C AFRICAN REPUBLIC
Peacekeepers ‘overwhelmed’
French and African soldiers serving in the country are “overwhelmed” by the “state of anarchy” there, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday, a day after Chadian troops began withdrawing from the peacekeeping mission. The UN Security Council is due this week to approve a 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping force for the former French colony. The force will take over authority from African Union troops in an attempt to restore order. However, that force is not expected to arrive until September, stoking fears of a security vacuum as the interim government struggles to control intercommunal violence that has killed more than 2,000 people since December last year. During a brief visit on his way to Rwanda, Ban appealed for more help and said the international community was at risk of repeating the mistakes of the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
IRAN
Officials upbeat on talks
The government on Saturday said it had useful expert-level nuclear talks with world powers in Vienna, addressing all major technical issues in the way of a final settlement. “The meetings were useful, raised mutual insight into our differing positions,” negotiator Hamid Baeedinejad told the official IRNA news agency at the end of the three-day talks in Vienna. “Everyone came well-prepared ... addressing issues in minute technical details can facilitate hard political decisions.”
JORDAN
Security forces kill refugee
At least one Syrian refugee was killed in the sprawling Zaatari camp when hundreds of refugees clashed with security forces, residents said on Saturday. They said scores of refugees in the sprawling camp close to the Syrian border were injured as baton-wielding anti-riot police used tear gas to disperse stone-throwing refugees who set fire to official offices and caravans. Police blamed agitators who were apprehended after trying to flee the refugee camp of nearly 70,000 residents. Authorities said at least 22 anti-riot police were hospitalized for treatment, but denied any deaths occurred. Residents say the rioting, the first such serious disturbance this year, was provoked when a security officer ran over with his car and seriously injured a four-year old Syrian child, prompting outrage by residents and relatives protesting ill treatment.
CAMEROON
Western priests, nun seized
Two Italian priests and a Canadian nun were kidnapped in the north overnight, a bishop and a government source said on Saturday, months after a French priest was seized nearby. Residents said that a group of armed men on motorcycles arrived at the homes of the group and smashed open windows just after midnight before fleeing in a stolen jeep. It was not immediately clear who took them, though Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram is known to operate in the area. “Doors were broken towards midnight by unknown people and the religious were taken away. We do not know where they are. The act is not yet claimed but we imagine who is behind this kidnapping,” said Bishop Phillippe Stevens, from the parish of Maroua, where the kidnapping took place. He named the priests as Giampaolo Marta and Gianantonio Allegri, both missionaries sent out by the diocese of Vicenza in northeast Italy, and the nun as Gilberte Bissiere. Local governor Augustine Fonka Awa said that Bissiere was in her 70s and ill and had intended to return to Canada when she was seized.
BRAZIL
Soldiers occupy Rio slum
Thousands of soldiers in armored vehicles, trucks and on foot fanned out across Rio de Janeiro’s most notorious slum on Saturday to shore up security before the World Cup. The move is an attempt to drive drug gangs out of the notorious Mare shanty town, a haven for organized crime and one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, located near Rio’s international airport. The Mare complex, home to 130,000 people, is a potential through route for tens of thousands of football fans flying in and out of the metropolis, which will stage seven World Cup matches, including the July 13 final.
MEXICO
State official detained
The No. 2 official in the troubled western state of Michoacan was ordered to be held for up to 40 days on Saturday while authorities investigate alleged ties with organized crime. The attorney general’s office said in a statement that it “found possible contacts” between Michoacan Secretary of the Interior Jesus Reyna and “criminal organizations.”
ARGENTINA
Capital declares emergency
A year-long public security emergency was declared on Saturday in Buenos Aires after a spate of violent robberies and assaults sparked a wave of vigilante action. Last week, a series of robbery-murders triggered a furious response from people who attempted to lynch suspected thieves. Some of them were beaten to death in the street. Buenos Aires Province Governor Daniel Scioli, an ally of President Cristina Kirchner with aspirations to the presidency, said the decree will free up 600 million pesos (US$75 million) to ramp up security. He announced a decentralized system for emergency calls, a “panic button” app for mobile phones and measures against drug trafficking, which he blamed for the worst of the rise in crime.
UNITED STATES
Peter Matthiessen dies
Peter Matthiessen, a rich man’s son who rejected a life of ease in favor of physical and spiritual challenges and produced such acclaimed works as The Snow Leopard and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, died on Saturday. He was 86. His publisher Geoff Kloske of Riverhead Books said Matthiessen, who had been diagnosed with leukemia, was ill “for some months.” Matthiessen helped found the Paris Review, one of the most influential literary magazines, and won National Book Awards for The Snow Leopard, his spiritual account of the Himalayas, and for Shadow Country. His new novel, In Paradise, is scheduled for publication tomorrow. A leading environmentalist and wilderness writer, he embraced the best and worst that nature could bring him, whether trekking across the Himalayas, parrying sharks in Australia or enduring a hurricane in Antarctica.
ARGENTINA
Hunt for horseback robber
Police are hunting for a man who whipped two passersby while riding a horse in the middle of a busy city street and attempted to rob them, before galloping off. The incident happened during the daytime on a major thoroughfare in Resistencia, capital of the northern province of Chaco, local media said on Saturday. Friday’s attack was recorded on security cameras and showed a man on horseback approaching his young male victims, whipping them and demanding their belongings. Witnesses told police that the suspect fell from his horse in the failed robbery, then jumped back on his mount and fled, dodging cars as he galloped off into the distance.
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