BOLIVIA
Morales announces lawsuit
President Evo Morales on Saturday said that his nation has decided to file suit against Chile at the International Court of Justice over a water dispute. Morales’ nation says it owns the Silala spring in its southwest department of Potosi and that it is not being compensated by Chile for use of its waters, which flow across their shared border. However, Chile says that it is an international waterway. “We have decided as a pacifist country to go to The Hague so that Chile respects our water in Silala,” Morales said at a public event. Chilean Minister of Foreign Affairs Heraldo Munoz has said his nation could file a counterclaim. The move would mark the second legal action taken by Bolivia against Chile at the Netherlands-based court that oversees disputes between nations.
CHILE
Zika sexually transmitted
The nation has confirmed its first case of the Zika virus having been sexually transmitted, the Ministry of Health said in a statement on its Web site on Saturday. The mosquitoes that transmit the virus are not found in the nation, which has confirmed 10 cases of Zika involving people infected outside the country. The new case is that of a 46-year-old woman whose partner was infected while in Haiti. There is growing evidence that suggests a link between Zika and microcephaly in babies. The condition is defined by unusually small heads that can result in developmental problems.
MEXICO
Three killed in shootout
Police in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz said they killed three alleged criminals in a shootout, and then found three bodies the suspects had apparently been transporting. The confrontation occurred on Saturday on a rural highway. Veracruz state police said they approached a car that was parked suspiciously by the side of the road. Police said they came under fire from the car’s occupants, two men and a woman. All three were killed in the exchange of gunfire. When they secured the crime scene, police found a second vehicle with three more dead bodies. Local media reported the suspects had been attempting to dispose of the bodies at a nearby dump, but that could not be immediately confirmed.
UNITED STATES
‘Vaxxed’ axed at Tribeca
Robert De Niro is removing the anti-vaccination documentary Vaxxed from the lineup of his Tribeca Film Festival, after initially defending its inclusion. Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Conspiracy was set to be part of the film festival when it opens next month. The decision to include the film by anti-vaccination activist Andrew Wakefield came under fire, particularly since Wakefield’s contention that vaccines have a link to autism have been discredited. While De Niro on Friday defended the decision to include the film, he released a statement on Saturday saying he had reversed his decision. De Niro, who has a child with autism, said he had hoped to provide an opportunity for conversation surrounding an issue “that is deeply personal to me and my family.” However, he said that after he and Tribeca organizers reviewed it, “we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.” He said members of the scientific community had also reviewed it with him. The Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 13 to April 24.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency