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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema