UNITED STATES
Trump booed at baseball
President Donald Trump was booed by baseball fans as he attended a World Series game with his wife, Melania, in Washington on Sunday. The Trumps attended the tie-breaking Game 5 of the series. After the game’s third inning, the stadium’s video display showed military members in attendance and then cut to Donald Trump. The cheering crowd immediately switched to loud and sustained boos. When the display cut back to the soldiers, the booing died down, but fans soon took up a chorus of “Lock him up!” — a play on the chant frequently heard at Donald Trump rallies against former secretary of state Hilary Rodham Clinton. Demonstrators sitting behind the home plate also unfurled “veterans for impeachment” banners during the game, in reference to the House of Representatives investigation into whether Donald Trump abused power by withholding military aid to Ukraine.
UNITED STATES
California official resigns
Representative Katie Hill on Sunday announced her resignation amid an ethics probe, saying that explicit photographs of her with a campaign staffer had been “weaponized” by her husband and political operatives. The California Democrat, 32, had been hand-picked for a coveted leadership seat, but in recent days, compromising photos of Hill and purported text messages from her to a campaign staffer surfaced online and in a British tabloid. The House Ethics Committee also had launched an investigation into whether Hill had an inappropriate relationship with an aide in her congressional office, which is prohibited under House rules. Hill has denied that and vowed to fight a “smear” campaign waged by a husband she called abusive. However, her relationship with the aide became a concern for House Democrats who have made equality in the workplace a particular priority. After apologizing for the relationship with a subordinate, Hill announced she was stepping aside. “It is with a broken heart that today I announce my resignation from Congress,” she wrote in a statement. “Having private photos of personal moments weaponized against me has been an appalling invasion of my privacy.”
UNITED STATES
Geena Davis honored
Actress Geena Davis on Sunday urged Hollywood filmmakers to take new steps to address a gender imbalance in media as she accepted an honorary Oscar for her work to promote more women on screen. While equality for women lags throughout US society, it is even worse in film and television, said Davis, the Thelma and Louise star who founded a nonprofit research group called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. “However abysmal the numbers are in real life, it’s far worse in fiction — where you make it up!” Davis said as she accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “We make it worse.”
COLOMBIA
Bogota elects female mayor
Bogota on Sunday elected its first female mayor in what is being hailed as an important advancement for women’s right. Claudia Lopez won the race for mayor of Bogota on a platform promising to combat corruption and advance equal rights for minority communities. The Alianza Verde candidate captured more than 1.1 million votes, or about 35 percent of the vote, defeating runner-up Carlos Galan by 2.7 percentage points.
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
The Venezuelan government on Monday said that it would close its embassies in Norway and Australia, and open new ones in Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe in a restructuring of its foreign service, after weeks of growing tensions with the US. The closures are part of the “strategic reassignation of resources,” Venezueland President Nicolas Maduro’s government said in a statement, adding that consular services to Venezuelans in Norway and Australia would be provided by diplomatic missions, with details to be shared in the coming days. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had received notice of the embassy closure, but no
A missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
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