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.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
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