PAKISTAN
Mosque death toll rises
The death toll from a mosque in Lahore has risen to 24, rescuers said yesterday, after pulling more bodies from the rubble. The worshipers were killed when the roof of the mosque collapsed on Tuesday as about three dozen people gathered for afternoon prayers. The incident took place in Daroghawala, a low-income neighborhood of narrow and congested streets. Seven people have been pulled alive, but seriously injured, from the rubble, officials said. District administration head Mohammed Usman said the rescue operation would continue until all the rubble was removed.
NEW ZEALAND
Hotelier in court for assaults
A hotelier allegedly videotaped himself indecently assaulting at least 16 foreign male tourists after drugging them while they stayed at his backpacker lodge, police said yesterday. Michael Harris, 56, appeared in court on 39 charges, including indecent assault, drugging a victim and making and possessing intimate recordings. Police said the alleged sex attacks were carried out on 16 males aged between 18 and 25 over the past three years at a backpacker lodge in the North Island town of Kaitaia. Detective Senior Sergeant Rhys Johnston said there could be more victims and appealed for them to come forward.
PHILIPPINES
Autonomy law requested
President Benigno Aquino III yesterday asked Congress to swiftly enact a law creating a Muslim autonomous area in the south, a crucial step in ending nearly five decades of conflict. The government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed a deal in March to end a rebellion that has killed more than 120,000 people, displaced 2 million and stifled development in the region. Aquino is keen to see the deal in place before his term ends in June 2016.
FIJI
Peacekeepers still held
The government may have jumped the gun yesterday by announcing that its 45 UN peacekeepers who are being held captive by Syrian insurgents since Aug. 28 would be freed soon. At a news conference in Suva yesterday morning, Brigadier General Mosese Tikoitoga said the government had been told by UN headquarters in New York that the Nusra Front had agreed to release the men later this week without any conditions or demands. Three senior Fijian military officers would arrive soon in the Golan Heights to receive the men, he said. However, within hours, the government issued a bland statement: “All efforts to release the Fijian peacekeepers are continuing.” Military officials also telephoned local news outlets asking them to retract their earlier stories. There was no comment either from the Nusra Front yesterday on its social networks. It typically communicates via its Twitter feeds.
AUSTRALIA
Mother, children found dead
A rural town was in shock yesterday after a mother and her three children were found shot dead at a farmhouse in a “horrific scene,” as police searched a nearby dam for the father. Police found the bodies after being called to a property near the town of Lockhart, about 535km southwest of Sydney, on Tuesday afternoon. They were named as Kim Hunt, 44, her son, Fletcher, 10, and daughters Mia, eight, and Phoebe, six. A search is under way for Geoff Hunt, 44, with divers scouring a dam “within sight of the homestead” after a car was found abandoned nearby.
HONDURAS
Fugitive official arrested
Police arrested the fugitive former director of the national social security institute on Tuesday on charges of stealing more than US$330 million in public money from 2010 until January this year. Mario Zelaya, who headed national health and pension fund IHSS under former president Porfirio Lobo, was arrested at dawn in El Paraiso department after eight months on the run, President Juan Orlando Hernandez told a press conference. Zelaya went on the run in January after a court ordered his arrest on charges of diverting hundreds of millions of dollars in IHSS funds into personal accounts and property.
UNITED STATES
Ex-nurse assisted suicide
An ex-nurse who admitted going online and encouraging people to kill themselves was convicted on Tuesday in Minnesota of assisting the suicide of an English man and attempting to assist in the suicide of a Canadian woman, following a legal battle that has spanned more than four years. Rice County District Judge Thomas Neuville ruled that the state proved that William Melchert-Dinkel, 52, assisted in the hanging suicide of Mark Drybrough, 32, of England, in 2005. He said the state failed to prove Melchert-Dinkel’s assistance was a direct cause of the suicide of Nadia Kajouji, 18, of Brampton, Canada, who jumped into a frozen river in 2008, but found him guilty on a lesser charge of attempting to help her take her life. Kajouji Neuville set a sentencing hearing for Oct. 15.
UNITED STATES
Father killed children: police
A man is suspected of killing his five children in South Carolina and then driving for hours before dumping their bodies, wrapped in individual garbage bags, on a dirt road in rural Alabama, authorities said. Timothy Ray Jones, 32, led investigators to the site where the bodies of the children were found, off a two-lane highway near Camden, Alabama, Alabama Department of Public Safety spokesman Sergeant Steve Jarrett said on Tuesday. Jones has been charged with child neglect and police expect to lodge additional charges against him in connection with the children’s deaths, authorities in South Carolina and Mississippi said. The children ranged from one to eight years old and were reported missing by their mother, with whom Jones shared joint custody, on Sept. 3, authorities said.
MEXICO
Migration criminals targeted
The top prosecutors of the US, Mexico and Central America agreed to join forces on Tuesday to go after criminal organizations involved in a surge of unaccompanied child migrants. Meeting in Mexico City, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam, US Attorney General Eric Holder and their counterparts from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador decided to create a high-level working group to tackle the problem. Murillo Karam’s office said the goal is to draw up a strategy to protect children heading to the US alone and efficiently pursue “the criminal organizations that benefit from committing various crimes linked to migration.”
MEXICO
Harris, Burtka married
Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka were married on Saturday in Italy. They had been dating for 10 years and are parents to three-year-old twins, Gideon and Harper. Harris, 41, just won a Tony Award for his role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Burtka, 39, who played Tulsa in the Bernadette Peters-led revival of Gypsy, was seen off-Broadway in The Play About the Baby and is also a chef.
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