Briefly

TURKEY

Hagia Sophia reopens as mosque for prayers

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined thousands of worshippers at Hagia Sophia on Friday for the first prayers there since he declared the monument, revered by Christians and Muslims for 1,500 years, a mosque once again. Erdogan and his ministers, wearing white face masks as a precaution against COVID-19, knelt on blue carpets at the start of a ceremony which marks the return of Muslim worship to the ancient structure in Istanbul. A court announced this month it had annulled Hagia Sophia's status as a museum. Erdogan later decreed that the building, a Christian Byzantine cathedral for 900 years before being seized by Ottoman conquerors and serving as a mosque until 1934, had been converted once again to a mosque. Orthodox church leaders in Greece and the United States, meanwhile, observed "a day of mourning" over the inaugural prayers.

UNITED STATES

Senate passes $740b military spending bill

The US Senate on Thursday passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, a $740 billion bill setting policy for the Pentagon that US President Donald Trump has threatened to veto over a provision removing Confederate names from military bases. The vote was 86-14, one of the few times the Republican-led Senate has broken from the president, and could pave the way for a fight later this year with the White House. The Democratic-led House of Representatives also passed its version of the act earlier this past week with far more than the two-thirds supermajority needed to override a veto. Now that the House and Senate have passed versions of the bill, congressional negotiators will meet behind closed doors to negotiate a final act. The process will likely take months.

Agencies via Xinhua