UNITED STATES
Trump to sue TV network
Billionaire real-estate mogul Donald Trump is planning to sue Spanish-language TV network Univision for dropping coverage of the Miss USA pageant he part-owns, his lawyer said on Thursday. “We intend to pursue all legal rights and remedies available to Mr Trump pursuant to the terms of the license agreement as well as a defamation case against Univision,” his lawyer, Michael Cohen, said in a statement. The network had said it would not air the pageant and has ended its business relationship with the Miss Universe Organization, which produces the Miss USA pageant, due to what it called “insulting remarks about Mexican immigrants” by Trump, a part owner of Miss Universe. During his presidential campaign kickoff speech last week, Trump accused Latino immigrants of bringing drugs, crime and rapists to the US. He called for building a wall along the southern border of the US. Trump says he was only criticizing US policies concerning Mexico, not its people. He says Univision is in default of a five-year contract.
UNITED STATES
Giant gem tussle continues
The fight over a giant emerald is not over. A state judge in Los Angeles last month found that a trading company, FM Holdings, had established clear title to the so-called Bahia Emerald, which weighs 341kg and has been appraised at US$372 million. However, Brazil contends the emerald was illegally mined and smuggled out of the country, and wants it back. On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington issued a restraining order that prevents anyone from transferring, selling or otherwise disposing of the gem until the Brazilian criminal case is settled. The order also requires the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to keep storing the emerald. The government sought the order at the request of the Brazilian government. A call to an attorney for FM Holdings was not immediately returned.
ENGLAND
Beware big bird, Britons told
Police in central England have warned locals to beware of a large, aggressive bird which has gone on the run, saying it posed a “very real threat to the public.” The 1.83m rhea, a tall, flightless bird native to South America, went missing from a private collection in Carlton-in-Lindrick, Nottinghamshire, on Tuesday and has not been seen since.
GERMANY
Hoover scares off thieves
A shop assistant in a late-night convenience store chased away two armed robbers demanding money with the hose of a vacuum cleaner she was using to clean her shop in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, police said on Wednesday. One of the two would-be robbers was brandishing a pistol and demanded she turn over the money from her cash register in the attempted robbery just after midnight on Tuesday.
UNITED STATES
‘Avengers’ star dies
Patrick Macnee, star of the 1960s TV series The Avengers, has died. He was 93. His son Rupert said in a statement that his father died on Thursday at his home in Rancho Mirage. The British-born actor was best known as dapper secret agent John Steed in the long-running television series. His son says Macnee died of natural causes with his family at his bedside. The Avengers, which began in 1961 in England, debuted in the US in 1966. It ran for eight seasons and continued in syndication for decades afterward.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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