BRAZIL
Cuban doctors arrive
More than 200 Cuban doctors have arrived in the country to work in impoverished areas where physicians and medical services are scarce in Latin America’s biggest country, the Ministry of Health said on Saturday. Ministry press officer Ed Ruas said 206 doctors arrived in the city of Recife to take a connecting flight to Brasilia, the capital. He said another 194 doctors were to arrive yesterday in the city of Salvador. The 400 are the first of an expected 4,000 physicians from Cuba who will eventually work in the country. About 250 doctors from other countries arrived in Brazil on Friday, along with Brazilians who studied abroad. They and the Cubans are part of the “More Doctors” program to get more physicians working in underserved areas. Foreign doctors in the program will receive the equivalent of US$4,080 a month. In the case of the Cubans, the country will send their wages to Cuba’s government through the Pan American Health Organization and Havana will decide how much each doctor will receive.
MEXICO
Drug lord’s release appealed
Federal prosecutors have filed an appeal with the Supreme Court against a court’s decision to free a drug lord. The Attorney General’s office says it has asked the country’s highest court to review a federal court’s decision to release Rafael Caro Quintero because the court’s arguments are “absurd and illogical.” Caro Quintero was 28 years into a 40-year sentence for helping orchestrate the 1985 killing of US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. He has disappeared from the public eye since his release two weeks ago. A three-judge federal appeals court overturned his sentence in Camarena’s case on procedural grounds, saying he should have been tried in a state court instead of federal court.
COLOMBIA
Peace talks to restart
The government has announced that peace talks with the country’s largest guerrilla army will be renewed today in Cuba after the rebels temporarily walked away from the negotiations. Almost simultaneously, the army said that 13 members of the military were killed in a rebel ambush on Saturday in Arauca Province, about 390km northeast of the capital, Bogota. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, temporarily walked away from the talks on Friday over President Juan Manuel Santos’ refusal to agree to modify the constitution if a peace pact is struck. On Saturday, government negotiator Humberto De la Calle said: “After an evaluation, it is confirmed that the FARC has made the decision to return to the negotiating table at 8:30am on Monday to continue the talks.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Helicopter crash kills four
Four people were killed when a helicopter carrying oil workers crashed into the sea off Scotland’s Shetland Islands, raising fresh questions about safety in the remote North Sea energy sector. Fourteen people were rescued after the Super Puma L2 helicopter, made by EADS unit Eurocopter, came down — the fourth incident in the area involving different models of the widely used aircraft in just more than four years. Scottish police said three bodies had been recovered and work was underway to recover the body of the fourth person. Sky News said the fourth body was in the wreckage. The helicopter hit the sea as it approached Sumburgh airport.
CHINA
Fewer Japanese visits
The number of Japanese tourists visiting Beijing fell by more than half in the first six months of the year amid a spike in tensions between the countries, official statistics show. Beijing’s statistics bureau said yesterday that 136,000 Japanese tourists visited the capital between January and last month. That was down 53.7 percent from the same period last year. The drop follows violent anti-Japanese protests in Beijing and several other cities in September last year in response to complaints from the government over Japan’s move to nationalize uninhabited East China Sea islands claimed by the country. Japanese businesses were torched and Japanese-brand cars were smashed, despite having been locally made. There were also scattered reports of assaults on Japanese citizens, although none of the attacks were serious.
CHINA
Cockroaches escape farm
At least 1 million cockroaches have escaped a farm where they were being bred for use in traditional medicine, a report said. The cockroaches fled the facility in Dafeng, Jiangsu Province, for surrounding cornfields earlier this month after an “unknown perpetrator” destroyed the plastic greenhouse where they were raised, the Modern Express newspaper said. Disease control authorities have sent five investigators to the area to come up with a plan to stamp out the insects. Farm owner Wang Pengsheng invested more than 100,000 yuan (US$16,000) in 102kg of Periplaneta americana eggs after spending six months developing a business plan, the report on Friday said. The cockroach is generally considered a pest, but believers in traditional Chinese medicine — which uses both plants and animals, including endangered species — say extracts from it can treat diseases including cancer, reduce inflammation and improve immunity.
AFGHANISTAN
Karzai talks about US killer
The day after a military jury sentenced US Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, 40, to life in prison without the possibility of release — the most severe punishment possible — President Hamid Karzai said: “A life sentence to him or a death sentence to him will not bring back our children that he killed.” Many Afghans had wanted him to receive the death penalty. Bales pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty for his raids near his outpost on March 11 last year, in which he shot 22 people — 17 of them women and children.
YEMEN
Air force bus bomb kills six
At least six people were killed and 26 wounded yesterday in a bomb attack on a bus carrying air force personnel to base in the capital Sana’a, witnesses and medics said. Ameen Saree, an air force officer who rushed to the scene, said a bomb had been planted in the vehicle. “The bomb exploded in the rear part of the bus and six of our colleagues were immediately killed,” Saree said. The country has been gripped by turmoil since pro-democracy protests against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh broke out in early 2011. Attacks against military personnel are more common in the largely lawless south and east where an Islamist insurgency is still raging. The nation is one of the poorest countries in the Arab world. Next door to world’s top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, it is also battling a powerful branch of al-Qaeda that US officials say is the most dangerous of the global network.
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