SPAIN
‘Pink Panther’ gang busted
Police on Friday said they had arrested five alleged members of the so-called “Pink Panther” gang of jewel thieves in Barcelona. A special operations unit from the Catalan police was waiting when the thieves, one armed with a pistol, tried to rob a jewelery store on the city’s famous Passeig de Gracia avenue, a police statement said. The operation was part of a larger investigation with different crime units in Spain and with the collaboration of the Serbian and German police, the statement said. Police were able to recover the jewelery the gang was trying to steal.
ARGENTINA
Rights leader warrant lifted
A judge lifted an arrest warrant on Friday for the 87-year-old president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights group in a highly politicized embezzlement case. The investigating magistrate had ordered Hebe de Bonafini’s arrest on Thursday, but hundreds of supporters massed outside the group’s offices to prevent police from removing her. The judge agreed on Friday to allow her to be questioned without being jailed. A date was not set. De Bonafini had twice refused to submit to questioning in a case involving the alleged diversion of nearly US$14 million in public funds earmarked for a low-incoming housing project registered under the Mothers’ name.
ENGLAND
Man charged in knife attack
A 19-year-old man on Friday was charged with the murder of a 64-year-old US woman in a knife attack that wounded five others in Central London on Wednesday, London Metropolitan Police said. The man, Zakaria Bulham, was also charged with five counts of attempted murder in relation to the individuals injured in the attack, police said. Bulham, a Norwegian man of Somalian origin, began attacking people on Wednesday evening in Russell Square, a park near the site of a 2005 suicide bombing. He was arrested on the same day. At the time, police said there was no evidence the attack was terrorism-related.
PANAMA
Stiglitz quits committee
Nobel Prize-winning US economist Joseph Stiglitz has resigned from a committee of international experts named to help reform Panama’s financial services sector after the Panama Papers scandal, the government said on Friday. Stiglitz and respected Swiss criminal law professor Mark Pieth quit the committee over “internal differences,” said a statement from the government, without giving further details. The Panama Papers scandal erupted in April, when media outlets around the world published details on dodgy offshore financial dealings gleaned from millions of leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
KUWAIT
Filipina arrested for IS links
Authorities have arrested a Filipina accused of pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) and planning to launch an attack in the state, news agency KUNA reported on Friday. The woman, born in 1984, entered the country in June as a housekeeper and has been in contact with the Islamic State’s affiliate in Libya, the Ministry of the Interior said in a statement published by KUNA. Security forces monitored one of the e-mail accounts run by the woman and found messages in which she had contacted the Libyan militant group and had been using “a fake name and nickname to evade monitoring,” the ministry said.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
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