■TIBET
Dalai Lama starts EU tour
The Dalai Lama began a European tour in Denmark on Friday, meeting Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen for what he called a “mainly spiritual and educational” visit. On leaving the Danish premier’s official residence north of Copenhagen, the Tibetan spiritual leader said the 45-minute encounter was not political. The meeting came despite China warning European nations against welcoming the Dalai Lama.
■CHINA
US lashes out over lawyers
The US says it is “deeply disturbed” by reports that China has refused to renew the licenses of human rights lawyers. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters on Friday that the US was urging “that rights lawyers in China be given full scope to practice law.” He said the US would continue to raise concerns about China’s treatment of rights lawyers with Beijing. Lawyers in China say authorities have met or talked on the phone with senior members of at least nine law firms in recent weeks. They say authorities urged them to not seek the renewal of licenses for certain lawyers or to submit partial applications that would allow authorities to reject them on technicalities.
■CHINA
US school group released
A group of 21 students and three teachers from a Silver Spring, Maryland, private school has been released from quarantine after being held by the Chinese government over fears about swine flu. The students from the Barrie School had just one day left to wrap up their tour of Guizhou Province before they return home today. They arrived a week ago and were quarantined in their hotel for five days, beginning on Monday.
■AFGHANISTAN
Blast injures governor
A roadside bomb ripped through the motorcade of a provincial governor in the northeast yesterday, injuring the official and his driver, a security official said. Mohammad Omar, the provincial governor of Kunduz Province was injured when a remote-controlled bomb, similar to those used by Taliban insurgents, struck his vehicle, said Abdul Majeed Azimi, the local intelligence chief. “The governor was returning from [the neighboring] province of Takhar. Along the road a remote-control mine struck his vehicle, injuring him and his driver slightly,” Azimi said, adding that the two men were hospitalized with “slight injuries.”
■HONG KONG
Boy hacker ‘mentally stable’
A man who hacked a 3-year-old boy to death with a meat cleaver in front of horrified lunchtime crowds had been declared mentally fit by psychiatrists just weeks earlier, news reports said on Saturday. The 39-year-old man surnamed Leung was released from a psychiatric unit in 2006 after being an inpatient for two years. He attended a scheduled checkup on May 8 and was diagnosed as mentally stable by a senior psychiatrist, the South China Morning Post said. Leung attacked the boy, who was a neighbor, as he played on Friday in the street with his father outside a busy market. Horrified witnesses described how Leung suddenly ran out at the boy and sank the cleaver into his head several times as his father tried to defend him, pleading: “Do not chop my son. Chop me!”
■PHILIPPINES
Schools open despite flu
More than 23 million students were cleared to head back to schools next week despite the threat of swine flu, officials said on Saturday. The new school year will start as scheduled today with 21 million expected at elementary and secondary schools along with 2.6 million others at colleges and universities, the education department said. Health Secretary Francisco Duque played down fears raised by some politicians who have called for the start of the school year to be delayed until the outbreak of influenza A(H1N1) has subsided.
■INDIA
Hardliner denounces Taliban
“Acts of terrorism” by Taliban extremists in Pakistan are un-Islamic, a hardline Muslim politician campaigning for Kashmir’s independence said yesterday. Referring to Thursday’s spate of bomb attacks in Pakistan’s northwestern cities, in which 15 people were killed, Syed Ali Geelani told reporters that, “such attacks are forbidden in Islam as innocents are killed.” “Islam is a religion of peace and such attacks defame the religion,” said the 79-year-old Geelani, who supports a two-decade insurgency against New Delhi’s rule over half of Kashmir. Geelani, who heads a hardline faction in the region’s main separatist alliance, the Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, called on the Taliban to lay down their arms and hold peace talks with Pakistan’s government.
■AUSTRALIA
Swine flu ship docks
A cruise ship held off the northeast amid fears of a swine flu outbreak was on Saturday allowed to dock under emergency decree, as the number of confirmed cases passed 200. Queensland state health authorities were forced to declare a public health emergency after management at the Brisbane city port refused to let the Pacific Dawn dock and release passengers. State Health Minister Paul Lucas signed an emergency decree forcing the port to allow the P&O liner to berth at the Portside Wharf, the AAP newswire reported.
■ESTONIA
Swine flu case confirmed
A 29-year-old Estonian man was being kept isolated in a Tallinn hospital yesterday after becoming the first confirmed case of the A(H1N1) virus, or swine flu, in the Baltic states. The patient returned to Estonia on May 27 after visiting the US. Despite numerous suspected cases of swine flu in the Baltic states, no cases had been confirmed until now. The WHO has so far recorded more than 15,500 cases of the new influenza in more than 50 countries.
