World

LILLE, France — French authorities were on Thursday investigating the deaths of four people who were harvesting grapes in the famed Champagne region, as locals suspected they suffered sunstroke in unusually high outdoor temperatures.

Prosecutors in the cities of Reims and Chalons-en-Champagne said two men died in recent days while picking grapes, one woman died at home a few days after feeling faint during her vineyard work, while a fourth died in hospital after falling from a straddle tractor without showing any physical injuries from the fall.

None of the deaths was being considered suspicious and no autopsies ordered, prosecutors said.

They declined to comment on any possible link to high temperatures, reported at up to 34 Celsius in the region at the end of last week.

But winegrowers said the heat might be to blame.

“Maybe it will turn out that the sun had something to do with this,” said Maxime Toubart, head of the Champagne growers’ association.

“I am very sad,” he told AFP. “People don’t join the harvest to lose their lives.”

Some 120,000 people were helping with the two-week harvest every year and “obviously you’re going to have some accidents”, he said. Every year, “one or two people” died from heart failure or aneurysms, he said.

One risk factor was the lack of physical preparedness for what was a demanding job, he said.

“More and people come here without being in the physical shape needed for outdoor work. Some young people don’t have breakfast, don’t hydrate, are on medication or working shirtless,” he said.

Grapes for champagne are grown on 34 hectares in eastern France, where over 16,000 growers produce over 300 million bottles of champagne each year.

The United States are the main export market for champagne, followed by the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany.

BEIJING — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said his country could send its first astronauts to the Moon in a Chinese spacecraft, hailing on Thursday a scientific cooperation agreement he reached with President Xi Jinping.

Maduro, whose oil-rich country is in profound economic crisis, has been in China since last week. In Beijing on Wednesday, he met with Xi, with the pair agreeing to “upgrade” ties between their governments.

Maduro announced during his meeting with Xi on Wednesday that the two countries had agreed to train young Venezuelan astronauts in China, with plans to eventually send them to the Moon.

A special task team “on scientific, technological, industrial and aerospace cooperation will sooner rather than later [send] the first Venezuelan man and woman to the moon in a Chinese spacecraft”, Maduro said.

“Very soon, Venezuelan youth will come here to prepare as astronauts in Chinese schools,” he said.

China is pursuing plans to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030 and build a base there.

The world’s second-largest economy has invested billions of dollars in its military-run space programme in a push to catch up with the United States and Russia.

China maintains close relations with the internationally isolated Maduro government and is one of Venezuela’s main creditors.

The Latin American country’s GDP fell 80 per cent in a decade due to the effect of its economic crisis, with citizens struggling to access basic necessities and millions having fled the country.

‘Airtight partnership’ 

In a video posted on Thursday on social media, Maduro said: “Where we’re heading is for the Moon, to a splendid era for China and Venezuela.”

He said the two countries “have declared the relationship as an airtight and strategic partnership for all times”.

And speaking at a press conference Thursday as he wrapped up the trip, Maduro said China and Venezuela had entered “a splendid stage in economic, cultural, educational, civilisational, scientific achievements”.

“We had never achieved a document of the depth, strategic importance and consensus of this document,” Maduro said.

He also showed off two gifts from Xi, including a Huawei folding mobile phone.

“It is the most secure phone, impossible to break into,” he said.

The two sides said in an agreement signed on Wednesday they “are close friends of mutual trust, good partners of common development, and dear partners of strategic collaboration”.

It also reiterated Venezuela’s interest in joining the BRICS group of major emerging economies that held its most recent summit in August in Johannesburg.

The original grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa announced at that summit its admission of six new countries, including Argentina.

Venezuela “can contribute significant strengths to the group’s energy agenda, as a reliable supplier and the country with the largest proven oil reserves and the fourth-largest natural gas reserve worldwide”, Wednesday’s agreement said.

BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s supreme court on Wednesday opened its first trials over the January 8 riots by supporters of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, putting four accused in the dock in one of the buildings invaded that day.

The court’s 11 justices will deliver their decisions one by one in each case, with a majority needed to secure a conviction.

The lead judge on the case, Alexandre de Moraes, has already ruled to convict the first accused — a 51-year-old man named Aecio Pereira — recommending he be sentenced to 17 years in prison for his actions, which included invading the floor of the senate in a T-shirt marked “Military Intervention”.

A second judge asked for a much lighter sentence of just 2.5 years, with the trial scheduled to resume on Thursday and nine justices still left to weigh in.

