FRANCE
Le Pen wins legal battle
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the veteran ex-leader of the National Front (FN), on Tuesday won a legal victory in a battle over his expulsion from the far-right party amid a festering feud with his daughter. Daughter, Marine, now leading the party her father founded, launched a postal ballot earlier this month on whether to change the FN’s statutes and scrap Jean-Marie’s position as honorary president. A furious Jean-Marie successfully sued the party at a court in Nanterre, west of Paris, which ruled earlier this month that the ballot should be suspended. The FN appealed the decision, but a higher court in Versailles on Tuesday upheld the ruling, handing a further legal triumph to the veteran provocateur. The court said the ballot remained suspended “until the organization of a general assembly that conforms to current statutes.
MEXICO
Men sentenced for femicide
Five men were sentenced to an unprecedented 697 years in prison for the gender-driven killing of 11 women, in a state where hundreds of young women have been murdered since 1990. The sentence was the longest-ever given for a femicide — the killing of a woman due to her gender — and was based on scientific evidence, said an official at the attorney general’s office in the state of Chihuahua, home of the border city of Ciudad Juarez, which in 2008 recorded one woman missing each day. “They used ploys to recruit young women into prostitution and drug distribution,” Chihuahua’s attorney general’s office said in a statement. “Then, when they were no longer ‘useful,’ they took their lives and threw their bodies in the Navajo Arroyo, in the Valley of Juarez.” In addition to prison time of nearly 700 years each, those sentenced also have to pay a total of 9 million pesos (US$550,000) in damages to the families of the victims, whose bodies were found in 2012.
UNITED STATES
Spacecraft developer blamed
The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday concluded that the developer of a commercial spacecraft that broke apart over the Mojave Desert last year failed to protect against the possibility of human error, specifically the co-pilot’s premature unlocking of a braking system. In its finding, the board took pains to make clear that Scaled Composites, an aerospace company that partnered with Virgin Galactic to develop the spacecraft, should have had systems in place to overcome the co-pilot’s mistake. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was also faulted in its role of determining whether Scaled Composites should get permits for flight tests, and the board recommended several steps to improve the FAA’s oversight of private companies involved in commercial space transportation.
NEW ZEALAND
Missing students found dead
Police have confirmed that two bodies found in avalanche debris near a popular hiking track are those of two missing Canadian students. Police said a post-mortem conducted yesterday confirmed the deceased were Louis-Vincent Lessard and Etienne Lemieux, both aged 23. Police said the Montreal students traveled on July 7 to the South Island town of Te Anau, intending to hike the Kepler Track, a route which typically takes three or four days. Police said they were reported missing by their families on Saturday. Search and rescue teams found and recovered the bodies this week about 350m below the track amid the avalanche debris.
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,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.