THAILAND
UK-Thai couple murdered
An elderly British man and his Thai wife were beaten to death in a suspected robbery at a beach resort in Thailand, police said yesterday. A worker at the resort in Thap Sakae District of Prachuap Khiri Khan Province, 280km south of Bangkok, found the badly beaten bodies of Michael Raymond, 68, and Suchada Baokhamdee, 52, on Tuesday afternoon in their beachfront bungalow. “They were beaten with a chair and other hard objects,” case officer Captain Winai Raila-aied said.
MYANMAR
US in talks over remains
It’s been eight years since the US has been able to search for the 730 Americans missing from World War II in Myanmar. Now there is hope that some of them will be brought home. Negotiations with senior US officials began last month, following up on a visit in December by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Most of the missing were airmen flying some of the war’s most dangerous missions as they hauled supplies to beleaguered Allied forces over snowy Himalayan ranges and boundless jungles.
VIETNAM
Eight Hmong activists jailed
A Vietnamese court has sentenced eight Hmong ethnic minority leaders to up to 30 months in jail over rare unrest in the country’s northwestern highlands. Presiding Judge Pham Van Nam says the men were convicted of assaulting authorities and inciting others to gather to call for an independent state. They were arrested in early June following a religious gathering of 5,000 in Dien Bien Province. Two were given 30 months in jail, while six others received two-year sentences on Tuesday.
HONG KONG
Alleged serial rapist nabbed
Hong Kong police said yesterday they had arrested a suspected serial rapist who lured his victims to bogus job interviews through the Internet. The 31-year-old man, whom police identified only as Chan, was arrested on Monday after a 17-year-old schoolgirl said she had been raped in a hotel where he had arranged to interview her. “We are investigating whether there are other girls who fell victim to this scam. We are appealing to other victims to come forward,” a police spokesman said. As many as 10 women might have fallen for the trap, based on photographs found on the suspect’s electronic devices, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported. The man promised the women hostess jobs at karaoke lounges, it said. Police arrested him when he met an undercover female officer who was posing as a job applicant.
ISRAEL
S Korea, China ties marked
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was due to leave on Tuesday night for South Korea and China, to mark anniversaries of diplomatic ties with both countries, a spokesman said. Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said that in Seoul, Lieberman would meet Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan and attend festivities marking 50 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. He is also to visit the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea. Lieberman would then visit China, which is marking 20 years of ties with the Jewish state, Palmor said, without giving a precise itinerary. In Beijing he would meet Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) and other officials, along with Israelis living in the Chinese capital, Palmor said, adding that he would also travel to Shanghai and the southwestern city of Chengdu, where he would be accompanied by an Israeli business delegation.
SWITZERLAND
Bus crash kills 28
Police said 28 people died when a bus carrying Belgian students back from a skiing holiday crashed in a tunnel. Valais Cantonal police spokesman Jean-Marie Bornet said yesterday that a total of 52 people were onboard the bus. Police said 22 children were among those killed, and 24 other students had been hospitalized with injuries. The bus crashed at about 9pm on Tuesday night in a tunnel at Sierre near popular skiing areas in the Swiss Alps. A rescue helicopter and ambulances were called in to carry the injured.
ETHIOPIA
Gunmen kill 19 on bus
A government official said that unknown gunmen in the southwest of the country killed 19 people in an attack on Tuesday. Gambella region president Omod Obang Olum said that the victims were local residents on a public bus that was ambushed by attackers with machine guns near a town called Bonga. He said Gambella security forces were still pursuing the attackers, but that there were no further details as to their objectives. Gambella is a traditionally marginalized area of the country that suffers internal conflicts over resources like water and land and is bordered by South Sudan.
ISRAEL
Turkey warning issued
The government warned citizens to stay away from Turkey because of intelligence warnings about imminent attacks against sites frequented by Jews and Israelis there. The prime minister’s counterterrorism office issued the warning late on Tuesday. It said “terror groups are planning to carry out attacks against Jewish and Israeli sites inside Turkey in the coming days.” The two countries were once close allies, but in recent years Turkey has established closer ties with the Arab and Muslim world, and there have been several high-profile spats between the two.
