UNITED STATES
Venezuelans charged
Prosecutors on Monday formally charged the former head of Venezuela’s National Guard and a former anti-drug official there with colluding with cocaine traffickers. An indictment unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn accuses Nestor Reverol and Edilberto Molina of taking bribes in exchange for helping the traffickers by tipping them off about future raids. It also alleges that from January 2008 to December 2010, they deliberately allowed cocaine shipments to leave Venezuela and returned seized drug money to them. Reverol, 51, once ran the Venezuelan National Guard, which is charged with securing the country’s borders, and had been a spokesman for Venezuela’s anti-drug efforts. He also is the former head of the country’s anti-drug agency and ally of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Reverol has denied the US accusations, which were first reported late last year.
VENEZUELA
Animals are fed: government
The government on Monday denied that zoo animals were dying of starvation amid a national food shortage, saying they were being lovingly treated “like family.” Minister for Ecosocialism and Water Ernesto Paiva toured Caricuao zoo in Caracas, where a union leader last week said 50 animals including Vietnamese pigs, tapirs, rabbits and birds had starved to death in the past six months. “The animals are very dear, treated as if they were family, in fact they all have names,” said Paiva, adding that they were being seen by nutritionists to ensure they had an adequate diet. A union leader for employees of state parks agency Inparques, which oversees zoos, and sources at various facilities have said animals are suffering across the country, with lions being fed mangoes instead of meat and bears receiving less than half of their required intake.
BOLIVIA
Drug shipment seized
Police have seized 7.5 tonnes of cocaine and arrested three Bolivians in a massive bust of drugs headed for Honduras and likely eventual sale in the US, a government official said on Monday. The haul, which was hidden in a cargo of minerals, would be worth over US$160 million in Honduras and US$350 million in the US, Bolivian interior minister Carlos Romero said at a news conference. Romero said the cocaine had been intercepted in trucks carrying borates along a remote mountain pass that connects Bolivia with Chile’s sea ports. In May, Colombian police confiscated 8 tonnes of cocaine, which officials described as one of the largest in the history of the country.
BRAZIL
Security guard arrested
A private security guard at Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Park has been arrested after allegedly sexually assaulting a female firefighter while she slept, police said on Monday. “A security agent from a company working at the velodrome in the Olympic Park was caught red-handed” on Sunday, the police statement said. He was accused of molesting the woman while she slept “and could not offer resistance.” The man faces between two and six years in prison if found guilty, police said. Security is a major concern at the Rio Olympics, the first held in South America, which open on Friday. About 85,000 police and soldiers, as well as thousands of private guards, have been deployed — double the number used at the 2012 London Games. Brazil suffers high levels of violence against women, with statistics suggesting that in 2014 a sexual assault took place on average every 11 minutes.
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
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the