INDONESIA
Murderer escapes from jail
A child murderer has escaped from jail by putting on a woman’s veil, makeup and sunglasses, and walking out past unsuspecting guards, an official said yesterday. Anwar bin Kim An, who raped and murdered a schoolgirl, made the bold breakout from a Jakarta prison by quietly changing into a woman’s outfit allegedly smuggled in by his wife when she visited during the Eid al-Fitr holiday. “The wife gave him the woman’s clothing and he just changed his clothes in the meeting room where all the inmates meet with their families,” Jakarta police spokesman Awi Setiyono said. “He put on some lipstick and later walked away as a woman accompanied by his wife and their two children.” Prison video footage obtained by local media showed the convict, in his 20s, walking out of the prison dressed as a woman and wearing sunglasses, while holding one of his children.
BOSNIA
Model’s sentence upheld
The appeal court on Tuesday upheld a prison sentence against a former Playboy model for laying a honey trap for a mafia boss and helping a rival try to kill him, prosecutors said. Slobodanka Tosic was jailed for two-and-a-half years for arranging a date with gangster Djordje Zdrale in 2006 and betraying him to his archrival Darko Elez, who then attempted to have him murdered. Zdrale was wounded in the assassination attempt, but managed to escape. Though Zdrale was himself jailed for 20 years for an unrelated murder, he was brought from his prison cell to testify against Tosic, who was charged as an accomplice in the plot.
ITALY
Shirkers wear boxes
Public-sector workers have been caught wearing cardboard boxes over their heads in a bid to avoid identification as they cheat on their time clocks, media reported on Tuesday. Police caught 23 council employees in the town of Boscotrecase near Naples on camera clocking-in for friends or punching-in and leaving again, with two donning cardboard box disguises. Six were put under house arrest, 13 were suspended for a year and four were suspended for six months. With their staff gone, four council offices have been forced to close their doors, the reports said. The Cabinet passed a decree in January cracking down on public-sector shirkers. The problem of time-clock dodgers hit the front pages last year after 35 people were arrested in San Remo and 195 people were placed under investigation for absenteeism. A traffic cop who lives in the building he works in became the face of the scandal after he was secretly filmed by police as he clocked in in his underwear before apparently going back to bed, or got his wife to clock in for him in her nightie.
UNITED STATES
‘Parachute kid’ jailed
A so-called “parachute kid” from China who was involved in a brutal attack on a Southern California classmate is going to prison. The Los Angeles Times reported that Zheng Lu received a three-year sentence on Tuesday for last year’s attack in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Authorities say Zheng and others kidnapped an 18-year-old classmate and took her to a Rowland Heights park where she was stripped naked, beaten, burned with cigarettes and forced to eat her own hair. Zheng, 20, pleaded guilty to assault. Three other students are serving sentences ranging from six to 13 years. All were “parachute kids” — Chinese students who live with paid host families while attending high school.
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,”
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
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
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