INDONESIA
Church attacker shot
Police shot a sword-wielding man who attacked a church congregation during Sunday Mass, injuring four people, including a German priest. The reason for the attack yesterday morning in Sleman District in Yogyakarta Province was not immediately clear. The 22-year-old attacker decapitated statues of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary during the incident, photographs showed. Video showed people in the church throwing books at the man as he lunged toward them with his sword. Witnesses and police said the injured included a police officer who tried to subdue the attacker and the 81-year-old priest Karl Edmund Prier, a longtime resident of Indonesia. They suffered back, neck and head wounds and are in stable condition. The suspect, identified only as Suliyono, was hospitalized.
SOUTH AFRICA
ANC committee to meet
The African National Congress (ANC) would tomorrow convene a special meeting of its decisionmaking executive, its spokesman said, amid mounting pressure on President Jacob Zuma to step down. The ANC called off a similar meeting scheduled for Wednesday last week to discuss Zuma’s future after the president and party leader Cyril Ramaphosa agreed to hold talks for a transition of power. The party has only said that those talks were “constructive.” ANC spokesman Pule Mabe could not say whether the special meeting of the National Executive Committee would discuss Zuma’s political future. The committee is a key ANC decisionmaking body that has the power to instruct Zuma to resign.
SAUDI ARABIA
‘Abaya’ not a must: cleric
Women should not have to wear the loose-fitting abaya robe to shroud their bodies in public, a senior cleric said, in the latest sign of a far-reaching liberalization drive. “More than 90 percent of pious Muslim women in the Muslim world do not wear abayas, said Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlaq, a member of the Council of Senior Scholars — the kingdom’s highest religious body. “So we should not force people to wear abayas,” he told a TV program broadcast on Friday. The government has not said whether it will change the law, but this is the first such comment from a senior religious figure.
AUSTRALIA
PNG urged to help refugees
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is responsible for the human rights of refugees sent to a remote island by Australia, the UN human rights chief has said. In a day-long visit to PNG on Thursday last week, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein voiced his concerns about the refugees’ plight during meetings with the government. “The government has the responsibility to ensure that while these individuals are on their territory, they have access to their basic necessities and their basic rights, including the right to adequate housing and food,” Zeid’s spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters yesterday.
SRI LANKA
Vote to upset government
A political party backed by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa looks set for a landslide victory in local polls, early results showed yesterday, potentially undermining the country’s unity government and its reform agenda. The unexpectedly strong showing could lead to defections away from the center-left party led by President Maithripala Sirisena, a partner in the country’s coalition government, analysts said, creating instability in the legislature.
ICELAND
Composer Johannsson dies
Johann Johannsson, the award-winning composer whose haunting yet minimalist scores instilled depth in films full of abstraction, has died, his Los Angeles-based manager announced on Saturday. He was 48. Johannsson was found dead on Friday at his apartment in Berlin, where authorities were investigating the cause of death, Tim Husom said. “I’m so very sad. Today, I lost my friend who was one of the most talented musicians and intelligent people I knew,” Husom said in a statement. Johannsson, who blended classical form and electronic instrumentation, had become an increasingly in-demand musician for directors whose films probed more theoretical ideas, such as Arrival. He won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score for The Theory of Everything.
UNITED STATES
Trump decries abuse claims
President Donald Trump on Saturday said that lives were being “shattered” by allegations that might be false after two of his White House aides quit over domestic abuse accusations. The White House has been heavily criticized for its handling of the allegations. Critics say the president’s chief of staff, John Kelly, has badly mishandled the matter. “Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation,” Trump tweeted. “Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” Trump’s remarks came after White House speechwriter David Sorensen resigned on Friday, even while denying his former wife’s claims of abuse, and staff secretary Rob Porter stepped down Wednesday after abuse allegations from two ex-wives that he has also denied.
UNITED STATES
Gunman kills four, self
Five people, including a suspected gunman who apparently took his own life, were killed in a shooting spree at two locations in northeast Kentucky on Saturday, officials said. Police received a 911 call about 4pm about a shooting at a rural home near Paintsville, Johnson County Sheriff Dwayne Price said in a statement on Facebook. Officers found two people dead there. A second 911 call led deputies and police to an apartment, where three people were found fatally shot, including the gunman, the statement said. Officials identified the gunman as Joseph Nickell.
GUATEMALA
Cocaine, plane seized
Counternarcotics police on Saturday seized 476kg of cocaine, a small airplane and weapons, and arrested four suspects after a shoot-out, officials said. The suspects were arrested after the airplane landed near the town of El Estor, Ministry of the Interior said. The US-registered plane “arriving from the Venezuelan coastline” touched down at an illegal landing strip, a statement said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Oxford to produce gin
The University of Oxford’s famous Botanic Garden is to produce its own brand of gin. Distilled from barley grains grown by medieval farmers, “Physic Gin” is flavored with 25 different botanicals that were first planted after the garden was founded in 1621. The official Oxford gin — believed to be the first time a university has gone into the commercial spirits business — is a collaboration between Simon Hiscock, the director of the Botanic Garden, and the Oxford Artisan Distillery. The grain comes from barley grown in Oxfordshire, from varieties that date back to the 1200s.
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
‘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
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