IRAN
Opposition leading in polls
Conservative rivals of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were leading in the race for parliament, according to early election results yesterday. Early returns in Tehran showed loyalists of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had pulled ahead. Partial results from provincial towns also show conservative Ahmadinejad rivals were elected in many constituencies. State media said the turnout was estimated at more than 67 percent from among 48 million eligible voters. Out of 60 winners that emerged by yesterday morning, at least 46 were conservative opponents of Ahmadinejad. Three other liberal-leaning candidates were elected. The remaining 11 seats were split between supporters of Ahmadinejad and centrists.
UNITED STATES
Banker faces hate crime
William Bryan Jennings, Morgan Stanley’s bond underwriting chief in the US, was charged with a hate crime in the stabbing of a New York City cab driver of Middle Eastern descent over a fare. Mohamed Ammar said the banker attacked him on Dec. 22 with a 6.35cm blade and used racial slurs after a 64km ride from New York to the banker’s US$3.4 million Darien, Connecticut, home. Jennings, who had attended a bank holiday party at a boutique hotel in Manhattan before hailing the cab, refused to pay the US$204 fare upon arriving in his driveway, the driver said. A fight ensued and Jennings, 45, allegedly cut Ammar, 44, police said.
UNITED STATES
Man jailed for conspiracy
A New York man was on Friday sentenced to 27 years in jail for conspiring to kill US soldiers stationed overseas and on related terror charges, the Justice Department said. Betim Kaziu traveled from Brooklyn to Cairo, Egypt, in February 2009 to participate in attacks against US troops based in the Middle East and in the Balkans on behalf of al-Qaeda, prosecutors said at the trial. While Kaziu was in Cairo, he allegedly tried to acquire automatic weapons and attempted to travel to Somalia to join al-Shebab, a Somali terrorist organization allied with al-Qaeda, the court heard. He traveled to Kosovo to target US troops stationed there, prosecutors said, but was arrested by police on Aug. 27, 2009.
UNITED STATES
Ex-Dupont worker guilty
A former Dupont Co scientist has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets. Federal prosecutors say Tze Chao is now cooperating with an investigation of a Chinese government-owned firm suspected of buying the information. Chao admitted in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday that he kept confidential Dupont documents after his 2002 retirement from the company, his employer for 36 years. In 2003, he began consulting for Pangang Group Co, a Chinese steelmaker. Pangang, Chao and several others were indicted last month on charges that they conspired to steal Dupont’s recipes for manufacturing titanium dioxide. Chao admitted passing proprietary information to Pangang.
MEXICO
Drug tunnel discovered
Federal police on Friday discovered a tunnel leading into the state of Arizona that contained 240kg of marijuana. While conducting an investigation in a residential area of Nogales, police found a tunnel about 60m long running under the international border, a statement from the Secretariat of Public Security said. The tunnel was allegedly “used to transport illegal drugs” to the US as evidenced by “22 bundles of marijuana, with a combined weight of 240kg” discovered inside, it said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the