Armenians Defense Ministry says there's relative calm along the front lines in Nagorno Karabakh after the Prime Minister accepted what he called an unbelievably painful deal to end six weeks of war with Azerbaijan. The Azeri President Ilham Aliyev has described it as a capitulation by Armenia. Reports from the Armenian capital Yerevan. It has been a night of unrest and upset in Yerevan. The crowds of protesters stormed the building of the government and also the parliament situated in a different part of the city. The protesters accused the government of betrayal. They believed the fighting should have continued till the end, and they were confident the end would be victorious for Armenia. But in Nagorno Karabakh itself, the leadership of the unrecognized republic admitted that had the fighting continued, all of Karabakh who have been lost to Azerbaijan within days.
One of the leading Palestinian political figures of the past 30 years, Saeb Erekat, has died at the age of 65 after contracting COVID-19. Mr. Erekat was the chief negotiator for the Palestinians in peace talks with Israel for 2.5 decades. Tom Bateman reports. Saeb Erekat's final journey by ambulance was to Jerusalem, the place of his birth. Crossing a checkpoint into the city from his home in the occupied west bank, it marks the unfulfilled work of his lifetime, the negotiator who had hoped to see a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2017, a lung transplant left him with chronic health problems, and he tested positive for coronavirus in October before his emergency treatment in an Israeli hospital. His death at the age of 65 comes at a time of uncertainty and increasing isolation for the Palestinian leadership.
The trial has begun in Spain of three men accused of helping the perpetrators of a double Jihadist attack in Barcelona and a nearby seaside resort in 2017. The attackers, who were later killed by the police, use vans to run down pedestrians, killing 16 people.
The Vatican is due to release a report into sexual abuse carried out by the former archbishop of Washington, an late cardinal Theodore McCarrick. From Rome, Mark Lowen reports. When Theodore McCarrick was stripped of the priesthood by Pope Francis last year, he became the most senior head to roll over the sex abuse scandal, and the first cardinal to be forced out over crimes against minors and adults. Allegations had swirled since the 1990s of the abuse he committed at his beach house and even during confession. Today's report could expose who turned a blind eye. Expected to stretch to hundreds of pages, it's likely to focus on the cover-ups and complicity that enabled the crimes.
