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.
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