■NEPAL
Fourth election scheduled
Parliament will hold a fourth vote to try to elect a new prime minister, an official said yesterday, after the last election failed to produce a clear winner. The next vote will be on Friday, five weeks after former prime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal stood down under pressure from the Maoist party, leaving the country without a functioning government. Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal won the most votes in a race on Monday against Nepali Congress chief Ram Chandra Poudel. He failed to secure the majority needed to form a new government and the Maoists will now have to try to win over an alliance of smaller parties before Friday. “The rules state that we have to keep doing this until one candidate gets a majority,” parliament spokesman Mukunda Sharma said. “It is up to the politicians to get us out of this mess, but there seems to be a serious lack of honesty from political parties toward the process.”
■INDONESIA
HRW pans Islamist violence
The country is letting radical Islamists trample the constitutional rights of minorities, leading to inter-communal violence, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said yesterday. The New York-based watchdog called on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to repeal laws that it says have given extremists from the dominant religious group the legal space to launch attacks on people of other faiths and sects. “When the Indonesian authorities sacrifice the rights of religious minorities to appease hardline Islamist groups this simply causes more violence,” the group’s Asia director Elaine Pearson said. HRW urged the government to rescind such laws and said the failure of the police to arrest a single extremist over repeated attacks on the Ahmadiyah Islamic sect would only encourage more violence.
■CHINA
Gas kills nine miners
Nine workers have been killed and seven others remain trapped in a coal mine after gas leaked into the pit, the work safety board said yesterday. The accidental “gas outburst” occurred late on Monday at the Sanyuandong mine in the city of Dengfeng, Henan Province, the State Work Safety Administration said in a statement on its Web site. A total of 127 miners were in the pit at the time, but 111 of them were quickly brought to safety, the state Xinhua news agency reported, citing an official with the Zhengzhou Coal Industry Co Ltd, which owns the colliery.
■INDIA
Protesters throw stones
Protesters in Kashmir yesterday held rallies and threw stones at police in defiance of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who has pleaded for recent deadly violence to end. Forty people have died in weeks of unrest — most of them killed by security forces trying to disperse angry protests against New Delhi rule. Abdullah held crisis talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday and appealed for restraint as the region endures its worst bout of unrest for two years. Abdullah asked the central government to provide more paramilitary troops to enforce curfew orders that protesters have repeatedly ignored.
■MALAYSIA
Jailbreak threatens jobs
The home minister threatened to remove senior officials after 20 Afghans who had been arrested on immigration violations broke out of a detention center in the second such incident this year, authorities said yesterday. Police were searching for the detainees, who cut through metal grills and climbed over a fence on Sunday to escape the center near Kuala Lumpur’s main airport, where they had been waiting to be deported. Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Monday that the ministry’s secretary-general and the immigration director could be removed from their posts and transferred to other departments if investigations showed they failed to take precautions to prevent the breakout.
■PHILIPPINES
Ancient bones unearthed
Archeologists have found a foot bone that could prove the archipelago was first settled by humans 67,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought, the National Museum said yesterday. The bone, found in an extensive cave network, predates the 47,000-year-old Tabon Man that is previously known as the first human to have lived in the country, said Taj Vitales, a researcher with the museum’s archeology section. Archeologists from the University of the Philippines and the National Museum dug up the third metatarsal bone of the right foot in 2007 in the Callao caves near Penablanca, about 335km north of Manila.
■CHINA
Police arrest sexy activist
An activist sex worker said she had been detained after fronting an unusual protest to demand legalized prostitution. Ye Haiyan, who also goes by the name of “Hooligan Sparrow,” rallied a small group of sex workers and their supporters in Wuhan on Thursday last week. The group, holding red umbrellas, carried banners and collected signatures urging an end to discrimination against sex workers. “I cannot talk or use the Internet right now, I am with them,” Ye told reporters by text message, having been detained on Sunday. “I am at a ‘resort’ and receiving ‘re-education.’” Wuhan police could not be reached for comment.
■Russia
Plane crash kills 11
Eleven people were killed and four injured yesterday when a passenger plane crashed on landing in fog close an airport in Siberia, investigators said. The An-24 aircraft carrying four crew and 11 passengers was flying from the central Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk to the town of Igarka in the north. “As a result of the crash, one member of the crew and 10 passengers were killed,” the investigative committee of prosecutors said in a statement. An investigation has been opened into possible criminal infringements of the rules of air travel security and a group of investigators are already at the scene of the disaster.
■United Kingdom
Sex job ads to be banned
Employers looking for lap dancers, strippers, topless barmaids or sexy web-cam performers will be banned from placing adverts at job centers. Such a ban had previously been in place at the taxpayer-funded employment exchanges, but that changed seven years ago when Ann Summers, a sex toys and suggestive lingerie retailer, successfully argued at the High Court that it was unlawful. Now the government plans to legislate to protect vulnerable jobseekers who are keen to get back to work from feeling they have to consider jobs that they are not comfortable with, Minister for Employment Chris Grayling said in a statement.
