UNITED STATES
Jail wanted for billionaire
The government on Friday asked a judge to sentence Macanese billionaire Ng Lap Seng (吳立勝) to more than six years in prison, after his conviction in July last year for bribing two UN ambassadors to help him build a multibillion-dollar conference center. Prosecutors made their request in a filing with the District Court in Manhattan, and are also seeking a US$2 million fine. The request came four weeks after Ng’s lawyers urged that their 69-year-old client be sentenced to time served, and allowed to return to his family in China. Lawyers for Ng did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
MEXICO
Migrants rescued from truck
More than 100 Central American migrants, including dozens of minors, were found crowded inside a sweltering truck without food or water en route to the US, authorities said on Friday. The 136 migrants, from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, were rescued in the state of Veracruz after 24 hours in temperatures above 38°C, migration institute INM said. The migrants were discovered by federal police and migration agents who heard cries for help from within the truck, which had been abandoned near a freeway. Authorities said they counted 49 minors among the group, 13 of whom were traveling alone and are to receive aid to apply for refugee status in the country.
MEXICO
Presidential race begins
Two of the four candidates for the presidency have launched their campaigns before hundreds of cheering supporters. Ricardo Anaya, candidate of a right-left coalition, appealed to the youth vote with a 12-hour hackathon to develop proposals to effect change. Margarita Zavala, the former first lady who left Anaya’s conservative National Action Party to embark on an independent run, tried to distinguish herself as the only candidate free from corruption. Both set their sights squarely on front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, depicting him as a candidate with an antiquated vision who is soft on crime. Lopez Obrador and Jose Antonio Meade, the ruling party candidate, are scheduled to officially launch their campaigns today. The presidential election is to be held on July 1.
UNITED STATES
Zoo welcomes orangutan
The Denver Zoo is welcoming a baby Sumatran orangutan who is named after an Indonesian word that means “bright” and is often used to refer to sunshine. The female primate named Cerah was born on Sunday last week to parents Nias and Berani, and the family is bonding away from public view. Cerah is to make her debut within the next two weeks in the Great Apes exhibit in Primate Panorama. She was conceived within a month of 29-year-old Nias and 25-year-old Berani getting set up in July last year.
UNITED STATES
Missing teens found dead
Two bodies found in an abandoned Utah mine are those of a teenage couple who disappeared nearly three months ago, authorities confirmed on Friday. Riley Powell, 18, and Brelynne Otteson, 17, were stabbed to death and dumped in the mine in late December last year after visiting a woman whose boyfriend had warned her not to have male visitors, Utah County sheriff officials said. The bodies found on Wednesday were believed to be the missing couple, but the determination from state medical examiners made the identification official.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of