UNITED STATES
Jail wanted for billionaire
The government on Friday asked a judge to sentence Macanese billionaire Ng Lap Seng (吳立勝) to more than six years in prison, after his conviction in July last year for bribing two UN ambassadors to help him build a multibillion-dollar conference center. Prosecutors made their request in a filing with the District Court in Manhattan, and are also seeking a US$2 million fine. The request came four weeks after Ng’s lawyers urged that their 69-year-old client be sentenced to time served, and allowed to return to his family in China. Lawyers for Ng did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
MEXICO
Migrants rescued from truck
More than 100 Central American migrants, including dozens of minors, were found crowded inside a sweltering truck without food or water en route to the US, authorities said on Friday. The 136 migrants, from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, were rescued in the state of Veracruz after 24 hours in temperatures above 38°C, migration institute INM said. The migrants were discovered by federal police and migration agents who heard cries for help from within the truck, which had been abandoned near a freeway. Authorities said they counted 49 minors among the group, 13 of whom were traveling alone and are to receive aid to apply for refugee status in the country.
MEXICO
Presidential race begins
Two of the four candidates for the presidency have launched their campaigns before hundreds of cheering supporters. Ricardo Anaya, candidate of a right-left coalition, appealed to the youth vote with a 12-hour hackathon to develop proposals to effect change. Margarita Zavala, the former first lady who left Anaya’s conservative National Action Party to embark on an independent run, tried to distinguish herself as the only candidate free from corruption. Both set their sights squarely on front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, depicting him as a candidate with an antiquated vision who is soft on crime. Lopez Obrador and Jose Antonio Meade, the ruling party candidate, are scheduled to officially launch their campaigns today. The presidential election is to be held on July 1.
UNITED STATES
Zoo welcomes orangutan
The Denver Zoo is welcoming a baby Sumatran orangutan who is named after an Indonesian word that means “bright” and is often used to refer to sunshine. The female primate named Cerah was born on Sunday last week to parents Nias and Berani, and the family is bonding away from public view. Cerah is to make her debut within the next two weeks in the Great Apes exhibit in Primate Panorama. She was conceived within a month of 29-year-old Nias and 25-year-old Berani getting set up in July last year.
UNITED STATES
Missing teens found dead
Two bodies found in an abandoned Utah mine are those of a teenage couple who disappeared nearly three months ago, authorities confirmed on Friday. Riley Powell, 18, and Brelynne Otteson, 17, were stabbed to death and dumped in the mine in late December last year after visiting a woman whose boyfriend had warned her not to have male visitors, Utah County sheriff officials said. The bodies found on Wednesday were believed to be the missing couple, but the determination from state medical examiners made the identification official.
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,”
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
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
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