MEXICO
Three kids killed in attack
Three young children were killed on Thursday in Ciudad Juarez after attackers threw a Molotov cocktail into their house, their mother told officials. “They threw the Molotov cocktail through the window that faces the street,” the mother of the children — aged four, three and one — told investigators. She was inside the house at the time of the attack, but authorities said she managed to escape the blaze with her hair and clothes on fire. Her husband was at work when the attack took place. Firefighters have so far found the bodies of two children in the house, both underneath a bed. Ciudad Juarez is considered the most violent city in the country, with more than 3,100 homicides last year.
UNITED STATES
World’s oldest man dies
Walter Bruening, a retired rail worker who was the world’s oldest man, has died at the age of 114. Breuning died on Thursday of natural causes at a Great Falls hospital in Montana, Stacia Kirby, spokeswoman for the Rainbow Senior Living retirement home where he has lived since 1980, told local media. Breuning attributed his long life to eating only two meals a day for the past 35 years. “I think you should push back from the table when you’re still hungry,” he told the Great Falls Tribune newspaper in 2009. “You get in the habit of not eating at night, and you realize how good you feel. If you could just tell people not to eat so darn much,” he said. “I am deeply saddened by the loss of my dear friend and a great Montanan,” Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer said in a statement, the Tribune reported.
AUSTRALIA
Woman escapes jail term
A woman who left her maggot-encrusted mother to waste away in a heap of her own feces on their kitchen floor escaped a jail term yesterday. Polish-born Mary Pyrczak, 51, left her mother, 72, with gangrene, maggots in one of her feet and her toes blackened and mummified, on the floor of their Melbourne home in November 2008. Pyrczak, who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and a long-standing phobia of medical professionals, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Discovered in a filthy, stained gown and covered with blankets when Pyrczak finally called an ambulance, Kateryna Pyrczak was stiff, emaciated and unable to talk. She died in hospital later the same day. Describing her crime as one of “omission rather than commission,” Supreme Court judge Paul Coghlan said he had decided not to jail Pyrczak and instead suspended her three-year sentence. Psychiatric evidence showed that Pyrczak had been unemployed since 1996, had no motive to kill her mother and could not cope with the prospect of her dying.
CHINA
Police hunts for killer of 10
Police are searching for a bathhouse and car wash owner, who is suspected of killing 10 people in the city of Anshan in Liaoning Province, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday. “Ten people were found dead at a bathhouse and a neighboring car wash” in a village near the city of Anshan, Xinhua reported, citing local police. The suspect, Zhou Yuxin, 33, was still at large, said the report, issued late in the evening. The dead included Zhou’s wife, son and father, as well as workers in the two businesses he owned. The report did not say how they were killed during the murder rampage that began on Wednesday night and went into Thursday morning. It said “extramarital affairs were possibly behind the killing,” but did not elaborate.
VAGUE: The criteria of the amnesty remain unclear, but it would cover political violence from 1999 to today, and those convicted of murder or drug trafficking would not qualify Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez on Friday announced an amnesty bill that could lead to the release of hundreds of prisoners, including opposition leaders, journalists and human rights activists detained for political reasons. The measure had long been sought by the US-backed opposition. It is the latest concession Rodriguez has made since taking the reins of the country on Jan. 3 after the brazen seizure of then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Rodriguez told a gathering of justices, magistrates, ministers, military brass and other government leaders that the ruling party-controlled Venezuelan National Assembly would take up the bill with urgency. Rodriguez also announced the shutdown
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
A Virginia man having an affair with the family’s Brazilian au pair on Monday was found guilty of murdering his wife and another man that prosecutors say was lured to the house as a fall guy. Brendan Banfield, a former Internal Revenue Service law enforcement officer, told police he came across Joseph Ryan attacking his wife, Christine Banfield, with a knife on the morning of Feb. 24, 2023. He shot Ryan and then Juliana Magalhaes, the au pair, shot him, too, but officials argued in court that the story was too good to be true, telling jurors that Brendan Banfield set
RSS