CHINA
Tesla to recall 285,000 cars
Electric vehicle giant Tesla is to “recall” more than 285,000 vehicles from the market after an investigation found issues with its assisted driving software that could cause road collisions, a government regulator announced late on Friday. Tesla would contact affected users to upgrade their vehicle’s software remotely for free, a State Administration for Market Regulation notice said, adding that it affects some imported and domestically manufactured Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. “Due to issues with the cruise control system ... the driver can easily activate the cruise control function by mistake,” the agency said in the notice.
MALI
Six soldiers killed in raid
Six soldiers were on Friday killed in a raid in the center of the war-torn Sahel state, in a violent day which also saw 15 UN peacekeepers wounded in a car-bomb attack further north. The UN wrote on Twitter that an evacuation was under way after a car bomb struck a temporary base near Tarkint. German Minister of Defence Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said that 12 of the peacekeepers were German and that three were seriously injured. Two of the three were in stable condition, she said in a statement, while one underwent surgery. All of the wounded have been evacuated by helicopter, she added. One Belgian soldier was also injured in the attack, the Belgian Ministry of Defence said.
FRANCE
Killer of rapist freed
A woman who killed her rapist husband was on Friday spared any more jail time. Valerie Bacot, who shot her husband, Daniel Polette, dead in 2016, was sentenced to a four-year term, with three years suspended. She walked free from the court in Saone-et-Loire, as she had already served a year in pretrial detention. Announcing the jury’s decision, Judge Celine Therme said the court had recognized the “terror” that Bacot had endured for years. Prosecutors had told the court that the 40-year-old should not go back to prison, as she was “very clearly a victim” of her tyrannical husband.
MEXICO
Shoot-out leaves 18 dead
A shoot-out between suspected drug cartels on Friday left 18 people dead, a government official said. The gunfight happened in a remote area of Zacatecas state, government spokeswoman Rocio Aguilar said. Drug-related violence has claimed more than 300,000 lives in Mexico since 2006, when the government started deploying federal troops to fight the cartels. “There were 18 dead, and the confrontation occurred in the community of San Juan Capistrano, in the municipality of Valparaiso,” Aguilar added. The battle was between rival gangs fighting over turf, she told Milenio TV.
UNITED STATES
Death toll rises in collapse
Four people were on Friday confirmed dead and 159 unaccounted for following the collapse of an oceanfront apartment building near Miami Beach, as rescue teams scoured a mountain of rubble in a desperate search for survivors. The state’s governor called for full light to be shed without delay on the causes of the freak disaster, which reduced one wing of a 12-story tower to a gigantic pile of debris. Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said late on Friday that authorities were still without news of 159 people who might have been asleep in Champlain Tower South at the time of the collapse, fueling fears of a much higher death toll.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter