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.
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