GERMANY
Man attacks bakery workers
Police in the city of Fulda say they shot and killed a man who was attacking workers outside a bakery. Fulda police responded to a call at 4:30am that a man was attacking people outside the business in the city about 100km northeast of Frankfurt, they said in a statement yesterday. When they arrived, they say the man attacked them with stones and some sort of a truncheon. They say they shot and killed the man, whose name and age were not released. Police say the bakery was not open at the time of the incident, and that the victims attacked by the suspect were employees and a delivery driver. Some of their injuries were considered serious. Hesse state police and Fulda prosecutors are investigating.
TURKEY
Soldiers tied to cleric detained
Prosecutors ordered the detention of 70 serving army officers over alleged links to the US-based preacher accused of orchestrating an attempted coup in 2016, the Milliyet daily said yesterday. Police launched simultaneous operations in 34 provinces across Turkey in a probe led by state prosecutors in the central Turkish province of Konya, Milliyet said. It said the suspects were targeted based on statements by soldiers previously detained over ties to the cleric Fethullah Gulen and were believed to have been responsible for student houses for Gulen’s movement. The UN Human Rights Council last month said Turkish authorities had detained 160,000 people and dismissed nearly the same number of civil servants since the failed coup in July 2016, which Ankara blames on Gulen. He denies any involvement. Among those detained, more than 50,000 have been formally charged and kept in jail during their trials. The nation’s Western allies have criticized the crackdown. Ankara says the measures are necessary to combat threats to national security.
UNITED STATES
Buffalo launches ‘wing trail’
Buffalo, New York, is inviting tourists to eat their way through a new “wing trail” featuring a dozen chicken wing hot spots. Tourism officials unveiled the Buffalo Wing Trail on Thursday at the Anchor Bar, where the Buffalo wing took flight in 1964. While just about every restaurant in the city has wings on the menu, the restaurants chosen for the trail each put a unique spin on how they cook, season and serve the appetizer. Visit Buffalo Niagara says it polled its 86,000 Facebook followers, looked at online reviews and consulted with National Buffalo Wing Festival founder Drew Cerza before settling on the final list.
UNITED STATES
‘Fight club’ teacher charged
A former substitute teacher is charged with supervising a student “fight club” at a Connecticut high school. Police say cellphone videos show 23-year-old Ryan Fish encouraging students as they slap each other in the middle of a classroom at Montville High School. Fish pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges including reckless endangerment and risk of injury to a minor. He has denied facilitating the fights and says he thought that the students were just being “rambunctious.” Fish was fired in October last year. Police began investigating in December after a student told a social worker that he had been beaten at school. Superintendent Brian Levesque told the Day newspaper that he did not alert police after firing Fish because he knew of only one fight and thought that it was an isolated incident.
JAPAN
Diaoyutai patrols stepped up
The military is to beef up airborne patrols of disputed islands in the East China Sea, an official said yesterday in response to increased Chinese activity in the area. New crew members will operate two additional airplanes that will be deployed over the next 12 months to strengthen patrols around the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), which are also claimed by Taiwan, a Japan Coast Guard spokesman said. “We’ll boost our aviation crew by bringing in 60 more members,” the spokesman told reporters. Japan is to deploy two Falcon 2000LXS jets this fiscal year and one more plane next year to allow a “24-hour patrol system” to monitor the disputed islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands. Japan early this year spotted a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine in disputed waters.
VANUATU
Volcano prompts evacuation
Villagers on the island of Ambae were yesterday facing their second evacuation in seven months after a volcano rumbled back to life and rained ashes on their homes. Authorities have declared a state of emergency on the northern island, where 11,000 people were forced to leave in September last year. Many have only just returned home, but the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department said that the Manaro Voui volcano was undergoing a level-three eruption, the mid-point on a five-level scale. Vanuatuan Ministry of Climate Change Director-General Jesse Benjamin said that an evacuation would be more orderly than the one carried out last year, when a flotilla of small vessels were pressed into service to rush people off the island. “Last year’s evacuation was conducted in haste, amidst fears of a major eruption,” he told the Daily Post newspaper. “This time we will be evacuating people from the severely affected communities first.”
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