LONDON – A British police officer was shot dead inside a London police station early Friday while detaining a suspect.

London’s Metropolitan Police force said the officer was shot at the Croydon Custody Center in the south of the city. The 23-year-old man being detained also sustained a gunshot wound and is in critical condition in a hospital.

The force said no police weapons were fired.

It is rare for police officers to be shot and killed in the U.K., which has strict firearms laws.

“When a colleague dies in the line of duty the shockwaves and sadness reverberates throughout the Met and our communities,” said Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick. “Policing is a family, within London and nationally, and we will all deeply mourn our colleague.”

The force has launched ...

TOKYO – Asian shares other than those in China advanced Friday, cheered by a modest rally on Wall Street and rising hopes for fresh stimulus for the U.S. economy.

Despite signs of a global economic rebound in the third quarter, worries remain the upturn may be running out of steam.

House Democrats said they are paring back their proposal for a new stimulus package in an attempt to jump-start negotiations with the Trump administration. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have said the government’s top priority should be to provide affordable loans to small businesses and further support for millions of Americans still unemployed.

Paralyzing partisanship has prevented a Congressional renewal of aid, and the recent vacancy on the Supreme Court foll...

LOS ANGELES – At least one person was hurt when a vehicle ran into a small crowd of people protesting police brutality in Los Angeles Thursday night, authorities said.

An ambulance transported one patient to a hospital in unknown condition following the hit-and-run at Sunset Boulevard and Seward Street in Hollywood shortly before 9 p.m., said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Nicholas Prange.

About 30 minutes later, KCAL9 TV showed helicopter footage of a white sedan pushing slowly through a crowd of marchers blocking another intersection on Sunset.

A group of protesters in a black pickup truck chased down the white sedan and cut it off. They confronted the driver and banged on the sedan’s windows before the car drove away.

It wasn’t immediately known if anyone was hurt in the seco...

Rio de Janeiro delayed its annual Carnival parade, saying Thursday night that the global spectacle cannot go ahead in February because of Brazil’s continued vulnerability to the pandemic.

Rio’s League of Samba Schools, LIESA, announced that the spread of the coronavirus has made it impossible to safely hold the traditional parades that are a cultural mainstay and, for many, a source of livelihood.

“Carnival is a party upon which many humble workers depend. The samba schools are community institutions, and the parades are just one detail of all that,” Luiz Antonio Simas, a historian who specializes in Rio’s Carnival, said in an interview. “An entire cultural and productive chain was disrupted by COVID.”

Rio’s City Hall has yet to announce a decision about the Carnival street...

CANBERRA, Australia – China appeared to be expanding its network of secret detention centres in Xinjiang, where Muslim minorities are targeted in a forced assimilation campaign, and more of the facilities resemble prisons, an Australian think-tank found.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute used satellite images and official construction tender documents to map more than 380 suspected detention facilities in the remote Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting reeducation camps, detention centres and prisons that have been newly build or expanded since 2017.

The report builds on evidence that China has made a policy shift from detaining Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in makeshift public buildings to constructing permanent mass detention facilities.

This is despite Chinese...

JUNEAU, Alaska – The U.S. Forest Service is proposing to exempt the country’s largest national forest from a ban on timber harvests and road building in roadless areas, a move conservation groups denounced Thursday.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, under which the Forest Service falls, announced Thursday the upcoming release of a final environmental review identifying a preferred alternative to exempt the Tongass National Forest from the so-called Roadless Rule. Once the review is released, at least 30 days must pass before a final decision is made.

The Tongass, which covers more than 25,000 square miles (64,750 square kilometres) in southeast Alaska, is one of the largest, relatively intact temperate rain forests in the world, and a majority of the Tongass is in a natural condition...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Democrat Amy McGrath called for fundamental change to combat “systemic racism“ as the Senate candidate met Thursday with some of the Kentucky protesters seething over a grand jury’s decision not to charge officers in the killing of Breonna Taylor.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, her Republican opponent, said peaceful protests offer a way to honour Taylor’s memory. He defended the investigation by his political ally, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, into the Black woman’s death

The senator condemned incidents of property damage and gunfire that broke out during demonstrations in his hometown of Louisville. Two police officers were shot and wounded during the protests Wednesday evening.

Nationwide protests over the deaths of Blacks by police hav...

Two workers were rescued after the scaffold they were on at a Toronto highrise collapsed Thursday afternoon

At 12:19 p.m., Toronto police tweeted its officers were responding to an unknown trouble call in the area of Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue.

Officers had reports two men were seen dangling from the side of a building after the scaffold they were working on collapsed. The two men were on their safety lines near the 25th floor, police said.

Both men were later brought to safety at the top of the building.

No injuries have been reported.

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COPPER CENTER, Alaska – The hunter killed by a grizzly bear last weekend in a remote part of Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve was identified Thursday by park officials as a 22-year-old man from Ohio.

The death of Austin Pfeiffer late Sunday was the first recorded fatal bear attack in the park since it was established in 1980, the park said in a statement. Park spokesperson Jan Maslen, said in an email that officials were not releasing his hometown at the family’s request.

Pfeiffer was hunting with a friend and they were salvaging meat from a moose they killed a day earlier when the attack occurred, the statement said.

National Park Service investigators determined it was a surprise attack and that Pfeiffer did not have ready access to a gun or deterrent, like be...

NEW YORK – Donald Trump’s niece followed up her bestselling , tell-all book with a lawsuit Thursday alleging that the president and two of his siblings cheated her out of millions of dollars over several decades while squeezing her out of the family business.

Mary L. Trump sought unspecified damages in the lawsuit, filed in a state court in New York City.

“Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleged the president, his brother Robert, and a sister, the former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, portrayed themselves as Mary Trump’s protectors while secretly taking her share of minority interests in the family’s extensive real estate holdings. Robert Trump died last month.

Messages seeking comment were sent to the Justice...