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.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant