Foreign News
Four children found alive in Amazon after 40 days
Four children have been found alive more than a month after their plane crashed in Colombia’s Amazon jungle, the country’s president has said.
The siblings, aged 13, nine, four and a one-year-old baby, were on board the plane with their mother, a pilot and a co-pilot when it crashed on 1 May. Their mother and the other adults on board the plane died.
President Gustavo Petro said finding the children after weeks of searching was “a joy for the whole country”. He called it a “magical day”, adding: “They were alone, they themselves achieved an example of total survival which will remain in history. “These children are today the children of peace and the children of Colombia.”
A massive search began and in May, rescuers recovered items left behind by the children including a child’s drinking bottle, a pair of scissors, a hair tie and a makeshift shelter. Small footprints were also discovered, which led search teams to believe they had survived the collision.
The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group and members of their community hoped that their knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills would give them a better chance of surviving. Indigenous people joined the search operation and helicopters broadcasted a message from the children’s grandmother, recorded in the Huitoto language, urging them to stop moving to make them easier to locate.
Colombia’s president came under criticism last month when a tweet published on his account announced that the children had been found. He erased the tweet the next day saying that the information – which his office had been given by Colombia’s child welfare agency – could not be confirmed.
Petro shared a photograph of several members of the military and Indigenous community tending to the siblings, who had been missing for 40 days.He said the children were now receiving medical attention – and that he had spoken to their grandfather, who told him “the mother jungle returned them”.
The Cessna 206 aircraft the children and their mother had been travelling on was flying from Araracuara, in Amazonas province, to San José del Guaviare, when it issued a mayday alert due to engine failure.
The bodies of the three adults who had been with them were found at the crash site by the army.
Preliminary information from the civil aviation authority suggested the children escaped the wreckage and had wandered into the rain forest to find help.
(BBC)
US congressman Henry Cuellar was held up at gunpoint while his car was stolen in Washington on Monday evening, according to local media reports.
Cuellar, a Republican from Texas, was reportedly parking about a mile (1.6km) from the US Capitol when he was approached by three armed people.
He was unharmed and his vehicle was later recovered. US Capitol Police said in a statement that detectives were working to track down the suspects.
The incident happened at about 21:30 local time (01:30 GMT) in the city’s south-eastern Navy Yard neighborhood. As well as the car, the 68-year-old’s phone and iPad were also taken, according to Mr Cuellar’s chief of staff Jacob Hochberg. It is not clear if these have been returned.
The number of carjackings in Washington has been on the rise in recent years. In 2021, the local police department launched a task-force to deal with the issue.
According to the latest police figures, there have been 750 incidents of carjacking in the city so far this year and 75% of these offences involved guns.
Mr Cuellar is currently serving his 10th term in the US House of Representatives for Texas’ 28th congressional district.
(BBC)
Former President Donald Trump has attacked a judge and prosecutor in a day of courtroom drama as he attended the opening of a fraud trial that could threaten his business empire.
On entering the room on Monday dressed in a blue suit, Mr Trump – who turned up voluntarily – looked ahead as he walked past the prosecutor who brought the case. State’s attorney general Letitia James, sitting in the front row, averted her gaze. Their paths did not cross for the rest of opening statements as both sides laid out their case.
Mr Trump, the Trump Organization, several executives and two of his children – Donald Jr and Eric – are the defendants in the civil trial in New York Superior Court. They are accused of fraud, falsification of business records, issuing false financial statements and conspiracy.
As the trial got under way, the former president occasionally glanced in the direction of Judge Arthur Engoron as he addressed the court.
Moments beforehand, in a tirade outside court that echoed across the chamber, Mr Trump had called the judge a “rogue adjudicator”.
Ms James was not spared either in his remarks to reporters at the top of the courtroom steps. “It’s a scam, it’s a sham. Just so you know, my financial statements are phenomenal,” Mr Trump added. “There was no crime – the crime was against me.”
Given the former president’s personal attacks, observers expected a tense atmosphere in the cramped confines of the court. But the three key figures in the legal drama had minimal direct interactions.
