INDIA
Sexual deodorant ads pulled
Regulators have ordered television channels not to broadcast “overtly sexual” deodorant commercials that use females models in risque storylines, news reports said yesterday. Advertisements under the scanner include one in which a woman finds a man’s deodorant so attractive that she starts unbuttoning her blouse and another in which a woman is drawn to her sweet-smelling brother-in-law. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting announced a crackdown after it found the commercials violated advertising codes, the Financial Express newspaper reported. “The depiction and portrayal of women in these ads are overtly sexual,” the ministry said in a notice quoted by the newspaper. “The ads brim with messages aimed at tickling the libidinous male instincts and portrayal of women as lustily hankering after men.”
CHINA
Kim Jong-il visits IT firm
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il visited an information technology firm in Beijing yesterday, resuming his economic fact-finding tour after an apparent summit with President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), South Korean media reported. Kim has been in the country for nearly a week, on what Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said was a trip aimed at studying Beijing’s dramatic economic development — and perhaps winning fresh assistance from his regime’s sole major ally. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the 69-year-old visited Shenzhou Shuma in Beijing’s Zhongguancun District — which is sometimes called “China’s Silicon Valley.” The report said Kim would head home later in the day.
AUSTRALIA
Asylum policy under fire
Canberra’s asylum seeker policy came under more fire yesterday, with the Human Rights Commission warning that suicide and depression were major concerns in the country’s detention centers. A new study focusing on the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney was released as criticism mounted of Canberra’s plan to send boatpeople to Malaysia, where detainees can be caned. Detention is mandatory for asylum seekers who arrive in Australia until their claims are processed, with some remaining locked up for more than a year. Canberra plans to send 800 boatpeople to Malaysia and in return will accept 4,000 people already assessed to be refugees from Malaysia for resettlement over four years. According to Amnesty International, Malaysia canes up to 6,000 detainees a year, claims seized on by critics yesterday.
INDIA
Plane crashes into house
Ten people were killed when a small plane carrying a patient to a hospital crashed into a house near New Delhi, police said yesterday. All seven people on board died, along with three women living in the house, when the single-propeller plane came down in a heavily populated neighborhood of Faridabad. The privately chartered plane was being used as an air ambulance to carry a young male patient on Wednesday night from the eastern city of Patna to a New Delhi hospital, local media reports said.
MALAYSIA
Police detain immigrants
Marine police say they have detained 105 illegal immigrants from Indonesia who were trying to sneak out of the country on a boat. Marine police official N. Kalai Chelvan says the 89 men and 16 women were caught early on Tuesday off southern Johor State after a 30-minute boat chase. He says the boat’s driver escaped by jumping into the sea.
GEORGIA
Two die in protest
Officials in ex-Soviet Tblisi said two people died after riot police ended five days of opposition protests aimed at ousting Western-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili early yesterday. A policeman and a former officer were hit by a car allegedly carrying a protest organizer that sped away after police used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to stop the rally, the interior ministry said. Riot squads moved in just after midnight to disperse about 300 activists armed with sticks who had vowed to thwart a showpiece military parade to mark Independence Day yesterday. “In total, 37 people were hospitalized, 28 protesters and nine policemen,” interior ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said. Rights groups accused the police of using excessive force.
TURKEY
Bomb blast injures seven
A bomb blast at a bus stop in central Istanbul yesterday left seven people injured, including a police officer, officials said. “A bomb with a medium impact, placed on an electric bike, caused the blast at 08:58 am,” Istanbul police chief Huseyin Capkin told reporters at the scene in his televised remarks. Capkin said no suspects had been identified, but the fact that there was a police school nearby increased suspicions that police were the target of the attack. The casualties had no life threatening injuries, Anatolia news agency quoted Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu as saying. The blast broke the windows of four vehicles, including two public buses and a taxi, a reporter at the scene said.
