Mexico started off the New Year with a string of shootouts and killings.
In the northern city of Torreon, federal police said on Friday they had captured two alleged hit men after the suspects threw a hand grenade at police and soldiers who cornered them at a house. Eight officers were wounded in the Thursday confrontation.
The Public Safety Department said more grenades, pistols and assault rifles were found inside the home. The two suspects were members of the Gulf drug cartel and were wanted on homicide charges in the US.
Killings in the border city of Tijuana started less than an hour into this year, when Saul Tamayo Hernandez, 26, was shot by gunmen while celebrating the new year outside his house with his family.
Things in Tijuana seemed to get worse with the reported kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy. But police said on Friday the youth staged his own disappearance.
The boy was reported abducted on Wednesday when he ran to his home to pick something up for a New Year’s Eve dinner at his grandparents house a few blocks away.
When the boy didn’t return, his mother went looking for him and found the door of her house forced open. A note said her son had been taken and that she would be killed if she stayed at her home.
Police said in a statement on Friday the boy was found and confessed to ransacking the home and leaving the note to get money to party with his friends.
In the western town of La Huerta, a shootout between rival families at a New Year’s party left four dead, and a clash between soldiers and alleged drug traffickers in Chihuahua state reportedly killed three smugglers.
Federal prosecutors also said they placed three municipal policemen in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez under house arrest on suspicion of aiding drug traffickers.
And in the northern city of Monterrey, prosecutors accused former Nuevo Leon state policeman Aldo Perales, 34, of leading a gang of bank robbers and participating in more than 30 robberies.
Police say he has confessed to at least three bank robberies but denied carrying out others.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
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