SOUTH KOREA
Police chief quits
National Police Agency chief Cho Hyun-oh resigned yesterday following public fury at a bungled case in which a woman was raped and murdered after frantically calling police for help. Cho said he would step down to “take all responsibility ... for unpardonable carelessness” by the police and asked the victim’s family for forgiveness. “I express my deepest regret at the police’s negligence which had such a horrendous result and attempts to cover it up with lies,” Cho told a press conference. The dismembered body of the 28-year-old woman was found on Monday last week in Suwon about 13 hours after she had called the police emergency number from her home. She gave police a detailed location for her home before the intruder broke in on the evening of April 1. Police admitted miscommunication between the emergency call center and officers on duty, as well as bureaucratic shortcomings, which led them to search the wrong area for hours.
PAKISTAN
Six dead in checkpost raid
About 20 militants attacked a military checkpost in the northwest near the Afghan border, sparking a clash that left two soldiers and four militants dead, an official said yesterday. The attack was beaten off when troops responded with artillery and heavy weapons, a senior paramilitary Frontier Corps official said. “More than 20 militants attacked a Frontier Corps checkpost in the Khapiyanga area of Lower Kurram tribal region on Sunday night, which triggered a firefight, killing two soldiers and four rebels,” the official said.
MALAYSIA
Student ban to be lifted
Lawmakers are expected to approve a plan allowing university students to join political parties. Higher Education Minister Khaled Noordin yesterday tabled a proposal for legal amendments that would lift a decades-old ban on the involvement of university students in politics and allow them to participate in political activities not conducted on campus.Lawmakers are expected to debate and endorse the amendments soon.
MYANMAR
NLD leader to take seat
Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will take her seat in parliament for the first time on April 23, her party said yesterday. The veteran dissident’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which won 43 seats in April 1 by-elections, will be the main opposition in a national parliament dominated by the military and its political allies. NLD spokesman Nyan Win said the Nobel laureate would travel to the capital Naypyidaw by April 22 in time to attend a new session of the lower house the following day. Parliament has been in recess since March 23.
PHILIPPINES
Two held over bombings
Police have detained two suspects over bombings on Palawan that wounded three people, a police spokeswoman said yesterday. Two blasts went off nearly simultaneously on Thursday outside a hotel in the El Nido beach resort and a bus depot in the provincial capital Puerto Princesa at the start of peak Easter tourist holiday season. Two suspects were arrested on Sunday, Palawan police spokeswoman Inspector Grace Gomba told reporters. “At first they were reluctant to talk, but they are now cooperating with the police,” she added, without elaborating. The motive for the attack has not been established, and police declined to identify the detained suspects.
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
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema