taken into custody and released. Police didn’t immediately identify the driver.Sheila Foster, Garrett’s mother, said she was told her son was pushing his fiancée, who uses a wheelchair, through an intersection when the suspect was driving “erratically” through the crowd. She said she was told the driver shot her son three times.In the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, meanwhile, a protester shot and wounded someone after a car drove through a crowd marching on an interstate highway, police said. The wounded person was taken to a hospital in stable condition. Police didn’t release many details about the shooting, including whether the person who was shot had been in the car. Police said on Twitter that demonstrators also caused “major damage” to a courthouse.Protesters in Oakland, California, set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station, broke windows, spray-painted graffiti, shot fireworks and pointed lasers at officers after a peaceful demonstration Saturday evening turned to unrest, police said.In Virginia’s capital, Richmond, a dump truck was torched as several hundred protesters and police faced off late Saturday during a demonstration of support for the protesters in Portland. Police declared it to be an “unlawful assembly” at around 11 p.m. and used what appeared to be tear gas to disperse the group. Five people were arrested in the incident and charged with unlawful assembly. A sixth person was also arrested and charged with rioting and assault on a law enforcement officer.In downtown Atlanta on Sunday, federal agents examined damage to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility where windows were shattered late Saturday. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, FBI spokesman Kevin Rowson said in an email. No arrests had been announced.And in Baltimore, people from a group of nearly 100 demonstrators spray-painted anti-police messages on a Fraternal Order of Police building and adjacent sidewalks on Saturday night, The Baltimore Sun reported.|
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Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of “Gone With the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter who challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104.  Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.De Havilland was among the last of the top screen performers from the studio era, and the last surviving lead from “Gone With the Wind,” an irony, she once noted, since the fragile, self-sacrificing Wilkes was the only major character to die in the film. The 1939 epic, based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Civil War novel and winner of 10 Academy Awards, is often ranked as Hollywood’s box office champion (adjusting for inflation), although it is now widely condemned for its glorified portrait of slavery and antebellum life.The pinnacle of producer David O. Selznick’s career, the movie had a troubled off-screen story.  Three directors worked on the film, stars Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable were far more connected on screen than off and the fourth featured performer, Leslie Howard, was openly indifferent to the role of Ashley Wilkes, Melanie’s husband. But de Havilland remembered the movie as “one of the happiest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. It was doing something I wanted to do, playing a character I loved and liked.”During a career that spanned six decades, de Havilland also took on roles ranging from an unwed mother to a psychiatric inmate in “The Snake Pit,” a personal favorite. The dark-haired De Havilland projected both a gentle, glowing warmth and a sense of resilience and mischief that made her uncommonly appealing, leading critic James Agee to confess he was “vulnerable to Olivia de Havilland in every part of my being except the ulnar nerve.”She was Errol Flynn’s co-star in a series of dramas, Westerns and period pieces, most memorably as Maid Marian in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” But De Havilland also was a prototype for an actress too beautiful for her own good, typecast in sweet and romantic roles while desiring greater challenges.  Her frustration finally led her to sue Warner Bros. in 1943 when the studio tried to keep her under contract after it had expired, claiming she owed six more months because she had been suspended for refusing roles. Her friend Bette Davis was among those who had failed to get out of her contract under similar conditions in the 1930s, but de Havilland prevailed, with the California Court of Appeals ruling that no studio could extend an agreement without the performer’s consent.  The decision is still unofficially called the “De Havilland law.”De Havilland went on to earn her own Academy Award in 1946 for her performance in “To Each His Own,” a melodrama about out-of-wedlock birth. A second Oscar came three years later for “The Heiress,” in which she portrayed a plain young homebody (as plain as it was possible to make de Havilland) opposite Montgomery Clift and Sir Ralph Richardson in an adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square.” In 2008, de Havilland received a National Medal of Arts and was awarded France’s Legion of Honor two years later.She was also famous, not always for the better, as the sister of Fontaine, with whom she had a troubled relationship. In a 2016 interview, de Havilland referred to her late sister as “Dragon Lady” and said her memories of Fontaine, who died in 2013, were “multi-faceted, varying from endearing to alienating.””On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in the later years, severed,” she said. “Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.”De Havilland once observed that Melanie Wilkes’ happiness was sustained by a loving, secure family, a blessing that eluded the actress even in childhood.  She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of a British patent attorney. Her parents separated when she was 3, and her mother brought her and her younger sister Joan, to Saratoga, California. De Havilland’s own two marriages, to Marcus Goodrich and Pierre Galante, ended in divorce.Her acting ambitions dated back to stage performing at Mills College in Oakland, California. While preparing for a school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she went to Hollywood to see Max Reinhardt’s rehearsals of the same comedy. She was asked by to read for Hermia’s understudy, stayed with the production through her summer vacation and was given the role in the fall.Warner Bros. wanted stage actors for their lavish 1935 production and chose de Havilland to co-star with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck.”II wanted to be a stage actress,” she recalled. “Life sort of made the decision for me.”She signed a five-year contract with the studio and went on to make “Captain Blood,” “Dodge City” and other films with Flynn, a hopeless womanizer even by Hollywood standards.”Oh, Errol had such magnetism! There was nobody who did what he did better than he did,” said de Havilland, whose bond with the dashing actor remained, she would insist, improbably platonic. As she once explained, “We were lovers together so often on the screen that people could not accept that nothing