BRAZIL
Campos’ flight not recorded
The black box recovered from the wreckage of a plane crash that killed socialist presidential candidate Eduardo Campos failed to record his flight, the air force said on Friday. The two hours of recordings it contained were not related to Wednesday’s doomed flight, according to the military branch in charge of the investigation into the crash. “The reasons why the recording does not correspond to the flight will be studied during the investigation,” the air force added, noting that the voice recording was not “crucial” to the probe seeking to determine the causes of the crash. Campos, 49, died when his campaign jet slammed into houses in Santos city in bad weather, killing all seven people on board and setting buildings alight. He had been running third in opinion polls for the October election. A popular former governor of the northeastern Pernambuco State, Campos was married with five children, the youngest just six months old. His remains are due to be buried in the coming days in Recife, capital of Pernambuco.
MEXICO
Border deployment slammed
The Foreign Relations Department is denouncing Texas’ decision to deploy US National Guard troops along the border. The department said in a statement on Friday that Texas’ decision “doesn’t help joint efforts to have a modern, prosperous and safe border.” A new wave of National Guard troops were deployed along Texas’ border with Mexico this week as part of a counter-drug task force. Mexico says there has not been a change of border security to justify the decision. It says such measures “deviate from the path of dialogue and cooperation.”
COLOMBIA
Pair charged over bus fire
A church pastor and a bus driver face up to 60 years in prison after they were charged on Friday over an inferno on an overcrowded bus that killed 33 children in Colombia. The May tragedy in northern Colombia deeply shocked the country and prompted a crackdown on rules governing the road-worthiness of vehicles. Jaime Gutierrez, the driver of the bus — who lost two of his own children in the tragedy — and the pastor of the church that hired him, Manuel Ibarra, have been accused of numerous offenses including “manslaughter in the form of possible fraud,” prosecution sources said. The children burned to death when Gutierrez refueled the bus with a jerrycan and it burst into flames. He fled the scene, pursued by a mob that stoned his house, before giving himself up to police. The children, aged between three and 12 years old, were returning from evangelical church services in the small northern town of Fundacion.
UNITED STATES
New orca tanks planned
Theme park operator SeaWorld said on Friday that it would build new tanks for its killer whales, whose captivity has caused uproar and hit the company’s earnings. SeaWorld also pledged US$10 million in funds for killer-whale research and announced an ocean health partnership. The Orlando, Florida company, whose shares have hit their lowest point since going public in April last year, has faced rising criticism since the release of the documentary Blackfish. The film probed the impact of captivity on SeaWorld’s orcas and the fatal 2010 attack by one of them, Tilikum, on a trainer. The first of the so-called whale environments, due to open to the public in 2018 at SeaWorld San Diego, is to have a total water volume of 38 million liters, nearly double that of the existing facility.
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