Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
Lafontant told Haiti’s Chamber of Deputies that he sent President Jovenel Moise his resignation letter. Moise confirmed via Twitter that he had accepted Lafontant’s resignation along with those of other Cabinet members.
The prime minister’s abrupt resignation came ahead of a vote on a motion of censure Lafontant, a first step toward asking that Moise name a new prime minister to form a Cabinet to handle the crisis. The prime minister is the second highest official in Haiti after the president.
Lafontant was to answer questions about the July 6-8 riots that followed the government’s attempt to raise fuel prices by up to 51 percent as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. At least seven people were killed and dozens of businesses were looted during the unrest.
Instead, Lafontant used the opportunity to announce his resignation, while in various parts of Haiti’s small protests were held demanding the head of state step down.
San Diego
The Justice Department on Friday filed a plan to reunify more than 2,500 children age 5 and older by a court-imposed deadline of July 26 using “truncated” procedures to verify parentage and perform background checks, which exclude DNA testing and other steps it took to reunify children under 5. The administration said the abbreviated vetting puts children at significant safety risk but is needed to meet the deadline.
Chris Meekins, deputy assistant Health and Human Services secretary for preparedness and response, filed a declaration that he is fully committed to meeting the deadline. However, he does not believe “the placing of children into such situations is consistent with the mission of HHS or my core values.”
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw took umbrage at Meekins’ statement, disputing the official’s interpretation of his orders and saying that safe reunification could and will occur by July 26.
Los Angeles
Heavy Fire Equipment Operator Braden Varney, 36, died in the morning hours, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.
The blaze broke out Friday night in Mariposa County, near the west end of Yosemite National Park and Sierra National Forest. Fire officials said it had burned about 150 acres.
Varney worked through the night and was driving the bulldozer to cut a firebreak to keep the fire from extending into a nearby community, according to fire chief Nancy Koerperich. Investigators were working to determine further circumstances surrounding Varney’s death, but they believe he was working his way out of the fire area when he was killed, Koerperich said.
Of 88 unprovoked shark bites that the Florida Museum of Natural History documented around the globe last year, more than one third took place along the shores of Florida, the shark attack capital of the world.
But the vast majority of those attacks were on southern beaches between Cape Canaveral and Miami. Shark encounters are relatively rare farther up Florida’s Atlantic coastline and are almost unheard of in northernmost Nassau County.
Or so they were before Friday afternoon — when consecutive attacks sent two people to the hospital and shut down Fernandina Beach, just south of the Georgia border about 25 miles northeast of Jacksonville.
“I was in two feet of water or less, laying on my stomach,” the first victim, Dustin Theobald, 30, told News 4 Jax from his hospital bed.
Theobald said he had brought his 8-year-old to the beach and was watching the boy play in the surf when “when I felt something grab onto my foot and pull.”
A 17-year-old boy was bitten no more than five minutes after Theobald, First Coast News reported. And though he, too, is expected to recover, the reports caused authorities to evacuate all swimmers out of the water along the beach.
A jaguar at a New Orleans zoo slipped out of its enclosure and went on a killing rampage sometime Friday night, attacking four alpacas, an emu and a fox trapped in their own habitats before zoo officials managed to sedate it.
The big cat was first reported missing at 7:20 a.m., before the Audubon Zoo opened, officials said in a press release. By 8:15 it had been spotted, tranquilized and returned to its enclosure by veterinarians.
Three animals were killed; three others were being cared for. No humans were injured, although the circumstances of the escape sparked a worrisome thought at what might have been: The “jaguar jungle” is also home to a children’s play area.
In a news conference Saturday, zoo officials insisted the facility was safe for the general public, even though they wouldn’t say how the predator managed to escape and either kill or injure every alpaca on zoo property.
— Wire reports