Dozens of people, some armed with what appeared to be hunting rifles, clashed in broad daylight on Friday in a residential suburb outside the capital Kyiv, and at least three people were wounded, according to officials.The violence, captured in amateur footage taken from surrounding apartment blocks and posted online, occurred in the morning in Brovary.Unidentified men shoot during an armed conflict in the residential area of Brovary town, Ukraine, in this still image from a video taken May 29, 2020. (Oleksandr Tkachenko/Handout via Reuters)According to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, about 100 people took part in the clashes, some of whom came from another region.The footage, which Reuters could not immediately verify independently, showed men in masks and dark clothes exchanging fire with hidden adversaries who were obscured by trees. Reuters counted around 40 shots.President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the government to investigate the incident and punish those responsible, the presidential press service said.”The head of the interior ministry reported to the president that the conflict occurred between representatives of companies involved in passenger transportation in Brovary,” it said in a statement.Avakov said 20 people were detained.The interior ministry said that the head of police in the region of Vynnytsya, where some of those who took part in the clashes came from, had been sacked. It was not clear whether the two were related. 
 
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For over a thousand years, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia operated as the biggest Greek Orthodox Christian church before being converted into a mosque, then a museum and, most recently, a United Nations-designated cultural landmark.At the direction of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a reading of the Quran will take place Friday at the ancient building.In announcing his decision, Erdogan said the Conquest Sura, a section of the Quran, would be recited at the site, and that prayers would also be held as part of a celebration organized by the country’s culture ministry in commemoration of the fall of the Byzantine empire in 1453.FILE – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan listens during a teleconference with his cabinet in Istanbul, May 11, 2020.Whether followers will be allowed to pray inside Hagia Sophia or around the massive structure, or across its sprawling courtyard, remained unclear.Erdogan’s announcement comes as Turkey, among the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus, moves Friday to ease restrictions as death and infection rates from the pandemic have plummeted, according to state statistics.Still, the Quran recital has angered the neighboring Greeks, the former keepers of the monument.”Any move to change the existing status of Hagia Sophia, as safeguarded by UNESCO, cannot be accepted,” Deputy Foreign Minister Miltiades Varvitsiotis said. “The monument has long relinquished its religious character … and any attempt to alter its status will isolate Turkey even further,” he told the Athens-based Real FM radio station.Pundits, politicians and the press condemned the move Friday, as national television networks topped news bulletins with developments on what they called a “provocation” by Ankara.”It is obvious that Erdogan is playing to his local audience with this move,” Deputy Defense Minister Alkiviadis Stefanis said. “But for us, the Greek nation, it is a move that touches on sensitive chords: our religious and national sentiments.”History of Hagia SophiaBuilt in the sixth century, the Hagia Sophia, which means Holy Wisdom in Greek, was converted to a mosque soon after the Ottomans conquered what was then called Constantinople, 567 years ago. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, hundreds of years later, secular Turkish leaders transformed the mosque into a museum in 1935.FILE – An aerial view of the Byzantine-era monument of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, April 24, 2020.A masterpiece of Byzantine architecture, the building features an immense dome propped on massive pillars. It is sheathed with marble and decorated with mosaics.With the Turkish economy stuttering, analysts suggest Erdogan’s play on Hagia Sophia aims to rally his electoral base, fulfilling a longstanding demand by hardline Islamists in his country bent on converting the UNESCO landmark back into a mosque.”This is an act of desperation and will lead to no good,” said Elmira Bayrasli, director of the Globalization and International Affairs program at Bard College.Heightened tensionsErdogan’s announcement comes as relations between Greece and Turkey have taken a turn for the worse.While both NATO allies, Greece has been aggressively boosting its border security since Ankara fanned what Greek officials have called “a migrant offensive,” allowing over 150,000 refugees to travel freely into Europe.Turkey has since then also sent exploratory ships to drill in areas of the eastern Mediterranean, which Greece and Cyprus claim exclusively their own. Mock dogfights between Greek and Turkish fighter jets have also become a daily occurrence over the Aegean Sea that divides the two countries, heightening fears of an accident and all-out offensive between the traditional enemy states.”In just one day this week, we had to send up 62 jet fighters to intercept Turkish aircraft in Greece airspace,” said Stefanis.It was not immediately clear whether Greece would seek recourse with the United Nations or in other international fora to block the Quran readings from proceeding at Hagia Sophia on Friday. Still, opposition lawmakers in Athens are advising a more tempered stance by the government, saying a reading of the Quran does not explicitly constitute prayer or any semblance of disrespect for the 1,000-year-old monument. 
