CATALONIA
Puigdemont to stay in exile
Fugitive Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont on Saturday said he had had no intention of handing himself in to authorities during a brief visit to Spain earlier this week. Puigdemont, who fled abroad after leading a failed 2017 independence bid for Catalonia, defied an arrest warrant to return to Spain on Thursday. He delivered a speech to thousands gathered outside the Catalan regional parliament in Barcelona before slipping away. “I never had any intention of handing myself in to a judicial authority that is neither competent to persecute us... nor to render justice, but is motivated by political objectives,” Puigdemont said in a video published on social media site X. On Friday, Puigdemont had revealed he was back in Belgium, where he has lived in exile for the past seven years. The 61-year-old had been hoping to enter the Catalan regional parliament building to take part in a vote to pick a new leader for the wealthy northeastern region. Instead, he disappeared into the crowd as the Catalan regional police force launched a search. Speaking from his home in Waterloo, close to the Belgian capital, Puigdemont said he had been hoping to “enter parliament to take part in the session and exercise my right to speak and to vote.” However, a heavy police presence at the park near parliament where he gave a speech had convinced him to abandon those plans to avoid “certain arrest,” he said.
UGANDA
Landslide kills eight people
A landslide at a landfill in the capital, Kampala, has killed eight people, the city’s authorities said on Saturday. The incident happened late on Friday after heavy rainfall when sections of the landfill collapsed, covering some nearby houses, Ugandan media reported. Kampala Capital City Authority said government and Red Cross personnel were searching the site and had rescued 14 people. “On a very sad note, eight people have so far been found dead, six adults and two children. The rescue operation is still ongoing,” the authority said on its X account. The landfill, known as Kiteezi, has served as Kampala’s sole garbage dump for decades and had turned into a big hill. Residents have long complained of hazardous waste from the site polluting the environment and posing a danger to people. Parts of Uganda have been experiencing heavy rains in recent weeks causing flooding and landslides, although no fatalities had previously been reported.
UTAH
‘Toilet Bowl’ collapses
A large geological feature in southern Utah known as the “Double Arch,” the “Hole in the Roof” and sometimes the “Toilet Bowl” has collapsed, US National Park Service officials said on Friday. No injuries were reported. The popular arch in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area fell on Thursday, and park rangers suspect that changing water levels and erosion from waves in Lake Powell contributed to its demise. Michelle Kerns, superintendent of the recreation area that spans the border of Utah and Arizona, said the collapse serves as a reminder to protect the mineral resources that surround the lake. “These features have a life span that can be influenced or damaged by manmade interventions,” she said in a statement. The arch was formed from 190 million-year-old Navajo sandstone originating in the late Triassic to early Jurassic periods. The fine-grained sandstone has endured erosion from weather, wind and rain, the statement said. The recreation area encompasses nearly 5,180 square kilometers and is popular among boaters and hikers.
‘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
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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,
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