PHILIPPINES
Man killed in gaming row
A man has been stabbed to death in Manila following a row between two groups of men playing the popular video game Counter-Strike, police said on Wednesday. The quarrel between the men playing the game — in which gamers play either terrorists or counterterrorism officers trying to kill their opponents — erupted in an Internet cafe, police investigator Noel Ibanez said. The teams had bet 300 pesos (US$7.15) on the outcome of their competition on Monday, but when one side won, an argument broke out over the payment, Ibanez said. A member of the winning team, still angry over the dispute, later followed losing player Eric Cristobal to his home and stabbed him to death, he added. “He [Cristobal] did not start the quarrel. He just got caught up in it, but they all had long been betting on Counter-Strike,” Ibanez said.
BANGLADESH
Court orders pages blocked
A lawyer said the High Court had ordered that five Facebook pages and a Web site be blocked because their cartoons and other content are blasphemous and mock the Koran. The lawyer said a panel of two judges found the Facebook pages and the Web site had lots of disparagement not only to the Prophet Mohammed, but also Jesus Christ, Buddha and Hindu gods. Muhammad Nawshad Zamir was the barrister who petitioned the court. He said the court also asked authorities to investigate the content and find the people behind it. He refused to name the Bengali-language Web site or disclose further details.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Airport to be renamed
The government agreed on Wednesday to rename the country’s main airport in Prague in honor of late former president Vaclav Havel, Czech media reported. Havel, a former anti-communist dissident and playwright, was jailed by the country’s totalitarian rulers before the 1989 bloodless “Velvet Revolution” catapulted him to the presidency. Havel is acclaimed for his peaceful resistance to the oppressive government in the 1970s and 1980s that inspired human rights campaigners around the world and won him respect from leaders around the world. One of Havel’s close aides has protested the plan, saying the former president actually never liked flying, but the idea that Havel should be remembered by a landmark like the country’s main entry port, which served 11.8 million people last year, won widespread support across the political scene as well as from the country’s intellectual elite. Havel died on Dec. 22 last year, aged 75.
GREECE
Poets join protests
It is not often that demonstrators quote from the works of Nobel laureates, but in Athens on Wednesday Greek poets joined anti-austerity protests holding outdoor recitals at cultural sites in the city as they made their way to parliament. Several hundred people attended the rally, along with dancers on stilts and a Latin music percussion band, to mark World Poetry Day. Teenagers handed out their own poems to the public — as irritated drivers stuck in midday traffic looked on in amazement and striking hospital doctors in medical uniforms passed by in a separate protest. “For me, this is the epitome of a protest, people making their point in a civilized way,” said Manolis Polentas, a poet and radio show host. “It’s because the crisis affects everybody — poets included. Poets are usually inspired by personal misery, but that’s why they fight for a fair and more colorful world.”
UNITED STATES
Asian population soars
Asians are the fastest--growing racial group in the country, reflecting a surge in immigration from the region over the past decade, the Census Bureau said on Wednesday. As part of an ongoing analysis of the data it reaped from its 2010 census, the federal agency said those who identified themselves as Asian alone, and not mixed race, grew by 43.3 percent from a decade earlier. That was more than four times faster than the rate of growth for the overall population, which grew 9.7 percent in the same period to 308,745,538. About 14.7 million people, or 4.8 percent of the total population, identified themselves as Asian alone. Another 2.6 million said they were Asian in combination with another race group, most commonly white. New York had the biggest Asian population with 1.1 million, followed by Los Angeles with 484,000. Chinese was the largest of all Asian groups with 4 million, including 700,000 who identified themselves as mixed race.
UNITED STATES
Obama visits Roswell
A lighthearted President Barack Obama on Wednesday joked that although he had landed in Roswell he could not disclose if extra-terrestrials had done the same in a flying saucer in 1947. “I announced to people when I landed that I come in peace,” the president said. Roswell, a town of 50,000 inhabitants in the state of New Mexico, is known worldwide for being the place where a spacecraft and its alien occupants were allegedly recovered 65 years ago and then hidden by the government. “Let me tell you, there are nine and 10-year-old boys ... when I meet them they ask me: ‘Have you been to Roswell, and is it true what they say?’” Obama said. “And I tell them: ‘If I told you I’d have to kill you,’ and you know, their eyes get all big,” the president added in Maljamar, a town 80km from Roswell, where he was trumpeting his energy policy.
UNITED STATES
Pot pilot charged
A California man whose plane was intercepted by air force F-16 fighter jets last month because it entered the same Los Angeles airspace as President Barack Obama’s helicopter has been charged with possession of marijuana and transporting it for sale. Police in Long Beach, where 43-year-old Brian Choppin was forced to land his Cessna, said they found marijuana during a search of the plane. The Los Angeles Times said Choppin was arraigned on Wednesday and released on his own recognizance. It is not clear whether he entered a plea. Pilots were told that during Obama’s Feb. 16 visit they were not to come within 5km of Los Angeles International Airport. The Secret Service said Obama was never in danger.
UNITED STATES
Woman sets drugs record
Customs officials at Dulles International Airport say a Nigerian woman set an unfortunate record when she tried to smuggle 2.27kg of heroin into the country. Authorities said 52-year-old Bola Adebisi ingested 180 thumb-sized pellets filled with US$150,000 worth of heroin. She is charged with drug smuggling in federal court. Officers became suspicious on Saturday when she said she was visiting her brother, but could not describe him. A routine pat-down found her stomach to be abnormally rigid. An X-ray revealed the pellets and she was taken to the hospital. A public defender declined to comment. The previous record for an ingested drug seizure at Dulles occurred last year, when another Nigerian was discovered with 1.81kg of pellets.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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