■PAKISTAN
Brutal penalty ordered
A court has ordered that two brothers should have their noses and ears cut off after they were found guilty of doing the same to a woman who was not allowed to marry one of them, a government prosecutor said on Tuesday. The judge at an anti-terrorism court in Lahore handed down the sentences on Monday in line with the Islamic law of Qisas. The brothers, Sher Mohammad and Amanat Ali, abducted their 22-year-old cousin at gunpoint in September after her father refused to let her marry Mohammad. “They put a noose around her neck and tried to strangle her. After failing to do so, Sher Mohammad chopped off her nose and two ears with a knife,” government prosecutor Ehtesham Qadir said. Such sentences are rarely handed down by Pakistani courts and have always been revoked on appeal. However, the court also sentenced the pair to life in prison, Qadir said. Qadir said the girl’s mother died of a heart attack on seeing the condition of her daughter.
■NEW ZEALAND
Nude is okay, with a helmet
Police picked up two naked men on a late night bike ride but let them off with a warning: Put on helmets. “They were wanting to experience total freedom,” said Senior Constable Cathy Duder, who stopped the pair at about 10pm on a recent night in the town of Whangamata. She told them: “You may experience total confinement. You should head home and get helmets.” The duo headed directly back to their house, Duder said yesterday. She did not see them again during her shift and it was not known if they donned helmets and resumed their nude ride. Public nudity is illegal, but Duder cut the two men a break. “It was dark and there was no one else around,” she said. The two were “happy young men [who seemed] sober as two judges.”
■ETHIOPIA
Professor sentenced to die
A court sentenced five people to death — including an Ethiopian professor teaching at a US university — and 33 to life in prison for being members of a terrorist group and conspiring to assassinate government officials. Those convicted have been accused of being members of the Ginbot 7 — May 15 in the Ethiopian calendar — which refers to Ethiopia’s election day in 2005 when postelection violence killed close to 200 people. Among those sentenced to death on Tuesday was Berhanu Nega, an exiled opposition leader who was elected mayor of Addis Ababa in 2005. But Berhanu, currently an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, dismissed the legitimacy of the court and its sentence. “This is what the government wanted in order to continue terrorizing the population, and there is nothing more to it than that,” he said on Tuesday. “For those of us who know this government, there is no surprise.”
■EGYPT
Jailing of blogger upheld
Egypt’s High Appeal Court has upheld the four-year prison sentence given to a blogger who was convicted of insulting Islam and Egypt’s president. Egypt’s official news agency said on Tuesday that the court rejected Abdel Kareem Nabil’s last appeal. Nabil was sentenced by a court in February 2007 to three years in prison for insulting the Prophet Mohammed and another year for insulting the president. In the trial, Nabil was convicted for calling Islam a brutal religion in a piece he wrote in 2005 after Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria.
■RUSSIA
Astronauts dock at ISS
A rocket carrying three astronauts from Japan, Russia and the US docked at the International Space Station yesterday, the Russian flight control center said. The Soyuz rocket left from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome on Monday carrying Soichi Noguchi of Japan, US astronaut Timothy Creamer and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov. The crew will now spend six months in orbit. The expedition has several technical goals including completing a new viewing platform for the station. The ISS is a sophisticated platform for scientific experiments, helping test the effects of long-term space travel on humans.
■IRAN
Hanging escape bid fails
Two men convicted of armed robbery were hanged in the city of Sirjan, the Fars news agency reported yesterday. The report added that an attempt to execute them was made on Tuesday morning but before being pronounced dead they were freed by relatives and escaped. The two along with five relatives were arrested later on Tuesday on their way to port city of Bandar Abbas. The two were hanged on Tuesday evening, the report added.
■MADAGASCAR
Police scatter protesters
Security forces in Antananarivo used tear gas on Tuesday to scatter hundreds of protesters angered by the military-backed leader’s rejection of international attempts to mediate a political resolution. The head of the city’s police force said two protesters were wounded and 13 arrested. Rivals of Andry Rajoelina, who seized power in March, had called a meeting at parliament of politicians designated as lawmakers under an agreement sponsored by international mediators to create a transitional coalition. The violence prevented the meeting from going ahead.
■UNITED STATES
Mom calls cops over game
Police said a frustrated Boston woman called police to say she couldn’t get her 14-year-old son to stop playing video games and go to sleep. Police spokesman officer Joe Zanoli said on Monday the mother called for help at about 2:30am on Saturday to say that the teenager also walked around the house and turned on all the lights. Two officers who responded to the house persuaded the child to obey his mother. Zanoli said the mother’s police call over video game obsession “was a little unusual, but by no means is it surprising — especially in today’s day and age when these kids play video games and computer games.” The boy was reportedly playing the popular Grand Theft Auto game.
■UNITED STATES
Couple married at airport
A woman in a wedding gown surprised her fiance by greeting him at a Texas airport along with a justice of the peace. Robyn Moore and William Acosta exchanged vows on Monday at Corpus Christi International Airport after he got off a plane arriving from Toledo, Ohio. Photos were taken near a Christmas tree at a security checkpoint. Acosta, who was wearing jeans and a sweater, says he was speechless and thrilled by the wedding Moore planned. Moore says she and Acosta “spent half our relationship in airports.”
■MEXICO
Official gunned down
A state tourism secretary and his chauffeur were gunned down during a drive-by shooting on Tuesday, the attorney general’s office said. Northeastern Sinaloa state tourism secretary Antonio Ibarra Salgado and his driver had just left a restaurant in the state capital of Culiacan when gunmen in a passing car strafed their car with bullets, killing them both, the office said. Local newspapers said army soldiers investigating drug trafficking activities last week raided several homes, including Ibarra’s, in a residential district of Culiacan.
■BRAZIL
Tourist accused of fraud
A 25-year-old US tourist faces fraud charges for allegedly lying to police that robbers had made off with his bags so he could claim insurance money. Nicholas Anthony Porfilio “was arrested Monday but released on bail pending his trial,” a spokesman for the special DEAT tourist police unit said on Tuesday. Porfilio’s passport was confiscated, he said. The incident follows a similar case of two British women, Shanti Andrews and Rebecca Turner, both 23, who declared thieves had stolen their laptop and iPod, among other belongings. Originally convicted and sentenced to lengthy community service, the two women — both law graduates — were acquitted on appeal last week and allowed to return to the UK.
■BRAZIL
Boy told to return to dad
The chief justice ruled in favor of an American man who has waged a five-year legal battle for his son, ordering relatives on Tuesday to turn over the nine-year-old boy. The decision put David Goldman one step closer to finally being reunited with his son, Sean, and appeared to bring the case in line with international custody accords. The boy was taken by Goldman’s now-deceased ex-wife to her native Brazil in 2004, where he has remained. Goldman, of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, has been fighting to get him back from the boy’s stepfather. Both governments have said the matter clearly fell under the Hague Convention, which seeks to ensure that custody decisions are made by the courts in the country where a child originally lived — in this case, the US.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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