■IRAQ
No anti-gay violence: Sadr
Radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered the “depravity” of homosexuality be eradicated but warned against the anti-gay violence that has recently erupted, a spokesman said on Friday. “The only remedy to stop it is through preaching and guidance. There is no other way to put an end to it,” Sheikh Wadea al-Atabi said, stressing that the movement could not resort to violence after a series of killings of gay men in Baghdad. “Al-Sadr rejects this type of violence ... and anyone who commits violence [against gays] will not be considered as being one of us,” Atabi said. In the sprawling Baghdad Shiite district of Sadr City, police last month recovered the bullet-riddled bodies of three men said to have been homosexuals. Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam, frowned upon in Arab society and illegal in many Middle Eastern countries.
■SWITZERLAND
Images to deter smokers
Cigarette packages should show graphic images of yellow teeth, blackened gums, protruding neck tumors and bleeding brains to alert smokers to their disease risks, the WHO said on Friday. More than 20 countries, including Britain, Iran, Peru and Malaysia, already use visual warnings on their tobacco products, the head of the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative said. “Although some people question the need for such pictures, the evidence is absolutely clear that they convince people to quit,” Douglas Bettcher told a news conference ahead of World No Tobacco Day today. He said that the “disgust, fear, sadness or worry” from the warnings can discourage smoking.
■RUSSIA
Oleg Shenin dies at 71
Soviet Communist Party official Oleg Shenin, who played an active part in an abortive attempt to overthrow former president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, has died in Moscow, the Russian Communist Party said on Friday. He was 71. The Communist Party’s statement said Shenin died on Thursday, but did not give a cause of death. Shenin was part of a group of party hardliners disillusioned by the steady breakdown of communist institutions, who briefly unseated Gorbachev in their attempts to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. The group attempted to hold Gorbachev under house arrest but the three-day coup failed when the army refused to quell protests backing Boris Yeltsin, who was leading the opposition to the plotters. The August 1991 coup sped the collapse of the Soviet Union.
■RUSSIA
Village shelled accidentally
A Russian naval ship carrying out target practice off the Russian Baltic Sea coast accidentally rained shell fragments on a village near St Petersburg, officials said on Friday. Nobody was injured when the fragments from shells fired by an anti-submarine ship in the Gulf of Finland fell on houses in the village of Zelyonaya Roshcha, close to the border with Finland, regional military prosecutor Igor Lebedev said. An investigation has begun, Lebedev said.
■UNITED STATES
Ethnic studies pioneer dies
Ronald Takaki, a descendant of Japanese plantation workers who helped change the way universities teach US history by bringing in minority viewpoints, has died, his son said on Friday. He was 70. Takaki, a retired professor at the University of California at Berkeley, killed himself on Tuesday at his home after a 15-year battle with multiple sclerosis, his son Troy Takaki said. Takaki joined Berkeley in 1971 and spearheaded its new ethnic studies department. Two decades later, Berkeley required students to take a multicultural course, a decision soon replicated at many universities, but which also met fierce criticism by those who assailed “political correctness.”
■MEXICO
Crime wave intensifies
With law enforcement tied up attacking drug cartels, freelance crime gangs have become more daring and sophisticated, hijacking trucks and trains and stealing massive loads of steel, coffee and beans. These gangsters are armed not only with guns but heavy machinery to unload industrial materials and bulk agricultural goods, deftly passing them off to the black market. The third-largest steel producer, Altos Hornos de Mexico, has been victim of nearly 40 robberies since January last year, mostly along one stretch of deserted road in the north between the cities of Monterrey and Monclova.
■PERU
PM threatens to resign
The prime minister threatened on Friday to resign unless President Alan Garcia’s party gives him more support as he tries to end blockades in the Amazon and retake lawless regions run by cocaine traffickers. Yehude Simon was miffed when lawmakers from the president’s APRA party failed to show up or walked out of Congress on Thursday as he presented his plan for defeating a band of violent leftists who control coca production in the Apurimac and Ene valleys in the south. “If the party isn’t comfortable with my being in the administration, I don’t have any problem [quitting],” he said.
■HAITI
Aristide speaks up
Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide has released a rare statement from exile about the death of his ally Reverend Gerard Jean-Juste. A poem titled Triumph Over Death was posted Thursday on a Web site of Aristide’s Famni Lavalas party accompanied by an apparent recording of Aristide reading it aloud. In the poem, he compares Jean-Juste’s time in prison after the ouster to Jesus’ crucifixion and refers to his work with Haitian migrants in Florida. Aristide rarely issues statements from his South African exile except on Jan. 1, independence day. Aristide also refers to his 2004 removal from power aboard a US plane as a kidnapping. Jean-Juste died on Wednesday in Miami of stroke complications.
■CUBA
US, Microsoft criticized
Havana criticized Microsoft on Friday for blocking its Messenger instant messaging service on the island and in other countries under US sanctions, calling it yet another example of Washington’s “harsh” treatment of its southern neighbor. The technology giant recently announced it was disabling the program’s availability in Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea to come into compliance with a US ban on transfer of licensed software to embargoed countries. The move “is just the latest turn of the screw in the United States’ technological blockade against the island,” a writer said in the state youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
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
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