ITALY
Chinese cops begin patrols
Chinese police officers are in Italy to start patrols with Italian officers in Rome and Milan in a two-week experiment. Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said on Monday that the aim is to make Chinese tourists feel safe and added that it is the first time China has sent police officers to Europe for such a project. Starting yesterday, two Chinese uniformed police officers were to patrol with their Italian counterparts in Rome, while two others were to patrol with local police in Milan. For the second week, the Chinese will switch cities. The Chinese, who speak Italian, received training from Italian officials in Beijing. About 3 million Chinese tourists visit Italy annually.
UNITED STATES
Sting nets would-be bomber
A Florida man has been arrested and charged with trying to blow up a synagogue with a fake bomb following an FBI sting operation. James Gonzalo Medina, 40, was accused of intending to use a “weapon of mass destruction” at a synagogue in the city of Aventura near Miami, the US Department of Justice said on Monday. The FBI had earlier placed him under surveillance after he expressed anti-Semitic sentiments to an undercover informant. The criminal complaint says Medina claimed to have converted to Islam about four years ago and planned to claim that the Islamic State group had planned the attack. After Medina studied the synagogue, he was given an inert device he believed to be a bomb. He was arrested on Friday last week while en route to the synagogue.
MEXICO
Severed heads discovered
Two severed human heads were found in Mexico City over the weekend, authorities said on Monday — gruesome discoveries that are more common in other regions of the nation. A man’s head was found in a suitcase on Sunday in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Tepito, an official in the city prosecutor’s office said. Elsewhere, another head was found on Saturday, along with a hand and two forearms inside a black plastic bag that was dumped on a street corner in Atlampa District. More body parts from the same individual were found in bags discarded in two other municipalities, Mexico City prosecutors said. They said the bodies have been tentatively identified as those of a 23-year-old and a 27-year-old. Both have criminal records and were from a municipality in northern Mexico City. City officials have insisted that drug cartels do not operate in the metropolitan area of more than 20 million people.
GUATEMALA
Extortion gang raided
Security forces on Monday launched raids on one of the nation’s biggest gangs, arresting 72 suspected members of a cell specializing in extortion, officials said. More than 120 raids were carried out by nearly 300 law enforcement officers and prosecutors in the south, center and northeast of the nation. “The operation is focused on fighting the scourge of extortion,” Chief State Prosecutor Thelma Aldana told a news conference. The raids targeted members of the notorious Barrio 18 gang, who formed a ring known as Solo para Locos (Only for Crazies) that strong-armed public transport companies plying routes between the capital and southern coastal areas, the public ministry said. Aldana said the extortion cell earned nearly US$400,000 a year from its illegal activities and was linked to 30 murders. A spokeswoman for the public ministry said the raids turned up weapons and ammunition, grenades and other explosives, mobile phones and cash.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
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