AZERBAIJAN
Security minister fired
President Ilham Aliyev on Saturday fired his security minister in a surprise move that opposition politicians said highlights a lack of transparency in the former Soviet nation’s political system. “I decree to relieve Eldar Mahmudov of the position of the Azerbaijani Republic’s national security minister,” Aliyev said in a decree published on his Web site, giving no explanation for the decision. Widely seen as an Aliyev loyalist, Mahmudov, 59, served as national security minister since 2004. Prominent opposition politician Isa Gambar said the way Aliyev fired the veteran minister shows that “there is no transparency whatsoever in political decisionmaking. What happened to Mahmudov shows yet again how opaque Azerbaijan’s political system is,” Gambar said.
MONTENEGRO
Protesters tear gassed
Police on Saturday used tear gas to break up a protest by the opposition demanding the government’s resignation and an early election in the Balkan state. Several hundred opposition leaders and supporters gathered in downtown Podgorica, the capital, and tried to advance through a police cordon. Officers fired tear gas and pushed them away. Anti-government leaders had staged a days-long protest in a main street in Podgorica, but police removed their tents earlier in the day.
CUBA
Syria deployment denied
A senior official in Havana on Saturday “categorically” denied reports that troops were in Syria supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Talk of up to 300 soldiers sent to Syria originated in the US’ Fox News network on Wednesday, citing an unnamed US official as source. The Fox story also mentioned that the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies had learned that the head of the armed forces visited Syria with a military team to support the al-Assad regime. On Saturday, Gerardo Penalver Portal, the head of bilateral affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a brief statement that the nation “refutes and categorically denies the irresponsible and unfounded information on the alleged presence of Cuban troops in Syria, which some media have echoed.”
THAILAND
Man rescues birdwatchers
A construction worker on a fishing trip dramatically rescued two Norwegian bird watchers who were sinking into a mudflat in the south, lying down in the mud to allow the pair to use his body to pry themselves to safety. The incident on Friday morning in Krabi Province was caught on camera by an amateur photographer from Bangkok, who posted the video on Facebook. The posting got at least 1.6 million views, with many showering the rescuer with praise. The Norwegian pair, whose names were not released, had taken their cameras to a river estuary at first light, but the mudflats proved to be far less firm than they had thought. They quickly found themselves sinking. A construction worker, identified by media as Chat Ubonchinda, was heading home from a fishing trip by boat when he spotted them. First, he tried to pull the two out, but the mud was too thick. After taking their belongings to firmer ground, Chat lay down in the mud and let the two lift themselves up by pulling against his body. One of them even crawled across his back on the way to safety. “All Thais are proud of what you did, it’s great and no more words need to be explained,” Somchai Ouansakul wrote on Facebook.
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.