FINLAND
Wife-carrying race held
A Finnish pair won the country’s annual wife-carrying competition for the third year in a row, organizers said on Saturday. Taisto Miettinen and Kristiina Haapanen defended their title in front of 6,500 spectators who turned out to watch the celebrated event in Sonkajarvi. The 46-year-old lawyer, his partner’s legs wrapped around his head, sprinted 253m, leaping hurdles and negotiating a water pool along the way, all in a time of one minute. Less than a second behind them were Estonian rivals Alar Voogla and Kristi Viltrop, while a Lithuanian couple came third. The competition has its roots in the legend of local bandit Herkko Rosvo-Ronkainen who lived in the forest at the end of the 19th century and stole food — and sometimes girls — from nearby villages.
UNITED KINGDOM
Mayor states rail conditions
London Mayor Boris Johnson will not support a high-speed rail link between the capital and other major British cities unless the entire London section is underground, a letter published yesterday showed. While other countries, such as Japan and France, have extensive high-speed rail networks, Britain has only the short Channel Tunnel link between London and the south coast for services to Paris and Brussels. Johnson said he “cannot support” the plans unless the London section is in tunnels — which would ramp up the construction costs in the indebted country. The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, which saw the letter, said Johnson’s opposition could cause long delays or even scupper plans for a high speed line up the spine of the country.
AFGHANISTAN
US looks to Central Asia
The US military is expanding its Central Asian supply routes to the war in Afghanistan, fearing that the routes going through Pakistan could be endangered by deteriorating US-Pakistani relations, the Washington Post reported late on Saturday. Citing unnamed Pentagon officials, the newspaper said that in 2009, the US moved 90 percent of its military surface cargo through the Pakistani port of Karachi and then through mountain passes into Afghanistan. Now almost 40 percent of surface cargo arrives in Afghanistan from the north, along a patchwork of Central Asian rail and road routes that the Pentagon calls the Northern Distribution Network, the report said. The military is pushing to raise the northern network’s share to as much as 75 percent by the end of this year, the paper said.
JAPAN
Murder trial to begin
The family of a British teacher killed in Japan in 2007 arrived in Tokyo yesterday to attend the first court hearing against the man charged with raping and murdering her. The trial is due to start today at the district court in Chiba, a city southeast of Tokyo, about 20 months after Tatsuya Ichihashi was arrested for the murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker. “I’m here to get justice for my daughter,” her father, William Hawker, told reporters at Narita Airport as he arrived with her mother and two sisters. Under the country’s legal system, the family will be able to question Ichihashi at the discretion of the court and give their opinion on sentencing. Hawker’s body was found in March 2007 in a sand-filled bathtub on the balcony of Ichihashi’s apartment just outside Tokyo. Ichihashi plans to donate royalties from a book, which he published in January about his fugitive days, to the Hawker family or for public good, according to media reports.
MEXICO
Headless bodies dumped
The bodies of two decapitated men were hurled on Saturday in front of the offices of two newspapers in Culiacan, prosecutors said. “We suspect that the two instances were simultaneous ... At the Noroeste newspaper, there was a decapitated male. There was an additional decapitated man thrown at the newspaper El Debate, also in Mazatlan,” an office spokesman said. Along with the bodies, messages threatening Sinaloa Governor Mario Lopez Valdez and Mazatlan Mayor Alejandro Higuera were found. Authorities said the messages were from the Zetas and Beltran Leyva brothers’ drugs cartels. The country is the world’s deadliest place for journalists, according to the UN. In the past decade, at least 66 journalists have been slain and another dozen are missing.
GUATEMALA
Lynch mob executes six
Vigilante townspeople rounded up and killed six suspected thieves in a small town, authorities in the violence-plagued Central American nation said on Saturday. The five men and a woman were killed on Friday in San Pedro Carcha, in Alta Verapaz department near the northern border. A fire brigade spokesman, who did not wish to be named out of fear of reprisals, said the six were thought to have been involved in the robbery of a shop and killing of its owner. In many isolated areas, where the reach of government authorities is limited, local people frequently take the law into their own hands. In this case, without hearing or trial, townspeople grabbed the six and took them to a cornfield, where they were blindfolded and shot dead. Their bodies were taken to a local morgue, officials said. A human rights report released last week by the Rights Prosecutor said that in the first half of this year, 25 people have been executed by “lynch mobs” in small towns and another 66 injured.
BRAZIL
Former leader Franco dies
Ex-president Itamar Franco, who helped steer the country to stability in the wake of a major scandal, died on Saturday after losing a battle to leukemia, hospital officials said. Franco died at Albert Einstein Hospital in Sao Paulo at age 81. He arrived in power unexpectedly because of the impeachment of former president Fernando Collor de Mello following a string of corruption scandals. The Franco government served briefly from 1992 to 1994 as an institutional “bridge” to the next presidential elections, won by Franco’s finance minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso. “When [Franco] took over the presidency at a turbulent moment, he had the wisdom to dialogue with society and helped the country get on the right track,” popular ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a statement.
UNITED STATES
Immigrant law protested
Thousands rallied in Atlanta to protest Georgia’s new immigration law, which they say creates an unwelcome environment for people of color and those in search of a better life. Men, women and children converged on downtown Atlanta for Saturday’s march and rally, cheering speakers while shading themselves with umbrellas and posters. Capitol police and organizers estimated that between 8,000 and 14,000 protesters gathered. They filled the blocks around the Capitol, holding signs decrying House Bill 87 and reading “Immigration Reform Now!” Saturday’s rally follows a “day without immigrants,” when some parts of the law took effect.
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