UNITED STATES
Oregon occupier acquitted
A federal court jury on Thursday acquitted anti-government militant leader Ammon Bundy and six followers of conspiracy charges stemming from their role in the armed takeover of a wildlife center in Oregon earlier this year. Bundy and others, including his brother and codefendant Ryan Bundy, cast the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a legitimate and patriotic act of civil disobedience. Prosecutors called it a lawless scheme to seize federal property by force.
UNITED STATES
Activists forced off pipeline
A months-long protest over the Dakota Access oil pipeline reached its most chaotic pitch yet when hundreds of law enforcement officers moved in to force activists off private property. Thursday’s nearly six-hour operation dramatically escalated the dispute over Native American rights and the project’s environmental impact, with officers in riot gear firing bean bags and pepper spray. Morton County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Donnell Hushka said 141 people were arrested. No serious injuries were reported, though one man was hurt in the leg and received treatment from a medic. Among those arrested was a woman who pulled out a .38 caliber pistol and fired three times at officers, narrowly missing a sheriff’s deputy, State Emergency Services spokeswoman Cecily Fong said.
AUSTRALIA
Parents sentenced for abuse
A husband and wife were yesterday sentenced to lengthy prison terms for sexually abusing, torturing and confining their daughter over 15 years. The District Court in Sydney was told that the father used various sharp tools to rape and torture the girl who was left tied up in a shed or in a plastic box for up to three days at a time on the family’s rural property in northern New South Wales. The parents cannot be identified. The 59-year-old father, was sentenced to 48 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole after serving 36 years. The mother, 51, was sentenced to 16 years in prison and must serve at least 11 years. The father began abusing the girl when she was five years old. He had also held the girl’s head under water in a creek, wrapped her in barbed wire, forced her to eat hot chilies and threatened her with a chain saw. The mother began teaching her daughter how to sexually arouse her father from the age of 8. The father was convicted of 73 offenses and his wife of 13 offenses in June. They denied all charges. Judge Sarah Huggett described the crimes as “atrocious in the extreme.” She also described the father as “selfish, depraved and sadistic.”
UNITED STATES
Cult member denied parole
California officials have denied parole for Charles “Tex” Watson, the self-described “right-hand man” of murderous cult leader Charles Manson. The decision came on Thursday at the 17th parole hearing for Watson and 47 years after he helped plan and participated in the slayings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969. A panel of California parole commissioners meeting at Mule Creek State Prison, near Sacramento, said the 70-year-old Watson should remain in prison after being sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Watson can seek parole again in five years. In prison, Watson wrote the book, Manson’s Right-Hand Man Speaks Out, saying the charismatic Manson offered utopia then persuaded his followers to act out his destructive worldview.
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.