Moraes said the rioters, who also ransacked the presidential palace and congress, carried out a “criminal invasion aimed at illegally seizing power via a military coup and violently overthrowing (the) democratically elected government” of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Brasilia riots deeply shook a nation still divided by veteran leftist Lula’s narrow win over Bolsonaro in the October 2022 presidential race, and drew inevitable comparisons to the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by supporters of then-president Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s political role model.

Outraged over Bolsonaro’s loss to Lula, thousands of his supporters overwhelmed security to storm the seat of power a week after Lula’s inauguration, calling for a military intervention to oust the newly installed president, who was not in Brasilia at the time.

They ran riot inside the three buildings, smashing windows, throwing furniture into fountains, vandalising artwork and turning the senate’s central dais into a slide.

The four men on trial, aged between 24 and 52, are accused of crimes including armed criminal conspiracy, violent uprising against the rule of law and an attempted coup.

The supreme court plans to hear a total of 232 cases involving the most serious alleged crimes committed during the riots.

The first four accused each face a total of up to 30 years in prison. They have denied the accusations against them, saying they believed the protests would be peaceful.

Damning cell phone video 

But prosecutors said the first accused had openly incited a coup.

Prosecutor Carlos Frederico Santos said the evidence against Pereira included a cell phone video he recorded during the riots, in which he appeared at the front of the senate chamber celebrating the invasion.

“His support for the coup-mongering intent of the anti-democratic horde is irrefutable,” Santos said.

Lawyers for Pereira, reportedly a former employee of the Sao Paulo municipal sanitation company, told the court their client was unarmed and committed no acts of violence.

Defence attorney Sebastiao Coelho da Silva called the trial “politically motivated”.

In addition to the 232 cases before the supreme court, prosecutors are investigating more than 1,000 others over the attacks, mostly on lesser charges that could be settled in plea bargains.

Investigators are also working to trace the financial backers behind the protests and establish whether police and army officers played a role. Seven Brasilia police commanders were arrested last month for dereliction of duty in connection with the riots.

Bolsonaro, who was in the United States at the time, faces investigation over accusations of inciting the riots.

The 68-year-old ex-army captain, an open admirer of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime, denies wrongdoing.

“Some people are obsessed with trying to link me” to the events of January 8, he told newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo on Monday.

Bolsonaro is also under investigation over various allegations of corruption and abuse of office.

In June, electoral authorities barred him from running for office for eight years over his unproven allegations that Brazil’s electronic voting system was vulnerable to large-scale fraud.

KENNETT SQUARE, United States — For two weeks America held its breath as fugitive Brazilian murderer Danelo Cavalcante dodged drones, helicopters and law enforcement from the FBI to Border Patrol, only to be cornered on Wednesday by a police dog which subdued him with just a "minor bite wound".

Pennsylvania state police revealed the details of Cavalcante's arrest at a press conference hours after he was taken into custody, following days in which the diminutive, convicted killer appeared to have an uncanny ability to elude hundreds of pursuing officers backed by special units in military style gear.

"Last night, shortly after midnight, a series of events started to unfold," Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania state police told reporters in Chester Country, in rural Pennsylvania.

A burglar alarm went off within a police perimeter, drawing law enforcement's attention, and an aircraft picked up a heat signal in the woods, Bivens said.

With a storm breaking overhead the aircraft had to retreat, but in the morning police moved in on their target.

"They had the element of surprise. Cavalcante did not realise he was surrounded," Bivens said.

The 34-year-old still refused to surrender and instead tried to crawl away through thick underbrush while still clutching a stolen rifle, Bivens said.

At that point law enforcement released their K9 unit. "The dogs subdued him and team members... moved in. He continued to resist but was forcibly taken into custody," Bivens said.

Footage on CNN showed heavily armed officers in camouflage handcuffing the Brazilian national and removing his shirt, revealing a large tattoo on his back, before placing him in the back of a police vehicle. In a photo released by state police, he appeared to have blood dripping down his forehead.

Cavalcante, who had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend — stabbing her dozens of times in front of her children — had just begun his sentence on August 31 when he climbed over the prison wall and cleared two razor-wire fences.

The Brazilian national, measuring just 1.52 metres tall, had raised the stakes on Tuesday by entering a private garage to steal a .22 caliber rifle with a scope — then dodging pistol gunfire from the pursuing homeowner to get away.

Police declared him "armed and extremely dangerous".

Chester Country district attorney Deb Ryan told reporters one of the first calls made after Cavalcante's capture was to his victim's family, "who as you can imagine have been living in a complete nightmare".

"They can now finally sleep again," she added.

