■CHINA
Students stabbed in dorms
Knife-wielding men stabbed nine college-age students at a vocational school in Hainan, breaking into their dormitories after a dispute at a food stall hours earlier, local media said. More than 10 men, apparently from a nearby village, slashed a school guard, disabled a security camera, then around 2:30am on Wednesday burst into the dormitories, where they randomly hacked at students. One lost a hand, the China News Service said. Three attackers had been arrested, the Hainan Daily reported. Some students from the college, the Institute of Science and Technology, earlier had a confrontation with local youth at a barbecue stall. Four of them were injured in that fracas, media said.
■MALAYSIA
Maid abuser sentenced
A Kuala Lumpur district court sentenced a woman to eight years in prison yesterday for scalding her Indonesian housemaid with hot water and assaulting her with scissors and a hammer. The case was one of several involving the abuse of Indonesian domestic workers that strained ties between Indonesia and Malaysia last year, causing Indonesia to stop supplying new maids to its neighbor. Hau Yuan Tyng, a 44-year-old single mother of two, pleaded innocent in June last year to charges of assaulting Siti Hajar Sadli. She was convicted yesterday but remained free on bail pending an appeal, said her lawyer, M. Manoharan. She had faced a maximum penalty of 43 years in prison. Siti Hajar, 34, ran away in June last year after working for Hau for three years in a luxury condominium. Photographs of her reddened, scalded body were widely publicized, sparking anger in Indonesia, whose President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono pledged to seek justice for her.
■PAKISTAN
Authorities block YouTube
Authorities have blocked the popular video sharing Web site YouTube in a bid to contain “blasphemous” material, officials said yesterday. The blockade came hours after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) directed Internet service providers to stop access to social network Facebook indefinitely on Wednesday because of an online competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad. Wahaj-us-Siraj, the CEO of Nayatel, an Internet service provider, said PTA issued an order late on Wednesday seeking an “immediate” blockade of YouTube.
■AUSTRALIA
Ninjas save mugging victim
Three men who police said were robbing a German medical student in an alley fled in a panic when five members of a nearby martial arts school rushed to the rescue dressed in full ninja gear. The trio attacked the 27-year-old man on Tuesday night after he got off a train, New South Wales state police said. As the assault was under way, a student coming out of class at the Ninja Senshi Ryu school saw what was happening and called on his teacher and three other students for help. “We started running towards them and they took off. They would have seen five of us in ninja gear ... all in black with our belts on, running toward them,” ninja sensei Kaylan Soto told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “I think they’re probably still running if I’m not mistaken.” The victim suffered minor injuries, and the men stole his mobile phone and iPod, police said. Police said yesterday that they had arrested a 16-year-old and 20-year-old and charged them with robbery. They were still seeking a third suspect.
■INDIA
Freight train attacked
Suspected Maoist rebels set 15 cars of a freight train on fire yesterday, a day after five soldiers were killed when their paramilitary vehicle struck a rebel land mine. The soldiers belonging to the Central Reserve Police force were ambushed on Wednesday in West Midnapore district, nearly 175km west of Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state, said Zulfikar Hassan, an inspector-general of police. Early yesterday, the rebels struck again, triggering three explosions on a railway track in neighboring Bihar state and setting 15 freight cars carrying gasoline and diesel on fire, railway spokesman Dilip Kumar said.
■MALAYSIA
State-run TV fires producer
A TV producer said yesterday he was fired by the state-owned broadcaster after he publicly complained that his show about a politically sensitive dam project on Borneo island had been scrapped. Chou Z Lam wrote on his blog last month that Radio Televisyen Malaysia canceled a documentary he had completed about the Bakun Dam in Sarawak state on Borneo island after two of the show’s 10 episodes had already aired.
■PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Ferry capsizes, 17 missing
At least one person is dead and about 17 are missing after an overloaded ferry capsized, an official said yesterday. Fifty-seven people were rescued after Monday’s accident off the impoverished South Pacific country’s northeast coast, disaster and emergency coordinator Pius Ikuma said. Ikuma said the ferry was struggling with steering problems before the accident on Monday afternoon, about 55km offshore. The people on board were mainly villagers headed to a market in the town of Madang.
■IRAN
Jailed hikers meet moms
Three Americans jailed in Iran met with their mothers yesterday for the first time since their arrest last July along the border with Iraq. Tehran has accused the three Americans — Sarah Shourd, 31; her boyfriend, Shane Bauer, 27; and their friend Josh Fattal, 27 — of spying. Their relatives reject the accusation and say the three were hiking in Iraq’s Kurdish region. State-run Press TV broadcast images of Nora Shourd, Cindy Hickey and Laura Fattal throwing their arms up in the air and rushing to embrace their children as they entered a suite in upscale Esteghlal hotel in Tehran. The mothers hugged their children, some of them rocking back and forth together in an embrace with tears in their eyes.
