INDIA
Talks held with Pakistan
India and Pakistan have agreed to “carry forward” talks aimed at resuming the full-fledged peace dialogue between the arch rivals that was suspended in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistan counterpart Salman Bashir held talks late on Sunday in the Bhutanese capital Thimphu — the first high-level meeting between the nuclear-armed neighbors since July. The meeting failed to produce a date for an expected visit to India this year by Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi.
CHINA
Divorces outpace marriages
Nearly 2 million couples divorced last year — far more than the number who got married in the world’s most populous nation, state media reported. A total of 1.96 million couples applied for divorce last year and only 1.2 million tied the knot, the Legal Evening News quoted the civil affairs ministry as saying. The country’s divorce rate has risen gradually at an average of 7.65 percent a year since 2003 when the law regulating marriage was amended, simplifying both marriage and divorce procedures, the report published late on Sunday said.
SOUTH KOREA
N Koreans sail south
Thirty-one North Koreans crossed the tense Yellow Sea border by boat and arrived in the South, but they have not so far expressed any wish to defect, the country’s Ministry of Defense said yesterday. A spokesman, confirming a report in Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, said the country’s navy on Saturday detained the five-tonne boat about 2.5km south of the disputed border. Officials were interrogating the group, the spokesman said. The 11 men and 20 women arrived off the island in thick fog and were towed to the western port city of Incheon, Yonhap news agency quoted a military official as saying. “Given the circumstances so far, they might have been drifting after setting the wrong coordinates or losing power on their boat,” another official was quoted as saying.
MYANMAR
Report supports sanctions
The party of the country’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday recommended maintaining Western sanctions on the country, saying the embargoes affected the military regime and not the broader population. The announcement by the National League for Democracy (NLD), the government’s biggest opposition force, will be a blow to both the junta and Western investors keen to tap the isolated country’s vast natural resources. “We came to find that the sanctions affect only the leaders of the ruling regime and their close business associates, not the majority of the people,” NLD vice-chairman Tin Oo said.
SOUTH KOREA
Remittances to North grow
North Koreans who have fled to the capitalist country send an estimated US$10 million a year to families left behind in the impoverished communist state, a report said yesterday. The country’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper, citing Seoul officials and refugees, said the money has become a major part of the North’s underground economy in border areas. “With the number of North Korean defectors rapidly rising and diversified methods of money remittance, the total amount sent back is growing,” Chosun quoted a senior official as saying. The remittances are arranged by brokers in China and in the North, who use their own bank accounts and cash reserves to transfer money with a commission of 30 percent, Chosun said.
UNITED STATES
Lee offers reward for photo
Actor Jason Lee is offering a US$25,000 reward for the return of a stolen photograph of the late Dennis Hopper. Lee’s black-and-white Polaroid of the iconic Easy Rider actor and director was on display as part of an exhibit in Los Angeles when it was swiped on Saturday night. Lee’s publicist, Nancy Iannios, said on Sunday that an unidentified person grabbed the photo from the wall and ran out the front door of the gallery in the Highland Park neighborhood. Iannios said the My Name is Earl star has a sentimental attachment to the picture and will pay US$25,000 for its safe return, no questions asked.
CUBA
End to hunger strike urged
A leader of the Ladies in White opposition group said she would urge a colleague to end a 10-day-old hunger strike she launched to demand freedom for her jailed husband. Laura Pollan said the protest could be counterproductive in efforts to gain freedom for the last political prisoners from a 2003 crackdown on dissent. She said she planned to travel to the home of Alejandrina Garcia, near the central city of Matanzas, to deliver the message personally. The Cuban government on Friday released one of the prisoners and the Catholic Church announced that another release was imminent.
UNITED STATES
Two arrested in shooting
Two men have been arrested and charged in a shooting at an Ohio fraternity house that killed one student and injured 11 people at a party just north of the Youngstown State University campus. Youngstown police chief Jimmy Hughes said each man was charged with aggravated murder, shooting into a house and 11 counts of felonious assault. He said the men were in their early 20s and from the Youngstown area, but he withheld their names pending further investigation. Hughes said earlier that the suspected gunmen were involved in a dispute at a party, left, then returned and began firing outside the crowded house early on Sunday. Coroners identified the dead victim as 25-year-old Youngstown State University senior Jamail Johnson. Johnson was shot once in the back of the head and several times in the lower body, investigator Rick Jamrozik said.
CHILE
Rapa Nui family evicted
Police on Sunday evicted 17 indigenous protesters from an Easter Island hotel that they have occupied for six months in a property rights battle that has drawn international interest. The squatters, members of a native family, claim that the Hangaroa Eco Village and Spa is being built on land that was illegally taken from them and sold to the Schiess family, one of Chile’s most powerful clans. Land disputes turned violent in December, shaking the celebrated vacation destination, which attracts 50,000 tourists each year. The Polynesian island, located 3,500km from the South American mainland, is home to just 4,000 mostly Rapa Nui inhabitants and is famous for its iconic, mystery-shrouded stone face statues, known as moais.
BRAZIL
Fire destroys Samba City
A large fire in Rio de Janeiro has destroyed Samba City, a part of metropolis where costumes and floats for the city’s famed carnival are being made, media reports said yesterday. The Globo TV network reported that the fire was affecting the samba school, showing images of the disaster. Firefighters were trying to contain the large blaze in the center for the practice of samba, in the port area of the country’s second-largest city, Globo said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the