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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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