Mexico: Farmers threaten to kill hostages

Farmers desperate to keep their land from being seized for a new Mexico City airport threatened Friday to kill about a dozen hostages and spark uprisings across the country.

With machetes strapped to their belts and wearing ski masks, about 1,000 farmers demanded police free fellow protesters detained during a confrontation Thursday.

They threatened to tie the hostages, including a deputy state prosecutor and police officers, to hijacked gasoline tanker trucks and set them on fire. State officials said they would not negotiate with the protesters.

President Vicente Fox’s government has approved plans to build a six-runway, $2.3 billion airport that will gobble up much of San Salvador Atenco and other surrounding communities. Residents have for months protested government attempts to expropriate their lands for the 11,000-acre project.

Paris: NY firefighters honored for courage on Sept. 11

Retired firefighter John Vigiano stood silently Friday as he accepted a French award on behalf of the New York Fire Department for courage in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

But on his mind was his personal loss: two of his sons were killed when the World Trade Center collapsed.

Vigiano, a retired captain with 36 years in the department, and five other firefighters accepted France’s Gold Medal for an Act of Courage and Devotion in a ceremony at the Interior Ministry.

The World Trade Center attacks killed 343 firefighters.

The firefighters stood in formation as French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy pinned the medal on a red and white NYFD flag and a marching band played the Star Spangled Banner.

The firefighters and family members of colleagues killed in the attacks are in France to mark the signing of a cooperation agreement between the New York and Paris fire departments.

Germany: Remains believed to be from U.S. WWII airman

U.S. Army forensics experts have recovered several parts of a fighter plane, a piece of a life preserver and human remains they believe to be bone fragments of a missing pilot shot down over Germany during World War II.

Speaking from the wooded site in the Thuringia Forest, members of the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory said Friday they believed the remains were those of 2nd Lt. William Lewis Jr.

Lewis, a member of the 8th Air Force’s 55th Fighter Group, was shot down Sept. 11, 1944, in an infamous air battle over eastern Germany.

“Most of what we’ve got is aircraft wreckage,” said Mark Leney, an anthropologist working at the site. “We also have fragments that are possible human remains.”

Peru: President names new prime minister, Cabinet

President Alejandro Toledo swore in a new prime minister and several Cabinet members Friday in a bid to revive his sagging popularity and calm turbulent political waters one year into his administration.

Luis Solari, a key figure in Toledo’s Peru Possible Party, was named prime minister and chief of the Cabinet. He replaced Roberto Danino, an independent former Washington, D.C., lawyer whose management was said to have alienated some party leaders.

Javier Silva Ruete, a two-time economy minister, assumed the post again from Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a U.S. investment banker and World Bank official whose free-market economic program had sparked frequent street protests.

Toledo has seen his approval ratings tumble to below 20 percent.

Moscow: Nuclear sub launches inflatable space vehicle

A Russian nuclear submarine on Friday launched a prototype of a European-Russian inflatable space vehicle that could be used to bring payloads or people back to Earth from space, its designers said.

The Demonstrator-2 blasted off from underwater, aboard the Ryazan submarine in the Barents Sea, into orbit on a converted Volna SS-N-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, the Russian navy said in a statement.

The project was a joint effort among Russian space officials, the European Space Agency and Germany-based Astrium, a unit of European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co., according to Russia’s Babakin Space Center, which designed the craft.