MEXICO
Official clarifies pot remark
Secretary of Tourism Enrique de la Madrid suggested that legalizing marijuana could help reduce drug violence at big tourist resorts, but later said he was not speaking in an official capacity when he made the comment. De la Madrid on Thursday said that legalizing pot could help reduce violence in states like Baja California Sur, which is home to the twin resorts of Los Cabos and has the country’s second-highest murder rate, and Quintana Roo, home of the resort of Cancun. Cancun, while relatively quiet, has had outbursts of shootings, some related to a struggle by the Jalisco New Generation cartel to move into the city. However, late on Thursday, De la Madrid said on Twitter: “I want to emphatically say that my opinion on legalizing marijuana was a personal comment.” Security analyst Alejandro Hope on Friday wrote in a column in newspaper El Universal that “when the law enforcement agenda is being set by the tourism secretary, something is not working. Seriously.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Top BBC men take pay cut
The BBC on Friday reported that six of its highest-paid male broadcasters have agreed to take pay cuts after revelations of a gender divide in salaries. The BBC said in a statement that the public service broadcaster was “very grateful” to Huw Edwards, Nicky Campbell, John Humphrys, Jon Sopel, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Vine for agreeing to reduce their salaries. Details of the voluntary salary cuts were not announced. The BBC was embarrassed last year when a list of top earners showed that two-thirds of the best-paid workers were men. Many men were also found to be receiving much larger salaries than women in comparable jobs. Humphrys, 74, a popular host of the influential Radio 4 morning news program, said the wage cut was his idea. “I’ve been at the BBC for an awfully long time and I’ve been paid very well and I’m not exactly on the breadline,” he said.
HONDURAS
Inauguration protest planned
President Juan Orlando Hernandez was scheduled to be sworn in yesterday for a second term as the opposition vowed mass protests over claims he fraudulently won the election in November last year. The leftist Alliance in Opposition against the Dictatorship has called for street protests during the inauguration in Tegucigalpa. Thousands of extra police and troops have been called up to ensure security for the event. On the eve of the inauguration, it emerged that Hernandez’s newly appointed police chief, Jose David Aguilar Moran, would be investigated by a government commission after reports that he had helped a drug cartel ship a consignment of cocaine to the US.
UNITED STATES
Inmate caught on supply run
A Texas inmate who had escaped has been arrested trying to break back into prison with bottles of alcohol, tobacco and home-cooked food. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said 25-year-old Joshua Hansen of Dallas has been charged with escape and possession of marijuana. He was originally imprisoned on a narcotics conviction. Deputies on Wednesday spotted Hansen as he ran onto private land near the prison in Beaumont and grabbed a duffel bag containing three bottles of brandy, some whisky, tobacco and “a large amount of home-cooked food.” They arrested him as he ran back toward the prison. Nearby rancher Michael Latta told KFDM-TV that he has for years contended with low-level offenders who flee the facility only to later return.
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