BRAZIL
Two nursery fire victims die
Two children burned in an arson attack at a nursery school in Brazil succumbed to their wounds on Friday, bringing the death toll to eight on the day the first victims were buried. Cecilia Davine Dias and Yasmin Medeiros Salvino, both aged four, died early in the afternoon, a hospital spokesman in the city of Monte Claros told reporters. The tragedy unfolded on Thursday morning in Janauba, a town of 70,000 people about 600km from Belo Horizonte. A security guard at the nursery sprayed his young victims with alcohol before setting fire to the building. He died from burns a few hours later. According to local authorities, he had suffered from mental health issues since 2014. In total, seven four-year-old children were killed, along with a teacher aged 43. Another 40 people were treated at three hospitals in the region. Dozens gathered for the first funerals of victims at a cemetery in Janauba on Friday afternoon. Small white coffins were opened for a few minutes as devastated family members wept. “What has happened is inexplicable. I have no words. When I heard about the fire on the radio, I immediately thought of my grandchildren. I was sure something had happened to them,” said Antonio Pereira da Silva, who buried his granddaughter.
MEXICO
Military helicopter crashes
A military helicopter on Friday crashed in the northern state of Durango, seriously injuring one military member aboard and likely killing seven others, the Secretariat of National Defense said in a statement. The helicopter, a Bell 412, crashed 4km northeast of the town of El Salto in mountainous Durango during a training flight. The one survivor was in grave condition in a hospital, while authorities were searching for the bodies of seven other military members who were presumed to be among the remains of the aircraft. Durango borders Sinaloa State, home of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Military authorities are investigating what happened to the helicopter, the secretariat said.
UNITED STATES
Dead Chinese couple found
Authorities have recovered the bodies of a Chinese couple from a car that plunged off a cliff in California’s Kings Canyon National Park. Fresno County Sheriff’s spokesman Tony Botti on Friday said a rescue crew successfully extracted the bodies a day earlier from the Kings River. He said they are 31-year-old Wang Yinan and his 32-year-old wife, Song Jie. The couple vanished during an August vacation. Officials believe their car plunged 150m over the cliff. The car was found as authorities were recovering another car that had plunged into the river earlier. The bodies of two exchange students from Thailand were recovered from that car last month.
UNITED STATES
Man lived with dead bodies
Prosecutors said a Minnesota man lived in his house with the decomposing bodies of his mother and twin brother for about a year. Robert Kuefler, 60, of White Bear Lake was charged with interference with a dead body or scene of death, because he neglected to tell authorities they died of natural causes, the St Paul Pioneer Press reported. The bodies were found last year. Kuefler was charged this week. Police said he told them his mother, 94-year-old Evelyn Kuefler, died in August 2015 and his brother, Richard Kuefler, died before that and he could not bring himself to bury them. The complaint said his mother’s body was decayed and skeletal, while his brother’s body was “mummified.”
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.