MALAYSIA
Immigrants escape detention
More than 100 Rohingya immigrants on Thursday escaped from a detention center in Perak State after a protest, with one confirmed killed in a road accident, officials said yesterday. Immigration Department Director-General Ruslin Jusoh said in a statement that 131 detainees escaped from the center. Nearly 400 personnel were deployed to hunt them down, he said, without giving details on what sparked the breakout. District police chief Mohamad Naim Asnawi was quoted by national Bernama news agency as saying that the immigrants escaped from the men’s block after a riot broke out at the center.
GREECE
Police, students clash
Police and student protesters on Thursday clashed in the center of Athens after a demonstration against government plans to allow private universities. Demonstrators attacked police cordons, set fire to trash dumpsters and threw stones at riot police near parliament and later during clashes along the capital’s narrow streets. Police responded with tear gas and made several arrests. The government wants to legalize privately run universities in a bill that is due to go before parliament this month, arguing that the reform would prevent skilled people from leaving the country and make higher education more relevant to the labor market. But the plan has sparked several protests, including an ongoing campaign to occupy university buildings in protest, which has disrupted classes and forced some academic authorities to reschedule upcoming exams. In Thessaloniki, police joined by officers from a special-forces unit evicted protesters from the principal’s office of the city’s public university, which they had occupied.
HAITI
Killings increase, UN says
More than 2,300 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in the Caribbean nation from October to December last year, a nearly 10 percent increase compared with the previous quarter, the UN said in a report released on Thursday. The number of killings alone spiked to more than 1,600 during the period, with officials blaming the vacuum created by the death of a gang leader known as Andrice Isca for unleashing territorial fights in the Cite Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince that killed and injured nearly 270 people over about two weeks in late November. Isca has also been identified as Iskar Andrice and Iscar Andris. Authorities said fights occurred within a gang federation known as G-9 Family and Allies, which also targeted an opposition gang coalition called G-Pep. “In addition to the loss of human life, the humanitarian toll of the clashes was disastrous: Over 1,000 people were forced to abandon their homes and take refuge in nearby areas,” the report said.
UNITED STATES
Alaska sets cold record
Much of Alaska has plunged into a deep freeze, with Anchorage having some of its coldest temperatures in years. In the state capital, Juneau, snow blanketed streets and rooftops as part of a two-day storm that helped set a new January snowfall record of 2m for the city. Anchorage surpassed 2.5m of snow this week, the earliest date that the state’s largest city has ever hit that mark. For much of the last week, temperatures were minus-40°C or colder in Fairbanks, an inland city of about 32,000 that is a popular destination for seeing the northern lights. “That’s a pretty solid streak,” National Weather Service meteorologist Dustin Saltzman said, adding that it was the coldest outbreak in at least several years.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
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
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS