IRAN
Opposition leading in polls
Conservative rivals of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were leading in the race for parliament, according to early election results yesterday. Early returns in Tehran showed loyalists of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had pulled ahead. Partial results from provincial towns also show conservative Ahmadinejad rivals were elected in many constituencies. State media said the turnout was estimated at more than 67 percent from among 48 million eligible voters. Out of 60 winners that emerged by yesterday morning, at least 46 were conservative opponents of Ahmadinejad. Three other liberal-leaning candidates were elected. The remaining 11 seats were split between supporters of Ahmadinejad and centrists.
UNITED STATES
Banker faces hate crime
William Bryan Jennings, Morgan Stanley’s bond underwriting chief in the US, was charged with a hate crime in the stabbing of a New York City cab driver of Middle Eastern descent over a fare. Mohamed Ammar said the banker attacked him on Dec. 22 with a 6.35cm blade and used racial slurs after a 64km ride from New York to the banker’s US$3.4 million Darien, Connecticut, home. Jennings, who had attended a bank holiday party at a boutique hotel in Manhattan before hailing the cab, refused to pay the US$204 fare upon arriving in his driveway, the driver said. A fight ensued and Jennings, 45, allegedly cut Ammar, 44, police said.
UNITED STATES
Man jailed for conspiracy
A New York man was on Friday sentenced to 27 years in jail for conspiring to kill US soldiers stationed overseas and on related terror charges, the Justice Department said. Betim Kaziu traveled from Brooklyn to Cairo, Egypt, in February 2009 to participate in attacks against US troops based in the Middle East and in the Balkans on behalf of al-Qaeda, prosecutors said at the trial. While Kaziu was in Cairo, he allegedly tried to acquire automatic weapons and attempted to travel to Somalia to join al-Shebab, a Somali terrorist organization allied with al-Qaeda, the court heard. He traveled to Kosovo to target US troops stationed there, prosecutors said, but was arrested by police on Aug. 27, 2009.
UNITED STATES
Ex-Dupont worker guilty
A former Dupont Co scientist has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets. Federal prosecutors say Tze Chao is now cooperating with an investigation of a Chinese government-owned firm suspected of buying the information. Chao admitted in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday that he kept confidential Dupont documents after his 2002 retirement from the company, his employer for 36 years. In 2003, he began consulting for Pangang Group Co, a Chinese steelmaker. Pangang, Chao and several others were indicted last month on charges that they conspired to steal Dupont’s recipes for manufacturing titanium dioxide. Chao admitted passing proprietary information to Pangang.
MEXICO
Drug tunnel discovered
Federal police on Friday discovered a tunnel leading into the state of Arizona that contained 240kg of marijuana. While conducting an investigation in a residential area of Nogales, police found a tunnel about 60m long running under the international border, a statement from the Secretariat of Public Security said. The tunnel was allegedly “used to transport illegal drugs” to the US as evidenced by “22 bundles of marijuana, with a combined weight of 240kg” discovered inside, it said.
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
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
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to