PAKISTAN
Imam jailed for hate speech
A court in Lahore has jailed an imam for five years for inciting hate against a rival sect, officials said yesterday. Maulana Abubakar, a prayer leader, was arrested in February in Kasur District, Punjab, about 50km south of Lahore, for making a speech against the rival minority Shiite sect, a prosecutor said. “The judge of an anti-terrorism court on Tuesday sentenced the imam to serve five years in prison for [giving a] hate speech,” the prosecutor said on condition of anonymity. “The imam was found guilty of inciting hatred against Shiite [people] and raised slogans during his sermon that Shiites were infidels,” he said. The official said that under the National Action Plan against terrorism, authorities have arrested many prayer leaders and courts have sent them to jail over hate speech charges.
AUSTRALIA
Men used kittens as bait
Two men have been charged with using kittens as live bait to train greyhounds, following allegations that piglets, rabbits and possums were also used in the sport. The men, aged 26 and 62, are accused of strapping the animals to mechanical lures that dogs would chase as part of their training regime between August last year and this month. Greyhounds traditionally chase an artificial hare or rabbit. Queensland police said the arrests were part of a joint investigation with the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) into live baiting and other instances of animal cruelty in the state. “The joint Queensland Police Service and RSPCA task force continues to investigate allegations of live baiting within the greyhound racing industry,” police said in a statement after the charges were laid late on Tuesday. “To date, 23 people have been arrested on 65 charges.”
SOUTH KOREA
Compensate lepers: ruling
A court yesterday ruled in favor of a group of leprosy patients seeking compensation from the government for forced abortions and sterilization, in the latest ruling that sheds light on decades-long abuses. Seoul Central District Court said each of the 135 lepers who filed the suit against the government in 2012 should receive between 30 million and 40 million won (US$27,360 and US$36,480). The latest ruling is the third in favor of lepers seeking redress from the government for abuses including being forced to live on a distant southern island, until the law was removed in 1963. Up until the 1990s, hundreds of lepers underwent forced sterilization before being allowed to marry, while those women who did become pregnant were forced to abort.
AUSTRALIA
Museum defends drug call
A museum has defended an artist who suggested that teenagers be given marijuana to unlock their potential, describing the proposal as “brave and creative.” Leon Ewing is to raise the idea of “educational marijuana” at an event focusing on challenges faced by high schools in Tasmania next month at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. “Basically what I’m proposing is the idea of using performance-enhancing drugs in education,” Ewing told Australian Broadcasting Corp yesterday. “We already prescribe amphetamine-like medication for focus and docility. What if we medicated for creativity?” Ewing, a multimedia artist, said it was already known that many young people experimented with drugs and he suggested that illegal substances could “open the mind to greater creativity and lateral thought.”
HUNGARY
Krasznahorkai wins award
Writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the Man Booker International Prize for what the judges said were “magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence.” Krasznahorkai, 61, won the prestigious £60,000 (US$93,121) prize for works that include The Melancholy of Resistance, Seiobo There Below and Satantango, and was chosen from among 10 contenders. “Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range,” writer and academic Marina Warner, who chaired the panel, said as she announced the winner at an award ceremony in London on Tuesday. “I seriously reckon that there is a very advanced sphere of literature, high literature so to speak, that serves as a force against decay,” Krasznahorkai told Hungarian daily newspaper Nepszabadsag in a interview on Wednesday last week.
ISRAEL
Segregated bus ‘trial’ halted
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday suspended a measure barring Palestinians from buses carrying Jewish settlers when returning from Israel to the West Bank. The news came hours after the launch of a pilot project approved by Minister of Defense Moshe Yaalon. The ban had been attacked by rights groups and the opposition. “Under a three-month pilot project, Palestinians who work in Israel will... need to return home by the same crossing without taking buses used by [Israeli] residents” of the West Bank, a ministry official said. Thousands of Palestinians travel daily to Israel. “The proposal is unacceptable to the prime minister. He spoke with the defense minister this morning and it was decided that the proposal will be frozen,” he said.
CANADA
Police arrest ‘militants’
Police arrested 10 youths at Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport last weekend who are suspected of wanting to go to Iraq and Syria to join militants, officials said on Tuesday. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued a statement confirming that 10 young Montreal residents had been arrested at the airport. The statement did not mention a specific group, but said the 10 were “suspected of wanting to leave the country to join jihadist groups.” Police could not identify the suspects because charges have not been brought.
MEXICO
Elections head sorry for leak
The head of Mexico’s elections institute apologized on Tuesday after a recording appeared on YouTube in which he made fun of the way an indigenous leader he had just met with spoke. The recording of the telephone call between Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) President Lorenzo Cordova and IFE executive secretary Edmundo Jacobo took place late last month after a private meeting with indigenous leaders, an IFE source said. “I’d like to take this opportunity to offer a frank and sincere apology to anybody who could have been offended,” Cordova said at a news conference.
UNITED STATES
California oil pipeline leaks
A pipeline ruptured on Tuesday in California, dumping oil along the coast of Santa Barbara and into the Pacific Ocean, the US Coast Guard said. The leak sullied waters at a beach, Coast Guard Petty Officer Andrea Anderson said. It was from a pipeline operated by Plains All America Pipeline, the company said, adding that it does not know how much oil leaked. The spill was estimated at 80,000 liters of oil, local media reported.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion