Ex-Honduras leader convicted of aiding drug traffickers

NEW YORK — Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted Friday in New York of charges that he conspired with drug traffickers and used his military and national police force to enable tons of cocaine to make it unhindered into the United States.

The jury returned its verdict at a federal court after a twoweek trial, which has been closely followed in his home country. Hernandez was convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S. and two weapons counts. The charges carry a mandatory minimum of 40 years in prison and a potential maximum of life. Sentencing was set for June 26.

Hernandez, 55, who served two terms as the leader of the Central American nation of roughly 10 million people, patted a defense attorney, Renato Stabile, on the back as they stood along with everyone else in the courtroom while the jurors filed out after the reading of the verdict.

Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry is struggling to stay in

power as he tries to return home, where gang attacks have shuttered the country’s main international airport and freed more than 4,000 inmates in recent days.

As of midday Wednesday, Henry remained in Puerto Rico, where he landed the day before after he was barred from landing in neighboring Dominican Republic because officials there closed the airspace to flights to and from Haiti.

Locked out of his country for now, Henry appears to face an impasse as a growing number of officials call for his resignation or nudge him toward it.

TikTok once again finds itself in a precarious position.

This time, it comes in the form of legislation that would ban the popular social media platform if it doesn’t break ties with ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent company.

On Thursday, a House panel unanimously approved a bipartisan bill that would require the Chinese firm to divest TikTok and other applications it owns within six months of the bill’s enactment in order to avoid a nationwide ban. The legislation also creates a process that lets the executive branch prohibit access to other apps that pose a threat to national security. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise announced Thursday that he would bring the bill to the House floor for a vote next week. It’s unclear what will happen in the Senate, where several bills aimed at banning TikTok have stalled.

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon study released Friday that

examined reported sightings of UFOs over nearly the last century found no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence, a conclusion consistent with past U.S. government efforts to assess the accuracy of claims that have captivated public attention for decades.

The study from the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office analyzed U.S. government investigations since 1945 of reported sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena, more popularly known as UFOs. It found no evidence that any of them involved signs of alien life, or that the U.S. government and private companies had hidden information.