UNITED STATES
Loud music prompts arrest
Authorities say a New Hampshire woman has been arrested four times in 26 hours for blasting the AC/DC song Highway to Hell and other loud music from her home and for throwing a frying pan. Police first issued a warning to Joyce Coffey on Tuesday afternoon at her home in Epping. They say they were called back an hour later and arrested her for the loud music. Police say Coffey was arrested again five hours later. She was released and arrested again before dawn on Wednesday over more loud music. Police arrested her again after her nephew said he tried to remove some of his belongings from her house and she threw the frying pan at him.
AFGHANISTAN
Army recruits to be vetted
The commander of US special forces in the country has suspended training for all new Afghan recruits until Afghan soldiers are re-investigated for ties to insurgents, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. The newspaper said the re-vetting process is to affect more than 27,000 troops. The suspension comes in response to the killing of at least 45 US troops this year by their Afghan colleagues. “We have a very good vetting process,” the paper quotes an unnamed senior special operations official as saying. “What we learned is that you just can’t take it for granted. We probably should have had a mechanism to follow up with recruits from the beginning.”
BRAZIL
Slum anger at police killings
Two people were killed on Saturday during a counter-narcotics operation by an elite police unit in a slum, angering residents who blocked a main road into Rio de Janeiro. The mayor’s central operations office reported that Brasil Avenue, which runs from the international airport into the downtown area, was blocked for more than 20 minutes by protesters, near the Complexo da Mare favela. The victims, both 25-year-old suspects, sustained bullet wounds and died while being transported to hospital. Many run-down favelas are crime-plagued that have long lacked even basic city services. The nation is also trying to burnish its international image ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
PERU
Gold mine protests quashed
The government says that it is to lift a state of emergency today imposed in early July for three provinces where violent protests against a gold mine project resulted in five deaths and dozens of injuries. However, the office of President Ollanta Humala also said that security forces are to remain on alert to guard against disturbances. Hundreds of soldiers have been deployed in the three provinces to quell protests against the proposed US$8 billion Conga gold mine. Poor farmers in the region fear the mine will hurt their water supplies and have been mounting protests since last year. The state of emergency suspended the right of assembly and other civil liberties in the three provinces.
CANADA
Legionnaire’s kills 10
An outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in Quebec City has killed 10 people since late July, health authorities said on Saturday in an updated toll. A total of 165 people have so far been diagnosed with the disease, which poses a risk for people with weak immune systems. Regional health authorities noted that the most recent count included cases reported over the past 10 to 15 days, as Legionnaire’s has an incubation period of two to 10 days.
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