Towns and cities across Bangladesh were paralyzed yesterday as the opposition launched a three-day general strike to protest a grenade attack on an opposition party rally that killed five people. \nDemonstrators took to the streets in the tense capital, Dhaka, and other parts of the country as riot-equipped security forces stood guard. \nThe strike came as human rights group Amnesty International appealed to the government to fully investigate Thursday's blast at the Awami League rally that killed four party activists and former finance minister Shah A.M.S. Kibria. \nThe attack occurred just over a week before Dhaka plans to host a summit of South Asian leaders. \nThe opposition said Friday the Muslim-majority nation was being "held hostage to violent extremism and radicalism" aimed at wrecking its secular foundations. \nThe government, an Islamist-allied coalition led by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party, dismissed the allegations as "emotional outpourings" and pledged a full probe into the attack. \nThe dawn-to-dusk strike which ends tomorrow emptied towns and cities of traffic, stranded trains in stations and shut businesses, shops and schools, police and witnesses said. Saturday is a working day in Bangladesh. \nPolice broke up two rallies in downtown Dhaka and arrested two women after demonstrators attacked security forces, city police chief Mizanur Rahman told reporters. There was no immediate comment from the Awami League. \nSome 8,000 riot police were guarding key locations in the teeming capital, Rahman said. \nPolice also said they arrested five people in the southeastern port city of Chittagong when they tried to stage a demonstration outside Awami League offices. \nStrikes are common in Bangladesh where the opposition enforced 22 shutdowns last year, despite pleas from aid donors and business to find other ways to protest, saying such actions drained the nation's impoverished economy. \nThe strike halted cargo deliveries at Chittagong Port, port officials said. \nIn its statement, London-based Amnesty also accused the government of failing to investigate similar earlier attacks with "rigor and determination." \nThe group said "unless such inquiries are conducted thoroughly and impartially, they will lack credibility and the culprits will be sheltered from justice." \nThe strike brought other parts of the country to a halt, police reported. \n"Shops are closed, there are long traffic jams of buses and trucks and sporadic marches but no violence," police chief Abdul Aziz Sarker said in southwestern Khulna.
A glimpse of a possible Picasso in the home of Imelda Marcos filmed during a visit by her son after his presidential election win has set off a flurry of speculation in the Philippines, where the family that once plundered billions is set to return to power. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, the son and namesake of the late dictator, won a landslide victory in Monday’s presidential election, an outcome that has appalled those who survived his father’s regime. Images released by the family showed Marcos Jr visiting the home of his mother, who had displayed Picasso’s Femme Couche VI (Reclining Woman VI),
The images of a besuited Ferdinand Marcos Jr, clad in a top hat and leaning nonchalantly on a Rolls-Royce, dating from his time in Britain in the 1970s, are as you might expect from the playboy scion of a kleptocratic dictator. Yet as the Marcos family returns to power in the Philippines after a landslide presidential victory by Marcos Jr, he is facing calls to stop misrepresenting the circumstances of his studies at the University of Oxford. The university has confirmed that he did not complete his degree in philosophy, politics and economics after enrolling in 1975. “According to our records, he did
HATE CRIME: Officials were investigating a detailed ‘manifesto’ posted online before the livestreamed shooting, in which the suspect outlined his reasoning and plans A heavily armed 18-year-old white man on Saturday shot 10 people dead at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a “racially motivated” attack that he livestreamed on camera, authorities said. The gunman, who was wearing body armor and a helmet, was arrested after the massacre, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told a news conference. Gramaglia put the toll at 10 dead and three wounded. Eleven of the victims were African Americans. The gunman shot four people in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket, three of them fatally, then went inside and continued firing, Gramaglia said. Among those killed inside the store was
‘UNITED AS ONE’: Photos showed people working on farms or walking in a North Korean town, indicating that a lockdown does not require people to stay home North Korea yesterday imposed a nationwide lockdown to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after saying for more than two years that it had a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world. The size of the outbreak was not immediately known, but it could have serious consequences, because the country has a poor healthcare system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated against COVID-19. Some experts say that the North, by its admission of an outbreak, might be seeking outside aid. The North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said that
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