UNITED STATES
Todd Palin in intensive care
Former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on Tuesday said her husband is still in the intensive care unit of an Alaska hospital with multiple injuries, including broken bones and a collapsed lung, two days after a serious snowmobile accident. Todd Palin, 51, suffered multiple broken ribs, a broken shoulder blade and broken clavicle, as well as knee and leg injuries. He was back in surgery to repair several fractures, Sarah Palin said in a statement on social media on Tuesday. “Knowing Todd, once he’s cognizant, he’ll probably ask docs to duct tape him up and he’ll call it good,” she said. “He’s tough.” The accident on Sunday forced Sarah Palin to cut short a campaign trip for Donald Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
ECUADOR
Plane crash kills 22
An army plane crashed in the Amazon rainforest on Tuesday, killing all 22 people on board, President Rafael Correa said. “There are no survivors,” Correa wrote on Twitter, several minutes after first posting news of the crash. “This is a tragedy.” He said the plane was carrying 19 paratroopers, two pilots and a mechanic. The plane went down in the eastern province of Pastaza, near the border with Peru. Minister of Defense Ricardo Patino said he was on his way to the scene. “General Luis Castro is personally leading the operation [to recover remains]. Everyone distressed by loss of our fallen brothers,” Patino said on Twitter. “The plane is completely destroyed and the wings were scattered” across the area,” said Jesse Guevara, a student of the Pastaza aviation school who reached the crash site.
ISRAEL
US ‘treasure hunter’ arrested
A US tourist has been arrested after spending a night in a cave below Jerusalem’s Old City in what might have been a search for mythical buried treasure, police and media reports said on Tuesday. The tourist was found on Friday last week after spending the night in Zedekiah’s Cave, also known as Solomon’s Quarries, a 20,000m2 area beneath the Muslim quarter of the Old City. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the 19-year-old tourist, who was not identified, hid inside the site at closing time on Thursday last week before digging in different areas of the cave. Several worthless limestone rocks were found in his backpack, police said. Haaretz reported that the odd expedition may have been linked to “Jerusalem Syndrome” — the name given to what some tourists experience when they are overwhelmed while visiting the Holy Land due to its religious significance. Zedekiah’s Cave is the remnant of what was once the largest quarry in Jerusalem, dating back at least to the Second Jewish Temple period, from the sixth century BC to the first century AD. Several myths are associated with the site, including treasure supposedly buried there.
FRANCE
Woman, 91, earns doctorate
A woman aged 91 has become one of the oldest women in the country to gain a doctorate after she completed a thesis that she had begun three decades earlier. Colette Bourlier was awarded the mark of “high distinction” for her work, which she successfully defended on Tuesday before a jury of the University of Franche-Comte in Besancon. “It took a bit of time to write because I took breaks,” Bourlier said, explaining the exceptional time for her opus. The thesis was titled Immigrant workers in Besancon in the second half of the 20th century.
INDONESIA
Security forces kill militants
Security forces killed two ethnic Uighur Chinese belonging to a militant network led by the nation’s most-wanted man, police said yesterday. The nation has launched an aggressive, military-backed security campaign in the jungles of Sulawesi Island as it battles the threat from growing domestic support for the Islamic State militant group. Police said the men, part of China’s Uighur Muslim minority, had joined Santoso, a militant in Poso in central Sulawesi, who is Indonesia’s most high-profile backer of the Islamic State and has been on the run for more than three years. “Based on testimony from another suspect we had arrested, those two were identified as Uighurs,” Central Sulawesi police spokesman Hari Suprapto said.
CAMBODIA
Student jailed over post
A court on Tuesday jailed a university student for 18 months for inciting crimes in an antigovernment Facebook post that called for regime change. Facebook is popular in the nation, where disenfranchised citizens have increasingly turned to the Internet to highlight alleged state abuses and demand political reforms. Kong Raya, 24, was the first Cambodian convicted of using social media to attack the government of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has warned that online critics could be traced and arrested in a matter of hours. “There’s nothing to be surprised about. This is how the court works,” Raya, who looked unshaken by the verdict as he left the courtroom flanked by guards, told reporters. Raya was charged in August last year for urging the public to join his “color revolution” to “change the vulgar regime.”
INDIA
In-laws arrested over killing
The father-in-law of a lower-caste student brutally hacked to death in a suspected “honor killing” has been arrested, police said Tuesday. Three men armed with sickles and sharp weapons attacked the 22-year-old student from the lowest Dalit caste and his wife on a crowded street in the southern state of Tamil Nadu on Sunday, killing him and seriously injuring her. The woman’s father and uncle were among five people arrested over the assault, which was apparently motivated by her decision to marry outside her own caste, police said. “We have arrested five accused and are looking for five more,” A. Dhavamani, an investigating officer, told reporters. “Three of them were involved in the attack, including the woman’s uncle,” he said, adding that the others have confessed to conspiracy to kill the man. The Press Trust of India news agency said the woman’s mother was also among those arrested, although this could not immediately be confirmed. Police said the 19-year-old woman married the Dalit engineering student eight months ago in defiance of her family, who are from the Thevar caste.
BAHRAIN
Activist begins sentence
Activist Zainab al-Khawaja has begun a two-month prison sentence for tearing up a photograph of the king, her lawyer, Mohammed al-Wasti, said on Tuesday. She has been arrested and freed several times since an uprising in 2011 mainly by the nation’s majority Shiite Muslims demanding reforms and a bigger share in government of the Sunni Muslim-led kingdom, and has already served time in prison. Khawaja took her 15-month-old son, Hadi, with her into detention rather than leave him in the care of relatives. Al-Wasti said Khawaja’s time in prison could be extended to more than three years over other alleged offenses.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of