INDIA
Gas leak prompts evacuation
Thirty students at a school were yesterday hospitalized complaining of breathlessness and eye irritation following a gas leak from a fuel tanker, witnesses said. More than 100 students were evacuated from the Rani Jhansi school in the capital, New Delhi, media said. It was not clear what had caused the leak and no further details were immediately available. “Some students complained of irritation in eyes and throat due to the gas leak,” a school official told reporters.
PERU
Investigation targets Humala
The national prosecutor’s office on Friday said it has opened an investigation into allegations of “crimes against humanity” related to the military’s fight against leftist guerrillas in the 1990s, in a case involving former president Ollanta Humala. The investigation comes as testimony from two new witnesses suggests that soldiers under Humala’s command at the Madre Mia military base tortured and murdered civilians. Humala was an army officer during Peru’s bloody campaign against Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path in the 1980s and 1990s. Humala has publicly denied the allegations. A previous probe into the alleged human rights violations was shelved in 2009 for lack of evidence. However, leaked transcripts of recorded telephone conversations published in local media over the past few weeks appear to suggest Humala bribed torture victims to alter their testimony, which he has also denied.
UNITED STATES
Cassini finds ‘the big empty’
The uncrewed Cassini spacecraft, after completing two passes in the vast, unexplored area between Saturn’s rings, has discovered not much else there, researchers at NASA said. Scientists have been surprised to find that not all that much — not even space dust — lies between Saturn’s iconic rings. Cassini late last month made a first pass to explore what lies between the rings and a second one on Tuesday at a speed of about 123,920kph relative to the planet. “The region between the rings and Saturn is ‘the big empty,’ apparently,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory Cassini project manager Earl Maize said after the probe’s first pass. The gap between the rings and the top of Saturn’s atmosphere is about 2,400km. Cassini is expected to make a total of 22 dives between the rings and the planet before making a death plunge into the gas giant in September.
VANUATU
Storm damage assessed
The government yesterday began assessing the damage after the nation was pounded by destructive winds from Cyclone Debbie, which brought down houses and buildings. The eye of the category three cyclone veered away from the nation before making landfall, but National Disaster Management Office Director Shadrack Welegtabit said winds in excess of 200kph wreaked havoc in outlying islands. “The cyclone has passed through and we have now started our response, doing an assessment of the damage and what people need,” he told reporters. “It did not make landfall, but the gale force winds affected some islands. There was damage to houses and buildings, but we haven’t had any reports of injuries.” A curfew was imposed in many of the populated islands on Friday, with residents taking shelter in caves and evacuation centers until the storm passed. Although Donna was tracking west toward New Caledonia, the nation was warned to expect “damaging gale force winds and very rough seas” for another 24 hours.
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