INDONESIA
Province in smog crisis
A province at the heart of a Southeast Asian smog crisis last year has declared a state of emergency after being blanketed in thick haze from forest fires, officials said yesterday. Thousands have fallen ill, transport has been disrupted and schools closed after days of fires in Riau Province on Sumatra Island, where blazes are deliberately lit every year to clear land for palm oil and wood pulp plantations. More than two dozen people suspected of starting fires in rainforest and peatland have so far been arrested, national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said. Declaring an emergency allows Riau to seek help in tackling the blazes from the central government, and Nugroho said aircraft were preparing to drop water on fires and carry out “cloud-seeding” to chemically induce rain.
INDIA
Court blocks Gandhi killers
The Supreme Court in New Delhi halted the freeing of four more killers of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi yesterday after a political uproar over a state government’s plan to release all seven. The court issued a temporary restraining order against releasing the four, who are serving life in jail over Gandhi’s assassination in 1991 by a Tamil female suicide bomber. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week rejected the Tamil Nadu chief minister’s moves to set all seven free, saying it was against all principles of justice as the murder was “an attack on the soul of India.” The court last week blocked the release of three of the men convicted of plotting the assassination after Singh’s comments and his government’s urgent legal action against the move.
HONG KONG
Lawmaker sorry over photos
An embarrassed lawmaker has apologized after he was photographed looking at pictures of scantily dressed models on his tablet computer during a budget speech in parliament. Pro-democracy politician Albert Ho (何俊仁) was snapped flipping through multiple photographs of bikini-clad women while Financial Secretary John Tsang (曾俊華) delivered a one-and-a-half-hour-long budget speech on Wednesday. “It just so happened that at that time, I casually saw the photos,” said Ho, who failed in a bid to become the territory’s leader in 2012. “I have learned a lesson, I should not commit such a mistake again,” he told reporters, adding that he had apologized for the incident.
BRUNEI
Terror suspect detained
Authorities have detained an Indonesian national for alleged “terrorist-related activities” in the oil-rich sultanate, a media report said yesterday. The suspect, identified as “Daniel, alias Awaluddin Sitorus,” was detained on Friday last week and is believed to be a member of the Indonesia-based militant group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the Brunei Times said. JI has been blamed for a number of attacks in Southeast Asia, with the deadliest being the Bali bombings of October 2002 that killed 202 people. Awaluddin is suspected of plotting to help militants enter and use Brunei — which shares the huge island of Borneo with Malaysia and Indonesia — as a “safe haven” and to channel financing to militants abroad, the newspaper said, citing Brunei security officials. Brunei authorities could not immediately be reached for comment. Awaluddin, who the newspaper said was in his 40s and used aliases including Abu Yasar and Dani Sitorus, had stood trial in Indonesia a decade ago over a plot to bomb three churches in the city of Medan in May 2000. He was acquitted.
ISRAEL
Amnesty slams killings
An international rights group looking into the shooting deaths of 22 Palestinian civilians by soldiers in the West Bank says troops used unnecessary force. Amnesty International says it found evidence of willful killings that could amount to war crimes. The report released yesterday investigated the deaths of the Palestinians last year, including four children and at least 14 killed during protests. It says soldiers’ lives did not appear to be at risk. The military responded that troops use live fire only in life-threatening situations. Amnesty says soldiers acted with “near total impunity” and a pattern of unlawful killings has emerged.
SPAIN
Flamenco guitarist dies
Flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia — one of the country’s most influential musicians and a composer who fused traditional flamenco with jazz and other genres — died on Wednesday of a heart attack in Mexico. A spokesman for the city hall in Algeciras, where de Lucia was born, confirmed his death and said the city would decree two days of official mourning. De Lucia, born Francisco Sanchez Gomez, was 66. He had lived both in Mexico and in Spain in recent years. In the 1970s and 1980s he played with jazz pianist Chick Corea and fusion guitarist Al Di Meola.
SWEDEN
Chaos at jobs office
Police dispersed an angry crowd of jobseekers outside an employment office in Stockholm on Wednesday after it called 61,000 people for a recruitment meeting by mistake. “Something has gone wrong with the mailing list ... it has set off a very messy situation at the city office,” acting office director Clas Olsson said. An e-mail call for a recruitment meeting that should have gone out to about 1,000 job-seekers went out to considerably more people, about 61,000 — apparently all the registered job seekers in Stockholm, police said. The country’s total unemployment stood at 8.6 percent last month.
UNITED STATES
Meteorite crashed into moon
A meteorite as large as 1.5m in diameter smashed into the moon in September last year, producing the brightest flash of light ever seen from Earth, astronomers said this week. Similarly sized objects pummel Earth daily, though most are destroyed as they plunge through the planet’s atmosphere. NASA says about 100 tonnes of material from space enter Earth’s atmosphere every day. The moon, with no protective atmosphere, is fair game for celestial pot shots. The evidence is all over its cratered face and is occasionally recorded by cameras on Earth. Such was the case on Sept. 11, last year, when a pair of telescopes in Spain, which were automatically trolling for lunar meteorite impacts, hit pay-dirt with the longest, brightest flash ever observed on the moon. Typically, flashes of light from meteorite impacts on the moon last just a fraction of a second. Last year’s flash was nearly as bright as Polaris, the North Star, and the afterglow lasted another eight seconds, a video recording made by Madiedo shows. Scientists estimate the meteorite was between 0.6m and 1.4m in diameter and weighed about 400kg. Moving faster than 61,000kph, the meteorite smashed into a region known as “Mare Nubium” with the force of about 15 tonnes of TNT. It likely left behind a 40m wide crater. The research was published on Sunday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of