UNITED STATES
Senator cashes in on assault
A jury on Wednesday awarded Republican Senator Rand Paul more than US$580,000 over an attack by a neighbor that left him with broken ribs and fluid in his lungs, media reported. Rene Boucher, who assaulted the junior senator from Kentucky in 2017, owes US$375,000 in punitive damages, US$200,000 for pain and suffering and US$7,834 for medical expenses, local media reports said. “This lawsuit wasn’t about me. It was about all of us and what we find acceptable as a society. We need to send a clear message that violence is not the answer — anytime, anywhere,” Paul wrote on Twitter. Boucher was arrested in 2017 after Kentucky State Police responded to a reported assault at Paul’s Warren County home. The New York Times, citing neighbors and Republican lawmakers familiar with the incident, reported that the assault stemmed from a landscaping dispute.
UNITED STATES
Texas man put to death
The US on Wednesday carried out its first execution for the year, putting to death a Texas man convicted of murdering a police officer 30 years ago during an attempted robbery. Robert Mitchell Jennings, 61, was pronounced dead at 6:33pm at a prison in Huntsville. Jennings gunned down Elston Howard in a Houston adult bookstore on July 19, 1988, according to a court filing and local media. Howard, 24, was in the middle of arresting an employee of the bookstore for illegally showing pornographic movies when Jennings entered, having just robbed a neighboring adult movie theater. Jennings walked up to Howard and shot him twice. After the officer fell, Jennings fired again. He then demanded money from the store clerk before fleeing to his getaway vehicle, where he told an accomplice he had shot a “security guard.”
UNITED STATES
Toddler escapes rhino pen
A toddler who fell into a rhinoceros exhibit at a Florida zoo earlier this month suffered bruises to her chest, stomach, back and behind her right ear after being bumped by two rhinos. A report on the incident released on Wednesday shows the 21-month-old girl also had a bruised lung and lacerated liver. The report by state wildlife investigators says the 12kg girl fell through the bars at a rhinoceros enclosure during a private tour with two employees at the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Florida, on New Year’s Day. The report says two rhinoceros pressed the girl into the enclosure’s metal poles with their snouts before she was removed by family members and zoo staff.
UNITED STATES
Seals take over beach
A colony of elephant seals took over a beach in Northern California during the government shutdown when there was no staff to discourage the animals from congregating in the popular tourist area, an official said. Now they are not going anywhere. About 60 adult seals that gave birth to 35 pups took over a beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, knocking down a fence and moving into the parking lot, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Wednesday. The park north of San Francisco is home to a colony of about 1,500 elephant seals that tend to frequent another beach, said park spokesman John Dell’Osso. “Sometimes you go out with tarps and you shake the tarps and it annoys them and they move the other direction,” he said. However, nobody was at work to address the seal migration. Officials have no plans to move the animals while some of them nurse their pups.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate