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.
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on Sunday announced a deal with the chief of Kurdish-led forces that includes a ceasefire, after government troops advanced across Kurdish-held areas of the country’s north and east. Syrian Kurdish leader Mazloum Abdi said he had agreed to the deal to avoid a broader war. He made the decision after deadly clashes in the Syrian city of Raqa on Sunday between Kurdish-led forces and local fighters loyal to Damascus, and fighting this month between the Kurds and government forces. The agreement would also see the Kurdish administration and forces integrate into the state after months of stalled negotiations on
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