UNITED STATES
Troops ordered to Cameroon
President Barack Obama on Wednesday said he had ordered 300 troops to Cameroon to work with west African soldiers seeking to counter the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram. In a letter to Congress, Obama said that the troops would provide “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” in the region. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the troops would be armed for their protection, but that they would not engage in combat. Obama said that an advance force of about 90 military personnel on Monday had begun deploying to Cameroon, which borders Nigeria.
ECUADOR
UK refuses Assange passage
Britain has refused Quito’s request to give Julian Assange safe passage for a medical checkup after he had a sharp pain in his right shoulder, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ricardo Patino said on Wednesday. The WikiLeaks frontman has been holed up in the nation’s embassy in London since 2012, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden. Swedish prosecutors want to question him about a rape claim, which carries a 10-year statute of limitations that expires in 2020. Assange faces arrest if he leaves the embassy.
UNITED STATES
Court rehears gold case
A federal appeals court is again weighing the fate of 10 rare gold coins possibly worth US$80 million or more that the government says were illegally taken from a Philadelphia mint and wound up in a jeweler’s hands. A lawyer for jeweler Israel Switt’s heirs on Wednesday told the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that authorities gave up any right to the coins when they failed to respond to the family’s seized-property claim within 90 days. The Department of the Treasury insists the US$20 Double Eagles were stolen from the US Mint in Philadelphia before the 1933 series was melted down when the nation went off the gold standard.
MEXICO
Boy arrested for murder
A 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing a man after he was allegedly contacted on Facebook and offered 31,000 pesos (US$1,900) to commit the crime, authorities said. Prosecutors said the minor was caught on Saturday last week as he tried to flee the scene of the crime in Tijuana. “The child said that he was contacted by a person via Facebook,” Miguel Angel Guerrero, a special investigations coordinator in the Baja California state prosecutor’s office, told reporters late on Tuesday. The person offered the boy money to kill someone, Guerrero said. The child told investigators that he agreed to meet the person at one of the city’s main roads. A taxi took him to a neighborhood known for its bars and drug dealing where “they gave him a weapon and they pointed to the person he had to kill,” Guerrero said.
UNITED STATES
Texas executes cop killer
Texas on Wednesday executed a man who killed a police officer outside a nightclub in 2001, the 12th person put to death in the state this year. Licho Escamilla, 33, died by lethal injection at a Huntsville prison at 6:31pm, Texas Department of Criminal Justice official Jason Clark said. Escamilla, who was 19 at the time of the crime, was already wanted for another murder when he became involved in a brawl in a nightclub parking lot. Off-duty police officer Kevin James, who was working as security, was shot dead as he and other off-duty officers tried to break up the fight.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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