UNITED STATES
Spokeswoman unruffled
Secretary of State John Kerry’s spokeswoman shrugged off a campaign to denigrate her personally in the Russian media and said she took it as “a badge of honor.” Jen Psaki has been under fire in the Russian media and from pro-Kremlin commentators on social media as Washington and Moscow trade words over the crisis in Ukraine. The attacks on Psaki have included altered photographic images of her, cartoons, satirical reports and edited video. At a Department of State briefing on Tuesday, Psaki said the criticism was part of a Russian effort to discredit US officials because “the United States supports a strong democratic Ukraine, along with the majority of the international community and the Ukrainian people… So, if I get dinged a bit for that, I’m not going to sweat it. I will take it as a badge of honor. They do seem to have a bit of a tendency to focus on the outfits I’m wearing and the colors I’m wearing, and they’ve superimposed my head in photos. I think it’s ... a pretty clear sign that they don’t have the truth on their side.”
UNITED STATES
Non-teen pleads guilty
A 34-year-old woman who posed as a teenager to enroll as a sophomore at a Texas high school has pleaded guilty to failure to identify. A judge in Longview on Tuesday sentenced Charity Johnson to 85 days in jail in a plea agreement. New Life Christian School officials said Johnson enrolled in October last year with a guardian and indicated she was 15 years old. She was arrested on May 13.
BRAZIL
Rousseff’s support slipping
Support for President Dilma Rousseff continues to slip ahead of October’s elections, according to a poll released on Tuesday, but she remains comfortably ahead of her two main rivals. Rousseff, from the ruling Workers’ Party, would receive the vote of 38 percent of those surveyed by pollster IBOPE, compared with 40 percent last month. Senator Aecio Neves, Rousseff’s biggest rival, was backed by 22 percent of those polled, up from 20 percent. Pernambuco Governor Eduardo Campos polled 13 percent and was also up two points from 11 percent last month. Rousseff’s approval ratings over the past year have suffered because of a stagnant economy, inflation, protests over public spending on the soccer World Cup and a series of scandals at the state run energy company.
GERMANY
Rescuers reach injured man
The mountain rescue service says an injured researcher stuck deep inside an Alpine cave on the Austrian border is able to walk with help, but an operation to bring him out may still take several days. The service on Tuesday said that a six-member multinational team is now with the 52-year-old man, who was hit by falling rocks on Sunday in the Riesending cave system near Berchtesgaden. The accident happened about 6,000m from the cave entrance.
UNITED STATES
Two die in school shooting
A gunman walked into an Oregon high school gym with a rifle and shot a student to death on Tuesday before he was found dead in a bathroom stall. Authorities identified the victim as 14-year-old Emilio Hoffman, a freshman at Reynolds High School in the Portland suburb of Troutdale. Gym teacher Todd Rispler was grazed by a bullet, but made his way to the school’s office to initiate the lockdown, police said. USA Today cited a police spokesman as saying the shooter was a teenager who shot himself to death.
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