MEXICO
Dog leads police to grisly find
Police in the country’s south on Wednesday said that they found a dismembered human body after spotting a dog trotting down the street with a human arm in its mouth. It was the third time in the past month that canines have been seen in the country trotting off with human body parts. Police in the southern state of Oaxaca said they responded to a call on Wednesday morning about “a black dog that carried in its mouth a human arm.” State prosecutors later said the discovery led them to find other parts of the dismembered body in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Oaxaca City, the state capital. The victim’s cause of death and identity were not immediately known. Late last month, residents of a town in the state of Zacatecas saw a dog running down the street with a human head in its mouth. Police eventually managed to wrest the head away from the dog.
UNITED STATES
Quake hits west Texas
A strong earthquake shook a sparsely populated patch of desert in west Texas yesterday, causing tremors felt as far away as the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. The magnitude 5.3 earthquake struck at about 3:30pm, said Jim DeBerry, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the west Texas city of Midland. He said the strength of the quake means it likely caused damage in the remote oil patch and scrubland, but none had been reported so far. DeBerry said the epicenter was about 37km south of Mentone.
NIGERIA
At least 12 killed in attack
Gunmen have killed at least 12 people in an attack on a village in the northern state of Plateau, residents and the state governor said on Wednesday, the latest deadly incident fueled by growing pressure on land resources in the country. Violence between farmers and pastoralists has become increasingly common in the past few years as population growth leads to an expansion of the area dedicated to farming, leaving less land available for open grazing by nomads’ herds of cattle. A local resident, Bernard Matur, said the gunmen attacked Maikatako village on Monday evening.
SRI LANKA
Call to free protest leaders
The government is being urged to drop charges against two protest leaders detained for more than three months following the anti-government demonstrations that engulfed the island-nation earlier this year. Amnesty International also renewed its call for the country to repeal the harsh, civil war-era Prevention of Terrorism Act under which the two protest leaders are being held. Wasantha Mudalige and Galwewa Siridhamma, both university student leaders, were arrested in August and have been detained for more than 90 days under the act.
UNITED STATES
Mall security guard killed
A security guard was fatally shot inside a Chicago-area shopping mall on Wednesday, police said. Two men tried to rob a jewelry store at the mall, but were met by the security guard, police said. The robbers then pulled out weapons and fire several rounds. The shooting occurred just after noon at River Oaks Center in Calumet City. The guard was transported to a hospital, where he later died. About 20 people were inside the mall at the time of the shooting and police were working to interview them, Calumet City spokesman Sean Howard said.
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her