MEXICO
Drug gangs kill more
The tortured and bound bodies of seven men were dumped in a Pacific port city along with messages signed by a drug gang, authorities said on Thursday. The Michoacan state prosecutors’ office said each victim’s head was covered with a black plastic bag and had a bullet wound in the back of the neck. Police found posters with threatening messages from the New Generation gang, an ally of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel. The killings in the port of Lazaro Cardenas came only two days after nine bodies were found in other Michoacan towns, also with messages signed by New Generation. Authorities also reported that the bodies of five more men were discovered shot dead on Thursday in other areas of Michoacan. In the northern state of Tamaulipas, four men and a woman were decapitated and their bodies left in plain sight on Thursday.
UNITED STATES
Killers target immigrants
Investigators said on Thursday they have not determined who is responsible for the fatal shooting of two illegal immigrants by camouflage-wearing men. The two killed on Sunday were among 20 to 30 illegal immigrants crammed in a pickup truck driving in the remote Arizona desert. Five immigrants in the group told investigators that two or more camouflage-clad gunmen appeared and yelled “Alto,” Spanish for “Stop,” fired at them and ran away, Pima County sheriff’s Deputy Dawn Barkman said on Thursday. Most of the immigrants fled into the desert. The five immigrants, all from Mexico, were found hiding in nearby brush.
BRAZIL
Brainless can be aborted
The supreme court has voted to authorize abortions in cases of fetuses with no brains. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except when a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother and in cases of rape. The Supreme Federal Tribunal’s 8-2 vote on Thursday decriminalized abortions involving anencephalic fetuses. Such fetuses develop without brains and cannot survive outside the womb for more than a few minutes. Most die before birth. The country has a high rate of such cases, with 10 out of every 10,000 pregnancies. Brazil is the world’s most populous Roman Catholic country and religious groups staged vigils outside the court and in other cities opposing a ruling to allow such abortions.
UNITED STATES
Sewer workers find ring
A woman says she believes in miracles after sewer workers found the US$6,000 diamond wedding ring she accidentally flushed down the toilet 18 months ago. Mechelle Rieger claimed the seven-diamond ring on Thursday morning at City Hall, bringing with her a photo and the March 2001 appraisal from the jeweler that made it. Rieger thanked city workers Travis Fleming and Carey Knight, who spotted the ring along with loose coins in a filtration basket while doing routine maintenance last week.
UNITED STATES
Coast guards murdered
Two coast guard members who were fatally shot at a communications station on an island off Alaska appear to be victims of a double homicide. A member found the two on Thursday morning at their work areas inside the Kodiak Island station Captain Jesse Moore, commanding officer of the coast guard base, said the shootings likely occurred soon after the two arrived for work. The captain says he is not aware of anything that might have indicated problems at the station.
VIETNAM
Monks lay claim to Spratlys
Five Buddhist monks have set sail for the disputed Spratly Islands, where they will spend six months setting up pagodas in the archipelago, a senior monk said yesterday. The monks will re-establish three temples which were abandoned by the nation in 1975, but have been recently renovated as part of the country’s drive to assert its territorial claims over the potentially oil-rich islands. “We plan to stay on the Truong Sa [Spratly] Islands for six months,” Thich Giac Nghia said by phone on a board a boat sailing toward the islands. The team will stay on one of the larger islands which is under Hanoi’s military control. Parts of the Spratlys are also claimed by Taiwan, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei.
SOUTH KOREA
Opposition chief to resign
The main opposition party chief yesterday said she would resign to take responsibility for this week’s parliamentary election defeat. “I’m stepping down as the party head to take responsibility,” Democratic United Party (DUP) Chairperson Han Myeong-sook said after the ruling conservative New Frontier Party (NFP) retained its majority in Wednesday’s polls. The NFP won 152 of the 300 seats in the National Assembly, 25 more than the DUP, despite opinion polls predicting a victory by the opposition. “I am stepping down today, but will still continue efforts for the administration change in the 2012 presidential election,” Han said.