FRANCE
Lawsuits and countersuits
A junior minister suing for slander over sexual harassment claims got hit by a further charge yesterday when a far-right leader said she would sue him for hinting she was behind the allegations. Prosecutors said on Wednesday they had launched a probe after Civil Service Minister Georges Tron was accused of sexually harassing two former employees of the town hall where he is mayor in the Paris suburb of Draveil. Tron counter-sued for defamation and linked the case to a feud with relatives of Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front, hinting that she was close to the lawyer representing the alleged harassment victims. Le Pen told RFI radio yesterday: “I find that very serious and from today I am suing Mr Tron for defamation.” “I will not let my reputation be called into question in order to save his,” she added. Commenting on the complaint brought against Tron, prosecutor Marie-Suzanne Le Queau said on Wednesday: “If the facts alleged are established, they could come under the headings of sexual aggression and rape.” On Tuesday, Tron told reporters the case was an attempt “to echo what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic,” a reference to the sex crime charges in New York against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
RUSSIA
US man kills wife, self
Investigators say a US citizen has killed his Russian wife and then committed suicide by leaping from the 15th floor of a Moscow hotel. A Web site statement posted yesterday by the federal Investigative Committee said the body of Juan Guillermo Cardona was found on Wednesday next to the hotel, on the eastern fringes of the city. The statement said Cardona was in his mid-30s. The body of his wife, in her late 20s but unnamed in the statement, was found in a room on the 15th floor. The statement said jealousy was the motive for the killing, without elaborating. No further details were given.
UNITED STATES
Loughner unfit for trial
A judge ruled on Wednesday that Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman accused of trying to assassinate a congresswoman and killing six other people in Tucson, Arizona, is mentally unfit to stand trial. Loughner had to be removed from court after an angry outburst at a hearing to decide if he was competent to stand trial over the January attack, in which lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at point-blank range. Judge Larry Burns said doctors found that Loughner was schizophrenic and has an irrational distrust of lawyers, making him unable to help in his own defense or understand the court proceedings taking place in Tucson.
UNITED STATES
Kidnapper sentenced to life
A self-styled prophet in Los Angles who kidnapped a teenager and held her captive for nine months was jailed for life on Wednesday, closing one of most notorious cases in recent criminal history. Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 when she was taken from the bedroom of her home in June 2002 and was repeatedly raped during her ordeal, came face to face in court with her abductor Brian David Mitchell shortly before he was sentenced. Mitchell’s wife Wanda Barzee was jailed for 15 years in 2009 after pleading guilty to helping her husband kidnap Smart, who was rescued in March 2003 less than 32km from her home.
BRAZIL
Journalist finally faces time
In a country where justice can come slowly, and the rich and powerful often avoid serving time, one of the nation’s most famous journalists has finally been ordered to prison, 11 years after killing his former girlfriend. On Friday, the Supreme Court in Sao Paolo rejected the latest appeal of Pimenta Neves, 74, and told him he must serve the 15-year prison sentence handed down to him in 2006. “The time has arrived to pay the penalty” for the murder of Sandra Gomide, Judge Celso de Mello said in a statement. Gomide, 33, was shot and killed in August, 2000, in a crime Neves confessed to at the time. He was the editor of O Estado de Sao Paulo, one of the country’s biggest newspapers, while Gomide was a financial journalist. The two had separated a month earlier.
PERU
Protesters trap tourists
About 300 foreign tourists were stranded on Wednesday at Lake Titicaca bordering Bolivia as thousands of residents hardened an anti-mining strike that has brought an Andean port city to a standstill. “The 300 tourists in our area, mainly Europeans and Japanese, are being held incommunicado, unable to move, unable to leave the port on Lake Titicaca as it has been taken” by protesters, said Carlos Canales, president of the National Tourist Board. The area’s mainly ethnic Aymara inhabitants first blocked the main road linking the south to Bolivia 16 days ago in a protest over the presence of Canadian mining company Bear Creek.
CANADA
LP names interim leader
The once dominant Liberal Party (LP) named an interim leader on Wednesday after a crushing defeat in elections earlier this month. Bob Rae, a high-profile, former New Democrat premier of Ontario, was chosen over Montreal Parliament member Marc Garneau, a soft-spoken, one-time astronaut. The Liberals, who ruled for much of the last century, suffered a crushing defeat in the May 2 election in which they came in third behind the New Democratic Party (NDP). Rae left the NDP for the federal Liberals in 2005.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of