BRAZIL
Military police shoot tourist
A Spanish tourist who was on an organized tour of one of the nation’s largest slums was fatally shot by military police on Monday morning when the vehicle she was traveling in failed to stop at a checkpoint, officials said. The incident followed a firefight between police officers and suspected drug traffickers in the Rocinha slum that left two officers injured. When a car drove past police about 10:30am, officers opened fire, police statement said. When officers reached the vehicle they learned that three tourists along with a driver and a guide were inside. The Spanish woman, identified as 67-year-old Maria Esperanza Jimenez Ruiz, was taken to a hospital, but died from her injuries. Valeria Aragao, an inspector with the tourism police, said authorities would consider pressing criminal charges against the tour operators. The driver of the car, who is an Italian and lives in Brazil, said he did not see any checkpoint, according to an inspector with civil police force, which investigates crimes.
UNITED STATES
Lawsuit over surgeries
A 36-year-old Oregon woman has filed a US$1.8 million lawsuit against medical professionals who she says mistakenly suggested she undergo a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy. The Oregonian/OregonLive reported on Monday that Elisha Cooke-Moore’s lawsuit says she underwent the life-altering surgeries after her gynecologist, William Fitts, determined that genetic blood tests indicated she had a 50 percent chance of getting breast cancer and up to an 80 percent chance of getting uterine cancer. However, test results after the surgeries indicated no such risk of getting cancer.
UNITED STATES
NYC transit going digital
New York City’s transit agency is changing how bus and subway passengers pay their fares. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is phasing out its MetroCard in favor of something more modern. An MTA committee on Monday approved a US$573 million contract for a new payment system. Instead of riders swiping their MetroCards, the new system will allow them to use their cellphones or certain types of debit or credit cards to pay their fares directly at turnstiles. The full MTA board will vote to approve the bid today. MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota says the changes will bring the way passengers pay into the 21st century. Officials say the plan is to fully retire the MetroCard by 2023.
UNITED STATES
Judge orders baby born
A Utah mom in her final days of pregnancy gave her baby an eviction notice and made it official with a judge’s signature. Incredibly, the baby obeyed. Kaylee Bays was pregnant with her third child, a girl, and thought she was going into labor last week, but it stopped. She went back to work to her job as a judicial assistant at the Fourth District Court in Provo, and jokingly asked Judge Lynn Davis to serve an eviction notice on her baby. He did and it worked. Less than 12 hours later, baby Gretsel was born, the Daily Herald reported. Bays said Davis told her it was his first baby eviction notice in his 31 years as a judge. “He told me: ‘If it really works, I want it framed.’ It did, and I’m going to frame it for him,” Bays said. Bays said the eviction notice gave her baby three days to “vacate the premises.” The notice was addressed to Gretsel at Mommy Belly Lane, in Womb, Utah. “She came 12 hours later. So far, she’s a good listener,” Bays joked. “She didn’t want to be in contempt of court.”
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
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing