CHINA
Baby-napper gets death
A Chinese court says it has sentenced a woman to death for trafficking and abducting 223 infants from late 2009 to August 2010.The Qujing Intermediate People’s Court in southwest China’s Yunnan Province said yesterday in a statement posted on its official Web site that Jiang Kaizhi was the leader of a trafficking ring that abducted and bought infants from the province and transported them to be sold in central China’s Henan Province. The court says 35 others involved in the trafficking ring were sentenced on Friday to prison for terms ranging from three years to life.
THAILAND
Two Canadians found dead
The bodies of two Canadian sisters have been found in a hotel room on the popular tourist resort island of Phi Phi, Thai police said yesterday, without revealing the suspected cause of death. The sisters, aged 26 and 20, were found dead on Friday afternoon by hotel staff on the Andaman sea island, 800km south of Bangkok. “Their bodies were found a little after midday [Friday]. They were sisters,” said Lieutenant Pongpan Waiyawat of the island’s police force. “We have to wait for the post mortem to determine the cause of death, but based on initial investigations there’s no sign of violence in their room.”
INDIA
Dozens die in bus plunge
At least 32 pilgrims were killed and more than 20 injured yesterday when their bus plunged off a bridge in western India, the Press Trust of India reported. The pilgrims were returning from a visit to the popular Shirdi Saibaba temple, built in honor of an Indian guru, when the accident occurred before dawn in Maharashtra State’s Osmanabad District, police said. “We had to struggle to rescue survivors and retrieve the victims’ bodies from water,” a police official said. Nearly 135,000 people, or 366 a day, died on India’s roads in 2010, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
BANGLADESH
Reporter stabbed to death
Police say that unidentified men have stabbed a journalist to death apparently for his reports on the illegal drug trade in the southwest. Local police chief A.K.M. Faruk Hossain said yesterday that the attack on Zamal Uddin took place late on Friday at Kashipur Bazar in Jessore District bordering India. The area is 140km west of the capital, Dhaka. Hossain says the reporter was rushed to hospital with severe injuries and later declared dead. Uddin worked for the Bengali-language Gramer Kagoj daily. The police chief says Uddin had recently filed a complaint with police seeking security after he was threatened for his articles on the illicit drug trade.
BANGLADESH
One dead in bridge collapse
One person was killed and up to 10 were missing after several vehicles plunged into a canal as a small bridge collapsed in Bangladesh’s northeast on Friday night, police said. Six trucks, a microbus and an auto-rickshaw were on the bridge when it caved in, making a loud noise and plunging the vehicles into a canal at Companyganj, about 200km from the capital, police said. “We’ve recovered one dead body and rescued 15 persons alive. The rescued persons were sent to local hospitals,” district police chief Shakhawat Hossain said. Hossain could not give the exact number of missing people as police did not know how many passengers the lorries were carrying, which had been transporting stones from a nearby quarry.
NIGERIA
Soldiers kill ‘militants’
An official says soldiers have killed four people in a raid on a suspected media center belonging to the radical Boko Haram sect in the north of the country. Army spokesman Lieutenant Iweha Ikedichi said the soldiers stormed a house in a residential area of Kano City on Friday and shot dead four suspected members of the sect. Ikedichi said the soldiers found 12 laptops and two scanners, leading them to believe the house was a media center for the sect, which has held telephone conference calls with journalists. He said they also found a gun, some ammunition and explosives.
IRAQ
ISI claims bomb campaign
Al-Qaeda affiliate the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) has claimed responsibility for a wave of bombings across the country that killed 72 people during a Shiite pilgrimage, the SITE Monitoring Service said yesterday. US-based SITE said the ISI, in a statement posted on jihadist forums, dubbed the attacks the “blessed Wednesday invasion.” Coordinated attacks took place nationwide on Wednesday, leaving 72 people dead and more than 250 wounded, marking the deadliest day in almost 10 months. They came as pilgrims headed to shrines to mark the death of Imam Musa Kadhim.
EGYPT
Bedouins release captive
Bedouins who kidnapped a Singaporean tourist in the Sinai Peninsula on Friday released him after several hours, a security source said. The Bedouins were demanding the release of one of their tribesmen arrested for possession of drugs, security officials said. The freeing of the tourist, one of a group of 20 visiting Sinai, was confirmed by the official news agency MENA, which said it came after “efforts by the security forces in coordination with the chiefs of tribes.” The tourist was abducted in central Sinai where several foreigners have been kidnapped over the past months by Bedouins demanding the release of tribesmen they feel have been unjustly detained.
TOGO
Dozens wounded in protests
The political opposition says dozens of people have been wounded and arrested in three days of protests in the West African nation. Opposition coalition leader Zeus Atta Mensah Ajavon said on Thursday that at least 56 people were seriously hurt this week. The government said more than 30 police and security officers were also wounded. The nation is scheduled to hold legislative and municipal elections in October, but Togolese opposition parties have expressed disagreement about a new formula for the redrawing of boundaries for constituencies.
UNITED STATES
US, Palestinians to meet
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week in a bid to try to breathe new life into stalled peace talks, an official said on Friday. Clinton had already met with Israeli negotiator Yitzhak Molho and “she will see Erakat next week,” Department of State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. Clinton recently talked with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and separately with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. While direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians remain in deep freeze, top officials from both sides have been holding a quiet dialogue on a range of issues, including an exchange of letters between Netanyahu and Abbas.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion