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.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not