GERMANY
Company wants Iran meeting
A media company said it wants to meet with Iran’s foreign minister in order to secure the release of its two detained journalists. Axel Springer AG said in a statement on Saturday its top executives or editors-in-chief are ready to meet with Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Akbar Salehi in Teheran or elsewhere to discuss all relevant questions to ensure the journalists’ release. The two journalists were detained in October last year while covering the case of an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning. News weekly Der Spiegel on Saturday quoted Salehi as saying Axel Springer and the journalists’ newspaper Bild am Sonntag could speed up the case “if they would admit that they made a mistake.”
MALAYSIA
Transsexual wages ID fight
A transsexual has vowed to fight for her rights after a court refused to change the gender on her identity card to female. Her lawyer, Wong Kah Woh, said the High Court ruled on Friday that it was sympathetic but couldn’t declare his client a woman because it was not empowered to deal with the issue. Wong said the 35-year-old ethnic Chinese transsexual, who isn’t identified for security reasons, was born a male but underwent surgery to become a woman in Thailand in 2006. Wong said yesterday that his client would challenge the ruling in the Appeals Court.
DENMARK
Crown princess births twins
Crown Princess Mary has given birth to twins — a boy and a girl — the royal court announced on Saturday. The palace said Mary has become the proud mother of “two fine children” at the national Rigshospitalet hospital in Copenhagen. “Both mother and children are doing well,” the court said. The boy, weighing 2.7kg, was the first one born on Saturday morning, while his sister, weighing 2.6kg, was delivered 26 minutes later. The 38-year-old princess was admitted to hospital early on Saturday, accompanied by her husband Crown Prince Frederik.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Post-1989 minister dies
Jiri Dienstbier, a senator and Czechoslovakia’s first foreign minister after the end of communism, has died aged 73, news agency CTK reported on Saturday. The former journalist worked as a Czechoslovak Radio commentator until he lost his job and Communist Party membership because of his opposition to the 1968 Soviet invasion. After that, he worked in various jobs including as an archivist and night watchman while becoming more active as a dissident. He was one of the first signatories of Charter 77, a human rights movement in Czechoslovakia whose members, including playwright and later president Vaclav Havel, went on to be political leaders after the fall of communism. He became foreign minister in 1989 and photographs of him cutting border fences when the Iron Curtain fell became a symbol of the time.
GUATEMALA
Bus plunge kills 14
Fourteen ex-paramilitaries were killed on Saturday and more than 50 of their colleagues were injured when a bus plunged down a 50m deep ravine, local media reported. The accident took place in the predawn hours near western San Marcos, with rescue crews and survivors pointing to break failure as its likely cause. The former paramilitaries were being bused to San Marcos to collect their wages after taking part in a reforestation program in the area. From 1960 to 1996, the country suffered a civil war that killed as many as 200,000 people.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing