Luis Armando Albino was 6 years old in 1951 when he was abducted while playing at an Oakland, California park. Now, more than seven decades later, Albino has been found thanks to help from an online ancestry test, old photos and newspaper clippings.

The Bay Area News Group reported Friday that Albino’s niece in Oakland — with assistance from police, the FBI and the Justice Department — located her uncle living on the East Coast.

Albino, a father and grandfather, is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, according to his niece, 63-year-old Alida Alequin. She found Albino and reunited him with his California family in June.

On Feb. 21, 1951, a woman lured the 6-year-old Albino from the West Oakland park where he had been playing with his older brother and promised the Puerto Rico-born boy in Spanish that she would buy him candy.

Instead, the woman kidnapped the child, flying him to the East Coast where he ended up with a couple who raised him as if he were their own son, the news group reported. Officials and family members didn’t say where on the East Coast he lives.

For more than 70 years Albino remained missing, but he was always in the hearts of his family and his photo hung at relatives’ houses, his niece said. His mother died in 2005 but never gave up hope that her son was alive.

Oakland police acknowledged that Alequin’s efforts “played an integral role in finding her uncle” and that “the outcome of this story is what we strive for.”

Newsom signs Calif. plastic bag ban

“Paper or plastic” will no longer be a choice at grocery store checkout lines in California under a new law signed Sunday by Gov. Gavin Newsom that bans all plastic shopping bags.

California had already banned thin plastic shopping bags at supermarkets and other stores, but shoppers could purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly made them reusable and recyclable.

The new measure, approved by state legislators last month, bans all plastic shopping bags starting in 2026. Consumers who don’t bring their own bags will now simply be asked if they want a paper bag.

Iran coal mine explosion kills 34 workers

An explosion in a coal mine in eastern Iran killed at least 34 workers and injured 17 others, officials said Sunday, marking one of the worst mining disasters in the country’s history as others remained missing hours after the blast.

The blast struck a coal mine in Tabas, about 335 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran, on Saturday night. By Sunday, weeping miners stood alongside mine cars that brought up the bodies of their colleagues, all covered in coal dust.

Around 70 people had been working at the time of the blast. State television later said that 17 were believed to be trapped at a depth of 650 feet down a 2,300-foot tunnel. Figures kept changing Sunday regarding the disaster with some reports suggesting the death toll was higher.

A provincial emergency official said that the death toll had reached at least 34 as rescue efforts continued.

Robinson campaign staffers quit in fallout

Several top staffers in North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor have quit their posts, marking more fallout from a CNN report outlining evidence that he made disturbing posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.

The campaign said in a news release Sunday that senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, the campaign’s finance director and a deputy campaign manager “have stepped down.”

Pogorzelski said separately on Sunday that additional staffers also left the campaign.

The CNN report on Thursday unearthed past posts it said Robinson left on a porn site’s message boards in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI;” said in 2012 he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama; and slammed the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.”

French anti-riot force sent to Martinique

France has sent a group of special anti-riot police that’s been banned for 65 years to the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where protesters have gathered despite the government barring demonstrations in parts of the island.

The force arrived this weekend after the local representative of France’s central government in its overseas territory said in a statement that protests were forbidden in the municipalities of Fort-de-France, Le Lamentin, Ducos and Le Robert until Monday. The government also issued a curfew.

The restrictions came after violent protests broke out on the island last week over the high cost of living, with gunfire injuring at least six police officers and one civilian.

The elite riot police, known as the Companies for Republican Security, were banned in the French territory following bloody riots in December 1959. The unit had been accused of using disproportionate force against protesters, ending in the deaths of a number of young demonstrators.

21 wounded in Kharkiv; Zelenskyy in U.S.

Russia launched new strikes in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv that hit high-rise apartment buildings, leaving at least 21 wounded in a second consecutive nighttime attack, authorities said.

The bombs fell Saturday night on the district of Shevchenkivsky, north of the center of Kharkiv, which is the second-largest Ukrainian city, local Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said. Kharkiv’s city council said that 18 buildings were damaged.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday visited the Pennsylvania ammunition factory that is producing one of the most critically needed munitions for his country’s fight to fend off Russian ground forces.

Social Democrats hold back far right in Germany

The Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz won an election in the eastern German state of Brandenburg on Sunday, gaining a narrow edge over a growing far-right party, according to the vote count. The vote took place three weeks after the far right made gains in two other states in eastern Germany.

According to final results published Sunday evening by the state electoral administration, the Social Democrats won 30.9% of the votes in the election to the parliament of Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin. The far-right Alternative for Germany was a close second with 29.2%.

A new leftist movement, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, came in third with 13.5% while the center-right Christian Democrats took 12.1%.

Rhino population up; poaching is too

The rhino population across the world has increased slightly but so have the killings, mostly in South Africa, as poaching fed by huge demand for rhino horns remains a top threat, conservationists said in a new report.

The number of white rhinos increased from 15,942 in 2022 to 17,464 in 2023, but the black and greater one-horned rhino stayed the same, according to the report published by the International Rhino Foundation ahead of Sunday’s World Rhino Day.

— From news services