Today’s news briefs include Venezuela opposition candidate flees; Australia searches for man who attacked baby; School policy forced girls to sleep with boys.
Venezuelan presidential candidate flees to Spain
Venezuela’s opposition candidate has fled to Spain aboard a Spanish military aircraft. The latest development comes as protests continue over what many, including Western world governments, see as the theft of the election by the country’s current Marxist President Nicolás Maduro. Edmundo González had been in hiding in Venezuela since an arrest warrant was issued by Maduro. Opposition leader María Corina Machado said González had fled “to preserve his freedom, his integrity and his life.” She accused Maduro’s administration of unleashing “a brutal wave of repression” following the election, the results of which many nations in the region have questioned.
Man who pours hot coffee on baby, flees Australia
The man who poured scalding hot coffee on a baby at a family picnic has fled Australia. Police are intensifying their international search, CBS reports. Queensland Police’s Paul Dalton said the 33-year-old suspect fled the country days after committing “the most cowardly” crime the detective had seen in a decades-long career. The 9-month-old baby was at a family picnic in a Brisbane park in late August when the man, an itinerant worker, poured the coffee over its face and limbs. The baby “sustained serious burns” and required multiple surgeries, the police said in a statement. Thet man, whom the family did not know, left the country about 12 hours before he was identified.
School district for forcing girls to share beds with boys
A Colorado school district is being sued for allowing “a “nonbinary” female to supervise boys’ showers and forced a female student to share a bed with a male, violating parental rights over children’s privacy and accommodation decisions on school trips, according to a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of parents,” CP reports. The lawsuit against Jefferson County Public Schools accuses the district of of lying by omission to parents concerning who will be supervising and sharing accommodations with their children on school-sponsored trips, the advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed the complaint on behalf of three families, said in a statement. The policy at the center of the controversy directs that students be “assigned to share overnight accommodations with other students that share the student’s gender identity” rather than according to their biological sex.