■LAOS
Pregnant Briton sentenced
A court found a pregnant British woman guilty of trafficking heroin and sentenced her to life in prison on Wednesday, a court official said. The life sentence for 20-year-old Samantha Orobator came after a one-day trial in the capital, said Chanthaly Duangvilai, vice president of the Vientiane Court. Orobator pleaded guilty, the court official said at a press briefing after the trial, adding that she named several of her alleged accomplices in her testimony. She was the only defendant in the case. Heroin trafficking is punishable by death, but she was spared because law does not allow the execution of pregnant women, Chanthaly said. Under a pact signed last month with Britain that still needs ratification, Orobator could be extradited to serve her time in the UK. Officials, however, could still veto her return.
■JAPAN
Alleged kidnapper arrested
Police yesterday arrested a Chinese man following an Interpol request, an official said, amid reports he was a suspected member of a gang that has kidnapped children in his home country. Police suspect He Guangqiang, 39, entered the country on a fake passport two years ago and has stayed at a Tokyo apartment ever since, a spokesman at the metropolitan police department said. The suspect was caught after the international police agency Interpol in Beijing requested cooperation, the official said, without giving further information. The suspect was expected to be extradited to China shortly.
■PHILIPPINES
Vessels search for boat
Rescue vessels and a helicopter scoured the rough seas in the east yesterday for a fishing boat that disappeared with 21 people aboard, officials said. The small boat left Cataduanes Island on Wednesday afternoon but failed to arrive at its destination in nearby Rapu-Rapu Island, a distance of about 40km, said disaster official Cedric Daep in Albay Province. Navy vessels and an air force helicopter launched a search yesterday as soon as the weather improved, the coast guard said. The boat operator sent a cell phone text message to his relatives saying they encountered rough weather, a radio report said.
■INDONESIA
Authorities detain migrants
Authorities have detained 59 Afghan and Pakistani migrants on eastern Sumba Island and arrested four alleged people-smugglers trying to send them to Australia, police said yesterday. The migrants were traveling from neighboring Sumbawa Island’s coastal town of Bima to Australia on Wednesday, East Sumba police chief Petra Putra said. The police also arrested a boat captain and three crew members on suspicion of people-smuggling. Crew member Adhar said he had been paid 2 million rupiah (US$200) to bring the migrants to Australia.
■PHILIPPINES
Peace activist released
A Sri Lankan peace activist kidnapped by Islamic militants in the south almost four months ago has been safely released, police said yesterday. Umar Jaleel was rescued late on Wednesday from his Abu Sayyaf captors in the town of Tipo-Tipo on Basilan Island, regional police spokesman Superintendent Danilo Bacas said. No other details were released. Jaleel’s group, the Brussels-based Nonviolent Peaceforce, said he was freed after negotiations facilitated by local contacts in Basilan. Jaleel was seized by teenaged gunmen on Feb. 13.
■ISRAEL
Officials give mixed signals
Israel issued contradictory signals on Wednesday on whether it might bomb Iran, with the foreign minister saying there were no such plans and the defense minister saying all options were on the table. “I have been asked by Saudi journalists about when Israel plans to bomb Iran. We are not planning to bomb Iran,” far-right Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said during a visit to Russia. Israel has in the past said all options were on the table in preventing Tehran from building atomic weapons, and this was repeated later by Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “I repeat what I have always said, we are not taking any options off the table,” Barak told reporters in Washington after meetings with US officials.
■TURKEY
Demined border approved
Parliament yesterday approved a bill to clear land mines from the nation’s border with Syria. The controversial bill, which passed 255-91, would allow foreign companies to do the job in return for the right to farm the fertile land for up to 44 years. Opposition parties objected that the measure went against national interests.
■GUINEA
Burn bandits: official
A senior member of the military junta, which seized power in December, on Tuesday urged the public to burn thieves alive, saying prisons were overcrowded. “I am asking you to burn alive armed bandits who are caught red-handed,” said Captain Moussa Tiegoro Camara, in charge of fighting crime and drug trafficking. “Our jails and our correctional centers can no longer take in people and the situation cannot carry on like this,” he said at a meeting discussing security measures in Conakry. The call was immediately slammed by rights activists. “This is unacceptable and intolerable,” Thierno Diallo said.
