NORTH KOREA
Man tried over music
A rare public trial has been held for a man accused of possessing South Korean music, in what one analyst described yesterday as an intensified crackdown on foreign cultural influences. Film footage broadcast this week by South Korea’s MBC TV station shows the April 28 trial in the western border city of Sinuiji. The footage, available on YouTube, shows one man on trial for possessing a movie and 75 songs from South Korea, and another accused of encouraging prostitution in the city. Crowds gathered at the scene of the open-air trial were shown chatting and carrying on with their business as the defendants stood on a stage.
SOUTH KOREA
Alleged chemical site probed
The country said yesterday it had launched an inspection of a site where US troops allegedly buried leftover Agent Orange. The environment ministry said it had sent a team of officials and experts to the site at Waegwan, 216km southeast of Seoul. The investigation followed a report by a US TV station that the substance was buried at Camp Carroll, a US army logistics base at Waegwan, in 1978. Investigators would check soil and underground water around the camp, the ministry said in a statement.
AUSTRALIA
Last WWI veteran buried
The last known combat veteran of World War I has been laid to rest. Claude Stanley Choules died two weeks ago at age 110. During a funeral on Friday in the western city of Fremantle, his loved ones remembered him as a remarkable man. Choules’ son Adrian urged mourners not to be sad because his father had lived “a very long and very wonderful life.” Choules began training with the British Royal Navy at age 14. In 1917, he joined the battleship HMS Revenge, from which he watched the 1918 surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, the main battle fleet of the German Navy during the war. He later joined the Royal Australian Navy. Choules published his autobiography at age 108.
NEW ZEALAND
Minister cites hair envy
A government minister has hit out at critics of his “dead possum” haircut, chastizing bald-headed journalists for mocking his manicured mane. In a light-hearted video blog posted on YouTube this week, Revenue Minister Peter Dunne said too much attention was paid to his bouffant hairstyle. “What’s this thing about my hair? I’m getting a bit fed up with being described as having a dead possum on top, all sorts of other things like that,” he said. “Some people who think it’s untidy, it’s too grey, it’s too coiffured. The only thing that ever goes on this is a comb and a hairbrush,” he added, waving a comb at the camera. “And I think it’s really bald-headed men [behind the criticism].” He then asks an off-camera staffer “what was I supposed to be talking about?” receiving the reply “tax,” before the video ends.
PAKISTAN
US convoy hit by car bomb
A Taliban car bomb struck an armored vehicle taking US officials to the US consulate in Peshawar yesterday, officials said, in a strike the militants said was in revenge for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Two Americans suffered minor injuries, but one Pakistani passerby was killed and at least 10 others were wounded in the attack, officials said. The strike was the first on Westerners since the May 2 raid by US commandos on bin Laden’s hideout. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the car bomb.
SOUTH AFRICA
Hundreds hurt in train crash
Hundreds of people were injured, some seriously, when a commuter express smashed into a stationary train in Johannesburg’s Soweto township, the country’s rail operator said yesterday. Two people were in a critical condition after the crash, which happened during rush hour on Thursday as people made their way home from work, Metrorail said. There were no fatalities. “We have around 857 people that were injured,” Metrorail acting regional manager Douglas Chauke said. The coaches remained on the tracks and most of the injured had already been discharged from hospital, he said. The cause of the accident is being investigated by the Railway Safety Regulator, which said the passenger train was traveling toward Orlando when it hit a stationary Soweto Business Express train.
UKRAINE
Forecaster in political storm
A weather forecaster has created a storm of her own by taking a swipe at the nation’s leadership during a live radio broadcast. Lyudmila Savchenko, head of the forecasting section of the meteorological service, put her own spin on why the country was enjoying a spell of blissful weather. “One cannot remain indifferent to this beauty which shows in the tender scent of lilac and lily of the valley and the melodious trilling of the birds,” she said lyrically on national radio. “At times it seems that such miraculous days are a gift from nature to compensate us for the chaos, lawlessness and injustice which reigns in our country,” she added. “It is simply incomprehensible that anyone can dislike this paradise on Earth, this country, the Ukrainian people so much that they treat it so badly.”
UNITED STATES
Child sex ring sentenced
Six people have been sentenced to time served after agreeing to plead guilty to participating in a sex ring in eastern Texas that used children as performers. Three of the six had been sentenced previously to life in prison, but their convictions were overturned. Texas District Judge Jack Steen sentenced them on Thursday in Tyler, Texas, after they pleaded guilty to third-degree felony injury to a child and waived their rights to trial and appeal.
SOUTH AFRICA
Photographer believed dead
The family of missing photographer Anton Hammerl said yesterday they now believe he was killed in the Libyan desert by Moammar Qaddafi’s forces. Family spokeswoman Bronwyn Friedlander said that journalists recently freed by the Libyan regime reported that they were with Hammerl when he was shot in a remote location on April 5. “We believe that his injuries are such that he would not have survived without immediate medical attention,” Friedlander said.
MEXICO
Pastor jailed for hijacking
A court sentenced a Bolivian pastor to more than seven years in jail for the 2009 hijacking of a passenger plane traveling from Cancun to Mexico City, authorities said on Thursday. Jose Marc Flores Pereira, an evangelical preacher and singer, had claimed to be on a divine mission and used three juice cans to convince crew members he had a bomb on the Aeromexico flight on Sept. 9, 2009. A Mexican judge sentenced him to seven years, seven months and 15 days and fined him almost US$1,000, a statement from the federal Attorney General’s Office said. Flores Pereira had demanded to fly over the airport seven times and to speak with President Felipe Calderon to warn him of an earthquake.
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