CHINA
Police raid trendy gay bar
Police raided a popular gay bar on Shanghai’s Bund riverfront on Sunday, taking more than 60 people into custody for several hours, the Shanghai Daily reported yesterday. Police said “pornographic” shows were taking place when they arrived at the Q Bar in the early hours of Sunday, reported. All those detained — DJs, customers and bar staff — were released later in the day, the report said. Some were held for up to 12 hours. Steven Bao, a DJ at the Q Bar, said he believed the raid was the result of fierce competition between clubs, suggesting other venues had complained to police to create problems for the bar and its patrons.
AUSTRALIA
Cannibal gets life in jail
A self-proclaimed cannibal, who slit his roommate’s throat, partially severed his genitals and then drank his blood, was found guilty of murder yesterday and jailed for life. A Supreme Court jury convicted Robert Ian Logan, 23, of killing Ben Huntingford, 22, in their Queensland home in June 2006 and stabbing his pet dog, Butch, in a bloody attack likened by witnesses to an abattoir slaughter. Huntingford’s throat was cut from ear to ear and prosecutors told the jury his blood had been used to write obscenities on the walls. His penis was almost severed and Huntingford also had stab wounds to the heart, liver, spleen, kidney and lung, with Logan alleging he was motivated by an unwanted sexual advance from Huntingford.
MALAYSIA
Bird photo leads to charges
Five soldiers on anti--poaching duty face criminal charges after Facebook pictures appeared of them posing with a dead, endangered Great Pied Hornbill bird. Defense Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said the group was part of a force protecting the Royal Belum-Temengor rainforest in the northern state of Perak, when they came across the bird which had been shot by a hunter. Department of Wildlife and National Park official Ahmad Zahid said that although the soldiers were not responsible for shooting the bird, they should have tried to save it rather than killing and posing with it.
BANGLADESH
Equality law sparks strike
Riot police patrolled the streets of Dhaka yesterday as a strike called by Islamic parties to protest a proposed law favoring female equality brought much of the country to a halt. The parties, known as the Islamic Law Implementation Committee, called the strike to protest against the government’s move to pass laws ensuring equal property and inheritance rights for women in the Muslim-majority country. Most shops, businesses and schools in Dhaka were shut and major roads in and around the capital were almost deserted.
VIETNAM
Activist sentenced to jail
The son of a revolutionary leader was jailed for seven years yesterday for anti-state propaganda activities, in one of the nation’s most politically charged cases in years. After a trial lasting about half a day, Cu Huy Ha Vu, 53, was convicted of advocating an end to one-party communist rule. “Cu Huy Ha Vu’s behavior is serious and harmful to society. His writings and interviews blackened directly or indirectly the Communist Party of Vietnam,” said Nguyen Huu Chinh, who chaired the trial. Vu is the son of Cu Huy Can, who was a member of founding president Ho Chi Minh’s provisional Cabinet from 1945, and is also a celebrated poet.
FRANCE
Mexico dispute heats up
A bitter dispute has erupted between Paris and Mexico City following the Mexican government’s claim that a Mayan-style statue sold at a Paris auction for a record 2.9 million euros (US$4.124 million) was a fake. Bidding was frantic for Seated Divinity, a 1.5m warrior with axe and shield, described in the catalogue as up to 1,400 years old. However, no sooner had the piece been sold to an unidentified buyer than Mexican officials declared it a modern piece made to look old. “It is a recently manufactured piece that does not belong to any of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic cultures,” the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement. Nonsense, replied the Binoche et Giquello auction house. “They want to ruin the market for pre-Hispanic art in my opinion,” auctioneer Alexandre Giquello said. Jacques Blazy, specialist for the sale, said the denunciation was political. The latest war of words broke out less than two months into Paris’ Year of Mexico, a cultural festival that celebrates Mexican culture across the country. However, the mood soured when Paris declared it would use the occasion to push for the release of Florence Cassez, 36, a French woman jailed for 60 years in Mexico for kidnapping. Mexico retaliated by pulling out of the celebrations.
FRANCE
Lost passenger jet found
Newly found wreckage from an Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris is a large and intact part of the passenger jet, Transport Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told France Inter public radio, a day after investigators announced that parts of the doomed plane had been found. Kosciusko-Morizet said there was now the “hope to quickly find the black boxes” that might tell investigators exactly what caused the crash, which has been partly blamed on allegedly defective speed monitors. The plane went down roughly midway between Brazil and Senegal on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board, in the deadliest crash in Air France’s history.
YEMEN
Police wound hundreds
Police using live rounds and teargas wounded about 409 protesters who tried to march to a presidential palace in the Red Sea city of Hudaida early yesterday, doctors said. Residents said the demonstrators arranged the 2am march in protest at a security crackdown on rallies in Taiz, south of the capital, that killed two and wounded hundreds on Sunday. A few thousand demonstrators took part in the march. Protests inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have brought President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 32-year rule to the verge of collapse. However, the president, a perennial survivor, called on Sunday for an end to the violence, signaling he has no intention of resigning soon.
KENYA
UN calls for more centers
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres yesterday urged Nairobi to permit the expansion of residential areas for Somali refugees. More than 314,000 Somalis currently live at three camps in the Dadaab area in the northeast of the country and a new residential site needs to be built to house refugees who are arriving daily, the High Commissioner and the heads of the World Food Programme and UN Women said in a joint e-mailed statement. Most of southern and central Somalia has been controlled by the Islamist al-Shabaab militia since it began a campaign against the government in 2007.
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
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema