INDIA
Kashmiris flee flooding
At least 10 people have been buried by mudslides and hundreds more have had to flee their homes yesterday after heavy rain triggered flooding in the New Delhi-controlled section of Kashmir, police said. Mudslides buried at least four houses in Chadoora, the worst hit area of the Himalayan region. Police said 237 families had been evacuated, most of them from Chadoora, about 15km west of Srinagar. With more rain forecast, authorities set up relief camps in Srinagar and issued an alert asking people living near the Jhelum River to move to safer areas.
JORDAN
Amsterdam donates bikes
Amsterdam on Sunday donated 500 second-hand bicycles for Syrian refugees to use in the Zaatari refugee camp. Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Lilianne Ploumen handed over the bikes to representatives of aid agencies working in the desert camp. “This camp is the size of a city and that is why I think we need to help people live in this camp like it was a city,” Ploumen told reporters. The donation followed a request for aid from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The bikes had been confiscated were those that had been abandoned or illegally parked and then left unclaimed in storage for more than three months.
TUNISIA
Museum raid leader killed
Security forces have killed the commander of the group responsible for the recent massacre of 21 foreign tourists at the National Bardo Museum, Prime Minister Habib Essid said on Sunday. Khaled Chayeb, also known as Lokman Abu Sakhr, was killed with eight other Muslim militants by national guard forces in an ambush, Interior Minister Najem Gharsalli told journalists in a news briefing. The news came as several foreign leaders, including French President Francois Hollande and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, took part in a Tunis march against terrorism. The dignitaries joined thousands of Tunisians who marched across Tunis to the site of the March 18 massacre.
AUSTRALIA
E-mail error blamed
The personal details of world leaders who traveled to Brisbane for a G20 summit in November last year were mistakenly e-mailed to a member of the Asian Cup football local organizing committee, a report said yesterday. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection confirmed there had been a data breach, but gave no details and did not say whether the world leaders had been informed. “The data was immediately deleted by the recipient and was not distributed further,” a department spokeswoman said. The information included the passport numbers, visa details and other data on 31 world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. An immigration worker apparently failed to check that the autofill function on the e-mail system had addressed the e-mail correctly.
BANGLADESH
Blogger hacked to death
Police said a blogger was hacked to death yesterday in Dhaka by three men and that two of the suspected attackers were caught near the scene. Dhaka Metropolitan Police official Biplob Kumar Sarker said that two of the men who attacked Washiqur Rahman Babu are students of two separate Islamic schools. The third suspect fled the scene.
ISRAEL
Olmert found guilty of graft
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert was found guilty yesterday of accepting bribes in a retrial of corruption charges, the latest chapter in the downfall of a man who only years earlier hoped to lead the nation to a historic peace agreement with the Palestinians. Olmert’s lawyers said they would likely appeal the ruling by the Jerusalem District Court. He is due to be sentenced at a later court hearing. Olmert was acquitted in 2012 of a series of charges that included accepting cash-stuffed envelopes containing hundreds of thousands of dollars from US businessman Morris Talansky before he became prime minister. However, Olmert’s former office manager and confidant Shula Zaken later became a state’s witness, offering tape recordings of conversations with Olmert about illicitly receiving cash, leading to a retrial.
MEXICO
Prisons run by mafias
Women’s prisons are often overcrowded and run by mafias, with inmates suffering extortion, sexual abuse and sometimes even forced prostitution, according to a report released on Sunday. The autonomous National Human Rights Commission looked at conditions in 77 of the 102 prisons that house 12,690 women. It highlighted deficiencies in food, hygiene, medical attention and child care. Women also suffered mistreatment, sexual abuse and had to pay for “protection” by organized crime-linked “parallel governments” that were sometimes run by male prisoners in the men’s part of the penitentiary. It said that in 51 of the prisons studied some women had to sleep on the floor among cockroaches and rats. In 20 prisons, women were forced to prostitute themselves.
UNITED STATES
Bodies found in Manhattan
Two bodies were found on Sunday amid rubble from the Manhattan apartment building collapse three days earlier and authorities said everyone was accounted for since an apparent gas explosion which caused a massive fire, leveled three buildings and damaged a fourth. Authorities had been looking for signs of two missing men since Thursday’s explosion, in which 22 people were injured, including four critically. Officials suspect someone may have improperly tapped a gas line serving one of the buildings.
RUSSIA
Theater group director fired
In the latest skirmish between the Russian Orthodox Church and the cultural elite, the culture minister on Sunday fired the director of a Siberian theater group who included a controversial interpretation of the life of Jesus in the Wagner opera Tannhauser. The director, Boris Mezdrich, had failed to apologize and to take other steps to mitigate the outcry among the Orthodox faithful offended by various aspects of the production at the Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, Deputy Minister of Culture Vladimir Aristarkhov said, according to Interfax. A 2013 blasphemy law made it a criminal offense to perform public acts that offend believers, punishable by up to three years in prison.
UKRAINE
US to train National Guard
Hundreds of US paratroopers will train soldiers from April 20 as Kiev battles to contain pro-Russian separatists in the nation’s east, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said yesterday. Soldiers from the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, based in Italy, are to instruct about 900 troops from the National Guard of Ukraine in three waves of training, each lasting eight weeks, followed by joint war games.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was