From Venezuela to age records: The non-coronavirus news you may have missed

Venezuela has charged two former US soldiers with terrorism and conspiracy for allegedly taking part in a failed bid to topple President Nicolas Maduro, the attorney general said on Friday. Luke Alexander Denman, 34, and Airan Berry, 41, were among 17 people captured by the Venezuelan military, which said it had thwarted an attempted invasion by mercenaries in the early hours of Sunday. Attorney General Tarek William Saab said they had been charged with “terrorism, conspiracy, illicit trafficking of weapons of war and (criminal) association,” and could face 25 to 30 years in prison. Eight attackers were reportedly killed in the incident. Mr Saab said Venezuela had requested arrest warrants – as well as inclusion in the Interpol system – for the capture of former US army medic Jordan Goudreau, who allegedly organised and trained the mercenary force. South African Fredie Blom celebrated his 116th birthday on Friday unfazed by the coronavirus crisis, more than 100 years since the Spanish flu pandemic killed his sister. “I have lived this long because of God’s grace,” said Mr Blom, possibly one of the oldest men in the world. Lighting a cigarette, he recalled the 1918 pandemic that left tens of millions dead worldwide including his sister. Mr Blom was born in 1904 in the rural town of Adelaide, tucked near the Great Winterberg mountain range of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. He is older than a 112-year-old British resident named the world’s oldest living man by the Guinness World Records in March. Mr Blom’s age has not yet been verified by the body. It has not received much attention with the world focused on the pandemic, but deforestation has surged in the Amazon rainforest this year, raising fears of a repeat of last year’s record-breaking devastation – or worse. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon hit a new high in the first four months of the year, according to data released on Friday by Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), which uses satellite images to track the destruction. A total of 1,202 square kilometres of forest – an area more than 20 times the size of Manhattan – was wiped out in the Brazilian Amazon from January to April, it found. That was a 55 per cent increase from the same period last year, and the highest figure for the first four months of the year since monthly records began in August 2015. Media rights groups have been pressuring the Maputo government to help locate a Mozambique journalist who went missing one month ago in militant-hit Cabo Delgado province, as friends and relatives begin to fear the worst. Community radio journalist Ibraimo Abu Mbaruco disappeared on April 7, in the northern district of Palma – the epicentre of attacks by militant Islamists seeking to establish a caliphate. The journalist, who is in his thirties, reported on daily life in Palma, including the insurgency – which the government had denied until late last month. “It has been a very long time since he has disappeared,” said one of Mbaruco’s colleagues, who did not want to be named. “We are beginning to fear that something worse has happened to him.” The US government has awarded a $275 million (Dh1bn) border wall contract for construction that would begin in South Texas in January, at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term if he is re-elected. Caddell Construction, based in Montgomery, Alabama, won the contract to build 22.5 kilometres of barriers in and around Laredo, Texas, a city of 260,000 people on the Rio Grande, the river that runs between Texas and Mexico. There is little existing wall separating Laredo and its sister city of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Much of the planned construction would cut through private land in districts close to the edge of the Rio Grande, requiring the government to take property through its power of eminent domain.