Security camera sightings 

Police long struggled to narrow down the fugitive's location in the heavily wooded area. However, Cavalcante repeatedly popped up on private security cameras and even trail cams meant to monitor wildlife, turning his escapade into a kind of grim reality TV show.

Stealing from houses, he succeeded in finding clothes, food, the rifle, a van and somehow even managed to get shaved. At Wednesday's press conference, police offered to replace a Philadelphia Eagles hoodie that Cavalcante had apparently stolen.

On Tuesday, after the rifle theft, authorities set up roadblocks in the rural roads around Bucktown, Pennsylvania, where elite SWAT police and armoured vehicles were also deployed.

In addition to flooding the search zone with messages warning residents, a decision was taken early Tuesday to close schools in the Oakland J. Robert school district.

'Needle in haystack' 

Defending against criticism that the police were inept in the manhunt, Bivens had called Cavalcante the "proverbial needle in the haystack".

The director of Lundale Farm, some 64 kilometres outside of Philadelphia, said police were "walking through our property, walking through the woods".

She said the area has "trees, creeks and bridges and all kinds of corners [where] you could sneak around".

"It's been very stressful."

Police had upped the reward for information on Cavalcante's whereabouts, from $20,000 to $25,000. Cavalcante is also wanted for murder in Brazil, where his name is officially listed with a different spelling: Danilo Souza Cavalcante.

It was not immediately clear if the newly recaptured convict would face new charges in the United States.

But Pennsylvania authorities were in celebratory mode, a large group of officers in camouflage even bunching up for a victory photo around the handcuffed Cavalcante.

"Our nightmare is finally over and the good guys won," Ryan told the press conference.

SEOUL — North Korea marked its founding anniversary with a parade attended by leader Kim Jong-un as well as Russian diplomats and a high-ranking Chinese delegation, state media said on Saturday, as Pyongyang deepens ties with Moscow and Beijing.

The Friday event featured Pyongyang's "paramilitary forces", state media said, rather than soldiers in the regular army, and it did not showcase the country's banned weaponry including intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Images in state media showed uniformed paramilitary brigades, including some riding tractors or in large red trucks.

Kim, flanked by his young daughter, looked on smiling and clapping.

Kim Il-sung Square "was full of excitement and joy of the spectators significantly celebrating the birthday of their great powerful country", the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

"All the participants paid the highest glory and warmest thanks to Kim Jong-un, peerless patriot and ever-victorious iron-willed commander."

Kim met with the visiting Chinese delegation led by Liu Guozhong, vicepremier of the State Council, the second such visit by top officials from Beijing in six weeks, as Pyongyang shows signs of easing its strict Covid-era border controls.

The two sides announced their aims of "further intensifying the multifaceted coordination and cooperation" between the two countries, according to a separate KCNA report.

Russian diplomats also attended the event, as well as a Russian military song-and-dance ensemble which had arrived in Pyongyang to mark the occasion, KCNA reported.

Moscow expanded its official presence in North Korea shortly before the parade, with its Pyongyang embassy saying this week that it had been allowed to bring in 20 diplomatic and technical staff — the first such rotation of personnel since 2019.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Kim a message marking the anniversary, KCNA said Saturday, in which he called for the two countries to "expand the bilateral ties in all respects".

And according to Chinese state media, President Xi Jinping "extended congratulations in a call to Kim Jong-un" on the anniversary.

"For the North Koreans, it's another confirmation that they can completely count on the Chinese support and a nice confirmation that, [since] the war in Ukraine, Russia basically has no choice but to be supportive of North Korea," analyst Andrei Lankov said.

Friday's event was the nuclear-armed state's third parade this year.

The last one, a military parade featuring the country's most advanced weaponry, took place in late July to commemorate the signing of an armistice that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War.

The Chinese and Russian visits come as speculation mounts that Kim,  who rarely leaves his country and has not travelled since the coronavirus pandemic started — will meet Putin to discuss arms deals.

US and other officials told The New York Times that Kim is likely to head by armoured train later this month to Vladivostok, on Russia's Pacific coast not far from North Korea, to meet Putin.

Lankov told AFP that a Kim-Putin meeting is "likely to happen" as, for Moscow, "with a bit of diplomacy North Korea can be used as a tool to influence behaviour of the United States, South Korea" and other places over the Ukraine war.

Moscow's moves to boost military ties with Pyongyang — including possible naval drills, are "gentle diplomatic blackmail" of Washington, he added.

Growing cooperation between China, Russia and North Korea, coupled with Xi skipping the G20 Summit in India, "give the appearance of a widening fissure in Asia's geopolitical landscape", said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.