CHILE
Pinera aims for comeback
Former president Sebastian Pinera on Tuesday entered the presidential primary race, as polls show the conservative billionaire stands a solid chance of making a comeback. Pinera, who led the nation from 2010 to 2014, had gone back to his business empire. The law does not allow immediate re-election. “Before you and all my fellow citizens, I am announcing my decision to seek the presidency again,” he said at a rally in a Santiago park. “The only reason that I am here, standing again for the presidency, today, is because I want to give the best of myself.” Polls show Pinera with support of about 25 percent ahead of the Nov. 19 election.
AMERICAN SAMOA
Small-boat fishermen win
A federal judge in Honolulu, Hawaii, has ruled that the decision to reduce the area off-limits to large vessels along the coast of American Samoa “is invalid,” clearing the way for local fishermen and their small boats to return. US District Court Judge Leslie Kobayashi also ruled that the US National Marine Fishery Service’s change of the rule “was arbitrary and capricious.” Fishing waters had been preserved for the local fishing fleet from the shoreline out to 80km since 2002. Last year, the fishery service reduced the large-vessel-protected area to 19km from the shoreline.
UNITED States
Sir David wins fossil fame
Sir David Attenborough, the famed British naturalist, recently had a polar research vessel named in his honor. Now he has an ancient shrimp as a namesake. To mark Attenborough’s 90th birthday, researchers from Yale University and universities in England named in his honor a distant relative of today’s shrimp and lobster. The crustacean was identified from a 430-million-year-old imprint in volcanic ash found in the English county of Herefordshire.
UNITED STATES
Fentanyl blamed for deaths
Authorities said they have uncovered a dangerous new trend in drug trafficking in Arizona in which addicts are taking counterfeit OxyContin pills that are laced with the more powerful painkiller fentanyl. The counterfeit pills are responsible for the overdose deaths of 32 people in metro Phoenix over the last 18 months, said Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s operation in the state, noting that the addicts did not know they were taking a more powerful drug. “They think they are taking Oxy, but they are taking fentanyl,” Coleman said.
UNITED STATES
Toddler shoots brother dead
A nine-year-old boy shot in the head by his two-year-old brother with their mother’s handgun died on Tuesday and their mother told police she had previously let the toddler handle the gun when it was not loaded, authorities said. Landen Lavarnia was declared dead at a hospital, Phoenix police spokesman Seargent Vince Lewis said. The mother, Wendy Lavarnia, 28, told police she had put her loaded gun on a bed within reach of her two-year-old and four-year-old sons while she turned to get a holster, according to court records. That is when the two-year-old grabbed the gun and shot the nine-year-old, who was playing video games about 1m away, police said. Wendy Lavarnia told police she had allowed “the two-year-old to practice pulling the trigger of this gun when empty on previous occasions,” the records showed.
SOUTH KOREA
Park questioned for 14 hours
Ousted president Park Geun-hye left a prosecutor’s office early yesterday after being questioned in an investigation into a corruption scandal that ended her presidency this month. Prosecutors questioned Park as a criminal suspect for the first time since the Constitutional Court on March 10 upheld her December impeachment by parliament. Park is accused of colluding with a friend, Choi Soon-sil, to pressure big businesses to donate to two foundations set up to back the president’s policy initiatives. Prosecutors did not discuss the details of the questions, but said Park was responding well to the investigation. The questioning lasted 14 hours until just before midnight, one of Park’s lawyers, Sohn Bum-gyu, told reporters.
SOUTH KOREA
Chinese remains returned
Seoul yesterday repatriated the remains of 28 Chinese soldiers killed in the Korean War, despite a heated row between the two nations over a US missile defense system. A row of goosestepping Chinese honor guards received lacquered wooden boxes, each containing one set of remains, from their counterparts during a ceremony at Incheon International Airport. Beijing deployed millions of soldiers in the 1950 to 1953 conflict. More than 180,000 Chinese soldiers are estimated to have died in the war. “[We] appreciate the friendship and good will that South Korean people and media have shown regarding the repatriation of Chinese soldiers’ remains,” Chinese Vice Minister of Civil Affairs Sun Shaocheng (孫紹騁) was quoted as saying at the ceremony by Yonhap news agency. A total of 569 sets of Chinese remains have been repatriated since the two nations reached an agreement on the issue three years ago, he said.
INDIA
Two jailed over shrine attack
A court in Jaipur, Rajasthan, yesterday sentenced two Hindu hardliners to life in prison for triggering an explosion at a Muslim shrine that killed three people and injured more than a dozen a decade ago. A third suspect in the case died after the 2007 blast, which occurred in Ajmer, a Muslim pilgrimage center in Rajasthan. News reports said that the two were former preachers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, a Hindu group that has long been accused of stoking religious hatred against Muslims.
CHINA
Students die in stampede
Two student died and 20 were injured yesterday following a stampede during a morning bathroom break at an elementary school in Henan Province. The Puyang County Government said in a brief notice that the incident is under investigation. A county official reach by telephone confirmed the deaths and injuries, but declined to give other details. Overcrowding and poor building design and construction have been blamed for past crushing deaths and injuries at Chinese schools.
VIETNAM
Nine traffickers get death
State media yesterday reported that a court had sentenced nine men to death for trafficking 495kg of heroin. The Tuoi Tre newspaper said a court in Hoa Binh Province also sentenced nine others to life imprisonment and four others from 17 to 20 years in jail at the end of the 23-day trial on Tuesday. The group was convicted of trafficking the heroin from Laos for sale in China from 2012 until the ring was broken up in 2015, the report said, adding that the group made illegal profits of US$672,000.
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