UNITED STATES
Mom punishes bad grades
Wearing a sign around his neck that read, “Honk if I need an education,” 15-year-old James Mond III stood for nearly four hours on a Tampa, Florida, street corner. Fed up with his bad grades, his mother sent him there hoping to teach him a lesson about the importance of an education. Ronda Holder never finished high school and doesn’t want the same for her son. So she sent him out on Wednesday with a sign telling the world about his low 1.22 Grade Point Average. His middle school has since enrolled him in after-school tutoring. The Department of Children and Families is investigating whether the incident might be a form of maltreatment. Holder says she doesn’t care about the critics. She wants her son to have an education. Plenty of people honked.
UNITED STATES
Meteorite sold to museum
A small meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Virginia medical office last year is becoming part of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington. The Smithsonian paid US$10,000 for the meteorite to Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi, the doctors who found it. They have in turn given the US$10,000 check to the Doctors Without Borders charity. Museum spokesman Randall Kremer said on Saturday the meteorite is part of the museum’s research collection. The Smithsonian holds the world’s largest collection of meteorites. Meteorites are lucrative, and after the tennis-ball-sized rock fell from the sky and landed in an examination room in the office in January last year, the landlords at the doctors’ building made a legal claim to it, but that claim was later dropped.
HAITI
Wyclef Jean shot in hand
A spokesman for Wyclef Jean says the hip-hop star has been released from a hospital after being treated for a gunshot wound to his hand. Joe Mignon, senior program director for Jean’s Yele Foundation, says Jean was shot in the hand after 11pm local time on Saturday in the city of Delmas, just outside Port-au-Prince. Jean’s brother, Samuel, confirmed the musician was shot. Neither he nor Mignon had additional details. The shooting comes on the eve of presidential elections. Jean is supporting fellow musician Michel Martelly. A police spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.
MEXICO
Gunmen kill 10 in bar
Masked gunmen have opened fire in a bar in the resort city of Acapulco, killing 10 people. The Public Safety Department of southern Guerrero State says the gunmen arrived in several vehicles at the strip bar in a rough Acapulco neighborhood far from the tourist strips. The 10 men killed ranged in age from 25 to 45. Four other people were injured in the attack early on Saturday. Authorities have blamed rising violence in Acapulco on fighting between remnants of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, most of whose leaders have been captured or killed.
UNITED STATES
Anti-Asian student quits UCLA
A student who posted an Internet video of her tirade against the Asian population at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said on Friday night that she was leaving the school. Alexandra Wallace said she has chosen to no longer attend classes at UCLA because of what she called “the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats and being ostracized from an entire community” in the wake of the three-minute video.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema