PAKISTAN
Bombings kill five
A pair of bombings targeting police in Peshawar yesterday killed five people, including a senior police officer. In the most deadly attack, a suicide bomber struck a vehicle carrying Rasheed Khan, the deputy superintendent of police in southern Peshawar, killing him and three others, including his driver, one of his guards and a passer-by, police official Shafqat Malik said. Seven people were wounded in the attack, which took place on the outskirts of Peshawar, he said. Less than three hours later, a roadside bomb hit a police vehicle on patrol, killing one policeman and wounding three others, police official Fazle Wahid said. The bombing took place several kilometers away from the first attack.
JAPAN
Ozawa charged over scandal
Ruling party powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa was charged yesterday over a funding scandal, a court spokesman said, a widely expected judicial move that could widen a rift in the ruling party over whether he should leave the party. Ozawa’s indictment will give fresh ammunition to opposition parties who control parliament’s upper house and are refusing to join multiparty talks on tax reform to curb the country’s huge debt. They are instead trying to force Prime Minister Naoto Kan to either resign or call a snap election for the powerful lower chamber.
SRI LANKA
News offices set alight
Unidentified attackers in Colombo set ablaze the offices of an anti-establishment news Web site yesterday. The lankaenews.com premises were torched in a pre-dawn attack, but there were no reports of casualties, a police officer at the scene said. Yesterday’s attack appeared similar to the July burning of a private television station, Siyatha, in Colombo. In January 2009, another independent television station, Maharaja Television, was bombed by an unidentified group of people. A spokesman for President Mahinda Rajapakse’s office said he had ordered police to carry out a thorough investigation.
NEW ZEALAND
Jackson in stable condition
Lord of the Rings director Sir Peter Jackson is in stable condition in the intensive care unit of Wellington Hospital after surgery for a perforated ulcer. Publicist Melissa Booth said yesterday that Jackson was “doing well,” but would be in the hospital for at least a few more days. She said doctors expect Jackson to make a full recovery. He was admitted to Wellington Hospital on Wednesday after complaining of acute stomach pains.
BOLIVIA
Flood claims 34 lives
At least 34 people were killed when a river near Pampahuas burst its banks, sweeping away a passenger bus and a truck, authorities said on Sunday. Bodies have been washing up on the banks of the Mollepunku River since the incident late on Friday near the town, which is 700km southeast of La Paz, police said. The passenger bus had been carrying 39 people, and regional police commander Iver Marquez said the truck was carrying two people at the time of the accident, indicating the final death toll may rise. Firefighters were on the scene recovering bodies and locating any survivors, Marquez said.
VENEZUELA
Military arms depot explodes
A fire and a series of explosions tore through a military arms depot on Sunday, killing one person and leading authorities to evacuate thousands of people. About 10,000 residents fled their homes in areas up to several kilometers from the site as the burning ammunition produced powerful blasts, officials said. The cause of the pre-dawn fire was unclear. Hours after the initial explosions, faint booms could still be heard in the distance as clouds of white smoke rose from the area alongside hills in Maracay, 100km west of Caracas. Vice President Elias Jaua said state television that authorities were investigating — and suggested they weren’t ruling out sabotage.
IRAN
Porn site operators get death
The courts on Sunday sentenced two people to death for running porn sites, Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said, according to the IRNA news agency. “Two administrators of porn sites have been sentenced to death in two different [court] branches and [the verdicts] have been sent to the supreme court for confirmation,” Dolatabadi said, without naming the two convicts. In December last year, Canada expressed concern about the reported death sentence handed down to an Iranian-born Canadian resident for allegedly designing an adult Web site.
ISRAEL
Activist jailed nine years
A court sentenced an Israeli-Arab human rights activist to nine years in prison on Sunday after convicting him last year of spying for the Lebanese organization Hezbollah. Amir Makhoul had confessed to the spying charge as part of a plea bargain at Haifa District Court, which added a further year’s suspended sentence to the nine years behind bars. Makhoul initially pleaded not guilty, but agreed to enter a new plea in exchange for reduced charges and to drop his previous complaints of maltreatment while under interrogation. In October last year, the three-judge panel at the Haifa court found Makhoul guilty of passing information to Hezbollah on the location of several secret installations in Israel and of passing information on various other matters to the group.
UNITED KINGDOM
Composer John Barry dies
Oscar-winning composer John Barry, who wrote the scores to Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves and numerous Bond films, has died at the age of 77, the BBC reported yesterday, citing relatives. John Barry Prendergast died of a heart attack, the broadcaster said.Barry won five Oscars for his work on Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves, The Lion in Winter and Born Free, for which he won best song and best music score.He also composed scores for a string of James Bond films, among them Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.
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