EL SALVADOR
Flores has brain damage
Former president Francisco Flores, who faces trial accused of embezzling millions of US dollars in aid money for earthquake victims, has irreversible brain damage after suffering a stroke, doctors said on Thursday. Flores, who was under house arrest, was rushed to a hospital on Sunday after having a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and he has been in a coma ever since. “The patient has irreversible neurological damage,” a team of specialists at Rosales hospital in San Salvador told the court where Flores faces trial. He has undergone several operations, his lawyers say. Flores, 56, is accused of stealing US$15 million donated by Taiwan for victims of a 2001 earthquake. Salvadoren president from 1999 to 2004, he turned himself in last year to respond to the allegations, which he denies.
IRAN
Drone flies over US ships
State television is reporting that the country flew a surveillance drone over a US aircraft carrier during an ongoing naval exercise. The report yesterday said the drone took photographs of the carrier, without elaborating. The US Navy’s 5th Fleet, which oversees the Persian Gulf from Bahrain, declined to immediately comment yesterday. The nuclear-powered USS Harry S. Truman, based out of Norfolk, Virginia, is in the Gulf supporting operations against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
UNITED STATES
Circus elephant dies in care
Ringling Brothers, the US’ best-known circus, on Thursday announced the death of its youngest elephant at a conservation center where it is retiring the animals after criticism from rights groups. Mike, a two-year-old, died of a virus “despite the heroic efforts of our veterinary and animal care staff,” Ringling Brothers said in a statement. Animal rights group PETA said that the elephant’s death was “no surprise.” Ringling director of veterinary care Ashley Settles said the illness progressed aggressively with Mike beginning to show symptoms on Saturday and dying by Monday. “No one knows why the virus manifests this way in some elephants, since most elephants harbor the virus and never become ill,” she said. Mike was born in June 2013 at the Ringling conservation center in Florida and was the youngest elephant there. Ringling Brothers announced two weeks ago that it was relocating all its elephants by May to the center, which develops breeding programs and research aimed at the animals’ protection. “Stressful conditions have been linked to the highly fatal disease that killed this calf, which disproportionately impacts captive baby elephants,” Rachel Mathews of PETA said.
UNITED STATES
Guitarist Paul Kantner dies
Paul Kantner, an original member of the seminal 1960s rock band Jefferson Airplane and the eventual leader of successor group Jefferson Starship, has died at age 74. Kantner, who had survived close brushes with death as a younger man and recovered from a heart attack last year, died at a San Francisco hospital on Thursday after falling ill earlier in the week, former girlfriend and publicist Cynthia Bowman said. Few bands so embodied the idealism and hedonism of the late ’60s music scene in San Francisco as Jefferson Airplane. Kantner drew upon his passion for politics and science fiction to help write favorites such as Wooden Ships. The group was the first from the Bay Area to get a national record contract and achieve mainstream success, thanks to the classics Somebody to Love and White Rabbit.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
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