POLAND
President to veto bills
President Andrzej Duda yesterday said he would veto two of three bills reforming the nation’s judiciary system, easing worries that the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) would undermine the division of powers. “I have decided that I will send back to Sejm [lower house of parliament], which means I will veto the bill, on the Supreme Court, as well as the one about the National Council of the Judiciary,” Duda said after days of mass street protests. Observers say Duda’s decision puts him at odds with the de facto leader of the country, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is the leader of PiS, but has no formal government post. “What we had was not a reform, but appropriation of the courts. I congratulate all Poles, this is a great success, really,” said Katarzyna Lubnauer, head of the opposition Nowoczesna party’s parliamentary caucus.
UNITED STATES
Alaska’s feline mayor dies
Stubbs, the cat who became the unofficial mayor and a tourist attraction for the small Alaska town of Talkeetna, has died at 20, his owners said. Stubbs went to sleep on Thursday night and never woke up, the Spone family said in a statement late on Saturday. “He was a trooper until the very last day of his life,” the family said. Stubbs, who liked to drink water and catnip from a margarita glass, was elected unofficial mayor of Talkeetna in 1997, news reports said. The Spones acquired Stubbs when they bought Nagley’s General Store and a restaurant in 2015 from the previous owners, the family said.
ITALY
Venice detains divers
Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro says six young Belgians were going to spend the night in jail after they dove from a bridge into the Grand Canal. Brugnaro also tweeted “caught!!!” after police detained the men, ages 21 to 23, following the 10m leap after dawn on Sunday from Constitution Bridge near the parking terminal for cars, which are banned from city’s historic center. Police monitoring surveillance camera footage spotted the tourists as they dove into the lagoon. Brugnaro said he hoped the “most exemplary punishment possible” would be meted out for the prank.
CUBA
Negotiator reassigned
Havana has reassigned the woman who led two years of intense negotiations with the US under the detente worked out by then-US president Barack Obama and President Raul Castro, state media said on Sunday. Josefina Vidal, former head of North American affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has been named as ambassador to Canada, according to people close to her. Vidal’s reassignment follows US President Donald Trump’s declaration last month that the normalization process was a “terrible” deal and that he would ban future business with military-operated Cuban companies and tighten up on travel.
FRANCE
Paris hosts Libyan talks
The government yesterday said it would host talks today between Fayez al-Serraj, head of Libya’s UN-backed government in Tripoli, and Khalifa Haftar, a powerful military commander in the nation’s east who has so far rejected his authority. President Emmanuel Macron aims to show Paris’ support for UN backed efforts to stabilize the country, “which would based upon the involvement of all the different factions in Libya,” his office said in a statement.
NEW ZEALAND
Hongi like a headbutt: Boris
British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Boris Johnson yesterday joked on his visit to the town of Kaikoura that a traditional Maori greeting could be misinterpreted as a headbutt elsewhere. He visited the town to thank people there for looking after tourists, including 200 Britons, who were stranded in the town after a massive earthquake in November last year. He also thanked them for teaching him a Maori greeting called a hongi, in which people press noses together. “I think it’s a beautiful form of introduction, though it might be misinterpreted in a pub in Glasgow,” he said in a reference to a headbutt. Prime Minister Bill English said he did not think people would be offended by Johnson’s comment.
CHINA
US student released
A US university student is free following a week-long detention for allegedly injuring a taxi driver who was roughing up his mother during a fare dispute. Guthrie McLean, a student at the University of Montana, was released from a detention center in Zhengzhou early yesterday, his mother said. “We are very, very very, very happy,” Jennifer McLean said in an e-mail to reporters. She said the release — at 2am local time when her son was delivered to her doorstep — came as a surprise after she had twice been told to anticipate a release only to be disappointed. “They have not finished the process completely, but we are hopeful it will go smoothly from here on,” she said. The release followed an agreement with authorities to drop any charges against Guthrie McLean, US Senator Steve Daines said.
VIETNAM
Indonesia shoots fishermen
Indonesia’s navy shot and wounded four Vietnamese fishermen aboard a fishing boat in the South China Sea on Saturday night, authorities said. The boat was about 132 nautical miles (244km) southeast of Con Dao island when the fishermen were shot, the Binh Dinh provincial search and rescue committee said on its Web site. The coordinates given by the authorities indicated that the shooting happened close to the area Indonesia calls the North Natuna Sea. Two of the fishermen were said to have been seriously wounded. They were taken to Con Dao Island for treatment.
MYANMAR
River swallows pagoda
Rising floodwaters have swallowed a Buddhist pagoda in the center of the nation and sent tens of thousands fleeing their homes, as the government warned of more heavy rains ahead. Dramatic footage circulating on social media showed the riverside pagoda sinking into the floodwaters in Magway region, with shocked bystanders looking on as its golden spire collapsed beneath the waves. “This pagoda was built in 2009, when it was far away from the river,” Monk Pyinnya Linkara said by telephone yesterday. “Year by year, the river has eroded the land and now the pagoda has fallen into the river.”
SWITZERLAND
Five hurt in chainsaw attack
A manhunt was launched yesterday after a man armed with a chainsaw wounded at least five people, two of them seriously, in the small town of Schaffhausen. The town was put into lockdown as police searched for the suspect, whom they said they had identified, although they did not release his name. Police said the attack was “not an act of terror.” The attack took place inside an office building in the center of town. Police spokeswoman Cindy Beer said police were alerted at 10:39am.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese