Stockholm, Sweden - It's a sunny summer morning in the historic university city of Uppsala in central Sweden. Two teenage boys glide past a plaza filled with cafes and toward the sleek glass facade of the newly renovated railway station on electric scooters, their dark tracksuits hanging loosely on their slight frames. At about 9am, the boys board a train for the three-hour journey north to the small coastal city of Sundsvall, tucked between the Baltic Sea and rolling forests of pine and birch.
Ecuadorians voted on Sunday to reject a package of referendum measures that would have allowed foreign military bases in the country. The result is seen as a sharp political setback for President Daniel Noboa, the 37-year-old conservative leader and close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump. The proposal was heavily backed by Noboa as a crucial step to confront drug traffickers and violent gangs.
"You have a 17-year-old kid who tried to kill people with a gun and is still walking around with guns," said a Manhattan police officer. "What do you think he's going to do with a gun? He's going to kill somebody."
These facts are not in dispute: In a span of four years and nine months, gang member William Arnold Armendariz III shot to death five people in three separate attacks, including the slayings of three people at a Banning cemetery in August 2020 as they held a memorial birthday party for a relative. Five years before that, just after midnight on Nov. 7, 2015, Armendariz had gunned down 51-year-old Charles Neazer on 5th Street in Banning.
For the first time Wednesday, prosecutors also released security camera footage of the chaotic gunfight, which unfolded Aug. 17 inside the Taste of City Lounge in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The video showed patrons scrambling for cover as bullets ricocheted across the densely-packed club, with at least 40 shots fired from five guns, prosecutors said.
Layne Smith, left, clears vegetation to prevent flames from spreading to his home as a fire burns through the Chinese Camp community of Tuolumne County. Multiple structures have burned in the historic Gold Rush town after thousands of lightning strikes ignited a spate of fast-moving fires in the dry rural foothills of the eastern Sierra. Chinese Camp, named for the Chinese miners who settled there, is a registered California landmark filled with historic structures and home to roughly 60 residents. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP
Protection rackets are not a popular topic among bar owners in Cape Town. "You just adapt," says a man from East Africa who does not want to give his name. "The laws of the street apply here." German bar owner Randolf Jorberg learned what these laws look like in 2015. After he spoke publicly for the first time about extortion practices in the restaurant industry and refused to pay, a Congolese bouncer working for him was stabbed to death.
