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From Washington, this is VOA news. I'm Michael Lipin reporting. U.S. media have identified a gunman who killed three police officers on Sunday in the southern U.S. city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The reports named the gunman as Gavin Long and described him as a 29-year-old black male. Authorities said a gunman dressed in black killed the three officers and wounded three others with an assault rifle near a major road. The incident is the latest episode in a month of violence and heightened racial tension in United States. U.S. President Barack Obama condemned Sunday's killings in an address to the nation. "This has happened far too often. And I've spent a lot of time with law enforcement this past week. I'm surrounded by the best of the best every single day. And I know whenever this happens, wherever this happens, you feel it. Your families feel it. But what I want you to know today is the respect and the gratitude of the American people for everything that you do for us." French police have released the estranged wife of a truck driver who ran down nearly 300 revelers in a suspected terror attack in the French resort city of Nice on Thursday. The wife of the Tunisian-born assailant, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was arrested Friday. She was detained hours after Bouhlel drove a refrigerator truck along Nice's Promenade des Anglais, mowing down people and killing 84 of them. Police later shot him dead. The woman's lawyer told French television she was no longer in touch with Bouhlel after kicking him out of their house when he physically abused her. Authorities said Bouhlel sent a text message to someone 18 minutes before the truck attack, saying, "Bring more weapons." They have arrested six people so far. You are listening to VOA news. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has promised to rid Turkey of people involved in Friday's failed coup against his government. Some of those rebel troops engaged in fighting with Turkish security forces on Sunday at two air transportation facilities in the country. Officials said Turkish security forces fired warning shots and made arrests near the Sabiha Gökçen International Airport around Istanbul. There were also clashes at an airbase in Konya, a major city in the central region of Turkey. Freelance journalist Tulin Daloglu spoke to VOA earlier today and gave us her view of the security situation in Turkey. "Even before this coup, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant had carried it not ??? but, you know, ???, you know, attacks inside the country and people are really getting nervous about it. This coup showed, you know, security structure has, you know, received some significant damage and there is, you know, unity to fight against anything that can be deemed as enemy or a terror organization. So that shows Turkey's weakness. So we can only hope that there will be, you know, no more plans to take lives on Turkey's streets, but you never know when you are talking, you know, about terrorist and there, you know, mind that." Turkish authorities have detained around 6,000 people since the coup that began late Friday collapsed [earlier on] early on Saturday. On the eve of the U.S. presidential nomination conventions, three new surveys published on Sunday showed Democrat Hillary Clinton with a consistent advantage over Republican Donald Trump. The lead for Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state seeking to become the first female U.S. president, ranged from four to seven percentage points over Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul set to claim the Republican nomination this week in the Midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio. The ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Clinton ahead at 47 to 43 percent, while the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll pegged the race at 46-41 and the CNN/ORC International poll had it at 49-42 in favor of Clinton. And finally, in one of the all-time great performances in golf history, Sweden's Henrik Stenson won the British Open on Sunday at Royal Troon, Scotland. Stenson carded a final round 8 under par, 63, that featured 10 birdies, many of them converted with long pats to defeat America Phil Mickelson by three shots. I'm Michael Lipin reporting from Washington. That's the latest world news from VOA. |