VENEZUELA
Smuggling probe extended
President Nicolas Maduro extended a crackdown on contraband to a second state as he steps up his effort to stop smuggling along the border with Colombia. Maduro on Monday declared a state of emergency across three municipalities in Zulia State and shuttered the Paraguachon border crossing with Colombia. “Our people are targeted by smugglers, criminal gangs; we will liberate them from all of that,” Maduro said in a televised address. An additional 3,000 troops were being deployed to border towns, and only indigenous Wayuu would be permitted passage to Colombia, he said.
CANADA
Two candidates ousted
The governing Conservative Party of Canada on Monday dropped two of its candidates for the House of Commons because of embarrassing videos featuring them. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp replayed hidden camera footage showing one candidate, Jerry Bance, taking a coffee cup from a sink he was fixing in a customer’s kitchen and then urinating in it. The video, made by a consumer affairs program in 2012, shows Bance rinsing the mug before returning it to the sink. The Conservatives also said that a candidate named Tim Dutaud had been removed by the party because of a series of prank calls he recorded and posted on YouTube about six years ago. In one of them, Dutaud, a real-estate agent, pretends to be mentally disabled while dealing with a cellphone company.
UNITED STATES
Clinton defends e-mail use
Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said she does not need to apologize for using a private e-mail account and server while at the Department of State because, “what I did was allowed.” Clinton spoke to reporters during a campaign swing through Iowa, which holds the first vote in the state-by-state nominating race. Clinton said lingering questions about her use of e-mail while serving as secretary of state have not damaged her campaign. “It’s a distraction, certainly, but it hasn’t in any way affected the plan for our campaign,” she said.
UNITED STATES
White alligator dies
A rare white alligator has died at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans. The Audubon Nature Institute announced the death of “Spots” the alligator on Monday. The alligator was 28 years old. The cause of death is being investigated. Spots had a rare genetic condition called leucism, which reduces color pigmentation in the skin. The institute said Spots was one of 17 alligator hatchlings recovered in 1986 by the Louisiana Land and Exploration Company.
NEPAL
Police search for US teacher
Police yesterday said that they are searching a river where the body of a 27-year-old teacher from Austin, Texas, was thrown after she was hammered to death. Authorities are searching the Seti River for the body of Dahlia Yehia, who disappeared from the resort town of Pokhara in western Nepal last month, police official Hari Bahadur Pal said. Police have arrested a local teacher, Narayan Paudel, who was hosting Yehia while she was in Pokhara to help people affected by April’s devastating earthquake. Pal said Paudel confessed to the crime and described it, including where he threw the body into the river. Pal said authorities plan to seek the maximum sentence of life imprisonment for Paudel, 30. Authorities said the motive behind the murder was money, according to Pal.
INDIA
Six arrested over rape
Police yesterday said they had arrested six men after a teenager alleged she was gang-raped after being lured to a hotel on the promise of a job. The 17-year-old girl told police she had traveled from her home in New Delhi to the western city of Jaipur with neighbors who had promised her work there. “She was then confined to a hotel where 10 people, including the manager, took turns to rape her. She managed to escape last week and file a complaint in Delhi,” a police officer said in Delhi. “Based on her complaint we have arrested six men and we are studying the CCTV footage from the hotel to nab the rest of the suspects,” he said on condition of anonymity. The alleged attack on Aug. 30 adds to a grim record of sexual assaults in the nation, which have sparked domestic and international outrage.
THAILAND
British academic released
A British academic who accused a Thai official of plagiarism, and whose name later showed up on a national security blacklist as a potential danger to society, yesterday said he had been freed after being held for four days at a Bangkok airport. Wyn Ellis, a long-term resident of Thailand with British and Thai citizenship, was freed late on Monday after he was detained shortly after arriving from Europe on Thursday. Ellis is working on a sustainable rice program for the UN in Thailand. He discovered just a few days ago he had been blacklisted, apparently because of a 2009 letter written by the man he had accused of copying his work. “I am out and I am off the blacklist,” Ellis told reporters yesterday after spending four days in a cell with 15 other people.
TURKEY
Blast kills 14 police officers
A roadside bomb targeting a bus yesterday killed 14 policemen, state-run Anadolu news agency reported, the second major attack on security forces this week as clashes between the government and Kurdish gunmen intensify. The attack follows Turkish airstrikes on several Kurdish rebel bases in northern Iraq overnight. Commando units also clashed with PKK fighters after 16 troops were killed on Sunday, the highest toll from a single attack against Turkish soldiers since violence flared in July, shattering a three-year lull. “The PKK is increasingly shifting attacks to urban areas and targeting policemen to inflict greater damage on security forces, while targeting soldiers in rural areas,” Nihat Ali Ozcan, who studies the group at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, said by telephone. “If the government can’t exert control in the area, spiraling violence could increase the risk of a civil war amid growing nationalist backlash.”
LEBANON
Sandstorm strikes
An unseasonal sandstorm has hit Lebanon and Syria, reducing visibility and sending dozens to hospitals with breathing difficulties. The storm hit the coastal capital of Beirut yesterday, a day after it engulfed the eastern Bekaa Valley and neighboring Syria further to the east. Officials advised people to stay indoors. The state news agency said at least 80 people fainted or suffered breathing problems because of the fine dust. People have been warned against burning trash that has piled up on Beirut streets this summer, sparking a political crisis and protests. In Syria, the storm reached the capital, Damascus. The state al-Watan newspaper said it forced the government to halt its airstrikes against rebel fighters north of the central province of Hama.
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