BENIN
New government formed
President Thomas Boni Yayi on Sunday named a new government after sacking his entire Cabinet in part over concerns of some members’ alleged links to a businessman accused of trying to poison him. Yayi named a 26-member team and opted not to appoint a prime minister, a presidency statement said. There had been disagreements between Yayi and former prime minister Pascal Koukpaki and he will not be part of the new team. Koukpaki and another member of the government were suspected of being close to the businessman charged with the alleged poison plot, Patrice Talon, a presidential advisor said. There are no opposition politicians in the new government. Talon is currently in France, where a court is considering whether he should be extradited.
U.A.E.
Jihadists plan jail break
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasser al-Wuhayshi said he would free jailed Islamist militants soon in a statement found on a jihadist Web site. Wuhayshi did not say how he would free those jailed, but al-Qaeda militants staged at least two prison breaks last month. Intercepted communication between al-Wuhayshi and al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahri was part of intelligence that prompted Washington to close 19 US embassies and send some staff in Yemen home last week. “We ask God to make us a cause for unlocking your incarceration and relieving your agony,” al-Wuhayshi said in the statement. “Your brothers are pounding the walls of injustice and the thrones of oppression. These walls and thrones are coming down every day and victory is but one step. Victory is one hour of perseverance.”
IRAQ
Group claims Eid bombings
An al-Qaeda affiliate said it carried out Saturday’s Eid al-Fitr bombings, which killed dozens of people, in response to a government campaign to arrest suspected militants, the SITE Monitoring group reported yesterday. The statement from Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) posted on jihadist forums claimed responsibility for the attacks across Baghdad and in southern provinces targeting people celebrating the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, SITE said. It has been one of the country’s deadliest Ramadan holidays in years, as Sunni Islamist militants wage an insurgency against the Shiite-led government. “They will pay a high price for what they did and they will not be secure day or night during Eid or other times, so they should watch their footsteps and stop the detention campaigns and cease harming the Sunni clans,” the ISIL statement said, according to a SITE translation.
SRI LANKA
Mosque closed after attack
The Sri Lanka Muslim Council closed down a new mosque in Colombo yesterday after attacks by a Buddhist mob. The council said it had agreed to shut its Grandpass mosque and move to an older place of worship that the government had earlier earmarked for demolition. “We have a compromise deal worked out last night,” council president N. M. Ameen told reporters. “The government will rescind the order acquiring the old mosque premises and will grant more land and help with renovations and improvements.” Buddhist-led mobs vandalized the new mosque on Saturday, wounding at least four people. Sporadic clashes also erupted on Sunday. Buddhists had objected to the setting up of the new mosque near a Buddhist temple even though it was built to replace the older mosque to be torn down for city works.
FRANCE
Soldier held over attack plan
Police have arrested a young soldier on suspicion of planning to fire shots at a mosque near the eastern city of Lyon, the Ministry of the Interior said on Sunday. The 23-year-old man, who investigators say is “close to the radical far-right,” was detained at his airbase near Lyon. He was remanded in custody on Wednesday last week and charged with the possession of ammunition and plans to damage a place of worship “in connection with a terrorist enterprise.” Judicial officials said he told investigators that he planned to fire the shots at the Minguettes mosque at Venissieux on Thursday last week at the end of Ramadan. He also admitted to throwing an incendiary device at a mosque door in southwestern Libourne in August last year.
BRAZIL
Petrobras accused of bribes
State-run energy giant Petrobras funneled kickbacks to officials from political parties, the weekly Epoca magazine reported on Sunday. Epoca cited evidence from lobbyist Joao Augusto Rezende, a former head of BR Distribuidora, a Petrobras subsidiary. The lobbyist for the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), which is part of President Dilma Rousseff’s ruling coalition, said between 60 and 70 percent of the graft money was passed on to the PMDB. Epoca also reported that Joao Vaccari Neto, the ruling Workers Party’s finance secretary, received the equivalent of US$8 million in kickbacks from construction conglomerate Odebrecht as part of a Petrobras international contract during Rousseff’s 2010 presidential campaign. The weekly quoted Augusto as saying he and Vaccari arranged for the money to be transferred to the Rousseff campaign. However, Vaccari was quoted as saying he was not in charge of the Rousseff campaign’s finances and that all donations were made “within the law.”
THE NETHERLANDS
Prince Johan Friso dies
Prince Johan Friso, who went into a coma following a skiing accident in February last year, has died, the government said yesterday. “Prince Friso died from complications that arose as a consequence of the brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation following his skiing accident,” the government said in a statement. The prince, 44, was skiing off-piste in Lech, Austria, when he was buried in an avalanche. He was initially treated at a London hospital and was brought back to The Hague last month.
HUNGARY
Alleged war criminal dies
Laszlo Csatari, a 98-year-old Hungarian who topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of alleged war criminals, has died in hospital, his lawyer said yesterday. Csatari was alleged to have been actively involved in the deportations of thousands of Jews to death camps in World War II from a town in present-day Slovakia. After being sentenced to death in absentia in 1948 he made it to Canada where he worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship in the 1990s. He returned to Hungary where he lived until prosecutors began investigating his case in late 2011 on the basis of information from the Wiesenthal Center. In June Hungarian prosecutors charged him, saying he was “actively involved in and assisted the deportations” in 1944 of Jews from a ghetto in Kassa, now known as Kosice. The former police officer “regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip without any special reasons, regardless of their sex, age or health,” prosecutors said. He had been under house arrest ever since.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the