SPACE
Astronauts arrive at ISS
Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday, carrying a European, a Russian and an American astronaut for a four-month mission. “Capture confirmed,” said a NASA commentator as the spacecraft docked at the ISS at 4:58pm, live NASA television images showed. The trio — Frenchman Thomas Pesquet, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and US astronaut Peggy Whitson — were launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday.
UNITED STATES
Lewis records found
Officials in Nashville, Tennessee, have discovered never-before-published photographs and records detailing the early arrests of Representative John Lewis, a civil rights icon. Nashville Mayor Megan Barry on Saturday surprised Lewis with the records while he was receiving a literary award for March, a graphic novel about his life in the civil rights movement. Lewis, now 76 and a congressman from Georgia, said he was surprised and nearly cried upon seeing the records. He said he plans to place copies in his Washington office to inspire visitors. Lewis said he had been arrested 45 times for his activism, but his first arrest was in Nashville. City officials plan to display copies of the records in the Nashville Public Library.
MEXICO
Alleged assassin arrested
Authorities say federal forces have arrested an alleged leader of a band of assassins in Acapulco. The government has identified the man only as “Benito N” and it says he was responsible for a significant amount of the bloodshed in the city. A statement released late on Friday said his arrest was one of the state’s top security priorities. Local media says the suspect was the head of assassins for the Beltran Lleyva cartel. Killings are up 5 percent in Acapulco this year over a very bloody last year despite tightened security. Authorities say 790 homicides were recorded between January and last month.
UNITED STATES
Family upset by booing
The father of a California soldier killed in Afghanistan says he felt disrespected and hurt by passengers who booed him and his family when they were getting off a flight while headed to pick up his son’s remains. Stewart Perry, his wife and daughter were on an American Airlines flight on Monday from Sacramento to Philadelphia with a transfer in Phoenix, the Stockton Record reported on Saturday. Perry said the flight arrived in Phoenix 45 minutes late and the crew, fearing the family could miss their connecting flight, asked the rest of the passengers to remain seated to let a “special military family” deplane first. Perry said several passengers in first class booed, complaining that it was “baloney” and that they paid first-class fares. “It was just disgusting behavior from people in first class; it was terrible to see,’’ Perry said. He said his son, Sergeant John Perry, 30, died of injuries caused by an improvised explosive device on Nov. 12 at Bagram Airfield.
UNITED STATES
Call to scrap bar curtains
A group of Utah restaurants wants to scrap a law requiring so-called “Zion curtains” that wall off customers from bartenders preparing drinks. The Salt Lake Area Restaurant Association plans to hire a lobbyist to push the change during the legislative session that starts in January. Association president Tamara Gibo told the Salt Lake Tribune that the 2009 law affects new businesses more than others that were grandfathered in.
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,”
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