■ HONG KONG
Teenager dies in attack
A 15-year-old boy died yesterday after being attacked by a group wielding iron bars, police said. Police launched a murder inquiry after the teenager was assaulted from behind by 10 people as he was walking with a friend late on Saturday, the 19-year-old friend told police. "Sustaining serious injuries to his feet, the boy was rushed to [hospital] where he was certified dead at 2:40am Sunday," a spokesman said in a statement. A post-mortem was to be carried out today. Such blatant attacks are rare in the territory, despite gang activity in extortion, prostitution and the drugs trade.
■ SRI LANKA
Five killed in likely reprisal
Five men were killed near Colombo yesterday in what was believed to be a reprisal for attacks by criminal gangs, police said. The men were between the ages of 20 and 22 and were shot and hacked to death in Panadura, 25km from Colombo, a police official said, adding that there had been a spate of similar killings in the area. Underworld gangs have easy access to weapons and hitmen as a result of the country's decades-old Tamil separatist conflict. The country's military also has a high desertion rate, with some ex-soldiers resorting to crime.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Rescue mounted for caver
A rescue team headed deep underground yesterday to aid a cave climber with a broken leg who was trapped after a rock slide, police said. The injured climber -- stranded 3km from the cave's entrance on South Island -- had his leg smashed and suffered head injuries by falling rocks in Nelson's Middle Earth cave system, rescue coordinator Sergeant Mike Fitzsimmons said. Two men with the four-member caving group took six hours to climb out to raise the alarm, he said. The other member stayed with the injured man. Fitzsimmons said a rescue team of five, including a doctor, went underground yesterday morning to aid the local man, whose name was not released.
■ CHINA
Cyber-dissident detained
Cyber-dissident Lu Gengsong, a former lecturer turned activist, has been detained by police in Zhejiang Province, a rights watchdog group said yesterday. Lu, 51, was picked up at his home on Friday in Hangzhou as part of a crackdown ahead of this year's Chinese Communist Party congress and next year's Beijing Olympics, Chinese Human Rights Defenders said in a statement. Police searched his home and seized the hard disks from his and his daughter's computers, the group said. His wife was detained for three hours and then released. The family was told that Lu is under questioning on charges of inciting subversion of state power and holding secret documents, the group said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Equine flu halts racing
The equine influenza outbreak that has brought the country's racing industry to a standstill is starting to spread, with hundreds of horses now displaying symptoms of the disease. Government officials confirmed yesterday that the disease had spread out of Sydney into rural New South Wales and across the state border into Queensland. The government tried to contain the highly contagious disease by enforcing an unprecedented nationwide lockdown. The multi-billion dollar racing industry is already in turmoil because of the outbreak, but further spread could threaten this year's Melbourne Cup.
■ FRANCE
Rabbi fired for marriage
A rabbi who married a Protestant pastor in what is possibly a unique inter-faith union has been fired from his post, his wife announced on Saturday. Jonathan Levy, 53, has been ordered to cease his religious functions in the cities of Montpellier and Strasbourg following last month's wedding, said Catherine Stoerkel, a 35-year-old pastor in the southeastern town of Sainte Affrique. The Federation of Liberal Judaism "simply fired my husband," she said. She said that her own church had accepted the marriage and she was continuing her duties.
■ GERMANY
Chickens to be destroyed
Authorities will destroy 160,000 poultry at a Bavarian farm following the discovery there of the highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 bird flu, local authorities said on Saturday. Tests on a number of ducks from the farm at Wachenroth near the southern city of Erlangen, 200km north of Munich, confirmed the strain, local authority spokeswoman Annika Fritzsche said. Investigations will continue to determine how the virus entered the farm, Fritzsche said. It was detected in three young ducks from a batch delivered four weeks ago by a supplier in Lower Saxony.
