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.
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
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