Today’s edition of quick hits.
* In Niger: “President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday that France will end its military presence in Niger and pull its ambassador out of the country as a result of the coup that removed the democratically elected president.”
* Intel matters: “American spy agencies provided information to Ottawa after the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in the Vancouver area, but Canada developed the most definitive intelligence that led it to accuse India of orchestrating the plot, according to Western allied officials.”
* The special counsel’s office gets a little bigger: “Special counsel Jack Smith has added a veteran war crimes prosecutor — who served as Smith’s deputy during his stint at the Hague — to his team as it prepares to put former President Donald Trump on trial in Washington and Florida. Alex Whiting worked alongside Smith for three years, helping prosecute crimes against humanity that occurred in Kosovo in the late 1990s.”
* In Nebraska: “A Nebraska mother who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus was sentenced Friday to two years in prison. Jessica Burgess, 42, pleaded guilty in July to tampering with human remains, false reporting and providing an abortion after at least 20 weeks of gestation, which is illegal in Nebraska. Madison County District Judge Mark Johnson sentenced her Friday to one year in prison for each count, with the first two to run concurrently.”
* What a bizarre thing to get upset about: “Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan complained this week that he was uncomfortable with the use of what he described as ‘LGBT colors’ at the United Nations, which is decorated this week with bright colors promoting the Sustainable Development Goals.”
* A tentative deal: “The Writers Guild of America and Hollywood’s top media companies reached a tentative agreement Sunday that could resolve the writers strike and bring a close to one of the longest walkouts in entertainment industry history.”
* Amazing: “A capsule containing precious samples from an asteroid landed safely on Earth on Sunday, the culmination of a roughly 4-billion-mile journey over the past seven years. The asteroid samples were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and jettisoned the capsule over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert.”
* Noted without comment: “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is getting roasted on Twitter (now known as X) after posting a Yom Kippur message featuring an image of a Hanukkah menorah. She swiftly deleted the post without an apology and reposted the original text of the message on her page without the image.”
See you tomorrow.