■ GERMANY
Symphony to perform in Iran
A symphony orchestra will play classics by Beethoven, Elgar and Brahms in Iran this week -- a rare visit from a European ensemble amid political tensions between the Islamic republic and the West. The 60-member Osnabrueck Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Hermann Baeumer, will arrive today and perform on Wednesday and on Thursday in Tehran as the return half of an exchange that saw the Tehran Symphony Orchestra perform to a packed hall last year in Osnabrueck.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Novelist awarded honor
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy has been awarded one of the country's oldest literary honors for his tale of a father and son's travels through a post-apocalyptic US. The University of Edinburgh announced on Saturday that McCarthy won this year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for The Road, which has already garnered the author a Pulitzer. Author and journalist Byron Rogers took the biography category prize for his book on R.S. Thomas, a British poet. Each author wins £10,000 (US$20,000), making the award Scotland's most valuable. The media-shy McCarthy was not there to collect his prize.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Murdered boy gets tribute
Thousands of Everton soccer fans rose to their feet before a game in Liverpool on Saturday to pay tribute to the 11-year-old boy who dreamed of playing for the club someday before he was killed this past week in a shooting that has shocked the country. Rhys Jones' face looked down from Goodison Park stadium's giant video screen to the crowd of more than 30,000 -- which included his mother, father and older brother -- who applauded for a minute to celebrate the life of the boy who idolized the team. Police appealed over the stadium's public address system for help in finding Rhys' killer as the players took to the field, wearing black armbands in a sign of mourning.
■ UNITED STATES
Obama more open to Cuba
Senator Barack Obama on Saturday promised a more open policy towards Cuba at a packed campaign rally in Miami. "Just 90 miles [144km] from here there is a country where justice and freedom are out of reach," the US Democratic presidential hopeful told the cheering crowd packed into a city auditorium. "That's why my policy toward Cuba will be guided by one word: Liberty." He criticized US President George W. Bush, who restricted travel to Cuba and money remittances to the island in 2004 with the goal of toppling the communist regime of President Fidel Castro. The measures angered the estimated 1.5 million Cubans living in the US, many of who strongly oppose Castro but want to help friends and relatives on the island.
■ CANADA
Balloon fire kills two
A hot-air balloon caught fire as it left for a sunset flight near Vancouver, killing two people and injuring 11, including some who jumped from the craft in midair, police and witnesses said on Saturday. The balloon with 12 passengers and a pilot caught fire as it was taking off from a field in Surrey, British Columbia, on Friday, and the pilot ordered panicked passengers to jump to safety, police and witnesses said. The balloon then gained height and sped away, before the basket plunged like a fireball into a nearby trailer park, destroying three mobile homes and two cars. One man jumped at least 12m to the ground. Some of the 11 injured were in serious condition, but there were no injuries among people on the ground, officials said.
■ UNITED STATES
Sikhs protest turban rules
The Sikh Coalition, the largest civil-rights organization of US Sikhs has slammed a new airport security policy that it said allows arbitrary searches of turbans, a sacred headdress for members of the religion. The coalition said on Saturday that it had been told by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that under its new guidelines, turbans could be subject to manual pat-downs even if their wearers had passed a metal detector test. Amardeep Singh, executive director of the coalition, said in a statement that the message the new TSA policy sends to the public is that "people who wear turbans are dangerous." But TSA spokeswoman Lara Uselding on Saturday denied the allegation, saying: "TSA does not conduct ethnic or religious profiling, and employs multiple checks and balances to ensure profiling does not happen."
■ CANADA
Wedding guests killed
A pickup truck plowed through a crowd leaving a pre-wedding celebration in British Columbia, killing six people and injuring 19, police said. The 71-year-old driver of a truck lost control and ran into 25 to 30 people who were walking along a rural road toward him, police in Abbotsford said on Saturday. The victims had been at the bride's parents' house and were heading to another home, making their way along an unlit road lined with parked cars, police and a neighbor said. The wedding was to go ahead yesterday as scheduled.
■ PUERTO RICO
Police hearings set
The island's civil rights commission plans to hold hearings for public-housing residents after 10 officers were arrested for allegedly planting drugs as fraudulent evidence against low-income people. On Thursday, the FBI arrested eight police officers accused of planting drugs in housing projects in Mayaguez.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese