UNITED STATES
Rape documentary debuts
A rape documentary banned by the Indian government has received its premiere at a star-studded New York event, featuring Meryl Streep and Indian actress Freida Pinto. Monday’s screening of India’s Daughter at Baruch College started with a candlelight vigil honoring the medical student who died after being gang raped on a bus in 2012. Streep told a packed auditorium that victim Jyoti Singh was not only India’s daughter, but “she’s our daughter, too.”
UNITED STATES
Relative cuts baby’s throat
A nine-month-old girl died after a relative cut her throat with a power saw, a Chicago police official with knowledge of the investigation said on Monday. Officers found the child after being called on Monday morning to a building on the city’s West Side. The police official confirmed media reports that a 52-year-old relative used a circular saw to cut the baby’s throat, apparently because the girl would not stop crying. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because an official autopsy had not been performed. The official said the woman is in police custody at a hospital with self-inflicted wounds. The police said both the baby and the woman were found by another relative.
UNITED STATES
Rescued baby recovering
An 18-month-old girl who was rescued from a car partially submerged in a Utah river for 14 hours remained in critical condition in hospital on Monday, but relatives said she was improving and was smiling and laughing for family members. The girl, Lily Groesbeck, was found by a fisherman on Saturday in a car seat inside the upturned vehicle alongside the body of her 25-year-old mother, Lynn Jennifer Groesbeck, who was killed in the accident, the police said. The toddler was in the back seat of the car “with the water just inches away from her face,” Spanish Fork Police Department Lieutenant Matt Johnson said.
UNITED STATES
Buttock injector convicted
A former madam who bragged of doing black-market “body sculpting” on thousands of women was convicted on Monday of murder in the death of a dancer whose heart stopped after nearly 1.9 liters of silicone was injected into her buttocks. Padge-Victoria Windslowe’s colorful testimony during her Philadelphia trial included claims that she was “the Michelangelo of buttock injections.” Yet Windslowe had no medical training, other than tips she said she picked up from overseas doctors who performed her sex change operation and a physician-client of her escort service who became her lover. Windslowe, 45, described herself as a serial entrepreneur who once ran a transgender escort service and a Gothic hip-hop performer who called herself “the Black Madam.” Authorities said that she fled in 2011 after a botched injection killed Claudia Aderotimi, a 20-year-old London break-dancer and college student. The trial was halted for several days last week while Windslowe was hospitalized after reporting that she had chest pains. She has been in prison since 2012, when the 18-month investigation led to a coroner’s homicide ruling and later an arrest warrant. The jury got the case late on Friday last week. They were choosing between third-degree murder, which is not premeditated, but involves malice, and involuntary manslaughter, which involves reckless disregard for a person’s life.
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