■IRAN
Khomeini remembered
The nation yesterday commemorated the 20th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, at a ceremony in the Khomeini Mausoleum in southern Tehran. Tens of thousands of people, as well as high-ranking political and military officials of the Islamic state, including Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attended the ceremony. Khomeini was the driving force behind the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and initiator of an Islamic system that has turned into a major political challenge for the West.
■NETHERLANDS
Court asks for Bildt
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia asked that Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt meet with Radovan Karadzic’s lawyers over an immunity deal the former Bosnian Serb leader said he was offered in 1996. Karadzic filed a motion last month arguing that charges against him should be dropped because he was promised immunity by US peace mediator Richard Holbrooke if he disappeared from public life. Karadzic said Bildt helped broker the agreement and had requested a meeting with him. Holbrooke has repeatedly denied the existence of a deal. Swedish Ambassador to the Netherlands Hans Magnusson told the court Bildt was also unaware of any immunity deal. However, presiding pre-trial judge Iain Bonomy told Magnusson the court would like Bildt to meet Karadzic’s team and the minister could be ordered to do so if he failed to attend voluntarily.
■UNITED STATES
‘Queen of Blues’ dies
Blues legend Koko Taylor, who became known as the “Queen of Blues” and was one of the few women to find success in the male dominated blues scene, died on Wednesday, her publicist said. She was 80. Born Cora Walton on a sharecropper’s farm outside of Memphis, she earned the nickname Koko for her love of chocolate. She moved to Chicago in 1952 with her soon-to-be-husband the late Robert “Pops” Taylor and settled on the city’s south side, haunting blues clubs by night and cleaning houses by day. Taylor got her big break in 1963 when composer Willie Dixon came up to her after a performance and told her “I never heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues.” Taylor’s final performance was on May 7. She died of complications following a May 19 surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding.
■MEXICO
Police detained after kidnap
Soldiers detained the head of traffic police and 48 officers suspected of taking part in the kidnap of a customs worker in Veracruz, officials said on Wednesday. Soldiers in Veracruz rounded up scores of police on Tuesday after a review of the city’s security cameras during a kidnap investigation, said state prosecutor Salvador Mikel Rivera at a news conference. Federal maritime customs administrator Francisco Serrano was kidnapped on Monday at a fake police road block and his van later appeared at Veracruz traffic management offices, said Pedro Canabal, a state official.
■UNITED STATES
Shell trial stalls again
Another delay was announced on Wednesday in the potentially landmark trial of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell over allegations of complicity in Nigeria’s human rights abuses. A pre-trial conference scheduled to take place in federal court in New York was canceled at short notice and the trial has been put off indefinitely. The conference, already delayed once, was ordered after the judge last week decided to delay the scheduled start to the trial itself. Nigerian plaintiffs are suing Shell for alleged complicity in the 1995 executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a renowned writer and activist, and other leaders of a movement protesting alleged environmental destruction and abuses against the Ogoni people. The corporation is also accused of complicity in the torture, detention and exile of Saro-Wiwa’s brother and other violent attacks. Shell denies all the charges.
■UNITED STATES
Reagan statue unveiled
A teary-eyed Nancy Reagan watched with delight as a bronze statue of her late husband Ronald Reagan was unveiled in the US Capitol building on Wednesday. Mrs Reagan, 87, and a crowd packed with Reagan era policymakers, looked on in the Capitol’s Rotunda. Ronald Reagan lay in state there after his death in 2004.
■UNITED STATES
Uighur leader rejects report
The leader of Uighurs in exile on Wednesday voiced “utmost” skepticism after China said it smashed “terror cells” in their predominantly Muslim region. Chinese state media said police have dismantled seven cells of extremists so far this year in Kashgar, a key center of Uighur culture. Rebiya Kadeer, the Washington-based leader of the world’s Uighurs in exile, said China made the allegations “without producing the slighest piece of evidence. I stress that the international community should view these claims with the utmost of skepticism,” Kadeer said in a statement. “These allegations are being made in such a way so as to associate peaceful Uighurs with the scourge of terrorism,” she said.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
In front of a secluded temple in southwestern China, Duan Ruru skillfully executes a series of chops and strikes, practicing kung fu techniques she has spent a decade mastering. Chinese martial arts have long been considered a male-dominated sphere, but a cohort of Generation Z women like Duan is challenging that assumption and generating publicity for their particular school of kung fu. “Since I was little, I’ve had a love for martial arts... I thought that girls learning martial arts was super swaggy,” Duan, 23, said. The ancient Emei school where she trains in the mountains of China’s Sichuan Province
RSS