BELGIUM
Workers killed in collapse
Five construction workers were confirmed dead on Saturday, a day after a school construction site partially collapsed in Antwerp. The last two bodies were pulled out the rubble on Saturday afternoon, Antwerp’s fire department said, meaning that all the missing victims were now accounted for. King Philippe of Belgium visited the scene accompanied by Prime Minister Alexander De Croo. Two of the dead were from Portugal and Romania, police told local media, while the nationality of the other dead workers was not clear. However, when three people were still missing, rescue workers had said they were looking for two more Portuguese and one Russian.
UNITED STATES
Man rages over cheese
An angry Florida man pulled a gun on a drive-thru worker because she forgot the cream cheese with his bagel, Miami Gardens Police said. The employee just happened to be the daughter of the police chief. Police said the man became angry at a Starbucks drive-thru when they messed up his order earlier this week. He returned to the window, screaming at the employee. She asked whether he had paid for the cream cheese, at which point he became enraged and pulled out a gun, according to an arrest report. Police Chief Delma Noel-Pratt told CBS4 that the experience traumatized her 23-year-old daughter. The chief’s daughter told police that the man did not point the gun at her, but that she feared he would hurt her if she did not give him the cream cheese.
MEXICO
At least 15 die in attacks
Gunmen aboard a number of vehicles on Saturday staged attacks in several neighborhoods in the city of Reynosa near the US border and at least 15 people died in clashes that caused widespread panic, police said. The Tamaulipas State agency coordinating security forces said in a statement that the attacks began in the early afternoon in several neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city, which borders McAllen, Texas. The agency said one person died during an attack on police near a border bridge, but it was not clear if the others were shot in random attacks or were targeted. Authorities said they detained a person who had two women, apparently kidnapped, in the trunk of his car, and said they seized three vehicles.
SWITZERLAND
Shots for children planned
The country plans to allow children aged 12 to 15 to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as next week, the government’s vaccine chief Christoph Berger said in an interview published yesterday by the Neue Zurcher Zeitung. The development comes two weeks after the country’s medicines regulators, Swissmedic, extended its temporary ordinary authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to include people in that age group. The drug regulator is separately considering Moderna’s application to extend the authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine in the country to 12 to 17-year-olds.
UNITED KINGDOM
Former speaker defects
Former House of Commons speaker John Bercow said he has left the Conservative Party to join the opposition Labour Party, launching a blistering attack on Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In an interview with the Observer newspaper published yesterday, the former lawmaker said the Conservative Party under Johnson was “reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic.”
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
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