Russia eases citizenship rules in east Ukraine
AFP/File / Aleksey FILIPPOVA crowd waits for Denis Pushilin, acting leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic, in Donetsk, Ukraine on November 9, 2018
Russia on Wednesday made it easier for people living in eastern Ukraine's separatist territories to obtain Russian passports, drawing swift condemnation from Kiev only three days after it elected a new president.
President Vladimir Putin signed the decree aimed at residents of the unrecognised Donetsk and Lugansk republics that broke away from Kiev in 2014 and are governed by Moscow-backed rebels.
People living in the separatist regions will now be entitled to receive a Russian passport within three months of applying for one.
The conflict between the Ukrainian government and breakaway rebels began after Moscow annexed Kiev's Crimea peninsula in 2014. The war has claimed some 13,000 lives.
Officials in Kiev slammed the move, saying the timing was aimed to destabilise Ukraine during a period of transition.
The country elected comedian Volodymyr Zelensky as president last weekend.
Due to be inaugurated by early June, Zelensky has pledged to "reboot" peace talks with the separatists that also involve Russia and the West.
- 'Knife in Ukraine's back' -
Putin said the new law was "purely a humanitarian issue."
"We have no desire to create problems for the new Ukrainian authorities," he said during a meeting with lawmakers in Saint Petersburg.
The Russian leader added that people living in the rebel republics are "completely deprived of any civil rights".
"They cannot move normally, cannot realise their most elementary needs," he said.
According to a copy of the decree published on the Kremlin website, the law aimed to "protect rights" and was guided by "the norms of international law".
But Ukraine's foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin called the decision "the continuation of aggression and interference in our internal affairs."
He urged residents in eastern Ukraine not to take Russian passports.
"Russia has deprived you of the present, and now it is trespassing on your future," he wrote on Twitter.
Iryna Gerashchenko, the deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, said Putin "always uses moments of uncertainty and transition periods to plunge another knife into Ukraine's back."
She said the move is a "gross violation" of peace agreements signed by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany in Minsk in 2015.
These aimed to put an end to the conflict but fighting has continued with no clear end in sight.
Zelensky, whose only previous political experience so far has been limited to playing the role of president in a TV show, won Sunday's vote with a landslide victory.
He has said he wants to "renew relations" with the residents of eastern Ukraine, saying "they are also Ukrainians".
The actor has announced plans to start a "powerful information war to end the conflict."
People living in eastern Ukraine mainly have access to Russian television channels.
On the campaign trail, Russian-speaking Zelensky criticised some of Kiev's anti-Moscow policies while saying he would keep Ukraine on a pro-Western course.
He has also said he would not resort to force to take back Crimea.
Russia's reaction to his win has been mixed, with the Kremlin refusing to congratulate him but others seeing an opportunity to improve ties.
US white supremacist who lynched black man to be executed
AFP/File / PAUL BUCKJohn William King (C) is pictured in 1999 after being sentenced to death for the brutal murder of a black man
An avowed white supremacist convicted of a notorious racist murder -- chaining a black man to the back of a pickup truck and dragging him to his death -- is to be executed on Wednesday in the US state of Texas.
John William King, 44, one of three men convicted of the brutal June 1998 killing of James Byrd Jr., filed a last-minute request to halt his execution with the Supreme Court.
Unless the nation's highest court grants his plea for a stay of execution, King is to be put to death by lethal injection at 6:00 pm Central Time (2300 GMT) at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas.
King was one of three white men convicted of carrying out one of the most gruesome racist murders in recent US history.
Lawrence Brewer was executed in 2011 while Shawn Berry -- who cooperated with investigators -- was given life in prison.
Berry testified during his trial that he and the two others were out drinking beer and cruising in a 1982 Ford pickup truck when they picked up Byrd, who was hitchhiking, and drove him to a remote country road.
The men severely beat the 49-year-old Byrd before chaining him by his ankles to the back of the truck.
AFP/File / PAUL BUCKConvicted murderer John King (C) being escorted into the Jasper County Courthouse for the penalty phase of his murder trial in February 1999
Byrd was alive for some two miles (3.2 kilometers) while being dragged along the road, a pathologist testified during King's trial.
He was decapitated when his body hit a concrete drain pipe, the pathologist said.
Byrd's dismembered body was found outside a black church in the small town of Jasper, Texas, near the Texas-Louisiana border.
The killing horrified the US public and kindled memories of the era of racist lynchings of African-Americans in the South.
Ten years after King's conviction, president Barack Obama signed a law aimed at preventing hate crimes which was named after Byrd and Matthew Shepard, a young gay man murdered the same year.
- Request for stay -
In his request for a stay of execution filed with the Supreme Court late Tuesday, King's lawyer, A. Richard Ellis, claimed that King's attorney during his 1999 trial ignored his request to plead not guilty.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AFP/File / HOConvicted murderer John King, pictured in 2017, has asked the US Supreme Court for a stay of execution
"From the time of indictment through his trial, Mr. King maintained his absolute innocence, claiming that he had left his co-defendants and Mr. Byrd some time prior to his death and was not present at the scene of the victim's murder," Ellis said.
"Despite Mr. King's explicit and repeated requests, his counsel conceded his guilt to murder at trial."
Repeated efforts to have King's conviction overturned have failed with the Supreme Court refusing to examine the case in 2018.
On Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously refused to grant him a reprieve.
During the sentencing phase of King's trial, his attorneys argued that prison violence had compelled him to hook up with a white prison gang.
"He wasn't a racist when he went in, he was when he came out," said his attorney, H. "Sonny" Cripps.
King's body is covered with racist tattoos proclaiming "Aryan Pride" and his allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan and a racist group known as the Confederate Knights of America. One tattoo is of a black man hanging from a noose.
The 1999 death sentence for King was the first in Texas since the 1970s handed to a white man for killing a black man.
If King's execution is carried out as scheduled, it will be the fourth so far this year in the United States.
Three of Byrd's sisters plan to attend King's execution, including Louvon Harris, who told The New York Times King was "not going through any pain."
"He's not chained and bound and dragged on a concrete road, swinging back and forth like a sack of potatoes, with an arm coming off and being decapitated or nothing like that," she told the newspaper.
"When you look at it at that angle," she went on. "I don't have sympathy."
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