Japan
Japan-based destroyer dedicated to McCain
YOKOSUKA — The head of the U.S. Navy on Thursday dedicated one of two destroyers involved in fatal accidents in the Pacific last year to Sen. John McCain.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, in a ceremony aboard the USS John S. McCain at a naval base in Japan, added McCain’s name to a warship that had already been named for the Arizona senator’s father and grandfather. All three generations of McCains have the same name.
Spencer told reporters after the ceremony that changes to naval practices recommended after the accidents have been 78 percent implemented. Some are completed, and others will take two years.
Seventeen sailors died after the USS Fitzgerald and then the McCain collided with commercial vessels in separate incidents in June and August of 2017.
Mexico
Quake damage reveals temple inside pyramid
MEXICO CITY — Archaeologists say damage to a pre-Hispanic pyramid in central Mexico from the Sept. 19, 2017, earthquake has revealed an older structure that was covered by later buildings.
The Teopanzolco pyramid platform is in the city of Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City. The Aztec-era pyramid was built sometime between 1200 and the Spanish conquest in 1521.
The magnitude-7.1 quake caused parts of the pyramid to sink or lean.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday that in doing repair work, experts found a smaller, older temple inside that probably dates to 1150 to 1200.
El Salvador
Court orders president to answer on ’79 kidnap
SAN SALVADOR — El Salvador’s Supreme Court has ordered President Salvador Sanchez Ceren to present any information he has on the fate of a South African diplomat who was kidnapped and disappeared by leftist guerrillas in 1979.
Then-Ambassador Archibald Gardner Dunn was kidnapped by a guerrilla faction that became part of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN. The rebels demanded a ransom but the diplomat was never turned over.
Sanchez Ceren is a former leader of the FMLN, which disbanded and became a political party following 1992 peace accords.
Presidential press officer Roberto Lorenzana said the court order “has a political motive to damage the president’s image.”
Colombia
Three judicial officials slain in rebel ambush
BOGOTA — Three Colombian judicial investigators were killed Wednesday when their vehicle was ambushed along the country’s southern border with Ecuador by a dissident rebel group, authorities said.
Officials said two of the men were incinerated to death when their car was torched by holdout guerrillas from the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
The same group has been behind a wave of drug-related violence, including the March kidnapping of three Ecuadorean newspaper workers who were later found slain. It is led by a former FARC mid-level commander, Walter Arizala, better known by his alias Guacho, who is the target of an intense military manhunt backed by the U.S.
Wire reports