FRANCE
Gorbachev backs eco court
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called on Tuesday for the creation of an international court to try environmental crimes, in an interview published in French daily Le Monde. “I would personally look favorably upon creating an international tribunal to try those responsible for environmental crimes, both business leaders and the heads of state or government,” the 81-year-old Nobel Peace Prize recipient said. Gorbachev, who was in Marseille on Monday to speak at the Sixth World Water Forum, has led the environmental pressure group Green Cross International since 1993. Evoking the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident last year, Gorbachev said his environmental group backed gradual denuclearization in both civil and military spheres.
UNITED STATES
Obama welcomes Cameron
President Barack Obama welcomed British Prime Minister David Cameron to the White House with all the pomp of a state visit. The two allies are stressing their unity in dealing with hot spots like Iran, Syria and Afghanistan. Amid concerns in Britain that Washington’s focus is shifting toward the Asia-Pacific region, Obama is seeking to reassure an old ally with a formal White House dinner and talks on how to coordinate policies on a host of thorny problems. The welcome for the British leader has all the pomp of a state visit. However, it will not be called one, because the British monarch is considered the head of state rather than the prime minister.
TURKEY
Petraeus meets top officials
The US embassy in Ankara said CIA Director David Petraeus had visited the country and met with top officials. An embassy statement said Petraeus, a former top general in Iraq and Afghanistan, had “productive meetings” on Monday and Tuesday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hakan Fidan, director of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization. The statement said Petraeus and Turkish leaders discussed “regional security issues and counter-terrorism cooperation.” It described the relationship between the countries’ intelligence services as “excellent.”
BRAZIL
Police probe torture claims
Police are investigating allegations made by a young man who said he was tortured over the weekend by army soldiers patrolling a Rio de Janeiro slum. Inspector Jose Costa da Silva told O Globo newspaper there was “no doubt” that the 22-year-old man was “tortured.” He said either eight soldiers on duty in the Vila Cruzeiro slum or local drug dealers tortured the man. The newspaper said medical exams show that the victim’s right arm had been fractured and that both his wrists were bruised apparently by handcuffs. Requests for further details on the case went unanswered.
UNITED STATES
Woman ‘stole’ from church
A former financial executive of the Philadelphia archdiocese has been charged with stealing more than US$900,000 from the church. City prosecutors said 42-year-old Anita Guzzardi surrendered on Tuesday. She was fired in July, weeks after becoming chief financial officer. Prosecutors said Guzzardi used hundreds of church checks to pay personal credit card bills from 2005 to last year. The investigation began when American Express contacted authorities. Guzzardi’s lawyer did not immediately return a message on Tuesday. Guzzardi had worked for the Roman Catholic archdiocese since 1989. Prosecutors said they had recovered about US$150,000 for the church. The archdiocese said insurance would pay for most of the remaining losses.
PANAMA
Noriega sick: doctors
Former dictator Manuel Noriega has a benign brain tumor, a possible heart condition and other ailments that raise the risk of him dying in prison, a team of private doctors hired by Noriega’s family said at a press conference on Tuesday. They said the penitentiary where the 78-year-old Noriega is being held lacks the medical facilities to treat him in case of an emergency. Lawyers for the former strongman are seeking to have him serve out his 60-year sentence in a hospital or under house arrest, but the doctors said this decision depends on an evaluation by the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences.
UNITED KINGDOM
Student to be extradited
London has authorized the extradition to the US of a student who created a Web site allowing people to watch films and TV shows for free, the Home Office said on Tuesday. Richard O’Dwyer, a 23-year-old student at Sheffield Hallam University in northern England, allegedly earned tens of thousands of US dollars through advertising on the TVShack Web site before it was closed down by US authorities. A British judge ruled in January that O’Dwyer could be extradited to the US to answer copyright infringement allegations. O’Dwyer’s mother, Julia, said her son was being “sold down the river” by the British government. “If Richard appears to have committed a crime in this country, then try him in this country,” she said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing