■AUSTRALIA
Bill targets oppressors
The government said yesterday it would introduce laws to make it quicker and easier to apply sanctions against oppressive and destabilizing regimes, as it watched developments in Iran and North Korea. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the Autonomous Sanctions Bill introduced to parliament was designed to cut red tape and allow Australia to impose boycotts without waiting for the UN Security Council to do so. “The bill will improve Australia’s capacity to respond quickly to issues of international concern, such as in the case of Iran and North Korea,” he told parliament.
■THAILAND
Bombs kill two, injure 51
Two bombs hidden in motorcycles exploded yesterday in southern province of Yala, a predominately Muslim area, killing two people and wounding 51, police said. A separate shooting left one more person dead. Police said the motorcycles were parked outside a Mazda car showroom. The first explosion shattered showroom windows and damaged the exterior of the building. Ten minutes later, another bomb went off as police officers were fencing off the crime scene. Police also said a Muslim rubber tapper was shot dead in nearby Pattani Province.
■AUSTRALIA
Attacker gets 19 years
A court yesterday sentenced a man to 19 years in jail for the vicious attack on Irishman David Keohane, which left the tourist with severe brain damage and confined to a wheelchair. Thomas Isaako, 21, will serve a minimum of 14 years for the August 2008 attack on Keohane and that on another man committed less than a fortnight later, Australian Associated Press said. Keohane, a flooring contractor who was living in Sydney at the time, was punched repeatedly in the head and robbed as he returned to his home in the beachside suburb of Coogee.
■INDONESIA
Journalists to be deported
Two French journalists were to be deported yesterday after they filmed a peaceful demonstration in Papua Province, where the government is accused of rights abuses. Baudouin Koenig and Carole Helena Lorthiois were expelled from the Papuan provincial capital Jayapura yesterday morning and have been ordered to leave Indonesia, Jayapura district immigration head Robert Silitonga said. “After questioning them, we found that they had committed permit violations, so they’ll be deported. They had filmed a protest and they did so outside the areas they were permitted,” he said.
■AUSTRALIA
Fraser quits Liberal Party
Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has quit the party he once led because it has become too conservative, a report said yesterday. The Australian Financial Review quoted friends and colleagues who said Fraser was upset about the way the party was run and about its stance on illegal immigration. Fraser, in power from 1975 to 1983, was said to be especially angry over a new TV ad showing Australia as a target for illegal immigrants.
■SINGAPORE
Oil slick contained
An oil slick from a tanker damaged in a collision off eastern Singapore has been contained by emergency response teams, the vessel’s operator and port officials said yesterday. “Small patches of oil” were sighted at a naval base and six vessels had been dispatched to clean them up. “Other than this, the oil slick has not affected Singapore’s coastlines,” a statement said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
European crime ring hit
British, Irish and Spanish police launched dawn raids on Tuesday in a coordinated hit aimed at smashing a major European guns, drugs and money laundering empire, authorities said. Some 32 people were arrested, including the suspected “godfather,” in a strike on a crime conspiracy with tentacles stretching across the globe. “The target was a criminal network suspected of trafficking huge quantities of drugs and firearms, and of laundering hundreds of millions of pounds in criminal profits,” Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency said in a statement. The gang’s suspected crime lord, a 53-year-old Irish-born British national living in Malaga, was arrested in the southern Spanish coastal resort. Spanish officers detained him along with family members, other British and Irish nationals and four Spanish lawyers.
■NETHERLANDS
Web freedom touted
France and the Netherlands have joined forces to develop an international code of conduct against Internet censorship, the Dutch foreign ministry said on Tuesday. “The Netherlands and France are taking the initiative to develop an international code of conduct for the freedom of traffic on the Internet,” the ministry said in a statement. The foreign ministers from both countries met in Rotterdam and expressed concern over a recent rise in Internet censorship. A pilot group is scheduled to meet in the coming weeks in Paris and will bring together governments, rights organizations and Web-based businesses all working to protect freedom on the Internet, the French foreign ministry said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Guerrilla calls off strike
A jailed republican guerrilla called off his hunger strike on Tuesday after he was moved from his cell in a Northern Irish jail to the prison hospital when his condition deteriorated following 42 days without food. Liam Hannaway, 39, a distant relation of Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, is two years into a 10-year sentence imposed for possessing explosives and is a member of the small dissident republican group Saor Uladh, according to local media. Saor Uladh, which has recently been revived after being disbanded more than 50 years ago, opposes Sinn Fein’s role in Belfast’s power-sharing administration with unionists and, like other dissident republican groups, wants a united Ireland.
