■MONGOLIA
Red Cross appeals for aid
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an emergency appeal yesterday for nearly US$1 million to help thousands of herders who have lost their livestock to one of the worst winters in decades. The nation is grappling with a severe winter after a dry summer, a phenomenon known as a dzud that has led to extreme cold and food shortages for the livestock that many depend upon for survival. A total of 4.5 million livestock have died since December. The IFRC said the fund would provide families with emergency food and non-food relief, assistance with restoring and diversifying their livelihoods, and support to cope with depression and stress.
■MYANMAR
Bus company stops caning
A bus company has been told to stop caning drivers and conductors for letting too many passengers on buses, the Myanmar Times reported yesterday. The paper said Bandoola Transport brought in the punishment on two routes in Yangon last month as fining drivers and conductors was not improving discipline, but it was told last week to stop the caning, an order thought to have come from the Commander of Yangon Division. The firm will revert to issuing fines, the paper said.
■MALAYSIA
Migrants escape detention
Sixteen migrants were on the run yesterday after escaping a detention center at the main international airport, immigration officials said. The group, 12 Afghan and four Myanmar nationals, got through the gate of a facility at Kuala Lumpur airport, where officials said they were being held for their own protection from human trafficking syndicates. The migrants are believed to have cut through the wire mesh of the gate. The Afghans were part of a group of 18 rescued last October from a ship off the Malaysian coast as they were suffering from starvation, officials said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Wildlife smugglers jailed
Two foreigners were sentenced to prison yesterday for hunting and possessing protected native lizards. The men were sentenced to six months in jail, but District Court Judge Raoul Neave reduced their terms to 18 weeks because they entered guilty pleas. In his sentencing remarks, Neave said the men’s actions were no different from that of ivory hunters. Swiss Thomas Benjamin Price and Mexican Gustavo Eduardo Toledo-Albarran had arrived in the country last month and traveled to South Island. Price admitted possessing the lizards and Toledo-Albarran admitted illegally hunting them.
■GREECE
Bomb kills 15-year-old
A 15-year-old boy was killed and his mother and sister injured late on Sunday after a bomb exploded outside a building in central Athens, police said. Bomb attacks by militant leftist groups are frequent in the country and usually target police, public buildings or businesses. Sunday’s explosion was the first in years to kill someone. Urban violence increased in the country after the police shooting of a teenager in December 2008. Police later said the dead person was a 15-year-old teenager and that the injured women were his 44-year-old mother and 11-year-old sister. The bomb, which went off outside an association for business management, also damaged cars and adjacent buildings.
■UAE
Indians sentenced to death
A court in Dubai has sentenced 17 Indians to death over the killing of a Pakistani following a dispute involving illegal trade in alcohol, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Shariah court in Sharjah, one of the smaller of seven emirates, sentenced the men to death following DNA tests indicating involvement in the fatal stabbing, the Khaleej Times reported. The sentence is thought to be the largest single number of people sentenced to death at one time in the country, which is dominated by the oil-exporting emirate of Abu Dhabi and its flashy but deeply indebted neighbor Dubai. The newspaper reported three Pakistanis who survived the attack said that 50 people had assaulted them with knives.
■ITALY
Fraudsters sink to a new low
Fraudsters have sunk to a new low with a scam that threatened to break the hearts of thousands of children. Tax police in Latina, south of Rome, have seized 20,000 fake soccer stickers and are investigating eight people, among them a distributor and newsagents, suspected of preying on the passion for filling folders with soccer players’ faces and swapping doubles in the playground. The Italian firm Panini, which makes the original versions of the Italian Serie A stickers, said it had not seen such fine fakery in 50 years. The cards sell at EU$0.60 (US$0.80) for an envelope of six, and albums to stick them in for 2 euros. The newsagents, who allegedly purchased the cards at lower prices than the Panini cards, could face eight years in prison and fines.
■FRANCE
Sarkozy Sr writes memoir
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s father, a self-confessed bon vivant and womanizer, said he was setting the record on his life straight in an autobiography written above all for his children, and meant to counter claims he was a bad father. Pal Sarkozy wrote Tant de Vie (“So Much Life”) after his son advised him against filing lawsuits against his disparagers and instead to “answer later ... about all these unjust accusations,” the 81-year-old said in an interview on Sunday. So the book is above all a family affair, he said.
■GERMANY
Boy finds WWII bomb
A six-year-old boy found an unexploded World War II incendiary bomb while on a walk in a Berlin woods with his grandfather, police said. The boy spotted the roughly 60cm cylinder with a red head casing in a wooded area of Berlin’s Kopenick neighborhood, which his 62-year-old grandfather recognized as being a WWII-era bomb. After being contacted by the grandfather, police bomb specialists arrived, confirmed it to be a WWII incendiary bomb, and removed it. Berlin police plan to award the boy with a stuffed animal for his find, a spokesman said.
■MEXICO
Shootout kills five
Five people were killed in a shootout with soldiers near Monterrey, officials said, shortly after thousands held a protest march in the city against drug-related violence in their region. Nuevo Leon state security chief Luis Carlos Trevino said troops in Monterrey on Sunday were tipped off to the presence of gunmen in a hotel in nearby Santa Catarina. When they got there the troops were met with a hail of gunfire, Trevino said. The shootout occurred shortly after a peaceful demonstration attended by about 8,000 people in downtown Monterrey to protest against the violence in the city.
■UNITED STATES
Man held for bomb hoax
A Carnival cruise ship was held off the Florida coast for several hours on Sunday while authorities searched the vessel and arrested a drunk passenger on bomb hoax charges, the Coast Guard said. No explosives or hazardous materials were found and the ship, the Carnival Sensation, was allowed to dock at Port Canaveral on Sunday morning, Coast Guard petty Officer 1st Class Christopher Evanson said. The ship was carrying 3,470 passengers and crew and was headed back to Florida after a three-day cruise to the Bahamas when a passenger reported hearing another passenger make a bomb threat, the Coast Guard said. The man was quoted as saying: “We are jihad. Come to the top deck and watch the bomb. The bomb is going to blow.” Evanson said the man was “highly intoxicated.”
■UNITED STATES
Ground zero search to start
New York City officials are planning to search through material excavated from around the World Trade Center site for any remains of Sept. 11 victims. The three-month endeavor will start on Friday at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The material being searched was taken from the area around ground zero in the last two years. The search is expected to cost US$1.4 million.
■ISRAEL
Country’s image a concern
A Passover eve poll says Israelis are increasingly concerned about their country’s international standing amid its most serious crisis with the US in decades. A poll published in the Maariv newspaper showed that only 14 percent of citizens defined the country’s standing as good, 36.8 percent called it reasonable and more than 48 percent called it bad. The survey questioned 500 people and had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
■ITALY
Low voter turnout
Polls reopened yesterday for the second and final day of regional elections with the specter of a sharp drop in turnout haunting embattled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Interior Ministry said after the close of voting on Sunday that turnout reached 47.7 percent, nearly nine points off the figure at the same point in the 2005 regional polls. Turnout was down 12.5 percent in Rome’s Lazio region.
■IRELAND
Adams key to IRA: book
A new book on the Northern Ireland conflict published yesterday identifies Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams as a key Irish Republican Army (IRA) figure who directed some of the IRA’s most notorious killings and bombings. Sinn Fein has rejected the allegations in Voices From the Grave, a book based on interviews provided by Northern Ireland militants to Boston College researchers on condition that they not be published until the interviewees were dead.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
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