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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion