AUSTRALIA
Anti-Trump motion passed
The New South Wales Legislative Council, the upper house of the state’s parliament, yesterday unanimously passed a motion that described US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as “a revolting slug unfit for public office.” “This house ... agrees with those who have described Mr Trump as a ‘revolting slug’ unfit for public office,” the motion said. The house “condemns the misogynist, hateful comments” made by him about women and minorities, and those “that clearly describe sexual assault,” the motion said. No one objected to the motion, so it was recorded as having been unanimously agreed to by the Sydney-based house. Greens party lawmaker Jeremy Buckingham introduced the motion.
MYANMAR
Crackdown kills 26
Security forces have now killed at least 26 people in response to attacks on police that have sparked a dramatic escalation in violence in a Muslim-majority region along the border with Bangladesh, state media reports said. Military personnel and police reinforcements have poured into Maungdaw, Rakhine State, and have clashed with groups of up to 300 men, armed with pistols, swords and knives, the reports said. Human rights groups and advocates for the stateless Rohingya have voiced concern that the civilian population may be caught up in the authorities’ violent response. The killings bring the total death toll in northern Rakhine State since Sunday to 39, including 13 security personnel. The 26 alleged attackers reported killed include several who a local resident told reporters were shot while unarmed and fleeing soldiers.
BURUNDI
Vote to quit ICC passed
Lawmakers on Wednesday overwhelmingly voted in support of a plan to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), something no nation has ever done. The decision escalates a bitter dispute with the international community over the human rights situation in the nation, which has seen more than a year of deadly violence after President Pierre Nkurunziza made a controversial decision to pursue a third term. Ninety-four out of 110 lawmakers voted in favor of the withdrawal plan. The decision, which was also unanimously adopted by the Senate, now needs the president’s approval.
PHILIPPINES
Death toll revised
Police have said nearly 2,300 people have died in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs since July, down from an earlier estimate of 3,600, after investigations into the near-daily killings. “Not all [the deaths] are related to the war on drugs,” National Police spokesman Dionardo Carlos said late on Wednesday. He said that 1,566 drug suspects were killed in police operations and 722 deaths were still under investigation or had already been investigated.
CHINA
Trapped elephants rescued
Rescuers in Yunnan Province used a large excavator to break down a concrete wall and free three elephants stuck in a reservoir for more than two days, state media reported. The two adult elephants and calf were discovered on Sunday in the 5m deep reservoir by forest rangers, but heavy rains filled up the pool and delayed rescue efforts. The two adult elephants helped the calf keep afloat as the water levels rose, while rescuers provided the trio with food. Authorities believe the calf fell in to the reservoir and the two adults went in to help.
ITALY
Playwright Dario Fo dies
Nobel prize-winning playwright, director and political activist Dario Fo, an acclaimed satirist who poked a finger in the eye of the church and state, has died aged 90, officials said yesterday. Famous for his cutting political satire in plays such as The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Fo won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997. He remained a committed activist to the end, skewering the nation’s authorities with his sharp wit. He was admitted to hospital in Milan 12 days ago. “With Dario Fo, Italy loses one of the great protagonists of theater, culture and the civic life of our country,” said Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who was himself regularly ridiculed by the irreverent Fo.
UNITED STATES
Turkey frees US journalist
Turkish authorities have released US journalist Lindsey Snell detained for the past two months after she fled Syria claiming to have been kidnapped by militants, a senior US official said yesterday. Snell is returning to the US, the official said. She was arrested on Aug. 6 for “violating a military zone” after she returned from Syria, where she said she had been filming civilians affected by airstrikes. The Committee to Protect Journalists media freedom watchdog welcomed Snell’s release. On her return flight to New York on Wednesday, Snell said she was concerned about her husband Suliman Wardak, who was also arrested in Turkey after traveling there to help with her case, the Guardian reported.
ITALY
Human traffickers jailed
A judge sentenced three men to 20 years each in jail on Wednesday for their role in packing hundreds of refugees into a boat in which 49 suffocated in the Mediterranean in August last year, a legal source said. The judge in Catania, Sicily, found the three guilty of murder and facilitating illegal immigration, more than a year after rescuers recovered the victims from the hold of a fishing boat from which they also pulled 312 survivors.
ECUADOR
Assange rape case delayed
The government has delayed until Nov. 14 its questioning of Julian Assange in a Swedish rape investigation, at the Wikileaks founder’s request, the prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday. The questioning, originally scheduled for Monday, could help end a four-year-long deadlock since Assange took refuge in the nation’s London embassy. “He made the request in a document, via the Ecuadoran ambassador in the UK, in which he sets out his reasons pertaining to protection guarantees and self-defense,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Swedish chief prosecutor Ingrid Isgren and a police investigator will be allowed to be present to ask questions through the Ecuadoran prosecutor, who will later report the findings to Sweden, the European country’s prosecutors have previously said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Firm fined over Ford’s leg
A film production company was fined £1.6 million (US$1.95 million) on Wednesday over an accident on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that broke the leg of movie star Harrison Ford. The actor was struck by a hydraulic door on the set of the Millennium Falcon at Pinewood Studios near London in June 2014. Prosecutors said Ford, who was 71 at the time, could have been killed by the door, which struck him with a force comparable to the weight of a small car.
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