UNITED STATES
Boy on stray unicorn saved
A volunteer water rescue team saved an eight-year-old boy who floated away from the North Carolina coast on a raft shaped like a unicorn. News outlets reported that the Ohio boy was at the beach on Oak Island on Monday when a gust of wind blew the raft nearly 0.8km out to sea. Volunteers with Oak Island Water Rescue said that the unicorn float acted as a sail, which caused it to move too fast for the boy to stop. Rescue crews said that family members called 911 and the team used a raft to reach the boy and return him back to shore.
AUSTRALIA
Police seize drug shipment
Police have seized a record amount of drugs hidden in stereo speakers shipped from Thailand, officials said yesterday. Australian Border Force agents found 1.6 tonnes of methamphetamine and 37kg of heroin in vacuum-sealed packages lodged inside the speakers after the shipment arrived in Melbourne, they said. “This is the largest meth bust we’ve ever seen in this country,” force Commander Craig Palmer said. The haul size demonstrates “the brazen nature of those involved in this criminal activity,” he added. No arrests were made in connection with the smuggling operation. Palmer said that the seized drugs had a street value of A$1.2 billion (US$836.4 million).
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Americans’ deaths unrelated
Authorities said that the deaths of a Pennsylvania psychotherapist and an American couple five days later at the same resort appear to be unrelated incidents. Minister of Tourism Francisco Javier Garcia said an autopsy found that Miranda Schaup-Werner, 41, of Allentown, had a heart attack on May 25. Police also are investigating the deaths of a Maryland couple found at another hotel in the same resort on Thursday last week. Officials said that Edward Nathaniel Holmes, 63, and Cynthia Ann Day, 49, appeared to have had respiratory failure and fluid in the lungs.
UNITED STATES
‘Creative’ sentence sought
Attorneys for a Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the shooting of an unarmed woman who had called 911 have asked a judge to give him a creative sentence rather than send him to prison. A jury in April convicted Mohamed Noor of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a dual citizen of the US and Australia. Noor’s lawyers said in papers filed ahead of a sentencing hearing yesterday that he should receive probation requiring him to report to a week in county detention on Damond’s birthday and the anniversary of her death. Prosecutors were waiting until the hearing to recommend a sentence.
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
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘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