MEXICO
Six dead in attack on police
Gunmen attacked a police convoy in the northern violence-plagued city of Matamoros on Saturday, sparking a clash that left five suspects and one officer dead. The clash erupted after four carloads of armed civilians opened fire on Tamaulipas state and federal police in the city that borders Texas, authorities said. Four of the suspects were killed inside a car, which struck a restaurant’s metal gate, the Tamaulipas state government said in a statement. A state police officer was wounded and later died in a hospital. The other assailants were able to escape following a car chase, except for one who was gunned down. Following the shootout, police chased a different group of criminals and two bystanders were wounded by bullets fired by the suspects, the government said.
BRAZIL
Thousands of fish perish
More than 10,000 fish died in temporary holding tanks during construction of what is being touted as the world’s largest freshwater aquarium, media outlets reported. Billed as “the biggest freshwater aquarium in the world” by the former governor of the state, work on the US$53 million facility was supposed to have finished at the end of last year, but has been delayed, the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper reported on Saturday. Since November last year, the fish had been in quarantine with a firm called Anambi, which won a contract to care for the animals. An Anambi document from May states that 80 percent of the fish died from a temperature drop as winter approached. However, government officials said they have identified several technical failures in the temporary tanks. A final date for completion of the aquarium has still not been finalized.
UNITED KINGDOM
Singer collapses on flight
A British boyband singer collapsed from heat exhaustion during a flight while wearing 12 layers of clothing in a bid to beat an excess luggage fee, he said on Saturday. James McElvar, 19, from the Scottish group Rewind, was about to board an EasyJet flight from London Stansted to Glasgow on Wednesday when he was told he had one carry-on bag too many. With his bandmates already aboard and just minutes to spare, he made a foolhardy snap decision, emptying his rucksack and donning the entire contents. Barely able to move, he could not even get the seatbelt secured around him. As he was drenched in sweat and feeling sick, cabin crew laid him out, stripped down, on an empty row of seats, where he was violently sick and then fainted. The singer has no memory of the rest of the flight and was taken off the airplane at Glasgow Airport to a waiting ambulance.
UNITED STATES
Zoo macaque recaptured
A small, “very spirited” monkey that escaped its enclosure at the Memphis Zoo has been captured. Multiple media reports say that zoo workers spotted three-year-old macaque Zimm inside a drainage system on the eastern side of the zoo on Saturday morning. Memphis Zoo Animal Programs director Matt Thompson said the monkey is now safe and secure after an “all-zoo effort” to find her. After Zimm escaped her enclosure on Thursday, she found shelter in drainage pipes underneath the zoo. Senior veterinarian Felicia Knight called Zimm a “very spirited monkey.” Zimm was being examined by the veterinarian staff and will have a brief stay in the zoo’s hospital before returning to her enclosure. The monkey’s escape resulted in a Twitter account that racked up more than 1,500 followers.
CHINA
Law firm labeled ‘criminal’
The government has denounced a law firm that specializes in rights cases as a “major criminal organization” after more than 50 lawyers and activists were said to have been detained in a sweeping crackdown. At least five lawyers from the firm, Beijing Fengrui, have been “criminally detained,” said a report late on Saturday in the People’s Daily. Zhou Shifeng (周世鋒) and his colleagues from Fengrui established “a major criminal gang that organized and planned creating an uproar in more than 40 sensitive cases and that seriously disturbed social order,” said the newspaper report, which laid out the charges. “These no-holds-barred lawyers staged open defiance inside the courtroom and on the Internet, and behind the scenes instructed their key troublemakers to organize petitioners,” the report said. “Zhou Shifeng and the others are suspected of other serious crimes, and the case is still under investigation,” it added.
INDIA
Floods hurt lion population
Officials said the monsoon flooding last month in Gujarat State that killed at least 81 people also hurt the world’s last population of wild Asiatic lions. Gujarat forest officials said the rains also killed at least 10 of the country’s 523 lions — the last members of the subspecies left anywhere in the wild. The report, submitted over the weekend to the state’s environment ministry, said other lions were found in “weak health and shocked condition” and were given treatment and food supplements.
MYANMAR
Rally backs higher wages
Several hundred factory workers yesterday staged a peaceful demonstration to demand that a new daily minimum wage be set higher than proposed. The workers protesting in a northern suburb of Yangon want the daily minimum wage to be set at 4,000 kyat (US$3.54) rather than the 3,600 kyat proposed by the National Minimum Wage Committee last month following negotiations between the government, employers and employees. The current daily minimum wage is 3,000 kyat. Factory owners say a wage hike will affect their ability to operate.
TUNISIA
Corpses found in sea
Authorities have recovered 27 corpses of migrants off the Mediterranean coast who apparently died trying to reach Italy from Libya. Security official Mongi Kadhi told The Associated Press that naval and civil protection units found the migrants between July 3 and Friday off the coast of the cities of Ben Guerdane and Zarzis, close to the Libyan border. He said they appeared to be Africans.
CHINA
Beijing’s offices shifting
The Beijing City Government yesterday said that it would move part of its administrative functions out of the city center as part of a plan to better integrate the capital with neighboring Hebei Province and the port city of Tianjin. The municipal government’s Chinese Communist Party committee also agreed at meetings on Friday and on Saturday to stick to its target to limit the city’s population to 23 million, according to the city’s information office microblog. Its population was 21.5 million at the end of last year. The “subsidiary administrative center” will be in Tongzhou district in the eastern suburbs, which is about a 40-minute car ride from downtown Beijing without heavy traffic, and will take shape by 2017. Officials want to develop high-quality resources such as hospitals and universities in the whole area.
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
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