While prosecutors set out their case, Mr Trump for the most part sat still, occasionally whispering to his legal team.
Ms James kept her eyes on the lawyer unveiling a visual presentation that accompanied her team’s opening statements.
Proceedings began with her team accusing Mr Trump and his co-defendants of intentionally and persistently committing fraud, which reaped Mr Trump over $100m (£82.7m).
Last week Judge Engoron ruled against Mr Trump in a central claim of the lawsuit, finding that he had overvalued his properties by hundreds of millions of dollars in order to get favourable bank loans.
Mr Trump’s lawyers took the stand shortly afterwards, attacking the New York attorney general’s arguments. Alina Habba said Ms James’ goal as attorney general was to “go to work, get Trump and go home”.
She claimed that Mr Trump did not inflate the value of his assets – including his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Real estate was malleable, she said, and his properties were “Mona Lisas” – Mar-a-Lago would sell for at least a billion dollars, she argued.
But before lunch, proceedings turned increasingly fractious. Mr Trump’s attorney, Chris Kise, argued with Judge Engoron about issues including whether expert opinion counted as testimony.
And Ms Habba’s attacks on Ms James drew Judge Engoron’s ire. The judge said he had already dismissed claims that the suit was politically motivated.
The afternoon in court proved calmer, with former Trump accountant Donald Bender testifying as the first witness called by the attorney general’s office. Mr Bender said he had worked on Trump’s tax returns and completed accounting work for Mr Trump’s corporate entities. He testified in a criminal trial against the Trump Organization in Manhattan last year, claiming the company sought to evade taxes on bonuses and other luxury benefits.
His two-hour testimony on Monday – largely focused on technical questions about his work for the Trump Organization – capped off the first day of the three-month long trial.
The case will be decided by Judge Engoron, not a jury. None of the defendants will face jail time if convicted, because this is a civil case not a criminal one.
Ms James is seeking $250m (£207m) and sanctions that could prevent the Trumps from doing business in the state of New York. There is even the possibility that Mr Trump could lose some of the properties that have become a signature part of his brand. The stakes could not be higher.
(BBC)
In 2012, Nobel Prize-winner Dr Denis Mukwege was attacked by gunmen – a consequence, he believes, of criticising the Democratic Republic of Congo government’s policies on gender-based violence.
A decade later, living under the protection of UN peacekeepers, Dr Mukwege has launched another challenge against the nation’s leadership. He will be running for president in elections due in December, he announced on Monday.
Known as “Dr Miracle”, the 63-year-old rose to global fame for performing reconstructive surgery on women who had been raped in the country’s war-torn east. His hospital has so far treated more than 50,000 survivors of sexual violence, while he has cemented himself as one of the world’s foremost experts in his field.
Dr Mukwege was born in 1955 in Bukavu, a city in eastern DR Congo. After numerous visits to see sick members of the community with his preacher father, he decided he wanted to become a doctor. He began his training at a medical school across the border in Burundi, later studying gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Angers in France.
In 1998, he set up a clinic in his home city. The doctor intended Panzi hospital to be for maternal health, with his team treating new or expecting mothers. However, when war broke out, more and more women came to the clinic with gruesome injuries from sexual violence committed by various armed groups.
In 2013, Dr Mukwege told the BBC that rape in eastern DR Congo was part of a ‘stratergy’ to force communities away from their land and resources.
For three decades the region has been wracked by conflict, with numerous armed groups battling for gold and other valuable resources. Different militias have been accused of carrying out indiscriminate rape – tens of thousands of women are thought to have been attacked over the course of the conflict, Amnesty International has reported.
Dr Mukwege told the BBC about his first experience of treating a woman who had been raped and mutilated by armed men. “After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs,” Dr Mukwege said of the first rape survivor that came to his clinic. “The real shock came three months later. Forty-five women came to us with the same story.”
Along with his colleagues, Dr Mukwege has since treated tens of thousands of victims and become “the world’s leading specialist in the treatment of wartime sexual violence”, according to the Nobel Prize.
(BBC)
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