■MALAYSIA
Judge rejects Anwar’s bid
A judge yesterday refused to let opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim see statements made to the police by the man who accuses him of sodomy, dealing another blow to his beleaguered defense. Anwar, 62, denies the charge, calling it a plot by the administration to cripple his opposition coalition. High Court Judge Mohamad Zabidin Diah ruled that there was no basis for the defense to obtain statements that Anwar’s former aide, Saiful Bukhari Azlan, made to police in 2008 — statements that Anwar’s team said would show Saiful had changed his story.
■JAPAN
Ozawa under probe: Kyodo
Prosecutors are seeking to question ruling party kingpin Ichiro Ozawa over a political funding scandal, Kyodo news agency said yesterday, in a possible blow to the Democratic Party ahead of an upper house election. The party needs to win a majority in the election, expected in July, to avoid policy stalemate as the country tries to bolster a fragile economic recovery. Prosecutors are seeking to question Ozawa as party secretary-general following a judicial panel’s decision last month that he should be charged over a scandal, Kyodo said.
■PAKISTAN
Grenade kills two girls
Two girls were killed yesterday when a hand grenade exploded while they were playing on the outskirts of Peshawar, police said. The incident took place in the Khazana area where small children were playing on a building site. “An unknown person threw a hand grenade at a house under construction in Khazana, killing two girls aged four and six,” senior police official Mohammad Karim Khan said.
■UNITED STATES
Biden’s son hospitalized
Vice President Joe Biden’s oldest son, Delaware Attorney-General Beau Biden, had a mild stroke on Tuesday and was transferred to a Philadelphia hospital from the Deleware hospital he had initially been taken to, authorities said. Beau Biden, 41, will undergo further tests at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and was expected to recover, doctors said. He returned last year from a year-long deployment to Iraq with his Army National Guard unit, where he served as a military lawyer.
■MEXICO
Bridegroom found dead
Police have found the decomposing bodies of a bridegroom, his brother and an uncle dumped in a van on Monday after they were abducted from a wedding in Ciudad Juarez. Inhabitants of a residential area alerted authorities to a nauseating smell coming from the abandoned van, where police found the three bodies and another unidentified corpse. The four bodies were handcuffed, tied at the feet, with plastic bags over their heads, a police source said. Eight armed men stormed a church on Friday and dragged the three men away. They shot dead another man who tried to flee as they arrived outside.
■CANADA
Fundraiser pleads guilty
A Sri Lankan immigrant pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that he helped raise money for the Tamil Tigers militia. Prapaharan Thambithurai, now a Canadian citizen, was the first person convicted under the Anti-Terrorism Financing law, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Robert Powers said. The law was enacted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the US. Thambithurai acknowledged raising money from Tamil immigrants for the World Tamil Movement, but admitted knowing that some of the money would end up funding the Tamil Tigers. He was arrested in March 2008. Outside court, Thambithurai, 46, said Canadian Tamils “failed to teach the Canadian government the Tigers are not terrorists … The Sri Lankan government are terrorists. He will be sentenced tomorrow.
■CANADA
Sinkhole bodies recovered
The bodies of all four members of a family who went missing after their house was swallowed by a gaping sinkhole northeast of Montreal have been found. The family was in their basement cheering on the Montreal Canadiens in their Stanley Cup playoff game against the Pittsburgh Penguins when the massive landslide hit on Monday night in Saint-Jude, a town of 1,000 near the Yamaska River. The first body found belonged to father Richard Prefontaine. The others were his wife Lynne Charbonneau and daughters Anais, 9, and Amelie, believed to be 11. The landslide tore a hole more than four times the size of a football field.
■BRAZIL
Pre-dinosaur fossils found
Paleontologists announced on Tuesday they discovered the well-preserved and near-complete fossils of a pre-dinosaur predator that lived some 238 million years ago. The creature, a Prestosuchus chiniquensis, was about 7m long, weighed 900kg and lived in the Triassic Period (250 million to 200 million years ago), paleontologists from the Lutheran University of Brazil said. The remains were found in a sedimentary rock formation that was a lake millions of years ago. Paleontologists believe that herbivore creatures stopped to drink at the site and were ambushed by carnivores such as the Prestosuchus.
‘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