 
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Australia’s highest court ruled on Friday to make public letters between Queen Elizabeth II and her representative that would reveal what knowledge she had, if any, of the dismissal of an Australian government in 1975.
The High Court’s 6-1 majority decision in historian Jenny Hocking’s appeal overturned lower court rulings that more than 200 letters between the now 94-year-old monarch of Britain and Australia and Governor-General Sir John Kerr before he dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government were personal and might never be made public.
The only dismissal of an elected Australian government on the authority of a British monarch triggered a political crisis that spurred many to call for Australia to sever its constitutional ties with Britain and create a republic with an Australian president. Suspicions of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency conspiracy persist.
Hocking, a Monash University academic and Whitlam biographer, said she expected to read the 211 letters at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra next week when a coronavirus lockdown is lifted.
She described as absurd that communications between such key officials in the Australian system of government could be regarded as personal and confidential.
“That they could be seen as personal is quite frankly an insult to all our intelligence collectively — they’re not talking about the racing and the corgis,” Hocking told The Associated Press, referring to the queen’s interest in horse racing and the dog breed.
“It was not only the fact that they were described quite bizarrely as personal, but also that they were under an embargo set at the whim of the queen,” she added.
Archives director David Fricker later said staff had begun assessing whether there was any information in the letters that should still be withheld. The archives have 90 business days — or more than four months — to do so.
Kerr dismissed Whitlam’s reforming government and replaced him with opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as prime minister to resolve a month-old deadlock in Parliament. Fraser’s conservative coalition won an election weeks later.
The archives has held the correspondence, known as the Palace Letters, since 1978. As state records, they should have been made public 31 years after they were created.
Under an agreement struck between Buckingham Palace and Government House, the governor-general’s official residence, months before Kerr resigned in 1978, the letters covering three tumultuous years of Australian politics were to remain secret until 2027. The private secretaries of both the sovereign and the governor-general in 2027 still could veto their release indefinitely under that agreement.
A Federal Court judge accepted the archives’ argument that the letters were personal and confidential. An appeals court upheld that ruling in a 2-1 decision.
Buckingham Palace said in a statement that the High Court decision was a “legal matter in the Australian courts and we would not comment.”
Dickie Arbiter, the queen’s spokesman for 12 years until 2000, said the letters should not be made public in her lifetime.
“I would have thought that the right time for the release of these documents is on the demise of the crown,” Arbiter told Nine Network television.
Hocking has been fighting since 2016 to access the letters written by Kerr to the queen through her then private secretary, Martin Charteris.
The British royal family is renowned for being protective of its privacy and keeping conversations confidential.
The family went to considerable lengths to conceal letters written by the queen’s son and heir, Prince Charles, in a comparable case in Britain that was fought through the courts for five years.
Britain’s Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that 27 memos written by Charles to British government ministers could be made public despite objections that their publication might damage public perceptions of the future king’s political neutrality.
Years of dogged research by journalists and historians have pieced together answers to many of the questions surrounding how and why Whitlam’s government was dismissed and who was behind it.
Kerr, who died in 1991, rejected in his memoirs media speculation that the CIA ordered Whitlam’s dismissal over fears that his government would close the top secret U.S. intelligence facility that still exists at Pine Gap in the Australian Outback.  
In the 1985 Hollywood spy drama “The Falcon and the Snowman,” a CIA plot to oust Whitlam motivated a disillusioned civilian defense contractor played by Sean Penn to sell U.S. security secrets to the Soviet Union.
Australian rock band Midnight Oil also blamed “Uncle Sam” for Whitlam’s downfall in the lyrics of its protest song “Power and the Passion.”
The Australian Republic Movement, which campaigns for an Australian president to replace the British monarch as head of state, welcomed the ruling as a win for Australian sovereignty.
“These letters provide a crucial historical context around one of the most destabilizing and controversial chapters in Australian political history,” the movement’s Chair Peter FitzSimons said.
Philip Benwell, national chairman of the Australian Monarchist League and a vocal advocate of the British monarch remaining Australia’s head of state, had warned before the High Court decision that releasing the letters would create a constitutional crisis “if the queen’s personal opinions became known.”
He said after the ruling that the letters’ exposure will strengthen Australia’s ties to the monarchy.
“It will show that the queen had done everything that she could to protect the people’s interests,” Benwell said.