■NETHERLANDS
Shop sells ‘Pope condoms’
De Condoomfabriek (The Condom Factory) will be giving away 2,000 “Pope condoms” this weekend in a dig at the Roman Catholic Church. The store said it wanted to make a point about sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and the Vatican’s opposition to contraceptives. The condom wrapper carries the image of a papal figure with an unmistakable general likeness to Pope Benedict, though the figure’s face is removed. It bears the words “I SAID NO! We say YES!” framing the papal image.
■FRANCE
Cabinet approves burqa ban
The government on Wednesday approved a draft law to ban the Muslim full-face veil from public spaces, opening the way for the text to go before parliament in July. “In this matter the government is taking a path it knows to be difficult, but a path it knows to be just,” President Nicolas Sarkozy told the Cabinet, his office said. While Sarkozy’s right-wing majority is expected to be able to push the law through parliament, constitutional experts have warned that it could be thrown out by judges and might fall foul of European law. The country’s highest administrative legal body, the Council of State, has also warned that it might be legally impossible to impose and enforce such a ban.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Doctors face practice ban
Doctors face being banned from practicing if they fail to respect the wishes of terminally ill patients who want to die by refusing treatment, the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday. Citing new guidelines from doctors’ regulator the General Medical Council, the paper said doctors must let dying patients refuse food and water if they do not wish to have treatment to prolong their life. They must also respect so-called “living wills” where patients have set out in advance that they do not want to be resuscitated. Doctors who breach the guidelines would be forced to attend a fitness to practice hearing before the medical council and could be struck off the medical register if the case against them were proved.
■FRANCE
ETA military leader arrested
Police arrested the suspected military leader of the Basque separatist movement ETA in the southwestern town of Bayonne yesterday morning. Spanish national Mikel Kabikoitz Karrera Sarobe, known as Ata, was detained along with another man and a woman belonging to the group at an apartment, police said. A fourth suspected ETA member, of French nationality, was arrested at the same time in the village of Urrugne, close to the coastal town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in French Basque country.
■COLOMBIA
Rights activist shot dead
A human rights activist working for displaced people was shot and killed in northern Sucre, a group monitoring major crimes said on Wednesday. Masked gunmen killed Rogelio Martinez, who received death threats for reporting on the infiltration of right-wing paramilitary groups in regional politics, according to the crime monitoring group, Movice. It said the assailants intercepted Martinez as he was riding home on a motorcycle. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ representative in Colombia Christian Salazar condemned the killing and asked Bogota to “promptly establish who is responsible” for the crime.
■UNITED STATES
Washington ‘returns’ book
A library book borrowed by the nation’s first president, George Washington, has been returned to New York City’s oldest library, 221 years late. Washington checked out the book from the New York Society Library at a time when the library shared a building with the federal government in lower Manhattan. The library said in a statement that its borrowing records showed Washington took out The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel on Oct. 5, 1789. The book was not returned, nor any overdue book fine paid — with the overdue fee now calculated at about US$300,000.
■UNITED STATES
Cold calls worse than no sex
The prospect of making cold calls for a week as a salesperson is more unappealing than giving up sex for a month, a survey showed this week. Only getting a root canal was deemed worse than making sales calls to businesses people did not know, the poll of 1,226 respondents said. From five options presented, one-third of the people said a root canal was worst, followed by cold calls at 23 percent, giving up sex for a month at 18 percent, being a surprise guest on a reality TV show at 15 percent and speaking in front of an audience at 13 percent. The random online poll was conducted in February for Sandler Training, a sales management training firm in Maryland.
■MALAWI
Gay couple get 14 years
A judge has sentenced a gay couple to the maximum 14 years in prison for unnatural acts and gross indecency. The harsh sentence had been expected after the same judge convicted Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza earlier this week under anti-gay laws dating from the colonial era. The government has been defiant in the face of international criticism over the couple’s prosecution. Chimbalanga, a 20-year-old hotel janitor, and his unemployed partner were arrested the day after they celebrated their engagement with a party at the hotel where Chimbalanga worked.
■UNITED STATES
Laotian gets passport back
An elderly Laotian man got his passport back on Wednesday and plans to go home to die after suing the US government for the return of the document, his attorney said. The lawsuit filed by the 88-year-old man using only his last name, Xiong, alleged immigration officials had refused to return the passport after seizing it when he applied for asylum in 2008. Xiong says he is in poor health and wants to be reunited with his wife and numerous children in Laos before his death, according to the suit filed in US District Court in San Francisco. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that following “further review of the case, we believe that this is the appropriate course of action.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
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