■GERMANY
Robbers blow up bank
Robbers in Germany appear to have misjudged the amount of explosives needed to rob a rural bank in Malliss after the entire building was reduced to rubble, police said on Tuesday. No one was hurt in the explosion overnight on Tuesday in the village near Schwerin in northern Germany, but flying debris damaged nearby buildings and parked cars and 55 firemen were needed to make the area safe. The discovery of a damaged construction vehicle — which was in flames — nearby raised suspicions that the robbers wanted to make off with the bank’s cash dispenser, reports said, but they were left empty handed.
■RUSSIA
Cyrillic addresses launched
Russia launched its first Cyrillic Web addresses on Tuesday as part of a global move by the Internet’s administrators to boost access for users of non-Latin scripts. The move has long been demanded by the Kremlin which hopes to boost the use of Russian, once the main language throughout the Soviet Union, but now losing ground to local languages and to the creeping influence of English.
■UNITED STATES
Man pleads guilty to terror
A Jordanian man accused of trying to blow up a downtown Dallas skyscraper has agreed to enter a guilty plea in return for no more than 30 years in prison, according to federal court documents filed on Tuesday. Hosam Smadi, 19, agreed to plead guilty in a deal with prosecutors to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, which is punishable by up to life in prison. US District Judge Barbara Lynn scheduled a new arraignment for Smadi yesterday and is expected to rule on whether to accept the plea. Smadi has admitted leaving what he thought was a truck bomb in a garage beneath the Fountain Place building in downtown Dallas in September. The device was a decoy provided by FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda operatives. Smadi also admitted using a cellphone to detonate the “bomb,” according to his signed statement. Instead, the phone rang an FBI number and he was arrested.
■CANADA
Drum-body identified
A body found encased in concrete in a metal drum at the bottom of Toronto harbor over the weekend belonged to a Chinese-Canadian man with ties to organized crime, police said on Tuesday. Quang Lu, 47, went missing in October 2007 shortly after returning from a trip to China, Toronto police homicide Detective Justin Vander Heyden told a press conference. Police divers found the barrel early on Sunday morning in Lake Ontario. Lu’s corpse was well-preserved and he was identified by his fingerprints, he said.
■BRAZIL
Priest seeks bail
Lawyers for a Marcin Michal Strachanowski, a Polish priest accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy, requested on Tuesday that he be freed pending trial. Hugo Sarubbe, one the priest’s lawyers, said his legal team filed a written challenge to a judge’s order last week for their client’s arrest. Sarubbe said a prosecutor’s request for the preventive arrest of the 44-year-old priest had been issued more than two years ago, when an investigation into the alleged abuses first began. “His passport was taken away from him in 2008. Absolutely nothing has changed — he has continued to live at the same address and he poses no threat of fleeing Brazil,” Sarubbe said. Strachanowski was suspended from duties last week.
■UNITED STATES
Mosque plan wins support
A New York City community board voted late on Tuesday to support a plan to build a mosque and cultural center near Ground Zero. “It’s a seed of peace,” board member Rob Townley said. “We believe that this is a significant step in the Muslim community to counteract the hate and fanaticism in the minority of the community.” The vote was 29-to-1 in favor of the plan, with 10 abstentions. The Manhattan Community Board meeting was unruly, with project opponents jeering at speakers and yelling comments such as, “You’re building over a Christian cemetery.” Many said they were not opposed to a mosque — just not one that’s two blocks from Ground Zero.
■CANADA
Plane crashes on office roof
A small plane crashed onto the roof of an office building near Toronto on Monday, killing the pilot and his passenger, police said. The single-engine Cirrus SR-20 crashed in Markham, Ontario, following an explosion, witness reports said. The 14 employees of a toy company, Thinkway Toys, were evacuated with two injured, local media said. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia