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.”
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