HONG KONG
Activist Albert Ho arrested
One of the territory’s best-known rights activists, Albert Ho (何俊仁), 71, was yesterday arrested by national security police for alleged witness tampering, a police source said. The lawyer and former lawmaker used to lead the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance, which organized an annual candlelight vigil for more than three decades to mourn the victims of China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Ho is already facing up to a decade in jail over an “incitement to subversion” charge under the National Security Law, which Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. Ho was yesterday arrested for “allegedly interfering with witnesses” while on bail, said the source, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the case. Violation of bail conditions can lead to immediate arrest.
HONG KONG
‘Pooh’ horror film canned
The screening of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a British slasher film due to be released in the territory this week, has been canceled for “technical reasons,” movie Web sites said yesterday. Moviematic, which had organized a screening of the film for yesterday evening, reported the cancelation on its social media page. Several other Web sites and media also reported the cancelation of screenings. The movie’s distributor in Hong Kong, VII Pillars Entertainment, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A ticket-booking link on its Facebook page brought up a message saying ticketing was temporarily unavailable. Chinese censors have in the past targeted the film’s main character, originally conceptualized by English author A.A. Milne, due to memes that compare the bumbling bear to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
INDIA
Internet cut for fugitive hunt
Police in India’s border state of Punjab yesterday continued their hunt for a fugitive Sikh separatist leader for a fourth day — with mobile Internet and messaging services for the region’s more than 27 million people cut off to prevent his supporters from gathering and inciting violence. The self-styled preacher, Amritpal Singh, has called on his followers to revive a banned secessionist movement that fought to create an independent state called Khalistan for followers of the Sikh faith in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s. A state-wide search for Singh was launched over the weekend, but the 30-year-old has so far evaded arrest. Punjab security personnel yesterday continued patrolling several districts, said Swarandeep Singh, a senior police official in the city of Jalandhar.
PAKISTAN
Eleven die in ‘family feud’
Shooters killed 11 people, including a prominent local politician in the country’s northwest, police said yesterday, blaming the ambush on a decades-long vendetta between families. Inter-family feuds are common in Pakistan. Police said 42-year-old Atif Munsif Khan, leader of a district council in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, was killed on Monday night in the town of Havelian, 33km north of Islamabad. District police official Omar Tufail said that “up to five people opened fire from two sides” on a vehicle carrying Khan and 10 others, including bodyguards and a police escort, “killing them all on the spot.” The Khan family registered a police complaint “blaming the assassination on their rivals” in a feud “said to be almost five decades old,” Tufail said. “Dozens of people from both sides have been killed as a result of this family feud so far,” he added.
UNITED STATES
Intel on COVID declassified
President Joe Biden on Monday signed into law a bill requiring the release of intelligence materials on potential links between the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. “We need to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins ... including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement. “In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible,” he added. Biden said that in 2021, after taking office, he had “directed the Intelligence Community to use every tool at its disposal to investigate.” That work is “ongoing,” but as much as possible will be released without causing “harm to national security,” the president said.
UNITED STATES
Two wild areas protected
President Joe Biden was to announce yesterday that he was designating two giant wilderness areas in Nevada and Texas as national monuments, as well as considering a new marine sanctuary in the Pacific. The White House said Biden would establish the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada and the Castner Range National Monument in Texas, protecting from development more than 200,00 hectares of public land. “He will also direct the secretary of commerce to consider initiating a new National Marine Sanctuary designation within the next 30 days to protect all US waters around the Pacific Remote Islands,” the White House press office said.
THAILAND
Elections set for May 14
The nation is to hold a general election on May 14, with a pre-poll survey showing opposition parties holding a clear lead over military-backed establishment parties in the outgoing government led by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha. Candidates should register to contest the 400 constituency seats to the House of Representatives between April 3 and 7, the Election Commission said in a statement yesterday. Political parties will need to nominate their candidates for the 100 party-list seats during those dates, it said in a statement. Parties must submit a list of their prime ministerial nominees to the election agency by April 7. After the May vote, the newly elected members of the lower house and the military-appointed Senate will pick the nation’s next leader from the list of candidates.
ETHIOPIA
US comments ‘inflammatory’
The government yesterday accused the US of taking a “partisan” approach by alleging that its forces, and Eritrean troops, had committed war crimes during the two-year conflict in Tigray. “The US statement is inflammatory,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, a day after Washington accused all parties to the conflict of committing war crimes, but singled out Ethiopian, Eritrean and regional Amhara forces for crimes against humanity, without mentioning the Tigrayan rebels. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who last week made his first visit to Ethiopia since a breakthrough peace deal between the federal government and Tigrayan rebels, on Monday made a forceful call for accountability on his return to Washington.He said the Department of State had carried out a “careful review of the law and the facts,” and concluded that war crimes were committed by federal troops from both Ethiopia and its ally Eritrea, as well as by the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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