had happened between us.”She did date Howard Hughes and James Stewart and had an intense affair in the early ’40s with John Huston. Their relationship led to conflict with Davis, her co-star for the Huston-directed “In This Our Life”; Davis would complain that de Havilland, a supporting actress in the film, was getting greater and more flattering time on camera.De Havilland allegedly never got along with Fontaine, a feud magnified by the 1941 Oscar race that placed her against her sister for best actress honors. Fontaine was nominated for the Hitchcock thriller “Suspicion” while de Havilland was cited for “Hold Back the Dawn, a drama co-written by Billy Wilder and starring de Havilland as a school teacher wooed by the unscrupulous Charles Boyer.Asked by a gossip columnist if they ever fought, de Havilland responded, “Of course, we fight. What two sisters don’t battle?” Like a good Warner Bros soap opera, their relationship was a juicy narrative of supposed slights and snubs, from de Havilland reportedly refusing to congratulate Fontaine for winning the Oscar to Fontaine making a cutting crack about de Havilland’s poor choice of agents and husbands.Though she once filmed as many as three pictures a year, her career slowed in middle age. She made several movies for television, including “Roots” and “Charles and Diana,” in which she portrayed the Queen Mother. She also co-starred with Davis in the macabre camp classic “Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte” and was menaced by a young James Caan in the 1964 chiller “Lady in a Cage,” condemning her tormenter as “one of the many bits of offal produced by the welfare state.”  In 2009, she narrated a documentary about Alzheimer’s, “I Remember Better When I Paint.” Catherine Zeta-Jones played de Havilland in the 2017 FX miniseries about Davis and Joan Crawford, but de Havilland objected to being portrayed as a gossip and sued FX. The case was dismissed.Despite her chronic stage fright, she did summer stock in Westport, Connecticut, and Easthampton, New York. Moviemaking, she said, produced a different kind of anxiety: “The first day of making a film I feel, `Why did I ever get mixed up in this profession? I have no talent; this time they’ll find out.'” 
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With more than four million confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the country, many U.S. states are pausing reopening efforts, leaving those who remain unemployed unsure about their futures. Senate Republicans plan to introduce another coronavirus relief bill this week. VOA’s Esha Sarai has more.
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Turkey’s decision to convert the ancient Hagia Sophia monument back into a mosque has sparked a war of words between Athens and Ankara. However, as Greece intensifies its diplomatic scramble to slap sanctions on Turkey, Greek businesses have launched a campaign to boycott goods and services from the neighboring country.Vassilis Korkidis, a leading representative of commerce in Greece, is blunt about the need, as he puts it, to strike back at Turkey.We recognize the ongoing works and efforts of the government to counter the recasting of Hagia Sophia, he said. However, until that materializes into something concrete, Korkidis said, Greek businesses should waste no time in boycotting trade with their Turkish partners.Even on a personal level, he says, consumers should follow suit. They can do so immediately, he said, boycotting Turkish goods, which bear the numbers 868 and 869 on the barcodes of imported products.Despite age-old animosity between the two countries, trade relations have grown substantially in recent years. Greece’s annual exports to Turkey total about $1.6 billion, significantly more than the $1.2 billion in imports from Turkey.Whether Greeks will heed the trade boycott remains unclear, especially as the economy here has been thrown into chaos by the COVID-19 pandemic.However, the anger, sadness and resentment toward the Hagia Sophia recast weighs heavily in this largely Eastern Orthodox country — so much in fact, that experts say any short-lived trade gain is offset by bigger losses.In this Presidential Press Office handout picture, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attends Friday prayers at Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in Istanbul, July 24, 2020.Korkidis explained, “We may enjoy a generous trade surplus, he says, but when you factor in the resources that Greece has to pull together to fend off continued flows of illegal migration from Turkey, and the huge military costs now racking up to safeguard against Turkish provocations — well all of that wipes out any semblance of a surplus.”The issue of Hagia Sophia is just the latest of a string of crises Greece is facing from its fellow NATO member, Turkey. Relations have been aggravated for years over land and sea rights in the Aegean, as well as thousands of illegal migrants continuing to stream into Greece from Turkey. In recent weeks, also, tensions have soared as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to begin drilling for oil and gas in waters Greece considers its own. Greek business associations say they are already reaching out to partner organizations across Europe to institute build an even broader boycott against Turkey.It is clear that the West is becoming increasingly unnerved by the actions of Turkey, Korkidis said. It is high time, he said, that Erdogan’s government stops using cultural issues to advance its political agenda.The trade boycott is just one of many grassroots movements and protests, swelling in Greece.On Sunday, alone, church bells tolled anew across the nation while tens of thousands of people packed into houses of prayer, singing hymns in honor of the Hagia Sophia, the seat of Eastern Christianity for about a thousand years before Ottoman Turks conquered its host city, then known as Constantinople.Protesters burn a Turkish national flag outside of a church during a gathering in Thessaloniki, July 24, 2020, against turning the historic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to a mosque after serving for more than 80 years as museum.In more worrying signs, though, teams of far-right nationalists fanned out across a city in northern Greece, torching a Turkish flag. The Greek government condemned the move. Still, it stoked nationalist and patriotic passions with a fresh round stinging remarks against the country’s age-old foe by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.He said Turkey is a troublemaker threatening peace and security in the region, he says, but we have shown, that we can defend our borders, the European Union’s frontiers.Greece believes the Hagia Sophia conversion is part of a bigger plan by Turkey to reassert itself as a regional and energy superpower.Turkey says Greece is significantly overreacting. Even so, Greece insists it is not taking any chances, keeping its forces on code-red alert, ready to wage war if further provoked on any front. 
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Pakistan and China have refuted as “absurd” and “fabricated” media reports that the two close allies are jointly conducting secret research to develop biological weapons in breach of global treaties. 
 
