AFGHANISTAN
Gunmen kidnap official
Gunmen abducted the deputy public works minister in Kabul yesterday, officials said, a grim reminder of the insecurity plaguing the nation as most foreign troops prepare to withdraw at the end of the year. Public Works Deputy Minister Ahmad Shah Wahid was on his way to work when five gunmen ran his car off the road in northern Kabul, dragged him into their four-wheel-drive vehicle and sped away, police chief of investigations Gul Agha Hashim said. The armed men allegedly shot and wounded Wahid’s driver when he tried to drive away to safety, Ministry of Public Works spokesman Soheil Kakar said. It was not immediately clear who was behind the abduction.
CHINA
Health scam suspects held
Authorities have detained 160 suspected members of a criminal group in Shanghai after the group reportedly swindled patients by luring them to fake medical clinics and selling them overpriced drugs, Shanghai police said yesterday. The group reportedly cheated more than 500 victims out of 1.7 million yuan (US$273,400), reportedly employing corrupt doctors to inflate drug prices and prescribe large amounts of medicines to patients, the city’s police department said in a posting on its official microblog. Corruption in the nation’s healthcare system is said to be rife, with a scarcity of doctors and bribery pushing up the cost of care and creating tension between healthcare workers and patients. More than 600 Shanghai police launched a sting operation on April 2, after seven months of investigation, detaining 160 suspects in raids around the city and seizing crates of medicine and fake firearms, the statement said. The group would allegedly lure patients into four fraudulent clinics by placing people at hospitals and metro stations to praise the quality of the care. Unqualified doctors would then allegedly sell them prescription medicines at prices often inflated to more than 10 times the real value.
PAKISTAN
Cannibal arrested again
Police re-arrested a convicted cannibal on Monday after finding a young boy’s head in his home. Mohammad Arif, 35, and his brother Mohammad Farman, 30, from the town of Darya Khan, served two years in jail for cannibalism and were released last year. Police said the two had dug up more than 100 corpses from the local graveyard and eaten them. “Residents informed police after a stench emanated from the house of the two brothers. We raided the house on Monday morning and found the head of a young boy,” district police chief Ameer Abdullah told reporters. “We have arrested one of the brothers, Mohammad Arif, and are conducting raids for the arrest of the other brother.” Police were searching nearby graveyards to see if they had been disturbed, he said.
INDIA
Neutral gender recognized
The nation’s highest court yesterday recognized the existence of a third gender that is neither male nor female, in a landmark judgement hailed by transgender people. “Recognition of transgenders as a third gender is not a social or medical issue, but a human rights issue,” Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan told the Supreme Court while handing down the ruling. The court directed state and federal governments to identify transgenders as a neutral third gender who should be granted access to the same welfare schemes as other minority groups in India. “Transgenders are citizens of this country and are entitled to education and all other rights,” Radhakrishnan said.
VENEZUELA
Kidnapped journalist freed
A journalist was freed on Monday, eight days after she was kidnapped by masked men in front of her house. Minister of the Interior Miguel Rodriguez Torres told a news conference that 3,000 people had been hunting for Nairobi Pinto, chief correspondent for the Globovision TV station, and “the police pressure played an important role” in prompting her captors to free her. He said nobody had been arrested and did not say if a ransom was paid. Rodriguez Torres said officials have not wanted to speculate about a motive for the kidnapping, adding that in addition to being a journalist, Pinto is a university law student and member of a Christian group. While kidnapping for ransom is a widespread problem, Pinto’s family said earlier they had received no messages from the abductors. Pinto herself appeared briefly alongside the minister and said she could not identify her captors because her eyes were always covered.
ITALY
Grillo’s Nazi post outrages
A blog post by a comedian who founded the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement — parliament’s third-largest party — has sparked outrage in the nation’s tiny Jewish community. Comedian Beppe Grillo on Monday posted a photograph of the gate of Auschwitz with the infamous words Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”) changed to P2 macht frei, in a sarcastic reference to the shady organization of local business and political figures some equate to a “shadow government.” The blog post also parodied a work by the late Primo Levi, who survived deportation to a Nazi death camp, to criticize President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Noting that Passover started on Monday, Jewish community leader Renzo Gattegna denounced the post as “shameful” and “criminal,” as did the leaders of various political parties.
BRAZIL
Forgotten baby corpses found
The bodies of 40 newborn babies and fetuses have been found abandoned in a Rio de Janeiro hospital morgue, with some having been there for years, authorities said on Monday, comparing the scene to a horror movie. Some of the small corpses had been moldering in a morgue refrigerator for as long as five years at the city-administered Pedro Ernesto Hospital. Officials also found a number of body parts which prosecutors said were probably left over from emergency amputations. “Our goal now is to give the bodies a dignified burial as soon as possible,” prosecutor Ana Cristina Huth Macedo said. The hospital is renowned for delivering high-risk births, which likely explains why so many babies would have died, she said. Hospital director Rodolfo Acatuassu Nunes told local media that the infants’ bodies had never been claimed by their parents.
FRANCE
Nazi memento auction axed
A Paris auction house has dropped plans to sell a swastika-covered box that once belonged to Adolf Hitler and dozens of other Nazi-owned objects collected as spoils from World War II, citing “political pressure.” The Vermot de Pas house on Monday canceled its planned April 26 sale of about 40 items French forces seized from Hitler’s Bavaria home in the last days of Nazi Germany in May 1945. Passports of Hermann Goering, an aviator’s watch, pictures of Hitler and silverware were among the items set to go under the block. “It was not our goal to stir a scandal,” auction house comanager Laudine de Pas said. “We were pitching this as part of the responsibility to remember, but in no way to shock or create a polemic.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not