HUNGARY
Crane arrives in Budapest
A huge floating crane, designed to lift a sunken sightseeing boat that was carrying South Korean tourists, on Wednesday arrived in Budapest as the search for more bodies continued, officials said. However, rising waters in the Danube River could impede the crane from reaching the site of the tragedy for up to four days, said Istvan Gyenyei, captain of the Adam Clark floating crane. The Hableany sightseeing boat, carrying 33 South Koreans and two Hungarian crew members, capsized and sank in about seven seconds after a collision on Wednesday last week with the Viking Sigyn, a river cruise ship. “Once the ropes are in place, the lifting tasks take a couple of hours,” Gyenyei said. “The question is how the [sunken] boat will behave as it starts to tear away from the river floor... If the boat’s hull doesn’t break, the ropes will bear it for sure.” The plan is to put the Hableany on a barge in the river once raised out of the water, he said. The confirmed death toll rose to 13, as two more bodies were recovered from the river. Seven people were rescued and 15 remain missing.
UNITED STATES
Shooter smuggling Chinese
Authorities said that a 23-year-old US citizen who died in a shoot-out with border inspectors in San Diego was bringing two Chinese men into the country illegally. Customs and Border Protection on Wednesday said that the man fired at officers several times after refusing to pull aside for inspection. The Chinese men — aged 18 and 27 — were found unharmed inside the vehicle. San Diego police identified the driver as Travis James Eckstein. Police said seven Customs and Border Protection officers were involved in the shooting on Monday night, none of them injured. All vehicle and pedestrian traffic into the country was suspended for about 30 minutes after the shooting. San Ysidro is the nation’s busiest border crossing, separating San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico.
UNITED STATES
Ladybugs pop up on radar
A huge blob that appeared on the National Weather Service’s radar was not a rain cloud, but a massive swarm of ladybugs over southern California. Meteorologist Joe Dandrea said that the array of bugs appeared to be about 129km wide as it flew over San Diego on Tuesday. However, Dandrea told the Los Angeles Times that the ladybugs were actually spread throughout the sky, flying at between 1.5km and 2.8km, with the most concentrated group about 16km wide. It was not immediately known what type of ladybug was causing the phenomenon. The newspaper said that one species, adult convergent lady beetles, mate and migrate from the Sierra Nevada to valley areas where they eat aphids and lay eggs.
UNITED STATES
Deer trap elderly woman
Police rescued an Indiana woman after three deer crashed through a window, trapping her inside her apartment. Decatur police said that the 74-year-old woman was in her retirement home apartment on Tuesday night when the deer crashed through a bedroom window. Officers found her trapped on her living room couch, with her walker knocked over, as one deer jumped about the room. Sergeant Kevin Gerber said that an officer shielded the woman after that deer knocked her over. Gerber said that officers subdued and removed one deer, while the other two ended up in a bathroom where they were tranquilized and released. The woman was not injured and “was amazingly calm” during her ordeal, but the deer heavily damaged her apartment, he said.
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
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.