An Australian publication, The Klaxon, alleged in its investigative report last week that Beijing and Islamabad have entered a covert three-year deal “to expand potential bio-warfare capabilities, including running several research projects related to the deadly agent anthrax.” 
 
The report quoted multiple intelligence sources as saying that China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology had “lent all financial material and scientific support” to set up the secret facility in Pakistan. “The Wuhan lab was providing “extensive training on manipulation of pathogens and bio-informatics” to Pakistani scientists “to help Pakistan develop its own virus collection database,” it said.  
 
“It is a politically motivated and fake story, composed of distortion of facts and fabrications that quote anonymous sources,” said a Pakistan Foreign Ministry statement issued Sunday. 
 
It insisted that “there is nothing secret” about the facility referred to in the report, saying the laboratory is being used for research and development on emerging health threats, surveillance and diseases outbreak investigation.  
 
The ministry noted that Pakistan has been “strictly” abiding by its international obligations and has been sharing information about the laboratory in question with states parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The international treaty forbids member nations from developing, producing and stockpiling biological agent or toxin. 
 
“The attempt to cast aspersions about the facility is particularly absurd against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the need for better preparedness in the areas of disease surveillance and control and international collaborations in that regard,” the Pakistani statement lamented. 
 
The Chinese Embassy in Pakistan also denounced as “fabricated” the Australian media report.  
 
“It is totally irresponsible, vicious-intentioned to smear China and Sino-Pak relations. As a responsible nation, China always lives up to its obligations to BWC,” the diplomatic mission tweeted Sunday.  
 
Pakistan and China have traditionally maintained close political, economic and defense relations. The two neighboring countries have over the past six years further cemented bilateral ties, with Beijing investing billions of dollars in major infrastructure and energy development projects in Pakistan. 
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