MONGOLIA
Former president arrested
Scores of police arrested former president Enkhbayar Nambar, raiding a house in the capital at dawn yesterday after he refused investigators’ summons to answer questions about corruption charges, law enforcement officials said. Investigators initially tried to arrest Enkhbayar on Thursday night. They stopped the former president’s car, but were foiled by his bodyguards, who took him to a nearby compound, setting up a standoff that ended with the raid, police said. Now an opposition politician, Enkhbayar served as prime minister and then president for most of a decade until losing office in 2009. He presided over a period of robust growth, but also a widening wealth gap and corruption, critics said.
CHINA
Wen to visit Europe
Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) will travel to four European countries on a trip starting next week, just months after Beijing warned of an “urgent” need to solve the eurozone debt crisis, the foreign ministry said yesterday. Wen will travel to Iceland, Sweden, Poland and Germany from Friday next week to April 27, the ministry said. He will attend the opening ceremony of the Hannover fair, it said, but gave few other details of Wen’s itinerary. Wen will hold talks with leaders of each country, meet businesspeople and deliver speeches outlining China’s opening up policy, it said.
INDIA
Abused baby dies
A three-month-old baby girl who was allegedly battered by her father has died in a hospital in Bangalore. Doctors say the baby suffered cardiac arrest and that attempts to revive her failed on Wednesday. The baby, Afreen, was brought to the hospital over the weekend with severe head injuries and burn and bite marks all over her body. Afreen’s father was arrested after her mother accused him of battering the child. The father has denied harming the baby. The mother had complained to police earlier that her husband had threatened her for giving birth to a girl.
GERMANY
Train crash kills three
Police say three people were killed and 13 injured, six of them seriously, in a train crash near Frankfurt early yesterday, when a regional train collided with a construction train and derailed. DAPD news agency reported that the deceased were the passenger train’s conductor and two construction workers present at the site near the town of Muelheim. Authorities had no immediate information on what caused the crash.
UNITED KINGDOM
Teens arrested for prank
Two teenagers have been arrested in connection with recording telephone calls made to Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist hotline, police said late on Thursday. London’s Metropolitan Police said a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old were arrested on suspicion of offenses under the Malicious Communications Act and the Computer Misuse Act. The arrests came after a hacktivist group posted on YouTube what appeared to be recordings of calls made to the hotline and claimed responsibility on Twitter for “terrorizing” the anti-terrorist unit.
IRAQ
Six killed in attacks
Gunmen ambushed a police patrol about 40km south of the northern city of Kirkuk, killing two policemen and three civilians and wounding three policemen and three civilians, police Brigadier General Sarhad Qader said. In Diwaniyah in the center of the country, attackers threw dynamite at a religious institution linked to the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, a Shiite political movement, “killing an eight-year-old girl,” the head of the provincial council’s security committee, Karim Zaghir said. “Security forces surrounded the location of the incident and prevented anyone from getting near it,” Zaghir said. Violence in Iraq has fallen sharply from a peak of 2006 and 2007, but attacks still continue across the country. Last month 112 Iraqis were killed in violence.
DENMARK
Terror plot trial starts
The trial of four Swedes accused of plotting a revenge attack on a Danish newspaper that printed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed has started. The four men — three citizens and one resident of Sweden — are accused of terrorism and illegal possession of weapons and face about 16 years in prison if found guilty. A lawyer for one of the accused, Mounir Ben Mohamed Dhahri, said yesterday before the trial that his client would plea guilty to the weapons violation, but not guilty to the terrorism charge. Three of the four accused were arrested in December 2010 while they were allegedly on their way to carry out an attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper that published 12 cartoons of the prophet in 2005.
MALI
Children killed in blast
A hospital official in the north of the country said two children were killed after playing with an explosive device they found near a military base. Abdel Aziz Ould Mohamed said a third child lost a leg in Wednesday’s accident in the historic town of Timbuktu. The deaths happened near a military base controlled by a militant Islamist Tuareg faction that wants to impose Shariah law in the north together with al-Qaeda’s North Africa branch. The West African country was plunged into a political crisis when its democratically elected president was overthrown in a coup last month. Tuareg rebels affiliated with a separate secular movement in the region have declared their independence, but the power vacuum in the region has allowed extremist groups to take root.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
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
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