Sans Frontiers

World Tour

New mexico A man who escaped from a Colorado prison in 1974 was found living under an alias in a small town in northern New Mexico after the Denver police officer he shot decades ago helped track him down. Luis Archuleta, 77, also known as Larry Pusateri, was arrested in Espanola, where he had been living as Ramon Montoya for about 40 years.

New hampshire For the second time in a decade, a New Hampshire woman has a new face. Carmen Blandin Tarleton, 52, a former nurse whose face was disfigured in an attack by her ex-husband, became the second person globally to undergo the procedure twice after her first transplant began to fail after six years. She received the transplant from an anonymous donor.

China Chinese short video-sharing platform TikTok, banned recently in India, collected device data for at least 15 months between 2018 and 2019 through its Android app, using a technique that Google prohibits developers from using without users’ consent, The Wall Street Journal reported. TikTok managed to hide the tactic through an “unusual added layer of encryption”.

Foreign Hand

Democrat Joe Biden named California senator Kamala Harris as his running mate for the 2019 US presidential elections, making history by selecting the first Indian-origin woman to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket and acknowledging the vital role Black and Indian-American voters will play in his bid to defeat President Donald Trump. In choosing Harris, Biden is embracing a former rival from the Democratic primary who is familiar with the rigour of a national campaign. Harris, a 55-year-old first-term senator, is also one of the party’s most prominent figures and quickly became a top contender for the No. 2 spot after her own White House campaign ended. Harris was born to two immigrant parents: a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Her father, Donald Harris, was an academic, and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher and civil rights activist from Chennai. After her parents divorced, Harris was raised primarily by her Hindu single mother. She says her mother adopted Black culture and immersed her two daughters—Kamala and younger sister Maya—in it.

Harris’s appointment comes at a time when Biden’s controversial remarks about race risked alienating young Black voters who despise Trump but are not inspired by his Democratic rival. When pressed by Errol Barnett of CBS News on whether he’d taken a cognitive test, Biden responded that the question was akin to asking the Black reporter if he would take a drug test to see if “you’re taking cocaine or not?.... Are you a junkie?”  In a later interview, Biden seemed to draw distinctions between Black and Hispanic populations in the US. “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things,” he told the Latina reporter. He later walked back the comment.

Black voters as a whole delivered the Democratic nomination to Biden, powering his commanding win in the South Carolina primary, which rescued his floundering campaign. But that success was heavily dependent on older Black voters. In a general election where Democrats say no vote can be taken for granted, young Black activists and elected officials say Biden’s missteps could make it harder to get their vote. Most Black voters view Trump as someone who exacerbates racial tensions and are unlikely to support his campaign in large numbers. But those who sit out the presidential election could sway the outcome in closely contested states.