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Protesters supporting Kosovo’s ruling Self-Determination Movement, or Vetevendosje!,  took to the streets of Pristina, the capital, Thursday to oppose President Hashim Thaci’s nominee to be the country’s new prime minister after the Constitutional Court upheld his decree for the nomination.A poster read “We want elections,” and a banner said, “On the side of justice, not the president.”Arlind Manxhuka, a spokesperson for Vetevendosje!, said the peaceful gathering of a few thousand supporters was intended to show the party’s ability to organize a protest while respecting coronavirus pandemic restrictions.”Taking into consideration the many requests we received from activists and citizens to organize a protest against the latest political developments in our country [Kosovo], we felt obligated to demonstrate a way in which an eventual protest could be held in this new condition of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.Thaci nominated Avdullah Hoti, from the center-right Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, to replace acting Prime Minister Albin Kurti, who lost a no-confidence vote in March.  That vote was spurred by the LDK, then a junior partner in governing coalition with Vetevendosje!The movement argues Hoti’s nomination to form a new government is unconstitutional, saying that it is the only party entitled to do so because it won the most seats in Kosovo’s October parliamentary election. It has further said that if it cannot form a government, the country should hold new elections.The LDK says it has at least the 61 votes in the 120-seat parliament, required for his confirmation.Kosovo’s Constitutional Court had suspended the nomination decree until May 29. 
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In northern Hungary, one of the European Union’s poorest regions, many Roma who live with hardship in the best of times are facing hunger as the coronavirus brings the economy to a halt. Justin Spike reports for VOA from the town of Ózd, northeast of Budapest.
Camera: Gabor Ancsin, Agency  Producer: Rod James
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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced Thursday a new global fundraising campaign to finance the development and worldwide distribution of testing, vaccines and treatments against COVID-19, seeking to ensure they are equally shared.In an address from EU headquarters in Brussels, von der Leyen said the new effort — called “Global Goal: Unite for Our Future” — is meant to raise tens of billions of dollars with private and public donations. It would feature a month of fundraising and awareness, culminating with a June 27 pledging summit featuring businesses, foundations and citizens. She said 15 governments have also pledged their support.The new initiative follows another EU-led global campaign for the same goal which in less than a month raised nearly $11 billion, more than half of it from EU nations and institutions. The U.S. did not participate.The EU is increasingly taking a role as a champion of global cooperation while the United States and China, which have the world’s largest economies, favor national initiatives. The new campaign, which is being launched in cooperation with international advocacy organization Global Citizen, illustrates the need for funds to develop and make vaccines and treatments available for everyone.
 
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The World Health Organization said Thursday that since early March about 159,000 more people have died in 24 European countries than would have ordinarily been expected, with a “significant proportion” of the increase linked to COVID-19.WHO official Katie Smallwood told reporters during a remote briefing Thursday that while that figure reflects all causes of deaths in those countries, its timing coincides with the peak period during which people were dying of COVID-19 in hospitals in Italy, France, Spain and Britain.Smallwood said that is a good indication the significantly higher death toll during the period is linked to COVID-19.WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge said during the briefing there are now more than two million confirmed cased of COVID-19 in Europe, up 15 percent over the past two weeks, with Russia, Turkey, Belarus and Britain leading the way in new infections.  More than 175,000 people have died in Europe from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.Smallwood said European countries that may ease restrictions, including on bars, discos and other social hubs, must have robust disease detection, testing and tracing systems in place first, to help keep at bay a potential “second wave,” where the pandemic might re-emerge.
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Markets in Europe are once again on the rise as investors continue to express optimism that the global economy is turning a corner from the coronavirus pandemic. The FTSE index in London is up 0.8% in midday trading.  The CAC-40 in Paris is up nearly one percent, and the DAX index in Frankfurt is 0.4% higher.   Asian markets also enjoyed an upswing Thursday after a shaky start.  Tokyo’s Nikkei index closed 2.3% higher, while Sydney’s S&P/ASX index posted a 1.3% gain, and Shanghai was 0.3% higher.   But Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index lost 0.7% as China passed a controversial natural security law that critics say threatens the financial hub’s semi-autonomous status.  Seoul and Taiwan also posted slight losses.    Oil markets reversed course Thursday, with U.S. crude essentially unchanged at  $32.82 per barrel, while Brent crude, the international benchmark, is $34.98 per barrel,  a rise of 0.6%.   China’s recent moves to tighten control over Hong Kong have raised diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Washington and subsequently rattled investors.  U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday that the Trump administration no longer considers the global financial hub as autonomous from China, indicating the U.S. is considering suspending the preferential status that has made the city a top U.S. trading partner.     In futures trading, the Dow Jones is up 0.6% and the S&P 500 is 0.6.% higher, but the Nasdaq is down 0.4%, signaling uncertainty as investors brace for the latest U.S. unemployment figures.   
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