BRAZIL
Flood death toll rises
Raging floods and mudslides have killed at least 57 people in the south and forced nearly 70,000 to flee their homes, the Civil Defense agency said on Saturday. At least 74 people were injured and another 67 were missing from the catastrophic flooding, it said. The toll did not include two people who died in an explosion at a flooded gas station in Porto Alegre, where rescue crews were attempting to refuel. The Guaiba River, which flows through the city, is at a historic high of 5.04m, well above the 4.76m that had stood as a record since devastating 1941 floods.
MEXICO
Bodies likely those of surfers
Three bodies recovered from a cliff-top shaft in the crime-hit Baja California are likely those of two Australian brothers and an American who disappeared on a surfing trip, local investigators said on Saturday. Although the bodies were in an “advanced state of decomposition” when they were hoisted out of a shaft a few steps from the edge of the Pacific Ocean cliff, authorities believe they were the bodies of the missing men based on certain physical descriptions, state Attorney General Maria Elena Andrade said. Another body found at the site had been there longer and was unconnected to the latest disappearances, officials said. Andrade said one line of inquiry is whether the deaths resulted from an attempt to steal the tourists’ pickup truck. The vehicle, which had been burned, was found nearby.
AFGHANISTAN
Last female diplomat resigns
An Afghan diplomat in India, who was appointed before the Taliban seized power in 2021 and said she was the only woman in the country’s diplomatic service, has resigned after reports emerged that she had been detained for allegedly smuggling gold. Zakia Wardak, the Afghan consul-general for Mumbai, on Saturday announced her resignation on X after Indian media reported that she was briefly detained at the city’s airport on allegations of smuggling 25 1kg bricks of gold from Dubai. Wardak made no mention of her reported detention or gold smuggling allegations, but wrote that over the past year she and her family had faced numerous personal attacks that “severely impacted my ability to effectively operate in my role and have demonstrated the challenges faced by women in Afghan society.”
GERMANY
Army meetings found online
The army faced more questions over security lapses after the Zeit Online news site on Saturday reported that thousands of its meetings were freely accessible online. Federal prosecutors are already investigating a secret army conversation on the Ukraine war that was wiretapped and ended up on Russian social media in March. The latest security flaw again concerned the online video-conference tool Webex. Zeit Online said it had been able to access army meetings by using simple search terms on the platform. “More than 6,000 meetings could be found online,” some of which were meant to be classified, it wrote.
UNITED STATES
TSA finds bag of snakes
Airport security officers in Miami found a slithering surprise late last month — a bag of snakes hidden in a passenger’s pants. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wrote on X that officers at the Miami International Airport found the small bag of snakes hidden in a passenger’s trousers on April 26 at a checkpoint. The post included a photograph of two small snakes that were found in what appeared to be a sunglasses bag.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
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