■Kenya
Security beefed up for vote
The country is bracing for its first national vote since the political violence in 2007-2008 that left more than 1,000 people dead, dispatching 18,000 additional police officers to a potential hotspot ahead of the ballot on a new constitution. Politicians and analysts predicted that today’s referendum would be largely peaceful, but at least 200 people in the volatile Rift Valley had fled their homes before the vote, fearing a new flare-up. Thousands of extra police officers will be stationed at Rift Valley, home of the largest concentration of Kenyans planning to vote against the constitution and site of some of the worst attacks in 2007-2008.
■United Kingdom
Antiques smuggler jailed
A court on Monday jailed an antiques dealer for eight years for smuggling a stolen William Shakespeare manuscript to the US and trying to sell it to pay for his playboy lifestyle. Raymond Scott, 53, was found out after taking the book to staff at the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington in 2008 and asking them to verify that it was genuine. The First Folio, a collection of Shakespeare’s plays worth about £1 million (US$1.5 million), was taken from Durham University in England in 1998. Scott was cleared of stealing, but found guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from — dating from 1623 from the UK.
■Belgium
Spanish ship nabs pirates
A Spanish warship foiled an attack on a Norwegian chemical tanker in the Gulf of Aden yesterday, holding seven suspected Somali pirates pending possible prosecution, EU naval forces (NAVFOR) said. A pirate skiff shot at the bridge of the MV Bow Saga, which responded with water hoses to prevent the assailants climbing aboard, before a helicopter from the SPS Victoria managed to intervene, a statement said. “After warning shots, first from the helicopter and then from the warship, the pirates eventually stopped and the skiff was searched by a boarding team. Weapons were subsequently found on the skiff,” NAVFOR forces said.
■UNITED STATES
Guantanamo trial appealed
Army Lieutenant Colonel Jon Jackson said on Monday that he has asked the Supreme Court to halt the war crimes trial of the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The trial is scheduled to begin next Tuesday for Omar Khadr and it would be the first at the US Navy base under President Barack Obama’s administration. Khadr, son of a slain al-Qaeda financier, is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan and faces a maximum life sentence if convicted. The Toronto-born inmate was 15 when he was captured in 2002. Jackson said the offshore system for prosecuting terror suspects is unconstitutional. Among other concerns, he said it is unfair because it is reserved only for non-US citizens. “The military commissions provide young Omar, a Canadian citizen, only second class justice. This kind of discrimination is something we cannot stand for as a country,” he said.
■UNITED STATES
Sex tourism term increased
A former English teacher has been sentenced in California to 25 years in prison for traveling to Thailand to have sex with minors. The sentence was ordered after prosecutors challenged a previous 10-year sentence, calling it too lenient. US District Judge Consuelo Marshall said on Friday that 61-year-old Steven Erik Prowler’s conduct was particularly “depraved.” Prowler pleaded guilty in February 2007 to federal charges of traveling abroad with the intent to have sex with a minor and to engaging in illicit sexual conduct with minors in another country. The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his first 10-year sentence following a Justice Department appeal. Prowler was arrested in Bangkok in 2005.
■UNITED STATES
Fake funeral leads to jail
A former Los Angeles mortuary employee has been convicted of defrauding insurers by staging a fake funeral and attempting to cover it up by cremating a mannequin and cow parts she placed in the casket. The US attorney’s office said on Monday that 67-year-old Jean Crump was found guilty of two counts of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud. Prosecutors say she and three accomplices took out bogus death certificates, purchased a burial plot, buried an empty casket and staged a funeral, then billed US$1.2 million to insurance companies. They say that when insurers investigated, Crump and her cohorts exhumed the coffin, filled it with a mannequin and cow parts and cremated it. Crump is to be sentenced Nov. 29.
■UNITED STATES
Hailstone sets record
North America’s heaviest hailstone ever might also be its most-traveled. A 875g hailstone that fell in South Dakota on July 23 has been taken to National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, about 600km away. Charles Knight, a scientist at the center, plans to cast plaster replicas for researchers, a South Dakota museum and Leslie Scott, the ranch hand who found it. Knight says he’ll then cut it in two and photograph its internal rings. The hailstone is being stored in a freezer. Federal climate officials have confirmed it was the heaviest ever recorded on the continent.
■CUBA
Castro launches book
Former president Fidel Castro presented his new book at a closed-door ceremony on Monday. The Strategic Victory has yet to be released to the public. Organizers of the unveiling ceremony said 3,500 copies would be made available in coming days and 50,000 copies would be published.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion