15 suspected drug smugglers killed by Thai border patrol

MADRID (AP) — Spain’s National Court says it has charged a 74-year-old retired man with terrorism for allegedly sending six letters containing explosive material to Spain’s prime minister and the U.S. and Ukrainian embassies in the country. The as-yet-unidentified man appeared before a judge in Madrid on Friday and was detained without bail. The suspect, referred to only by the initials PGP in court documents, was charged with six separate terrorism offenses after being arrested in the northern city of Miranda de Ebro on Wednesday. The man was charged with the manufacture and use of explosive devices for terrorist purposes, according to court documents. Two of the alleged offenses were classified as aggravated as they involved members of the government.

Sayfullo Saipov was found guilty of murder by a federal jury for using a rented truck to fatally strike eight people on a New York City bike path on Halloween Day in 2017. Jurors deliberated about six hours over two days in the case involving the deadliest terrorist attack New York had seen since 9/11 — which left six foreign tourists and two Americans dead.

Shawn Denning, the top officer in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, used the app Wickr to run drug deals because he thought it was safe, prosecutors said.

BANGKOK (AP) — A court in Thailand sentenced a 27-year-old political activist to 28 years in prison on Thursday for posting messages on Facebook that it said defamed the country’s monarchy, while two young women charged with the same offense continued a hunger strike after being hospitalized. The...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican immigration authorities say they have found 57 Guatemalan adolescents packed into a trailer on a highway near the U.S. border. The National Immigration Institute says that during an inspection Thursday officers discovered the 43 boys and 14 girls were crammed into the truck’s trailer, along with eight men and a woman and her daughter. All of the adolescents were considered unaccompanied minors, meaning they had no relatives or parents with them. The driver of the vehicle was detained. The minors were taken to a child welfare facility. Children are frequently smuggled through Mexico to rejoin parents or relatives who have already emigrated to the the United States.

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - San Francisco police released dramatic video footage on Friday of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, being struck by a hammer as police rushed in to stop his attacker.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — An investigation by the global chemical weapons watchdog established there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Syria’s air force dropped two cylinders containing chlorine gas on the city of Douma in April 2018, killing 43 people. A report published Friday by a team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons offered the latest confirmation that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons during his country’s grinding civil war. Syria joined the OPCW in 2013 under pressure from the international community after being blamed for another deadly chemical weapon attack. It doesn’t recognize the investigation team’s authority and has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — A 16-year-old in Denmark has been charged with joining an international neo-Nazi group and having tried to recruit another person to the group, which Danish authorities described as a terrorist group. The teenager, who was not identified, was also accused of sharing militant extremist material as well as bomb and weapons manuals. A prosecutor said Thursday that authorities believe the teenager assumed a leadership role in the Feuerkrieg Division which has been advocating for a race war and promotes some of the most extreme views of the white supremacist movement.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Officials in southern Poland say two people have been found dead after an explosion demolished half of an old Evangelical parish house in the city of Katowice. The regional governor said Friday’s explosion injured seven others. He said two women initially were reported missing but firefighters found their bodies in the rubble in the afternoon. Firefighters say gas that was used for heating and cooking in the three-story brick house most likely caused the explosion. A hospital said two girls aged 5 and 3 were admitted with non life-threatening injuries.

Police arrested Micki Witthoeft on traffic charges this month on the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. D.C. AG declined to charge her.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. special operations forces have killed a senior Islamic State group official and 10 other terrorist operatives in remote northern Somalia, the Biden administration announced Thursday. The operation carried out on Wednesday targeted Bilal al-Sudani, a key financial facilitator for the global terrorist organization, in a...

More than 7,500 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti have been approved to come to the United States under a program set up by the Biden administration earlier this month, which administration officials have cited as contributing to a drop in border crossings, according to data obtained by CNN. President...

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorders recovered from the Jan. 15 plane crash in Nepal are being sent to Singapore for analysis to identify the cause of the crash that killed all 72 people on board. The twin-engine ATR 72-500 flown by Yeti Airlines crashed on its approach to the airport in the resort town of Pokhara in the Himalayan foothills. Some aviation experts say video taken from the ground of the plane’s last moments indicated it went into a stall, although it’s unclear why. It was carrying 68 passengers, including 15 foreign nationals, as well as four crew members.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Turkey has summoned the Danish ambassador and accused Denmark of endorsing a “hate crime” after an anti-Islam activist burned two copies of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, in a one-man protest in Copenhagen. Far-right activist Rasmus Paludan, who holds both Danish and Swedish citizenship, had already infuriated Turkey by staging a Quran-burning protest in Sweden on Jan. 21. On Friday, he replicated the stunt in front of a mosque and the Turkish Embassy in Copenhagen. He vowed to repeat his action every Friday until Sweden is admitted into NATO. The Danish ambassador was summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry where Turkish officials “strongly condemned the permission given to this provocative act which clearly constitutes a hate crime.”

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Two investigative journalists for a major daily newspaper in Finland have been convicted of revealing national defense secrets in an April 2017 article that prosecutors said included information from classified documents. Finnish media said the prosecution had asked for the Helsingin Sanomat reporters to receive prison sentences of six months to one year. Instead, a judge fined them. The Helsinki District Court judge on Friday also acquitted the newspaper’s acting manager at the time. All three had denied wrongdoing. The reporters argued the information they published was public. Finnish broadcaster YLE says the judge found the article contained several pieces of information that should have been kept secret to protect Finland’s security.

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — Croatian police on Friday brought in for questioning several people over the disappearance last October of a luxury yacht from an Adriatic Sea marina where it was held there under international sanctions in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The disappearance of the 35-meter Irina Vu from the marina on the island of Murter was only recently noticed and reported by local media. The yacht reportedly sailed to Turkey and another one was left in its place. The incident has triggered public criticism of the authorities in Croatia.

BEIRUT (AP) — Angry protesters in several Middle Eastern countries have gathered to denounce the recent desecration of Islam’s holy book by far-right activists in Sweden and the Netherlands. Friday’s protests in Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq came days after a far-right activist from Denmark received permission from police to stage a protest outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm where he burned the Quran, Islam’s holy book. Days later, the leader of a Dutch far-right movement in the Netherlands tore pages out of a copy of the Quran near the Dutch parliament and stomped on the pages. Iraq’s powerful Shiite cleric Muqata al-Sadr also condemned the desecration of the Quran, while protesters in Beirut burned Swedish and Dutch flags.

MADRID (AP) — A spate of gender-based violence, coupled with the early release of several sex offenders, has increased pressure on Spain’s left-wing government, which strongly plays up its feminist credentials, to do more to protect women from abuse. Following an urgent meeting Friday, the country’s Equality Ministry proposed housing and income support for abuse victims but said there was no need to tighten a law that has allowed some sex offenders to review and reduce their sentences. At least six women have been killed — allegedly by their current or former partners — so far this year, according to the latest government records. The Equality Ministry found that some of these victims had been living with their alleged killers for economic reasons.