BANGLADESH
Student arrested for post
A student has been arrested for allegedly posting obscene remarks about the father of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Facebook, police said yesterday. Police picked up Al Nayeem Jubaer, 19, from his village at Horinakundu, 200km west of Dhaka, on Monday after scores of angry ruling party activists stormed his house. “We arrested him for making obscene remarks about the birth of Bangabandhu,” local police chief Abul Khaer said, using the nickname of the nation’s founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Sheikh Hasina. “We have learned that Jubaer’s father is a [opposition party] Jamaat-e-Islami official,” he said, giving no further details about the remarks posted on Facebook. The post was not showing up on Jubaer’s page yesterday. According to Khaer, Jubaer told police he was a victim of password theft, alleging that someone broke into his account on the social networking site.
CHINA
Beijing demands release
Beijing yesterday called for the immediate release of 29 Chinese workers held by Sudanese rebels, as it dispatched a team to the African nation to help defuse the situation. “China calls on all sides to remain calm and exercise restraint, ensure the safety of Chinese personnel and quickly release the Chinese personnel out of humanitarian concerns,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Liu Weimin (劉為民) said. The workers were captured when rebels in the South Kordofan state attacked their camp on Saturday. They have been described as hostages by the military, but rebels say they were side victims of fighting with government troops.
MYANMAR
Nuclear ambitions denied
President Thein Sein has denied his country is trying to obtain nuclear weapons from North Korea, describing allegations of a covert program as “unfounded.” “We are not acquiring nuclear weapons from North Korea,” the Straits Times newspaper yesterday quoted him as saying in an interview during a four-day state visit to Singapore. “These allegations are unfounded and based on suspicion by some Western countries.” A 2010 UN report accused Pyongyang of supplying banned nuclear and ballistic equipment to Myanmar, Iran and Syria.
CHINA
Toddlers have palms read
Several kindergartens in Shanxi Province are charging parents 1,200 yuan (US$190) for a palm-reading test that they claim can predict their toddlers’ intelligence and potential, Xinhua news agency said. Many parents have flocked to palm readers for the test, used in kindergartens in the province and designed for children above the age of three months, the report said. According to the company that designed the tests, Shanxi Daomeng Culture Communication Co, the reading of palms helps “determine the children’s innate intelligence and potential,” Xinhua reported. However, some experts have dismissed the idea of the palm-reading technology. “This technology remains unaccounted for,” Xinhua quote a pediatrics expert as saying.
CHINA
Police recruited for Xinjiang
Authorities in the Xinjiang region plan to recruit 8,000 extra police officers, a government official said yesterday, as they beef up security in the area. Hou Hanmin (侯瀚民), a spokeswoman for the Xinjiang government, said that authorities planned to employ the first batch of new officers — about 4,000, or half of the proposed total — this year.
UNITED STATES
Marine jailed over suicide
A marine accused of hazing a fellow marine who later committed suicide in Afghanistan has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and a reduction in rank. Navy Captain Carrie Stephens sentenced Lance Corporal Jacob Jacoby on Monday at the marine base in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, after Jacoby pleaded guilty to assault. Jacoby admitted punching and kicking Lance Corporal Harry Lew in the hours before Lew killed himself at their patrol base in Helmand Province on April 3 last year. Two other marines have also been accused of hazing Lew and face courts-martial.
VENEZUELA
US$9bn in gold repatriated
The country repatriated a final shipment of gold from foreign banks on Monday, saying it has withdrawn a total of US$9 billion of its gold reserves and moved it to its central bank. The shipment of 14 tonnes brought the total amount of gold shipped to Venezuela since November last year to 160 tonnes, central bank President Nelson Merentes said. President Hugo Chavez in August initially announced a plan to retrieve about 211 tonnes held in US and European banks. Merentes did not explain the change, but said about 85 percent of its gold reserves were now held in the country. While some economists have questioned the move, Chavez has said having the gold in the country would help protect it from economic troubles in the US and Europe.
UNITED STATES
College submits false scores
A senior administrator at California’s Claremont McKenna College has confessed to submitting false SAT college admission test scores to publications such as US News & World Report since 2005 to inflate the small, prestigious school’s ranking among the nation’s colleges and universities. Claremont McKenna president Pamela Gann told college staff members and students at the school about the falsified scores in an e-mail on Monday, the New York Times reported. Gann said the scores reported to US News and others “were generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each.” The current US News rankings list Claremont McKenna as the ninth-best liberal arts college in the country.
YEMEN
Air raids on al-Qaeda kill 15
Overnight air raids struck an al-Qaeda meeting and control post in the south, killing about 15 people, including a long-hunted regional militant leader, tribal officials said yesterday. The four raids appeared to have been carried out by US planes, one tribal official said. Al-Qaeda extremists have taken advantage of months of political turmoil in Yemen to overrun swathes of the south of the country. The night-time air strikes were in the Loder and Al-Wadih areas of Abyan Province, one official said.
MEXICO
Outflows cost US$50 billion
The country hemorrhaged almost US$50 billion per year in illegal financial outflows in the past decade, without counting cash transactions, according to a report presented on Monday in Mexico City. “During the 1970s, the figure was US$3 billion, in the 1980s it was US$10 billion, in 1990 it was US$17 billion and almost US$50 billion in the first decade” of this century, Global Financial Integrity director Raymond Baker said. Crime, corruption and tax evasion cost the economy “an impressive outflow” of US$872 billion between 1970 and 2010, Baker said. The estimates were conservative because they did not include cash transactions often favored by drug smugglers or human traffickers.
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
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
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