MEXICO
Federico Campbell dies
Author, journalist and essayist Federico Campbell has died at age 72. The National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City said Campbell died on Saturday. He was perhaps best known for his novel Tijuanans, a portrait of Campbell’s native city during the 1930s. Born in 1941, Campbell studied law, literature and philosophy in Mexico City and journalism at Macalester College in Minnesota. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Washington, founded a publishing house and translated works of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. He won the Colima Narrative Fine Arts Prize in 2000 for his novel Transpeninsular. He published nearly two dozen other works of fiction and nonfiction, including novels, short story collections, essays and interviews. The institute did not list a cause of death, but said he had been hospitalized.
TAJIKISTAN
Prison barber kills warden
A prisoner stabbed a prison governor to death with scissors after being ordered to give him a haircut, the Ministry of Internal Affairs said yesterday. The prison governor, 66, “on Sunday evening asked the prisoner, who had worked as a barber before being jailed, to come to his office to cut his hair,” an interior ministry spokesman said. The prisoner then used his scissors to stab the prison governor once in the head and then 16 times in his body. The official died before reaching hospital. The prisoner, 29, is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for murdering a young man, whom he stabbed 57 times.
UNITED STATES
Obama, Barkley talk aging
Like most people of a certain age, President Barack Obama is starting to complain about the aches and pains of getting older. Obama told retired NBA star Charles Barkley in an interview that aired on Sunday that because “things happen,” he was limiting his basketball playing to about once a month. “One is, you just get a little older and creakier. The second thing is, you’ve got to start thinking about elbows and you break your nose right before a State of the Union address,” Obama, 52, said in the interview broadcast on the TNT network before the NBA All-Star Game. Discussing the aging process during an exchange about his signature healthcare reform law, Obama said that being past 50, “you wake up and something hurts and you don’t know exactly what happened, right?”
SPAIN
Man recovers after pot cake
A university student reportedly went into a comatose state early on Sunday after he ate a birthday cake baked with marijuana, while nine others were also hospitalized for irregular heartbeat, Madrid officials said. The comatose man was not responding to stimulus when admitted to a Madrid hospital, but he later recovered, Madrid emergency services spokesman Javier Chivite said. The man was still hospitalized. It was not immediately clear whether the pot cake directly led to the man’s comatose state, or if he had ingested other substances or had underlying medical problems. An official at Puerta de Hierro de Majadahonda hospital confirmed the man went into a comatose state, but declined to reveal further details, citing privacy issues. The hospital official spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to be identified by name. A total of 11 people were affected by eating the cake, Chivite said. Ten of them were hospitalized, the hospital official said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of