■MEXICO
Drug trafficker arrested
Authorities have captured a key Colombian drug trafficker who was a top supplier of cocaine to the fractured Sinaloa cartel, police said on Thursday. Ever Villafane Martinez was detained on Wednesday for illegally carrying a gun in Mexico City, they said. Villafane supplied drugs to a gang led by Arturo Beltran Leyva, a one-time ally of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, considered Mexico’s most wanted man, police said. The Beltran Leyva and Guzman gangs are waging a turf war for control of the Sinaloa cartel. Beltran Leyva’s hitmen reportedly killed one of Guzman’s sons in May.
■MEXICO
Official denies family killed
Agriculture Minister Alberto Cardenas confirmed on Thursday the fatal shooting of six people, including two children, in western Mexico, but denied that they were from his family. An official and news reports said earlier that six of the minister’s relatives, including two girls aged seven and eight, were found executed in his home in Jalisco. Cardenas confirmed the killings but said that the victims had been close friends living in a house he had sold them. The prosecutor’s office said that the family could have been caught up in a robbery because one of the victims had recently withdrawn a large amount of money from the bank.
■UNITED STATES
Fat cat abandoned
A 20kg cat found lumbering around New Jersey was abandoned by a woman who said her home was foreclosed, an animal shelter official said on Thursday. The porky white cat found on Saturday became a local media sensation and was dubbed “Princess Chunk.” But the animal is really a male whose name is Powder. Jennifer Anderch, director of the Camden County Animal Shelter, said that the cat’s owner came forward to describe the animal’s background. Anderch said she had received hundreds of calls from people seeking to adopt Powder. The largest cat on record weighed 21.3kg.
■UNITED STATES
Body found in restroom
The body of a woman was found inside an airplane restroom after a Delta Airlines flight from Los Angeles landed in Atlanta early on Wednesday, a Delta statement and media reports said. “Medical professionals on the flight were called to assist the crew,” and authorities meeting the flight “confirmed that the passenger had passed away,” Delta spokeswoman Maria Schnabel said. There were no signs of foul play and the body of a woman in her 60s was taken to a medical examiner’s office for an autopsy, the Los Angeles Times said, quoting Atlanta police. The identity of the deceased was not released “as a matter of passenger privacy,” Delta said.
■CANADA
Man decapitates seat mate
A passenger traveling across the Western plains on a bus stabbed, gutted and decapitated a man seated next to him, and then taunted police with the head, a witness told media on Thursday. The victim, about 18 years old, had been sleeping with headphones on his ears before he was repeatedly stabbed in the chest by the man with a “big Rambo knife,” witness Garnet Caton told public broadcaster CBC. The other 34 passengers and the driver were jolted by “blood-curdling screams” and fled, bracing the door on their way out to trap the assailant inside the bus, he said. Moments later, police surrounded the bus and arrested the man after a nearly three-hour standoff, an official said. “He was taunting police with the head in his hand out the window,” Caton said.
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