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South Korea’s Kim Jong Yang was elected as Interpol’s president on Wednesday, edging out a veteran of Russia’s security services who was strongly opposed by the United States, Britain and other European nations. The U.S. and others expressed concern that if Russia’s candidate had been elected, that would have led to further Kremlin abuses of Interpol’s red notice system to go after political opponents and fugitive dissidents.
In a rare moment of direct criticism, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked President Trump on Wednesday for the president’s description of a federal judge who ruled against his asylum policy as “an Obama judge.” “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. Within hours, the president fired back on Twitter, launching an unusual conflict between the executive and judicial branches.
A British Ph.D. student has been sentenced to life in prison in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for spying. Matthew Hedges, 31, of Durham University, has said he is innocent, and that he had been researching the country’s security strategy. Prosecutors say he admitted the charges in an Abu Dhabi court, which found him guilty of “spying for or on behalf of” the UK government. British Prime Minister Theresa May said the UK was urgently seeking talks with the Emirati government on the issue.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa has slowly started defying its name, losing four centimeters of its tilt over the past 17 years. The movement, roughly 1.5 inches, comes after extensive consolidation work done between 1993 and 2001, which was required to reverse its slump and keep the tower upright. The building in Tuscany, which attracts thousands of tourists every day, is back to the tilt it had at the beginning of the 19th century.
An estimated 85,000 children under age 5 may have died of hunger and disease since the outbreak of Yemen’s civil war in 2015, an international aid group said Wednesday. Save the Children based its figures on mortality rates for untreated cases of Severe Acute Malnutrition, SAM, in young children. The U.N. says more than 1.3 million children have suffered from SAM since a Saudi-led coalition went to war with Yemen’s Houthi rebels in March 2015.