CHINA
Fire leaves 17 dead
A fire at a southern China wholesale market has killed at least 17 people and injured nine, including one firefighter who was seriously hurt, officials said yesterday. The fire broke out on Thursday afternoon on the fourth floor of the market in southern Guangdong Province and was controlled that night, a statement issued yesterday by the Propaganda Department in Huidong County said. The department said the cause of the fire is still under investigation, but CCTV reported it started in a movie theater on the fourth floor where decorative materials were flammable and toxic. CCTV said authorities in the county detained nine people in connection with the blaze.
CHINA
Distemper kills fourth panda
A fourth giant panda has died from canine distemper virus in the same rescue center in the northwest, where three other pandas have died since December last year, state media reported. The Xinhua news agency said late on Thursday that the six-year-old panda, named Feng Feng (鳳鳳), died after falling into a coma on Jan. 8.
UNITED STATEs
Pope to visit Congress
Pope Francis will address Congress on Sept. 24, becoming the first pontiff to do so, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday. “That day his holiness will be the first pope in our history to address a joint session of Congress,” Boehner told reporters at the US Capitol. “We are humbled that the holy father has accepted our invitation, and certainly look forward to receiving his message on behalf of the American people.” The address has been under consideration for nearly a year. Boehner, along with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, first extended the invitation in March last year. The Argentina-born pope confirmed late last year that he would be visiting the country in September to take part in a Catholic Church congress in Philadelphia.
VATICAN CITY
Pontiff admits tech deficit
Pope Francis, who has called the Internet a “gift from God,” confessed via webcam to an inquisitive girl on Thursday that he is a disaster with technology and does not know how to use a computer. Alicia, from Spain, who took part in a worldwide Google Hangout for children with special needs, asked the pope if he liked to take pictures and download them on his computer. “I have to tell you the truth. I am a disaster with machines,” he said. Francis used the Spanish word tronco, or tree trunk, which is colloquially used for someone who is clumsy. “I am not able to use computers,” the 78-year-old pontiff said, laughing. “What an embarrassment, right?”
spain
Nation hit by snow, cold
Heavy snowfall in the north has blocked roads and rail services as well as pilgrims attempting to reach the city of Santiago de Compostela. A fresh wave of bitterly cold weather on Thursday hit 33 of the nation’s 50 provinces, the meteorological service said. In the northern province of Leon, civil guards rescued 19 “disoriented” Catholic pilgrims, including three South Koreans, a South African and 13 children, on the road to Santiago de Compostela. In the small town of Aguilar de Campoo, north of Madrid, about 60 stranded travelers were put up in a gymnasium and a school, scenes reproduced elsewhere during the recent days of bad weather. Aid services rescued around 100 people from their cars on the nearby A-67 motorway.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the