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.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in