UNITED STATES
Stowaway tries again
A woman with a history of stowing away on airliners was arrested on Tuesday for attempting to sneak onto a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, authorities said. The arrest of Marilyn Hartman, 69, came two weeks after a judge rejected a plea deal that would have given her probation for a previous attempt to stow away on a flight. Hartman, who is being held on a trespassing charge, allegedly left the facility where she had been staying while on electronic monitoring. The device allowed Cook County sheriff’s deputies to track her as she headed for O’Hare. Deputies activated an alarm on Hartman’s device as she neared Terminal 1, where she was arrested. The Sheriff’s Department said it plans to seek a felony escape charge for Hartman.
HONDURAS
President implicated in trial
A Honduran accountant on Tuesday testified in a New York court that he fled his country because he felt his life was in danger after witnessing two meetings in which an alleged drug trafficker paid bribes to now-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez in 2013. In both meetings, the subject was “protection and receiving drugs,” said Jose Sanchez, a pseudonym prosecutors used for his protection. At one, Hernandez was given US$10,000 and at another the amount was US$15,000, the accountant said. The accountant said he felt fear seeing Hernandez and a drug trafficker sitting at the same table. That alleged drug trafficker was Geovanny Fuentes Ramirez, whose New York trial is in its second week. “I was seeing the candidate for the presidency meeting with a drug trafficker,” he said.
UNITED STATES
Hacker gets three years
A Florida teenager was on Tuesday sentenced to three years in prison for his role in hacking the Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls, and scamming people around the globe out of more than US$100,000 in bitcoin. Graham Ivan Clark, 18, pleaded guilty to multiple fraud charges as part of a deal with Hillsborough County prosecutors, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Clark was the mastermind behind the scheme to take over prominent Twitter accounts and send tweets seeking bitcoin payments, prosecutors said. During the security breach on July 15 last year, tweets were sent from the accounts of former president Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
UNITED STATES
Crowder’s video pulled
YouTube said it had removed a video uploaded by comedian Steven Crowder for contravening the platform’s COVID-19 content policies. The video Web site on Tuesday took down the most recent episode of his show, Louder With Crowder. “This video violates our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming that the death rates of COVID-19 are less severe or equally as severe as the common cold or seasonal flu,” a YouTube spokesman wrote in a statement. “As a result, the video was removed from Steven Crowder’s channel.” The discussion, which claimed it would uncover all the lies about COVID-19 and the “liars who told them,” had amassed more than 500,000 views before it was pulled. YouTube said that Crowder’s video was flagged by its enforcement system when it was uploaded and blocked from running ads, so Crowder did not make money from it.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
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