UNITED STATES
Polanski’s request denied
A Los Angeles County judge on Monday denied a request from film director Roman Polanski that his decades-old sexual abuse case be resolved in his absence. Judge Scott Gordon of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County refused to provide Polanski, 83, the clarity he sought on how he might be detained and sentenced were he to return to the nation. Gordon found that the requests mirrored those Polanski had made before and were denied by other judges. “There is no sufficient or compelling basis for reconsideration of these issues,” he said. Polanski fled the country in 1978 when he feared a judge would withdraw a deal he struck after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. The court has ruled that Polanski, who has evaded extradition for decades while living in Switzerland, Poland and elsewhere, must return to the US to resolve the case.
ECUADOR
Julian Assange taunts Lasso
WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange is celebrating the results of the presidential runoff with a blast at the losing candidate who had pledged to evict him from the nation’s embassy in London. Assange has been holed up at the diplomatic mission since 2012, when President Rafael Correa granted him asylum. Before the election, conservative banker Guillermo Lasso had said he would evict the Australian activist, who is wanted for extradition by Sweden, within 30 days of taking office. Ruling party candidate Lenin Moreno, the apparent winner in Sunday’s tight race, said he would allow him to stay. Shortly after the results became known, Assange took a jab at Lasso’s pledge on Twitter. “I cordially invite Lasso to leave Ecuador within 30 days (with or without his tax haven millions),” he wrote, alluding to allegations that the banker had stashed money abroad.
UNITED STATES
Teen pleads guilty to plot
A New Jersey teen on Monday pleaded guilty to a plot allegedly inspired by the Islamic State group to kill Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the country. The Department of Justice said Santos Colon, 15 years old at the time, sought to recruit a sniper to shoot the pope in Philadelphia on Sept. 27, 2015. Colon also allegedly planned to set off explosives. However, the teen unwittingly recruited an undercover FBI agent for the job and was arrested quietly 12 days before the event. Court documents said Colon sought to carry out the act in support of the Islamic State group and that he had used the adopted name Ahmad Shakoor. In a plea bargain with prosecutors, Colon, now 17, agreed to forego trial and plead guilty as an adult to one charge of providing material support to a terror group. With the deal, prosecutors dropped three other charges filed against him as a juvenile.
MEXICO
‘Norte’ closes over killings
A newspaper in the border city of Ciudad Juarez is shutting down due to the risk of violence after a string of killings of reporters around the country, the newspaper’s owner said on Monday. Norte ran a headline that said “Adios” (Goodbye) on the front page of its Sunday edition. Its owner, Oscar Cantu, said in a letter that he was shutting the newspaper down after 27 years. “No company, no business is worth more than a person’s life,” Cantu said in an interview. Cantu pointed to a string of murders of journalists, including the death of Miroslava Breach, who was shot multiple times last month in the northern state of Chihuahua. At least 16 journalists have been killed in the nation since 2015, the Committee to Project Journalists said.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
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